Adorno and the Need in Thinking: New Critical Essays [1 ed.] 0802092144, 9780802092144

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AD O RN O AN D TH E N EED IN TH IN K IN G : NE W C R ITI CAL ESSAYS

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Edited by Donald A. Burke, Colin J. Campbell, Kathy Kiloh, Michael K. Palamarek, and Jonathan Short

Adorno and the Need in Thinking New Critical Essays

U N I V E R S I T Y O F TO R ON TO P RE S S Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com © University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2007 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 978-0-8020-9214-4

Printed on acid-free paper

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Adorno and the need in thinking : new critical essays / edited by Donald Burke ... [et al.] ISBN 978-0-8020-9214-4 1. Adorno, Theodor W., 1903–1969. I. Burke, Donald, 1971– B3199.A34A62 2007

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C2007-901967-6

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

Contents

Acknowledgments

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Introduction 3 the editors PART ONE: LANGUAGE 1 Theses on the Language of the Philosopher theodor w. adorno 2 Adorno’s Dialectics of Language michael k. palamarek

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3 The ‘Aesthetic Dignity of Words’: Adorno’s Philosophy of Language 78 samir gandesha 4 The Linguistic Image: Mediation and Immediacy in Adorno and Benjamin 103 kathy kiloh PART TWO: METAPHYSICS AND SOCIETY 5 Metaphysics after Auschwitz: Suffering and Hope in Adorno’s Negative Dialectics 133 lambert zuidervaart 6 From the Actual to the Possible: Non-identity Thinking deborah cook

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Contents

7 Experience and Aura: Adorno, McDowell, and ‘Second Nature’ 181 jonathan short PART THREE: COMMUNICATION, REIFICATION, AND THE NON-IDENTICAL 8 Mystical Kernels? Rational Shells? Habermas and Adorno on Reification and Re-enchantment 203 asher horowitz 9 Politics beyond Speech: Communication and the Nonidentical 218 martin morris 10 Adorno’s Aesthetics of Reconciliation: Negative Presentation of Utopia or Post-metaphysical Pipe-Dream? 233 donald a. burke PART FOUR: AESTHETICS AND CULTURE 11 On Adorno’s Aesthetics of the Ugly 263 pamela leach 12 ‘Three-Minute Access’: Fugazi’s Negative Aesthetic colin j. campbell

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13 A World of Difference: Adorno and Cultural Studies 296 shane gunster 14 ‘On the Morality of Thinking,’ or Why Still Adorno asha varadharajan PART FIVE: ECOLOGY 15 Adorno and Ecological Politics andrew biro Contributors

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Acknowledgments

This book has been long in the making, and we, the editors, owe a debt of gratitude to many people for making its appearance possible. We would like to thank the Canadian Centre for German and European Studies, co-housed at York University and Université de Montréal, for granting us the opportunity to establish the Contemporary Relevance of Adorno Research Group at the Centre, and especially for its financial support of ‘Reconciliation, Dialectics, Critique: A Symposium on the Work of Theodor W. Adorno,’ a conference that we organized in May 2002 at York University in Toronto. While this book does not consist simply of the proceedings from the conference, the conference served as the original impetus for this collection. We would like to thank Ian Balfour, the faculty adviser to the research group, and Asher Horowitz, whose advice throughout the various stages of the preparation of this book was invaluable. We are also grateful to Virgil Duff, our editor at University of Toronto Press, John St James, our copy editor, and the two anonymous reviewers of the manuscript for their many helpful suggestions. Three of the articles in this volume have been previously published elsewhere, and are included here with the kind permission of the original publishers. Deborah Cook’s ‘From the Actual to the Possible: NonIdentity Thinking’ first appeared in Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory 12 (March 2005): 21–35. Samir Gandesha’s ‘The “Aesthetic Dignity of Words”: Adorno’s Philosophy of Language’ was originally published in New German Critique 97 (Winter 2006): 137–58; copyright New German Critique, Inc. Lambert Zuidervaart’s ‘Metaphysics after Auschwitz: Suffering and Hope in Adorno’s Negative Dialectics’ will appear in his forthcoming book Social

viii Acknowledgments

Philosophy after Adorno (copyright Cambridge University Press, 2007). Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press. Finally, we would like to thank Suhrkamp Verlag for permission to publish an English translation of Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Thesen über die Sprache des Philosophen,’ from his Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1 (1973), 366–71.

AD O RN O AN D TH E N EED IN TH IN K IN G : NE W C R ITI CAL ESSAYS

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Introduction the edi tors

The introduction to any edited collection finds itself faced with a characteristic predicament: not only must it justify the existence of the volume itself in relationship to existing scholarship in the field, but even more dauntingly, it is charged with ‘summarizing’ the contents of the contribution as a whole, of showing that each piece contributes to some version of an ‘expressive totality’ serving to justify its existence. This double task appears especially difficult, even impossible, in a collection whose subject’s own life’s work pointedly rejects all attempts at systematization, schematics, or even thematic centring. In this respect, perhaps, it might be easy to stipulate that this collection of critical essays on the thought of Theodor W. Adorno should be approached the same way Adorno himself envisioned his work, as a decentred series of dialectical or constellational textual ‘compositions,’ not unlike the atonal music that he held in such high esteem.1 Such an approach would likely also provide an appearance of cultural contemporaneousness through which the collection could blend in with the general categories animating post-Enlightenment academia’s valorizations of difference, contingency, and spontaneity. However, any such valorization would risk making the first of the tasks named above – thinking the relevance of Adorno today – downright meaningless. For if Adorno’s work, or for that matter a new collection of secondary literature on it, can be presented as an academic enterprise capable of being effortlessly integrated into the cultural status quo, this move effectively occludes the question that most needs answering: why anyone needs to think about Adorno now. A response to this question is all the more urgent because it often seems as though Adorno’s work has been rendered academically obso-

4 The Editors

lete, that works like Dialectic of Enlightenment and Negative Dialectics are at best precursors to, or prototypes of, more well-informed or politically balanced contemporary theoretical approaches. Something like this argument is made on the one hand by postmodern critics and theorists of cultural difference – the majority of the practitioners of postcolonial or cultural studies, for instance – and, on the other hand, by ‘critical theory’ itself, or at least the Habermasian reconfiguration of it. The first of these attitudes could be called ‘post-Enlightenment’; for this group, the term ‘enlightenment’ is essentially and utterly identical with the European-colonial or the nostalgic remnant of a bygone era of elitist bourgeois posturing. The other could be called ‘pro-Enlightenment,’ which in this case is taken to mean simply, ‘rationally intersubjective, procedurally democratic.’ According to the prime exemplars of each side of this debate, Adorno falls clearly on the other side. Adorno, for postmodernism and cultural studies, is a classic latemodern European figure, at once bleakly pessimistic and elitist in the wake of the demise of the great European narrative-project of Enlightenment, a hater of everything touched by the non-European, such as jazz music. For Habermas and his followers, on the other hand, Adorno is only one example of the pervasive postmodern turn to irrationalism and against Enlightenment characterizing the current cultural and academic landscape. Adorno, like the postmodernists, has forsaken what is emancipatory and progressive in the heritage of European enlightenment, has effectively thrown the baby out with the bath-water. Each side of the pro- and anti-Enlightenment debate reads Adorno as being part of the rejected other, still guilty of the sins ‘we’ have finally, and with great studious effort, renounced. Perhaps it is because he is so close to us, because he touches on and remains in the orbit of our greatest hopes and fears, and yet is still apparently not within the ambit of our expectations, that we identify him as part of the other side. How a figure so recognizably proximate to contemporary intellectual currents could at once seem so removed from them is an issue that alone would seem to demand another engagement with Adorno’s thought. Whatever the status of this positioning, there is a way in which it follows the well-worn track of a conceit itself derived from an Enlightenment view of history. That ‘we’ (whoever we happen to be) come after Adorno in time seems automatically to imply that somehow, since his death in 1969, the world, or at least its critics, have become wiser, less naive, perhaps even more theoretically sophisticated, certainly more egalitarian and cosmopolitan, if not more open to difference. In this

Introduction 5

light, calls for a reassessment of Adorno such as the one presented above will sound at most like a call to acknowledge those forward-looking aspects of Adorno’s work that from the vantage point of the present still appear relevant, salvageable for today’s tasks at hand. That such an attitude betrays an uncritical reliance on one of the least tenable facets of the Enlightenment’s legacy was not lost on Adorno himself. In an essay titled ‘Aspects of Hegel’s Philosophy,’ Adorno argued that the call to ‘appreciate’ Hegel’s philosophy on the occasion of what was then the 125th anniversary of the latter’s death, would seriously misunderstand what is at issue in any act of commemoration.2 According to Adorno, a proper reception of Hegel’s significance would demand a reversal of the terms articulated above; if a facile historicizing gaze is to be avoided, one that would, in Adorno’s words, ‘sovereignly assign the dead person his place’ along a continuum of which the present inevitably appears as the culmination, Adorno suggests we consider instead ‘whether perhaps the reason one imagines one has attained since Hegel’s absolute reason has not in fact long since regressed behind the latter.’3 Presumably, this attitude would hold good for any reception of Adorno’s thought in the present as well, even if, at least for some, it were less a matter of affirming reason to be more advanced and, instead, championing the superior virtues of contemporary theoretical or cultural sophistication. When one surveys the real criteria for positioning Adorno on either side of a putatively affirmative or negative stance towards Enlightenment reason and its legacy, one finds the grounds for holding these views ultimately fragile, if not ill informed. Especially in North American academic circles, Adorno’s reception has been anything but fair and impartial. For both of the opposed ‘camps’ likely to banish Adorno to the other side – North American British-influenced cultural studies as much as Habermasian accounts of communicative rationality – Adorno’s thought has served as a foil in relation to which these other projects position themselves as more advanced. As Shane Gunster argues in his essay in this volume, ‘A World of Difference,’ and at greater length in his recent book Capitalizing on Culture, cultural studies, despite its apparent diversity, tends to look at Adorno with a uniform disapproval.4 According to Gunster, much of this reception is based on a superficial and generally misinformed reading of Adorno, and to a lesser extent Benjamin as well. The infamous ‘Culture Industry’ chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment, written by Horkheimer and Adorno in the early 1940s while in exile in the United States, along with Adorno’s scathing indictments of mass culture in the many solo

6 The Editors

essays published afterwards, consolidated Frankfurt critical theory’s reputation of reflexively opposing all things popular.5 That a casual inspection of the culture industry thesis was easily assimilated to the conservative British cultural position of a Matthew Arnold or an F.R. Leavis, against whose ‘culture and civilization’ tradition early British cultural studies cut its teeth, at least partly accounts for this reputation. In this British context, as Gunster puts it, Adorno’s ‘favourable references to serious art – especially in the context of the culture industry’s shortcomings – are easy to construe as evidence of a sympathetic orientation towards bourgeois aesthetics and hence a commitment to Culture rather than culture(s).’6 In fact, the generally dismissive attitude towards Adorno in particular seems to be largely reducible to the claim that Adorno harbours a nostalgic attitude towards European modernity’s high cultural products, to its ‘serious’ art, and it is this supposedly elitist7 attitude that places his reception of contemporary popular culture(s) in a narrative in which they can only be deformed and decadent versions of the high cultural watermarks of European modernism. From this view of Adorno’s thinking on culture, it is but a short step to attribute his pessimistic attitude about the capacity of people to think for themselves to a claim about how they have become cultural dupes, unthinkingly consuming the uniform products of an industrially organized and stultifying mass culture. This mandarin sensibility imputed to Adorno is correlatively blamed for what appears to be his outrageously outmoded notion that mass or popular culture consists of uniform products that produce correspondingly uniform minds, in short, a dull, unquestioning cultural standardization. Views such as the one attributed to Adorno have the virtue of being refuted by means of a simple gesture towards what exists in today’s seemingly diverse market of cultural goods and ever-expanding forms of ‘interactive’ entertainment, which aside from military pursuits, appears to be the major application for and spur to the development of advanced digital technology. It appears similarly easy to refute the ‘cultural dupes’ thesis by reference to a series of studies showing that culture is not consumed in the same fashion by everyone, that there are significant differences in the ways that people receive even the most ideologically standardized cultural fare. Indeed, according to the watchwords of Stuart Hall’s work, the idea that audiences are quite capable of ‘decoding’ mass-produced entertainment in ways that can produce both ‘oppositional’ and highly sophisticated ‘negotiated’ readings of cultural texts, regardless of the slant preferred by their original

Introduction 7

‘encoding,’ would only serve to verify the notion that most people consume culture in an active and thoughtful way, making the culture industry thesis appear as an at best tired theory to be met with hasty dismissal or embarrassed silence.8 The chief defect of this reading of the culture industry thesis – to the extent it is actually read – as Gunster goes on to show in some detail in his book, is that it misses the target of that thesis almost entirely, that is, the commodity form of contemporary capitalist cultural products. In Gunster’s quite plausible view, this is largely because the cultural studies tradition that emerged from its British origins and migrated across the Atlantic has assimilated to a significant degree the structural theory of language developed by Ferdinand de Saussure, especially as applied by such diverse thinkers as Roland Barthes and Louis Althusser.9 Whatever the value of these analyses – and nothing said here should be taken to impute a lack of value – they do tend to (over)emphasize the structural autonomy of linguistic and cultural expressions relative to the rest of the society in which they appear, although somewhat understandably in reaction to an earlier Marxism intent on reducing such forms of the ‘superstructure’ to mere moments of an underlying and all-determining economic base. But the danger in the move to such autonomy is that it can harbour the tempting illusion of understanding and analysing language, and more generally all forms of cultural expression, in isolation from those processes and relations that in capitalist society cannot be thought incidental to their form; namely, the expansionary tendency of capital to commodify more and more domains of social existence. Hence, despite significant differences in how cultural objects are approached within cultural studies, as Gunster observes, the approach as a whole ‘is founded on the understanding that cultural consumption is, at its core, an active process whereby a multiplicity of meanings, pleasures, and uses are taken from the objects and activities of popular culture irrespective of how they were originally produced.’10 Of course, insofar as ‘these types of claims make the point that there will always be more to culture than commodification, they are impossible to dispute,’ and indeed, there is little reason to want to do so.11 The real problems with this approach arise when this excess of reception over production is taken as licence to disregard the dimension of commodification altogether by analysing the semiotic or affective dimensions of culture autonomously from its integration into capitalist relations of production and consumption. If it is admitted that there is no moment of reception wholly indepen-

8 The Editors

dent of capitalist social relations and the commodity-form, the door is open for a reading of contemporary culture closer to those proffered by the authors of Dialectic of Enlightenment; indeed, various strands of cultural studies are beginning to recognize that in an era of vastly expanded global corporate power and concentration, earlier ‘optimistic’ talk of forms of resistant decoding formally separable from hegemonic forms of encoding makes little sense apart from a more nuanced understanding of how those very opportunities for decoding play into the logic of capitalist exchange. Stuart Hall, for instance, has recently argued that global capitalism ‘stage-manages’ the differences it presents as proof of healthy cultural diversity, thereby incorporating the moment of cultural ‘independence within it, so to speak.’12 As cultural theorist John Clarke observes, the cultural studies approach of theorizing consumers as free agents who freely mine cultural products for those signs of difference and identity that they find emancipatory, while supposedly remaining unaffected by the commodified milieu in which these differences are presented in fact ‘replicate[s] the view of capitalism which capitalism would most like us to see: the richness of the marketplace and the freely choosing consumer.’13 While much of this concern has been expressed in North American cultural studies circles in the form of a lengthy debate over the degree to which cultural studies should engage in political-economic analysis of cultural products rather than remaining content with more familiar discourse or content analysis, such debate still orbits within a base-orsuperstructure alternative, exposing thereby the limitations of the original thesis of independent reception while overlooking the alternative presented by a systematic theorization of precisely the cultural impact of the economic logic of the commodity form. It is this alternative with which the much-maligned culture industry thesis is primarily concerned.14 When the culture industry thesis in particular, and Adorno’s writings on culture in general, are presented as attempts to diagnose the cultural condition of a society whose forms of cultural life are increasingly colonized by the commodity-form, many of the features of its analysis previously thought to be defects transmute themselves into theoretical strengths. If it is admitted that there is no independent moment of reception even notionally unaffected by capitalist social relations, it follows immediately that the ‘social dupes’ thesis often attributed to Adorno mistakenly locates the power of social coercion in a quasiGramscian notion of hegemony in which the products and messages of

Introduction 9

the culture industry become an omnipotent brainwashing force. But as Adorno and Horkheimer specifically claim, it is not because the cultural industry has such vast powers that most people do not seriously rebel against capitalist relations of inequity. Rather, they claim that the social power of capitalist society to enforce conformity is not to be found primarily in the cultural industries, but in ‘steel, petroleum, electricity, chemicals. Compared to them the culture monopolies are weak and dependent. They have to keep in with the true wielders of power.’15 Rather than adapt semiotics to a theory of the hegemonic ideology of capitalist social relations, Horkheimer and Adorno turn our attention towards the material conditions under which ‘[t]echnical rationality today is the rationality of domination.’16 It is in light of the dependent relation of cultural expression to the social relations of capital that the effects of the culture industries can be assessed without arguing anything as naive as the view that the content of culture is simply a reproduction of capitalist or bourgeois ideology. On this front, Horkheimer and Adorno advance two main arguments about the effects of the commodity-form upon mass cultural expressions: first, that the forms of leisure and associated cultural activities increasingly come to resemble the conditions of capitalist accumulation, that is, of work and labour, and second, that this convergence between culture and accumulation occurs despite an increase in the ostensible diversity of the cultural products themselves. Beginning first with the second argument, the culture industry thesis suggests that differences propagated by the culture industry do not exist in free isolation, able to be picked up and used by groups of people wishing to advance their own activities autonomously from the commodity form that structures those very activities. As Gunster notes with respect to the most contemporary marketing techniques, ‘Linking a broad range of images, practices, and feelings with specific objects and activities is precisely what advertising tries to achieve’ in its ongoing attempt to exert ‘a powerful influence over how an object is integrated into the lived experience of an individual.’17 To the extent that advertising, as the ‘lifestyle’ arm of the commodification of everyday life, is able to turn the individual’s experiences into an integrated circuit of desire for consumption, the overall power of the economic system to affect subjects is most obvious yet perhaps least visible. Adorno is at his strongest in suggesting that the culture industry’s particular power does not lie in promoting mere escape or distraction outside the confines of the existing circuits of capitalist production and consumption,

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The Editors

but rather in integrating the individual ever more tightly to the forms of reality presented as inescapable by capital’s own reproductive requirements. For Adorno, if the culture industry were engaged in sheer escapism, it would retain at least some degree of subversive potential by suggesting that something else might be possible. What is much worse, according to Adorno, is that the affect generated through the display of ubiquitous and multifarious lifestyle commodities is a mode of ‘fantasy’ or desire that actively mirrors the very economic system which causes people to seek escape in cultural commodities in the first place. The experience of the consumer here will ‘confirm the schema by acting as its constituents,’ where the schema in question derives from the ‘model of the gigantic economic machinery, which, from the first, keeps everyone on their toes, both at work and in the leisure time which resembles it.’18 The convergence between the reality of both work and leisure, the reenforcement of capitalist economic reality by means of its cultural expressions, imprisons the individual within a schema of pseudo-individuality where the differences offered up are often pseudo-differences, whatever their novelty or variety. Even manifestly oppositional content has little purchase on the operations of the system of exchange itself, as the proliferation of nominally anti-capitalist paraphernalia like the ubiquitous Che Guevera ‘brand’ of a few years ago suggests.19 In a capitalist society, whatever the declared ideology of cultural products might be, their content is overshadowed by the market system in which they are immersed, just as the reciprocal conditioning of work and leisure under conditions of domination tends towards a majority in society whose discontent lacks a politically effective outlet – at least one providing an alternative to capitalist reality. Instead of suggesting a conspiratorial notion of bourgeois class interest, however, the convergence suggested above is simply a key manifestation of the logic of commodification as the market expands to more and more areas of cultural activity. As a result of such expansion, diversity, not uniformity, will result, but this logic must be conceived as a dialectical interaction between uniformity and diversity – not as simply one or the other. To the extent that they become commodities, and thus uniform in the sense that they exist primarily as objects to be exchanged at a surplus (since this is the only way they find themselves before a large segment of the public), cultural products must in fact proliferate their difference or diversity more and more shrilly and stridently precisely to stave off their uniformity as commodities. Anticipating the

Introduction 11

ideology of niche marketing by several decades, Horkheimer and Adorno write that ‘[s]omething is provided for everyone so that no one can escape; differences are hammered home and propagated.’20 Once the premise that mass cultural products are primarily determined by the market’s logic of exchangeability is accepted, the misconception that Adorno and Horkheimer (or even Marcuse for that matter) falsely represent all cultural products as cut from the same grey cloth loses much of its force. These claims, which in fact underpin the culture industry thesis, should give many contemporary cultural studies practitioners pause, not least because of the necessity of admitting something like the cultural industry thesis in their own efforts to understand contemporary postmodern capitalism. There is more in the theoretical armature underpinning the culture industry argument than is usually allowed by those seeking to dismiss critical theory’s potential for addressing the contemporary situation of unbridled capitalist dominance. Like the cultural products themselves, Adorno and Horkheimer’s argument mimetically represents the betrayal and co-optation of burgeoning creativity. It is an example or a model, more than the conservative prescription it is usually taken to be. Likewise, Adorno’s defence of modernist art is not primarily a testimony to mandarin tastes (although these are no doubt present), as it is an attempt to think about a form of art that at least for a while managed to stave off its reduction to the commodity-form (which is not to deny, of course, that high modernist artworks were and are also commodities, but merely to claim that it was not their being turned into commodities that provided the basic impetus for their creation). In other words, in a society given over to cultural production for rationalized exchange on the market, it is precisely high modernist artworks’ inaccessibility to a wide public’s appreciation that gives them a chance to express something not primarily reflective of the logic of exchange. That Adorno describes the art he favours as ‘autonomous’ rather than merely ‘high’ art does not express a desire that these works remain forever out of the reach of most people, but rather provides a critical vantage point through which to evaluate cultural commodities whose content is eclipsed by the feature of their exchangevalue, a feature that shapes their content or use-value to a much greater extent than those cultural products that resist the market’s logic. As this implies, if Adorno is not attacking popular culture from the lofty perspective of the class privilege of the cultural conservative, nei-

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The Editors

ther is his position reducible to that of the bourgeois art critic: for this charge is predicated upon the simple opposition between elite or high versus mass or low cultural forms; instead, his critique is directed against the expansionist logic of the commodity-form itself, without for that reason being engaged in the maligned economism or class reductionism imputed to other forms of Marxist theory. However, if Adorno’s ‘highbrow’ aesthetic tastes are set aside as the main reason for rejecting the culture industry thesis,21 other notions that seem to follow from this essentially ad hominem attribution falter as well. With the latter opposition’s displacement, the conceptual front moves to the more complex distinction between the nature of cultural products that escape, however partially, the market’s logic and those that are basically constructed for exchange on its terms. If it is the case that the products of the culture industry are principally produced for exchange as commodities, then for Adorno works of authentic autonomous art resist commodification and stand outside of the system of exchange. As the all-pervasive forces of the market colonize further domains of culture, as we drink our coffee from mugs bearing the image of Edvard Munch’s The Scream, the autonomy art once achieved is assimilated into the world as it is. However, while the products of the culture industry constitute a repetition of that which is always the same, thus producing standardized consciousness through the consumption of identical wares, autonomous art, the subject of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, transcends the administered world and can, at least potentially, lead to ‘the breaking through of reified consciousness’22 and the anticipation of the yet-to-exist. Horkheimer and Adorno’s larger thesis, reflected throughout Dialectic of Enlightenment and featured on practically every page of Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, is that the commodification process as exemplified in the cultural industries is merely the materialization and culmination of subject-dominated rationality. This rationality, they argue, is systematically deformed by the very identity-thinking through which it proceeds. This accounts for the dialectically tragic-farcical oscillations between enlightenment and mythology, such as the enlightened mythology of unlimited human progress in the midst of planetary disaster. But whereas the production of authentic autonomous art implicitly anticipates the yet-to-exist site of the reconciliation between civilization and non-human and human nature, negative dialectics explicitly uses ‘the strength of the subject to break through the fallacy of constitutive subjectivity.’23

Introduction

13

The name of dialectics says no more, to begin with, than that objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder, that they come to contradict the traditional norm of adequacy. Contradiction ... indicates the untruth of identity, the fact that the concept does not exhaust the thing conceived. Yet the appearance of identity is inherent in thought itself, in its pure form. To think is to identify ... Contradiction is nonidentity under the aspect of identity ... As the heterogeneous collides with its limit it exceeds itself. Dialectics is the consistent sense of nonidentity (ND 5) ... The cognitive utopia would be to use concepts to unseal the nonconceptual with concepts, without making it their equal (ND 10) ... Necessity compels philosophy to operate with concepts, but this necessity must not be turned into the virtue of their priority. (ND 11)

For Adorno, thought by definition demands unity and identity, and negative dialectics cannot set itself apart from the Western philosophical tradition by jettisoning this demand. Rather, negative dialectics operates openly with a concept of totality, yet is self-reflexively aware of the inadequacy of the concept fully to grasp the non-identical, that which eludes the concept, that with which the concept has a mimetic relation. It is precisely this ‘synoptic’ exercise in speculative dialectics,24 however, that attracts hostility from the so-called second generation of critical theory, associated with Habermas as well as his followers, such as Albrecht Wellmer.25 According to Habermas, Adorno’s two great philosophical works, Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory, terminate in a self-referential discourse from which there is as little possibility of escape as there is from the single dark room that is the setting of Beckett’s Endgame: ’Negative dialectics and aesthetic theory can now only “helplessly refer to one another.”’26 Whereas Adorno embraces the contradiction between identifying thought and the non-identical that ‘asks to be negated by thinking’ (ND 408), Habermas will have no truck with such aporiae: ‘Horkheimer and Adorno ... believe that even the critique of instrumental reason remains tied to the model that instrumental reason itself follows’ (TCA1 388–9). ‘This concept is no less paradoxical than a concept of the non-identical that is thought in an identifying manner’ (TCA1 395). What Habermas objects to is Adorno’s construal of the universal history of reason in negative terms; putting it schematically, Habermas reads Adorno’s history of the development of reason as a universal ‘process of self-destruction.’27 If, say the Habermasians, the history of

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The Editors

Occidental rationality for the first-generation critical theorists is merely the process of its psychotic domination of inner and outer nature, it follows that ‘it is no longer possible to place hope in the liberating force of Enlightenment.’28 Consequently, according to Habermas and his followers, Adorno closely follows the ‘ironic hope of the hopeless’ ascribed to Benjamin, a necessarily paradoxical and irrational hope that must take leave of rationality altogether, placing itself in the non-conceptual domain of high modernist artworks – a domain whose very inability to oppose enlightenment rationality by rational means becomes a testimony to the actual hopelessness of the totalizing critique of reason pursued by Adorno. Hence, according to Habermas, in Adorno’s work ‘[t]he promise for which the surviving philosophic tradition is no longer a match has withdrawn into the mirror-writing of the esoteric work of art and requires a negativistic deciphering. From this labor of deciphering, philosophy sucks the residue of that paradoxical trust in reason with which negative dialectics executes (in the double sense of this word) its performative contradiction.’29 The cause of this performative contradiction in Adorno is, for Habermas, only part of the larger irrational legacy of subject-centred reason; the subject, seeking to ground itself absolutely by its own means cannot but find itself simultaneously both presupposed and the object of continual critique. Subject-centred reason’s groundlessness, its lack of any normative foundations for its critique of society, lapses into irrationality and mere performance: ‘it is only the insistent force of a groundless reflection turned against itself that preserves our connection with the utopia of a long since lost, uncoerced and intuitive knowledge belonging to a primal past.’30 These difficulties can be resolved, Habermas argues, by recognizing that rationality has positive forms, with potential for differentiation beyond its instrumental or purposive relation to objects. Hence, Habermas argues that critical social theory must ‘put the cognitiveinstrumental aspect of reason in its proper place as part of a more encompassing communicative rationality’ (TCA1 390). Communicative rationality, Habermas argues, is inherent in everyday language in the form of ‘intersubjective understanding as the telos inscribed into communication in ordinary language.’31 This form of communicative rationality takes its place within a tripartite division within linguistically mediated reason between goal-directed, moral-practical, and aestheticexpressive acts. The moral or ethically communicative is held to be reason’s normative mode oriented towards uncoerced understanding reg-

Introduction

15

ulated by the force of the better argument, a normativity thereby rendering other modes of language, such as the instrumental or strategic use, ‘parasitic.’ At the level of social organization, the communicative reason that governs the lifeworld is trisected into cognitive-instrumental, moralpractical, and aesthetic-expressive rationality, as opposed to the colonizing forces of functionalist rationality operative in the capitalist economy and the modern bureaucratic state. According to Habermas, these plural rationalities came to be differentiated as independent spheres of validity, developing out of the traditional society of fused social forms. Following Max Weber here, but departing from his pessimistic appraisal of modern rationalization, Habermas contends that the lifeworld remains the potential location for ensuring a rational society. The pragmatics of discourse ethics directed to mutual understanding provide the basis for a resolution to the problems of modern society – for example, the colonization of the lifeworld by the steering media of money and power – in place of the substantive one proposed by critical theory’s first generation. The intersubjective nature of communicative rationality is held to be able to resolve the impossible predicament of the self-grounding of subjective reason by providing a forum in which normativity is built into the orientation towards consensus provided by intersubjective communicative action. The general agreement among Habermasian critics over Adorno’s allegedly one-sided view of reason, however, does nothing to dispel the problems haunting the alleged improvements to second-generation critical theory. As Asher Horowitz has argued, the need for an alternative to the dilemma of subject-centred reason is not finally laid to rest by the intersubjectively mediated conception of reason developed by Habermas: the forms of differentiated rationality directed towards morality, aesthetics, and goal-oriented rationality demand that within the lifeworld an ideal unity or balance must be conceivable, and this would amount to an objective, or substantive, conception of reason; but it is precisely the substantive form of rationality that Habermas’s communicative intersubjectivity within the lifeworld is meant to replace as outmoded and no longer tenable. Without such a substantive conception of reason, though, it is entirely unclear where one is to locate the balance and interplay between spheres of reason, if anywhere.32 As Simon Jarvis points out, agreeing with Horowitz here, communicatively motivated intersubjective dialogue, meant to replace an objective concept of reason, amounts to a substitution of a substantive concep-

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tion of reason with a purely procedural ideal of uncoerced communicative action within the lifeworld. But the problem with such procedural safety nets is that one is ‘again left in the predicament of “always having to suppose” just what we never find to be fully true in any particular case, that “only the unforced force of the better argument comes into play.”’33 Procedure lacks, in the end, substantive grounds that would stave off the scepticism that it is merely formalism – whether or not it makes for pleasant conversation – begging the question whether authentic subjective communication in fact exists against and in spite of procedurally assured communication. In presupposing a substantive conception of reason that is never supplied – because of its supposed contamination by subject-centred reason – as much as through its substitution of an inadequate form of proceduralism, second-generation critical theory manages to jettison what was of primary critical value for critical social theory, namely, an uncompromised criticism of the world as it exists. Even more seriously, as Lambert Zuidervaart’s essay in this volume demonstrates, a consequence of the substitution of proceduralism for substantive reason is the jettisoning of the ethical dimension of first-generation critique. If philosophy, for Habermas, now becomes a ‘solver of problems,’ that is, a device for managing proper procedure, the moral force of Adorno’s philosophical critique of the history of selfpreservation loses its compelling priority. Indeed, Zuidervaart notes that one of the hallmarks of second-generation critical theory is its marked lack of attention to, even indifference towards, socially induced suffering. Where the substantive content of reason for Adorno lay in the critique of a one-sided development of reason in the service of selfpreservation – and this point alone should cast some doubt on Habermas’s reading of Adorno as rehearsed above – the energies of the second generation are quite simply elsewhere. Given the continuation, and even escalation, of suffering posed by recent post–Cold War history, the Habermasian position seems literally ‘out of touch’ with the urgency of the historical situation and, at the limit, is very much in keeping with the neo-liberal tendency to substitute procedure for results. Indeed, one might go so far as to suggest that the decline of the liberal-corporatist social welfare state exposes the limits of the Habermasian project as a whole. The latter, along with its commitment to procedure, did at least imply the substantial goal of making room for a majority of the key parties in society at the table. In this context of a (German) corporatist model of society, committed to some measure of

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actual equality, Habermas’s regulative ideal of communicative action appears as a progressive contribution to that agenda. However, since the neo-liberalist ‘revolutions’ of Thatcher and Reagan, along with the systematic reversal of the social welfare state, fair procedure takes on a different role, the one foreseen by Herbert Marcuse in One-Dimensional Man: to substitute itself for any substantial outcome, while allowing the claim that a more robust capitalism is still ‘just.’ Under these conditions, the focus on substantive rational commitments takes on the necessary and progressive force that Habermas thought it vitiated. The urgency of this gesture and this sensibility has been radically reconfigured since the ubiquitously repeated ‘events of September 11, 2001,’ which have been read both in the popular mind and in an increasing range of critical appraisals to have either inaugurated a radically new political age or to have brought to their culmination trends that have been simmering throughout the latter part of the twentieth century. Adorno himself would surely have adopted the Hegelian position here: it is both simultaneously. The apparently amoral and nihilistic seizure of power – marked by quasi-Nietzschean rhetoric from Donald Rumsfeld about the perspectival nature of truth that is unprecedented in official American political discourse34 – is something radically new for Anglo-America, if not for the world at large. But it is also, as Marcuse already knew in 1962, merely the culmination of onedimensionality. The defence of ‘democratic institutions’ against Islamic fundamentalism is waged by a fusion of Christian fundamentalism and the ‘ethics’ of the nihilistic will to technical power. Torture, even of innocent victims, is justified as necessary for the protection of innocents from terroristic violence.35 The culture industry, in the figure of the embedded reporter, has fused with the twentieth-century military-industrial complex into a monolithic agent of capitalist expansion, rent with apocalyptic divisions that only increase its furiously productive cultural, economic, and military anxiety. But this is exactly the eventuality predicted in the ‘overly-pessimistic’ Dialectic of Enlightenment, which pointed to fascism as the unavoidable shadow of a society in which exchange-value has eclipsed and absorbed all tradition, along with every human element, into its circuit. ‘With the spread of the commodity economy the dark horizon of myth is illuminated by the sun of calculating reason, beneath whose icy rays the seeds of the new barbarism are germinating.’36 In this context, even the most eloquent champions of global cosmopolitanism are thrown back to the abstraction of philosophy and ‘utopia,’

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pointing to a world that would be possible, if only reason were observed. But as Adorno and Horkheimer long ago noted, ‘Now that self-preservation has been finally automated, reason is dismissed by those who, as controllers of production, have taken over its inheritance and fear it in the disinherited.’37 It is precisely this sense of the powerlessness and weakness of critique, ‘that had aimed to attain its world concept, [which] has perforce regressed to its school concept,’ that Adorno admitted inexorably marks thinking, but that also defines the need that remains in it. Adorno never forgot Marx’s radical injunction: ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.’37 But neither Marx nor the apparent failures of the Marxian project of radical social transformation provide grounds for any last word: ‘Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realize it was missed. The summary judgment that it had merely interpreted the world, that resignation in the face of reality had crippled it in itself, becomes a defeatism of reason after the attempt to change the world miscarried’ (ND 3). Adorno’s ‘doctrine’ of the primacy of the object in fact necessarily implies the fearless speech of what remains of subjectivity against every false ‘us or them’ alternative. As Lambert Zuidervaart argues, the primacy of the object for subjective experience refers to suffering, and to the hope that only comes from the will to contemplate suffering honestly. It is for Adorno the incommunicable, ultimately indisputable, primacy of the experience of human suffering and of the need for redemption that directs philosophical thought at every moment and in every mediation: But thinking, itself a mode of conduct, contains the need – the vital need, at the outset – in itself. The need is what we think from, even where we disdain wishful thinking. The motor of the need is the effort that involves thought as action. The object is not the need in thinking, but the relationship between the two. Yet the need in thinking is what makes us think. It asks to be negated by thinking; it must disappear in thought if it is to be really satisfied; and in this negation it survives. Represented in the inmost cell of thought is that which is unlike thought. The smallest intramundane traits would be of relevance to the absolute, for the micrological view cracks the shells of what, measured by the subsuming cover concept, is helplessly isolated and explodes its identity, the delusion that it is but a specimen. There is solidarity between such thinking and metaphysics at the time of its fall. (ND 408)

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It is that need that binds us, albeit at times uncomfortably and anxiously, in a human community of questioning that the rising twentyfirst-century political order declares to be obsolete. The weakness of a community based on what is non-communicable in the logic of identity is vibrantly obvious, but the 9/11 attacks, on one hand, and Gandhi’s political revolution, on the other, also make vibrantly obvious that weakness can be its own kind of strength. In recognizing the radically fraudulent nature of thinking about social change, the powerlessness of academic investigation in the face of the total industrialization of culture, we are opened to the as-yet unrepresentable possibility of real change, change in a redemptive and liberatory direction, the potentialities of a real change in which the domination of the lifeworld by the commodity-form would be eliminated, not merely controlled by social welfare measures. Adorno’s sense of the weakness of his own position is often forgotten or overlooked, given his admittedly charged and erudite rhetoric. But the editors of this volume would like to suggest that this weakness of the non-identical reflected negatively in thought is analogous to something the French irrationalists like Georges Bataille would call a ‘gift’ – something that by its very nature falls outside of the circuit of exchange, which does not anticipate any ‘exchange’ or ‘return’ in so many words. ‘No theory today escapes the marketplace. Each one is offered as a possibility among competing opinions; all are put up for choice; all are swallowed. There are no blinders for thought to don against this, and the self-righteous conviction that my own theory is spared that fate will surely deteriorate into self-advertising’ (ND 4). The totalization of market relations leaves no school of interpretation or criticism unaffected, including Adorno himself. But it is the unprecedented nature of the form of communication of the non-communicable that Adorno provided in his models that makes it all but impossible to assimilate it to any aspect of contemporary political experience. Its very usefulness must necessarily remain in question, precisely to prevent its reduction to mere exchange-value. It responds mimetically as well as reflectively to a totalitarian universe that rigorously prohibits or else sadistically humiliates mimetic forms of behaviour. The return to political ‘reality’ and the ongoing critical examination of, and dialogue about, Adorno’s theory, as well as philosophical and social theory in general, should not be avoided in any case, and is precisely what makes his dialectical gift meaningful in a real sense. We speak for all of our contributors when we say that we hope this volume will make a meaningful contribution

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to academic debate over the future of difference and rationality in these difficult times. As an important contribution to the ongoing and increasingly topical interpretive work on Adorno’s philosophy of language, the first section of the volume presents a series of provocative essays that attempt to make explicit crucial themes that are essential for grasping the absolutely central role of language throughout Adorno’s entire oeuvre. As an entirely appropriate point of departure, the section opens with a translation by Samir Gandesha and Michael Palamarek of a significant, early essay of Adorno’s entitled ‘Theses on the Language of the Philosopher.’ This relatively short piece presents, in highly condensed form, Adorno’s reflections on and critiques of idealist and phenomenological conceptions of language. While unpublished in Adorno’s lifetime, the essay, as Gandesha and Palamarek contend in their respective chapters, represents the early outlines of themes that continue to preoccupy and inform the development and refinement of Adorno’s attention to linguistic concerns. Not the least among these are a dialectical conception of language, the intimate, complex relationship between aesthetic and philosophical language, and the presentation of the model of ‘configuration.’ Gandesha’s essay, ‘The “Aesthetic Dignity of Words”: On Adorno’s Philosophy of Language,’ expands these themes in a set of comparative juxtapositions between Adorno, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein. Reading ‘Theses on the Language of the Philosopher’ in relation to Adorno’s other important essays from the 1930s, Gandesha shows how Adorno’s conception of language in this period emerges from immanent critiques of Heidegger’s ontology and logical positivism. Notably, the chapter suggests provocative and relatively unexplored links between Adorno’s presentation of language and the language philosophy of the later Wittgenstein. With varying degrees of explicitness, all the essays in this first section present the lines of a significant counter-argument to Habermas’s reorientation of critical theory along the lines of language as communication in their respective presentations of the particular elements of Adorno’s own conceptions of language. Given the entirely perplexing lack of concentrated attention to these conceptions and reflections among secondgeneration critical theorists, the essays as a whole argue for language as a foundational key to allow the themes of materiality, reification, and the relatively neglected yet vitally important topos of utopia to emerge more strongly in Adorno’s philosophy. If only as a countervailing cri-

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tique of the aporiae of communication, this work collectively argues for a revisiting of the importance of language in the work of first-generation critical theorists, in order to demonstrate its continuing relevance for a critical theory that seeks to provide an essential, dynamic critique of contemporary conditions. As part of this effort, Palamarek’s ‘Adorno’s Dialectics of Language’ attempts to develop a schematic framework through which the core elements of Adorno’s unsystematic reflections on language can be discerned, and their complex interconnections brought to the fore. In order to support his contention that Adorno consistently approaches language dialectically, Palamarek explores a series of interrelated dialectical complexes that he shows carry forward from the early ‘Theses’ essay to Minima Moralia, Dialectic of Enlightenment, and finally Negative Dialectics. Foremost among these are the dialectical relations between word and thing, communication and expression, and reification and reconciliation. These complexes measure out the contradictory tensions in language between its historical and cultural ruination, and its inescapable role as the ‘organon’ of critical thought in the service of utopic reconciliation. As an integral part of the possibility of such reconciliation, Palamarek emphasizes the ways in which Adorno’s critique of language is fundamentally informed by the effort to bring to expression what has and continues to suffer, or ‘to lend a voice to suffering’ (ND 17–18). In its connection to suffering, and its intention to bring the object as such to expression, Adorno’s approach to language is shown to be resolutely materialist and historical. Kathy Kiloh’s essay, ‘The Linguistic Image: Mediation and Immediacy in Adorno and Benjamin,’ addresses the often cited and underassessed relationship between Adorno and Walter Benjamin. Here, Kiloh attempts a rereading of Benjamin and Adorno that considers their bodies of work as though they were arranged in a kind of constellation or dialectical image. Her analysis is grouped around the key concepts of conceptual mediation versus immediate sensuous experience, iconoclasm versus iconophilia, and the titular ‘linguistic image.’ The concluding section of this essay describes the way in which language serves as the model for both Adorno’s thinking in constellations and Benjamin’s dialectical images. In understanding the key role that language (as a relational system that mediates between the material and the abstract) plays in both Adorno and Benjamin’s thought, we come to a greater understanding of the similarities and differences between the thinkers. This allows us to see the radical nature of Adorno’s model of

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subjectivity as well as the ways in which Benjamin’s understanding of the dialectic relies on a mediated relationship between subject and object, although Benjamin himself tends to avoid these terms in his writing. Kiloh contends that reading Benjamin and Adorno alongside each other opens up a critical and politically charged analysis of late capitalism that is powerful (somewhat paradoxically) because we are made aware of both the blind spots and troubling aspects of each thinker’s work. The second section of the volume, ‘Metaphysics and Society,’ opens with an essay by Lambert Zuidervaart, who argues that the ‘communicative turn’ of the second-generation Frankfurt School theorists ‘supports serious misinterpretations of Adorno’s philosophy,’ ‘blunts the political edge of critical theory,’ and ‘results in a truncated vision of philosophy’ that is unable to reflect in thought the passion necessary for a project that attempts to seriously engage with contemporary social, economic, and political problems. More specifically, Zuidervaart challenges Albrecht Wellmer’s bleak interpretation of Adorno; in Wellmer’s misreading of Adorno, all Adorno’s hope for societal change dissolves into an adaptation to the status quo. Zuidervaart suggests that Wellmer’s understanding of human consciousness as constant and unchanging, along with his refusal to acknowledge Adorno’s assertion that metaphysical transformation must be preceded or accompanied by social transformation, leads him into a philosophy barren of socially transformative possibility. However, Zuidervaart also identifies two weaknesses inherent in Adorno’s thematization of suffering and hope; first, Adorno takes the position that suffering can speak for itself and manifests itself as a non-culturally specific physical response of abhorrence. Second, Adorno over-invests objects that resist commodification with transformative hope. Zuidervaart identifies Adorno’s ‘globalizing of transformation’ – his all-or-nothing approach that refuses to recognize ‘multiple roots of change’ – as the origin of what he argues is Adorno’s insufficient conception of the subject as an individual agent of change. In response to his overemphasis on the liberatory potential of the non-identical in the object, Zuidervaart suggests that rather than abandoning Adorno’s demand to incorporate hope and suffering into philosophy (as the second-generation theorists have done), we can supplement his philosophy with a more nuanced concept of subjectivity. Deborah Cook’s paper engages with two recent interpretations of Adorno’s work, focusing on the work of J.M. Bernstein, who has emerged as one of the foremost Adorno scholars. Cook’s argument is

Introduction

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that while Bernstein has successfully extrapolated Adorno’s epistemology as that of a ‘complex concept,’ that is, a concept that does not abstract from the material objects on which it depends, his account of the speculative dimension of the concept is less successful. According to Cook, Bernstein neglects how much Adorno draws upon the universality inherent in the concept to level a critique of social conditions. Focusing in particular on Adorno’s discussion of the concept of freedom in Negative Dialectics, Cook points out that Adorno shows that the concept intends more than whatever is currently classified under it: all nominalistic attempts to limit what freedom ‘is’ to its current usage or experience in contemporary society betray it. That is, the non-identifying concept offers a critique of the object in its present condition through its ‘longing to become identical with the thing,’ thereby offering a critical glimpse of hidden possibilities in objects not to be experienced under given conditions. While the concept reveals objects straining to be otherwise than what they are under present conditions, this correspondingly offers a critique of the social conditions that prevent their fully measuring up to their concept. Once again, the intricacies of subject-object, universal and particular, are anything but simply abstract theoretical meditations, but point beyond themselves towards both a critique of society and a glimpse of what different, non-coercive social conditions would allow. Finally, Jonathan Short’s essay ‘Experience and Aura’ compares the notion of de-reification proposed in the project of the contemporary American philosopher John McDowell with the critique of reification found in Adorno’s own thought. Short argues that while there are certain epistemological commonalities between the two projects, too much has been made of these similarities (in this case by J.M. Bernstein). What precisely separates McDowell and Adorno on Short’s account is the latter’s critique of societal rationalization as the historically specific mode of epistemological irrationalism (reification) that both philosophers want to call into question. While McDowell offers an epistemology of expanded subjective experience, he also takes his largely empiricist account of the knowledge deriving from experience as an account of experience-in-general. He thereby neglects what Adorno calls the societal coercions built into and shaping empirical experience. The only way to get at these, Short suggests, is not through a purported account of experience in general but via Adorno’s specifically critical stance towards a disenchanted society read through the lens of disenchanted, post-metaphysical epistemology.

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The third set of papers, grouped around the theme of ‘Communication, Reification, and the Non-Identical’ opens with Asher Horowitz’s paper ‘Rational Kernels? Mystical Shells?’ Horowitz offers an epistemological critique of the social theory of Jürgen Habermas, in which the latter, dismissing Adorno’s own more sombre diagnosis of the reification inherent in modern society, offers instead a social theory that promises to make good on the rational potentials in modern social rationalization. As Horowitz points out, however, Habermas’s shift from Adorno’s epistemology – in which reification indicates a distorted relation to the object, which is mimetically related to disenchanted and coercive social practices – to a social theory where the concept of reification is replaced by the notion of a colonizing intrusion of ‘norm-free’ processes into the intersubjective lifeworld, has serious adverse consequences for the liberatory potential of social critique. One such consequence is that, in the shift from an epistemology where reification indicates an objective distortion in social relations to a neutral description of social differentiation, Habermas’s social theory becomes idealist: objects are what they are according to the collective validity-claims raised by intersubjective communication. This by itself, however, can say nothing about whether the relation to the object is more or less rational. Horowitz argues that the category of reification in Adorno, by contrast, allows claims to be made about the objective irrationality of present society precisely because reification posits an irrational relation to the object, one that can be removed through critique of the concept and its social genesis in a reifying society. Martin Morris also enacts a re-evaluation of the Habermasian position as he examines the libratory potential of aesthetic experience, and foregrounds Adorno’s assertion that the social and aesthetic realms are mutually mediated. Morris takes a critical look at the rift between the first- and second-generation members of the Frankfurt School. For Habermas, Adorno’s philosophical program risks falling into unreason because of its emphasis on the aesthetic and the non-identical. Morris argues that it is specifically because Habermas rejects this element of Adorno’s critique that his goal of presenting a viable form of radical democracy is untenable. However, he suggests that the inadequacies of Habermas’s project may be supplemented, and perhaps corrected, by reading them through Adorno’s aesthetic theory. Morris brings to the fore Adorno’s observation that the rhetoric of communication often masks an adaptation to the dominant forces of late capitalism; he argues that it is precisely this adaptability that makes Habermas’s

Introduction

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notion of radical democracy in communicative action so susceptible to the logic of capitalism. According to Morris, the ethical impulse and thrust of communicative action is confined to the cognitive moment of the social bond and, therefore, to what is possible within capitalist society. Because Habermas banishes imagination as unreason, there is no recognition in his work of what might be possible in a society not dominated by capitalism. Morris argues that there are moments within communicative action that do not enter cognition because they are ‘aesthetic, gestural, and affective.’ Without Adorno’s analysis of the aesthetic, Habermas’s theory is doomed to ignore both the progressive and the totalitarian potential of the social bonds it presupposes. Both Adorno and Habermas make responsibility to the other the cornerstone of their social theory. While Adorno understands this responsibility as an openness to the other, to the non-identical, Habermas sees the offer of the communicative act as the very moment of responsibility to the other. Morris concludes that these two understandings of social and ethical responsibility are not mutually exclusive and can, in fact, be incorporated as long as the reification and instrumentalization of communication and the social bond it engenders is prevented. In the third and final contribution to the section on communication, reification, and the non-identical, Donald Burke’s essay defends Adorno’s dialectical approach to aesthetics against the criticisms of Habermas and Wellmer. The essay is divided into three parts. Through a close reading of Habermas’s The Theory of Communicative Action, part one critically analyses Habermas’s theory of the differentiation of cultural spheres of value. Drawing upon the criticisms of Habermas advanced by Asher Horowitz and Christoph Menke, Burke argues that Habermas’s theory falls short of presenting a viable alternative to the subject-centred reason that is at the heart of critical theory’s first generation. In part two Burke argues that Wellmer’s reading of Aesthetic Theory, according to which the work of art is located in a structure of intersubjective communication, fundamentally mutilates Adorno’s text. Finally, in part three, Burke turns to a close reading of three dialectically related pairs of concepts in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory. The first subsection, on the dialectic of mimesis and rationality, argues that Habermas is entirely mistaken in reading mimesis as the Other of reason. The second subsection, on the dialectic of semblance and expression, argues that the essence of the work of art that is brought to appearance is integral to the work of art and is not addressed to a recipient. Finally,

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the third subsection, on the dialectic of l’art pour l’art and committed art, provides a defence of autonomous art that, unlike l’art pour l’art or committed art, resists being used for ideological purposes. The three subsections are unified in that they each advance the thesis that Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory cannot be read from the perspective of communicative rationality or reception aesthetics without inflicting a great act of violence on the text. Contributions from Pamela Leach, Colin Campbell, Shane Gunster, and Asha Varadharajan form the fourth section of this volume, focusing on aesthetics and contemporary culture and cultural studies. Focusing on Adorno’s development of the aesthetics of ugliness in Aesthetic Theory, Pamela Leach investigates the relation between aesthetic disharmony and political praxis – a relationship has been deemed largely non-existent by many of Adorno’s critics. Leach suggests that Adorno theorizes art not as existentially removed and elitist, but rather as an affective and intellectual practice that prepares the ground for real political praxis by affording the full aesthetic experience (one numbed to the point of unconsciousness by industrialized forms of culture) of the traumatic and ugly contradictions of late-capitalist life. Shane Gunster’s paper also weighs in explicitly from ‘outside’ contemporary cultural studies, taking up a critical theoretical voice that has more or less been rendered as a ‘classic’ (we should be mindful here of Adorno’s opinion of the label ‘classical,’ which was applied to so much of the music he loved) by the kinds of studies of mass culture of which Stuart Hall and the Birmingham School are emblematic. And yet, Gunster is an outsider within cultural studies. Among other things, Gunster points to a new development in the world of digital culture that takes as progressive ‘the deliberate and systematic excision of all traces of contingency,’ the dream of a total simulation become real. Most dangerous here, Gunster suggests, is the libidinization of identity, of precisely that which is removed from the body and materiality by conceptualization, ‘the cultivation of a generalized aesthetic disposition that defines beauty itself as the elimination of difference between concept and object.’ The deep danger here, of course, is the link between this kind of libidinization and the fascist type. Campbell’s paper is less a fully worked out meditation than a partial intervention into the larger debates that animate this volume. Drawing especially on the lyrical work of the punk band Fugazi, he considers punk rock as a ‘fan,’ fully mindful of Adorno’s thoughts about ‘music fans.’ At the same time, he wishes to throw some light on the appar-

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ently settled question of Adorno’s own, purportedly conservative, taste in music. Campbell argues that Adorno’s writing on music has been widely misread as being an insistence on the necessity of good taste (when Adorno himself insisted that taste is more or less obsolete) and finds a helpful guide in the street-level pronouncements of Fugazi’s Ian Mackaye and Guy Picciotto: ‘[E]verybody’s talking about their hometown scenes, and everybody’s talking about magazines, you wanna know what it all means? It’s nothing.’39 Campbell suggests that what were intended in Adorno to express the deepest adumbrations of the objective within the subject – the sheer emotional force of music, whether it is good or bad – are read as missives or legalistic pronouncements by interpreters who perhaps share with too many the ‘inability to hear with their own ears what has not already been heard, to touch with their hands what has not previously been grasped.’40 By way of a conclusion to the section, Varadharajan’s meditation begins again from the central issues cultural progressives have raised in intellectual debate in the last three decades: ‘difference’ and ‘minority.’ She suggests (without much ado) that ‘it might be safe to say that the potential of both has been exhausted without being satisfactorily represented!’ Outlining the form and the ‘fibre,’ rather than the content, of Adorno’s work, Varadharajan interrogates the resolutions that the issues of difference and minority have received from identity politics, introducing what she sees to be parallel, and crucial, distinctions ‘between self-consciousness and consciousness of self’ and ‘between the necessity of self-divestiture and self-mortification.’ Noting an ‘inescapable link between self-mortification and self-congratulation,’ Varadharajan aims to steer the difficult course between resignation in the face of the self-contradictory nature of ‘the progressive’ and an embrace of it that does not see how it is always defined in relation to a historical concept of progress. The question she raises for contemporary cultural studies is how to remain progressive when culture has so often shown ‘successful progress, not failed progress, to be its own antithesis.’41 Andrew Biro’s contribution rounds out the volume with a re-evaluation of Adorno’s relevance to environmentalist theory and praxis. Biro argues, in spite of and against the common perception of Adorno as not only a pessimistic and esoteric thinker, but also an intellectual withdrawn from political struggle, that it is precisely the difficult elements of Adorno’s critique that could ground an ecological politics equal to the challenges of late capitalist society. Adorno’s attempt to theorize a relation to the object that emphasizes relationality over classification –

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the grouping of concepts into constellations – is provocatively labelled ‘an ecology of the concept’ by Biro. Adorno’s complex understanding of ‘nature’ fruitfully destabilizes the romanticized conception of nature common to much ecological theory, by positing that nature is always historically and socially conditioned. Biro concludes that (contrary to the commonly made claim that Adorno allows no hope for change) Adorno’s critique of Enlightenment and the concept of nature he articulates imply that change is possible – that social relations can break from the tyranny of domination. Insofar as day-to-day political struggle is still complicit with domination in its adoption of a war-like mentality, Adorno’s claim that reconciliation with nature requires a fundamental change in both social relations and human subjectivity might be seen as a radical challenge to the present state of ecological politics. Biro concludes that only an ecological politics, one that ecologizes conceptual thinking, can lead to a reconciliation with nature.

NOTES 1 Fredric Jameson draws our attention to the fact that the final section of Negative Dialectics, entitled ‘Meditations on Metaphysics,’ is divided, ‘most uncharacteristically for this author ... into “chapters” and printed in the form of twelve numbered sections,’ thus mimicking Arnold Schönberg’s atonal, expressionist music, which liberated the five semi-tones that had previously been suppressed in Western music. Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno, or, The Persistence of the Dialectic (London and New York: Verso, 1990), 62. 2 T.W. Adorno, ‘Aspects of Hegel’s Philosophy,’ in Hegel: Three Studies, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), 1–52. 3 Ibid., 1. 4 Shane Gunster, Capitalizing on Culture: Critical Theory for Cultural Studies (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004). As Gunster’s book is one of the only texts to systematically treat the relationship of Adorno to British and North American cultural studies, we rely on it heavily in what follows, at the risk of at points repeating its arguments verbatim (if with considerable brevity). 5 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002). 6 Capitalizing on Culture, 174.

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7 The most scathing charge of Adorno’s alleged elitism, though not from the perspective of cultural studies, is surely to be found in Ian Jarvie, Philosophy of the Film: Epistemology, Ontology, Aesthetics (New York and London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987): ‘Paisley Livingston’s Ingmar Bergman and the Rituals of Art (1982) could be described as a literary-anthropological interpretation of Bergman. Bergman is something of a philosopher of culture and this explains why Livingston dips into those other sources of thinking about culture, anthropologists. The baneful presence in all philosophizing about culture is Hegel ... who Livingston avoids by treating us instead to doses of Adorno. Luckily, Bergman comes out as superior to Adorno, whose high-culture snobbery and conceit scarcely fit him to be discussed on the same page with Bergman. If there is anyone at whose arse Bergman’s foot should be directed ...,‘ 321–2. 8 Stuart Hall, ‘Encoding/decoding,’ in Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, ed., Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–79 (1973; repr. London: Hutchinson, 1980). 9 That structuralist semiotics was by and large a French phenomenon, as evidenced by the names associated with it, perhaps indicates that the strange silence between German and French academic traditions up until the 1980s has been continued on North American soil throughout this (mis)encounter between cultural studies and critical theory. It should be remembered, however, that there have been structuralisms outside of France as well – for example, the Prague School of structuralist literary analysis, including the work of the Russian émigré Roman Jakobson as well as the Czechs Jan Muka“ovský and Felix Vodiôka. 10 Capitalizing on Culture, 243, original emphasis. 11 Ibid., 244. 12 Quoted in Gunster, Capitalizing on Culture, 249. 13 Quoted ibid., 250. 14 Lawrence Grossberg, ‘Cultural Studies vs. Political Economy: Is Anybody Else Bored with This Debate?’ Critical Studies in Mass Communication 12.1 (1995): 72–81. 15 Dialectic of Enlightenment, 96. 16 Ibid., 95. 17 Capitalizing on Culture, 235–6. 18 Dialectic of Enlightenment, 98, 100. 19 ‘[T]hat radically abstract images can be displayed in public spaces without irritating anyone does not justify any restoration of representational art, which is a priori comforting even when Che Guevara is chosen for the goal of reconciliation with the object.’ Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory,

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20 21

22 23 24

25

26 27 28 29 30 31 32

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The Editors trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 212. Dialectic of Enlightenment, 97, emphasis added. ‘[Adorno’s] notorious cultural elitism is severely tempered by the readiness he shows to savage a representative of high culture alongside an avatar of the culture industry.’ Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 360. Aesthetic Theory, 196. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (New York: Continuum Press, 1973), xx (hereafter ND). See Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1, Reason and the Rationalization of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 385 (hereafter TCA1). It is ironically Adorno who wrote in Minima Moralia that ‘[t]he splinter in your eye is the best magnifying glass.’ Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1997), 50. For both Habermas and Wellmer, Adorno remains ensnared in the philosophy of consciousness and does not address the way in which artworks function intersubjectively as a means of transmitting norms. However, while Habermas, like Adorno, operates within a productivist paradigm of aesthetics, it should be noted that Albrecht Wellmer, who does adhere to Habermasian communicative rationality, is equally influenced by the reception aesthetics of Hans Robert Jauss. See Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982) and Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982). See Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1 Reason and the Rationalization of Society, 384. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987), 106. Ibid. Ibid., 186. Ibid. Ibid., 311. Asher Horowitz, ‘The Comedy of Enlightenment: Weber, Habermas, and the Critique of Reification,’ in The Barbarism of Reason (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 195–222. Simon Jarvis, Adorno: An Introduction (Cambridge: Routledge, 1998), 221. ‘SEC. RUMSFELD: Uhm ... you know, in life you have to take the good with the bad and so you have to balance it out. And my view is after many,

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36 37 37 39 40 41

31

many months now of assessing this and seeing the good with the bad, seeing instances where reports are filed and shown of a slice of fact, but the slice of fact is only that. It’s only a slice of fact. It’s not a total picture. It’s not in context. And it’s up then to the American people and the people of the world to take those slices and put them into a broader context over a period of time. So I am, I have developed conviction that it has been the right thing to do to embed reporters ... Number one, I have a lot of confidence in the American people that if they see enough slices of reality, they will be able to synthesize all of that and come away with reasonably correct judgments.’ From a U.S. Department of Defense News Transcript, 30 Nov. 2004 – Secretary Rumsfeld interview with Marc Bernier, WNDB-AM Radio, Daytona Beach, FL, at http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2004/tr20041130secdef1703.html, accessed 9 May 2006. In a lecture, Before Foucault: Power & Cynical Ideology, available over the internet, Arthur Kroker has provided a wonderful genealogical reading of the kind of cynical ideology that makes this kind of compulsive public lying possible and necessary. http://www.pactac.net/pactacweb/webcontent/video44.html, accessed 9 May 2006. [Click on Video Archive then Arthur Kroker, ‘Before Foucault: Power and Cynical Ideology.’] Dialectic of Enlightenment, 25. Ibid. Karl Marx, ‘Theses on Feuerbach,’ in The Marx-Engels Reader (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co., 1978), 145. ‘Song Number One,’ Repeater + 3 Songs (Dischord Records, 1990). Dialectic of Enlightenment, 28. Ibid.

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PART ONE Language

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1 Theses on the Language of the Philosopher1 theod or w. adorno

1. The distinction between form and content in philosophical language is not a disjunction in an eternity without history. It belongs specifically to idealist thought and corresponds to the idealist distinction between the form and content of knowledge. It is based on the view that concepts and, with them, words are abbreviations of a multiplicity of characteristics whose unity is constituted solely by consciousness. If the unity of the manifold is subjectively imprinted as form, such form is necessarily thought as separable from content. In the realm of objects such separability is denied, because the things themselves are supposed to be solely products of subjectivity. In the realm of language such separability cannot be concealed. It is a sign of all reification through idealist consciousness that things can be named arbitrarily; with respect to language, the putative objectivity of its intellectual constitution remains formal and cannot determine the material shape of language.2 For a thinking that seizes the things exclusively as functions of thought, names have become arbitrary: they are free positings of consciousness. The ontic ‘contingency’ of the subjectively constituted unity of concepts becomes evident in the exchangeability of their names. In Idealism names stand only in a representational relation to that which they intend, not in a concretely objective one. For a thinking that is no longer willing to recognize autonomy and spontaneity as the legitimate basis of knowledge, the contingency of the significative relation of language and things becomes radically problematic. 2. Philosophical language, which intends truth, knows no signa.3 Through language history wins a share of truth. Words are never merely signs of what is thought under them, but rather history erupts

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into words, establishing their truth-character. The share of history in the word unfailingly determines the choice of every word because history and truth meet in the word. 3. The language of philosophy is materially prefigured.4 The philosopher does not have elective thoughts to express, but rather must find the words that are alone legitimized by the state of truth in them. The words are to bear the intention the philosopher wants to articulate and cannot otherwise articulate than by hitting upon the word in which such truth dwells at the historical hour. 4. The demand for the ‘understandability’ of philosophical language – for its societal communicability – is idealist, necessarily predicated on the significative character of language. It posits that language is separable from the object, insofar as the same object could be adequately given in various ways. Objects, however, are not at all adequately given through language, but rather adhere to language and stand in a historical unity with it. In homogeneous society the communicability of philosophical language is never demanded; it is nevertheless everywhere imposed, if the ontological power of words is so extensive that objective dignity is attributed to them in society. This objectivity never results from an adjustment of philosophical language to societal communicability. Rather, objectivity, which renders language ‘communicable,’ is the same as that which unambiguously assigns words to the philosopher. It [die Objektivität] cannot be demanded; where it has become problematic, it is essentially non-existent and as little predetermined for the philosopher as is only to be registered in society. The abstract, idealist demand for the adequation of language to object and society is the exact opposite of linguistic reality. In atomized, disintegrated society, constituting language by taking audible being into consideration romanticizes a state of the ontological obligation of words to feign, [a state] that is instantly denied by the impotence of the words themselves. In the absence of unified society there is no objective language and therefore no truthfully communicative language. 5. The intended communicability of philosophical language is today to be unveiled in all aspects as fraud. Either it is banal: thus it naively posits words – whose relationship to the object has become in truth problematic – as pregiven and valid; or it is untrue, insofar as it undertakes to conceal this problem [of communicability]. It uses the pathos of

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words, which appear to have been released from the dynamic of history, in order to vindicate the ahistorical validity of words and thereby at once their communicability. The only justified communicability of philosophical language today is that which is in precise agreement with the intended things, and in the precise deployment of words according to the historical condition of truth in them. Every one striven for intentionally radically founders on the critique of language. 6. Against this: there is a procedure that arguably gauges the historical problem of words; it strives to avoid it, however, inasmuch as it strives to erect a new language of philosophy out of the individual and is equally illegitimate. Heidegger’s language flees from history, yet without escaping it. The places that his terminology occupies are altogether locations of conventional philosophical and theological terminology, which shimmers through and preforms the words before they take on a life of their own. At the same time, Heidegger’s manifest language fails – in the dialectical relation with the conventional language of philosophy – to uncover completely the latter’s disintegration. The freely posited language raises the claim of a freedom of the philosopher from the force of history, which already in Heidegger is immanently disproved by the insight into the necessity of being critical of this language, since its current problem has its ground in history alone. The conventional terminology – no matter how ruined – is to be preserved, and today the new words of the philosopher are formed solely out of the changed configuration of words, which stand in history; not by the invention of a language that scarcely recognizes the power of history over the word, but instead strives to avoid it in a private ‘concreteness’ only apparently guaranteed outside of history. 7. Today the philosopher confronts disintegrated language. The ruins of words are his material, to which history binds him; his freedom is solely the possibility of their configuration according to the force of truth in them. He is as little permitted to think the word as pregiven as to invent a word. 8. The linguistic procedure of the philosopher, today so abstract as hardly needs mentioning, is in any case solely to be thought dialectically. In the present societal condition no words are pregiven for his authentic intention, and the objectively available words of philosophy are devoid of substance, for him non-binding. The attempt to clearly

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convey new historical contents in the old language suffers from the idealist premise of the separability of form and content and is thereby objectively illegitimate; it falsifies the historical contents. In order to posit a new truth, there remains for him no hope other than to place the words in a new configuration, which would itself yield such a new truth. This procedure is not to be identified with the aim of ‘expounding’ new truth through conventional words. Configurative language will instead have to completely avoid the explicit procedure that presupposes the unbroken dignity of words. Against conventional words and the speechless subjective intention, configuration is a third way: a third way not through mediation. For intention is not somehow objectified through the medium of language. Rather, configurative language represents a third way as a dialectically intertwined and explicatively indissoluble unity of concept and thing. The explicative indissolubility of such unity, which eludes comprehensive logical categories, today compellingly requires the radical difficulty of all serious philosophical language. 9. The language of philosophy wanted to make itself indifferent to the sphere of the form-content duality, because precisely its irrelevance was prefigured by the specific structure of reified thought. Today its foundational share in knowledge is again manifest, a share that likewise existed latently in the idealist period insofar as the speechlessness of that epoch thwarted every genuine materiality. All philosophical critique is today possible as the critique of language. This critique of language does not merely have to concern itself with the ‘adequation’ of words to things, but just as equally with the state of the words on their own terms. It is to be asked of the words themselves how far they are capable of bearing the intentions attributed to them, to what extent their power has been historically extinguished, how far they can somehow be configuratively preserved. The criterion of this is essentially the aesthetic dignity of words. Such words are recognizable as impotent; those in the linguistic work of art – which alone preserves the unity of word and thing against scientific dualism – were succinctly forfeited to aesthetic critique, while up to now they themselves were permitted to enjoy the full measure of philosophical taste. Thereby the constitutive meaning of aesthetic critique is surrendered in favour of knowledge. Corresponding to it [aesthetic critique]: that genuine art today no longer has the character of the metaphysical, but rather turns itself in unmediated fashion towards the presentation of actual contents of being. The growing significance of the philosophical critique of lan-

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guage can be formulated as the onset of a convergence between art and knowledge. While philosophy has to turn itself towards the unmediated unity of language and truth – thought up to now only aesthetically – and must measure its truth dialectically against language, art wins the character of knowledge: its language is aesthetic, and only then harmonious, if it is ‘true’: when its words are in accordance with the objective historical condition. 10. The material structure of a philosophical construct may stand, at the very least, in a formed relationship of tension with its linguistic structure, where these [structures] are not concurrent. A thinking, for example, that arose with the claim to give ontological contents relies, however, on the form of comprehensive, logical definitions, idealistsystematic deductions, and abstract superficial relations. Such thinking not only has an inadequate linguistic form,5 but is also objectively untrue. Because the asserted ontological results have no power to align themselves according to the train of thought, they instead remain transcendent as free-floating intentions opposing the thought-form. This thinking can be followed into the tiniest cells of linguistic comportment: language is entitled to a proper identification of meaning. Scheler, for example, could thus be criticized for, to begin with, a disregard of all ‘objectivity’; it could be shown that the ontological delimiting of the Ideas from one another theorized by him conflicts with the procedure of presentation. This procedure of presentation always proceeds through the logical methods of deduction and syllogism, ‘constitutes’ abstract antinomies between the ideas, and, especially undiminished in the material studies, employs the worn-out language of precisely every nominalist knowledge whose sworn enemy he philosophically declares himself to be. By way of a linguistic analysis of Scheler, the inappropriateness of his ontological intention for his actually existing epistemological standpoint could be demonstrated, or, less psychologically: the impossibility of the constitution of a pure order of being through the means of emancipated ratio. All deceiving ontology is especially to be exposed by means of a critique of language.

NOTES 1 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Thesen über die Sprache des Philosophen,’ in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), 366–71. The

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Theodor W. Adorno translation, by Samir Gandesha and Michael K. Palamarek, reproduces the text as it appears in the original, including paragraph numbering. As Adorno made no notes to the essay, all endnotes are ours. All words in italics (with the exception of foreign words) or in quotation marks reflect Adorno’s own emphases. Where we felt it was useful or important to improve the readerly flow in English, as well as to present Adorno’s meaning as precisely as possible, we have inserted a number of terms in square brackets that typically clarify a corresponding German relative pronoun in the original text. The translators would like to thank Christoph Menke for his assistance with the text. In addition, we consulted and in places slightly modified Susan Buck-Morss’s and Peter Hohendahl’s translations of parts of the essay, as published in Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt Institute (New York: Free Press, 1979) and Hohendahl, Prismatic Thought: Theodor W. Adorno (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995). Our rendering of Sprachgestalt in the original. In Latin in the original. For durch die Sachhaltigkeit vorgezeichnet. Compare Sprachform with Sprachgestalt used on p. 35.

2 Adorno’s Dialectics of Language m i ch a e l k . pal a m a r e k

All philosophical critique is today possible as the critique of language.1 T.W. Adorno

When Adorno insisted in ‘Theses on the Language of the Philosopher’ on a critique of language as the key to deciphering the presuppositions and commitments of the philosophy of his day, he could not possibly have foreseen in what ways his words would become prophetic. While idealist and ontological conceptions of language constitute the principal targets in this early, unpublished essay from the 1930s, the terms of Adorno’s critique in this work already offer an important counterweight to, and a kind of prospective critique of, the various guises of the ‘linguistic turn’ in contemporary philosophy. In the historical development of critical theory alone, Habermas’s paradigm shift to a theory of communicative action places language, as the effort to reach and coordinate mutual, intersubjective agreement, at the centre of the attempt to carry forward the intentions of critical theory to provide a critique of modern forms of domination. The turn to language within critical theory itself is accompanied by a similar shift in post-structuralism, where language as discourse serves as the central category of social critique. Both of these disparate theoretical currents have unwittingly followed Adorno’s enigmatic lead, albeit under fundamentally different terms. For Adorno is also unhesitatingly clear in the ‘Theses’ that ‘the linguistic procedure of the philosopher, today so abstract as hardly needs mentioning, is in any case solely to be thought dialectically.’2 While the exceptionally important role of language in Adorno’s philosophy has recently garnered increasing critical attention,3 the task of

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providing a systematic framework that draws out and connects up central themes vis-à-vis language remains unfulfilled. This interpretive lacuna is undoubtedly due to the extraordinarily unsystematic – indeed fragmentary – character of Adorno’s engagement with linguistic questions. Moreover, throughout his entire corpus Adorno addresses a remarkably wide range of themes, from the perceived disintegration of language to its irreplaceable role as the motor of critical thought. Incisive remarks on language are also found among the essays on culture and cultural criticism, including direct engagements with the process of writing. The affinity of music and language, as well as a critique of language in Hegel and especially Heidegger, represent other dimensions of Adorno’s approach. Finally, all of these themes are consistently inflected by Adorno’s elaboration of the complex relation between aesthetic and philosophical language. As this rather brief sampling demonstrates, Adorno offers no explicit ‘theory’ of language that can be succinctly discerned, even as he constantly underlines the paramount importance of the question of language for philosophy and social critique. While I cannot reasonably hope to address all of the aforementioned themes, nor claim to reconstruct a coherent theory of language in Adorno, in what follows I shall attempt to offer at least a schematic framework that fleshes out what I take to be the core terms of Adorno’s understanding and critique of language. For it is undeniably clear that there is an intimate reciprocity between language and philosophy in his work. For Adorno, language is the form that philosophical thought – however inchoate – must take if it is to express its insights into truth, knowledge, or being. This welding of thought and language means that, as Adorno would later frame it in a lecture course on philosophical terminology, ‘for philosophy, its language is essential, philosophical problems are to a great extent problems of its language.’4 There is an inescapable linguistic dimension to philosophical questions, not only in the obvious sense of their articulation and presumed communicability to others, but, more importantly, a linguistic limit that conditions the form and content of what can be thought. Concomitantly, as various thinkers associated with the linguistic turn, from Saussure to Derrida to Habermas, have duly emphasized, problems of language – such as representation, meaning, communication, and expression – are inversely problems of philosophy. The intimate reciprocity of language and philosophy is, in a sense, merely a general yet essential point of departure for grasping the

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import of language for Adorno’s project of negative dialectical critique. Such critique is unthinkable without language, and in fact presupposes it: ‘Dialectics – literally: language as the organon of thought.’5 Because dialectics and language are inseparable, or even further, mutually constitutive, language itself is understood by Adorno to be dialectical. Like the dialectical thought it seeks to express, language must operate mimetically in the logic of contradiction and antagonism, if it is to give an adequate form to such thought. At the same time, this relationship is far from one-sided; Adorno’s work on language also suggests the more profound claim that language presupposes and gives rise to dialectical thinking. If ‘the most literal sense of the word “dialectics” postulates language,’6 it likewise follows, as I shall elaborate further on, that language itself postulates or provides a model for dialectics. The specific task that I take up here is to articulate what is entailed in an elaboration of the language of dialectics, or the dialectics of language. Adorno’s critique proceeds from this core dialectic of language and thought, and can be usefully grasped as a series of interrelated dialectical complexes, each of which illuminates a key dimension of language. Fundamentally, the critique concentrates on the relation between word and thing as the basic terms of linguistic analysis. It is neither the sign, as in Saussure, nor the utterance, as in Habermas, that serves to orient critique. Adorno’s principal concern is to investigate the various historical and philosophical configurations of the relation between word and thing. While there is a modicum of etymological analysis, especially for instance in the pair of essays on the foreign word,7 the word is always taken as indivisibly related to the thing, not as a semantic unit enclosed upon itself. The pragmatics of language – the actual uses to which it is put and the actions it achieves – is likewise not seen as the predominant feature of speech. This orientation of the word to the thing immediately foregrounds the resolutely material and historical character of Adorno’s approach to language. The word cannot be thought apart from the thing, nor hypostatized as somehow above the thing and determinative of it. Similarly, the word does not merely recount history, as if it were somehow insulated from it. As Adorno attempts to demonstrate, the various configurations of the word’s relationship to the thing are themselves the measure of the history of language, and an index of societal reification; ‘history does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.’8 For Adorno, the history of language is to be grasped as a protracted struggle between the increasingly muted possibilities of language to

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express and its equally powerful capacity to communicate. As expression, the word seeks to engage with the thing in a relation of respectful, measured distance through what Adorno would at first call ‘configuration,’ and later, most explicitly in Negative Dialectics, ‘constellation.’ The emphasis on expression is entirely in accord with Horkheimer’s description of philosophy as the effort to find ‘the right name for things.’9 This is the buried truth and contemporary philosophical task of language. In contrast, the communicative word, which claims not only to represent but also to fully substitute for the thing, is mere instrumental means in the service of control and command; at its most insidious, it is the word of cunning deceit. This dialectic of expression and communication is by no means one of absolute opposites, but, like all Adorno’s dialectical pairs, reciprocally mediated. While expression is not essentially oriented to communicability, it cannot renounce it altogether. What is at issue is the capacity for language to express thought that at a minimum both resists and is critical of the status quo; language thus serves the interests of redemptive critique. The dialectics of word and thing and expression and communication are the linguistic indicators or means to assess the extent to which contemporary society is one of reification (Verdinglichung) and the possibilities that remain of overcoming reification in the interest of reconciliation (Versöhnung). Against a long-standing reading of Adorno as an irrecuperably pessimistic thinker, the critique of language he presents oscillates between the identification of how language operates as a force of domination, and is itself reified thereby, and the ways in which language points in the direction of an inconceivably utopic reconciliation. These utopic moments are consistently present throughout Adorno’s work on language, if often obliquely.10 If philosophy is still possible today as the critique of language, this does not mean that all philosophy is reducible to linguistic critique, or that language is or should be philosophy’s only concern. Adorno’s interest in the problem of language is not esoteric. Rather, as an often impotently insulated sphere of society, philosophy must nonetheless aim at critique of not only the form but also the content of society. Philosophy requires an object of critique, and that object for Adorno is historical and material suffering. If there is a driving force to Adorno’s philosophy, it is this need for language to ‘lend a voice to suffering’: philosophy ‘lends its voice to its subject, against the latter’s will; it is the voice of contradiction which otherwise would not be heard, but would triumph silently.’11 In its elaboration and critique of the contradiction of

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suffering, philosophy avails itself of language in order to press towards the overcoming of the infliction of suffering: ‘although it is true that there is no word which could not ultimately be used by the lie, the word’s temper never gleams in the lie but only in the thought hardened in the fight against power.’12

I Today the philosopher confronts disintegrated language. The ruins of words are his material, to which history binds him.13 Adorno

Adorno’s early ‘Theses’ essay is of central importance for appreciating not only the unwavering seriousness to which he accorded the problem of language for philosophy and social critique, but also because the main elements of his critique of language are already present in more than embryonic form. Although useful commentary in English on the piece has been available since at least Buck-Morss’s comparative study of Adorno and Benjamin,14 the complete essay has hitherto been unavailable in full translation. This circumstance is unfortunate, as the approach to language presented there is essential for posing the key problems of language for Adorno. Chronologically, the essay demonstrates that language was an early concern for Adorno, one that carries forward throughout his thought. Thematically, the beginnings of a dialectical, historical, and material approach to language centred on the relation between word and thing are worked out in the contrast Adorno draws between ‘significative’ (signifikative) and ‘configurative’ (konfigurative) language. Adorno’s analyses in the ‘Theses’ – as well as in all of his writing on language – are driven by the fundamental premise that the philosopher, and the writer, find themselves in a historical situation where language is ‘disintegrated’ and words, in Benjaminian parlance, are ‘ruined’ (zertrümmert). In consonance with the assessment of the state of modern culture as one of degradation and impoverishment, most forcefully expressed in Nietzsche and carrying through to Benjamin and Lukács, Adorno concentrates on the effects of this impoverishment for language, especially that of philosophy. For all of the modern emphasis on language as a means of communication, language can no longer be used to communicate directly; for all of their richness of expression, words and their meanings are on the verge of exhaustion, if not already

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exhausted. As Adorno describes with reference to the problem of nuance in Minima Moralia, ‘words and phrases spoilt by use do not reach the [writer’s] secluded workshop intact. And the historical damage cannot be repaired there.’15 If Adorno is not entirely explicit here in terms of why language is in a state of disintegration, the immanent critiques of idealist and Heidegger’s ontological conceptions of language more clearly present how language is deformed. Furthermore, it is precisely in and through these critiques that the terms of Adorno’s own conception of language come to the fore. According to Adorno, both idealism and ontology suffer from similar deficiencies. To begin, both currents overprivilege the moment of subjective intentionality on the part of the philosopher with respect to the words he or she chooses. This alleged freedom is contradicted by the relation between the word and history, if not by history itself. The lack of serious consideration of the historical dimension to language renders idealism and ontology profoundly ahistorical. The second principal deficiency, found in varying degrees in both philosophical currents, resides in their elision of the integral relation between word and thing. The ‘Theses’ essay opens with a thinly veiled critique of Kant’s transcendental idealism. While Adorno’s relationship to Kant is complex,16 the concern here is to demonstrate how a linguistic critique of the idealist distinction between form and content in philosophical language undermines that very distinction, and, by extension, the pretensions of the idealist subject. If apprehendable objects in the Kantian doctrine are ultimately taken to be products of the activity of consciousness, then the difference or ‘separability’ (Ablösbarkeit)17 between form and content dissolves. Since the subject is at once the form and also constitutes the content of consciousness, the difference resolves into tautology. For Adorno, it is in and through language that this difficulty most clearly emerges, for ‘in the realm of language such separability cannot be concealed.’18 It is not the subject, but the word and its intrinsic relation to the thing that alone preserve the distinctiveness of each as well as that of form and content. Without these distinctions, ‘the things can be named arbitrarily,’ which Adorno takes to be ‘a sign of all reification through idealist consciousness.’19 The arbitrariness of the names assigned to things is the linguistic reflection of the putative freedom of the transcendental subject; names have become nothing more than ‘free positings [freie Setzungen] of consciousness.’20 As a further indication of their reification, the free arbitrariness of names means that, like the

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products they resemble, names are no longer discrete or unique, but interchangeable. Underlying idealist thought is the presupposition that words are simply representations of concepts and things, or ‘merely signs of what is thought under them.’21 This is the crux of what Adorno calls significative language. For Adorno, this relation of representation, and the freedom that underlies it, are belied by history. If philosophy is to retain an interest in and orientation to truth and objectivity, its language must take history and the history of words into account, because ‘history erupts into words, establishing their truth-character. The share of history in the word unfailingly determines the choice of every word because history and truth meet in the word.’22 The words of philosophy are not direct reflections of thought, ‘free-floating signifiers,’ or subjectively manipulable. Rather, they must take their cues from the historical possibilities of language available at a given moment. Not only is the language of philosophy historically determined, but it is also ‘materially prefigured [durch die Sachhaltigkeit vorgezeichnet]’23 by the truth content of the available words: ‘The philosopher does not have elective thoughts to express, but rather must find the words that are alone legitimized by the state of truth in them.’24 The material, historical instantiation of truth in words is one of the elements of Adorno’s materialist conception of language. Adorno sees the problem of subjective freedom and a lack of sufficient attention to the historical dimension of language as equally applicable to the early Heidegger’s deployment of language. The brunt of Adorno’s critique is directed to what he takes to be the ahistorical character of Heidegger’s attempt to revivify selected Western philosophical concepts, as well as to transform everyday words into high philosophical ones. This charge is expressed succinctly in the sentence ‘Heidegger’s language flees from history, yet without escaping it.’25 For Adorno, the very words that Heidegger employs already bear the accretions of historical residue. This history means, in Heidegger’s case, that the ‘conventional philosophical and theological terminology ... shimmers through and preforms the words before they take on a life of their own.’26 But Adorno’s critique is likewise directed, if rather elliptically, at the early Heidegger’s extensive use of neologisms. Not only does this ‘invention of a language ... scarcely recognize the power of history over the word,’27 it bespeaks a measure of freedom and intentionality on the part of the philosopher. For all of Heidegger’s concern with the phenomenological problem of intentionality, Adorno argues that, at least in

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the early Heidegger, the problem of language is uncritically insulated from such concern. Alongside its necessary orientation to history and truth, philosophical language must also reckon with the question of its own objective relation to society, and it is with respect to this problem that Adorno first formulates a critique of communication, or ‘communicability.’ Philosophy, as Adorno will consistently underline, is integrated with society as part of the social division of labour, a division underpinned by the separation of manual and mental labour. As such, even within its own seemingly isolated sphere, philosophical thought reflects the state of society at the same time as it offers the possibility of social critique. At issue for Adorno is the problem of the communicability of philosophical language in a society that is at once ‘homogeneous’ (read: reified), ‘atomized,’ and ‘disintegrated.’28 For Adorno, ‘the demand for the “understandability” of philosophical language – for its societal communicability – is idealist,’ because ‘it posits that language is separable from the object.’29 The demand for the easy comprehension of philosophical language repeats this separation. If society is to be the object of critique, and if society is objectively untrue, philosophical language cannot accommodate itself to prevailing linguistic forms and modes. It cannot use the ‘false’ objectivity of society, or of the language within society, as the standard for its own objectivity. But this does not mean that philosophical language can dispense with a relation to objectivity or communicability altogether. If such language had no objective basis or possibility of being understood, it would be entirely incoherent. Adorno refers to a different kind of objectivity, one that ‘renders language “communicable,”’ and that ‘unambiguously assigns words to the philosopher.’30 Objectivity ‘cannot be demanded,’31 or imposed at will. Rather, it is to be determined in the orientation to the historical truth content of words, which both registers the current degradation of language and indirectly points to its recuperation. These are the limits of what communicability can mean in a society in which the communicability of philosophical language, and language in general, is blocked. At present, ‘in the absence of unified society [geschlossene Gesellschaft] there is no objective language and therefore no truthfully communicative language.’32 If ‘the abstract, idealist demand for the adequation of language to object and society is the exact opposite of linguistic reality,’33 it remains for Adorno to specify the kind of language that avoids either reifying word and thing or succumbing to societal reification. As a conception

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of language that attempts to respond to the critical linguistic deficiencies of idealism and ontology, Adorno counterposes what he calls configurative language. As a precursor to the later employment of the notion of constellation as a model of how language works, or ought to work, configuration incorporates what Adorno considers to be the primary – because historically necessary – features of philosophical language: a relinquishment of subjective intention, a relation to history, and the dialectical unity of word and thing. Against the notion of free, subjective intentionality in language, it is the force of history in words, and their current historical state, that determine the form and content of the philosopher’s very language: ‘The ruins of words are his material, to which history binds him; his freedom is solely the possibility of their configuration according to the force of truth in them.’34 Even as the philosopher’s language is limited by the current state of language in contemporary society, the space for critique is not wholly eradicated. If philosophical language wants to retain an interest in truth, if it wants to ‘posit a new truth, there remains no hope other than to place the words in a new configuration, which would itself yield such a new truth.’35 Configuration, by placing the words in tension with the thing and with their own historical content, attempts to achieve indirectly what philosophical language can no longer presume to accomplish directly. Adorno proposes configurative language as a ‘third way,’ an alternative to the linguistic problems associated with ontology and idealism: ‘Against conventional words and the speechless subjective intention, configuration is a third way: a third way not through mediation. For intention is not somehow objectified in language.’36 If the early Heidegger’s ontology uncritically relies on conventional words, idealism operates as if thought could be unproblematically translated into or externalized in speech. It is this latter criticism that perhaps partly explains the rather perplexing characterization of configurative language as seeking to relate words and things without mediation, given the central role mediation plays throughout Adorno’s later philosophy. What is at issue is the one-sided determination of language by subjective intention, which idealism passes off as mediation. In contrast to such a concept of mediation, Adorno poses configurative language as ‘a dialectically intertwined and explicatively indissoluble unity of concept and thing.’37 If configurative language proposes a turn to the unmediated unity of word and thing, this brings philosophical language closer to the realm

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of the aesthetic, and thereby marks the already early emphasis in Adorno’s thinking on the importance of the aesthetic for philosophy. It is in the aesthetic aspects of words that the salvageability of disintegrated language can be ascertained. For Adorno, [the] critique of language does not merely have to concern itself with the ‘adequation’ of words to things, but just as equally with the state of words on their own terms [bei sich selber]. It is to be asked of the words themselves how far they are capable of bearing the intentions attributed to them, to what extent their power has been historically extinguished, how far they can be somehow configuratively preserved.38

What permits the assessment of the historical situation of words is their ‘aesthetic dignity,’39 for it is through this characteristic that word and thing are most directly conjoined and the materiality and sensuousness of language most fully preserved against their reification. As Adorno argues, it is ‘the linguistic work of art ... which alone preserves the unity of word and thing against scientific dualism.’40 The turn to the aesthetic advocated in and through configurative language entails salient consequences for philosophical language, insofar as ‘the growing significance of the philosophical critique of language can be formulated as the onset of a convergence between art and knowledge.’41 This convergence brings the question of truth to the fore, in both art and philosophy. As Hohendahl discusses, this passage underlines how, at least in this early stage of Adorno’s thought, he ‘conceives of the disclosure of truth not as a formal and conceptual process but as an aesthetic event.’42 In its effort to express truth directly, without mediation, the configuration of aesthetic words succeeds only ‘when its words are in accordance with the objective historical condition.’43 What is implicitly posed as a problem here is the whole question of the cognition of aesthetic truth because, even as in its attention to the historical, ‘art wins the character of knowledge,’44 there remains a paradox; for even within the most eloquent configurations of aesthetic words, truth comes to expression speechlessly. This is simultaneously a limitation of art’s capacity to express truth, yet also its advantage over philosophy. Philosophy likewise has to deal with this problem of the ineffability of truth, but, if it is to remain philosophy, it must nonetheless strive to give truth an expressly linguistic form. Aesthetic configuration, in its unmediated, direct relation to word and thing, provides a model for this effort. For Adorno, ‘philosophy has to turn itself to the unmediated unity of language and truth ... and must measure its truth dialectically

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against language.’45 The operation of words within configurations furnishes a kind of imperative for philosophy to critique its own language with respect to the representations of word and thing, as well as their relation, that it articulates. If it is to retain an interest in truth as a ground for social critique, philosophical language has to struggle for a non-reified, appropriate expression of truth in language, or to find a language of truth. The challenge posed by the configurative unity of word and thing ‘today compellingly requires the radical difficulty of all serious philosophical language.’46 This begins to explain why Adorno’s own language is so difficult at the same time as it reinforces the centrality for philosophy that he accords to linguistic problems. As much as the ‘Theses’ essay addresses the reification of language, and argues for a strict attention to history and the aesthetic in the form of configurative language, it does not present precisely how language is ruined or disintegrated, or how such a situation has come to pass. Nor is Adorno explicit as to the way in which specifically philosophical language is to achieve a relation between word and thing that conserves an orientation to truth. What kind of language, philosophical or otherwise, offers a counter to reification, or indeed might even escape it? Moreover, how is it possible for language to become reified, yet also function as a critique of itself as reified, as well as of reification in toto? Part of the answer to these queries lies in the dialectical pairing of expression and communication to which, as Buck-Morss indicates, Adorno had already alluded in a 1940s essay on George and Hoffmannsthal.47 While the ‘Theses’ essay only refers to the impossibility of ‘truthfully communicative language’ in reified society, and points towards configurative language as an implicit model for expression, in Minima Moralia Adorno begins to specify inversely what is entailed in expression by means of its sharp contrast with communication. Adorno’s comments on communication in this text and elsewhere are often harsh, and are meant to emphasize the dire situation in which both intellectual and everyday speech find themselves. For Adorno, modern communication, as the easy, clear technological transmission of information, on the one hand, and the expanded opportunities for social interaction, on the other, contracts the possibilities of thinking. For its part, intellectual language sacrifices a concern with the careful expression of thought to the social imperative of being widely understood. In the acceptance of the ‘liberal fiction of the universal communicability of each and every thought,’ intellectuals, despite themselves, inhibit the ‘objectively appropriate expression of such thought.’48 In a world where reification has become pervasive, ‘no thought is immune

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from communication, and to utter it in the wrong place and in wrong agreement is enough to undermine its truth.’49 Under the rule of communication, everyday speech is similarly distorted in its reduction to a mere means of rote, scripted interaction. The purported narrowing of inequality between people in the social use of language serves as a reifying screen for the real, ever-widening differences of power and privilege: ‘Matter-of-factness between people, doing away with all ideological ornamentation between them, has already itself become an ideology for treating people as things.’50 As manipulative means, the degradation of language reaches the point where even its communicative dimension becomes impossible. As Adorno bleakly writes, ‘[s]ociability itself connives at injustice by pretending that in this chill world we can still speak to each other.’51 If the focus on communication immunizes language from its essential connection to thinking, and perpetuates the isolation of subjects from each other as a function of their reification, the possibilities of expression are consequently undermined. From the perspective of communicative clarity, a ‘regard for the object, rather than for communication, is suspect in any expression.’52 Already in Minima Moralia, the concern and content of expression is to be concentrated on the object; Adorno will develop the full complexity of this crucial orientation, as well as its implications for philosophical language, most directly in Negative Dialectics. Nonetheless, the basic lines of what is involved in expression are set out in Minima Moralia through a critical comparison between expression and the Freudian notion of repression. While the comparison is intended to argue against the psychologization of art, it grants insight into the concept of expression as such. Unlike the subjective psychoanalytic symptom, which repeatedly tries ‘to substitute itself delusively for reality,’ expression negates reality by holding up to it what is unlike it, but it never denies reality; it looks straight in the eye the conflict that results blindly in the symptom. What expression has in common with repression is that its movement is blocked by reality. That movement, and the whole complex of experience of which it is a part, is denied direct communication with its object.53

Although repression issues from its difference from reality, it does not consciously recognize this difference nor sufficiently realize the enormity of the task of changing the external conditions that require repression. Its psychoanalytic resolution results in a subjective accom-

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modation to these conditions, rather than a critique of them. In contrast, expression ‘sets an objective, polemical self-revelation’54 that aims reflexively to understand and critique how and why its possibilities of a real communication with its object are circumscribed, or ‘blocked.’ In addition to the tensions inhering within the dialectic of expression and communication, another piece of the explanation as to how language can operate as either critique or as reifying force can be discerned in two passing references Adorno makes to the fundamentally ambiguous character of language. At the end of another essay from the 1930s, ‘The Idea of Natural History,’ Adorno refers to the ‘antithetical sense of primal words’ as support for his reading of archaic myths as not fixed once for all in time, but as ‘historically dynamic’ and internally contradictory;55 in Minima Moralia, language is described as ‘ambiguous since primeval times.’56 As Hullot-Kentor quite rightly, I think, surmises in a translator’s note to the natural history essay, these phrases come from a 1910 essay of Freud’s entitled ‘The Antithetical Sense of Primal Words.’ Here Freud addresses Karl Abel’s work on the completely contradictory and oppositional meanings of words in the language of ancient Egypt. Freud outlines how Abel identifies not only ‘a large number of words that denoted at once a thing and its opposite,’ but also compounds composed of two words with directly opposite meanings.57 This primal ambiguity of language – its capacity to encompass contradiction in a single word – serves as support for Adorno’s thesis that nature and history are not diametrically opposed, but rather dialectically intertwined. Because our apprehension of nature in the form of myth rests on this fundamental ambiguity of language, thus rendering both myth and even nature historical, a crucial dimension of the dialectic of history and nature is the dialectical character of language. The very language of myth undoes its apparent transhistorical character, insofar as it undermines the reification of historical, social relationships that have taken on the character of ‘second nature.’ As a rehearsal of the intertwining of language, reason, and myth in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, history devolves into myth as much as myth is always already historical.

II The violence done to words is no longer audible in them.58 Horkheimer and Adorno

The theme of the historical, dialectical connection between reason and myth, of course, forms the core of Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique of

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forms of domination in advanced capitalist society in the Dialectic of Enlightenment. But this critique also further develops and supports Adorno’s earlier emphasis on a dialectical critique of language, and on the tension between language’s reifying effects and its potentially utopic, or at least critical, possibilities. At every stage in the transitions from magic to myth and from myth to Enlightenment, and the degeneration, both actual and potential, of Enlightenment into sheer barbarism, the installation of forms of domination is accompanied by, if not dependent on, the emergence and evolution of the capacities of language. This dependency and evolution can be traced through in the various orientations of word and thing. Whereas the unity of word and thing in magical thinking preserves an uneasy harmony between the emerging subject and nature, the subject’s growing separation from nature is secured through the word of cunning deceit, seen by Horkheimer and Adorno as narrated in Homeric myth; the success in the linguistic confrontation with nature is not only purchased at the price of a repression of the self, but also that of others through the commanding word. Finally, the instrumentalization of the word, as the essential counterpart to social domination, reaches its apogee in Enlightenment, whereby the word is taken to wholly represent, determine, and completely substitute for the thing. These linguistic developments are indices of the concomitant reification of language, the subject, and society. As Adorno remarks in a later lecture series on metaphysics, ‘[T]he historical-philosophical fate of language is at the same time the historicalphilosophical fate of the subject matter to which it refers.’59 As an unconventional text that self-consciously eschews traditional forms of philosophical inquiry in its structure, its reliance on mythic and literary texts, and its compact, dialectical mode of argumentation, the Dialectic of Enlightenment attempts to deploy what remains of the critical potentials of language against language itself. From the outset, the text directly challenges the adequacy of contemporary philosophical language to express critical thought. Indeed, this situation, and Horkheimer and Adorno’s response to it, are made explicit in their 1944 ‘Preface.’ In the face of the growing commodification of thought, accompanied by language as ‘the celebration of the commodity, the attempt to trace the sources of this degradation must refuse obedience to the current linguistic and intellectual demands before it is rendered entirely futile by the consequence of those demands for world history.’60 Consonant with Adorno’s earlier designation of language as ruined, language is described here as ‘threadbare,’ not in the least because its capacity to express dialectical antagonisms has been severely

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diminished: ‘Thought finds itself deprived ... of the conceptual language of opposition. No terms are available which do not tend toward complicity with the prevailing intellectual trends.’61 The demand for clarity – for clear, unambiguous communication – in philosophical language, and indeed, language in general, not only delimits what language can accomplish, but is further reinforced by social conditions of implicit censorship, both internal and external.62 If, as Horkheimer and especially Adorno contend, language has become reified, then one of the principal tasks of their investigation is to show how this has developed historically. However, given the idiosyncratic and speculative character of their historical anthropology, they do not offer a solid history of the origins of language. As they see it, ‘when language first entered history its masters were already priests and sorcerers ... What preceded that stage is shrouded in darkness.’63 In this magical stage, thought and practice operate through the mimetic imitation of nature. In the form of gesture and incantation, the magician endeavours to take on the myriad qualities of formless, unknowable, variegated nature. The problem of representation is already posed here, but it is not a problem of accuracy. Because ‘magic implies specific representation,’64 the question is rather how best to appease the gods and spirits by imitating them and invoking their names. The sacrifice in magical rites is not the sacrifice of the general in the particular, but that of particulars for particulars: ‘[T]he uniqueness of the chosen victim ... coincides with its representative status, distinguishes it radically, makes it non-exchangeable even in the exchange.’65 There is no strict separation between representations and what is represented: ‘At the magical stage dream and image were not regarded as mere signs of things but were linked to them by resemblance or name. The relationship was not one of intention but of kinship.’66 If the mimetic language of magic, with its unmediated unity of the thing and the word, maintains a precarious truce with nature, it is also marked by a primal fear of nature’s otherness. Horkheimer and Adorno illustrate the qualities and effects of this fear with reference to the concept of mana, the attribution of overwhelming power and force to material nature. As ‘primal and undifferentiated, [mana] is everything unknown and alien.’67 Confronted with the alien, the proto-subject responds with the most primal, material form of communication, ‘the cry of terror.’ Moreover, this reaction becomes indelibly fixed in language inasmuch as ‘the cry of terror called forth by the unfamiliar becomes its name.’68 The emergence of language is forever fated to bear the traces of this

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transition from the cry to the name, rooted in a fear of alienness and otherness. This fear drives the trajectory of the subject’s separation from the object, from nature. As both the registration and motor of this fear, language comes into its own as ambiguous, contradictory, indeed, as dialectical: ‘If the tree is addressed no longer as simply a tree but as evidence of something else, a location of mana, language expresses the contradiction that something is at the same time itself and something other than itself, identical and not identical. Through the deity speech is transformed from tautology into language.’69 The likeness of language and the thing, the tautology that the name resembles the thing, begins to dissolve in the uneven transition of magic into myth. The word becomes detached from that which it resembles, and can only refer to it ambiguously. For Horkheimer and Adorno, the emergent dialectical character of language goes hand in hand with the birth of dialectical thought. Even further, the contradiction at the heart of dialectics can be seen to be grounded in language, since ‘the concept ... was ... from the first, a product of dialectical thinking, in which each thing is what it is only by becoming what it is not.’70 At its most elemental, then, the dialectic simply registers a separation of subject and object as the condition of the subject’s formation. But, because this separation is driven from its earliest beginnings by fear, dialectics already potentially miscarries: ‘[T]his dialectic remains powerless as long as it emerges from the cry of terror, which is the doubling, the mere tautology of terror itself.’71 Instead of addressing directly the fear at its origins, dialectical thought – indeed, thought in general – ceaselessly strives to overcome it, setting in motion a ‘bad’ dialectic akin to Hegel’s ‘bad’ infinity. Thus, one of the essential moments of a critical dialectics, such as Horkheimer and Adorno develop throughout the Dialectic of Enlightenment, is to reckon self-reflexively with this originary fear, if it is not to repeat or perpetuate a thinking ultimately grounded in primal terror. In place of an always already precarious kinship with unknowable nature, the world of myth is one of constant struggle and confrontation. The primary mode of language in myth is that of narration: ‘Myth sought to report, to name, to tell of origins – but therefore also to narrate, record, explain.’72 What myth records are deeds and exploits, of the hero’s confrontation and ultimate victory over recalcitrant nature. In order to vanquish nature, and the mythical fate it is taken to represent, language becomes not the semblance of kinship, but the language of cunning, control, and command. In short, the dialectic of language is used to deceive. For Horkheimer and Adorno, the paradigmatic example of this shift

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in the pragmatics of language is revealed in Odysseus’s encounters with various mythical figures. These events are symptomatic because they illustrate the way in which firm modes of domination over nature, the self, and others are established. This domination is enacted and secured at least in part, if not principally, through an instrumentalization of language. In its confrontation with the language of nature, human speech becomes the manipulative word of lies and authoritative commands. Odysseus’s encounters with the Sirens and the Cyclops Polyphemus are particularly instructive in this regard, for they graphically demonstrate the antagonistic struggle between human speech and the language of nature, as well as the dire consequences of the victory of the former over the latter. Odysseus knows he cannot win against mythical fate by brute force or indeed by language alone. Rather, he must resort to cunning, as ‘defiance made rational,’ in action and speech. In the Sirens’ episode, he commands his men to bind him to the mast of his ship, to ‘stop up their ears,’ and to row.73 Here the moment of control through language merges with the control of their labour.74 The Sirens’ words, ‘the archaic supremacy of the song,’75 are irresistible; the older language of nature still retains its power over the human world. While it is not entirely clear of what the Sirens sing, their call could be surmised as an entreaty to return to an undifferentiated unity of the self and nature that is at once threatening and seductive. For to go to the Sirens quite possibly means the death of the self, both literally and figuratively. At any rate, Odysseus permits himself alone to hear the Sirens’ song, to which he can only answer with ‘desperate cries’ or, more precisely, with the rudimentary language of gesture,76 neither of which succeed in having his bonds untied by his men. Despite and because of his self-imposed suffering, Odysseus’s gambit succeeds, and the Sirens are presumably vanquished.77 For Horkheimer and Adorno, Odysseus’s encounter with the Sirens demonstrates both the power and powerlessness of human language as recounted in myth. On the one hand, Odysseus can speak no words that will directly overpower the Sirens. On the other, the cunning words of command and deceit serve indirectly to outwit them in the end. The full capacity of deceiving language comes into its own, however, in Odysseus’s further engagements with the Sphinx and the Cyclops Polyphemus. In both cases, the human word, in the form of an ambiguous name, directly overcomes the threatening challenges posed by mythico-natural figures. The riddle of the Sphinx is solved with the single word ‘man,’ which announces in both its form and content the

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human victory over nature. Polyphemus is likewise deceived by the dialectical ambiguity of language employed by Odysseus to save himself and his men. When the Cyclops asks Odysseus to name himself, he replies with ‘Nobody,’ which declares and denies the name in one and the same gesture.78 These ‘stratagems of the name’ succeed because they directly counterpose two incommensurable orders of language against each other. Polyphemus lives in an older world, one where ‘mythical fate [is] one with the spoken word ... [and] the distinction between word and object was unknown. The word was thought to have direct power over the thing, expression merged with intention.’79 Odysseus, in contrast, knows how to manipulate words in order to achieve his subjective ends; by ‘inserting his intention into the name, [he withdraws] it from the magical sphere,’80 and debases it by rendering it an instrument of cunning. Because he succeeds, Odysseus can continue ‘to cling to the word in order to change the thing.’81 The success of the ‘stratagem of the name’ is not without consequences for the formation of the subject. By simultaneously affirming and denying his ambiguous name, ‘Odysseus, the subject, denies his own identity, which makes him a subject, and preserves his life by mimicking the amorphous realm.’82 However, Odysseus has already moved out of this realm; in fact, as a subject, he cannot tolerate its older logic of the unmediated unity of word and thing. He must reassert his identity as a discrete self by reclaiming his name. By proclaiming it to the Cyclops upon his escape, the name is re-enchanted, but this time consciously and intentionally so; Odysseus’s identity is ‘reestablish[ed] ... by means of the magical word which rational identity had just superceded.’83 This move not only ensconces cunning deception at the heart of identity in and through language, it also becomes compulsive. The astute hero ‘is driven objectively by the fear that, if he does not constantly uphold the fragile advantage the word has over violence, this advantage will be withdrawn by violence. For the word knows itself to be weaker than the nature it has duped.’84 This constant manipulation of words, because of its triumphs, becomes historically constitutive for language. As a ‘dialectic of eloquence,’ ‘self-preserving guile lives on in the argument between word and thing.’85 The incessant argument between word and thing in myth carries forward into Enlightenment, and is one indicator of the unshakeable mythical remainders that haunt it. Whatever its progressive, rational tendencies, for Horkheimer and Adorno Enlightenment reason cannot wholly purge itself of its mythical residues. The crowning achievements

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of Enlightenment – notably the formation of the autonomous, self-conscious subject and the mastery of nature – are secured through the intensification and extension of the mythical repression of the self, others, and nature. As ‘mythical fear radicalized,’86 Enlightenment refines and solidifies an approach to the object and others as mere means for the realization of subjective ends. This instrumentalizing relation becomes universal. In the process, the positing and content of actual ends are increasingly overtaken, indeed, replaced, by the means themselves; reason devolves into pragmatism, and pragmatism becomes systemic. The radical claims of Enlightenment are instantiated in and through language, in the same measure as language serves as the instrumental means for the articulation of an alleged freedom and autonomy. If the mythic word of cunning and command ultimately achieves a Pyrrhic victory over nature, and is condemned to speak endlessly about what it has done, Enlightenment dissolves the magical unity between word and thing and claims to resolve the mythical confrontation between the language of nature and human language. Enlightenment has absolute faith in its own words of reason and logic, because these guarantee the control of nature and the advancement of knowledge. The mimetic capacities and capabilities of the word as a discrete, particular, unique name for the thing in magic are renounced, and thereby seemingly lost: ‘The name, to which magic most readily attaches, is today undergoing a chemical change. It is being transformed into arbitrary, manipulable designations.’87 The word now designates, rather than expresses, that with which it was once in unison. In its separation of word and thing, the language of Enlightenment becomes formalistic, insofar as ‘the perennial ability [of words] to designate is bought at the cost of distancing themselves from any particular content which fulfills them.’88 Paradoxically, then, the refinement and precision of conceptual language in Enlightenment creates an ever-widening gulf between word and thing; Enlightenment operates as if the victory of word over thing were total. The thing is no longer merely a thing, but is transformed into a conceptual ‘object.’ For its part, the word sloughs off its last vestiges of materiality and becomes purely abstract sign. It is precisely this transformation of word into sign that anchors and enables the instrumentalization and reification of language in Enlightenment. In a reprise of themes from Adorno’s ‘Theses’ essay, the word as sign renounces the name and becomes an arbitrary, exchangeable linguistic unit; the unique particularity of the name in ‘[magical] representation gives way to universal fungibility.’89 But more importantly, as

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Jarvis astutely underscores as the ‘double character of language,’90 the transformation of word into sign splits language into two distinct spheres: the scientific and the cultural-aesthetic. For science, the word is first of all a sign; it is then distributed among the various arts as sound, image, or word proper, but its unity can never be restored by the addition of these arts, by synaesthesia or total art. As sign, language must resign itself to being calculation and, to know nature, must renounce its claim to resemble it. As image it must resign itself to being a likeness and, to be entirely nature, must renounce the claim to know it.91

Through the language of the sign, science completely severs its ties with the object in the interest of controlling it, and, further, claims that its procedure and aim are objective. As for culture, and especially art, its interest in retaining an orientation to the object is narrowed down to the form of inert, impotent image. In contrast to the ‘Theses’ essay, the claim of aesthetic, configurative language to ‘win the character of knowledge’ is not so easily guaranteed here. This division and incommensurability between what Jarvis calls discursive and mimetic language92 re-poses in a more refined manner the problem presented at the close of the ‘Theses’ essay, namely, the specificity and tasks of philosophical language. Given the historical situation of language as disintegrated, and now divided into two oppositional realms, philosophical language is faced with a seemingly irresolvable dilemma: either it throws its lot in with science in the vainglorious hope of imitating its advances, or it resorts to expressing its truth exclusively through the aesthetic image, running the risk of losing the capacity to speak altogether. For Horkheimer and Adorno, it is obvious which path Enlightenment philosophy has chosen. If, self-consciously, ‘Enlightenment ... is the philosophy which equates truth with the scientific system,’93 it thereby succumbs to reification and forfeits its relation to truth. But if science, and the reification it both instals and represents through the sign, clearly cannot offer a model for philosophical language, the cultural-aesthetic sphere suffers equally from the rule of signification. Overtaken by processes of commodification as the economic counterpart to linguistic reification, the possibilities of expression are reduced to the monotonously formulaic, repetitive products of the culture industry. The products of culture, like the words that animate them, are exchangeable in their uniformity – a uniformity enforced ‘by means of prohibitions applied to [their] syntax and vocabulary.’94 Moreover, if Adorno could later infamously claim that ‘all culture after

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Auschwitz is garbage,’95 this is partly because Odysseus’s mythical deceits have become universalized as the lies of cultural products, in the form of their false promises of happiness, gratification, and escape: ‘If, before its rationalization, the word had set free not only longing, but lies, in its rationalized form it has become a straightjacket more for longing than for lies.’96 At its worst, the culture industry replaces the expression of and engaged response to cultural works with conditioned reflexes triggered by mere ‘signals.’ Apart from the textual form of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno do not explicitly articulate the basis upon which philosophical language is to rest if it is to provide a critique of reified language and society. While the historical critique of the configurations of word and thing advances the terms of the problem, it does not offer a resolution to it. For Horkheimer and Adorno, philosophical language labours under a kind of double impenetrability. On the one hand, reified language obscures the kind of language with and through which philosophy could elaborate truth: ‘The more completely language coincides with communication, the more words change from substantial carriers of meaning to signs devoid of qualities; the more purely and transparently they communicate what they designate, the more impenetrable they become.’97 On the other hand, any language, either philosophical or aesthetic, that rejects the instrumentalization of the word and tries to penetrate to the word’s core will appear to be regressive, if it could even be understood at all. As Horkheimer and Adorno frame it, ‘language which appeals to mere truth only arouses impatience to get down to the real business behind it. Words which are not means seem meaningless, the others seem to be a fiction, untruth.’98 If, according to Horkheimer and Adorno, the history of reason is the quasi-teleological history of domination enabled and sustained by the instrumentalization of language, and if philosophical language thus finds itself severely constrained in its effort to speak truth, these are not their final words. There is another story narrated throughout even a text as seemingly pessimistic as the Dialectic of Enlightenment, a possibility that speaks, if only faintly, of a radically different form of life, indeed, of a utopian one. Horkheimer and Adorno’s intention is not only to demonstrate the catastrophic consequences of the entwinement of myth and Enlightenment, it is also to recover and reinvigorate the utopic spirit – the ‘secret utopia of reason’99 – which once animated Enlightenment thinking and practice and has not been completely extirpated from it. Because ‘freedom in society is inseparable from Enlightenment thinking,’100 Enlightenment still offers resources that

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could potentially be used against themselves in order to break the compulsive repetition of domination: ‘The instruments of power – language, weapons, and finally machines – which are intended to hold everyone in their grasp, must in their turn be grasped by everyone. In this way, the moment of rationality in domination also asserts itself as something different from it.’101 Language, despite its operation as an ‘instrument of power,’ continually points to the possibility of operating differently, as reaching towards expression and even reconciliation. Even in magical thinking, the mimetic unity of word and thing is at best neutral, neither aiming for the control of nature nor succumbing without resistance to it. Without doubt driven by fear for the precariousness of the subject’s own existence, the mimetic speech of chants and spells nonetheless aims at an immediate, unstable harmony with nature’s perceived power. If the words of command and deceit of mythic heroes break this harmony in order to struggle against and vanquish nature, it is not without a consciousness by such heroes of their deeds nor without a linguistic re-mainder. For myth not only narrates deeds, but in its gaps and silences it registers echoes of the suffering caused by those deeds. In myth, ‘when speech pauses, the caesura allows the events narrated to be transformed into something long past, and causes to flash up a semblance of freedom that civilization has been unable wholly to extinguish ever since.’102 The faint possibility of an alternative freedom exists even at the height of Odysseus’s cunning powers, as the possibility of wilfully choosing a direction that does not result in the destruction of mythico-natural figures, but opens onto something else. Horkheimer and Adorno enigmatically refer to Odysseus as ‘the one who should have known better [der es besser wissen müßte],’103 the one who might have used language not to deceive, but to reconcile. This is the other side of the reification of language, its silent interlocutor.

III Freedom follows the subject’s urge to express itself. The need to lend a voice to suffering is the condition of all truth.104 Adorno

The reticence of Adorno’s ‘Theses’ essay and the Dialectic of Enlightenment to speak of the explicit form of a language that would resist or

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overcome the reification of language attests to the difficulty of such a project under contemporary historical conditions. If one is to take up the problem of language, both texts suggest that the only available approach is one that employs language obliquely to effect a critique of language. This challenge is one of the foremost themes of Adorno’s Negative Dialectics. If this work can be read as the most definitive statement of Adorno’s mature philosophy, it is also the text where the linguistic problems addressed in Adorno’s previous work are more thoroughly refined. Negative Dialectics tries to clarify, in both its form and content, how specifically philosophical language is to claim its rights to critique in order to render justice unto both word and thing in the interest of utopic reconciliation. The dialectics of word and thing, and reification and reconciliation, are advanced here within the continued development of the problem of expression. At issue is the question of how language can express or present that which is emphatically not language – variously cast as the thing, the non-identical, or otherness as such – without reducing it to language or identity. This inordinately difficult task is to be accomplished through a reworking of Benjamin’s concept of constellation with respect to its affinities with language, as a rethinking of Adorno’s earlier model of configuration. Most significantly, Negative Dialectics draws out an essential connection between language and suffering as a reinforcement of the materialist dimension in Adorno’s understanding of language.105 The concern with expression in Negative Dialectics tacitly assumes and is informed by the dialectical pairing of expression and communication articulated in Minima Moralia, and given further clarification in Adorno’s preparatory studies on Hegel. One of the prime contradictions of language for Adorno is that ‘as an expression of the thing itself, language is not fully reducible to communication with others,’ but neither ‘is it simply independent of communication.’106 The expressive and communicative elements are dialectically ‘interwoven.’ While the critique of communication is not explicitly present in Negative Dialectics, its substance re-emerges when Adorno asserts that ‘essentially ... philosophy is not expoundable,’107 or that ‘direct communicability to everyone is no criterion of truth.’108 As the antidote to the obsession with the definition and fixing of concepts in identitarian thinking, the unfolding of expression, in its own obsessive attention to a linguistic accommodation to the thing, unsettles the language of such thinking. Despite the important weight the concept of expression is to bear as the mode of negative dialectical language, nowhere does Adorno precisely

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define what he means by the term. Rather, akin to the interrogation of the concept as such, expression is reflexively denied as a discrete concept so that the full contours of its conceptuality emerge indirectly, indeed, negatively, out of the mediating terms, problems, and objects with which it is engaged. What expression is, or could be potentially, is indicated by what it is not, or not yet. Adorno’s philosophical critique of identity thinking is inseparable from the linguistic element that not only provides the sole medium through which such critique is possible, but, further, demonstrates how thinking might approach the thing without reducing it to identity. The plurality of the names for things found in different languages already emphasizes how the thing constantly escapes its linguistic determinations. For Adorno, this dialectical tension and movement between words and things suggests the preliminary lines of a model for thinking: ‘How one should think instead has its distant and vague archetype in the various languages, in the names which do not categorically cover the thing, albeit at the cost of their cognitive function.’109 While the diversity of languages is useful as a guide for thought, philosophical thinking requires a certain degree of linguistic precision in its concepts in order to distinguish its language as philosophical from other genres. This ‘idiosyncratic precision in the choice of words, as if they were to designate the things, is one of the major reasons why presentation [Darstellung] is essential to philosophy.’110 Philosophy cannot afford to be indifferent to its language. This is all the more true for the language of negative dialectic, with its essential yet contradictory task, against the early Wittgenstein, of ‘uttering the unutterable,’111 of expressing the inexpressible. In order to pry philosophy away from its prioritization of the subject as the supposedly unproblematic condition of identity, Adorno advocates a reorientation to a ‘preponderance of the object [Vorrang des Objekts]’112 and the conditions of its historical becoming as object. The implications for language of this turn require a shift from the problematics of the word to that of the word’s relation to the thing. Unlike the identifying word, which serves as the simple, representative placeholder of identitarian definitions of concepts and things, expressive words come up against and illuminate the limits of language. Like the subject that cannot absolutely render the object its equal, despite its pretensions, the word is immeasurably distant from the thing and cannot fully encompass it. What sets apart the language that takes dialectics seriously is its conscious rejection of a positivity of language that assumes words can

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wholly represent or define things; at every step, the thing resists, or even thwarts the very effort to bring it to linguistic articulation. As Adorno describes, ‘[N]o matter how hard we try for linguistic expression of such a history congealed in things, the words we use will remain concepts. Their precision substitutes for the thing itself, without quite bringing its selfhood to mind; there is a gap between words and the things they conjure.’113 Negative dialectical language must recognize the constraining, historical character of the non-identity or non-coincidence of word and thing, yet it must also strive to reach the thing through words. Again, following Jarvis’s distinction, philosophical language must attempt to express the thing mimetically at the same time as it needs to remain discursive, if it is not to dissolve itself as language. The language of negative dialectic is thus the conscious effort to negotiate and mediate between these two aspects because, as Adorno underlines, ‘philosophy cannot survive without the linguistic effort.’114 The contradiction of a language that understands itself as necessary, yet acknowledges its failure in the face of the resistance of things, begins to set the terms of the form and content of its current expressive possibilities. Even as one might familiarly presuppose expression to be among the most subjective of concepts, it is from the outset delimited, as a facet of its objective determinations, by the thing. Given the state of reified language in general, and of philosophical language in and through its fixation with the clear identification of concepts, there is neither a guiding principle nor guarantee for the propriety of expressive words. Nevertheless, Adorno sees Benjamin’s figure of constellation as a crucial model for both recognizing and working through the insufficiencies of language and thought: ‘The determinable flaw in every concept makes it necessary to cite others; this is the font of the only constellations which inherited some of the hope of the name. The language of philosophy approaches that name by denying it.’115 In its precise arrangement and iteration of words, the linguistic constellation tries to achieve what the words on their own cannot, namely, a respectful proximity to the thing and the redemptive promise of the name. Because the magical entwinement of name and thing has been irretrievably lost, and replaced by the reified, designating name, the utopic hope that one day names will be reconciled with things can only be expressed negatively. For Adorno, resisting the temptation to name – to identify – is a first move towards finding the right names for things; thus, if ‘materialism is imageless,’ it is likewise nameless. Adorno’s elaboration of the affinities between constellation and lan-

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guage can be read as a crystallization of the major themes and concerns of his approach to language. If it could ever be said that there is a theory of language in Adorno, the presentation of linguistic constellation would be that theory in miniature. In addition to its gesture towards the utopic reconciliation of names and things, the historical and material dimensions of language are dialectically intertwined, furnishing at once the grounds of a critique of language and the possible terms of its salvageability. The turn to constellation is cast as a way to approach the thing in thinking and language, without reproducing a reification of it or a hierarchization of concepts: The model for this is the conduct of language. Language offers no mere system of signs for cognitive functions [Erkenntnisfunktionen]. Where it appears essentially as a language, where it becomes presentation [Darstellung], it will not define its concepts. It lends objectivity to them by the relation into which it puts the concepts, centred about a thing. Language thus serves the intention of the concept to express completely what it means.116

As a rejoining of Adorno’s consistent critique of signs, language cannot be exclusively confined to its representative functions. At its most critically incisive, language does not represent thought or the thing, but, in an acknowledgment of its essential connection to them, attempts to animate or express these by presenting them in a complex, dialectical relation of mediation. As a kind of mimetic facsimile of the thing, words within a linguistic constellation prismatically refract the thing’s particularity and the history of the suppression of that particularity.117 This difference between representation and presentation is pivotal for appreciating the kind of relation between words and the thing Adorno takes great pains to articulate. Representation substitutes identifying terms in place of the thing, while the mode of presentation aims for a mediated directness with it. Ashton’s misleading translation of Darstellung as ‘form of representation’ entirely misses this difference, for Adorno is precisely arguing against this particular conception of language.118 The linguistic constellation, as an objective form of the language of negative dialectic that seeks to express a relation of mediation between words and the thing, cannot remain merely formalistic. In the same fashion as it puts into motion a dynamic relationality among words and the thing they endeavour to express, thereby resulting in an indeterminate objectivity of form, the content of constellated language is likewise not absolutely determinable. To be sure, the figure of constellation stays

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focused on the thing; it helps ‘the concept to express completely what it means,’ ‘the “more” that the concept is equally desirous and incapable of being.’119 Adorno further qualifies this ‘more’ as the non-identical, the ineradicable, ‘indissoluble’ remainder that persists alongside identifying thought as its amorphous shadow. It is this indissoluble remainder that Adorno argues Hegel at once preserves in his notion of the concrete, yet in the end reduces to the selfidentity of spirit as the inevitable telos of the progressive mediations of the Hegelian dialectic. While this reading of Hegel is disputable, Adorno tries to show how appropriately rigorous dialectical thinking ought to arrive at or distil the irreducibility of non-identity out of the dialectic of identity and non-identity. Crucially, it is the intimate relation between language and dialectic that undergirds this effort; Adorno, in an echo of the simultaneous emergence of language and dialectics suggested in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, claims that ‘the most literal sense of the word “dialectics” postulates language.’120 As its most basic definition, dialectics contends that A and not-A, identity and non-identity, are not mutually exclusive, but reciprocally mediated. Hegel’s error, according to Adorno, is not only the subsumption of the non-identical under spirit, but also the identitarian delimitation of non-identity as a concept that renders this subsumption possible. But the non-identical, in its ineradicable persistence, resists the dialectical movement of the concept to bring all that it encounters under the rubric of identity. Against such predation, the non-identical maintains a relation – a kind of mute dialogue – with its own non-identity. As Adorno expresses, ‘it [the non-identical] communicates with that from which it was separated by the concept.’121 In its resistance, the non-identical ‘seeks to be audible. Whatever part of nonidentity defies definition in its concept goes beyond its individual existence.’122 Rather than conceptualize the non-identical, negative dialectic seeks to think it otherwise in order to give it the linguistic room to express itself, for it is the non-identical that points to the very limits of conceptual thinking. But, because ‘to think is to identify,’123 thinking the nonidentical means to bring it under a modicum of conceptuality; in its radical negativity, the non-identical resists even this, both for Hegelian dialectics and Adorno’s negative dialectic: ‘The inside of non-identity is its relation to that which it is not, and which its managed, self-identity withholds from it.’124 As an element of his critique of Hegelian dialectics and as a cautionary note, Adorno holds that the negation of negation – in this instance, the negation of the already supremely negative

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non-identical – cannot produce a positive, for this would be to hypostatize it. The non-identical side of non-identity points not to a selfidentity, but to an otherness that, although it ultimately escapes even negative dialectic, such dialectic tries to open onto. Something of this need for the expression of otherness is captured when Adorno argues, again contra Hegel, that ‘if the thought really yielded to the object, if its attention were on the object, not on its category, the very objects would start talking under the lingering eye.’125 But if objects could speak, or be given the space to speak, what would they say? With the help of a language truly adequate to them, they would speak of the history of their own suffering and suffering in general: of brutalized nature, of the physical pain of the labouring and tortured body, of psychic torment, of the inhuman oppression of others. The ‘sedimented history’ of the thing and suffering, of the damage inflicted upon it in its formations and deformations and the stifling of its voice, serves as the more specific content of constellated language. Moreover, it is through suffering and the need for its expression that the thing has connections with the subject, or, more precisely, with the subject’s objective side: ‘Freedom follows from the subject’s urge to express itself. The need to lend a voice to suffering [or, as Krakauer importantly translates, ‘to let suffering be eloquent’]126 is the condition of all truth. For suffering is objectivity that weighs upon the subject; its most subjective experience, its expression, is objectively conveyed.’127 What has been done to the object has also been done to the subject and to language. As suffering, both the subject’s subjective and objective sides are in sympathy with the thing, a sympathy that philosophy must articulate; philosophy’s ‘integral nonconceptually mimetic moment of expression is objectified only by presentation in language.’128 This mimetic moment is discernable in the linguistic contortions and distortions that the language of negative dialectic itself must bear in its critical expressions of the suffering of things, the subject, and other people. Adorno addresses this last intersubjective moment when he writes of those individuals who have somehow resisted their reification as subjects, and must therefore assume the duty to ‘make the moral and, as it were, representative effort to say what most of those for whom they say it cannot see.’129 Or, as Adorno underlines in Minima Moralia, ‘it is the suffering of men that should be shared: the smallest step towards their pleasures is one towards the hardening of their pains.’130 In order to fulfil this imperative to do justice to suffering, negative dialectical language is obligated to mediate between expression and

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what Adorno refers to as ‘stringency’ [Stringenz] or, in an essay on Siegfried Krakauer, as ‘rigour.’131 Even as the facets of expression are objectively determined, Adorno does not entirely dispense with the subjective share in language. In the face of the imprecision of words, even in constellation, this share takes the form of an ‘idiosyncratic precision’ or ‘residue of arbitrariness and relativity in the choice of words as well as in presentation as a whole.’132 The subject’s freedom to express is circumscribed, but it is not erased. This gives insight into why Adorno seeks to recover the rhetorical element for rigorous dialectical thinking. Despite its historical association with persuasive deception, the emotionality of rhetoric, however undisciplined or cunning, allows for the interconnected material expression of the subject’s objective side as well as of the thing. As Adorno argues, ‘[R]hetoric represents that which cannot be thought except in language.’133 In its attempted mimetic expression of subject and thing, the rhetorical quality of language holds to the promise of a mutually undistorting congruency of word and thing: Dialectics – literally: language as the organon of thought – would mean a critical rescue of the rhetorical element, a mutual approximation of thing and expression, to the point where the difference fades. Dialectics appropriates for the power of thought what historically seemed to be a flaw in thinking: its link with language, which nothing can wholly break.134

The possibility of the fading of the difference between word and thing – their reconciliation – is the linguistic substratum of the possibility of utopia. In this manner, expressive language serves thinking by at once recognizing the non-identity of word and thing, yet nonetheless conducting itself as if their identity and communication in peaceful solidarity were not only possible, but historically unfulfilled and therefore all the more necessary: ‘For the sake of utopia, identification is reflected in the linguistic use of the word outside of logic, in which we speak, not of identifying an object, but of identifying with people and things.’135

NOTES I would like to gratefully acknowledge the critical responses and commentary from Samir Gandesha, Asha Varadharajan, and especially my co-editors of this volume on the ideas I present here.

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1 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Theses on the Language of the Philosopher,’ trans. by Samir Gandesha and Michael K. Palamarek, p. 38 above. Originally published as ‘Thesen über die Sprache des Philosophen,’ in Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), 366–71 (hereafter GS, with volume number). According to Rolf Tiedemann’s Editorial Afterword to this volume, Adorno wrote the essay in the early 1930s, but it was never published (383–4). 2 ‘Theses,’ 37. 3 In addition to essays by Deborah Cook, Martin Morris, Kathy Kiloh, Gandesha, and Asha Varadharajan in this volume, see for example Peter Uwe Hohendahl, Prismatic Thought: Theodor W. Adorno (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), esp. 217–42; Rolf Tiedemann, ‘Concept, Image, Name: On Adorno’s Utopia of Knowledge,’ trans. Ellen Anderson and Tom Huhn, in Huhn and Lambert Zuidervaart, eds, The Semblance of Subjectivity: Essays in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), 123–45; Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 1998); Eric L. Krakauer, The Disposition of the Subject: Reading Adorno’s Dialectic of Technology (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1998), esp. 139–79; and J.M. Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 4 Adorno, Philosophische Terminologie, vol. 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, [1973] 1997), 7 (translation mine). 5 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (New York: Continuum Press, [1966] 1973), 56 (hereafter ND). 6 ND 163. 7 See Adorno, ‘On the Use of Foreign Words,’ trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, in Adorno, Notes to Literature, vol. 1, ed. R. Tiedemann (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 185–99; and ‘Words from Abroad,’ [1959] trans. Nicholsen, in Adorno, Notes to Literature, vol. 2, ed. Tiedemann (New York: Columbia University Press, [1974] 1992), 286–91. According to Tiedemann, ‘On the Use of Foreign Words’ was written in the early 1930s but was unpublished in Adorno’s lifetime; this piece is thus contemporaneous with the ‘Theses on the Language of the Philosopher’ essay. See Tiedemann, ‘Editorial Remarks from the German Edition,’ in Notes to Literature, vol. 2, xvii–xviii. 8 Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. Edmund Jephcott (London: Verso, [1951] 1974), 219 (hereafter MM). 9 ‘Philosophy is the conscious effort to knit all our knowledge and insight into a linguistic structure in which things are called by their right names.’ See Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (New York: Continuum Press, [1947] 1974), 179.

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10 Treatments of this extremely underappreciated utopic element in Adorno’s work can be found in Adriana S. Benzaquén, ‘Thought and Utopia in the Writings of Adorno, Horkheimer, and Benjamin,’ Utopian Studies 9.2 (1998): 149–61; and in Tiedemann, ‘Concept, Image, Name.’ Adorno’s clearest positions on the question of utopia emerge in ‘Something’s Missing: A Discussion between Ernst Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno on the Contradictions of Utopian Longing’ [1975], in Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988), 1–17. 11 Max Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (Stanford: Stanford University Press, [1944, 1947] 2002), 203 (hereafter DE). 12 DE 181–2. 13 ‘Theses,’ 37. 14 See Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute (New York: The Free Press, 1977), 88–90. Extended engagements with the ‘Theses’ essay can be found in Gandesha and Hohendahl. 15 MM, 219. 16 Compare for instance the sharp critiques of Kant in the Juliette chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment and in Adorno’s 1969 ‘Subject and Object’ essay (trans. E.B. Ashton. in Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt, eds, The Essential Frankfurt School Reader [New York: Continuum Press, 1993], 497–511) with the more positive valuations in Adorno’s lectures on Kant. See Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Rodney Livingstone, ed. R. Tiedemann (Stanford: Stanford University Press, [1995] 2001). 17 ‘Theses,’ 35. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid., 35–6. 23 Ibid., 36. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., 37. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. Along similar lines Pierre Bourdieu argues that Heidegger’s language draws upon ordinary language in order to establish a particular discursive, philosophical field that subsequently closes in upon itself, and is thereby detached from and fortified against the socio-historical determination of words. On Bourdieu’s reading, Heidegger’s terminology operates in the

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43 44 45 46 47

Michael K. Palamarek manner of Saussure’s langue, in that Heideggerian terms, like Saussure’s signs, derive their meaning and value only through their negative relation to other terms within the same philosophical field or ‘system.’ See Bourdieu, The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger, trans. Peter Collier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, [1988] 1991), esp. 70–87. While a substantial comparison between Adorno’s and Heidegger’s approaches to language is beyond what I can offer here, such a project would surely have to take account of Heidegger’s shift from the Dasein of Being and Time to the understanding of ‘language as the house of Being’ in his later work. Adorno’s critique of the language of ontology continues as a major element of his overall engagement with Heidegger in such texts as The Jargon of Authenticity (trans. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will [Evanston: Northwestern University Press, [1964] 1973]) and part one of Negative Dialectics. Important efforts in this comparative direction can be found in Gandesha (in this volume) and Hohendahl, Prismatic Thought. ‘Theses,’ 36. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 37. Ibid., 38. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 38–9. Hohendahl, Prismatic Thought, 225. Hohendahl further notes that the elaboration of the ‘program’ following from this early positing of the convergence between art and knowledge is most explicitly developed by Adorno in the much later Aesthetic Theory. ‘Theses,’ 39. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 38. Here Adorno elaborates the distinction between expression and communication as follows: ‘language no longer allows anything to be said as it is expressed’ and ‘to renounce communication is better than to adjust.’ As

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58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69

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cited in and translated by Buck-Morss, Origin of Negative Dialectics, 175. The citations are from Adorno’s essay ‘George und Hoffmannsthal,’ originally published in 1942 and reprinted in Adorno, Zur Dialektik des Engagements: Aufsätze zur Literatur des 20. Jahrhunderts II (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1973), 59, 81. MM 80. Ibid., 25. Ibid., 41. Ibid., 25–6. Ibid., 101. Ibid., 213. Ibid. Adorno, ‘The Idea of Natural History’ [1932], trans. Bob Hullot-Kentor, Telos 60 (1984): 123. See MM 222. See Sigmund Freud, ‘The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words’ [1910], trans. Alan Tyson, in James Strachey, ed., The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 11 (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), 156. While Strachey in his introduction to this essay suggests that Abel’s analyses might be superseded by subsequent work on Egyptian philology, Freud’s interest in primal words lies in further underlining the frequent capacity of dreams to combine highly contradictory elements into a singular, coherent unity. DE 135. Adorno, Metaphysics: Concepts and Problems, trans. E. Jephcott, ed. R. Tiedemann (Stanford: Stanford University Press, [1998] 2000), 123. DE xiv–xv. Ibid., xv, xvii. Ibid., xv. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 6. Ibid., 6–7. Ibid., 7. Ibid., 10. Ibid. Ibid., 11 (emphasis mine). In order to avoid any possible confusion as to where precisely the contradiction that language expresses lies, I have slightly modified Jephcott’s 2002 translation of this passage with reference to John Cumming’s 1972 rendering (see, for instance, Dialectic of Enlightenment [New York: Continuum Press, 1995], 15). It is essential to be clear that

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Michael K. Palamarek the contradiction of the identical and non-identical lies in the tree, and not in language, as might be intimated in Jephcott’s version. There is no ambiguity in the original: ‘Wenn der Baum nicht mehr bloß als Baum sondern als Zeugnis für ein anderes, als Sitz des Mana angesprochen wird, drückt die Sprache den Widerspruch aus, daß nämlich etwas es selber und zugleich etwas anderes als es selber sei, identisch und nicht identisch.’ See GS 3: 31. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 5. Ibid., 46. Rebecca Comay reads the physical separation between Odysseus and his men as an expression of ‘the founding opposition between intellectual and manual labour on which class society as such depends.’ See her ‘Adorno’s Siren Song,’ New German Critique 81 (Fall 2000): 22. DE 46. Ibid. The actual description in The Odyssey of this incident reads as follows: ‘The lovely voices came to me across the water, and my heart was filled with such a longing to listen that with nod and frown I signed to my men to set me free.’ See Homer, The Odyssey, trans. E.V. Rieu (London: Penguin Books, [1946] 1977), 194. In a short story, Kafka wonders if perhaps the Sirens did not sing as Odysseus passed, but elected to remain silent as an even more potent expression of their power. He further speculates that, recognizing the Sirens’ own cunning, Odysseus might even have pretended to hear their song. For Kafka, it is Odysseus who is outwitted by the Sirens. His hubris in attempting to defy them utterly fails; for after the encounter, nature survives intact and human cunning rebounds completely upon itself in a more insidious manner than even Horkheimer and Adorno suggest. See ‘The Silence of the Sirens,’ in Franz Kafka, The Complete Stories, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer (New York: Schocken Books, [1971] 1988), 430–2. Comay (‘Adorno’s Siren Song,’ 29) likewise draws attention to this text: ‘Kafka wonders ... whether it was not Odysseus who seduced himself with his own drive to mastery.’ Horkheimer and Adorno speculate that the Greek words Odysseus and Udeis (nobody) could be construed as a ‘play on words’ or even as homonyms in an ancient Greek dialect. See DE 53. Ibid., 47. Ibid., 53. Ibid., 47.

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Ibid., 53. Ibid. Ibid., 54. Ibid., 53, 47. Ibid., 11. Ibid., 134. Ibid., 47. Ibid., 7. See Jarvis, Adorno, esp. 177–8. DE 13. Jarvis, Adorno, 26. DE 66. Ibid., 101. ND 367. DE 133. Ibid. Ibid., 118. See ibid., 66, 73. Ibid., xvi. Ibid., 29. Ibid., 61. Ibid., 52; GS 3: 86. ND 17–18. Zuidervaart and Krakauer have likewise identified the importance of the connection between language and suffering for Adorno. Krakauer particularly draws attention to Adorno’s emphasis on the physicality and corporeality of suffering. See Krakauer, Disposition of the Subject, 145–8. Zuidervaart, in his Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory: The Redemption of Illusion (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), shows how suffering, expression, and constellation are core concepts in Adorno’s work on aesthetics. See for example the discussion of mimetic expression and labour (111–12), suffering (304–7), as well as ‘Metaphysics after Auschwitz: Suffering and Hope in Adorno’s Negative Dialectics’ in this volume. The difficult question of the relation between the language of aesthetics and the language of philosophy in Adorno is one that I have only been able to address parenthetically throughout this essay. Donald Burke’s ‘Adorno’s Aesthetics of Reconciliation,’ also in this volume, gives a perspective on this question from the aesthetic side. See also Hohendahl, Prismatic Thought, 236–42. 106 Adorno, ‘Skoteinos, or How to Read Hegel,’ in Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, trans. S.W. Nicholsen (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, [1963] 1993), 105.

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107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117

ND 33. Ibid., 41. Ibid., 52. Ibid., and GS 6: 61–2. ND 9. Ibid., 183. Ibid., 52–3. Ibid., 56. Ibid., 53. Ibid., 162 (translation modified). The image of the word as prism, as well as Adorno’s implicit critiques of Saussure, suggest potentially productive comparisons with Valentin Volo’inov’s insistence on the materiality of the word, and its status as a ‘special kind of sign’ that ‘refracts’ social reality. See Valentin Volo’inov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Ladislav Matejka and I.R. Titunik (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, [1929] 1973). The original of the text in question reads: ‘Wo sie wesentlich als Sprache austritt, Darstellung wird, definiert sie nicht ihre Begriffe.’ GS 6: 164. Jarvis improves upon Ashton’s rendering with his ‘exposition’; see Adorno, 177. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has a useful discussion of the political implications of the difference between representation (Vertretung), as a ‘speaking for’ or substitution, and her rendering of Darstellung as ‘representation,’ and its possibility of allowing subjects to speak in their own name. See A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward A History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 256–60. ND 162. Ibid., 163. Ibid. My reading here differs from that of Bernstein (Adorno, 273), who argues that ‘the nonidentical “communicates” with what it is separated from, the rationalized object of rationalized thought, by the concept’ (italics in text). While I do not disagree that the non-identical can be seen as indeed hived off or purged from the rationalized object, I am suggesting that Adorno’s critique is more directly levelled at Hegel’s perceived attempt to conceptualize non-identity under the logic of the identity of identity and non-identity. In this sense, the non-identical’s ‘communication’ is not with the rationalized, identitarian object but in the completely opposite direction; it points outside itself, to that which we can only vaguely conceive as the non-identity of non-identity. Although running the risk of incoherence, such a conception would indicate the very edges of the current possibilities of thought, and radicalize or extend the terms

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122 123 124 125 126

127 128 129 130 131

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of Jarvis’s insistence on ‘the non-identity of identity and non-identity’ as the experience that makes dialectical thought possible for Adorno (Adorno, 173, italics in text). ND 163. Ibid., 5. Ibid. Ibid., 27–8. In the original: ‘Das Bedürfnis, Leiden beredt werden zu lassen, ist Bedingung aller Wahrheit.’ GS 6: 29; and Krakauer, Disposition of the Subject, 146. ND 17–18. Ibid., 18. Ibid., 41. MM 26. ND 18; GS 6: 29; and Adorno, ‘The Curious Realist: On Siegfried Krakauer,’ [1964] in Notes to Literature, vol. 2, 59. Adorno credits Krakauer with leading him to appreciate two crucial ideas: first, that ‘among the tensions that are the lifeblood of philosophy the tension between expressiveness and rigour is perhaps the most central’; and secondly, that ‘expression and suffering are intimately related.’ ND 52, 53. Ibid., 55. Aristotle, in The Art of Rhetoric (London: Penguin Books, 1991), also attempts to connect up rhetoric and dialectic with its opening claim that ‘rhetoric is the counterpart of dialectic’ (66). But whereas Aristotle seeks to provide a rational justification of rhetoric so that it may be considered equally as important as dialectic and logic, Adorno mobilizes rhetoric as a counter to rationalized thought and language. ND 56. Ibid., 150.

3 The ‘Aesthetic Dignity of Words’: Adorno’s Philosophy of Language sam ir g a nd e s ha

There can be little doubt that Jürgen Habermas has decisively set the terms of the reception of Theodor W. Adorno’s work. Indeed, Habermas’s elaboration of critical theory as a theory of communication rests on the claim that in Max Horkheimer and Adorno critical theory reaches a fatal impasse, insofar as it represents ‘the exhaustion of the paradigm of the philosophy of consciousness.’1 By philosophy of consciousness Habermas means a philosophy that is grounded in the essentially monological relation between representing subject and represented object, which, having passed through post-Kantian idealism, is both canceled and preserved in what he calls the ‘paradigm of production.’ Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s critique of Karl Marx, Habermas argues that within this paradigm, the human species is conceived as an undifferentiated collective subject that transforms itself in the act of transforming nature.2 Evidence of the impasse reached by Horkheimer and Adorno is that, in having abandoned the very possibility of an expanded conception of reason, they have no other recourse than to fall back on a vague notion of mimesis – as a communicative relation between subject and object – about which, nonetheless, they are unable to give a theoretical account without self-contradiction. In the wake of the exhaustion of the philosophy of consciousness, Habermas aims to reconstitute critical theory through a pragmatic and linguistic turn, by grounding it in an account of intersubjective communication that is simultaneously immanent and transcendental. It is immanent because it is grounded in actual communicative interactions against the backdrop of the symbolically mediated lifeworld and transcendental because every speech act contains within it a context-transcending ideal speech situation.

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On closer inspection, however, Habermas’s claim that Adorno remains within the paradigm of consciousness philosophy is questionable.3 Since the publication in the 1990s of Fredric Jameson’s Late Marxism and, subsequently, Peter Uwe Hohendahl’s Prismatic Thought and Shierry Weber Nicholsen’s Exact Imagination, Late Work, as well as recent essays by Hermann Schweppenhäuser,4 it has become increasingly evident that, given Adorno’s nuanced reflections on the question of language, Habermas’s characterization is, at best, misleading.5 Already in the mid-1980s, Albrecht Wellmer – who, in fact, stands much closer to Habermas than do Jameson, Hohendahl, or Nicholsen – noted: ‘Perhaps we might speak of an implicit language philosophy or theory of rationality in Adorno. But whatever we decide to call it, I doubt whether the reformulation of Critical Theory in terms of language pragmatics is sufficient to supersede this implicit philosophy of Adorno’s.’6 Such an implicit philosophy of language in Adorno – what Wellmer nicely calls ‘buried treasure’ – does not circumvent the problem of communication but rather complicates it. Adorno’s short text titled ‘Theses on the Language of the Philosopher’ can be viewed precisely as this type of buried treasure that provides vital insight into Adorno’s philosophy of language.7 Not previously translated into English, this text from the early 1930s has received comparatively little critical commentary. This is surprising, given that it shares common topoi with the other main texts contemporary with it, namely, ‘The Actuality of Philosophy’ (1931) and ‘The Idea of Natural-History’ (1932). At the same time, problems that continue to occupy Adorno throughout his career can be discerned in this short text: for example, the relation between the logic of exchange and communication, and a critique of representationalism or the idea that language is to be thought exclusively in terms of its ability to accurately represent reality. A significant contribution of this text is to pose a question that becomes decisive for Adorno’s subsequent oeuvre, namely, the ‘convergence of art and knowledge.’ While Adorno’s philosophy of language is usually discussed in connection with Walter Benjamin, whose Trauerspiel book was particularly influential for Adorno’s thoughts on language, in this essay I shall take a slightly different path and suggest certain convergences between Adorno’s understanding of language and the tradition of pragmatism.8 In the ‘Theses’ Adorno issues the following statement, which may be taken as programmatic for his philosophy as a whole: ‘All philosophical critique is today possible as the critique of language’ (‘Theses,’ 38). Far from confirming Habermas’s thesis that Adorno represents the exhaus-

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tion of the philosophy of consciousness, this statement, naturally, undermines Habermas’s reading inasmuch as it suggests that a linguistic turn of a particular kind might be, in fact, immanent to Adorno’s writings. After all, Richard Rorty defines the ‘linguistic turn’ as ‘the view that philosophical problems are problems that may be solved (or dissolved) either by reforming language, or by understanding more about the language we currently use.’9 But the meaning of this statement, composed by Adorno not long after his return to Frankfurt from Vienna after a brief hiatus studying music under the illustrious member of the Second Viennese School, Alban Berg, remains to be clarified.10 The connection with Viennese modernism might provide some insight into what Adorno means by this.11 A parallel has been drawn, for instance, between the early Ludwig Wittgenstein and the ‘critical modernist’ attack on ornamentation in the work of the Viennese architect Adolf Loos.12 Adorno’s own understanding of philosophy could be seen, therefore, as motivated by something like the attack in the Tractatus on how, just as clothes disguise the body, ‘language disguises the thought’ that ‘all philosophy is critique of language’ (Alle Philosophie ist Sprachkritik).13 At the same time, Adorno’s statement could be taken as aiming, in an antithetical way, at a conception of critique as a form of ‘Destruktion,’ not of the history of Being per se but rather as the attempt to think ‘conceptually beyond the concept.’14 In other words, the history of philosophy is understood as a metanarrative of forgetting and, by extension, reification, insofar as philosophy has translated the ‘nonidentical’ into a static, representational relation between subject and object.15 There is, of course, a third alternative: the one presented by the author of the Philosophical Investigations. In this later text, Wittgenstein argues that ‘philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment [Verhexung] of our intelligence by means of language.’16 The problems (or more precisely pseudoproblems) of philosophy arise from a search for substances, corresponding with the substantives of grammar. Here, one can identify without much difficulty a parallel between Wittgenstein’s diagnosis of the pathology of philosophy as a bewitchment and Horkheimer and Adorno’s thesis about the intertwining of myth and enlightenment. In what follows, I shall try to situate Adorno in relation to these three, still regnant, schools of linguistic philosophy.17 Reading the ‘Theses’ permits a test of Adorno’s own concept of ‘configurative language’ or ‘constellation’; to begin interpreting this difficult text it is necessary, as alluded to above, to situate it in relation to the other important texts from this period.

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‘The Idea of Natural-History’ While he took up a deeply polemical stance vis-à-vis Martin Heidegger throughout his career, Adorno seeks nonetheless to develop his own concepts and categories out of an immanent critique of Heideggerian philosophy. Such an immanent critique plays a vitally strategic role, for example, in the structure of Negative Dialectics, a text whose account of philosophical experience becomes a critique of ‘the ontological need’ (das ontologische Bedürfnis) and an elaboration of models of ‘negative dialectics.’18 A much earlier, yet equally strategic, instance of Adorno’s engagement with Heidegger emerges in his lecture ‘The Idea of Natural-History,’ delivered to the Kant Society in Frankfurt in 1932. According to Rolf Tiedemann, taken together with other early writings, this lecture can be seen as an important transition from the neo-Kantian position of his teacher Hans Cornelius to materialism.19 In the lecture, Adorno argues that Heidegger moves beyond the antithetical construal of ‘time’ and ‘being,’ thus overcoming ‘false stasis and formalism’; that is, he pushes beyond the antithesis between the Platonic essences and life.20 This step forward is, however, at the same time, a step backward, insofar as such a destruction is purchased at the cost of the subordination of history (Geschichte) to historicity (Geschichtlichkeit) (‘Idea,’ 114). From this, two implications follow: (1) the difference between real historical contingency and the concept of historical contingency, namely, the concept of historicity, is effaced; as a result, (2) ontology becomes tautological (115). Actual historical events become, then, indistinguishable from Heidegger’s own ontology. It is possible to discern here a question that will occupy Adorno throughout his philosophical career: how is it possible to think the particular conceptually without subsuming it beneath concepts? To the two critical points mentioned above – the elision of the difference between actual contingency and the concept of contingency, and the problem of tautology – Adorno adds a third: the aspiration not just to the systematic but to a structural definition of the encompassing whole (umfassende Ganzheit) ultimately grounded in being’s (Daseins) grasping its ownmost possibility or Being-toward-death (Sein-zum-Tod) (115). Despite his far-reaching claims, Adorno insists on the determinate, as opposed to abstract, orientation of this critique. Thus Heidegger demonstrates how natural and historical elements are insuperably interwoven. Yet this insight can be fully realized only by moving away from the ‘possibilities of Being’ (Möglichkeiten des Seins) toward really existing

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entities (Seienden) (117). The intention of Heidegger’s approach to the tradition can be realized only inasmuch as it relinquishes the ontological understanding of temporality and moves toward considering actual history itself. Yet such actual history cannot, itself, be construed exclusively as the realm of either pure freedom or natural necessity. For the second leads to ‘false absolutes,’ while the first leads to ‘false spiritualism’ (117). Adorno seeks, therefore, to push the engagement with the philosophical tradition in a direction rather different than that of Heidegger. Drawing both on the early Georg Lukács’s notion of ‘second nature’ as the ‘charnel house of long dead interiorities’21 and on the Benjaminian notion of ‘allegory,’ Adorno offers an alternative account of reification as the ‘forgetting’ of what is transitory or what he will call the ‘nonidentical.’ If Lukács, in Theory of the Novel, understands history as composed of cultural forms or conventions, which, over time, become inert and come to be experienced as a kind of natural necessity antithetical to the will that produced them,22 then in the baroque Trauerspiel Benjamin detects nature as an allegorical text in which it is possible to read the unfolding of historical events. The setting of the sun, for example, allegorizes the death of a tyrant (‘Idea,’ 121). Through his reading of Lukács and Benjamin, then, Adorno transforms the categorial opposition of being and time into the concept of natural-history, which enables him to adhere to Heidegger’s intentions of undermining this traditional opposition, without allowing either side of the opposition to simply collapse into the other. Indeed, rather than permitting these oppositions to remain static, Adorno seeks to grasp history at its most historical as nature; at the same time, he seeks to grasp nature at its most natural as history (121).23 The dereifying strategy of undermining the opposition between nature and history aims at releasing the ‘new’ or transience from its reduction to either a naturalized history or a historicized nature – Heidegger’s Geschichtlichkeit or Hegel’s Weltgeschichte. Adorno’s dialectical conception of natural-history is also to be distinguished from Marx’s own materialist transcription of Hegel’s understanding of conceptual labour. Indeed, in Marx’s materialist conception of history, the ‘new’ gets swallowed up by the idealist vestiges of Hegelian universal history that persist within it.24 The critical intention of the idea of natural-history aims at ‘the new in its newness, not as something that can be translated back into the old

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existing forms.’25 This problem of addressing the novelty of the new leads Adorno, as it does Arendt, to a rethinking of aesthetic judgment.26 Adorno uses the concept of natural-history as a model in Dialectic of Enlightenment, which seeks to lay bare the entwinement of myth (or nature) and enlightenment (or history). While it might seem peculiar to read this text as a response to Being and Time, it is worth bearing in mind that in the preface to his Habilitationsschrift of 1927, ‘The Concept of the Unconscious in the Transcendental Theory of Mind,’ Adorno states that he intends enlightenment in a double sense: first as the enlightenment of ‘problematic concepts,’ and second ‘as Enlightenment as the goal in the comprehensive sense, which lends history to the concept: The destruction of dogmatic theories.’27 Through his engagement with Heidegger, Adorno develops a concept of writing, as set forth in ‘The Essay as Form,’ as the dialectical configuration of Kant’s concept of aesthetic reflective judgment.28 Writing, in its mimetic tracing of an object, namely, an artwork, accomplishes two things simultaneously: it participates in the disclosure (Erschliessung) of the world while making rational, that is to say, conceptual, truth claims about objects in the world. The ‘Theses’ presents an embryonic notion of writing in this sense. To put it differently, it is in writing that the force field between expression and communication is constituted. This is what Adorno in the ‘Theses’ calls the ‘aesthetic dignity of words.’ Before a discussion of the ‘Theses,’ however, it is first necessary to examine in some detail the other major text from this period, namely, Adorno’s inaugural lecture to the philosophy faculty at the University of Frankfurt, ‘The Actuality of Philosophy.’ On the Actuality of Philosophy The early lecture, ‘The Actuality of Philosophy,’ is critical to the development of Adorno’s thinking as a whole. It represents his continued attempt to develop the insights of Benjamin’s Trauerspiel, which Adorno subversively taught in his philosophy seminar. In this lecture Adorno presents a sketch of the recent history of German philosophy, which, as Herbert Schnädelbach has shown, from the last third of the nineteenth century had become stridently anti-Hegelian. With the rapid expansion of the forces of production in German society, guided by the firm hand of the Prussian state, and the central role played by science and technology as productive forces, philosophy yielded to the

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overwhelming pressure to distance itself from the grandiose claims of Hegel’s speculative system, which had understood science (Wissenschaft) in terms of a comprehensive, totalizing grasp of the real.29 Set against this backdrop, Adorno’s lecture can be viewed as marking the terms of a philosophical program that attempts to revive a form of dialectical thinking that is materialist yet, at the same time, as suggested above, relinquishes the concept of totality inherent in Hegelian and prevailing forms of Marxian thinking.30 In contrast to the young Lukács, who sought to synthesize Hegel and Marx,31 Adorno’s reconfigured materialist approach to philosophy takes the form of a hermeneutics that seeks to orient, but refuses to be swallowed up by, praxis. Yet what here is meant by ‘historical praxis’? While space does not permit an extended discussion of this concept here, Adorno’s perspective can be usefully distinguished from both the Lukácsian and Althusserian conceptions of praxis. According to Lukács, as is well known, through praxis the alienation of subject and object is finally overcome as identity in the unfolding of the historical process. According to Althusser, praxis is a knowledge-producing activity that remained relatively autonomous from its social and historical conditions – the sphere of ‘ideology.’ In contrast to both, Adorno’s conception of praxis is deeply indebted to ‘real sensuous activity,’ which is mediated by practical consciousness or language as in the writings of Marx.32 Like Marx’s early critique of religion, Adorno’s deflation of the claims of pure philosophical thinking – for example, phenomenology33 – hinges on asking how philosophy comes to pose the kinds of questions that it does. For example, as we have already seen, in his critique of Heidegger, Adorno engages in a critique of the ‘ontological need’ that itself is rooted in an analysis of the material conditions, and the suffering to which they give rise, that make possible the contemporary power of fundamental ontology. Adorno’s strategy, therefore, is to resituate philosophy in relation to the logic of the very social practices that it seeks to repress and yet is haunted by. Adorno identifies the inadequacies of recent German philosophy, from the neo-Kantianism of the Marburg and Southwest German schools, through Edmund Husserl and Max Scheler. For Adorno, the two most significant philosophical positions, however, are those of the Vienna Circle and Heidegger. Adorno’s survey of recent German philosophy is not intended as a general orientation in ‘intellectual history’; rather, because history is not incidental to but inherent in philosophiz-

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ing, Adorno argues that ‘only out of the historical entanglement of questions and answers does the question of philosophy’s contemporary relevance [Aktualität] emerge’ (‘Actuality,’ 124). In other words, the question of philosophy’s contemporary relevance is formulated in quintessentially Weberian terms, which is to say whether it is able to address the problem, posed most sharply by the Vienna Circle, of ‘the liquidation of philosophy’ or its dissolution into the ‘separate sciences’ (Wissenschaften).34 How can such a liquidation be countered? By asking about the presuppositions that govern science itself – presuppositions that it inherits from philosophy and is unable to do without. Yet philosophy itself rests not on self-posited but on historical grounds. The first presupposition has to do with the ‘meaning of the given itself’; this in turn poses the problem of the transcendental subject, as Kant had already shown. In contradistinction to Kant, however, this question ‘can only be answered historico-philosophically, because the subject of the given is not ahistorically identical and transcendental, but rather assumes changing and historically comprehensible forms’ (125). The second, related, problem is one that afflicts all forms of skepticism, namely, that of the ‘unknown consciousness,’ which can be understood only in analogy to one’s own experience. However, and in a way that connects up directly with the problem of the nature of the ‘given,’ as Adorno puts it, ‘the empiricocritical method already necessarily assumes an unknown consciousness in the language it has at its disposal’ (125). The Vienna Circle wishes, therefore, to escape the historical unfolding of philosophical problems by settling accounts once and for all, not simply with particular schools of philosophy but, rather, with philosophy per se. Yet, according to Adorno, ‘solely by posing these problems, [it] is drawn precisely into that philosophic continuity from which it wanted to distance itself’ (125). This does not, however, detract from this school’s momentous significance, which lies not in having successfully carried out its program but rather in sharpening the division of labour between science and philosophy. While the guiding idea of the separate sciences is ‘research,’ that of philosophy is ‘interpretation’; therefore, Adorno argues, the sciences ‘accept their findings, at least their final and deepest findings, as indestructible and static, whereas philosophy perceives the first finding, which it lights upon as a sign that needs further unriddling’ (126). As mentioned earlier, Adorno argues that philosophy is a historically

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grounded interpretation as opposed to transcendental research. However, if what is historically disclosed is not the fullness but fragmentation of being, then such interpretation cannot aim at ‘meaning’ as such. To depict reality as inherently meaningful is, at the same time, to justify a historically contingent and therefore changeable reality. In other words, the interpretation of meaning, or what Paul Ricoeur calls ‘recollective hermeneutics,’ is perpetually in danger of sliding into an ideological justification of what exists.35 Neither is interpretation to be understood as the attempt to uncover the (meaningful) essences lying behind the (meaningless) appearances.36 Both of the above rely on an understanding of language in terms of its ‘symbolic function’ or an understanding of the particular as a ‘moment’ of the universal: the part as a mediation of the whole. By contrast, the language of philosophy is allegorical in that, if configured correctly, the tiniest grain of empirical reality could disclose the whole. Adorno suggests that interpretation of the unintentional through juxtaposition of the analytically isolated elements and illumination of the real by the power of such interpretation is the program of every authentically materialist knowledge, a program to which the materialist procedure does all the more justice, the more it distances itself from every ‘meaning’ of its objects and the less it relates itself to an implicit, quasi-religious meaning. For, long ago, interpretation divorced itself from all questions of meaning, or, in other words, the symbols of philosophy are decayed. If philosophy must learn to renounce the question of totality, then it implies that it must learn to do so without the symbolic function in which for a long time, at least in idealism, the particular appeared to represent the general. (‘Actuality,’ 127)

Interpretation, understood as the ‘construction out of the small and unintentional elements,’ thus provides, on the one hand, an alternative to the formal and unbinding procedures of logical positivism and, on the other, the ‘multitude of possible and arbitrary worldview positions’ (weltanschaulicher Standpunkte), which try to counter it. The crucial, materialist orientation of such an approach to philosophic interpretation is revealed in its relation to praxis. If philosophical problems are ultimately historical ones, then those problems will continue to persist or be transformed or indeed abolished with new, emergent forms of historical praxis. This is what Adorno means when he speaks of the

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answer negating the riddle itself. Hence Adorno asserts the primacy of practical reason yet, again, in a way that breaks with Kant’s presupposition of the split between the noumenal as the realm of will and reason, and the phenomenal as the realm of the understanding. Rather, in a way that echoes Marx’s ‘Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach,’ Adorno argues that ‘the interpretation of given reality and its abolition are connected to each other, not, of course, in the sense that reality is negated in the concept, but that out of the construction of a configuration of reality the demand for its [reality’s] real change always follows promptly’ (129). Significantly, Adorno closes ‘The Actuality of Philosophy’ with a defence of the essay form, which represents his attempt to define a form of intellectual experience that is at once unrestricted and rigorous. In contrast, then, to both positivism and Heideggerian phenomenology, Adorno takes history, or, to be more precise, natural-history, as his starting point. This is the idea that – as with other constructs or accomplishments of the human species, elaborated and developed over long periods of historical time – language becomes, as a kind of second nature, hollowed out or drained of any inherent meaning. For signs to be meaningful, they must be wrested out of the contexts in which they are historically given, recontextualized, and deciphered. This is the philosopher’s task in relation to language. ‘Theses on the Language of the Philosopher’ In both ‘The Actuality of Philosophy’ and ‘The Idea of Natural-History,’ Adorno develops the idea of natural-history to address the capacity of philosophy to justify its continued existence against the apparently devastating program of logical positivism to decisively undermine the legitimacy of philosophy as such.37 Despite its confidence, bolstered by the then recently won hegemony of natural science within culture as a whole,38 logical positivism remains, like the sciences themselves, unable to reflect on itself and therefore to answer the question of the nature of ‘given’ as Heidegger had already shown in Being and Time. Nor is it able to answer the question as to the possibility of other minds.39 One question must be posed at the outset about the title of this text: why does a writer who thinks so carefully about titles not call the text ‘Theses on the Language of Philosophy’?40 It could be argued that to speak of philosophy, at least in its modern inflection, presupposes a prior understanding of its subject as transcendental, as in the Cartesian

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cogito or in Kant’s claim that the ‘“I think” must accompany each of my representations.’ Such a conception of philosophical language subordinates language to the logically necessary or transcendental mental states that it must transparently communicate. To speak of the language of the philosopher, however, is to speak of one who philosophizes, that is to say, one who engages in a certain sort of activity. This, in turn, implies that philosophy, as an activity, is situated socially and historically within the tissue of other practices inasmuch as the subject who poses philosophical questions is not a self-generating transcendental subject, like Johann Fichte’s absolute ‘I,’ but an embodied, situated, empirical subject who nonetheless makes context-transcending claims. To put it in different terms, the ‘language of the philosopher’ stands to the ‘language of philosophy’ as the perspective of the ‘participant’ stands in relation to that of the ‘observer.’41 Why, also, does Adorno use ‘Language’ in the title? Traditionally, philosophy has sought to legislate culture, in particular meaning, from a position outside and, indeed, above it. In posing the question of meaning from ‘the inside,’ however, that is, as a problem for philosophy itself, Adorno is pointing to a deep contradiction: if the philosopher employs a language continuous with that of society – that is, if philosophy is itself one form of social and historical praxis among others – and if language per se requires legislation or clarification to convey meaning, then philosophical language is itself in need of such legislation. Yet, to paraphrase the young Marx, who legislates the legislator? In other words, it is far from clear that the philosopher’s language will be equal to the task of philosophizing understood in the traditional sense as legislation. At this stage, philosophy enters into a crisis of its own meaningfulness and intelligibility. Philosophy can rescue such intelligibility only by pursuing a strategy that it has resisted since the dialogues of Plato’s middle period: rather than drawing itself upward and away from situated social practices – including and especially politics – perhaps philosophy can address this pervasive crisis of its own intelligibility only by drawing toward those practices. Two implications can be said to follow from this. First, philosophers are unable to think thoughts that are autopoetic or self-generating because they must formulate thoughts in a language that necessarily precedes them. Or, as Adorno puts it, ‘That language imprisons those who speak it, that as a medium of their own it has essentially failed.’42 Philosophers, whose starting point must be freedom, therefore become entangled in a contradiction. Philosophical texts are constituted not in

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relation to a world of objects or facts whose essence or transcendental structure they precisely mirror but, rather, in relation to the other philosophical texts that constrain them in the form of a tradition.43 Or, to put it somewhat differently, the world of objects or facts takes shape only through the particular tradition or ‘frame’ constitutive of a given set of discourses. Second, the language of the philosopher is not only historically but also socially impure. That is, it is imbricated in the fractured totality of the social and thus is itself fractured. ‘The purity into which philosophy regressed,’ according to Adorno, ‘is the bad conscience of its impurity, its complicity with the world.’44 An important starting point for all three approaches to the relation between philosophy and language discussed above – namely, the early Wittgenstein, the late Wittgenstein, and Heidegger – is the ‘everyday,’ the ‘ordinary,’ or what I have been calling praxis. For, prior to the linguistic turn, it was much easier for philosophers to separate themselves from the shadowy realm of appearances.45 Once the question of language is posed as intrinsic rather than extrinsic to the practice of philosophy, another question is simultaneously posed: the relation to the everyday. The first position seeks to clarify the vagueness of the everyday use of language in a way that transforms it into an ‘ideal language’ capable of providing a limpid picture of the totality of facts, or ‘everything that is the case,’ while remaining silent on all other questions including what properly constitutes ‘that which is the case.’ The second turns language away from the ‘fallen’ or inauthentic modes of Being in the everyday, the realm of ‘the they’ (das Man), toward an authentic selfdisclosure understood as embodying the structure of care (Sorge). The third strategy seeks to dereify philosophical language by reorienting metaphysical language toward the ordinary. This approach attempts to counter the ‘bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language,’ by decentering and situating philosophy’s attempted generation of an ideal language: ‘One thinks that one is tracing the outline of a thing’s nature over and over again, and one is merely tracing round the frame through which we look at it.’46 As we have already seen, the chiasmatic structure of natural-history – the historicization of nature (domination) and the naturalization of history (forgetting) – reveals history as a seemingly natural process obeying lawlike regularities and nature as the realm in which new, technologically mediated forms of domination appear. Language as a dynamic, conventional, and therefore historical structure calcifies in the fixity of significations that, in fact, makes possible ‘progress’ in the

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domination of nature.47 That is, concepts are the intellectual (geistige) effects of the historical domination of nature. Words are sundered from the experiences that they initially signified and become, in the process, death masks of intentionality, signifying not a full, unequivocal meaning but rather meaning’s absence.48 Or, as Nietzsche puts it in his meditation on history: ‘How much of the past would have to be overlooked if it was to produce that mighty effect. How violently what is individual in it would have to be forced into a universal mould and all its sharp corners and hard outlines broken up in the interest of conformity.’49 To be redeemed, linguistic signs have to be configured into new constellations, which enables the occluded object – the particular – to come into view without being subsumed by a concept that, through its own subsumptive logic, presses particularity into a ‘universal mould.’ In the first two theses, Adorno poses the problem of language in terms recognizable from the mature philosophy of Negative Dialectics: the separability of form from content and its corollary, the purely arbitrary nature of signification or the idea that the same object could, in principle, be given or represented in a multiplicity of ways. Adorno tells us, ‘It is a sign of all reification through idealist consciousness that things can be named arbitrarily’ (‘Theses,’ 35). Thus the intellectual constitution of objects remains merely formal – as in, for example, transcendental apperception – unable to determine ‘the material shape of language’ (Sprachgestalt). If all reification is a forgetting, then such a conception of language is constitutively premised on the disappearance of the particular it purports to name. The ‘Theses’ could be said, then, to, as it were, linguistify Kant’s differentiation between deductive judgments that subsume particulars beneath preexisting universals and reflective judgments that generate universals out of particulars. The former is transcendental; the latter, historical. Significantly, while the logic of deductive judgments predominates in the first two critiques, namely, the realms of science and morality, reflective judgment is central to the aesthetic. Adorno’s linguistification of reflective judgment centres on what he calls ‘the aesthetic dignity of words’ and approaches the philosophy of language from the standpoint of historically mediated experience (Erfahrung). It is precisely because language is subject to the dialectic of natural-history that it is in the process of decay. Words cannot simply be taken as inherently meaningful signifiers beneath which it is possible to subsume objects that they signify as the expression of authentic philosophical contents. Philosophers must, in contrast, find the right words to enable such an expression according

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to the historical truth stored up in the words themselves. The language of philosophers is, therefore, always already ‘materially prefigured’; this is unconsciously expressed in the demand for an accurate representation of a thing by a word. This demand, generated by the fractured nature of society, would be superfluous in a nonantagonistic society where everything would be called by its right name. It is against these assumptions that Adorno takes up again his dialectical critique of logical positivism and fundamental ontology. The demand for the communicability or understandability of philosophical language is either banal or untrue: banal in the sense that it simply takes words as inherently meaningful in themselves; and untrue in the sense of concealing how language has become historically problematic. In opposition to the presupposed communicability of philosophical language is Heidegger’s philosophy of language, which, as mentioned above, seeks to wrench a language that has degenerated to being a mere function of ‘the they’ or the mindless anonymity of the public realm into a sphere of the authentically generated meaning of being (Sinn des Seins). Against the historical obliviousness of logical positivism, Heidegger ‘gauges the historical problem of words’ (‘Theses,’ 37); however, rather than seeking to ground problems of language in history, he understands it in terms of historicity.50 In displacing the concept of history by the existential notion of historicity, Heidegger inadvertently universalizes or, better, ontologizes the historical experiences (and radical insecurities) of actually existing history, for example, the Weimar Republic, leading to a view of Dasein as ontologically constituted by fear and guilt. As Adorno puts it: ‘Heidegger’s language flees from history, yet without escaping it. The places that his terminology occupies are altogether locations of conventional philosophical and theological terminology, which shimmers through and preforms the words before they take on a life of their own’ (37). Thus, at first glance, Heidegger seems to represent a viable alternative to logical positivism inasmuch as he seems to pose the problem of the constitution or disclosure (Erschliessung) of the world as prior to any ‘scientific’ propositions about objects in the world.51 Yet, inasmuch as Heidegger understands such disclosure in terms of an ontologized temporality, he takes leave of history and, perhaps more important, the historical problem of the relation between words and things. Adorno’s own approach to language – what he calls ‘configurative language’ (konfigurative Sprache) – situates itself, then, between logical positivism, which, as its own name implies, provides a justification for positivity

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or what simply exists, and Heidegger’s attempt to invent a new language de novo. We can now situate Adorno’s reflections on language in relation to the early Wittgenstein, the late Wittgenstein, and Heidegger. As should be clear, I have been arguing that Adorno’s understanding of a critique of language (Sprachkritik) is to be distinguished from the early Wittgenstein’s attempt to provide a unified conception of language that would enable it, once and for all, to accurately picture reality as it really is. Indeed, as Wittgenstein himself acknowledges through the celebrated simile of the ladder, this is a self-revoking philosophy of language. Such a philosophy of language, based on presenting a clear picture of ‘everything that is the case,’ would render the Tractatus – a text clearly not about anything that is the case but rather how we might talk about what is – senseless. At the same time, while Adorno, like Heidegger, seeks to address the reification of meaning in the ‘tradition’ of Western metaphysics, Adorno refuses to understand this tradition as self-contained but rather situates it in relation to other all too ‘ontic’ practices constituting the history of domination. Adorno’s conception of a critique of language engages, therefore, in a critique of both linguistic positivism and Heidegger’s ontology of language. Hence ‘the official philosophical language, which treats any and all terminological inventions and definitions as if they were pure descriptions of states of affairs, is no better than the puristic neologisms of a metaphysically consecrated New German, which, incidentally, is derived directly from that scholastic abuse’ (‘Words,’ 1:190). ‘Philosophy must,’ therefore, according to Adorno, ‘dissolve the semblance of the obvious as well as the semblance of the obscure.’52 Adorno’s double-edged critique approximates the language philosophy of the later Wittgenstein. While this relation cannot be addressed here in all of its depth and complexity, it is possible to suggest broad areas of convergence. Rolf Wiggershaus, for example, has pointed to significant convergences in Adorno and Wittgenstein, primarily in the way they decentre the perspective of the observer in favour of that of the historically situated participant.53 In other words, both emphasize praxis over disinterested observation. Moreover, Wellmer has indicated three principal areas of convergence: the nonidentical, representationalism, and cultural criticism. Starting from the last and working forward: the problem of the chiasmatic structure of natural-history is what Wittgenstein referred to as the ‘bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language,’ or the idea that the concepts or words that we use

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have some ultimate purchase on the world as it is. Consequently, the problem of the adequacy of word and thing is displaced by the relationship between words within sentences and between sentences themselves within a plurality of language games that, themselves, cannot be understood through a unified set of rules. Rather, language games display in common only family resemblances – a non-unitary play of identity and difference. Similarly, as we have seen, the adequacy of language to express the philosopher’s intentions must be considered on its own terms and not with reference to a thing beyond it. Indeed, it is precisely through loosening the pretensions of the representational paradigm within culture more broadly that it is possible to clear space for that which is nonidentical.54 The philosopher’s task is to place words in new, that is, heretofore untried, configurations derived not only from the philosophical tradition but also from the ‘intentionless refuse of the physical world.’ While the implications of this remain to be worked out at this early stage of Adorno’s career, it is possible to argue that the ‘aesthetic dignity of words’ takes the form of a mimetic relation between philosophy and art, mediated by criticism or writing as it culminates in the essay. From the French essayer, to try or attempt, and essais, experiments,55 the essay form is Adorno’s model for open intellectual experience and judgment. He understands intellectual experience by way of analogy with the émigré – the person compelled to learn a new language through everyday life ‘instead of piecing it together out of its elements according to rules learned in school.’ In a manner that parallels Wittgenstein’s critique of the traditional, Augustinian account of language acquisition,56 Adorno argues that rather than grasping denotative meanings of words or formal definitions in a dictionary, the émigré is confronted with the richly nuanced, connotative meanings of words from the plurality of contexts in which they are used. Language is acquired across a plurality of incommensurable senses that arise from praxis. The nature of such nonrepresentational usage is itself shaped by the multiple, shifting, and fluid contexts in which it takes place. Language acquisition is, then, a form of socialization through praxis. Adorno writes, ‘This kind of learning remains vulnerable to error, as does the essay as form; it has to pay for its affinity with open intellectual experience with a lack of security that the norm of established thought fears like death.’ The reason why ‘established thought’ actively condemns such a conception of language and its implications for open intellectual experience is that it undermines or undoes the univocality

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of meaning underpinning the traditional philosophical enterprise. While such an enterprise relies on the stability of meaning, the essay ‘erects no scaffolding and no structure.’57 The essay sets to work a dynamic constellation that lights up a specific dimension or aspect of the object, which is possible only by relinquishing the aspiration to grasp the object as no more than a moment of an unfolding totality.58 What Wiggershaus’s and Wellmer’s compelling accounts of the relation between Adorno and Wittgenstein fail to address, however, is the conservative tenor of Philosophical Investigations, which appears to be suspicious of change.59 After all, Wittgenstein avows that his philosophy of language ‘leaves everything as it is.’ Yet this is not unlike Adorno’s own recognition that social praxis determines language, ‘a process in which the writer can intervene to make changes only by recognizing it as an objective one.’ At the same time, Adorno’s understanding of language possesses a utopian dimension that Wittgenstein would no doubt have rejected. An answer to this question of possibility of the historical transformation of language is implicit within the essay ‘Words from Abroad’ in which Adorno suggests that foreign or strange words (Fremdwörter) can be understood as countering the bewitchment of our thinking through language. The foreign word (Fremdwort), ‘the silver rib’ inserted ‘into the body of language,’ alerts us to the inorganic nature of language (‘Words,’ 1:187). It blasts meaning out of the continuum of history whose ‘customary ring of naturalness deceives us about [the separation of subject matter and thought]’ (1:194). In other words, by functioning as something that is clearly ‘nonidentical’ with the thing it purports to name, the foreign word offers insight into the nature of language per se. In a manner that almost directly parallels Wittgenstein’s discussion of the multiplicity of individual words in Philosophical Investigations, Adorno suggests that ‘the weight of words in different languages, their status in their context ... varies independently of the meaning of individual words’ (1:194). The Fremdwort, then, makes possible the experience of the new within the continuity of the old. How does it accomplish this? One might, with Jean-François Lyotard, argue that an account of language or language games based on different grammars or sets of rules makes it possible to think of power as penetrating the structure of language itself.60 That is, if the rules of language are conventional – albeit conventions that exist and change as a moment of the production and reproduction of the material conditions of life – then they can be understood as a kind of ‘social contract’ and, therefore, embody power relations.

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How is change possible within this account of language? Transformations in historical praxis are made possible inasmuch as existing language games are always open to transmutation. Foreign words, according to Adorno, ‘express the solitude of the intransigent consciousness in their reserve and shock with their obstinacy: in any case shock may now be the only way to reach human beings through language’ (1:192). Such a shock in effect breaks or at least loosens the hold of prevailing or dominant language games by radically historicizing them and, in the process, discloses alternative possibilities.61 This returns us, finally, to Habermas’s critique of Adorno as representing the aporetic nature of the philosophy of consciousness. Undoubtedly, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory stands at the heart of his philosophy. Habermas’s attempt to characterize Adorno’s philosophy as representing the exhaustion of the ‘philosophy of consciousness’ is central to marginalizing Adorno’s conception of mimesis. What Habermas’s characterization misses is that mimesis concerns the resonance of nature, its reverberation or ‘rustling’ in language rather than an immediate relation of communication between subject and object.62 As I have been suggesting, Adorno’s philosophy of language must be situated within the context of the idea of ‘natural-history’ and culminates in what he calls the ‘aesthetic dignity of words.’ What Adorno means by this might be explicated through an understanding of how Wittgenstein’s account of language is itself premised on the distinctively human ‘form of life’ that, as Wittgenstein himself suggests, is based on a concept of what he calls, significantly, ‘natural-history’ – that language use is to be understood alongside other human activities that satisfy material needs, such as eating and drinking. In other words, Wittgenstein presents us with a materialist account of language.63 Similarly, aesthetic experience for Adorno explicitly allows nature or sensuous particularity to find its way into language. As Adorno puts it in his reading of Hegel, ‘Truth is not adaequatio but affinity, and in the decline of idealism reason’s mindfulness of its mimetic nature is revealed by Hegel to be a human right.’64 The critical force of art – whose truth content is excavated and explicated by philosophical concepts – lies in its ability to force sensuous particularity up against the limits of language.65 What Habermas’s essentially Kantian appreciation of the place of the aesthetic can grasp only inadequately is that such a forcing of limits transforms the patterns of linguistic usage themselves; it changes the rules of the game, so to speak. If we encounter objects in the world only through the multiplicity of language games through

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which they are given to us, then such a pushing up against the limits of language pushes up against and occasionally ruptures the limits of the world.

NOTES I would like to thank John Abromeit, Ian Angus, Raj Gandesha, Christina Gerhardt, and Michael Palamarek for their helpful comments on previous drafts of this essay. 1 Jürgen Habermas, Reason and the Rationalization of Society, vol. 1 of Theory of Communicative Action, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon, 1984), 386. 2 See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958). 3 For a critique of Habermas’s philosophy of language see David Rasmussen, Reading Habermas (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1990). 4 Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno; or, The Persistence of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 1990); Peter Uwe Hohendahl, Prismatic Thought (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995); Shierry Weber Nicholsen, Exact Imagination, Late Work: On Adorno’s Aesthetics (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997); Hermann Schweppenhäuser, ‘Dialektischer Bildbegriff und ‘dialektisches Bild’ in der Kritischen Theorie,’ Zeitschrift für kritische Theorie 16 (2003): 7–25. 5 It comes as little surprise, then, that Nicholsen’s powerful interpretation of Adorno’s account of language draws largely on his essays and literary criticism. See Exact Imagination, Late Work. 6 Albrecht Wellmer, ‘Ludwig Wittgenstein: On the Difficulties of Receiving His Philosophy and Its Relation to the Philosophy of Adorno,’ in Endgames: The Irreconcilable Nature of Modernity; Essays and Lectures, trans. David Midgley (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998), 259. 7 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Thesen über die Sprache des Philosophen,’ in Philosophische Frühschriften, vol. 1 of Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 366–71; Adorno, ‘Theses on the Language of the Philosopher,’ trans. Samir Gandesha and Michael Palamarek (in this volume, 35–40). Hereafter cited as ‘Theses.’ 8 Such a strategy does not seem quite as outlandish as it might at first when one considers the latent pragmatism in the writings of the early Marx. See Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne

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(London: Verso, 1977). As has been indicated by others, given the fact that one of Benjamin’s aims in this book was to distinguish between tragedy (Tragödie) and the seventeenth-century ‘mourning play’ (Trauerspiel), a worse rendering of the title can hardly be imagined. Richard Rorty, introduction to The Linguistic Turn: Recent Essays in Philosophical Method, ed. Richard Rorty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 3. Interestingly, Rorty suggests that the linguistic turn embodies the tension between the pull of art and science. It is possible to argue that this is the central ‘force field’ in Adorno’s work, if we alter the terms to include the following oppositions: art and philosophy, expression and communication, particularity and universality, name and concept. For an interesting, if abbreviated, discussion of the relation between Adorno and Alban Berg see Raymond Geuss, Morality, Culture, and History: Essays on German Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 116–39. See Wellmer, ‘Ludwig Wittgenstein,’ which also draws attention to the connection between Wittgenstein and Adorno in a common Viennese culture. See Allan Janik, Wittgenstein’s Vienna Revisited (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2001), 18–20. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), 63. In ‘The Actuality of Philosophy,’ for example, Adorno argues that ‘it would be better just to liquidate philosophy once and for all and to dissolve it into particular disciplines than to come to its aid with a poetic ideal which means nothing more than a poor ornamental cover for faulty thinking’ (‘The Actuality of Philosophy,’ Telos 31 [1977]: 125; hereafter cited as ‘Actuality’). This statement provides tremendous insight into Adorno’s own style. Inasmuch as it is rigorous, Adorno’s style is aesthetic, and inasmuch as it is aesthetic, it is rigorous. I appreciate the differences between the early Witt-genstein and logical positivism centering on the problem of the ‘mystical.’ See also, e.g., Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (London: Cape, 1990); and Wellmer, ‘Ludwig Wittgenstein.’ Yet at the same time, Adorno, for good reason, takes the early Wittgenstein to be exemplary of logical positivism’s attempt to establish a purely logical language. Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Why Still Philosophy,’ in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 8. For the specifically modern dimensions of Adorno and Wittgenstein see Rolf Wiggershaus, Wittgenstein und Adorno: Zwei Spielarten modernen Philosophierens (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2000). Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (New York:

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Samir Gandesha Seabury, 1973). Indeed, Adorno has been viewed, with some justification, as a protodeconstructionist. See, e.g., Christoph Menke, The Sovereignty of Art: Aesthetic Negativity in Adorno and Derrida, trans. Neil Solomon (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998); Sabine Wilke, Zur Dialektik von Exposition: Ansätze zu einer Kritik der Arbeiten Martin Heideggers, Theodor W. Adornos und Jacques Derridas (New York: Lang, 1988); and Martin Jay, Adorno (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984). Cf. Samir Gandesha, ‘Leaving Home: On Adorno and Heidegger,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Adorno, ed. Tom Huhn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 101–28. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), sec. 109. The logical positivism of the early Wittgenstein is represented, for example, by W.V. Quine and his student Donald Davidson. Heidegger’s conception of language has had a profound impact on approaches as different within the so-called Continental tradition as deconstruction (Derrida) and hermeneutics (Gadamer). The later Wittgenstein has, of course, influenced the neopragmatism of Rorty, the postempiricist philosophy of science of Thomas S. Kuhn, and the postmodern agonistics of Jean-François Lyotard. Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Vorrede,’ in Negative Dialektik, vol. 6 of Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), 10. Rolf Tiedemann, ‘Editorische Nachbemerkung,’ in Adorno, Philosophische Frühschriften, 381–4. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘The Idea of Natural-History,’ trans. Robert HullotKentor, Telos 59 (1984): 114. Hereafter cited as ‘Idea.’ Georg Lukács, Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971), 64. Ibid. As he puts it in Negative Dialektik, ‘Die herkömmliche Antithesis von Natur und Geschichte ist wahr und falsch; wahr, soweit sie ausspricht, was dem Naturmoment widerfuhr; falsch, soweit sie die Verdeckung der Naturwüchsigkeit der Geschichte durch diese selber vermöge ihrer begrifflichen Nachkonstruktion apologetisch wiederholt’ (351). Interestingly, when Marx uses this new materialist method to understand concrete, historical events, things become much more complex. In a way connected with his extremely important if abbreviated discussion in The German Ideology of how the material form of language subverts the pretensions of Hegel’s account of absolute knowing, Marx in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte evinces a profound worry that the workers’

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movement might be condemned to repeat the political languages and idioms of revolutions that constitute a history that now ‘weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.’ Hence Marx writes, ‘The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future’ (The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, 2nd ed. [New York: Norton, 1978], 597). The unmistakable connection between Marx’s account of history and aesthetic modernism – in particular, Stephen Dedalus’s statement that ‘history ... is the nightmare from which I am trying to awake’ (James Joyce, Ulysses [Mineola, NY: Dover, 2002], 34) – throws Adorno’s defence of aesthetic autonomy into a different, perhaps more political, light. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘The Essay as Form,’ in Notes to Literature, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, 2 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991–2), 1:21. See Samir Gandesha, ‘Schreiben und Urteilen: Arendt und der Chiasmus der Naturgeschichte,’ in Arendt und Adorno, ed. Dirk Auer et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003), 199–234, repr. as ‘Writing and Judging: Adorno, Arendt, and the Chiasmus of Natural History,’ Philosophy and Social Criticism 30 (2004): 445–75. Adorno, Philosophische Frühschriften, 81. My translation. For Adorno, writing is quintessentially a form of aesthetic experience. That experience and judgment are complementary was recognized as early as Aristotle and then restated in the early modern period by Montaigne. Herbert Schnädelbach, Philosophy in Germany, 1831–1933, trans. Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 12–32. This is what Susan Buck-Morss calls ‘dialectics without identity’ (The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute [New York: Free Press, 1977], 43–62). Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1972). For example, Marx argues in his critique of Feuerbach that ‘the question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth, that is, the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking which is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question’ (Marx-Engels Reader, 144). See, e.g., Theodor W. Adorno, Against Epistemology, a Metacritique: Studies in Husserl and the Phenomenological Antinomies, trans. Willis Domingo (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982). Cf. Max Weber, ‘Science as a Vocation,’ in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociol-

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ogy, trans. H.H. Gerth and C.W. Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), 129–58. See Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970). For the classic statement of this see Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. R.S. Pine-Coffin (London: Penguin, 1961). Cf. also Adorno, ‘Why Still Philosophy,’ 5–18, in which Adorno addresses, again, this basic question in relation to positivism, on the one side, and Heidegger, on the other. Cf. Schnädelbach, Philosophy in Germany. As Michael Theunissen has shown, Heidegger’s philosophy ultimately fails to address this problem as well (The Other: Studies in the Social Ontology of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Buber, trans. Christopher Macann [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984]). Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘A Title,’ in Notes to Literature, 2:299–302. Cf. Wiggershaus, Wittgenstein und Adorno, 10. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Words from Abroad,’ in Notes to Literature, 1:189. Hereafter cited as ‘Words.’ Stanley Cavell calls this ‘inheritance’ (This New Yet Unapproachable America: Essays after Emerson after Wittgenstein [Albuquerque, NM: Living Batch, 1994]). Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Progress,’ in Critical Models, 148. This is what for Plato was the realm of politics. Hence there is an intrinsic connection between world, language, and politics. Cf. Arendt, Human Condition. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 41e. At first glance, such an invocation of the ordinary or ordinary language philosophy seems particularly misguided as an interpretation of Adorno inasmuch as Marcuse has characterized it, with good reason, as a reified view of the ‘concrete.’ On the other hand, when we consider the enterprise of interpretation from within, for example, psychoanalysis – its attempt to account for the associative meanings of ordinary language in terms of the fundamental workings of the unconscious as expressed in, for example, parapraxes – the idea of understanding Adorno as a kind of dialectical philosopher of the ordinary is not as farfetched as it may at first seem. For Adorno, the positivist understanding of truth as the equivalence of a proposition with a state of affairs in the world becomes indistinguishable from the giving of commands (‘Words,’ 1:191). Cf. Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama; and Nietzsche, who, in the second untimely meditation, speaks of the ‘mummification’ of life.

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49 Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 69. 50 In many respects, Adorno’s understanding of the relationship between positivism and ontology follows from Weber’s account of how rationalization, specialization, and disenchantment generate the search for experience and meaning. See Weber, ‘Science as a Vocation,’ 129–58. Of course, this approach is taken and radicalized in Dialectic of Enlightenment where the very antithesis of magical ways to approach the world, namely, the technical-scientific, actually turns into its opposite: mythology. 51 See, e.g., the analysis of the relation between Zu- and Vorhandenheit in Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper, 1962), 96–102. 52 Adorno, ‘Why Still Philosophy,’ 12. 53 Wiggershaus, Wittgenstein und Adorno. 54 Wellmer, ‘Ludwig Wittgenstein.’ 55 See Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1957). 56 The entire first part of Philosophical Investigations is geared to a critique of this account of language. 57 Adorno, ‘Essay as Form,’ 1:13. 58 As Adorno would famously put it later, ‘Das Ganze ist das Unwahre’ (Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben, vol. 4 of Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997], 55). Adorno’s later confrontation with Heidegger’s reading of Friedrich Hölderlin focuses centrally on the image of the foreign woman as the utopian sign of longing. 59 Cf. Cavell, This New Yet Unapproachable America. For precisely this interpretation see Ernest Gellner, Language and Solitude: Wittgenstein and the Habsburg Dilemma (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 157–74. 60 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). Derrida and Foucault have made similar arguments, albeit by way of structuralism: cf. Jacques Derrida, ‘Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,’ in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 278–93; and Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972). For a structuralist account of Adorno’s own theory of language see Jameson’s Late Marxism. 61 For example, the historical emergence of the novel in the nineteenth century makes possible a certain conception of inner experience. This is not to

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say, however, that the novel simply represents something that is already there waiting to be expressed through narrative form. Rather, the novel brings into being a certain kind of subjective experience previously unavailable. See Nicholsen, Exact Imagination, Late Work. For suggestive interpretations of a materialist Wittgenstein see Gavin Kitching and Nigel Pleasants, eds, Marx and Wittgenstein: Knowledge, Morality, and Politics (London: Routledge, 2002). Theodor W. Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), 41. In this sense, all authentic art is sublime art.

4 The Linguistic Image: Mediation and Immediacy in Adorno and Benjamin kathy kilo h

This essay addresses what I am arguing is a common misconception concerning the relationship between the work of Theodor W. Adorno and that of Walter Benjamin. The conventional reading of this relationship assumes an easy comparison between the two thinkers, leading to a judgment colouring Adorno’s position as elitist and despairingly pessimistic,1 while painting Benjamin’s work as a positivistic program for social change. Perhaps even more problematic is the relatively recent adoption of Benajmin’s themes and ideas as ‘techniques’ or ‘methods’ by the fields of cultural and visual studies, in which we have witnessed a (perhaps unintended, yet nevertheless troubling) depoliticization of his work. These seemingly oppositional uses of Benjamin’s work, as I note above, originate in an under-laboured comparison with Adorno, which may stem from an under-analysed reading of their correspondence with one another. In the first case, Benjamin and Adorno are assumed to have a similar understanding of subjectivity, while in the second it is assumed that the two could not be further apart on this point. Those who see Adorno as a pessimist, grief-stricken over the demise of the constitutive subject of bourgeois culture, and Benjamin as a celebrant of the libratory potential of the modern, base these claims on the unexamined and often unacknowledged assumption that both men adhere to a belief in the subject as an individual or collective social agent. In the case of Adorno, the assumption is that we are doomed because this agency has been historically denied us, while Benjamin is celebrated as a thinker who recognizes new possibilities for subjective action. Careful readers of Adorno and Benjamin, of course, recognize this as a gross misrepresentation of their work. What makes Benjamin’s work more radical than Adorno’s is not, I

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argue, a closer allegiance to particular political struggles or programs, but rather the threatened liquidation of the subject his work approaches in favour of the redemption of things.2 It is this dangerous line Benjamin walks that leaves his work open to readings that position him as a kind of proto-post-modernist – a champion of the fluidity of the subject – without understanding the particular political context Benjamin writes from: a world violently suspended between revolutionary freedom on the one hand and totalitarianism on the other. Furthermore, I argue that thinking through this complicated relationship between the two bodies of work allows us to recognize the utopian impulse underscoring Adorno’s writings, seeing in them not the grim pronouncements from the ‘Grand Hotel Abyss’ of Lukács’s criticisms,3 but a hopeful yet blind gaze towards future reconciliation. I argue that the relationship between Benjamin’s and Adorno’s conception of the subject is far more nuanced than either their correspondence reveals, or than these ‘either-or’ positions will allow. These faulty readings of Adorno and Benjamin, I argue, can only be corrected by reading their works together and against one another. Differences and similarities emerge when these bodies of work are positioned in dialectical opposition, and the social and political relevance of both Benjamin’s and Adorno’s contributions is clarified. The critical correspondence between the two, I argue, must be examined in light of what this dialectical relationship reveals. Revisiting the debate between the two concerning dialectical mediation versus immediate sensuous experience, I argue (leaving aside for the moment Benjamin’s own claims to the contrary) that both Adorno and Benjamin engage in an immanent critique of Idealist epistemology, putting the categories of ‘subject’ and ‘object’ under rigorous investigation. These terms occupy a central position in Adorno’s oeuvre, while Benjamin takes great pains to distance himself from the traditional ground of German Idealism. Nonetheless, I argue that even Benjamin’s emphasis on immediate sensuous experience is implicitly premised on a deeply critical understanding of the complex relationship between subject and object. Furthermore, it is my contention that in his own description and composition of dialectical images, Benjamin engages in an intensified dialectical mediation of subject and object along the lines articulated by Adorno in Negative Dialectics.4

1. Subject and Object Adorno argues, contra Hegel, that we cannot simply posit subject and

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object as given and solid categories of being. These terms are products of conceptual thought and cannot be determined otherwise. In Negative Dialectics, Adorno writes that the antagonism which philosophy clothed in the words subject and object cannot be interpreted as a primal state of facts. If it could be so interpreted, the mind would be turned into the body’s downright otherness, contradicting its immanent somatic side; but to have the mind alone void the antagonism is impossible, because that in turn would virtually spiritualize it.5

The concepts ‘subject’ and ‘object,’ as well as the very antagonism that gave rise to their separation itself, cannot be placed outside of the historical, beyond the human capacity for critique. Were it otherwise, the split between mind and body would be so total that bodily experience would be completely uncognizable. Adorno finds fault in Hegel’s attempt to describe and resolve this antagonism because his materialism is not radical enough; his attempt remains firmly within the realm of the subject. According to Adorno, the ‘separation of subject and object [in German Idealism] is both real and illusory.’6 This separation is real in the sense that it expresses, in the cognitive realm, the human condition under capitalism: the exploitation and alienation within the antagonistic society dominated by identitarian thought and the manifestation of this thought as the exchange principle. It is false because Enlightenment rationality forgets the abstract quality of this separation, hypostatizing the gap between subject and object, treating them as polar opposites of one another. In other words, thought identifies its objects by bringing them under the cover of a concept. All things thereby appear to be equivalent, identical, and exchangeable for one another. The intrinsic value of things is elided in favour of their fetishized exchange value. Enlightenment rationality carries within it the potential for the dialectical mediation of subject and object, but finds itself stalled in this abstract state of hypostasized identity-thinking. In this radically unmediated separation, the mind finds the (false) independence necessary for it to dominate the object; ‘the subject reduces [the object] to its own measure; the subject swallows the object, forgetting how much it is an object itself.’7 This domination of the object by the subject is exemplified in the arrest of conceptual thought at the stage of identification. The subject cognizes its surroundings by classifying any given datum as a member

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of a species; knowledge is produced through the intervention of an organizing concept. In this act of defining the object as equal to the concept, ‘something objective, no matter what it may be in itself, is subjectively captured by means of a fixed concept.’8 In the subjective (and partial) mediation of the object (the reduction of the object to the subject’s own measure), the subject can acknowledge only those elements of the object that exist in total identity with this fixed concept. The subject is blind to the object except insofar as it resembles the subjectively mediated covering concept. The non-identical (that which cannot be equated with the totality of the concept) must be repressed in the identification of thing and concept; both subject and object are presently enslaved to the ideology of identitarianism. Through the operations of identitarian thinking, the subject dominates not only the inanimate things of the material world but also the very life that forms the basis of human subjectivity. Adorno writes, ‘[T]he being of a subject is taken from objectivity – a fact that lends a touch of objectivity to the subject itself; it is not by chance that the Latin word subjectum, the underlying, reminds us of the very thing which the technical language of philosophy has come to call “objective.”’9 In other words, the subject finds its subjectivity in its relationship to objects external to it, and also out of its own status as an object. This mediation between subject and object, and particularly the subject’s dependence upon the object in this mediation, is precisely what Enlightenment rationality must forget in order to institute and maintain the domination of the object by the constitutive subject. Therefore, although this separation is a product of conceptual thinking, and this separation both expresses and contributes to the antagonism that pervades modern society, the goal of Adorno’s negative dialectics is not to lessen mediation in a celebration of some primal and original immediacy of subject and object.10 If, as Adorno claims, ‘the pseudos of the separation is manifested in their being mutually mediated – the object by the subject, and even more, in different ways, the subject by the object,’11 then the falseness of this separation can only be revealed through an intensified mediation of subject and object. The necessary forgetting of the object’s mediation of the subject in Enlightenment rationality is key to understanding Adorno’s resistance towards the importation into philosophy of the particular form of objectivity found in scientific rationality. The appeal to objective laws beyond the mediation of the subject serves to passivate it, robbing the subject of the only activity it has been granted under Enlightenment

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rationality: domination. This passivation of the subject further enslaves human rationality. Adorno perceives both the increasing reliance (in the twentieth century) on scientific methodology over social theory and the concurrent move towards positivism in philosophical discourse as the contemporary symptoms of reason arrested at the stage of identification. He claims that the only way out of the current state of subjective unfreedom is to recognize the priority of the object, ‘us[ing] the strength of the subject to break through the fallacy of constitutive subjectivity.’12 In other words, philosophy must embark on a second selfreflection that will entail a critique of the identification of objects with fixed concepts performed by the constitutive subject. According to Adorno, this critique will come closer to the object itself by negating the subjectively mediated conceptions that mask it. This negation will result in greater subjective freedom, Adorno argues, as the subject’s domination of itself as object is weakened in the process. Benjamin’s attempt to redeem empirical phenomena shares certain elements with Adorno’s position. However, Adorno warns that in prioritizing the object over the subject, Benjamin risks positing a utopian resolution of conflict (an end to the subject’s domination) as not merely imminent but already accomplished, thereby foreclosing any move towards intellectual critique or social change. In other words, Adorno reads Benjamin’s efforts to focus attention on the things themselves as a reorientation of thought towards the object that prematurely and erroneously declares the dominance of the subject to be over once and for all. This is a dangerous move according to Adorno, as Benjamin ignores the very real possibility that it could lead to a further reification of the subject, which is then devoid of any ability to form a critical perspective on the world. For Benjamin, ‘knowledge is possession.’13 In the Kantian framework the empirical realm is valued in terms of its usefulness in confirming the subject’s dominant position. Benjamin seeks to readdress this devaluation of the empirical by locating the possibility of transcendence in the realm of experience. Intentionally invoking the theological as mystical, he argues for a ‘profane illumination’ in which the essence of empirical objects and the past suffering of finite human beings is redeemed and brought into unity with a transcendent truth. Benjamin’s commitment to move beyond a mode of thought that consumes its object as mere property or fodder is often read as a rejection of conceptual reflection altogether. It is this double misconception – that Benjamin both prematurely declares an end to subjective domination and rejects

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conceptual mediation – that makes his work vulnerable to readings that emphasize the fractured fluidity of the weakened subject and a kind of depoliticized irrationalism. Benjamin comes closest to Adorno’s later thought in his Origin of German Tragic Drama of 1924–5, often considered the starting point for both Benjamin’s and Adorno’s theories of constellations and dialectical images. In this book, which went largely unnoticed during Benjamin’s lifetime, Benjamin brings together Kantian epistemology and the Platonic (and Neoplatonic) doctrine of ideas in a theoretical treatise on knowledge and experience. For Benjamin, although ‘ideas are simply given to be reflected upon,’14 they are not passively received by the subject from an inaccessible metaphysical realm. Instead, with the aid of the cognitive faculty, they are constructed out of the essential elements of objects found in the empirical realm. Benjamin argues that the task of philosophy is the representation of ideas, and ideas are the ‘objective, virtual arrangement [of phenomena], their objective interpretation.’15 According to Benjamin, truth resides in phenomena as essence, but this truth can only be conceived as partial, fragmentary. Empirical phenomena are redeemed when they are brought into the genuine unity of truth in the construction of the idea. The idea is formed in the mosaic-like arrangement of the essential elements of various tangentially connected phenomena. The traditional philosophical techniques of deduction, induction, and rational argumentation are not central to Benjamin’s writing here. And while concepts are not rejected from Benjamin’s theory of ideas, their role in the search for transcendent truth is much diminished in comparison to the central position they hold in Kant’s epistemology. The concept is, for Kant, the limit of human cognition; once a subject has conceptualized (or identified) its object, he or she has reached the limit of human knowledge. Obtaining this knowledge of the object, no matter how limited it is, is the aim of the constitutive subject. Benjamin calls for sensuous experience that goes beyond conceptual cognition – an experience that does not take partial and possessive knowledge of the object as its goal. Conceptual knowledge, for Benjamin, merely assists in the arrangement into ideas of the essential elements of phenomena; ‘[t]hrough their mediating role concepts enable phenomena to participate in the existence of ideas.’16 ‘Phenomena do not,’ Benjamin writes, ‘enter into the realm of ideas whole, in their crude empirical state, adulterated by appearances, but only in their basic elements, redeemed.’17 He argues that concepts ‘effect the resolution of objects

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into their constituent elements,’ shattering the false unity of the object of cognition as an empirical phenomenon, ‘so that, thus divided, they might partake of the genuine unity of truth.’18 In the fragmentation of the object into its essential elements, and the arrangement of those elements into a structure containing the essential elements of other empirical phenomena, its truth becomes accessible to human experience in the form of the idea, which ‘is to [the] object ... as constellations are to stars.’19 In the juxtaposition of partial and fragmented truths, a common, united idea emerges. In reading these constellations, the subject is able to unveil the transcendental truth inhabiting the material realm. While, for Adorno, constellations are groupings of concepts and, therefore, ultimately remain on this side of conceptual thought, Benjamin theorizes an indirect relationship between conceptually produced knowledge and the ideas that emerge in the juxtaposition of various phenomena. Kantian epistemology holds that noumenal knowledge (that which is given, that which structures the operations of cognition yet is imperceptible to consciousness) cannot be gathered within the phenomenal realm of human experience. Benjamin counters this assumption by arguing that transcendental truth can be approached within the material realm. What results from his critique of Kant is a theory of knowledge/experience ‘that would be transcendent vis-à-vis the predictable, lawlike regularities of the prosaic phenomenal world.’20 According to Susan Buck-Morss, it is precisely this restructuring of conceptual thought, enabling the thought of a ‘nonmetaphysical metaphysics,’21 that Adorno develops in his work on the constellation in Negative Dialectics and elsewhere.22 From Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Adorno adopts the notion of a truth that inhabits empirical objects – a truth that is, as a property of things existing in the world, historically determined. Because this truth provides the possibility of an alternate, more legitimate reality, it fulfils the necessary precondition that grounds and lends credence to a negative critique of the status quo. Restructuring Benjamin’s theory of knowledge and experience in his Negative Dialectics, Adorno argues that the concept must fulfil its mediating function in both the construction and liquidation of constellations. For Adorno, it is not the essential elements of phenomenal objects that enter into constellations (as it is for Benjamin); rather, it is the mediating concepts that form constellations, ‘illuminat[ing] the specific side of the object, the side which to a classifying procedure is either a matter of indifference or a burden.’23 Rather than taking thought beyond the

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realm of the conceptual (which, Adorno argues, would be to avoid thought altogether),24 the constellation reconfigures concepts into transitory groupings centred around the object of cognition. In this fashion, thinking is able to reach a greater proximity to the object (a thinking towards the object) that is able to access the ‘“more” which the concept is equally desirous and incapable of being,’25 while maintaining a conceptually mediated separation between subject and object. We might imagine that in the constellation each individual concept’s ‘blind spot’ is recognized, highlighted, and partially compensated for, in the gathering of concepts around the object. Adorno’s constellation intensifies the mediation of subject and object through the medium of concepts, while for Benjamin the concept strips the empirical object of its form, allowing for increased immediacy between the subject and the experience of transcendent truth it seeks. This truth, Benjamin argues, is not a property or a result of knowledge, and so cannot be approached through cognitive activity alone; ‘[t]ruth is an intentionless state of being, made up of ideas. The proper approach to it is not therefore one of intention and knowledge, but rather a total immersion and absorption in it.’26 Truth has no intended purpose; it is beyond the realm of means-ends rationality wherein the constitutive subject acquires knowledge. In other words, it is entirely objective. Therefore, Benjamin argues, truth must be accessed through direct experience rather than through the distanced reflection that accompanies and facilitates conceptual thought. He emphatically states that ‘[t]he being of ideas simply cannot be conceived of as the object of vision, even intellectual vision,’ for ‘vision does not enter into the form of existence which is peculiar to truth, which is devoid of all intention, and certainly does not itself appear as intention.’27 Writing about empiricist epistemology in Negative Dialectics, Adorno suggests that the association of immediacy with objective truth (as opposed to subjectively produced knowledge) is based on poor reasoning. He writes: Immediacy ... is ... something abstracted from the object, a raw material for the subjective process of production that served as a model for epistemology. What is given in poor and blind form is not objectivity; it is merely the borderline value which the subject, having confiscated the concrete object, cannot fully master in its own domain.28

In other words, Adorno argues that whatever is perceived immediately

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is not objective truth free of the contamination of the subjective. Immediate experience is predicated upon a process of abstraction, which must be initiated by the subject. If immediacy is abstracted from the object, but is not the object itself, it is, therefore, already a subjectively mediated experience of the object. Adorno’s statement that immediacy is the ‘raw material for the subjective process of production that served as a model for epistemology’ implies that Benjamin’s embrace of immediacy does not succeed in refuting or dispensing with mediation as such. Even though the supposedly immediate experience of the object is already subjectively mediated, this does not mean that the thing itself exists only as a product of thought. Instead, Adorno writes that the thing itself ‘is nonidentity through identity. Such nonidentity is not an “idea,” but it is an adjunct. The experiencing subject strives to disappear in it. The truth would be its demise – a demise merely feigned, to the greater glory of the subject objectified in a scientific method, by the subtraction of all specific subjectivity in that method.’29 The thing itself is not identity (the thought-product of the constitutive subject’s thinking), but rather the non-identity that the subject fails to grasp through identification. However, it is only through the operations of conceptual thought that the non-identical is separated from the identical, allowing the constitutive subject to perceive its own limitations. The experiencing subject (perhaps we can read ‘Benjamin’s subject’ here) strives to enter into the idea, into the truth of the thing in itself. Adorno argues against this assumption that there is a ‘genuine unity’ available for the subject to immerse itself in. For Adorno, there is only the non-identical: that which cannot be covered by the concept. Furthermore, this giving over of oneself to objective experience is a subjective act of self-mastery (and specifically, mastery over the will to classify) that results in greater reification: the transformation of the subject into an object. Against this model, and in defiance of Benjamin’s claim that conceptual thought requires and implies the distanced reflective gaze, Adorno advocates a strengthening of the subject that will bring subject and object into closer proximity through conceptual thought. Disappearance into the non-identical, Adorno argues, would not result in a greater freedom from subjective domination, but rather the problematic feigned demise of the subject. Therefore, the total immersion in truth that Benjamin calls for would result in the objectification of the subject rather than a relation of immediacy between subject and object. Immediacy implies direct contact; yet, because contact itself

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requires the delimitation of the parties in question, it also implies the separation of subject and object. In contrast, the total immersion of the subject in the objective realm would result in a blurring of those constitutive boundaries, as the subject, once again, becomes the object of its own domination.

2. Iconoclasm and Iconophilia Both Benjamin and Adorno are suspicious of what Rebecca Comay calls the ‘hypertrophic specularity’30 of modernity, although Adorno will accuse Benjamin of being seduced by it.31 The philosophy of the modern age, at least since Descartes, has been centred on the Archimedean point, the ideal position from which one is able to ‘see’ the entire field of knowledge and experience. The very term ‘Enlightenment’ communicates the clarity of ‘sight’ that is the goal of modern philosophy’s project. Here, vision itself figures as a site of immanence, claiming to satisfy the ego’s fantastical desire to eliminate the non-identical. This fantasy reveals the double-sided desire for the resolution of tension either as a return to an inorganic state (Freud’s death drive) or as an elision of all that would pose a threat to the dominance of the constitutive subject. Benjamin is especially interested in the modern tendency to imagine history as panorama, which posits a subject whose very gaze dominates and subdues the historical. In his writings on Paris, Benjamin connects the arcades and the novel gas-lighting of public streets to the particularly modern project of manifesting, in architectural form, the visual penetration of previously opaque structures. The resulting blurring of the boundaries between interior and exterior ‘promis[es] a visual exteriority while in fact reinforcing the immanence of the exterior ... and in this way ... mollif[ies] the demand for transcendence by providing the gratification of a good view.’32 The ‘good view’ is substituted for a legitimate transcendence, appeasing the urge to understand the realm of human experience and stifling movement towards social change. While Adorno rejects modern scopophilia as merely a diverting ideology (in league with encroaching objectivism and positivism) that exists only to further enslave the subject to identitarian thinking and the myth of an already accomplished reconciliation, Benjamin perceives a grain of truth in the scopophilic regime. In fact, this ideological connection between transcendent truth and the development of a par-

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ticularly modern visual perception becomes a central character in his unfinished Arcades Project. Because of what appears to be an embrace of the so-called immediacy of vision in the construction of his dialectical images, Adorno will accuse Benjamin of becoming seduced by the very regime of which he intends to form a critique. Adorno is particularly clear in his criticism of Benjamin’s ‘The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire’ – the piece Benjamin referred to as the armature of the Arcades project. In a letter to Benjamin on this topic, Adorno writes: The ‘mediation’ which I miss and find obscured by materialistic-historiographical evocation, is simply the theory which your study has omitted. But the omission of theory affects the empirical material itself. On the one hand, this omission lends the material a deceptively epic character, and on the other it deprives the phenomena, which are experienced merely subjectively, of their real historico-philosophical weight.33

In Adorno’s opinion, Benjamin falls into the vulgar Marxist fallacy of treating the economic base and the cultural superstructure of capitalist society as though they exist in a state of immediacy, the cultural expression of bourgeois society being determined (and dominated) by the objective operations of capital accumulation. Adorno explains that ‘[t]he material determination of cultural traits is only possible if it is mediated through the total social process.’34 The unmediated equation of economic base and cultural superstructure, paradoxically, creates a hero of the bourgeois individual and lends a certain legitimacy and even inevitability to capitalism’s claim to dominance. Without the mediation of theoretical interpretation, this claim goes unchecked. Adorno argues that Benjamin invites us to experience the heroic expression of bourgeois culture and society, without critically engaging in an interpretation of objective economic laws and their applicability. Without theoretical mediation of material conditions and culture, according to Adorno, the identification of phenomena with the subjectively produced conceptual category will be accepted at face value, and the challenge to the status quo potentially posed by the non-identical (that which provides the phenomena’s ‘real historical weight’) is defused. The problem remains: how does one ‘imagine’ the potentiality of a utopian reconciliation of subject and object, or of nature and history, without representing this possibility as already accomplished? For to espouse a belief in teleological or inevitable historical progress would

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be to deify progress, thereby creating an idolatrous outlet for any desire for social or political change. Keeping deified progress ‘in sight’ reinscribes the Enlightenment ideology of clear sight that equates the present with the future, the unreconciled state of capitalist society with post-revolutionary utopia. Comay has noted that in the ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History,’ Benjamin argues that theology must remain ‘out of sight’35 ‘because its promise contains the still unredeemed possibility of a happiness unrepresentable within the perspective of the present day.’36 Benjamin also recognizes this dilemma in his essay on Surrealism: ‘I concede that the breakneck career of Surrealism ... may have taken it ... into the humid backroom of spiritualism. But I am not pleased to hear it cautiously tapping on the windowpanes to inquire about its future.’37 Rather than a theory of evolutionary social change oriented towards the future, Benjamin argues for a revolutionary rupture in which the past is redeemed. Both Benjamin’s and Adorno’s turn to the Judaic ban on images is filtered through a historical-materialist perspective. The ban here is treated as an assurance against the idolatrous invocation of ‘the finite as infinite, lies as truth.’38 Adorno and Benjamin want to ensure that their investment in the very possibility of social change does not become an appeasing balm providing an escapist diversion from the necessity of critical thought. What this means is that neither Adorno nor Benjamin, who calls here for ‘pessimism all along the line,’39 posit a program for social change. Benjamin’s pessimism would amount to a critically suspicious mistrust of not only the current social, aesthetic, political, and economic values, but also a refusal to envision a utopian solution to current problems, resulting in a ‘mistrust in all reconciliation: between classes, between nations, between individuals.’40 For Benjamin, as we have seen above, this refusal will take the form of an aversion to the conceptual interpretation of phenomena and experience (which would result in the subject taking possession of them). Somewhat paradoxically, Benjamin obeys the ban on images not by refusing to utilize and present images in his work, but rather by refusing to assign these images a fixed conceptual interpretation. For Benjamin, the Bilderverbot is not a ban on visual representation of the transcendent per se. It is, rather, a ban on making false claims about the adequacy of visual representations and the immanence this adequation implies. Benjamin immerses himself totally in the realm of images, juxtaposing one image against another in an attempt to reveal the inherent contradictions of the myth of immanence within the modern culture of

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the specular. As Comay observes, ‘Iconophilia itself (or its appearance) may indeed thus come to assume iconoclastic proportions ... [In the baroque, Benjamin argues,] it is the very profusion of images that will here block any fantasy of premature reconciliation.’41 The same refusal to imagine reconciliation results, in Adorno’s writing, in the development of a negative dialectic that performs a rigorous self-critique, calling its claim to absolute knowledge into question: ‘The claim is a magic circle that stamps critique with the appearance of absolute knowledge. It is up to the self-reflection of critique to extinguish that claim, to extinguish it in the very negation of negation that will not become a positing.’42 In other words, rather than abandoning the philosophical tradition to those who support its claim to absolute knowledge, Adorno argues that we must use reason itself to challenge the claim – subjecting the products of philosophical thought to a secondary critique. According to Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Jewish religious doctrine allows ‘no word that would alleviate the despair of all that is mortal.’43 Adorno takes this religious refusal of verbal representation as a model for his own critical project. Negative dialectics, therefore, does not culminate, as does Hegel’s formulation of the dialectic, in a positive synthesis of the two opposing elements. Rather, its goal is the recognition and articulation of the contradictions, gaps, and fissures inherent in conceptual thought itself. The second self-reflection that constitutes negative dialectics is not imported into conceptual thinking from an external source; rather, it emerges out of Adorno’s immanent critique of German Idealism. Adorno argues that ‘[t]he negative fact that the mind, failing in identification, has also failed in reconcilement, that its supremacy has miscarried, becomes the motor of its disenchantment.’44 The supremacy of the mind is revealed to be an illusion, owing to its inability to grasp the non-identity of the object it seeks to know. Therefore, the reconciliation posited by the Hegelian system is also revealed to be false. For Adorno, this disappointment does not lead to a rejection or a devaluation of the concept, as though we could simply adopt or develop a mode of thought that is non-conceptual. Instead, he argues that thought, driven by the ‘motor of its disenchantment,’ must think through this impasse, not in the interest of reinstating the domination of the subject, but rather in a movement towards the reconciliation of subject and object. For Adorno, this reconciliation, which he also refers to as ‘the utopia of thought,’ ‘would not be the philosophical imperialism of annexing the alien. Instead, its happiness would lie in the fact that the alien, in

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the proximity it is granted, remains what is distant and different, beyond the heterogeneous and beyond that which is one’s own.’45 In the utopian state of reconciliation, one could speculate that difference and contradiction would be maintained. Reconciliation would not collapse subject and object into a state of undifferentiated immanence; instead, subject would continue to mediate object, and vice versa. Mediation would increase, bringing subject and object into greater proximity with one another. The continued separation of subject and object would impede rather than facilitate the domination of the subject over the object, and resist the subject’s claim to possess the alien through knowledge of it. Unlike the perceived resolution of contradiction in the Hegelian dialectic, there would be no ultimate synthesis of the elements into absolute spirit in the utopia of thought. This move away from Hegel’s system does not constitute a total rejection of it; for it is in the contradiction and negation of the Hegelian dialectic that, Adorno argues, the very possibility of a negative dialectic is first articulated. Adorno characterizes Hegel’s thought as ‘presumptuously idealistic’46 because of its formulaic depiction of the resolution of tension between subject and object. Hegel presupposes that the subject ‘might yield ... unreservedly to the object, to the thing itself’47 because in the dialectical process of cognizing the object, it is revealed to be a subject in its own right. Adorno counters this notion, arguing against the erroneous subjectivization of the object: ‘It is not true that the object is a subject, as idealism has been drilling into us for thousands of years, but it is true that the subject is an object.’48 However, Adorno also notes that Hegel’s description of this process shows an awareness of ‘the subject’s mode of cogitative conduct,’49 which contradicts Kantian epistemology. In Hegel’s explanation of subject–object relations, the subject is possessed of a radical passivity towards the object: ‘because the subject does not make the object, it can really only “look on.”’50 In Hegel’s dialectic, the object’s resistance to the classificatory process of Kantian epistemology results in the passivity of the subject, which is merely able to reflect upon the object but not to dominate or possess it. Adorno notes that Hegel reveals the subject’s weakness; its cognitive faculties cannot produce the object. Rather, they are enlisted to assist and develop the subjective process of reflection upon the object: the subject’s ability to ‘look on.’ While Hegel recognizes the priority of the object in its resistance to classification, Adorno argues that he limits the critical strength of this understanding by

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enveloping both subject and object in the false resolution of absolute spirit. For Adorno, the object itself is not a product of subjective identification; the relationship between subject and object is mutually mediated. Adorno writes: The measure of the subject’s postulated passivity is the object’s objective determination. But this determination needs a subjective reflection more lasting than the identifications of which Kant already taught that consciousness performs them, as it were, unconsciously and automatically. That the activity of the mind, and even more the activity which Kant ascribes to the problem of constitution, is something other than the automatism he equates it with – this, specifically, makes out the mental experience which the idealists discovered, albeit only in order to castrate it on the spot.51

The degree of subjective passivity towards the object, in Hegel’s system, is determined by the relative strength of the object’s own objectivity. This objectivity, however, can only be determined by subjective reflection. Adorno argues that the degree of objective determination required to passivate the subject is beyond the ability of the Kantian subject’s ‘unconscious and automatic’ identification of object and concept. The object’s claim to objectivity can only be furnished through the subjective mediation of cognitive activity beyond the unconscious and automatic process of conceptual identification Kant describes. This activity would be a second self-reflection upon the cognitive process, in which reason forms a critique of its own operations. In Hegel’s theory, which intimates the subject’s unreserved yielding to the object, Adorno discovers a more actively mediating subject whose cognition goes beyond identification towards a critique of identitarian thinking, and hence yields to the primacy of the object. Adorno’s cognitive utopia, which ‘would be to use concepts to unseal the non-conceptual with concepts, without making it their equal,’52 is already present, albeit undeveloped, within Hegel’s system. Rather than a retreat from the mediation of conceptual thought, Adorno advocates a thinking through concepts that pushes beyond the limiting and possessive categories of identitarian thinking. Hegel’s system fails to reach this point because, although it recognizes the highly mediated relation between subject and object, it retreats from this recognition, and therefore, falls back into the abstract identification of

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object and concept. According to Adorno, this idealist ‘castration’ of mental experience occurs because ‘Hegelian dialectics was a dialectics without language, while the most literal sense of the word “dialectics” postulates language.’53 Hegel ‘did not need language in an emphatic sense, since everything, even the speechless and opaque, was to him to be spirit.’54 In other words, there is no need in Hegel’s system for the mediation of thought by language, because all thought, every manifestation of thought, and every object that acts as a phenomenal prompt to thought exists in a state of immanence, as it originates in and returns back to absolute spirit.

3. Language and Image For Adorno, it is the ‘conduct of language’55 that provides the model for constellations.56 Language cannot be reduced to a system of signs that one could simply make into a tool for cognition. According to Adorno, language ‘will not define its concepts.’57 Rather, it lends ‘objectivity to them by the relation into which it puts the concepts, centred about a thing.’58 Although ‘the words we use will remain concepts,’59 language itself (not as a fixed system, but as a representational form that encodes and decodes meaning within a relational structure) does not adhere to the identitarian organizational principle of classification. According to Adorno, ‘language ... serves the intention of the concept to express completely what it means.’60 This does not mean that language is subordinate to the concept, but rather that its very relational structure enables it to express that which escapes the grasp of the strictly delimited concept. The constellation, taking the relational structure of language as its model, reveals the fetish at the core of idealist identitarian thought. As Adorno has noted, It is from a negative that philosophy draws whatever legitimacy it still retains: from the fact that, in being so and not otherwise, those insolubles which forced philosophy to capitulate and from which idealism declines are another fetish – the fetish of the irrevocability of things in being. What dissolves the fetish is the insight that things are not simply so and not otherwise, that they have come to be under certain conditions. Their becoming fades and dwells within the things; it can no more be stabilized in their concepts than it can be split off from its own results and forgotten.61

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The non-identical, that which cannot be equated with the concept that seeks to identify it, becomes fetishized as the sublimely unutterable. This fetish upholds the ideological standpoint at the heart of idealism that things, in themselves, simply are – that they are eternally and universally unutterable rather than historically and materially mediated. This ideology supports identitarian thinking by denying that conceptual thought can be anything other than identitarian – by denying the possibility of approaching the non-identical. It also supports the current social and political status quo in that it devalues the impact of history upon human existence and human society. The ‘insight that things ... have come to be under certain conditions’ is only possible if conceptual thought is pushed past the stage of identification. The constellation, because it clusters concepts around the object of cognition, thereby opening the object up to multiple interpretations, is able to read ‘things in being ... as a text of their becoming,’62 resisting the fetishization of the unutterable. Further on in Negative Dialectics, Adorno gives a more precise account of the constellation: ‘Cognition of the object in its constellation, is cognition of the process stored in the object. As a constellation, theoretical thought circles the concept it would like to unseal, hoping that it may fly open like the lock of a well-guarded safe-deposit box: in response, not to a single number, but to a combination of numbers.’63 Adorno does not guarantee that constellations will unlock the safedeposit box, only that they are constructed in the hope of doing so. In his description of the constellation, the multitudinous is favoured over the singular in opposition to Romantic and Idealist theories of language, which, as Benjamin argues, rely on Talmudic/biblical scripture and the theory of an Adamite language, and posit an immediate relation between word and thing. Adorno will not argue against the sentiment of this theory; after all, the utopia of thought would be a reconciliation of subject and object, and also a reconciliation of word and thing. However, he will argue that the magic unity between word and referent is primal, archaic. The philosophical reconciliation of word and thing must be developed through the mediation of subject and object, word and thing, within constellations, rather than, contra Heidegger, being declared as already existent in the invention of neologisms. According to Adorno, ‘the claim of immediate truth for which [the language of philosophy] chides the words is almost always the ideology of a positive, existent identity of word and thing.’64 In other words, the inability of concepts to reveal the thing in itself is implicitly

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blamed on the poverty of our present language, in comparison to an earlier, much richer language that is adequate to the expression of things. The continuation of this belief in an already existent identity of word and thing leaves reason stalled at the point of inadequate conceptual thought and prevents the development of a critical secondary reflection. At times, especially in writings on his magic language theory, it may appear that Benjamin advocates a return to the mimetic identity of word and thing. Benjamin interprets Genesis as a mythic description of language use and acquisition. According to his reading, words in Paradise are the product of a direct translation of the language of things into the language of man, in which the unique and particular name that man gives to a thing exists in immediacy with its material object. After the fall, this immediacy is lost, and language becomes an instrumentalized point of mediation, negotiating the difference between sign and referent. Symbolic language, unlike the immediacy of the Adamite language, can only approximate the representation of the things it attempts to name. In the imposition of the symbolic word upon the thing, Benjamin sees a parallel to the imposition of the concept upon the object. If, as Benjamin has noted in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, knowledge is possession, we might imagine that instead of giving expression to the thing, the word, likewise, claims possession of it. In his essay on surrealism, Benjamin links his theory of magic language with what he identifies as the revolutionary aims of surrealist poetry. Benjamin argues that the surrealists belong to a tradition of esoteric poetry that expresses a magic and primal drive that is contained, but cannot be expressed in, the reified, instrumentalized language of everyday existence in capitalist society (exemplified by advertising slogans and popular slang). According to Benjamin, ‘it is as magical experiments with words, not as artistic dabbling, that we must understand the passionate phonetic and graphical transformational games that have run through the whole literature of the avant-garde for the past fifteen years, whether it is called Futurism, Dadaism, or Surrealism.’65 In other words, what might appear to be nonsensical combinations of sounds and absurd juxtapositions are to be understood as experimental attempts to name that which has lost its linguistic code in the formalization of language within bourgeois thought and capitalist society. According to Benjamin, we have no words to properly and accurately articulate that which the surrealist poets attempt to name in their language experiments. Perhaps the closest approximation would be to

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describe the as-yet-unnamed as unconscious collective primal drives or energies that indicate a dissatisfaction with the present, a resentful memory of past oppression, or a desire for a better future. Benjamin argues that these drives are contained, but not expressed, in the rhetoric of capitalism that emphasizes novelty in phrases like ‘new and improved.’ For Benjamin, the surrealists’ experiments with language offer the possibility of breaking out of the reified language of capitalism, giving voice to a utopian revolutionary movement. But the care Benjamin takes with words should not be interpreted as an attempt to reconstruct the Adamite language; for Benjamin knew (above all) that any attempt at reunification of word and referent would not result in a return to Paradise. But this primal immediacy of name and thing is important for Benjamin, in that it motivates and forms the theoretical ground for his project of the profane redemption of historical phenomena. In the essay on surrealism he articulates the hope that the unnamed primal energies themselves will be redeemed and transformed through the magic of words, which brings these energies into consciousness. Likewise, revolutionary thought and action will allow for the articulation and redemption of the repressed collective memories of past suffering. Benjamin attempts to rescue these phenomena from their otherwise inevitable disappearance into the general categories and imprecise language of progressive historicism, by endeavoring to name them in their particularity. Benjamin’s revolutionary hopes for surrealist language experiments paradoxically seem to both transgress and anticipate Adorno’s criticism, in Negative Dialectics, of the assumed immediacy between word and thing. The ‘passionate phonetic and graphical transformational games’ he describes seem to prefigure Adorno’s image of the combination lock on the safe-deposit box. On the other hand, Benjamin’s embrace of language experiments that, he hopes, will redeem both the repressed urges and the repressed history of the proletariat, might also be read as an attempt to find an already existing adequation of word and thing. This ambiguity continues in Benjamin’s critique of social democratic rhetoric. Benjamin criticizes European social democratic movements for promoting a program that he characterizes as ‘a bad poem on springtime, filled to bursting with metaphors ... in which all act “as if they were angels,” and everyone has as much “as if he were rich,” and everyone lives “as if he were free.” Of angels, wealth, freedom, not a trace.’66 Benjamin’s aversion to the imprecise language of ‘moral metaphor’ would appear to align him with the philosophers

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Adorno accuses of sanctifying ‘the ideology of a positive, existent identity of word and thing,’67 since he mobilizes the archaic adequation of word and thing in his critique of metaphor here. Yet the aim of his critique is to show that the social democratic claim to adequately represent revolutionary potential in the language of moral metaphor is false, by exposing this claim’s reliance on a presumably already existent immediacy of word and thing. The metaphorical rhetoric of social democratic politics and the contemplative tradition within bourgeois thought, according to Benjamin, are not up to the task of properly expressing and understanding the mimetic impulses of the masses. Benjamin argues that both moral metaphor and contemplative thought mask the impulses and desires they claim to represent and comprehend by creating a barrier or a spacing that renders revolutionary experience impossible. Arguing for a radical reorientation of thought and artistic activity towards the proletarian revolution, Benjamin writes: ‘If it is the double task of the revolutionary intelligentsia to overthrow the intellectual predominance of the bourgeoisie and to make contact with the proletarian masses, the intelligentsia has failed almost entirely in the second part of this task because it can no longer be performed contemplatively.’68 Benjamin argues that contemplation and reflection, distanced from political action by the imprecise language of moral metaphor, take the place of effective political and intellectual change. This rejection of contemplation should not be read as a knee-jerk valorization of the non-intellectual masses. On the contrary, what Benjamin is arguing for here is a mode of artistic production (like that of the surrealist poets) clearly rejecting the distanced reflection that characterizes the modern (bourgeois) subject of philosophy. In order to ‘make contact with the proletarian masses,’ members of the intelligentsia must relinquish their attachment to the illusory clarity of sight offered by the Archimedean point of philosophy and immerse themselves totally in the sphere of primal drives and urges. Through the intervention of these artists and writers, Benjamin argues, these drives and urges will find adequate expression. By attempting to name not only these drives but also the historical oppression of the proletariat that feeds those drives, the intelligentsia will awaken the proletariat from their current ideologically induced dream state. Benjamin’s arguments in the surrealism essay position his work closer to the positivist position Adorno criticizes. But again, Benjamin dances on the borderline that separates Adorno’s negative dialectic from positivist claims. To be sure, he wants the surrealist poets to find

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the proper names for revolutionary drives, but he is, perhaps, more interested here in exposing the too-happy positivism of the social democrats and the complacency of the apolitical intelligentsia. In Benjamin’s later work, I would argue, we witness a greater proximity to Adorno’s thinking. Unlike Hegel’s dialectic, and as in Adorno’s constellations, Benjamin’s later development of the dialectical image (particularly in his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’) also models itself after the relational logic of language. The dialectical image does not always or necessarily incorporate a visual representation of a phenomenal object. The word ‘image’ is used here to invoke the specularity of modern life that Benjamin attempts to critique, while it simultaneously denotes a more archaic meaning of the term that lends the dialectical image an organizational structure. ‘Image,’ for Benjamin, denotes a likeness or non-sensuous similarity between two or more things. This meaning of the word ‘image’ originates in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, and is familiar to us from Genesis, wherein man is created in the image of God. In this sense, ‘image’ denotes an abstract likeness rather than a material, pictorial representation. As W.J.T. Mitchell writes, this archaic meaning of the term ‘image’ is not as common in our everyday parlance as is the concrete, pictorial image; however, this older definition of the term does come into play when we want to draw comparisons between two similar, yet different, objects. Image understood as similitude, in other words, does not in any sense denote a shared identity, or an immediate relation between two things; rather it implies the distinct difference of similar things. Although they share similarities, the objects under comparison within the image do not collapse into an undifferentiated state of immanence. According to Mitchell, the word ‘image’ only comes up in relation to this sort of likeness when we try to construct a theory about the way we perceive the likeness between one tree and another. This explanation will typically resort to some intermediate or transcendental object – an idea, form, or mental image that provides a mechanism for explaining how our categories arise.69

This ‘idea, form, or mental image’ is not, for Benjamin, a general category or a concept. Neither is it necessarily a representation of the compared objects in pictorial form. It is, rather (like the idea as it figures in The Origin of German Tragic Drama), a grouping of elements that acts as

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a conjoiner to the two (or more) things under comparison. The image is, therefore, a middle term, the mediating intermediary between like objects that articulates both their similarities and their differences. As Sigrid Weigel has noted, in Benjamin’s later work, the image also bridges the distance between ‘figures of the external world and those of abstract knowledge.’70 Material phenomena and philosophical thought do not collapse into one another in an unmediated relationship; rather, their differences are maintained. In the ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History,’ for example, Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus is not treated as a direct illustration of Benjamin’s Angel of History. Instead, the painting, Benjamin’s verbal description of the Angel of History, and Gershom Scholem’s poem are brought together in a complex image that upholds the contradictions developed between abstract thought and material object. The dialectical image is itself a kind of writing; the act of reading the image constitutes its construction as an image. The material elements of the object enter into the loose boundaries of the dialectical image at the very moment they are read as elements of the image. There is no conception of the particular dialectical image prior to the participation of the objective elements within it. Therefore, the specificity of the content is not lost in its conformity to the fixed laws regulating formal representation, and is thereby redeemed. That which Benjamin wants to redeem here, the specificity that is lost in formal conceptual thought, might be otherwise considered as Adorno’s non-identical. While Benjamin claims increased immediacy as a property of his dialectical images, the fact that they rely upon a subject to read them, thereby constituting them as images, indicates a need for the subjective mediation of the juxtaposed elements. Perhaps the immediate sensuous experience Benjamin wants the reader of the image to be subjected to is itself a product of mediation. Susan Buck-Morss is instructive on this point: [T]he Passagen-Werk [Arcades Project] makes of us historical detectives even against our will, forcing us to become actively involved in the reconstruction of the work … [Benjamin] compels us to search for images of sociohistorical reality that are the key to unlocking the meaning of his commentary – just as that commentary is the key to their significance. But in the process, our attention has been redirected: Benjamin has surreptitiously left the spotlight, which now shines brightly on the socio-historical phenomena themselves. Moreover (and this is the mark of his pedagogi-

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cal success), he allows us the experience of feeling that we are discovering the political meaning of these phenomena on our own.71

In a letter to Adorno, Benjamin defends his ‘philological’ approach in ‘The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire’ against Adorno’s criticism by arguing that ‘the object constitutes itself as a monad. And in the monad everything that formerly lay mythically petrified within the given text comes alive.’72 Benjamin argues that material objects themselves (not just concepts) store their history deeply embedded within them. However, it is only in their incorporation in the dialectical image that this history can be deciphered. In the dialectical image, the thought processes and historical phenomena that congealed and disappeared into historiographical texts as formalized totalities become differentiated and distinct and, therefore, thinkable and visible again. Benjamin’s argument here would seem to agree with Adorno’s contention that the positivist claim to the universal and eternal essence of things must be countered by reading ‘things in being ... as a text of their becoming.’73 The dialectical image – like the Hegelian model – has a tripartite structure, in which the image itself serves as a middle term connecting the material world to the realm of abstract thought. However, Benjamin’s dialectical image does not culminate in a Hegelian synthesis, ‘but in a constellation of non-synchronicity’74 that allows for the profane redemption of historical phenomena. If, however, the image is treated instead as an illustration of philosophical argument or as a metaphor for social processes, the dialectic progresses towards synthesis and the historical particularity of its parts is again sacrificed to the cohesion of the whole. The aim of this cohesion is to posit a vision of the future, which is precisely the kind of idolatry that both Benjamin and Adorno are so eager to avoid. It is this danger inherent to Benjamin’s dialectical images, their intellectual and political ambiguity, that drives Adorno to find a parallel structure within a more philosophically rigorous discourse. Benjamin’s images attempt to push past the problematic specular subjectivity of modernity, unmasking the ideological construction of vision in capitalist society. In this way, he attempts to uncover a profane illumination already extant within the visual field or ‘image sphere.’75 Adorno argues that the critical movement of reason, which has been arrested by the subject’s will to dominate, must be resuscitated by developing conceptual thought beyond its current stagnation in identitar-

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ian thinking and towards a self-critique of its own complex relation to self-domination. In the correspondence between Adorno and Benjamin, the proximity of their projects to one another is revealed. Referring to his own essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ and Adorno’s contradictory reading of mass culture in ‘On the Fetish Character in Music,’ Benjamin writes: ‘In my own essay I attempted to articulate the positive moments as clearly as you have articulated the negative ones. I can therefore see that your study is strong precisely in places where mine was weak.’76 One might add that Benjamin’s project is likewise illuminating in places where Adorno is not inclined to wander. In other words, these two bodies of work tend to contradict and complement one another in extremely provocative and critical ways. Reading Benjamin and Adorno in combination with one another constructs a constellation that might spring open the constitutive subject of German Idealism and the capitalist society in which we live ‘like the lock of a well-guarded safe-deposit box,’77 revealing the problems that plague these structures. Here, Adorno’s and Benjamin’s own significant blind spots come into conflict with one another. And this very conflict can perhaps be read like a dialectical image, bringing the history and the prehistory of this debate into the reader’s conceptual grasp or field of vision. Whether this particular constellation is structured as Benjamin’s dialectic at a standstill, frozen at the moment prior to synthesis in a state of immediacy between the terms in question, or whether it takes the form of Adorno’s constellation, which pushes beyond synthesis to a greater mediation of subject and object, might not be a deciding factor in its ability to expand the parameters of both critiques.

NOTES 1 For a detailed discussion of this characterization of Adorno in the field of cultural studies, see Shane Gunster’s article in this volume and his excellent Capitalizing on Culture: Critical Theory for Cultural Studies (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004). 2 I would like to acknowledge Colin Campbell’s assistance in clarifying this point. 3 See Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), 22. 4 In this assertion, I am indebted to Susan Buck-Morss’s argument (presented

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11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

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in The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute [New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1977] and The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991]) that Adorno’s Negative Dialectics is premised on Benjamin’s earlier work in The Origin of German Tragic Drama. For my purposes here, however, I am less interested in determining the origin of these ideas and more focused upon understanding the way they play out together and against one another, in a dialectical fashion. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (1966), trans. E.B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1997), 194. Adorno, ‘Subject and Object,’ in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (New York: Continuum, 2000), 498. Ibid., 499. Ibid., 498. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 183–4. It is important to note, however, as Colin Campbell has in his commentary on this paper that ‘the goal of negative dialectics is neither to lessen immediacy in a celebration of mediation as the abstract principle of exchange in capitalism.’ Adorno, ‘Subject and Object,’ 499. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, xx. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1963), trans. John Osbourne (London and New York: Verso Press, 1998), 29. Ibid., 31. Ibid., 34. Ibid. Ibid., 33. Ibid. Ibid., 34. Richard Wolin, ‘Benjamin, Adorno, Surrealism,’ in The Semblance of Subjectivity: Essays in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, ed. Tom Huhn and Lambert Zuidervaart (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), 96. Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics, 92. For a more detailed discussion of the development of Adorno’s thinking, from ‘configurations’ of concepts to ‘constellations,’ see Michael K. Palamarek’s article in this volume. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 162. Ibid., 98. Ibid., 162. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 36.

128 Kathy Kiloh 27 Ibid., 35. This desire for the total immersion of the subject in the realm of experience is instructive for an accurate reading of Benjamin’s later writings in dialectical images. In his essay ‘Benjamin, Adorno, Surrealism,’ Richard Wolin compares Benjamin’s ‘technique’ to surrealist montage, because the dialectical image brings together disparate elements from the realm of phenomenal experience and transforms them in a collage-like juxtaposition. However, this interpretation treats Benjamin’s dialectical images as a primarily visual form that ignores or at least downplays Benjamin’s call for sensuous experience, but also sidesteps his philosophical argument for the ‘total immersion and absorption in [truth]’ that inhabits the essence of empirical things. 28 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 187. 29 Ibid., 189. 30 Rebecca Comay, ‘Materialist Mutations of the Bilderverbot,’ in Sites of Vision: The Discursive Construction of Sight in the History of Philosophy, ed. David Michael Levin (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), 360. 31 Henri Lonitz, ed., Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin: The Complete Correspondence, 1928–1940, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 284. 32 Comay, ‘Materialist Mutations of the Bilderverbot,’ 352–3. 33 Lonitz, ed. Adorno and Benjamin Correspondence, 283. 34 Ibid. 35 Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History,’ in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 253. 36 Comay, ‘Materialist Mutations of the Bilderverbot,’ 351. 37 Benjamin, ‘Surrealism,’ in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schoken Books, 1978), 180. 38 Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1998), 23. 39 Benjamin, ‘Surrealism,’ 191. 40 Ibid. 41 Comay ‘Materialist Mutations of the Bilderverbot,’ 358. 42 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 406. 43 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 23. 44 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 186. 45 Ibid., 191. 46 Ibid., 188. 47 Ibid.

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Ibid., 178. Ibid., 188. Ibid. Ibid., 188–9. Ibid., 10. Ibid., 163. Ibid. Ibid., 162. For more on this relationship between language and Adorno’s constellations, see Palamarek’s essay in this volume. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 162. Ibid. Ibid., 53. Ibid., 162. Ibid., 52. Ibid. Ibid., 163. Ibid., 53. Benjamin, ‘Surrealism,’ 184. Ibid., 190. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 53. Benjamin, ‘Surrealism,’ 191. W.J.T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 33. Sigrid Weigel, Body- and Image-Space: Re-reading Walter Benjamin, trans. Georgina Paul with Rachel McNicholl and Jeremy Gaines (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 54. Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), x. Lonitz, ed., Adorno and Benjamin Correspondence, 292. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 52. Weigel, Body- and Image-Space, 58. Benjamin, ‘Surrealism,’ 191. Lonitz, ed., Adorno and Benjamin Correspondence, 295. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 163.

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PART TWO Metaphysics and Society

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5 Metaphysics after Auschwitz: Suffering and Hope in Adorno’s Negative Dialectics lambert zuidervaart

It is astonishing how few traces of human suffering one notices in the history of philosophy.1 T.W. Adorno

Suffering and hope sustain Theodor W. Adorno’s vision of philosophy. Not simply suffering, and not merely hope, but suffering and hope in their negative dialectical entwinement. And not simply Adorno’s own philosophy, but any philosophy he would consider worth pursuing ‘after Auschwitz.’ His successors do not share his passions (Leidenschaften). In the polite language of critical theory after the communicative turn, they find Adorno’s philosophy inappropriately ‘metaphysical’ or ‘theological’ or ‘utopian.’ And this is not merely a generational difference of purely sociological interest. It goes to the heart of philosophy’s tasks in contemporary society.2

1. Wozu noch Philosophie? A first approximation of two different visions comes from comparing essays with the same title: ‘Wozu noch Philosophie?’ Adorno’s essay, translated as ‘Why Still Philosophy,’3 began as a radio lecture broadcast on 2 January 1962. It comes from the time when he was writing Negative Dialectics. The essay objects to the formalism of much professional philosophy, and it criticizes other schools of thought for ignoring societal mediation: logical positivism, for ignoring the mediation of facts, and Heideggerian ontology, for ignoring the mediation of concepts. Such immanent criticism of other philosophies has a larger soci-

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etal purpose. It aims to expose the ‘unfreedom and oppression’ at work in contemporary society (CM 10/465) and to ‘catch a glimpse’ (CM 15/ 471) of a world where they would end. Adorno does not hesitate to use strong language when he states philosophy’s task. He speaks of ‘evil’ and ‘suffering,’ of ‘salvation’ and ‘hope’: The undiminished persistence of suffering, fear, and menace necessitates that the thought that cannot be realized should not be discarded. After having missed its opportunity, philosophy must come to know, without any mitigation, why the world – which could be paradise here and now – can become hell itself tomorrow. (CM 14/470) Only a thinking ... that acknowledges its lack of function and power can perhaps catch a glimpse of an order of the possible and the nonexistent, where human beings and things each would be in their rightful place. (CM 15/471) History promises no salvation and offers the possibility of hope only to the concept whose movement follows history’s path to the very extreme. (CM 17/473)

For Adorno, the pursuit of this vision requires that philosophy itself ‘must unrestrictedly ... experience’ (CM 17/473). Jürgen Habermas’s essay translated as ‘Does Philosophy Still Have a Purpose?’4 also began as a radio lecture. Broadcast on 4 January 1971, it forms the lead essay in a volume dedicated to Adorno’s memory (‘In Erinnerung an Theodor W. Adorno’). In the English translation of Philosophical-Political Profiles, this dedication disappears, just as Adorno’s passion had already vanished from Habermas’s lecture. When Adorno asked ‘Wozu noch Philosophie?’ he wondered what philosophy could contribute to transforming society as a whole. This is no longer Habermas’s question. One can detect the shift from how Habermas quotes Adorno. Habermas opens with a passage where Adorno says philosophy must no longer consider itself in control of ‘the absolute,’ yet it must retain ‘the emphatic concept of truth.’ Habermas ends the quotation with Adorno’s sentence ‘This contradiction is its element’ (CM 7/461, quoted in PPP 1/11). But the very next sentence in Adorno’s text is equally important: ‘It [i.e., this contradiction] defines philosophy as negative’ (CM 7/461). Habermas does not speak about negativity, about the neg-

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ativity of suffering, say, or the negativity of a societal totality that needlessly produces and prolongs suffering. He contents himself with a vision of non-absolute truth. And he becomes nearly elegiac about the distance of his vision from Adorno’s. Adorno’s death marks the end of a ‘great tradition’ of German philosophy, Habermas says, and with it a ‘style of thought bound to individual erudition and personal testimony’ (PPP 2/12). Quite rightly, I think, he wonders whether, in catching up with modernization in other Western countries, German philosophy itself will ‘fade away in the graveyard of a spirit that can no longer affirm and realize itself as absolute’ (PPP 9/22). Habermas does not wish philosophy to fade away. Yet his essay limits philosophy’s contemporary tasks to a ‘substantive critique of science’ (PPP 14/30). Although the critique is supposed to be ‘substantive,’ the specific tasks are notably formal in their description: ‘to criticize the objectivist self-understanding of the sciences,’ ‘to deal ... with basic issues of a methodology of the social sciences,’ and to clarify connections between ‘the logic of research and technological development’ and ‘the logic of consensus-forming communication’ (PPP 16/33). Habermas relegates questions of suffering and hope to religion, which itself has become impotent, he suggests, in ‘industrially advanced societies’ (PPP 18/35).5 One finds no trace here of Adorno’s emphasis on philosophical experience, and little trace of his desire to expose the negativity of society as a whole. Whether, in abandoning Adorno’s struggle with ‘the absolute,’ Habermas has also lost ‘the emphatic concept of truth’ remains an open question. Perhaps this comparison suffices to show a dramatic shift within critical theory not much more than a year after Adorno’s death. The question I want to pose is whether the shift matters. My answer is that it does, in three respects. First, it supports serious misinterpretations of Adorno’s philosophy. Second, it blunts the political edge of critical theory. And, third, it results in a truncated vision of philosophy at a time when passion, not simply precision, is required. This essay attempts to retrieve some of Adorno’s passion without neglecting his dialectical precision. First it questions the moves made in a Habermasian critique of Adorno’s ‘Meditations on Metaphysics.’6 Next I explicate the Adornian themes of suffering and hope as ones that post-metaphysical philosophy mistakenly neglects. Then I explore two problems in Adorno’s thematization of suffering and hope. I aim to indicate how these problems could be addressed without abandoning his social-philosophical project.

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2. Beyond Metaphysics? In an essay entitled ‘Metaphysics at the Moment of Its Fall,’7 Albrecht Wellmer interprets Adorno’s project as attempting to develop ‘the notion of a way of thinking’ that goes ‘beyond metaphysics’ (Begriff eines Denkens jenseits der Metaphysik). This is an ‘aporetic’ notion, Wellmer says, because Adorno argues both that ‘the “fall” of metaphysical ideas is irreversible’ and that ‘the truth of metaphysics can only be grasped at the moment of its fall’ (Endgames 183/204). Wellmer will claim that ‘a piece of unreconstructed ... metaphysics’ illicitly circulates in Adorno’s philosophy (191/212). He proposes instead an approach to the concept of truth that frees it ‘from the confines of metaphysics’ (201/223). Before turning to details in Wellmer’s provocative essay, I want first to question his general line of interpretation. On my reading, Adorno’s meditations are not an effort to go ‘beyond metaphysics,’ as if they were taking a Kantian step beyond Kant. Rather, they attempt to sublate (aufheben) metaphysics, to preserve and advance its ‘truth-content,’ in the very process of criticizing both traditional metaphysics and Kantian and post-Kantian critiques of metaphysics. In other words, Adorno’s is a quasi-Hegelian project, a negative dialectic, not a quasi-transcendental critique. Adorno’s meditations mark the culmination to his materialist metacritique of German idealism.8 The way of thinking he seeks would not be ‘beyond metaphysics.’ It would be beyond the ‘identity-compulsion’ (Identitätszwang, ND 406/398) that disfigures not only German idealism but also modern capitalist societies. Yet even this movement ‘beyond’ would occur by way of that which it negates. Perhaps it is Wellmer, not Adorno, who wishes to go ‘beyond metaphysics.’ I also find it implausible to say that ‘the truth of metaphysics can only be grasped at the moment of its fall.’ Nor do I think that this is Adorno’s position. To make this claim would be to assign precisely that superior vantage point to present conditions and to contemporary philosophy that Adorno rejects in Hegel’s absolute idealism. Although Adorno also rejects Heidegger’s regressively elevating the collapse of metaphysics into something metaphysical (ND 372/365), he would question the sanguine progressivism of philosophers who think they have a better grasp of things because modernization has moved them ‘beyond metaphysics.’ To be sure, Adorno’s project and Wellmer’s general line of interpretation do seem to agree on the Weberian thesis that the collapse of meta-

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physical ideas is ‘irreversible.’ Like Habermas, whose critique of Adorno resembles Wellmer’s, Adorno endorses ‘Kant’s famous dictum that the critical path is the only one still open to us’ (CM 7/461; cf. Habermas, PPP 14/29–30). Yet even the secularization thesis, if I may call it that, needs refinement to be accurate to Adorno’s project. For the point of his meditations is not simply to continue the trajectory of modernization but to prepare the way, or at least to hold open the door, for a fundamental transformation (Umschlag) in the society and philosophy that have taken this trajectory. Adorno’s ‘Self-Reflection of the Dialectic’ (ND 405–8/397–400), the last in his ‘Meditations on Metaphysics,’ points in this direction. Just prior to that section, he says ‘the world’s course is not absolutely conclusive [geschlossen].’ That’s why, although metaphysics cannot be resurrected, perhaps it would arise ‘only with the actualization of what has been thought in its sign’ (ND 404/396). This suggests not only that the collapse of metaphysics is not permanent but also that the truth of metaphysics could only be ‘grasped’ were both society and philosophy to undergo a fundamental transformation. Precisely such futurity, tentative though it be, gives Wellmer pause. But to label this element a ‘piece of unreconstructed metaphysics’ whereby Adorno ‘precritically undercuts Kant’ (Endgames 190–1/211–12) is to miss the truth of Adorno’s metacritique of metaphysics. The truth of Adorno’s metacritique lies in the insight that metaphysical questions about life, death, and immortality are not primarily epistemological in either intent or effect. Rather they are social-philosophical questions that encompass politics, ethics, and religion. Moreover, they are indexed both to the historical conditions in which they arise and to the larger historical process to which they contribute. This process, Adorno as a critical follower of Marx insists, has a material dynamic from which not even philosophy can be divorced. All of this is implied by Adorno’s transition into the ‘Meditations on Metaphysics.’ The preceding model on ‘World Spirit and Natural History’ ends with ‘the transmutation of metaphysics into history’ (ND 360/353) and with the contemporary impossibility of recollecting transcendence other than by way of the transient (Vergängnis, das Vergängliche). That sets the stage for ‘After Auschwitz,’ the opening section in ‘Meditations on Metaphysics.’ Unlike traditional metaphysics, contemporary philosophy can no longer tie truth to immutability, Adorno says, nor regard what changes as semblance (Schein), nor maintain a separation between eternal ideas and temporal phenomena. Instead, dialectical philosophy, secularizing a mystical impulse, considers the

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contemporary, historical world to be relevant for ‘transcendence’ or at least for the position consciousness takes towards traditionally metaphysical questions (ND 361/354). Adorno’s emphasis on transience not only calls Hegelian attention to the temporal and historical character of metaphysical ideas but also gives a Marxian nod to their proleptic character: they point towards change or, more strongly, towards transformation that has not yet occurred and whose occurrence is not yet impossible.9 They cannot be fully proleptic, however. The idea of truth, for example, cannot simply represent or assume utopia as if it presently exists or as if it were already accomplished. Any tendency towards proleptic assurance would make metaphysical ideas unbearable ‘after Auschwitz,’ when every attempt to derive future-oriented meaning from current existence seems ‘sanctimonious’ and disrespectful to the victims (ND 361/355). Adorno says that Auschwitz has shattered the basis for unifying ‘speculative metaphysical thought’ and ‘experience’ (ND 362/354). Whereas Kant asked epistemologically whether and how metaphysics is still possible as a science, Adorno will ask historico-philosophically whether and how ‘metaphysical experience’ is still possible (ND 372/ 364–5), not as a science, but as a basis for philosophy that has a societytransforming intent. It is so, as Wellmer claims, that Adorno considers ‘truth’ to be ‘supreme [die oberste] among metaphysical ideas’ (ND 401/394). It is also so that defending the idea of truth is ‘what really concerns him’ (Endgames 187/208) in his ‘Meditations on Metaphysics.’ Contrary to Wellmer’s interpretation, however, Adorno’s idea of truth does not have primarily epistemological intent and effect. Nor does Adorno’s defence of the idea aim simply to shore up philosophy itself. If we take seriously Adorno’s insistence on the sociohistorical character of metaphysical questions and the material dynamic of history itself, then we should regard his idea of truth as having primarily a social-philosophical character. In this sense, Adorno pushes Kant’s ‘postulates of pure practical reason’ beyond their inherently dualistic framework into a dialectical philosophy with society-transforming intent.10 Kant asked what ideas about the soul, the world, and God are needed in order for human beings to continue striving for the highest good, as we are morally obligated to do, despite the hindrances posed by our finitude and corporeality.11 Adorno, by contrast, asks what transformations in society and philosophy would be both possible and required in order for needless suffering to end. The truth-content of metaphysics, including the ‘metaphysical’ idea of truth itself, lies in keeping this question open.

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Wellmer touches on this when he says Adorno replaces Kant’s ‘We cannot know [the absolute]’ with ‘we do not know it yet’ (Endgames 190/211). But Wellmer pursues this in a primarily epistemological direction. He reads Adorno as precritically concluding ‘from the historical character of our forms of thought and intuition that the Absolute as reconciliation ... could become a historical reality.’ This conclusion is philosophically naive, he suggests, because ‘we can already know now that we cannot anticipate as real that which we cannot even consistently conceive [denken] as real’ (Endgames 190–1/212). The only potential resolution Wellmer credits for ‘the aporetic relationship between the necessity and impossibility of metaphysics’ is epistemological, not societal: philosophy could make some conceptual advances or ‘reformulate the questions that apparently permitted only aporetic answers’ (Endgames 190/211). From an Adornian perspective, Wellmer’s objections are problematic in several respects.12 First, Wellmer’s appeal to what ‘we can already know now’ assigns a constant and unchanging validity to ‘our’ forms of consciousness. That is precisely what Adorno rejects in Kant, on critical and not precritical grounds. Unless one rejects outright the Hegelian critique of Kant that Adorno reworks in his own materialist way – and Wellmer does not appear to reject it – one cannot simply appeal to what we can know now without begging the question of how present knowledge is historically mediated. Second, Wellmer’s emphasis on what ‘we’ cannot ‘consistently conceive as real’ puts a premium on logical consistency without acknowledging that such privileging of ‘identity thinking’ is exactly what Adorno himself links with the underlying societal principle – the exchange principle – that would have to change. Adorno does not reject logical consistency, of course, but he does suggest its insufficiency. Third, Wellmer seems to think that philosophical advances in matters metaphysical can occur independently from significant sociohistorical transformation. But this is to assume that the issues in dispute are primarily conceptual and logical problems, rather than sociohistorical dilemmas. Although many contemporary philosophers might share this assumption, it is not Adorno’s assumption, nor, I dare say, was it Marx’s, Hegel’s, or even Kant’s. To reduce metaphysical issues to conceptual problems would be to misread the critical tradition that Adorno’s alleged ‘piece of unreconstructed metaphysics’ purportedly falls behind. Even more problematic, however, is Wellmer’s construal of the relation between historical mediation and ‘the absolute.’ His construal omits Adorno’s well-known emphasis on the ‘priority of the object’

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(Vorrang des Objekts). Admittedly, this is a protean and diffuse emphasis. But its importance can hardly be overlooked. Adorno himself says Negative Dialectics aims to complete his lifelong task as a philosopher: ‘to use the strength of the [epistemic] subject to break through the deception [Trug] of constitutive subjectivity’ (ND xx/10). Let me mention two of the many ramifications to prioritizing the object. The first is that Adorno’s stress on the societal preformation of consciousness replaces idealist notions of constitutive subjectivity. Such societal preformation holds for both individual consciousness and intersubjective communicative action. Accordingly, the idea of truth cannot but be societal in its content and implications. That is one sense in which the object must have priority: the societal content and implications of ideas and practices must always come to the fore. This helps explain why Adorno uses the subjunctive (das Absolute wäre) when, in opposition to Hegel, but also to Kant, the final meditation ‘identifies’ the absolute. Here Adorno asks whether metaphysics, as knowledge of the absolute, is possible without Hegel’s presumption of absolute knowledge. The dilemma is this. If the absolute is conceived dialectically, then dialectical thought poses as a form of absolute knowledge, contrary to the idea of negative dialectics. But if the absolute is conceived as being completely incommensurable with dialectics, then one resorts to a double truth, contrary to the idea of truth. Metaphysics depends upon whether thought can get out of this aporia ‘without subterfuge’ (ND 406/397). Adorno’s response is to have dialectics turn against itself ‘in a final movement.’ Dialectics must turn against its own unavoidable tendency to absolutize the concept and conceptual identity. In this turn it absorbs the strength of the identity-governed ‘immanence-context’ in order to break out of that context from within. Using the means of logic, ‘dialectics grasps the coercive character [Zwangscharakter] of logic, hoping that this may yield. For that coerciveness is itself the mythical semblance [Schein], the forced identity. But the absolute, as metaphysics envisions it, would be the nonidentical that would not emerge until after the compulsion of identity [Identitätszwang] would dissolve’ (ND 406/398). The rest of Negative Dialectics makes clear that this compulsion would not dissolve unless society itself underwent structural transformation. The second ramification to ‘the priority of the object’ concerns the materiality of culture and consciousness – of Geist, in Adorno’s Hegelian language. In the passage from which Wellmer derives the title of his essay – the very last lines of Negative Dialectics – Adorno insists that

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his sublation of metaphysics into ‘micrology’ requires thought to proceed from the material need (das Bedürfnis – zunächst die Lebensnot) contained in thought as a mode of conduct (ein Verhalten) or action (als Tun). Thought must proceed from such need and must sublate it. The need within thought, which amounts to the non-identical there, attunes thought to that which thought cannot know so long as it follows the compulsion to identify (Identitätszwang). It is because thought cannot rid itself of all materiality that Adorno retains hope for a society in which material needs would be met and suffering would diminish. Permit me to quote Adorno at some length, in my own translation: ‘The need in thinking [Denken] desires that thought occur. It [i.e., the need in thinking] demands its own negation by thinking [Denken], must disappear in thinking to be really satisfied; and it survives in this negation, represents [vertritt] in the innermost cell of thought [des Gedankens] what is not like thought [nicht seinesgleichen]. The smallest innerworldly stirrings [Züge] would have relevance for the absolute, for the micrological view cracks the shells of what, measured by the subsuming cover concept, is helplessly isolated, and explodes its identity, the delusion that it is a mere specimen. Such thought has solidarity with metaphysics in the moment of its collapse’ (ND 408/399–400). Although one could question the moves Adorno makes here, it is simply not so that he straightforwardly and problematically concludes from the historical mediation of thought to the possibility of the absolute becoming actual. Nor does he resort to an ‘aesthetic’ escape hatch, as many Habermasians claim. Wellmer’s criticisms retain their plausibility only so long as one brackets the two ramifications I have mentioned. Conversely, the plausibility of what Wellmer labels a ‘materialistic appropriation of theology’ (Endgames 191/212) depends upon Adorno’s twofold stance that society preforms consciousness and that material need propels thought. One other ramification to ‘the priority of the object’ deserves mention. This one would remove what Wellmer sees as ‘an insoluble conflict between materialist and metaphysical (i.e., theological) motifs’ in Adorno’s approach. Wellmer separates ‘messianic hope’ or ‘the hope of salvation’ from the transformation of society or ‘the transfiguration of historical reality.’ He poses this as a dilemma that he thinks Adorno cannot resolve: ‘If the hope of salvation were to be fulfilled in history, it would not be the hope of salvation that was fulfilled (but rather that of a fulfilled life). On the other hand, if what was fulfilled were really the hope of salvation, this would still not signify a new condition of history’

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(Endgames 191/212). This posing of the dilemma assumes the traditional otherworldly eschatology already questioned by the Jewish mystics and Christian socialists with whom Adorno was conversant.13 The dilemma does not accord with the most productive eschatological theologies of the past three decades, such as the ‘liberation theology’ of Gustavo Gutiérrez and Jürgen Moltmann’s ‘theology of hope.’ Nor is the separation of salvation from a historical transformation of society demanded by the sacred writings of Judaism and Christianity, where imagery of earthly ‘shalom’ and societal reconciliation abounds. Rather than posing a dilemma, Adorno’s interpretation of the messianic condition as societal, historical, and material complements theologies that do not equate salvation with the release of individual souls into a state of disembodied immortality.14 Adorno shows his awareness of such ‘materialist’ potential within religious traditions in a passage on resurrection that Wellmer quotes, but without exploring its social-philosophical implications. Compared with speculative metaphysics, Adorno writes, Christian dogmatics was ‘metaphysically more consistent – more enlightened, if you will’ when it connected the awakening of souls with ‘the resurrection of the flesh.’ So, too, ‘hope means corporeal resurrection’ and loses its best element when it is spiritualized (ND 401/393).15 If, with Adorno, and in line with productive theologies of recent decades, one interprets ‘the hope of salvation’ as a hope for fundamental transformation in society, then the apparent dilemma of either salvation or historical transfiguration disappears. And if, like Adorno, one accepts ‘the transmutation of metaphysics into history’ and does not hold them in classical opposition, then one can consider Adorno’s approach ‘metaphysically more consistent – more enlightened, if you will’ than a post-metaphysical critique that relegates issues of suffering and hope to an outmoded ‘religion’ and detaches questions of truth from ‘the resurrection of the flesh.’

3. Suffering, Hope, and Societal Evil Wellmer’s objections signal a gap between Adorno’s vision of philosophy and the reigning paradigm today. Contemporary strands of Western philosophy converge in the claim that philosophy must be ‘postmetaphysical.’ This requirement is considered a matter of both historical necessity and disciplinary integrity. Surely, contemporary Western philosophers seem to say, no up-to-date and self-respecting philosophy can be metaphysical. This post-metaphysical presumption affects phi-

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losophy as a whole: its tasks, its relationships to other forms of inquiry and practice, and its political relevance in contemporary society. Adorno’s vision challenges contemporary philosophy’s self-understanding. According to his ‘Meditations on Metaphysics,’ philosophy must incorporate ‘metaphysical experience’ rather than ‘go beyond’ metaphysics. Otherwise philosophy cannot engage in thorough social critique, remain unswervingly self-critical, and hold open historical alternatives to contemporary society.16 If Adorno is right, then his own metacritique of metaphysics merits a critical retrieval. The themes of suffering and hope are central to such a retrieval. This means, to begin with, that one cannot ignore how Adorno’s metacritique positions itself ‘after Auschwitz.’ ‘To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,’ Adorno once said. Revising Adorno’s famous claim, which he himself revisited, one could argue from his ‘Meditations on Metaphysics’ that to write suffering and hope out of philosophy is barbaric. What does this positioning mean for Adorno’s project? I do not think his metacritique of metaphysics is simply an attempt to see Nazi genocide as ‘fulfilling the logic of disenchantment’17 or as ‘the moment of accomplishment and self-destruction of [the European] Enlightenment’ (Wellmer, Endgames 183/204). As Espen Hammer suggests, it is also Adorno’s attempt to work out the implications of ‘extreme evil’ for a society and a philosophical trajectory that resist or reject anything outside their confines. This is why, in Hammer’s words, ‘Adorno’s challenge is that post-metaphysical philosophy is not post-metaphysical enough. By discarding immutability and transcendence but without questioning the claim for radical immanence itself, a claim Auschwitz irretrievably has shown to have failed, it is not sufficiently alive to ways of thinking transcendence that would escape the charge of being affirmative.’18 Adorno suggests many ways in which contemporary philosophy avoids this challenge. One is the reluctance of philosophy to be radically self-critical. To be true today, he says, thought must also ‘think against itself.’ Otherwise it will be mere background music covering up ‘perennating suffering’ (das perennierende Leiden), which has as much right to be expressed as the tortured victim has to scream (ND 362/355, 365/358). A complementary tendency is the unacknowledged continuation of traditional metaphysical separations between body and soul. This ratifies a societal division between physical and mental labour and supports inattention to ‘questions of material existence’ (ND 366/358).

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A third indication of avoidance is philosophy’s inability to come to grips with the experience of death, despite an ideological ‘death metaphysics’ stemming from Heidegger’s Being and Time (ND 368–73/361– 6). Yet another sign lies in a reluctance to think through the tension between a promise of fulfilment (Glück) and the experience of waiting in vain (vergebliches Warten) for fundamental transformation to occur (ND 373–5/366–8). Add to these tendencies various falsely posed questions about ‘the meaning of life’ (ND 376–81/369–74), and one has ample evidence that, on the road to becoming post-metaphysical, contemporary philosophy has largely surrendered the task of explicating ‘metaphysical experience’ in the face of societal evil. It is against the backdrop of these tendencies that Adorno undertakes his materialist metacritique of Kant and Hegel.19 In Adorno’s terms, surrendering the explication of metaphysical experience would also mean that philosophy has largely abandoned the project of a comprehensive critique of society. This would imply in turn that, despite increasingly sophisticated discussions of politics, ethics, and morality, contemporary philosophy has become unethical: it has failed to take seriously enough what Adorno proposes as ‘a new categorical imperative,’ namely, that human beings (including philosophers) so ‘arrange their thought and action that Auschwitz would not repeat itself, [that] nothing similar would happen.’ Anticipating the objections of philosophers for whom argumentation trumps experience even in the face of unspeakable suffering, Adorno adds: ‘This imperative is as resistant to justification [Begründung] as the givenness of the Kantian [categorical imperative] once was’ (ND 365/358).20 A discursive treatment of the new imperative would be an ‘outrage’ (Frevel), he says, violating not a human principle or divine law but the moment of ethical excess (das Moment des Hinzutretenden am Sittlichen) that the imperative lets one feel corporeally. The corporeal feeling is an abhorrence of physical pain, an abhorrence-become-practical towards the unbearable physical pain to which individuals are exposed. Morality survives, he says, in this ‘materialistic motive’ (ND 365/358). The same goes for metaphysics, now that corporeal suffering in Nazi concentration camps has burned away any comfort intellectual culture could provide. For Adorno, the key to avoiding philosophy’s avoidance of societal evil is also a key to philosophy’s pursuit of truth: ‘The need to let suffering speak [beredt werden zu lassen] is a condition of all truth. For suffering is objectivity that weighs upon the subject’ (ND 17–18/29). The

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need to express suffering is a primary motivation for Adorno’s critique of identitarian thought, his insistence on non-identity, his emphasis on conceptualizing the nonconceptual, and the stress his philosophy places on linguistic presentation and conceptual constellations. Although his articulation of these themes has considerable relevance for epistemology, philosophy of language, and philosophy of science, his motivation for discussing them lies beyond the boundaries of such philosophical subdisciplines. It lies in a ‘philosophical experience’ where suffering and the need to express it are as unavoidable as they are compelling. For suffering defies discursive treatment, yet it calls for conceptual comprehension if philosophy is to resist both forgetting and perpetuating suffering. Although such comprehension will not render suffering conceptual, it will seek to understand its societal causes and social significance. Traditional metaphysics informed by Hebraic wisdom literature asked why good people suffer. Adorno asks why, in a society that has the means to eliminate poverty, hunger, and economic exploitation, suffering continues unabated and even takes the forms of genocide and mass destruction. If this is a ‘metaphysical’ question, then it is also a central question of social critique. To avoid it would be to give up philosophy’s pursuit of truth and to seal its political irrelevance. So the issue Adorno poses for contemporary philosophy is twofold: whether societal evil is inevitable, and whether a good society is historically possible. He wants to reject such inevitability, while looking societal evil squarely in the face. And he wants to affirm the historical possibility of a good society, while demolishing premature affirmations of the goodness of contemporary society. In each case the ‘goodness’ or ‘truth’ of society is indexed to both the remembrance and the elimination of suffering. This double gesture provides impetus for Adorno’s critical retrieval of Kant’s postulates of pure practical reason. Just as Kant’s critical resolution (Aufhebung) of the antinomy of practical reason hinges on his discovering a type of happiness ‘caused’ by virtue – namely, the ‘intellectual contentment’ one feels as a result of virtuously obeying the moral law (CPrR 234–6/117–19) – so Adorno’s critical retrieval of Kantian ethics hinges on his recognizing a type of resistance to societal evil occasioned by a corporeal feeling of abhorrence towards suffering. Just as Kant finds it necessary for human beings to postulate the immortality of the soul in order to strive for a state in which their happiness and virtue would coincide (CPrR 238–9/122–4), so Adorno finds it neces-

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sary to maintain the historical possibility of a good society in order for human beings to strive for a world where material needs are satisfied and needless suffering ends. In shifting the emphasis from pursuing moral goodness to resisting societal evil, Adorno rejects the separation between body and soul that sustains Kant’s conception of the highest good. Adorno also refuses to isolate personal goodness from the society in which individuals are constituted as individuals. These differences help explain why Adorno says the secret of Kant’s philosophy is ‘the incomprehensibility [Unausdenkbarkeit] of despair’ (ND 385/378). By advocating the practical necessity of postulating the immortality of the soul, for example, Kant recognizes in his own ideologically distorted way that there would be no genuine prospect of a good society if death had the final word. This is why, in an earlier passage, Adorno says the thought that death is final and absolute is ‘impossible to consider’ (unausdenkbar), just as impossible to consider as the idea of immortality is. Desire (die Lust) resists transience (Vergängnis). So does thought itself. If death were absolute, then everything would be absolutely nothing (überhaupt nichts), every thought would be empty (ins Leere gedacht), and no thought could be thought in a true fashion (keiner lässt mit Wahrheit irgend sich denken). ‘For it is a moment of truth that, along with its temporal core, truth should last; without any duration there would be no truth, [for] absolute death would swallow up its final trace’ (ND 371/364). But the incomprehensibility of death and despair has relevance for philosophy only if philosophy does not avoid trying to comprehend them. The insistence on this ‘speculative moment’ (cf. ND 15–18/27–9) runs directly contrary to a society where, according to Adorno, individual and collective self-preservation have become a structural obsession. To resist such a society, philosophy must maintain a moment of independence from self-preservative business as usual and must insist on the priority of the object (ND 388–90/381–2). Accordingly, Kant’s concept of the intelligible world, as something necessarily postulated but not necessarily existent, serves to point beyond the immanence of selfpreservation. ‘The gesture of hope is to let go what the subject wants to cling to, what [the subject] expects will endure. The intelligible ... could only be thought negatively’ (ND 392/384). And that, paradoxically, would make the intelligible [an] ‘appearance’ (Erscheinung) – what the non-identical discloses to the finite spirit (was das dem endlichen Geist Verborgene diesem zukehrt),21 what the finite spirit is compelled to think and deforms. ‘The concept of the intelligible is the self-negation of finite

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spirit’ (ND 392/384). The concept of the intelligible registers how what merely exists becomes aware of its insufficiency – becomes aware of this in spirit. Taking leave of such self-enclosed (and insufficient) existence gives rise to that speculative moment in which spirit separates from its own principle of self-preservation. Spirit transcends itself in self-negation. To be spirit, spirit must know that it is not exhausted in finite existence. That is why spirit thinks what lies beyond it – in the concept of an intelligible world, for example. On Adorno’s interpretation, then, the metaphysical experience inspiring Kant’s philosophy is the negation of the finite that finitude requires. The ‘intelligible’ points to spirit’s moment of independence from what exists, which spirit attains when it insists on the non-identical as distinct from spirit. Metaphysics has an inconspicuous possibility in spirit’s ‘moment of transcendent objectivity.’ ‘The concept of the intelligible realm would be the concept of something that does not exist and yet is not simply nonexistent [etwas, was nicht ist und doch nicht nur nicht ist]’ (ND 393/385). Yet we must not conclude from this concept that the intelligible already actually exists (as happens in ontological proofs for God’s existence, which Kant destroyed). Stringent critique of the insufficiency of what exists does not remove this insufficiency.22 At this point the Adornian emphasis on suffering turns into an emphasis on hope. Or, rather, the philosophical expression of suffering receives articulation as an expectation of its removal. For Adorno, the material need within thought propels thought towards the idea of a fundamentally transformed world within which thought itself would be fundamentally transformed. Although the need is itself societally mediated, it is neither absorbed nor satisfied by its societal mediation. Suffering and hope are complementary manifestations of this unmet need. Both are ineliminable from thought: ‘Weh spricht: vergeh’ (ND 203/203). Adorno’s sources of hope are mixed and scattered. They include the import of humanist culture, especially Kant and Beethoven (ND 397/ 389–90); the unredeemed promises of religious traditions (e.g., ND 401/393); the transience of everything cultural and societal; and the advanced state of productive forces in contemporary society. His object of hope is a future society ‘without unfulfilled needs [ohne Lebensnot]’ (ND 398/390). This is the import, I take it, of Adorno’s saying ‘hope means corporeal resurrection’ (ND 401/393). Both the sources and the object of hope come together in Adorno’s appeal to an experience that attends speculative thought. He appeals to

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the experience that thought which ‘does not decapitate itself’ flows into the idea of a world where ‘not only extant suffering would be abolished but also suffering that is irrevocably past would be revoked.’ It is the experience of having ‘all thoughts converge in the concept of something that would be different’ from today’s unspeakable world (ND 403/395). Contemporary society is both ‘worse than hell and better,’ Adorno says. Worse, because there is no escaping it. Better, because the world’s ‘disturbed and damaged’ course cannot be construed as purely meaningless and blind. The world’s course resists the desperate attempt ‘to posit despair as an absolute.’ No matter how weak the historical traces of the other, no matter how disfigured all happiness due to its revocability, the promises of the other, though broken ever again, still pervade what exists, in the breaks that resist identity. ‘Every happiness is a fragment of the entire happiness that is denied to human beings and that they deny themselves’ (ND 404/396). Like the experience of suffering, then, the experience of hope has an ineliminable materiality. Just as suffering is how objectivity weighs upon the subject, so hope arises because ‘something in actuality’ [in der Sache] presses towards ‘the humanly promised other of history’ (ND 404/396). Both suffering and hope are implied, it seems to me, when Adorno describes his own micrological ‘metaphysics’ as ‘a legible constellation of what exists [von Seiendem],’ receiving its material [Stoff] from what exists, but configuring the elements to form a script (ND 407/399). Both suffering and hope are implied when Adorno says such micrological thought must proceed from the material need sublated within itself. Such thought, materially motivated and materially attentive, would have solidarity with metaphysics, he says, ‘in the moment of its collapse’ (ND 408/400).

4. Critical Retrieval: Philosophical Experience and the Non-identical Earlier I raised several objections to Albrecht Wellmer’s critique of Adorno. Wellmer claims we cannot anticipate as real what we cannot consistently conceive as real. Adorno, by contrast, claims that what we inescapably experience as real compels philosophy to criticize its own restrictions on what can be conceived, and to do this as a way of not foreclosing upon the historical possibility of a fundamental transformation in society. Both suffering and hope, materially rooted and societally mediated, let us experience real societal evil that calls for resistance. Just

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as to ignore suffering would intellectualize the experience of societal evil, so abandoning hope would remove the horizon within which societal matters can be recognized as evil to be resisted. Social philosophy would then be left with ‘pathologies,’ ‘crisis tendencies,’ ‘anomalies,’ and ‘problems’ whose actual removal, though dramatic, would not require a radical transformation of society as a whole. Having said this in Adorno’s defence, I also want to state two reservations, with the aim of critically retrieving his social philosophy. My reservations have to do with (1) his privileging of ‘philosophical experience’ and (2) his objectification of hope. Let me discuss each in turn. (1) By singling out the need to express suffering as a condition of all truth, Adorno puts his own philosophy in a precarious position. On the one hand, he seems to cut off debate about the nature of truth, contrary to his own emphasis on dialectic and the concept. On the other hand, he appears to beg numerous questions about whose suffering and what manner of suffering need to be expressed, contrary to his emphasis on micrology and the non-identical. Adorno himself acknowledges this precariousness when the Introduction to Negative Dialectics discusses a ‘privilege of experience’ (ND 40–2/50–3). There he mentions two objections to his notion of philosophical experience: (a) that such experience cannot be intersubjectively tested, and (b) that making philosophical experience a condition of knowledge is elitist and undemocratic. His reply touches on the first objection and addresses the second. He (a) suggests that intersubjective testing might not be so decisive in any case, since the tests take place under distorting societal conditions, and he (b) claims that the administered world does not give everyone an equal capacity to engage in critique. Societal conditions have made many people incapable of experience in an emphatic sense. Under such conditions, he says, to construe truth as the will of the majority would invoke democracy to deceive everyone about what they need. Those who (like Adorno) have had the undeserved luck to resist prevailing norms have a moral obligation to speak on behalf of others and to express what most of them either cannot see or realistically refuse to see. Perhaps we can call this a charismatic or prophetic vision of the philosopher’s task in society. Adorno connects this prophetic vision with what Wellmer and Habermas would call an esoteric view of truth. What makes something true, says Adorno, is not its being immediately communicable to everyone. We must neither confuse communication with what is known nor rank it higher. ‘Today every step toward communication sells out the truth and makes it false’ (ND 41/51–2).

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Although truth requires subjective mediation, it is its own index. Truth loses its supposedly privileged character by not entering special pleas for the experiences to which truth is indebted and by entering contexts of justification [Begründungszusammenhänge] that make it evident or establish its inadequacies. Nevertheless: ‘Within philosophical experience chances that the universal randomly grants individuals turn against the universal that sabotages the universality of such experience. Were this universality achieved [hergestellt], the experience of all individuals would change accordingly and would lose much of the contingency that meanwhile continues fatally to disfigure their experience’ (ND 42/52). Now I do not want to deny that contemporary societal conditions render many people incapable of experience in an emphatic sense. Neither do I wish to make communicability decisive for truth. Nor do I doubt that people in a position to have emphatic experience have a moral obligation to speak on behalf of others. Social critique has long had a prophetic element, which philosophy would abandon at the cost of silencing itself. The problem in Adorno’s vision, as I understand it, is that it makes philosophical experience self-authenticating. His account of the ‘privilege of experience’ makes philosophical experience speak for itself and entirely on its own authority. So no matter how much the articulation of such experience enters contexts of justification, the experience being articulated cannot really be challenged. In an odd and wholly unexpected way, Adorno seems to ground his philosophy in a negative version of the ‘authenticity’ whose jargon he so effectively skewers.23 This problem directly affects his appeal to the need to express suffering. Recent ethnic conflicts and imperialist wars tell us that suffering does not speak for itself and its expression is not self-authorizing. It is always already interpreted as the suffering of certain people in certain respects and with a certain measure of opprobrium or indignation. North American media, for example, have given more weight to the sudden death of heroic firefighters in New York City on 9/11 than to the decade-long starvation of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children. Hence, as I have said in a different context, ‘the need to express suffering cannot be self-evident as a condition of truth. The need must also be met in ways that are true.’ So too, the ‘philosophical recognition of this need, no matter how compelling, cannot be self-contained. The recognition must also represent those for whom the suffering is expressed and interpreted.’24

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Accordingly, not even Adorno’s formulation of a ‘new categorical imperative’ speaks for itself. I realize how problematic it is to say this, and how questionable it is for me to say this. To say this seems immediately to violate the moment of ethical excess that Adorno’s formulation is supposed to let one feel, thereby dishonouring the victims of Nazi genocide. Moreover, for me to say this seems to put me in a position of ethical superiority that I have neither the right nor the intention to claim. Yet Adorno himself acknowledges that truth claims made in the articulation of philosophical experience must enter contexts of justification if they really are to serve as truth claims. And his understandable reluctance to justify the claim that after Auschwitz everyone ought to prevent its recurrence does not keep him from giving an implicit justification. Implicitly he argues that systematically inflicting physical pain on human beings is always abhorrent, and that the societal conditions fostering and supporting such abhorrent conduct must be resisted and changed. But Adorno casts this justification in the form of saying that the new imperative, which he has formulated, lets one feel abhorrence despite the false consolations of post-Auschwitz culture. That manner of justification is problematic in two respects. First, it ignores the fact that abhorrence, although it is a corporeal feeling, is itself culturally informed and ethically inflected, such that psychopaths and sociopaths may seldom feel it. Second, his justification does not say why this feeling should have precedence over other feelings that also arise when people confront extreme suffering, such as anger, hatred, fear, despair, compassion, or solidarity. Not even in circumstances of torture and cruelty does suffering speak for itself, at least not with respect to those who are not themselves the victims of torture and cruelty. The philosopher who takes seriously the need to express suffering also assumes an obligation to listen to other voices and to justify the philosopher’s own expression with respect to those voices. The philosophical experience informing a social critique may be emphatic, but it cannot be selfauthenticating.25 (2) The reverse side to Adorno’s privileging of philosophical experience lies in his objectification of transformative hope. By ‘objectification’ in this context I mean his tendency to regard hope as something that comes to us by way of objects that have resisted the principles of identification and exchange. Hope comes to us, he seems to say, from a historically possible future in which objects would no longer be reduced to mere instruments and commodities, and from their poten-

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tial even now to escape and resist the impositions of societally preformed, constitutive subjectivity. Further, such hope can arise because remnants in subjective experience remain as open to things in their non-identity as does the child who delights in a favourite village as if it were completely unique (ND 373/366).26 Contrary to other critics such as Wellmer, my objection here will not be that Adorno heads towards an aesthetic emergency exit, that ‘he could ultimately only transfer the unthinkable thought of reconciliation to the realm of aesthetic experience’ (Endgames 191/212). Although authentic artworks provide special sites for ‘the non-identical’ in this sense, I do not interpret Adorno as restricting such sites to art. This is clear even in the famous passage where Adorno links truth with hope and explicitly mentions art: Thought that does not capitulate before wretched existence comes to naught before its criteria, truth becomes untruth, philosophy becomes folly. And yet philosophy cannot give up, lest idiocy triumph in actualized unreason [Widervernunft] ... Folly is truth in the shape that human beings must accept whenever, amid the untrue, they do not give up truth. Even at the highest peaks art is semblance; but art receives the semblance ... from nonsemblance [vom Scheinlosen] ... No light falls on people and things in which transcendence would not appear [widerschiene]. Indelible in resistance to the fungible world of exchange is the resistance of the eye that does not want the world’s colors to vanish. In semblance nonsemblance is promised. (ND 404–5/396–7)

Adorno does not say that art is the only place where in semblance nonsemblance is promised, nor, as a materialist Hegelian, should he say this. The ‘priority of the object’ implies that all objects in their non-identity with the subject have priority, not simply those objects that draw artistic attention to their non-identity. To hope for a future society without unfulfilled needs where suffering ends is to hope for more than art could ever deliver. My objection will be instead that objects as such are an inadequate basis for transformative hope, even in their dialectical relation with emphatic experience. Simon Jarvis has said that ‘the real possibility of reconciled non-identity is the speculative moment which animates each of Adorno’s works’ and ‘the condition of intelligibility of his very utterances and texts.’27 I think Jarvis is right. In my own terms, to eliminate hope for a future society without unfulfilled needs would be to remove

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the point of Adorno’s negative dialectic as this culminates in his meditations on metaphysics after Auschwitz. But what makes ‘reconciled non-identity’ a ‘real possibility’? What generates and sustains the hope for a society that is fundamentally different from this unspeakable world? Certainly Adorno considers thought’s ability to think what lies beyond it in thinking against itself to be crucial in this regard. There must be something ‘more’ than this, however, something about which thought can think, albeit in self-negation, and something that calls for such self-negating thought. Adorno’s reply is that something in der Sache presses towards the concept of utopia (ND 404/396). Or, as his gloss on Kant’s ‘intelligible world’ suggests, something hidden to finite spirit turns itself towards spirit, which is compelled to think it (ND 392/384). This ‘something’ is that in the object which is ‘not disfigured’ (ND 57/66). It is that which, under current sociohistorical conditions, ‘does not exist and yet is not simply nonexistent’ (ND 393/385). So, without claiming that this ‘more,’ this ‘something’ actually exists, Adorno’s negative dialectic in its speculative moment traces what in actual existence gives rise to the non-identical’s transient non-existence. And he counts on there being elements in human experience that do not ‘want the world’s colors to vanish.’ But this presupposes that somehow the non-identical is there, in der Sache, historically and societally available to be traced by means of selfnegating thought. It presupposes that something in der Sache really does press towards the concept of utopia. Quite apart from the epistemological questions this presupposition raises, it is a rather thin basis on which to hope for a fundamental transformation in society. Even if one transferred Adorno’s presupposition to the side of the subject, suggesting, for example, that unmet material needs press for their satisfaction, it is not obvious why their satisfaction would not be endlessly deferred. Adorno’s hope seems both crucial and ill supported. The aporia in Adorno’s metacritique of metaphysics appears to be an internal conflict in the theme of hope, and not simply an allegedly unsuccessful marriage between materialism and theology. Two tendencies in Adorno’s negative dialectic give rise to this apparent aporia: (a) his globalizing of transformation and (b) his failure to distinguish sufficiently between societal evil and the violation of societal principles. By ‘globalizing of transformation’ I do not mean Adorno’s central claims that contemporary society as a whole needs to be transformed, and that this cannot occur unless the all-pervasive principle of exchange loses its grip. I share this position and think it is even

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more pertinent now, with the rapid globalization of capitalism, than it was when Adorno formulated it. The claims mark a social-philosophical crossroad where Habermasian and non-Habermasian critical theorists part ways.28 I use the phrase ‘globalizing of transformation’ to refer to Adorno’s tendency to pit the transformation of society’s entire architecture – society’s deep structure, if you will – against transformations within that architecture – within social institutions, cultural practices, and interpersonal relations, for example. The tendency results in an allor-nothing critique that, given the power of the exchange principle, makes ‘nothing’ most likely for the foreseeable future. In other words, Adorno’s radical critique of society is not radical enough. It does not penetrate sufficiently to the multiple roots of change that together could generate the architectonic transformation he rightly envisions. To demonstrate this tendency would require a lengthier discussion than I can give here, and in any case other critics of Adorno have already made a similar point. But let me give one example of the problem I have in mind. In the meditation on ‘Nihilism,’ Adorno claims that a theological consciousness of futility (Nichtigkeit) corrects those who believe that life here and now is meaningful, even if only in a few fulfilled moments. Yet the way to change the emptiness of life that theologians lament would not be by people having a change of heart (dass die Menschen anderen Sinnes werden), he says, but only by abolishing the life-denying principle, presumably, the principle of exchange. If that principle finally disappeared, so would the self-preservative cycle of fulfilment and appropriation (ND 378–9/371). I find Adorno’s juxtaposition of personal conversion and structural transformation rhetorically clever but social-philosophically problematic.29 How, pray tell, will the principle of exchange ever be abolished if the people who live under its grip and who sustain its operation do not have a change of heart? As Adorno has forcefully demonstrated elsewhere, we have long since left the stage of capitalism when, according to Marx and Engels, the proletariat had nothing to lose but its chains. Earlier in Negative Dialectics Adorno himself suggests that structural transformation will require a ‘transparent solidarity’ among human beings that currently is in short supply (ND 203–4/203–4). But if the architecture of society does not foster transparent solidarity, and if society’s architecture needs to be changed out of such solidarity, then how will the requisite solidarity be fostered? Do not social institutions, cultural practices, and interpersonal relations all have a crucial role in this

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regard? Unless multiple roots of change can be found within the complex architecture of contemporary society – despite and by way of their entwinement with a capitalist economy – I see little prospect for abolishing the life-denying principle. Nor do I think such roots of change will flourish if the human participants do not undergo gradual and repeated ‘changes of heart.’30 Adorno’s inattention to plural sources of transformation within the differentiated fabric of contemporary society leads to his exaggerating the object in its non-identity as a basis for transformative hope. Another way to put this is that Adorno has an insufficiently nuanced conception of ‘the subject.’ His conception oscillates between the societally constituted individual and the Gesamtsubjekt of not-yet-societally-actualized humanity. Lost in the oscillation are the diverse institutional, cultural, and interpersonal ways in which people become agents of change. And this, in turn, pushes Adorno towards a desperate position where the praxis of theory is the only sufficiently good praxis to be theorized under contemporary conditions of societal evil.31 The tendency to globalize transformation intersects a second source of Adorno’s apparent aporia, namely, his failure to distinguish sufficiently between societal evil and the violation of societal principles. By ‘societal principles’ I mean historically developed, continually contested, and widely shared expectations about how social institutions should be organized, how cultural practices should be carried out, and how interpersonal relations should be configured. Justice, truth, and authenticity would be examples of such principles in contemporary Western societies. Human suffering can signal both societal evil and the violation of discrete societal principles. So returning to the need to express suffering will help uncover Adorno’s tendency not to distinguish sufficiently between these. I said earlier that the philosophical experience informing a social critique, no matter how emphatic, cannot be self-authenticating. I also claimed that philosophers who take seriously the need to express suffering are obligated to hear and address other voices. Part of fulfilling this obligation, it seems to me, is to enter into conversation concerning the normative expectations according to which people recognize and respond to suffering. Adorno’s own philosophy harbours the strong normative expectation that, in a world with abundant material resources, no one’s basic material needs should go unsatisfied. In itself, however, that expectation is hardly adequate either for identifying the full scope of what is wrong in contemporary society or for discovering

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‘what needs to be done.’ Moreover, it would be the height of intellectual arrogance to provide a blueprint of how society should be changed in order to satisfy basic material needs without consulting those who have such needs. Nor could one consult the needy without attending to their own normative expectations concerning social institutions, cultural practices, and interpersonal relations. Of course, Adorno is not about to provide any such blueprint. In that sense, the object of his hope is a ‘negative utopia,’32 a society where no material needs are unmet, where needless suffering would end. Moreover, like Marx, Adorno sees all violations of societal principles, and perhaps even the principles themselves, as symptoms of a societal evil that resides in the structure of capitalist society as a whole. Precisely because he does not articulate distinct societal principles and does not explicate their specific violations, however, this object of hope becomes a displaced object – displaced into objects in their non-identity. Few doors remain open to point people towards specific and shared expectations, articulable as societal principles, that would give substance to hope for the future. The scope of societal evil becomes so all-pervasive that discrete societal goods cannot be distinguished nor their particular absences thematized. Adorno’s philosophy leaves us empty-handed, hoping against hope that something in der Sache will not only continue to press towards the concept of utopia but also, in tandem with selfnegating thought, enable that concept’s actualization. This burden is more than any object or all objects could bear.33 The apparent aporia of crucial but ill-founded hope arises from Adorno’s inattention to multiple roots of fundamental transformation and from his failure to distinguish sufficiently between societal evil and the violation of discrete societal principles. Habermasian criticisms of Adorno try to correct these deficiencies, but at the price of removing the themes of suffering and hope from philosophy and becoming ‘postmetaphysical.’ To the extent that an aporia exists in Adorno’s metacritique of metaphysics, it is, like its motivation, social philosophical. Certainly the apparent aporia has epistemological dimensions and implications, as Albrecht Wellmer has pointed out. But to address it would require more than an epistemological critique. It would require something like Adorno’s effort to rescue within philosophy that which resists philosophy’s own subsumptive concepts. It would require a social philosophy for which suffering is real and for which transformative hope is not misplaced. Perhaps such a social philosophy would show solidarity with Adorno’s negative dialectic in the moment of its collapse.

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NOTES 1 Paraphrased from Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (New York: Seabury Press, 1973), 153; Negative Dialektik (1966, 1967), in Gesammelte Schriften 6 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), 156. Internal citations give page numbers from the Ashton translation, followed by the pagination in Gesammelte Schriften (hereafter GS) 6, thus: ND 153/156. Frequently I modify the translation. 2 Parts of this essay were presented at the symposium ‘Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969),’ co-sponsored by the Canadian Philosophical Association and the Canadian Society for Aesthetics, in Halifax on 31 May 2003. I wish to thank Marie-Noëlle Ryan for her work in organizing the symposium, Albrecht Wellmer for his engaged interaction with the symposiasts, and all the participants for their instructive comments and questions. I also want to thank Jonathan Short and Deborah Cook for illuminating comments on an earlier version of this essay and the graduate students in my seminar ‘Metaphysics after Auschwitz’ for stimulating conversations on Adorno’s Negative Dialectics. 3 ‘Why Still Philosophy,’ in Theodor W. Adorno, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (1963, 1969), trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 1–17; ‘Wozu noch Philosophie?’ in Theodor W. Adorno, GS 10.2 (1977): 459–73. Hereafter CM, followed by the English, then the German, pagination, thus: CM 1/459. 4 Jürgen Habermas, ‘Does Philosophy Still Have a Purpose?’ in PhilosophicalPolitical Profiles, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983), 1–19; ‘Wozu noch Philosophie?’ in Philosophisch-politische Profile (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971), 11–36. Hereafter PPP, thus: PPP 1/11. 5 This move occurs in an underdeveloped reflection on how contemporary philosophy confronts a ‘collapse of religious consciousness.’ The term in German – Zerfall – is the same one Adorno sometimes uses to characterize the demise of metaphysical consciousness. Habermas regards this collapse as a challenge for philosophy because philosophical life-interpretations among the cultured elite traditionally ‘depended precisely on coexistence with a widely influential religion,’ but philosophy was unable to master ‘the meaninglessness of the negativity of the risks built into life – in a way that had been possible for the religious hope in salvation [die Erwartung des religiösen Heils]’ (PPP 17–18/35). 6 These twelve meditations compose the third ‘model’ in Negative Dialectics and the conclusion of the entire book. 7 Albrecht Wellmer, ‘Metaphysics at the Moment of Its Fall,’ in Endgames: The

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9

10

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Irreconcilable Nature of Modernity; Essays and Lectures, trans. David Midgley (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998), 183–201; ‘Metaphysik im Augenblick ihres Sturzes,’ in Endspiele: Die unversöhnliche Moderne; Essays und Vorträge (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1993), 204–23. Hereafter Endgames 183/ 204. I derive this apt description from Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 1998), 148–74. See also my summary of Adorno’s negative dialectic in the online entry ‘Theodor Adorno,’ in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2003 edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, at http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2003/entries/adorno/. On the eschatological character of Adorno’s philosophy of history (Geschichtsphilosophie), see Michael Theunissen, ‘Negativität bei Adorno,’ in Adorno-Konferenz 1983, ed. Ludwig von Friedeburg and Jürgen Habermas (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983), 41–65, esp. 53–7. Theunissen suggests that in Adorno’s eschatology apocalypse is even more fundamental than prolepsis. Like Wellmer, although with less animus against traditional metaphysics, Theunissen argues that the aporias in Adorno’s negative dialectic drive him into the arms of theology. For a summary and response to Theunissen’s essay, see Jarvis, Adorno, 211–16. Strictly speaking, the Kantian framework is not dualistic but a type of monism in which the mental, especially the rational, has priority. The Dutch philosopher Dirk Vollenhoven would call it a type of ‘ennoetism.’ See especially part one, book 2 in Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, in Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy, trans. and ed. Mary J. Gregor, general intro. Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 226–58; AK 5: 107–48. Cited internally as CPrR, thus: CPrR 226/107. I agree with Simon Jarvis’s general point that, because Adorno does not think that metaphysical experience can be eliminated from thought, he does not straightforwardly endorse ‘the very distinction between pre-critical and critical thinking which Wellmer, like almost all second-generation critical theorists, takes as a benchmark.’ But Jarvis concedes too easily Wellmer’s claim that we cannot anticipate as real what we cannot consistently think as real. Unlike Jarvis, I do not think this claim ‘would constitute a decisive objection to Adorno’s account of his relation to metaphysics’ (Adorno, 209), for reasons I explain in the text. Here I have in mind especially the scholarship of Gershom Scholem, with whom Adorno edited a two-volume collection of Walter Benjamin’s letters, and Paul Tillich, who supervised Adorno’s Habilitationsschrift on Kierkegaard and remained a lifelong friend. Habermas’s ‘Gershom Scholem: The Torah in Disguise’ (PPP 201–13) gives an indirect indication of how Jewish

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mysticism might resonate with Adorno’s negative dialectic. See also Habermas’s ‘The German Idealism of the Jewish Philosophers’ in the same volume (PPP 21–43/37–66). Mauro Bozzetti touches on Adorno’s ‘close kinship to the speculations of modern Hebrew philosophy’ in ‘Hegel on Trial,’ in Adorno: A Critical Reader, ed. Nigel Gibson and Andrew Rubin (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2002), 292–311, esp. 300–4. For Adorno’s personal reminiscences about Paul Tillich, see pp. 24–38 within ‘Erinnerungen an Paul Tillich,’ in Werk und Wirken Paul Tillichs: Ein Gedenkbuch (Stuttgart: Evangelisches Verlagswerk, 1967), the transcript of a radio program broadcast on 21 August 1966. It is interesting to note, as Rolf Tiedemann points out in his ‘Editor’s Afterword’ to Adorno’s posthumous lectures on metaphysics, that Adorno asked to borrow the third volume to Tillich’s Systematische Theologie when he was writing his ‘Meditations on Metaphysics.’ See Theodor W. Adorno, Metaphysics: Concept and Problems (1965), ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 194. I am indebted to my research assistant Matt Klaassen for this reference. I do not mean to suggest, however, that Adorno shares the more affirmative vision of these theologies. For a nuanced reading of Adorno’s relevance for ‘academic theology’ that regards his emphasis on negativity as a corrective to the ‘meaning-optimism’ of postmetaphysical theories, see Mattias Martinson, Perseverance without Doctrine: Adorno, Self-Critique, and the Ends of Academic Theology (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2000). Wellmer quotes this passage in Endgames, 186/206–7. In conversation Albrecht Wellmer has raised the question whether abandoning the ‘metaphysical’ side of Adorno’s project actually necessitates giving up a critique of society as a whole. I am not ready to argue for a necessary relation here, but I do not regard as mere coincidence the tendency for both developments to occur together in much of Habermasian critical theory. Traditionally, some vision of ‘the good,’ however partial and implicit, was presupposed when theorists tried to identify a principle or dynamic that unifies societal ills into societal evil. Against this backdrop, it is difficult to be ‘beyond good’ without being ‘beyond evil’ as well, as Nietzsche suggested. J.M. Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 383. Espen Hammer, ‘Adorno and Extreme Evil,’ Philosophy & Social Criticism 26.4 (2000): 75–93, at p. 79. I use the term ‘societal evil’ as a near equivalent for what Hammer labels ‘extreme or radical moral evil.’ See especially meditations 6–12 (ND 381–408/374–400).

160 Lambert Zuidervaart 20 Adorno’s essay ‘Education after Auschwitz’ opens in a similar way: ‘The premier demand upon all education is that Auschwitz not happen again. Its priority before any other requirement is such that I believe I need not and should not justify it ... To justify it would be monstrous in the face of the monstrosity that took place.’ Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, 191; GS 10.2: 674. 21 This is one of the passages where Adorno’s mostly unacknowledged proximity to Heidegger is readily apparent. Even the terminology – das Verborgene! – is Heideggerian, and it is not used ironically or caustically. 22 A remark by Albrecht Wellmer at the Adorno symposium in Halifax leads me to think that the question of human finitude separates his reading of Adorno from my own. Both Wellmer and I want philosophy to take human finitude seriously, and we find this impulse in Adorno too. Whereas Wellmer’s reading emphasizes the inescapability of finitude, my reading stresses the insufficiency of finitude. I think both themes are prominent in Adorno’s ‘Meditations on Metaphysics.’ Their interlacing makes Adorno’s metacritique so provocative. If accepting the inescapability of human finitude were a hallmark of post-metaphysical philosophy, however, then I would argue that neither Adorno’s project nor my own critical retrieval is postmetaphysical. In opposition to Habermas’s vision of post-metaphysical philosophy, this would mean refusing either to accept that ‘the nonobjective whole of a concrete lifeworld ... evades the grasp of theoretical objectification’ or to let all ‘explosive experiences of the extraordinary’ safely migrate out of philosophy into autonomous art and into a subrational religion that provides ‘normalizing intercourse with the extraordinary.’ See Jürgen Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays, trans. William Mark Hohengarten (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), 50–1. 23 See especially Theodor W. Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973); Jargon der Eigentlichkeit: Zur deutschen Ideologie (1964), GS 6: 413–526. I compare and criticize Heidegger’s conception of ‘authenticity’ and Adorno’s conception of ‘philosophical experience’ in ‘Truth and Authentication: Heidegger and Adorno in Reverse,’ an unpublished paper presented in April 2004 at a conference in Montreal on ‘Heidegger/Adorno: Aesthetics, Ethics, Technology.’ 24 Lambert Zuidervaart, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory: The Redemption of Illusion (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), 306. Deborah Cook has asked whether my criticisms of Adorno ignore his insistence that suffering is objective, that it is ‘objectivity that weighs upon the subject’ (ND 17–18/ 29). I do not deny that in suffering societal evil is inescapably registered. In

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that sense, suffering is objective. But I do question whether, in a philosophical context, suffering is either immediate (unmediated) or its expression self-authorizing. If ‘Weh spricht: vergeh,’ then there must always already be a language and an addressee for this expression, and the addressee will not automatically ‘hear’ what someone else interprets as being said. In other words, not even suffering can be removed from the dialectic of subject and object, which involves a further dialectic among subjects with respect to objects. In response to astute remarks made by Jonathan Short, I should clarify that I do not think Adorno makes suffering as such a self-authenticating event. He is not addressing all human suffering, but that which arises from the societal logic of Western capitalism. Moreover, Adorno clearly acknowledges that such suffering needs to be expressed, and he makes its expression a condition of truth. The focus to my criticism lies in Adorno’s tendency to let the philosophical experience of suffering speak for itself and to inoculate such experience against public discussion. Thanks to Jonathan Short for reminding me of this passage and insisting on the dialectical character of Adorno’s emphasis on the objectivity of hope. Jarvis, Adorno, 230. See, for example, Martin Morris, Rethinking the Communicative Turn: Adorno, Habermas, and the Problem of Communicative Freedom (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), and Deborah Cook, ‘Adorno on Mass Societies,’ Journal of Social Philosophy 32.1 (Spring 2001): 35–52. Cook has since expanded her defence of Adorno’s social philosophy against Habermasian criticisms into a book titled Adorno, Habermas, and the Search for a Rational Society (London: Routledge, 2004). For other recent books that seek to retrieve Adorno’s work from Habermasian post-metaphysics, but with less emphasis on social philosophy, see Yvonne Sherratt, Adorno’s Positive Dialectic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), and Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics. A crucial opening salvo in the struggle to reclaim Adorno from the Habermasians is Robert Hullot-Kentor, ‘Back to Adorno,’ Telos 81 (Fall 1989): 5–29. I discuss this problem under the heading ‘Antinomous Abstraction’ in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, 85–8. In Rethinking the Communicative Turn, 158–91, Martin Morris recognizes the need for multiple roots of change and for personal transformation, but his notion of a ‘politics of the mimetic shudder’ takes this recognition in an unduly restrictive, aesthetic direction. I have similar reservations about the notion of ‘fugitive ethical events’ in Bernstein’s Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics – see my review of Bernstein’s book in Constellations: An International

162 Lambert Zuidervaart Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory 10.2 (2003): 280–3. To the extent that a tendency to aestheticize resistance to societal evil pervades attempts at critically retrieving Adorno’s negative dialectic, Wellmer and Habermas’s criticisms of Adorno’s alleged aestheticism have a point. Nevertheless, I continue to find their criticisms misplaced. 31 Here I have in mind passages such as ND 241–5/240–3, where Adorno proclaims the most advanced state of theory to be the only ‘authority [Instanz] for right practice and the good’ (ND 242/250), and declares every individual or collective attempt to resist society as a whole to be ‘no less infected’ by societal evil than someone ‘who does nothing at all’ (ND 243/241). From this he draws an obvious and, in my view, politically problematic conclusion: ‘whoever cannot do anything without having it threaten to turn out bad, even if it aims for what is better, is compelled to think. This is the legitimation for thought and for intellectual satisfaction [die des Glücks am Geiste].’ Paradoxically, then, the societal blockade on transformative praxis ‘gives thought a breathing spell that it would be a practical outrage not to use’ (ND 245/243). 32 This is closely related to the description of Adorno’s so-called ‘utopianism’ as ‘utopian negativity’ in Jarvis, Adorno, 222. 33 In ‘The Possibility of a Disclosing Critique of Society: The Dialectic of Enlightenment in Light of Current Debates in Social Criticism,’ Constellations 7.1 (2000): 116–27, Axel Honneth has tried to rescue Adorno and Horkheimer’s mode of societal critique by construing their historico-philosophical framework as ‘a device of rhetorical condensation which a disclosing critique of society has to employ in order to evoke a new way of seeing the social world’ (124). Although Honneth is right to distinguish this manner of diagnosing social ‘pathology’ from less global forms of normative social criticism, he avoids the question that troubled Adorno, namely, the basis for hoping that one day not only a new way of seeing but also a new social world will arise.

6 From the Actual to the Possible: Non-identity Thinking deborah cook

Recently J.M. Bernstein and Yvonne Sherratt have sketched mutually incompatible versions of what Adorno once described as ‘cognitive utopia’: a mode of cognition that would ‘unseal the nonconceptual with concepts, without making it their equal.’1 If philosophy ‘must strive, by way of the concept, to transcend the concept’ (ND, 15), Bernstein takes this to mean that its concepts must exhibit both a ‘logical axis through which thought identifies different particulars … as belonging to the same concept ... and a material axis composed of the mediating moments of object, image, language, and tradition.’2 The normative impetus behind negative dialectics is satisfied when concepts are oriented towards particular objects through structures of inference that enable them to name objects materially. For her part, Sherratt takes a different tack. She wants to supplement identity thinking with a nonconceptual, aesthetic mode of cognition that consists in an absorptive identification with particulars. Instrumental identity thinking, which summarily reduces objects to concepts with the aim of controlling them, finds its dialectical counterpart in experiences of merging with or yielding to objects in order to gain ‘a richer, substantive identification’ with them.3 In this paper I shall outline a different view of Adorno’s cognitive utopia.4 In contrast to both Sherratt and Bernstein, my view is based on a Marxist reading of Negative Dialectics. As Marx states in a letter he addressed to Arnold Ruge in 1843, ‘[R]eason has always existed, but not always in a rational form.’ Marx therefore gives critics the task of focusing on ‘the very form of existing actuality’ in order to develop out of this form ‘true actuality as its ”ought” and its “goal.“’ Commenting on the letter, Seyla Benhabib observes that Marx adopts Hegel’s thesis

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about the unity of the actual and the rational because he believes that what currently exists ‘already contains within itself what “ought” to be as a possibility.’5 This prospective, Hegelian orientation towards a more rational form of life also inspires Adorno’s conception of non-identity thinking. In Negative Dialectics, Adorno not only maintains that reified reality harbours a better potential, he describes how this potential may be retrieved through determinate negation in order to provide a critical purchase on a world where life has been damaged to such an extent that it has become a reified and lifeless thing. In the course of exploring what Adorno means when he advocates using concepts to transcend the identificatory use of concepts, I shall argue that recent interpreters have largely ignored the speculative dimension of his critical theory. I shall pay particular attention to Bernstein’s Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics because, while Bernstein gets things right in important ways, he falls short of a complete outline of non-identity thinking. Concept Where Sherratt argues that the identificatory use of concepts should be augmented with an independent, non-conceptual, aesthetic absorption in objects, Bernstein plumbs the non-conceptual dimension of concepts themselves. Sherratt fails fully to grasp that concept-formation presupposes, and in some sense already contains, non-conceptual experience. As a result, cognition is not opposed to experience (aesthetic or otherwise) in the way Sherratt suggests when she asserts that Adorno postulates a dialectical relationship between aesthetic absorption and instrumental identity thinking. In contrast to Sherratt, Bernstein takes seriously Adorno’s claim that concepts are rooted in our somatic experience of the material world, or that there is ‘a “material” or “sensuous“ moment in the concept itself.’6 As Adorno argues at the end of Negative Dialectics, what lies within the ‘inmost cell of thought is that which is unlike thought’ (ND 408). What is unlike thought – the non-conceptual, or ‘unreconciled matter’ (ND 144) – is ‘constitutive’ for all concepts (ND 12). In a passage Bernstein also quotes,7 Adorno observes that concepts ‘refer to nonconceptualities’ because they are ‘moments of the reality that requires their formation, primarily for the control of nature’ (ND 11). Here Adorno insists on tracing concepts back to their source in our somatically based experience. Bernstein explores this aspect of conceptformation to great effect in his work. Adorno also returns in this pas-

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sage to a theme that surfaces throughout his writing. Western reason and its conceptual armamentarium first emerged in response to threats posed by external nature: ‘Ratio came into being in the first place as an instrument of self-preservation, that of reality-testing.’8 Interpreting the Odyssey as ‘one of the earliest representative testimonies of Western bourgeois civilization,’9 Horkheimer and Adorno find in Odysseus’s epic encounters with the forces of nature a confirmation of their view that it was speech that first allowed human beings to differentiate themselves from natural objects with a view to gaining mastery over them. Yet if speech serves as a means to the end of controlling nature, the attempt to dominate nature conceptually for the purpose of selfpreservation eventually turned against both outer nature and our own inner, somatic nature. The resulting antagonism between subject and object not only constitutes ‘the nucleus of all civilizing rationality,’ it has also become ‘the germ cell of a proliferating mythic irrationality.’ For ‘with the denial of nature in man, not merely the telos of the outward control of nature but the telos of man’s own life is distorted and befogged.’10 Human history has followed a course such that our conceptual apparatus now ‘determines’ the senses, shaping the objects of experience in advance.11 The increasing priority of the conceptual system over experience means that concepts have become dissociated from both their experiential base and that to which they are cognitively directed. The ever-widening chorismos between concept and object distorts both. At various points, Adorno actually praises Kant’s idea of the thing-initself because it suggests both that concepts are connected in some way to non-conceptual reality and that they are simultaneously divorced from reality. On the one hand, then, Kant registers the hope of negative dialectics that cognition ‘will not come to rest in itself, as if it were total’ (ND 406). The truth in his distinction between the thing-in-itself and the thing as constituted through conceptual apprehension lies in the idea that ‘the object would finally be the non-identical, liberated from the subjective spell.’12 On the other hand, ‘[t]he cognitive process that is supposed to bring us asymptotically close to the transcendent thing is pushing that thing ahead of it, so to speak, and removing it from our consciousness’ (ND 407). Kant ultimately turns the object into ‘something ”posited“ by the subject,’ and forgets ‘how and by what’ the subject is itself constituted. The ‘truth content’ of the Ding-an-sich also lies in ‘the historically amassed block between subject and object.’13 Since we are born into a world that is already preformed or pre-

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shaped by concepts, objects have become mere ‘occasions for triggering the appropriate conceptual response.’14 Although Sherratt wrongly infers from Adorno’s criticisms of the prevailing form of cognition that thought must be supplemented with a non-conceptual absorption into objects, she does provide an insightful discussion of these criticisms. Our conceptual system has become ‘a world unto itself governed by its own laws’; we summarily identify ‘this internal world of detached signs’ with the objective world.15 Moreover, we not only liken objects to our concepts by subordinating objects to them, we also fragment objects into small, rigid pieces for purposes of explanation, prediction, and control.16 In fact, Adorno complains in Negative Dialectics that the ‘universal by which every individual is determined at all as one of his particular kind ... is borrowed from what is as heteronomous to the individual as anything once said to have been ordained for him by demons’ (ND 315). This conceptual imperialism, which impoverishes experience, characterizes identity thinking. With identity thinking, ‘the particular is dictated by the principle of perverted universality’ (ND 344), which ‘compresses the particular until it splinters, like a torture instrument.’ Here the universal is actually ‘working against itself, for its substance is the life of the particular; without the particular, the universal declines to an abstract, separate, eradicable form’ (ND 346). Earlier in Negative Dialectics Adorno also remarked that the universals which squeeze the life out of particulars are themselves wretchedly particular (ND 199) because they originate in an idiosyncratic experience of objects that is oriented exclusively to controlling them for the purpose of self-preservation. Measured against a more ‘complete reason,’ the prevailing ratio ‘unveils itself as being polarized and thus irrational even in itself, according to its principle’ (ND 317). Complete reason, or ‘realized reason,’ will leave the ‘particular reason of the universal behind’ when it respects the non-identity of objects with concepts and attempts to unearth the ‘utopian particular that has been buried beneath the universal’ (ND 318). The polarity between universal and particular takes a cognitive form. But it also appears on the macroscopic level in the guise of contemporary society, where individuals are subordinated to the interests of the economic and political order or to interests in profit and power that masquerade as universal but remain stubbornly particular. Identificatory cognition finds its social counterpart in the exchange principle through which ‘nonidentical individuals and performances become

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commensurable and identical’ (ND 146). As social conditions developed and became more complex, individuals ceded the task of selfpreservation to the state. Acknowledging that this transfer was necessary, Adorno also observes that it ‘all but inevitably ... puts the general rationality at odds with the particular human beings whom it must negate to become general and whom it pretends – and not only pretends – to serve’ (ND 318). Still, he realizes that rationality ‘cannot, any more than the subjective authority serving it, the ego, be simply split off from self-preservation.’17 Indeed, Adorno baldly states that rationality ‘should not be anything less than self-preservation, namely that of the species, upon which the survival of the individual literally depends.’18 Rather than serving the interests of a few in the name of all, however, Adorno thinks that reason should ultimately satisfy the drive for selfpreservation in such a way that both the universal – human species – and particular individuals are preserved. Only in this way will reason finally cast off its wretched particularity. Object Before I examine what it would mean to strive by way of concepts to transcend concepts, a few general remarks will be made about the status of the object in Adorno’s negative dialectics. Again, Adorno claims that objects are the non-conceptual substance or matter of concepts. In our ordinary dealings with objects, however, we allow our concepts to subsume them, eschewing diversity for unity, multifarious content for homogeneous form. Bernstein rightly observes that ordinary perceptual judgment ‘only wants from the object judged its familiarity, its fit within the conceptual order as a step within practical life.’19 As opposed to reflective judgment, which is open and receptive to objects, Western judgment has become determinative or formal. To cite Friedrich Schiller, whose work is certainly apposite here, when formal, determinative judgment substitutes for receptive judgment, nature’s ‘manifold variety’ is ‘entirely lost upon us, because we are seeking nothing in her but what we have put into her; because, instead of letting her come in upon us, we are thrusting ourselves out upon her, with all the impatient anticipations of reason.’20 While remaining completely open and receptive to objects results in a loss of self (as Sherratt also claims), unilaterally imposing conceptual form on the content of experience runs the risk of sacrificing the object altogether. Adorno contrasts his negative dialectics to Hegel’s dialectical philos-

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ophy when he insists that the ‘matters of true philosophical interest at this point in history are those in which Hegel, agreeing with tradition, expressed his disinterest,’ namely ‘nonconceptuality, individuality, and particularity’ (ND 8). Whereas Hegel argued at the beginning of his Phenomenology of Spirit that the spatio-temporal ‘thisness’ of sense objects ‘cannot be reached by language’ because language ‘belongs to consciousness, i.e. to that which is inherently universal,’21 Adorno focuses precisely on what Hegel maintained language cannot reach. In ‘Why Still Philosophy’ he even adopts the watchword of Husserl’s phenomenology: to the things themselves. But Adorno also contends that philosophers can only carry out this task if they reject eidetic intuition and think through ‘subjective and objective mediations without ... conforming to the latent primacy of organized method, which over and over again offers phenomenological movements only a series of fetishes, homemade concepts instead of their longed-for things.’22 Adorno not only wanted philosophy to direct itself to the things themselves, he famously postulated the preponderance of things or objects over the subject of cognition and its concepts. The priority (Vorrang) of the object can be inferred from both the possibility of conceiving an object that is not a subject and the contrasting impossibility of fully conceiving a subject that is not an object. ‘Not even as an idea,’ he writes, ‘can we conceive a subject that is not an object; but we can conceive an object that is not a subject.’ He continues: ‘To be an object also is part of the meaning of subjectivity; but it is not equally part of the meaning of objectivity to be a subject’ (ND 183). While abstraction is the ‘principle whereby the subject comes to be a subject at all’ (ND 181), the subject is itself ineradicably bodily, physical. This affinity between subject and object, their shared material basis in the spatio-temporal world, is what makes it possible for the subject to know objects (ND 185). According to Bernstein: ‘Affinity represents the indeterminate idea of our immersion in and being parts of nature, ontologically and epistemologically.’23 Indeed, this affinity between subject and object also helps to explain why the object preponderates. Despite the preponderance of the object, Adorno rejects naive realism when he denies that objectivity is pure immediacy (ND 184). If, ‘according to its own concept,’ the object is ‘not so thoroughly dependent upon subject as subject is dependent upon objectivity,’ the object is nonetheless ‘also mediated.’ Paradoxically perhaps, the object asserts its primacy through the very qualities and attributes that the subject ascribes to it. Because an affinity exists between subject and object,

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owing to the subject’s own objectivity, qualities deemed purely subjective are in fact ‘all the more an objective moment.’24 On the one hand, then, the prevailing identificatory mediation of objects blocks objectivity because ‘it fails to absorb entity [Seiendes], which objectivity is in essence’ (ND 185). On the other hand, to do justice to the primacy of the object ‘requires both reflection upon the subject and subjective reflection.’25 Attempting to rend ‘the veil it weaves about the object’ in order to cognize it, the subject must simultaneously entrust itself to its subjective experience because that experience has an objective content of its own without which the subject could not acquire knowledge of objects at all. This is why Adorno makes the ostensibly perplexing claim that wherever the subject ‘senses subjective contingency, the primacy of the object shimmers through: that in the object which is not a subjective addition.’26 He even goes so far as to state that, if the object lacked the moment of subjectivity, ‘its own objectivity would become nonsense.’27 Objectivity would become nonsense because, without the moment of subjectivity, it would be reduced to a pure substratum, a subjectum (ND 184), or the ‘very reflection of abstract subjectivity.’28 Thus, without subjective mediation, the object would become as vacuous as Kant’s transcendental subject, an empty X inaccessible to cognition. Again, Adorno insists that the very preponderance of the object ‘is solely attainable for subjective reflection, and for reflection on the subject’ (ND 185). Accessible only through subjective mediation, the particular must also be thought, cognized. Hence: ‘Mediation of the object means that it must not be statically, dogmatically hypostatized but can be known only as it entwines with subjectivity.’ Conversely, ‘mediation of the subject means that without the moment of objectivity, the subject would be literally nil’ (ND 186, trans. mod.). Entity, non-conceptuality, particularity, individuality, matter: these are just some of the concepts that Adorno uses to describe objectivity. As subjective mediations of objectivity, these concepts too act as blocks to objectivity when they absorb it without remainder. The concept of particularity itself serves to illustrate this block. As with other concepts, when particular objects are subordinated to the concept of particularity, this concept ‘cuts short what the particular is and what nonetheless cannot be directly named, and it replaces this with identity’ (ND 173). Subsumed under this concept, particulars are made identical qua particular. In fact, it is this identificatory subsumption of objects under concepts that Adorno labelled ideology and criticized throughout his

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work. According to Adorno, ‘the mistake in traditional thinking is that identity is taken for the goal’ (ND 149). His negative dialectics ‘says no more, to begin with, than that objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder, that they come to contradict the traditional norm of adequacy.’ This contradiction ‘indicates the untruth of identity, the fact that the concept does not exhaust the thing conceived’ (ND 5). In the next section, I shall explore what Adorno means by nonidentity thinking. Non-identity Thinking Like Sherratt, Bernstein is interested in the ‘suppressed mimetic moment of the concept,’ and he makes use of Kant’s ideas about reflective aesthetic judgment to elaborate on non-identity thinking. In contrast to Sherratt, however, Bernstein respects Adorno’s injunction to transcend concepts by using concepts. As Bernstein correctly observes, the non-conceptual can be unsealed with concepts because what is not identical with thought ‘is not the other of conceptual understanding, but that part of the content of the concept which is passed over and abstracted from in the disenchantment of the world and the rationalization of reason.’29 Moreover, Adorno explicitly rejects the equation of non-identity thinking with a non-discursive, non-representational aesthetic absorption in objects when he argues that negative dialectics must not break its link with language: ‘to abolish language in thought’ would entail the blind sacrifice of ‘whatever is not merely significative in dealing with the object.’ Non-identity thinking runs completely counter to a non-linguistic absorption in objects. Appealing to the affinity that exists between concept and object, Adorno insists that ‘it is in language alone that like knows like’ (ND 56). For his part, however, what Bernstein misses in his account of nonidentity thinking is its properly speculative moment. To respond to the non-identical, Bernstein mistakenly thinks it sufficient that concepts are oriented to the matter or substance of thought, or that a concerted attempt is made ‘to restore to the concept the dignity of the material, naming axis.’30 Adorno himself reveals the limitations in Bernstein’s account when he describes the manner in which dialectical thought approaches objects. According to Adorno, the ‘means employed in negative dialectics for the penetration of its hardened objects is possibility – the possibility of which their reality has cheated the objects and which is nonetheless visible in each one’ (ND 52). Whereas Bernstein asserts

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that restoring the material axis to concepts would by itself disclose the damage done to ‘hardened’ or reified objects, Adorno argues that what is needed to effect this disclosure is an orientation towards the unrealized, emphatic possibilities that inhere in damaged life. Of course, concepts must also do justice to their non-conceptual substratum. On this point, Bernstein is both insightful and convincing. Nevertheless, to do justice to this substratum entails more than expressing or naming the material and affective basis of cognition. Indeed, Bernstein himself seems to recognize that non-identity thinking must also comprise a speculative orientation towards objects when he claims that his complex concept is the key to understanding experiences that interrupt the context of immanence to reveal ‘the possibility of otherness,’31 or that promise a form of life in which secular norms and principles would be fully instantiated.32 Despite this claim, however, Bernstein’s conceptual framework for non-identity thinking lacks the speculative dimension necessary for disclosing possibility. What is nonidentical with concepts is non-identical not only in the sense that objects are not concepts, but also in the more emphatic sense that objects fail to realize the potential inherent in them that would make them adequate to concepts. In the introduction to Negative Dialectics, Adorno argues that one ‘aspect of immersion in particularity, that extreme enhancement of dialectical immanence, must also be the freedom to step out of the object, a freedom which the identity claim cuts short’ (ND 28). Immersing itself in objects, thought steps out of them only by locating the possibilities immanent in objects that point beyond their damaged form. Thought can step out of the object because it is already an ‘act of negation, of resistance to that which is forced upon it.’ All thought ‘tends beyond that which merely exists, is merely, “given”’; it revolts against ‘being importuned to bow to every immediate thing’ (ND 19). In Minima Moralia, Adorno insisted that what is essential to critical non-identificatory thought is just this ‘element of exaggeration, of over-shooting the object, of self-detachment from the weight of the factual, so that instead of merely reproducing being [thought] can, at once rigorous and free, determine it.’ If thought should abandon this ‘medium of virtuality, of anticipation that cannot be wholly fulfilled by any single piece of actuality ... everything it states becomes, in fact, untrue.’33 Apart from its mimetic dimension, non-identity thinking also expresses the longing of the universal concept to become identical with the particular thing (ND 149). The concept longs to become identical

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with its object precisely because the object is not yet identical with it. Here, the inadequacy of concept and object is experienced in the object rather than the concept. Indeed, at one point Adorno insists that the task of dialectical cognition is to ‘pursue the inadequacy of thought and thing, to experience it in the thing’ (ND 153). In this case, the identity of object and concept becomes an unrealized normative goal: what is, is not yet what it ought to be according to its concept. Concepts reveal that ‘nothing particular is true; no particularity is itself, as its particularity requires’ (ND 152), or that ‘[w]hat is is more than it is.’ Adorno explains that this ‘“more” is not imposed upon’ the object ‘but remains immanent to it as that which has been pushed out of it’ (ND 161). Nonidentity thinking respects the concept’s longing to become identical with the thing by revealing the potential that lies hidden in objects themselves. The particular object ‘would come to itself only by voiding’ the contradiction or antagonism between concept and object in such a way that it not only holds on ‘to that of which the general concept robs’ it, but finally measures up to what the concept promises, thereby ‘achieving an identity of the particular with its concept’ (ND 151). In a passage that deserves far greater consideration than it has received in the secondary literature, Adorno states that negative dialectics entails the reciprocal ‘criticism of the universal and of the particular.’ Critics must judge both ‘whether the concept does justice to what it covers’ and ‘whether the particular fulfills its concept’ (ND 146). Here Adorno certainly demands that the particular be given its due or, in Bernstein’s terms, that concepts exhibit an intransitive material axis. However, he also insists that the particular fulfil its concept. To grant priority to the object does not imply that the universal concept may be treated like ‘a soap bubble’ because such treatment ‘would let theory grasp neither the universal’s pernicious supremacy in the status quo nor the idea of conditions which in giving individuals their due would rid the universal of its wretched particularity’ (ND 199). Only by making good on the potential that is immanent in it, a potential that some concepts evoke or intimate, would the object finally come into its own. Bernstein contends that ‘it is [the] premise of Adorno’s enterprise ... that there are no actual possibilities in contemporary experience that point toward a future structurally discontinuous with it.’34 Bernstein is correct to the extent that he suggests that Adorno advocated radical change over mere reform. At the same time, however, it is entirely unclear how he would interpret the claim that negative dialectics should deploy possibility to penetrate objects. In fact, Bernstein seems

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to ignore the full significance of Adorno’s discussion of Kant’s concept of freedom in Negative Dialectics, where Adorno models the emphatic dimension of this concept. Although the concept of freedom arose during a particular stage in our history and expresses our conflictive experience of ourselves ‘as now free, now unfree’ (ND 299), it cannot be reduced to our contemporary experience of freedom. Our experience of freedom contradicts what is predicated of it under the concept because the concept ‘feeds on the idea of a condition in which individuals would have qualities not to be ascribed to anyone here and now.’ Individuals are both more and less than what this concept attributes to them: they are more because the concept of freedom does not exhaust them qua particular, but they are less because no individual today can fully experience the possibilities conveyed by the concept (ND 150). On Bernstein’s account, Adorno was seeking a mode of possibility that lies somewhere between logical (conceptual) and actual (nomological) possibility.35 Having rejected the idea that there are ‘actual possibilities’ in experience that point radically beyond it, Bernstein later poses this problem: ‘how can an actual event demonstrate possibility without demonstrating something to be actually possible?’ Or, ‘how can we have an experience of something that is neither fully actual nor fully nonactual?’36 Adorno offers a solution to this problem in his description of how possibility inhabits experience. To return to his discussion of the idea of freedom, freedom against society ‘lives in the crushed, abused individual’s features alone.’ Freedom becomes ‘concrete’ in experiences that manifest ‘resistance to repression’ (ND 265). Here Adorno argues that the concept of freedom arose in resistance to domination. It is precisely the painful experience of unfreedom, or of ‘nature-controlling sovereignty and its social form, domination over people,’ that suggests ‘the opposite to our consciousness: the idea of freedom’ (ND 220; trans. mod.). As a ‘polemical counter-image to the suffering brought on by social coercion’ (ND 223), freedom ‘can only be grasped in determinate negation [bestimmte Negation] in accordance with the concrete shape of unfreedom’ (ND 231; trans. mod.). Consequently, unfreedom ‘is not just an impediment to freedom but a premise of its concept’ (ND 265).37 Freedom remains an idea that will be realized, if at all, ‘only in the organization of a free society’ (ND 276). It is not ‘actually possible’ in the sense that it could be realized under existing conditions. This may help to explain why Adorno calls such concepts ‘negative signs’ that ‘live in the cavities between what things claim to be and what they are’

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(ND 150). Since historical conditions falsify our concept of freedom, this concept ‘lags behind itself [bleibt hinter sich zurück] as soon as we apply it empirically’ (ND 151). Yet these very conditions also gave rise to a concept that evokes more than what freedom currently is – resistance to domination – by recoiling in its very universality against coercive domination, or the wretchedly particular universal that now shapes the experiences from which the emphatic concept itself issues (ND 221). In earlier work Adorno even stated that concepts like freedom are true an sich, or in themselves.38 In Minima Moralia and ‘Beitrag zur Ideologienlehre,’ for example, he rejected the view that such concepts are purely ideological, or manifestations of false consciousness, on the grounds that emphatic concepts also evoke something ‘spiritual, which is independent, substantial, and has its own standard.’ Although these concepts are untrue because of ‘this supersession, of the renunciation of a social foundation,’ their ‘moment of truth’ nonetheless ‘clings to such independence, to a consciousness which is more than the simple impression of what exists and which accordingly strives to penetrate what exists.’39 Bernstein acknowledges that the ‘fugitive ethical experiences’ his complex concept must capture are ‘forged in resistance.’40 However, he fails to see that Adorno believes resistive experience also gives rise to concepts in which the possibility of something other than damaged life glimmers. Emphatic concepts disclose possibilities that are neither fully actual, because experience negates them, nor fully non-actual precisely because they are gleaned through such experience in resistance to it. In other words, these concepts arise through the negation of what is negative. This Hegelian idea of determinate negation, on which Adorno draws extensively in his discussion of freedom, reappears when Adorno asserts that criticism of the negative or false is the precondition for whatever knowledge we may have of the positive or true. At the end of ‘Individuum und Organisation’ he remarks: ‘We may not know what people are and what the correct arrangement of human affairs should be, but we do know what they should not be and what arrangement of human affairs is false. Only in this particular and concrete knowledge is the other positive one open to us.’41 The lecture ‘Critique’ ends with a similar claim: ‘[T]he false, once determinately known and precisely expressed, is already an index of what is right and better.’42 Yet it would also be a mistake to suggest that emphatic concepts yield a completely positive vision of undamaged life. Indeed, Adorno also problematizes the extent to which we can think beyond the given, or

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imagine something radically other than what exists. Believing it imperative to make the attempt to think this Other, he was well aware that emphatic concepts are themselves products of damaged life. If the concept of freedom has a truth content to the extent that it recoils in its universality against particular experiences of domination, it is also invariably tainted by the experiences from which it is derived. Criticism of damaged life can do no more than to raise the spectre of what is other, the nonidentical, by using concepts that are themselves contaminated by what exists. The preponderance of objective conditions over thought means that even the critic’s imagination is inevitably chained to her and to her time ‘as static points of reference.’ This is why Adorno warns: ‘If a man will not be stopped from differing and criticizing, he is still not free to put himself in the right.’ In the right world, a world in which the better potential that exists in this one would be redeemed, ‘even the sharpest critic would be a different person, like the ones he wants to change’ (ND 352). Defining utopia as the ‘consciousness of possibility that sticks to the concrete, the undisfigured’ (ND 56–7), Adorno makes a further point about possibility. Apart from being contaminated by damaged life, possibility blocks off (versperren) utopia because its ‘inextinguishable color comes from non-being’ whose servant is thought, or ‘a piece of existence extending – however negatively – to that which is not’ (ND 57). Since they more or less impotently profile what does not yet exist, and may never exist, the colours of a possible world, of non-being, cannot be used to paint a complete picture of utopia. With some qualifications, then, Bernstein is correct to claim that ‘there are no actual possibilities of what would be different.’43 Furthermore, Adorno argued that, if possibility – that which is not – should ever unfold into actuality – that which is – it would be utterly transformed in the process. After characterizing Kant’s concepts of freedom and the intelligible character as subjective possibilities, things that come to be, not things that are, Adorno cautions against incorporating them into existence through description when he writes: ‘In the right condition, as in the Jewish theologoumenon, all things would differ only a little from the way they are; but not even the least can be conceived now as it would be then’ (ND 298–9). At the end of Minima Moralia, Adorno describes the difficulties facing those who try to wrest possibility from damaged life for purposes of immanent criticism. Critics are burdened with the task of fashioning ‘entirely from felt contact with their objects’ perspectives on the world

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that ‘displace and estrange’ it. They must reveal the world to be ‘as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light.’ By invoking possibilities immanent in actuality, thought acquires the critical leverage needed to achieve this Verfremdungseffekt. For Adorno, such estrangement through the lens of possibility ‘is the simplest of things’ because ‘consummate negativity, once squarely faced, delineates the mirror image of its opposite.’ Nevertheless, since thought only derives its idea of a better world from ‘the same distortion and indigence which it seeks to escape,’ such estrangement is ‘also the utterly impossible thing because it presupposes a standpoint removed, even though by a hair’s breadth, from the scope of existence.’44 Thus, critical theorists strive to think what it is virtually impossible to think: the possible, because only possibility affords a critical, utopian perspective on damaged life. These reflections on possibility explain why Adorno believes nonidentity can neither be obtained directly as something completely positive, nor fully reached by negating the negative. ‘If the whole is the spell, if it is the negative,’ Adorno writes, ‘a negation of particularities – epitomized in that whole – remains negative’ (ND 158). He adds that the positive dimension of the negation of particularities is ‘criticism, determinate negation’ (ND 159; trans. mod.). As critical, non-identity thinking negates the negative, thereby giving rise to emphatic concepts whose ‘positivity’ consists in indirect allusions to a world that is not identical with this one. Since what is other than damaged life, nonidentical with it, remains radically Other, non-identity thinking is just the frail, ephemeral, critical thought that what ought to be does not yet exist, and that what exists is not yet what it ought to be. Wrongly claiming that determinate negation yields something fully positive for critical thought, Michael Theunissen is certainly right to assert that negating the negative does not yield something ontologically positive.45 To cite Adorno: if ‘the seriousness of unswerving negation lies in its refusal to lend itself to sanctioning things as they are,’ it is still the case that ‘to negate a negation does not bring about its reversal; it proves, rather, that the negation was not negative enough’ (ND 159–60). Or again, ‘what is negated is negative until it has passed’ (ND 160). Concluding Remarks According to Bernstein, the non-identity of concept and object is respected by means of naming to the extent that naming is ‘ideal,’ a con-

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ceptual operation, and so unlike that to which it refers, its non-conceptual referent. Yet, pace Bernstein, when the complex concept rescues the suppressed mimetic moment of the concept, it is just the identity of concept and object that prevails because Bernstein’s version of non-identity thinking would mean that concept and object achieve likeness in language. For Bernstein, non-identity thinking consists in naming the affective and material point at which concept and object coincide, where like knows like, or where the concept is in some sense identical with its object. Insisting that dialectical cognition must also identify objects in the way that Bernstein suggests, Adorno argues that nonidentity thinking ‘identifies to a greater extent, and in other ways, than identity thinking’ precisely when it aims at ‘[e]lements of affinity – of the object itself to the thought of it’ (ND 149; trans. mod.). Naming is the identificatory dimension of non-identity thinking. As such it does not fully satisfy non-identity thinking because what is not identical with thought in the descriptive sense (the object is not the concept) is also non-identical with thought in a second, more emphatic sense. What is, is not identical with thought because it is not yet what critical thought discloses it ought to be. If particulars are to be saved, rescued, or redeemed – and Adorno uses all these terms to describe the task of negative dialectics – this task cannot be effected solely by naming them, or by saying what they are. Bernstein is simply incorrect to argue that the ‘transcending impulse of consciousness’ is exhausted in ‘the orientation to the material axis of the concept,’46 or in ‘an encounter with the sensuous particular where that particular is experienced in its own right and not as an example or token of anything else.’47 On its own, a mimetic relationship between the reified subject and its equally reified objects cannot fully reveal the possibility of otherness that Bernstein recognizes his complex concept must disclose. In the final analysis, Bernstein’s conceptually articulated mimetic relationship to objects ultimately entails likening concepts to damaged life, or uncritically identifying with it. In ‘Why Still Philosophy’ Adorno insisted that philosophy can prove itself ‘the most advanced consciousness’ only when it is ‘permeated with the potential of what could be different.’48 While all thought heeds a potential in objects, unconsciously obeying the idea of making amends for the damage it has done, philosophy alone makes this unconscious tendency conscious. It is accompanied by the hope for ‘reconcilement, because the resistance of thought to mere things in being, the commanding freedom of the subject, intends in the object

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even that of which it was deprived by objectification’ (ND 19). Concepts make amends for damaged life by refusing to turn objects into something fixed and immutable or to be satisfied with naming them as they now are. Only by aiming at the ‘process stored in the object’ (ND 163), at what the object may come to be, not at what it currently is in its reified form, can concepts do justice to the object as something living because ‘nothing could be experienced as truly alive if something that transcends life were not promised also’ (ND 375). This promise of something other than what now exists, which is ‘wrested from reality by negating it,’ is also ‘the only form in which truth appears.’49 This is why Adorno maintained that the only philosophy ‘which can be responsibly practised in the face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption.’50

NOTES 1 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), 10. Hereafter ND. 2 J.M. Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 33. 3 Yvonne Sherratt, Adorno’s Positive Dialectic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 204. 4 I am developing ideas that I advanced in the fourth chapter of my book The Culture Industry Revisited: Theodor W. Adorno on Mass Culture (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996); in ‘The Rhetoric of Protest: Adorno and the Liberal Democratic Tradition,’ Rethinking Marxism 9.1 (1996–7): 58–74; ‘Adorno, Ideology, and Ideology Critique,’ Philosophy and Social Criticism 27.1 (2001): 1–20; and ‘Ein Reaktionäres Schwein: Political Activism and Prospects for Change in Adorno,’ Revue internationale de Philosophie 227 (2004): 47–67. 5 Seyla Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia: A Study in the Foundations of Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 34. Adorno cites this letter himself in ‘Critique,’ in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 282. 6 Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics, 263. 7 Ibid., 280. 8 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Marginalia to Theory and Praxis,’ in Critical Models, 272.

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9 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: The Seabury Press, 1972), xvi. 10 Ibid., 54. 11 See also Sherratt, Adorno’s Positive Dialectic, 114: ‘Adorno thinks that knowledge acquisition implies a mastery of concepts, which in a given context are prior to sense impressions.’ 12 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘On Subject and Object,’ in Critical Models, 254. 13 Ibid., 254–5. 14 Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics, 315. 15 Sherratt, Adorno’s Positive Dialectics, 121. 16 Ibid., 123. 17 Adorno, ‘Marginalia to Theory and Praxis,’ 272. 18 Ibid., 273. 19 Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics, 315. 20 Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man: In a Series of Letters, trans. and ed. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L.A. Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 89n2. 21 G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 66. 22 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Why Still Philosophy,’ in Critical Models, 13. 23 Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics, 291. 24 Adorno, ‘On Subject and Object,’ 250. 25 Ibid., 251. 26 Ibid., 254. 27 Ibid., 257. 28 Ibid., 250. 29 Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics, 273. 30 Ibid., 322. 31 Ibid., 444. 32 Ibid., 38. 33 Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1974), 126–7. 34 Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics, 418. 35 Ibid., 418. At times, however, Adorno appears to conceive of possibility as Aristotelian potency or potential. Speaking of simple identifying judgments, Adorno writes that these too contain a utopian element to the extent that they imply that ‘“A” is to be what it is not yet. Such hope is tied to the breaks in the form of predicative identity. Philosophical tradition had a word for these breaks: “ideas”’ (ND 150). Indeed, Adorno uses the word ‘potential’ (Potential) throughout his work.

180 Deborah Cook 36 Ibid., 435. 37 Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Progress,’ in Critical Models, 152: ‘The ex-plosive tendency of progress ... requires the unfolding of reason through the domination of nature. Only reason, the principle of societal domination inverted into the subject, would be capable of abolishing this domination. The possibility of wresting free is effectuated by the pressure of negativity.’ 38 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Beitrag zur Ideologienlehre,’ in Soziologische Schriften 1, ed. R. Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972), 473. 39 Ibid., 474. See also Minima Moralia, 44. 40 Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics, 447. 41 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Individuum und Organisation,’ Soziologische Schriften 1, 456. 42 Adorno, ‘Critique,’ in Critical Models, 288. In ‘Television as Ideology,’ in Critical Models, 70, Adorno ends with the same point: ‘However, just as everywhere else, the canon of the negative would not be far from that of the positive.’ 43 Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics, 418. 44 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 247. 45 Michael Theunissen, ‘Negativität bei Adorno,’ in Adorno-Konferenz, 1983 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1983), 51. 46 Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics, 426, 428. 47 Adorno, ‘Why Still Philosophy,’ 16. 48 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 98. 49 Ibid., 247.

7 Experience and Aura: Adorno, McDowell, and ‘Second Nature’ j o nat h a n s h o r t

A common concern for both older and more recent social theory is the impact of the scientific revolution, specifically the impact of what Weber called ‘disenchantment,’ on modern societies. Thus, it is not surprising that philosophers with an interest in the work of first-generation critical theorist Theodor W. Adorno have recently been drawn to the work of contemporary Anglo-American philosopher John McDowell. J.M. Bernstein, in particular, has written an important account of the affinities and differences to be found in the respective works of Adorno and McDowell, and it is the theme of experience in Bernstein’s essay that this paper takes as its point of departure.1 In this respect, Bernstein rightly argues that McDowell’s attempted ‘exorcism’ of the epistemological dualism between disenchanted nature and human reason, by means of an expanded notion of human experience, avoids the central issue of the transcending social-historical forces at work in bringing about this dualism and in preventing its overcoming. Yet while insisting on this critical point, Bernstein also claims that ‘this difference may be as nothing, certainly in comparison with what is shared’ (RN 218). Ultimately, while criticizing McDowell, Bernstein attempts to remain neutral about whether his criticisms constitute ‘friendly refinements or corrections’ (RN 220). I want to argue in what follows that if the difference between Adorno’s speculative construal of emphatic experience and McDowell’s discussion of experience as human second nature are developed and drawn out, there can be little question that Adorno’s account of experience constitutes a critique of McDowell’s position.2 The upshot of this comparison is that despite Adorno’s well-known pessimism regarding the prospects for sufficiently radical social transformation, his understanding of metaphysical experience nevertheless

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holds open precisely those transformative possibilities that appear to be foreclosed in McDowell. Disenchantment and Epistemological Crisis Before launching into a discussion of these critical differences, it might be useful to get clear on what Adorno and McDowell do have in common. It is uncontroversial that for both Adorno and McDowell the relationship between some notion of modern disenchantment, prominently on display in the modern scientific paradigm and in modern epistemology, is centrally important. What McDowell intends by disenchantment is that in the aftermath of the natural scientific revolution, the implausibility of taking the natural world as a repository of humanly meaningful events becomes a permanent feature of epistemic and social reality. If the pre-scientific way of seeing the natural world as intertwined with human meanings helped humans feel as though they had their place within a greater order, this ‘belonging’ becomes from the modern perspective an alienation from conceptual capacities that have to be understood as uniquely human; for modern thought, rationality becomes the self-reflexively productive activity of human minds, individually and collectively. Accordingly, the modern scientific revolution, which largely divested or disenchanted the natural world, is also (part of) ‘an achievement of modern thought,’ allowing human beings to understand rationality as involving capacities with internal properties of its own (MW 71). This modernization of thought creates problems of its own, however. The place of humanly generated meanings, in the midst of a natural world basically alien or indifferent to them, subsequently becomes mysterious and troubling. In more narrowly epistemological terms, this issue manifests itself as the dilemma of how to think the relationship between sensibility and conceptuality. Following the scientific revolution, there is the ostensibly inescapable notion that, as McDowell puts it, ‘sensibility ... is part of our nature,’ so that ‘its operations are what they are by virtue of their positions in the realm of law’ (MW 72). But the ability to conceptualize entails that the information yielded by the senses is placed into rational relations of meaning. To that extent, ‘concepts are sui generis precisely in that it is not by virtue of their location in the realm of law that things instantiate those concepts’ (MW 72). The seemingly inevitable consequence is that ‘if we go on equating something’s place in nature with its location in the realm of law, we are

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debarred from holding that an experience has its conceptual content precisely as whatever natural phenomena it is’ (MW 76, emphasis added). The dualism between nature and reason, or sensibility and conceptuality (or spontaneity), thereby apparently becomes inescapable for moderns. It comes to appear unavoidable that human beings are ‘peculiarly bifurcated, with a foothold in the animal kingdom and a mysterious separate involvement in an extra-natural world of rational connections’ (MW 78). Under these conditions, philosophers are faced with two related but unpalatable epistemological choices. One choice involves accepting that sensible contents cannot be thought of as conceptually meaningful, so that knowledge is constituted by, but limited to, its rational coherence; while McDowell describes this view as ‘coherentism,’ it might also be described as a form of subjective idealism.3 The second choice involves identifying, usually through a process of analytic regress, some supposedly pre-conceptual bit of reality, something just ‘given,’ that serves as the (irrational) grounding for conceptual knowledge; this might best be called foundationalism. But as Kant already understood, both these options are unworkable, the former yielding epistemological emptiness and the latter producing epistemological blindness. From this brief sketch of the epistemological symptoms of scientific disenchantment in the work of McDowell, it is a simple matter to show that substantial agreement between Adorno and McDowell lies in their respective refutation of those epistemological symptoms through a return to Kant’s understanding of the relationship between intuition (sensibility) and concept (spontaneity) in the Critique of Pure Reason. It is worthwhile quoting fully Kant’s famous formulation of this relationship: ‘Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind. It is, therefore, just as necessary to make our concepts sensible, that is, to add the object to them in intuition, as to make our intuitions intelligible, that is, to bring them under concepts ... Only through their union can knowledge arise.’4 It is fairly obvious that both philosophers take Kant’s formula as a refutation of both subjective idealism and foundationalism. For McDowell’s purposes, what Kant intends by a necessary union between concept and intuition is that ‘[t]he relevant conceptual capacities are drawn on in receptivity ... It is not that they are exercised on an extra-conceptual deliverance of receptivity.’ Receptivity or experience is therefore ‘a kind of occurrence or state that already has conceptual content. In experience one takes in, for instance sees, that things are thus

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and so’ (MW 9, original emphasis). When one turns to Adorno’s understanding of the relationship between intuition and concept a corresponding position emerges. Attacking a subjective idealism of purely self-referential concepts, Adorno writes that ‘[w]ithout specific thoughts, thinking would contravene its very concept, and these thoughts instantly point to entities.’5 Or perhaps more explicitly still, ‘Nonconceptuality, inalienable from the concept, disavows the concept’s being-in-itself. It changes the concept’ (ND 137). Simultaneously, against foundationalism, Adorno argues that ‘[t]here is no peeping out. What would lie in the beyond [i.e., the fundament] makes its appearance only in the materials and categories within’ (ND 140).6 McDowell and Adorno each utilize Kant’s work as a basis for showing modern epistemological dualism to be simply a false opposition. Both would thus agree that what shows up in and through concepts is not something conceptual, that the very notion of a fact or a conceptual content implies something not identical to the concept; they also agree that any workable epistemology must reciprocally insist that the non-conceptual content received is always conceptually mediated and formed, that there is never a direct experience of the non-conceptual in itself. And yet, agreement about Kant’s understanding of the relationship between concept and intuition does not suggest anything like an overall correspondence between these positions. On the contrary, what they share becomes at once the point where they part company. ‘Exorcism’ and Human Second Nature One way to begin to get at the divergence between McDowell and Adorno is to examine just what role McDowell envisages conceptual content to play in his alternative to the epistemological dualism rehearsed above. In the passage quoted earlier, McDowell insisted that experience of independent reality, while passive, already draws on conceptual capacities. But to know that receptivity is drawing upon concepts requires that conceptual capacities can be utilized outside receptive situations as well. This is why McDowell argues that ‘the capacities that are drawn on in experience are recognizable as conceptual only against the background of the fact that someone who has them is responsive to rational relations’ (MW 12–13). Because rational relations extend beyond the context of any given experience, linking with other rational relations and enabling their use in experiential judgments, these relations form a ‘rational network,’ providing a conceptu-

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ally mediated image of the world. Since what receptivity takes in is already conceptually mediated, the sensory perception forming the content of experience is always informed by the relevant features of the broader rational network of which such perception is a part, functioning much like a rational proposition about that aspect of the rational network. Perception confirms or denies the relevant aspects of the rational network’s picture of the world. McDowell’s account allows the rational network to be both self-correcting and cumulative because the contents of experience are open to interpretive judgment by each subsequent experience in light of the relevant portions of the rational network or ‘space of reasons.’7 While the space of reasons is always accountable to on-going or new experiential content, and thus, to how things are, correspondingly, experiential content that does not fit the picture of reality currently provided by the space of reasons is also accountable to the reflective judgment provided by that space. The rational network or space of reasons includes the reflexive judgments of past experiences, so that conceptual knowledge (which is what these accumulated judgments would be) ‘is already borne by impressions that independent reality makes on one’s senses’ (MW 67); knowledge, as instantiated in the rational network, is the successful past application of concepts in receptive experience and its subsequent judgment, so that the network acts – however much in the background from the perspective of a given knowing subject – as the temporally cumulative basis of experiential judgment. While this account of perceptual experience is recognizably an empiricism, it also owes something to Hegel. McDowell, much like Adorno, claims that assigning a limit to the freedom of spontaneity can only be done from within spontaneity itself, that spontaneity and not something other than thinking sets limits on its freedom to conceptualize – and this is because the standard of truth can only be supplied by the concept. It is worthwhile quoting in slightly longer form a passage from the Phenomenology of Spirit that McDowell also quotes with approval: ‘In thinking, I am free, because I am not in an other, but remain simply and solely in communion with myself, and the object, which is for me the essential being, is in undivided unity my being-for-myself.’8 McDowell utilizes this Hegelian strand in his thinking in order to develop the originally Kantian insight that there is no ontological boundary to the conceptual space of rational relations, even while rejecting the more ‘metaphysical’ noumenal realm in Kantian thought. For McDowell, Kant’s initial depiction of the relation between intuition

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and sensibility is thwarted by the latter’s insistence on a noumenal or super-sensible reality beyond the boundary of possible empirical experience. As McDowell argues, ‘If we suppose that rational answerability lapses at some outermost point of the space of reasons, short of the world itself, our picture ceases to depict anything recognizable as empirical judgement’ (MW 42–3). This lapse would make it look ‘as if the ordinary empirical world were constituted by appearances of a reality beyond’ (MW 98). Hegel, on this reading, liberates Kant’s insight from its transcendental framework, allowing the claim that there is no boundary to the conceptual, that concepts do not stop short of the world itself (MW 83).9 According to McDowell, this super-sensible or foundationalist aspect to Kant’s epistemology was in no small measure his somewhat desperate attempt to deal with the problem of the place of human conceptual capacities once nature was conceived by the natural sciences as a series of law-governed events. Since disenchanted nature provides no place for the autonomy of rational relations, Kant ended up putting rationality beyond nature überhaupt. But once the problem of disenchantment is exorcised, the Kantian edifice of the super-sensible can be discarded as an understandable error belonging to a certain historical moment in the development of modern epistemology. Hence, resolving Kant’s antinomian understanding of spontaneous reason and lawful nature is not a matter of new theory-building as much as it is fully applying the Hegelian correction deemed unavailable to Kant. That is, McDowell’s response to the epistemological dualism that emerged at least partly as a consequence of scientific disenchantment is to turn the problem it poses around. Rather than trying to find a place for spontaneous reason within natural science’s disenchanted conception of nature, McDowell argues that natural science should be understood as an instance of the space of reason’s growth or development. Natural science does not yield a picture of reality tout court, but merely offers ‘a clear-cut understanding of the realm of law, and we can refuse to equate that with a new clarity about nature’ as a whole (MW 78, original emphasis). From this perspective, to understand nature from the perspective of natural science is to look at it from a certain vantage point afforded by the network of rational linkages within the more general network of rational relations characteristic of human knowledge; from here it is simply undeniable that law-governed relations are just an instance of a type of rational relations.

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In McDowell’s conception, the rational network, including science’s law-governed relations, reflects the practical experience of interacting with the world, and so it must be understood as the more or less successful instantiation of all the ways of experiencing the world characteristic of human beings. From this point of view, it now looks absurd to try to reduce all of these various ways of practically experiencing the world to only one of them, particularly since all experiential knowledge is, as McDowell has already shown, knowledge really pertaining to an independent world. This way of understanding the relationship between science and practical experience would allow a partial reenchantment of nature by positioning scientific knowledge as a subspecies of practical reason, a response to the varieties of possible experience for humans in the natural world as living beings. As a way of understanding the practical rationality he has been pursuing, McDowell suggests that the various aspects of experience embedded in rational networks ‘belong to our mode of living. And our mode of living is our way of actualizing ourselves as animals’ (MW 78). Since rational capacities reflect the different ways humans live their relationship to the world as living beings, McDowell thinks that the theory he has been pursuing substantially converges with Aristotle’s understanding of human beings as rational animals. He argues, consequently, that ‘[w]e need to recapture the Aristotelian idea that a normal mature human being is a rational animal, but without losing the Kantian idea that rationality operates freely in its own sphere’ (MW 85). It follows from this conception of human rationality that rational beliefs neither require nor can provide self-justification beyond those immanent to the rational network’s own contexts of application. McDowell writes that on the Aristotelian view he is recommending, ‘[w]e are alerted to these [rational] demands by acquiring the appropriate conceptual capacities. When a decent upbringing initiates us into the relevant way of thinking, our eyes are opened to the very existence of this tract of the space of reasons’ (MW 82). While McDowell argues that Aristotle’s theory of second nature should be amended to include a demand for continual reflection, he endorses the idea that ‘one can reflect only from the midst of the way of thinking one is reflecting about’ (MW 81). Reflection involves precisely employing that reflective judgment that new experiences demand, which bring the rational network’s ‘outlook to bear on a situation [that] alerts one to demands that are real,’ in a way that ‘would stand up to the outlook’s own reflective self-scrutiny’ (MW 81).

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Experience and Society It is on the issue of reflective self-scrutiny, however, that the inadequacy of a purely epistemological approach to human knowledge and experience is most pressingly revealed. Despite McDowell’s acknowledgment that the space of reasons can, and indeed must, be available independently of discreet instances of receptive experience, the only purpose of this claim is to demonstrate the non-mysteriousness of drawing on rational capacities in contexts where epistemological subjects passively experience the world. This feature of McDowell’s account marginalizes the significance of those aspects of the space of reasons that function independently of a more direct experience of the world, making them incidental to the main explanatory task of showing that the world is already concept-saturated. An important consequence of this marginalization is that the account of experiential judgment, the focus on how ‘thinking is answerable to the world,’ is rendered a matter for an empirical epistemology rather than broached as a social question (MW Introduction, xii). None of this is particularly surprising given that McDowell’s account of experience is meant to defend an empiricist theory of knowledge, but it is far from clear that this is enough as a non-reified account of human lives. Consider McDowell’s more reflective version of Aristotle’s ‘practical reason,’ outlined above. Here, the space of reasons McDowell has in mind changes as a result of reflective demands made on thinking by the world. But if the space of reasons not directly bearing on experience of the world is neglected, McDowell’s account will leave out those rational connections that are specifically social in origin and that inform experience without being called into question by it; these connections can be said to shape and colour experience without in any way having the structure of an empirical proposition about experience. In Aristotle’s case, for example, reflection about the treatment of slaves might well be possible on McDowell’s account, yet it is hard to understand how the institution of slavery as such might be brought under the selfscrutiny of an outlook in which the existence of slaves as a type of social being is considered perfectly natural, where this naturalness is just part of the space of reasons any normal adult in Ancient Greece would acquire.10 It would seem that no amount of empirical experience of particular slaves would necessarily call into question the naturalized institution of slavery. I would suggest that this problem arises because the idea that ques-

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tions of experience can be thought about in narrowly epistemological terms is already a piece of disenchanted reason, one of the hallmarks of which is that its characteristic modes of judging are unable to judge the rationality or lack thereof of its kind of reason at all. This is precisely because such questions would require a meta-reflection, beyond empirical experience, of the social relations of which empirical experience forms a part. From the perspective of social reflection, to pursue the rationality characteristic of disenchantment, that is, a rationality that fails to reflect on its social conditions of production, is itself irrational. It is from this vantage point of meta-reflection or cognition that Adorno and Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment argue that disenchantment is symptomatic of a larger problem within Western rationality, one whose features can only be grasped by a directly social critique. In their view, the undeniable advances made by modern scientific rationality go hand-in-hand with a society languishing under a surfeit of rationality. Not only is the process of technical mastery and social deformity consistent with the irrationality found in human pre-history, but at the apogee of modern development, positing itself as an independent vehicle of progress, disenchanted science unknowingly furthers the social irrationality in which it is deeply rooted. If enlightened reason received ‘all its subject matter from myths, in order to destroy them,’ to the point where reason itself ‘falls as judge under the spell of myth,’ any merely epistemological reconfiguration of enlightenment is already too late, being a victim of that process it aspires to undo.11 Because reason developed under the historic burden of the dual task of ‘liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters,’ ideals dialectically at odds with one another, the quest for mastery has meant that humans became more fearful the more complete their mastery (DE 1). Any resolution of this conflict would entail, at least, understanding the interconnections between disenchanted rationality and the social conditions in which that rationality comes to seem independent. This would also demand speculatively confronting social irrationality by seeing reflected in the reason of distorted second nature what the first nature of the human animal has become: ‘blind and mutilated’ (DE 31). A glimpse of this kind might release the hold of ‘that very claim to mastery which had enslaved it [reason] to nature’ (DE 31). This brief gloss of the meta-critique of reason found in Dialectic of Enlightenment suggests that the respective work of McDowell and Adorno have quite different foci. While McDowell focuses on disenchantment as a problem of epistemology, Adorno is concerned with

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that space of reasons exceeding answerability to any non-speculative epistemology as anything but neutral to its disenchanted functioning. So while Adorno might claim that philosophy’s practice should ‘lie in the diversity of objects that impinge upon it and of the objects it seeks, a diversity not wrought by any schema,’ a view that might appear to recommend a form of empirical experience close to that outlined by McDowell, it is also clear in this passage that Adorno is discussing the practice of a future ‘changed philosophy,’ one not currently available (ND 13). As Adorno writes in ‘Subject and Object,’ because ‘society is immanent to experience,’ any proper epistemology has an interest in going beyond epistemology towards a critique of society that would at once be a ‘critique of knowledge.’12 Adorno’s work consistently articulates the idea that the kind of free and open attitude allowing one to have an ‘unreduced experience in the medium of conceptual reflection’ is strictly impossible amidst the irrationality of present social conditions (ND 13). For Adorno, in socially sanctioned experience as currently constituted, ‘the supposedly pure object, free of any added thought or intuition, is the very reflection of abstract subjectivity’ (SO 250). Subjectivity is abstract because abstraction and formal exchangeability provide the model of experience in disenchanted capitalist societies, so that what empirical subjects are ‘for themselves, what they think they are, is secondary’ (SO 248). Given this, with a view quite the opposite of McDowell’s position on Kant, Adorno argues that Kant’s successors (including Hegel) acted prematurely in their ‘revocation’ of the transcendental subject, because the transcendental subject still presents an accurate theoretical image of what empirical subjects become under the exchange form; ‘the precedence of the abstract, rational relations that are abstracted from individuals and their conditions’ return to mould those individuals after their abstracted doubles (SO 248). Adorno’s suggestion that only in the full variety of subjective responses to objects could their objectivity be adequately reflected, while appearing out of keeping with our socially ingrained notions of objectivity, perhaps illustrates just how far away Adorno thinks these experiences are from us at present (SO 250). If such experiences are to be made available, a changed conception of experience must extend to the social conditions that mediate all epistemology. This point informs Adorno’s critical rejection of Hegel’s Absolute Concept as a reconciliation at the level of mere epistemology.13 Adorno’s rhetorical forays against the concept of the Absolute criticize Hegel for positing an identity between subject and object on the side of

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the subject. In the face of real social contradiction and irrationality, Adorno claims, Hegel’s ‘demand for complete consistency’ is itself contradictory.14 A conceptual Absolute can provide merely cognitive reconciliation between subject and object, and this ignores both that contradiction is socially real rather than epistemological and that only real social activity can resolve the antagonism of social reality. Adorno writes against the Absolute as a mere concept that ‘[o]nly through the process whereby the [social] contradiction becomes absolute, and not through the contradiction becoming alleviated in the absolute, could it disintegrate’ (AH 31, emphasis added). Needless to say, much of this critique of Hegel could be transferred to McDowell’s view that an epistemological therapeutic is anything like enough to resolve socially real disenchantment. Adornian ‘Emphatic Experience’ and Negativity With Adorno’s rejection of a purely epistemological reconciliation between subject and object, reason and nature, on the table, the stage is set to appreciate why Adorno wants to hold to the continuing truthvalue of the Kantian supersensible, while speculatively recasting it in light of contemporary social and historical conditions. While Adorno would agree with McDowell’s assessment that the Kantian supersensible is a response to disenchantment, Adorno argues that it reflects more than epistemological inadequacy on Kant’s part. If Kant had to accept the progress of social and scientific disenchantment in overthrowing traditional theology’s metaphysics of hope in a world hereafter, he maintained metaphysics’ insistence that ‘reflection is not cut short by the verdict on semblance’; to Kant, ongoing reflection suggested that despite the emerging social disenchantment, even ‘the hopelessly missed things’ yet exist (ND 393, 372). If for speculative reason even despair is possible only on the basis of something like its opposite, those metaphysical concepts eliminated as possibilities for substantive belief by disenchanted science still contain ‘the possibility of freedom,’ and so cannot be entirely abandoned (ND 396). Adorno takes this reading of Kant’s metaphysical ideas as his model for what he calls ‘metaphysical experience,’ whereby ‘the intelligible sphere which Kant envisioned would once again be “appearance”: it would be what that which is hidden from the finite mind shows to that mind’ (ND 392). That Adorno’s metaphysical experience is ‘appearance’ suggests that while on the one hand it is undeniably real at the level of individual

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experience, on the other it cannot be thought of as substantively real. Adorno’s emphatic experience is therefore located at the margins of socially sanctioned experience, in those individual experiences that are so idiosyncratically personal as to be foolish or even irrational by the standards of disenchanted reason’s definitions of empirical experience. Drawing inspiration from Proust’s meditations on the experience of remembered happiness, Adorno suggests that the adult’s capacities for fulfilment are deeply informed by childhood memories of experienced happiness. The importance of this passage requires that it be quoted at length: What is a metaphysical experience? ... [W]e are likely to visualize it as Proust did, in the happiness, for instance, that is promised by village names ... One thinks that going there would bring the fulfillment, as if there were such a thing. Being really there makes the promise recede like a rainbow. And yet one is not disappointed; the feeling now is one of being too close, rather, and not seeing it for that reason ... But what it takes to form this universal, this authentic part of Proust’s presentation, is to be entranced in one place without squinting at the universal. To the child it is self-evident that what delights him in his favorite village is found only there ... He is mistaken; but his mistake creates the model of experience, of a concept that will end up as the concept of the thing itself, not as a poor projection from things. (ND 373)

There is in this passage a palpable sense of Adorno’s recognition that he is on dangerous ground with regard to the tenability of these reflections, of their location just this side of the socially sanctioned divide between reason and absurdity. This recognition is what leads Adorno to describe these experiences in terms of their fragile, liminal quality, and why Adorno relies upon the concept of semblance to describe these experiences as something real, yet not existing in the domain of the fully thinkable. In this way, they have much in common with Adorno’s concept of the aesthetic aura derived from the work of Walter Benjamin. In Aesthetic Theory Adorno cites Benjamin’s claim that the aura of an artwork is the experience of a ‘unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be,’ through which, Adorno comments, ‘the artwork escapes its factual reality.’15 The childhood experience of place described above is thus quite close to Adorno’s discussion of the artwork’s aura, an experience in both cases of a liminal suspension between identity and nonidentity, reality and illusion, that Adorno in ‘Subject and Object’

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describes in terms of a pre-figuration of that reconciliation lying ‘beyond identity’ as much as ‘beyond contradiction’ (SO 247). While from a perspective like McDowell’s this notion of metaphysical or auratic experience might appear to commit Adorno to a form of foundationalism seeking to go behind the back of conceptual capacities, thereby gesturing towards something wholly unmediated, I believe this assessment misses what Adorno is doing. The notion of aura retrieves the trace of an unreduced experiential content – and thus, as Adorno argued in ‘Subject and Object,’ an objective content as well – escaping or exceeding its conceptual reception from the vantage point of societal actuality, and this is why it must remain a harbinger of the true while appearing untrue under present conditions. While aura does indicate an experience of something lying beyond, this beyond does not appear as something unmediated, but becomes negatively indexed to what subjects are unable to conceptualize under a disenchanted conceptual regime, with this inability critically joined to its transcending social conditions. It is because the content of an auratic experience cannot be made sense of under disenchanted social concepts that its content acts as a historical critique of the concept in its given (identifying) form. Aura or metaphysical experience stands in exactly the same relationship to the identifying concept as does the non-identical in Negative Dialectics. The non-identical, ‘whatever will not fit this principle [of identity], whatever differs in quality, comes to be designated as a contradiction’ from the standpoint of the identifying concept (ND 5). Adorno’s account of metaphysical experience will appear to contradictorily posit something foundational or unmediated while insisting on the conceptual mediation of all content. For Adorno this apparent contradiction is not only unavoidable, but worthwhile, if something other than logical consistency is the goal of thinking. Simultaneously, rather than taking refuge in an aestheticism that can easily be thought mystical or irrational, Adorno is excavating the social trajectory of Kantian metaphysics through disenchanted thought’s disintegration into subjective reason and identity-thinking. Thought’s refusal of any externally imposed criteria of adequacy entails thought’s dependence on what is extraconceptual or non-thought, that is, upon social conditions. As Adorno puts it on the final page of Negative Dialectics, even the ‘smallest intramundane traits would be of relevance to the absolute,’ an absolute that would by excluding them be convicting itself of falsehood (ND 408). Negative dialectics’ articulation of the contents of auratic or metaphysical experience in terms of negativity and contradiction, however,

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is meant to guarantee and safeguard the positivity of its content. While Adorno all but completely resisted the positive theorization of this content, one of his closest friends had fewer reservations. It is consequently possible to approach Adorno’s understanding of childhood experience and the category of the metaphysical experience by means of Walter Benjamin’s work. For the latter, children’s subjectivity partakes of possibilities absent from adult cognition, providing access to what Adorno describes as that ‘objective meaning that surpasses subjective intention’ (AT 275). Through play, perhaps the most characteristic activity of children, experience is cognitive and somatic at once, closely resembling modes of intensely creative artistic practice. In her essay ‘Dream World of Mass Culture,’ Susan Buck-Morss describes Benjamin’s understanding of the experience of play in terms of mimetic cognition.16 For Benjamin, in Buck-Morss’s words, ‘Children’s cognition ... is tactile, hence tied to action ... because, rather than accepting the given meaning of things, children get to know objects by laying hold of them and using them creatively, releasing from them new possibilities of meaning’ (DW 321). Much of this mimetic cognition is destroyed by the process of socialization, which amounts to a disenchanting of the individual that repeats the enlightening disenchantment of the species. ‘Bourgeois socialization suppresses this activity: parroting back the “correct” answer, looking without touching, solving problems “in the head,” sitting passively, learning to do without optical cues – these acquired behaviours go against the child’s grain’ (DW 321). For Benjamin, moreover, ‘the triumph of such cognition in adults signals at the same time their defeat as revolutionary subjects,’ as they come to inhabit the cognitive space of social subjectivity that Adorno compares to the abstract rationality of the transcendental subject (DW 321). Implicitly drawing on Benjamin’s theory of childhood experience, Adorno believes that while the adult inevitably yields to the standards of rationalized socialization, there still resides in adults traces of mimetic cognition, which, as the use of Proust suggests, is in fact the source of the non-identifying concept’s universality. This is why for Adorno ‘the [non-identical] concept clings to the promised happiness, while the world that denies us our happiness is the world of the reigning universal’ (ND 374). But because of the underground status of this positive content, its virtual inexpressibility in the world of socialized adulthood, the positivity inhering in the concept must turn negative; while lacking an adequate positive articulation, it can still become the impetus for critique and resistance to the given condition of socially reduced experience.

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As might be gathered, this expanded account of metaphysical experience is centrally important to Adorno’s socially critical ethics of suffering. It is striking just how much Benjamin’s account of childhood cognition informs Adorno’s discussion of children’s lucid awareness of the intimate connection between the material reality of physical suffering and the objective possibility of living. Witnessing ‘wretched physical existence,’ Adorno writes, ‘[a]n unconscious knowledge whispers to the child what is repressed by civilized education; this is what matters, says the whispering voice’ (ND 366, emphasis added). He continues, ‘[T]hat this has been forgotten, that we no longer know what we used to feel before the dogcatcher’s van, is both the triumph of culture and its failure’ (ND 366). Because culture is founded upon the division between mental and physical labour, it ‘cannot bear to be reminded of that zone’ of physical suffering, and the division cannot ‘be reconciled with the conception that culture has of itself,’ its pretense to supply the meaning of life (ND 366). The culmination of this denial of the centrality of physical suffering by culture is the historical event of Auschwitz, which to Adorno ‘demonstrated irrefutably that culture has failed’ (ND 366). What the child grasps, however fleetingly in the wake of the efforts of socially repressive agencies, is what Adorno calls the condition of all truth: ‘the need to lend a voice to suffering,’ because suffering is nothing other than ‘objectivity that weighs upon the subject’ (ND 17–18). There is thus an element of childhood mimesis located in the midst of Adorno’s most negative of pronouncements, his formulation of the new categorical imperative. Once again, because of its importance to the argument, I quote this passage in full: A new categorical imperative has been imposed by Hitler upon unfree mankind: to arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen. When we want to find reasons for it, this imperative is as refractory as the given one of Kant was once upon a time. Dealing discursively with it would be an outrage, for the new imperative gives us a bodily sensation of the moral addendum – bodily, because it is now the practical abhorrence of the unbearable physical agony to which individuals are exposed even with individuality about to vanish as a form of mental reflection. (ND 365)

Bypassing the cultural desire to ‘find reasons’ for this new imperative in the manner of abstract cognition, Adorno seeks to re-invoke in the adult reader the child’s sense of the intimate connection between physical suffering and material life that occurs in the interstice between

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mimetic cognition and the culture that represses it. If a ‘categorical imperative’ is something intelligible only from the heights of cultural abstractness, its content, the ‘moral addendum’ that readers are enjoined to feel as ‘unbearable physical agony,’ is precisely what culture would normally have people repress and ignore. But being able once again to inhabit an experience of this kind would negatively reestablish in witnessing suffering the intimate link between physical life and the very possibility of mental reflection; this linkage, in other words, would restore the child’s anterior sense of the linkage’s inseparability at a moment after its cultural sundering. As previously suggested, the restored sense of inseparability would constitute a negative and critical metaphysical or auratic experience. The significance of this negative metaphysical experience is that it invokes aura by means of its very absence or unavailability because of its evacuation from the mind to the ‘somatic, unmeaningful stratum,’ an idea similar to Adorno’s contention that modernist art’s preservation of aura lies in that aura’s very self-withholding (ND 365; AT 274). But the absence of aura assumes a contrapuntal relationship to the auratic experience of remembered childhood happiness. The dialectical image produced between the positive and negative poles of auratic experience is conveyed through the new imperative’s demand to recall the extinguishing of the human being’s aura in unbearable physical suffering. Unlike its more ephemeral positive counterparts, whose fragile vehicles are memory and aesthetic presentation, physical suffering is not semblance. But as real and actual, suffering convicts the society that inflicts it of being merely semblance from the perspective of a reconciled positive condition not yet substantively available. But this renders the empirical experience of suffering metaphysical in the precise sense that in being the objective actuality of the absence or unintelligibility of auratic experience, suffering gestures negatively beyond itself, thereby escaping its positively prescribed fate as mere actuality and calling for its removal in social reality. It is in that call, Adorno is suggesting, that we can hear the stirrings of an absolute that cannot yet be articulated in positive conceptual terms. To return briefly to McDowell’s project of limited disenchantment, what is striking is that compared to Adorno’s project, McDowell’s largely affirms the overall direction of modern social and rational development. The problems that it is concerned with are of a local character, and the solutions that it deems necessary are thus correspondingly local. This more affirmative account of the course of modernity would perhaps draw an advocate of the kind of re-enchantment

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McDowell offers closer to a Habermasian position, one critical of Adorno’s putative pessimism and irrationalism. As Espen Hammer has aptly summarized this position, ‘Adorno is forced to propose ... a form of irrationalism whereby human receptivity [consists in] being held susceptible to the impact of a reality that is supposed to be entirely independent of, or outside, the sphere of the conceptual.’17 What allegedly forces Adorno into this irrational position is that his historically un-nuanced and overarchingly negative account of reason presents modernity as a mere repetition of prehistoric myth. While this critique overlooks how much Adorno in fact affirms modernity – his project would be inconceivable without the modernist legacy of Kant, Hegel, and Marx – at the same time, it capitalizes on how much Adorno believes that explicitly affirming modern development as progressive or basically good is bound to be one-sided and ideological. Affirmation is ideological, Adorno believes, because as long as suffering is actual in the world, celebration is always premature, convicting the society in which it takes place of falsehood. This falsehood is in turn linked to the concept society has of itself, of what society’s self-concept makes of itself in the face of physical suffering. In society as it currently exists, Adorno would argue, such unreconciled negativity demonstrates that optimism about the course of history is as unfounded as is total despair. So in quite a different sense than the way it is understood by the Habermasians, Adorno might agree that the modern project is ‘unfinished,’ even while denying that modernity is something discreetly capable of being completed, and emphasizing instead that there are certain minimal conditions such as the removal of socially produced suffering that its truth content requires. Despite the demonstrable falsity of the Habermasian assessment of Adorno’s project, however, aspects of the latter’s work lend themselves to these kinds of misinterpretation. In particular, Adorno’s insistent focus on negativity, while understandable and socially necessary, tends to obscure the positive grounds of his critique, thereby downplaying the potentials for resistance that they might generate. Also, while Adorno tends to locate the positive potential for metaphysical experience in the traces of childhood mimetic experience, and while I believe there is merit in locating them there, he ignores the significance of the happiness resulting from their (partial) fulfilment in adult life and refuses to entertain their potential for inspiring resistance. However distorted or contaminated by what is wrong in present social conditions, moments of positive happiness are simultaneously the dialectical inverse of the protest against suffering, providing the necessary energy

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for this protest. Adorno obviously recognizes this, but seemingly rejects their significance by focusing on the overarching negativity of critique. This is likely because Adorno considers positive moments to be particularly vulnerable to assimilation by identity-thinking, turning the experiential use-value of joy into mere culture-industry exchange; the fragility of these experiences is such that even to speak of them in positive terms, to risk their conceptualization at all, threatens to deprive them of their potential as harbingers of a better condition and rob them of their force for critique. Yet it may well be that never to speak of them threatens them with isolation, making it impossible to socially articulate what it is about them that inspires resistance in their name, both as the contrast that makes widespread suffering all the more outrageous as much as for the spark of revolutionary energy their being threatened with standardization might ignite. It is perhaps this tendency of Adorno’s to overlook the positive potentials for fulfilled experience in the present as a source of resistance, even while acknowledging their incomplete character, that (wrongly) serves to give him the reputation of a tragic thinker who understands that the only remaining resistance is to be found in thought. The usefulness of contrasting Adorno’s thought with McDowell’s is that it dispels the temptation to think of Adorno as a ‘philosopher’ in the now contemporary sense of a professional academic concerned with self-contained epistemological problems. While McDowell’s endorsement of a certain strand of empiricism, one that looks partially disenchanted, keeps him squarely within the problematic of epistemology, Adorno’s work interprets epistemology, and indeed philosophy in general, as a text symptomatic of deeper social and historical ills. Rejecting a cure for disenchantment that would remain at the level of epistemology, Adorno’s socially situated theory indicts merely epistemological cures of furthering social irrationality and barbarity. From this perspective, it seems unlikely that Adorno would fall victim in turn to the narrowly epistemological solution he rejects in others’ work. As I have tried to show, it is Adorno’s negative mode of articulating what is also positively hopeful that threatens to give this impression.

NOTES 1 Two Adorno theorists who have been drawn to McDowell are Espen Hammer and J.M. Bernstein; see Espen Hammer, ‘Minding the World: Adorno’s

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3

4 5 6 7 8

9 10

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Critique of Idealism,’ in Philosophy and Social Criticism 26.1 (2000) and J.M. Bernstein, ‘Re-enchanting Nature,’ in Reading McDowell on Mind and World, ed. Nicholas H. Smith (New York: Routledge, 2002), 217–45 (hereafter RN). The main work (discussed here) of McDowell is his Mind and World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996) (hereafter MW). This paper, in insisting on the socially critical, metaphysically speculative character of Adorno’s thought, makes common cause with Deborah Cook’s and Lambert Zuidervaart’s papers appearing in this volume. My insistence on the speculative character of Adorno’s thought in this paper has been aided considerably by Deborah Cook’s extended treatment of the centrality of the notion of speculative cognition in Adorno’s writing; see ‘From the Actual to the Possible: Non-identity Thinking,’ in this volume. My conviction that the impetus for this speculative or dialectical cognition in Adorno’s writing stems from his passionate concern with real social conditions of suffering owes much to Zuidervaart’s paper ‘Metaphysics after Auschwitz.’ As Zuidervaart puts it, critics who find Adorno’s thought ‘inappropriately “metaphysical” or “theological” or “utopian”’ often attempt to dismiss him on this basis or downplay these dimensions in his writings. Much like Zuidervaart, I am arguing that to jettison this aspect of Adorno’s thought is to miss what is really important in his thought (see Zuidervaart, this volume). This means that, for me, Adorno is less a ‘philosopher’ in any strictly academic sense of the word, and more of a philosophically oriented social theorist of a Marxist variety. Espen Hammer usefully suggests the terms ‘subjective idealism’ and ‘foundationalism’ as synonyms for McDowell’s terms ‘Coherentism’ and ‘Myth of the Given’; ‘Minding the World,’ 84. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1956), 93. T.W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (New York: Continuum, 1973), 136 (hereafter ND). This passage is also quoted in Hammer, ‘Minding the World.’ Robert Brandom’s article ‘Placing McDowell’s Empiricism,’ in Reading McDowell, contains a very useful gloss on these points; see 92–105, 95. G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 120. McDowell quotes only the first two clauses on page 44 of Mind and World. See also Phenomenology of Spirit, 53. McDowell’s neglect of the entirety of the space of reasons parallels the way he takes up the notion of tradition in Gadamer; essentially, McDowell uses the idea of tradition as a heuristic device to suggest, first, that humans are

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11

12

13 14

15

16

17

initiated into the space of reasons in the course of their natural development through the acquisition of language (and the cultural resources embedded in that language), and second, that the human capacities of language and culture are what separate human animality from the merely animal, a claim that fits well with the notion of humans as rational animals. See Mind and World, 115–18, 184. Max Horkheimer and T.W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Edmond Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 8 (hereafter DE). T.W. Adorno, ‘On Subject and Object,’ in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 250 (hereafter SO). The issue of whether or not Adorno is right about Hegel, while interesting and for many quite contentious, is not relevant to my argument here. T.W. Adorno, ‘Aspects of Hegel’s Philosophy,’ in Hegel: Three Studies, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), 13 (hereafter AH). See Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’ in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968), 222, and T.W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 274 (hereafter AT). S. Buck-Morss, ‘Dream World of Mass Culture: Walter Benjamin's Theory of Modernity and the Dialectics of Seeing,’ in Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision, ed. D.M. Levin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 309– 38 (hereafter DW). Hammer, ‘Minding the World,’ 72.

PART THREE Communication, Reification, and the Non-identical

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8 Mystical Kernels? Rational Shells? Habermas and Adorno on Reification and Re-enchantment asher horowitz

The goal of the revolution is the abolition of fear. T.W. Adorno to Walter Benjamin, 1936

I Whatever their very substantial differences, for both Habermas and the Frankfurt School the problem of reification and its relation to reason and disenchantment is at the core of critical theory. According to Horkheimer and Adorno, the ‘true concern’ of the spirit ‘is the negation of reification’ (DE xv).1 Habermas’s theory of communicative action is given its overall shape not so much by his concern for simply drawing out whatever rationality might be embedded in the universal pragmatics of speech as it is by his fear that the resistance to reification, now reformulated as ‘colonization of the lifeworld,’ will be understood as depending on some non-rational or irrational, ungrounded, and discursively indefensible commitment, some piece of blind and uncomprehended second nature. For Habermas, as much as the development of reification does presuppose the historical rationalization of social action, the resistance to reification depends on reason and is to be the exclusive work of decentred rationality. He is therefore faced, at the outset of his most comprehensive and systematic work, with two initial but fundamental tasks: one looks towards transcending the insufficiencies of the theory proferred by the Frankfurt School; behind that, the task of undoing Max Weber’s fateful conflation of disenchantment with unlimited rationalization, reason with reification, ostensibly accepted and even radicalized by Habermas’s mentors into a ‘totalizing critique’ of reason.

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By accepting from Weber both an identification of reason with instrumental rationality together with the thesis that ‘objective reason cannot be restored, not even in dialectical concepts,’2 Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse are said by Habermas to lose their way within a philosophy of history that unfolds a ‘catastrophic view of the relation between spirit and nature’ (TCA1 380). Their critical theory becomes enmeshed in unsolvable and fatally damaging aporiae. They veer inexorably towards ‘the contours of a concept of reason ... in danger of becoming blurred’ (TCA1 366), begging the question of what constitutes rationality by appealing to a truth preconceived as ‘universal reconciliation’ (TCA1 380–1). This first aporia induces a second, the progressive renunciation of a unity between theory and practice, which quickly becomes involved in a third, the cession to art of the role of representing the rational and the reconciled. After all, if objective reason is impossible because disenchantment has revealed it to be only conceptually warmed-over myth, and if reason has from the start only been the relentless drive towards the self-preservation of subjectivity, there is nowhere to go but to art and mimesis for the criterion of ‘an encompassing societal rationality’ against which reification can be measured (TCA1 144–5). Since it appears that reason has been misconstrued and progressively abandoned by the Frankfurt School, critical theory will reject progressive differentiation and regress; it will do so as long as disenchantment and reification cannot be distinguished and their separate courses plotted. In their hands, ‘philosophical thinking intentionally retrogresses to gesticulation’ (TCA 385), mere body language. Adorno ends up converging with mysticism, in silence before the ineffable.

II Whatever the merits of Habermas’s analysis of the trajectory and substance of the Frankfurt School, an issue I will address below, he is not, of course, without a remedy ready to hand for the critique of reification. This involves a complex strategy for reconceptualizing both reason and reification. At the most general level, Habermas wishes to step aside from the entire ‘paradigm’ he sees driving not only the Frankfurt School, but Marx, Weber, and Lukács as well, into a linked series of culde-sacs. Reification is to be reconceived and possibly surmounted not on the model of a collective subject returning from an exilic and unacknowledged objectification in an alien, commodified, and administered world, not as the ultimate realization of the identity of subject and

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object. This almost tacit but commanding paradigm had been, according to Habermas, inherited by critical theory from Hegel, who had in turn heroically undertaken to reconcile the two concepts (as transmitted by the previous metaphysical and critical-idealist traditions) via the dialectical working through of the ultimate identity of identity and non-identity. Actually, this represents Habermas’s most important and basic misconstrual of Adorno’s fundamental trajectory: namely, for Adorno the true turning of Hegel, not simply on his head, but simultaneously inside out as well, lies in and via the non-identity of identity and non-identity. By transposing the underlying problematic of reification into the register of the philosophy of linguistically mediated intersubjectivity, Habermas proposes to reunite reason with freedom and meaning, which, taken together, are the opposite of reification. Since this redemption of reason cannot simply be done philosophically, it requires a historical social theory that will undo the Weberian conflation of disenchantment with rationalization. Reification, now understood by Habermas as a sort of surplus rationalization, a degree/ type of rationalization above and beyond what is necessary simply for the disenchantment of myth, will be seen as the outcome of a selective development of rationality attendant upon the development of capitalist relations of production. This surplus rationalization becomes finally highly acute especially in the current phase of social development, where class conflict and its attendant crises get transposed into the administrative system. Concomitantly, this historical social theory requires a careful and strict distinction, on the one hand, between the logic of the development of rationality and its actual dynamics and, on the other, between a linguistically mediated lifeworld and the systemic coordination of functional relations mediated by de-linguistified steering media. The logic of the development of rationality points in one direction; the actual dynamics of development have slipped away from the potential inherent in their logic to produce something parallel to what other critical theorists have understood by ‘reification.’ The concept of the colonization of the lifeworld by the abstract steering media of money and administrative power is meant by Habermas to substitute for the concept of reification, since the latter is inherently linked to the philosophy of consciousness. This is of course far more than a change in terminology. Reification implies a transformation of subjective qualities and relations into things, and the substitution of relations between things for relations between persons. It is effected through the commodification of ever wider spheres of action, expres-

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sion, and sensibility. Colonization, by contrast, denotes the intrusion of a certain ‘norm-free sociality’ into the sphere of potentially rational communicative action and is effected primarily after the displacement of class conflict into the administrative sphere under the systematic pressure (leading to steering crises) of the prior intrusion of the logic of commodity exchange into the sphere of material production and reproduction. Now, if it were not for Habermas’s quite specific construal of rationality, and his strict distinction between rationalization and reification, the theory of communicative action might seem simply to be a useful extension of the concept of reification, its translation into a different key, a variation on a theme. But the nub of the issue concerns his trisection of rationality into separate and irreducible spheres of rationalizable activity, a trisection that in turn requires mediation to effect a unity of reason. Without this mediation and short of some unity recognizable as rational, the mere ‘mediatization’ of the lifeworld is deprived of a criterion by which it can be separated from its colonization. Habermas fully expects and requires that the authentically rational and unreified social condition must make do with and coordinate its virtually infinite number of practical transactions through abstract media of exchange, like money and administrative power. But, by making the unity of trisected, disenchanted, and decentred reason the touchstone for the distinction between a destructive colonization of the lifeworld and its merely innocuous mediatization, Habermas effectively reintroduces the need for a ‘placeholder’ for objective reason. Where he, quite wrongly, sees Adorno finding such a placeholder in aesthetic ‘mimesis,’ he does not see himself groping towards such a placeholder in the assertion, in a decentred lifeworld, of the ‘interpenetration’ and ‘rational interconnectedness’ of the three spheres of possible validity. This interpenetration, he says, may be effected ‘via the transfer of validity that is possible in the performative attitude.’3 Playing, as it does, such a key role in the distinction between mediatization and colonization, and therefore in the differentiation of rationalization and reification, this claim should meet with some acute scepsis and thoroughgoing examination. But most of the time it simply does not, even in the relatively rare response to Habermas that understands the architectonic principle of his theory to be the transformation of the negative relation between enlightenment and reification into a positive one.4 Habermas goes to great lengths to defuse Weber’s ostensible contention that the mere differentiation of objective value spheres under the

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shadow of secularization leads with inexorable logic to the iron cage, to a loss of meaning and therefore of freedom. Yet he is quite clear that in not accepting Weber’s aetiology of this condition, he still finds the diagnosis compelling. That he still finds Weber’s analysis of the nature of reification essential shows up strongly in his understanding of the effects of colonization, in the false consciousness it reproduces while doing away with the need for ideology. In colonization, ‘the imperatives of autonomous subsystems make their way into the life-world from the outside – like colonial masters coming into tribal society – and force a process of assimilation on it’ (TCA2 355). Colonization induces a fragmentation of an already decentred rationality, but decentration, given the unifying and reconciling power of the ‘transfer of validity in the performative attitude,’ is actually the condition of meaning and freedom, not its opposite. ‘Everyday consciousness,’ he asserts, ‘is robbed of its power to synthesize; it becomes fragmented’ (TCA2 355). The desolation and passivity of a reified existence, the barely concealed, omnipresent, and all-but-conscious sense of compulsion and futility that Marcuse might simply have designated as ‘toil,’ together with the smoldering rage against its presence, are to be attributed in no way to the loss of relationality of subject and object. Instead, they are traceable in full to a fragmentation of rational interpretive possibilities within the decentred lifeworld of everyday consciousness. The concept of colonization is therefore chosen and designed to avoid any hint of a conflation of reason with reification and to maintain their mutual exclusivity. Yet they will only remain mutually exclusive to the extent that there exists a ‘placeholder’ for objective reason in decentred, everyday, modern intersubjectivity. Colonization involves more than simply an ‘intrusion’ of norm-free sociation into the lifeworld, one of whose essential constituents is a domain of normative awareness and action, irreducible to the a-normative logics upon which the functional coordination of complex social systems rest. Along with intrusion comes a ‘prejudicing’ of the ‘world relations, the ways in which speaking and acting subjects can relate to things in the objective, the social and their own subjective worlds’ (TCA2 355). Meaningful freedom is contained as a possibility that is already inherent in the system of three world relations constituting and defining a modern, disenchanted, decentred, and rationalized lifeworld. According to Habermas, with every speech act modern subjects not only raise distinct and irreducible validity claims. In doing so they necessarily presuppose a system of three formal world relations that is the ineluctable

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and (for a disenchanted world) universal condition of meaningful experience. Behind the ability to raise truth claims, no matter how explicit or implicit, lies this condition of meaningful reference (TCA1, esp. 98, 100). Only regression to metaphysics, myth, and religion lie outside this system of possible reference, Weber’s old churches with their open arms. The pathologies of colonization belong to the prejudicing that takes place within this system of reference. Disenchantment, for Habermas, means the emergence of this frame of reference trisected into three irreducible domains, together with the institutionalized cognitive practices that can operate cumulatively and objectively on the basis of their separation. Because the categories of purposive/instrumental reason are not confused with normativity, science can acquire objective knowledge of nature in a cumulative and self-corrective process; for the same reason, post-traditional morality and law can become deontological and formal; because both these former domains are separate from and irreducible to an internal world of subjective perceptions, art can become autonomous. It might be best to think of rationalization as those processes of systems differentiation that both depend on disenchantment and further it in degree. Modernity is the historical epoch in which disenchantment has reached its apogee. Reification is a pathology proper only to a thoroughly disenchanted lifeworld. Prior to reification, domination was maintained on the basis of the conflation of the three separate domains; with disenchantment, domination depends upon reification/colonization, which is not a function of conflation but of the prejudicing of the ‘form of objectivity’ proper to disenchantment in favour of instrumental rationality. In a reified/colonized world relations of self to other and self to self come to be prejudiced in as much as the very structure of experience gets distorted; reification/colonization is that prejudiced structuring of experience where other and self are apperceived as things in an external world properly open to means/ends rationality. This is what the intrusion of subsystems of delinguistified steering media accomplishes. Both the pre-modern conflation of the separate domains underwritten by universal pragmatics and the modern prejudicing of the form of objectivity are akin to, and are collectively performed and institutionally reproduced as, category errors. In principle, then, and potentially in practice, negating reification means strengthening disenchantment. The equation of reification with disenchantment and rationalization is apparently broken.

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III There is, however, a worm in the apple. Disenchantment and de-colonization (all the way through to discourse ethics and deliberative democracy) require both the separation and unity of the spheres of possible validity. Yet Habermas acknowledges that these spheres are rationally incommensurable and, even worse, inherently at odds with each other (TCA1 249). Here is a dialectical task worthy of Hegel himself. Yet to his credit, Habermas, eschewing ‘foundationalism,’ seems to see that setting out in the direction of a synthesis of separation and unity would be to venture far beyond a gesticulation in the direction of a placeholder for objective reason, it would announce the phoenix of something very much like objective idealism rising from the ashes. Shying away from that, Habermas offers a more modest rhetoric of ‘balance’ (TCA1 183–4) and ‘mutual interplay’5 between the spheres. Balance and mutual interplay are cozy, unobjectionable terms. They seem to admit the widest plurality of perspectives and needs. Everything, we can assure ourselves, will be included and somehow factored into the ultimate equation or, more properly, the meta-discourse about the relation and mutual interplay of Truth, Rightness, and Authenticity. It seems obvious when something is a question for scientific explanation, or when it is a question of what is right, or when it simply concerns the individual’s perceived inner orientations and emotions. And Habermas offers the argument in very persuasive terms that because each speech act presupposes this ‘ineluctable’ frame of reference, objective knowledge is granted to us, in part and within limits, by the existence of a ‘direction of fit’ between a claim and its object (see TCA1, chap. 1, sec. III). Within each separate sphere, language is constrained by its object; it does not go ‘all the way down,’ and validity claims are redeemable in principle. Certainly we have this experience all the time, ‘we moderns,’ in the laboratory, in political debate, if not in the concert hall. In one crucial but virtually unnoticed respect, however, language does go all the way down for Habermas. And that is in its ineluctable constitution of the world, of the object, as meaningful and coherent experience only within the separate categories supplied by the irreducible relations implied in the system of pronouns: I, you, he/she/it. There is, for Habermas, only one final form of objectivity whose elements can be conflated, separated, or prejudiced with respect to each other. But this form in no way supplies any form of judgment applica-

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ble to the question of how the world might be discerned in all three relations simultaneously. The final form does not inform us as to when we might properly relate to our experience in one set of terms versus another, or even as to how these might be negotiated as matters of degree. The system of formal world relations therefore offers no criteria even vaguely understandable as rational, for what might constitute ‘prejudice.’ I can relate rationally to my horse as a complex instance of the evolution of anatomico-physiological-environmental structures, as potential meat for my dog with exchange value attached, or as a perfect symbol of power and grace, but I cannot know which might be better or even more ‘appropriate’ under certain conditions. The theory of colonization as opposed to reification is possessed of only so much insight that perhaps the problem may arise for me out of these considerations.6 So far, then, is Habermas from restoring the contours of a reason ‘blurred’ by the Frankfurt School that he must blur them even further (assuming they blurred them in the first place) by obscuring with exhaustive and deft analytical precision the very limitations of a reason that constitutes the framework of its experience as driven by the socalled imperatives of systems evolution. For a moulding of itself to the imperatives of systems evolution is the actual form of the ‘mimesis’ of which Habermasian reason partakes. Reason adapts itself, and with great cunning, to the functional requirements of complex systems of social production and reproduction ultimately answerable only to their own ‘norms’ of self-preservation and expansion. And, finally, if the Frankfurt School separated theory and practice ‘too much,’ Habermas’s version of reason reacts in the direction of bringing them too close, making it all but impossible in the end to discern much or any of a difference between ‘mediatization’ and ‘colonization’ or between rationalization and reification. All of which was the point in the first place.

IV If Habermas therefore ends up by re-enchanting disenchantment, as it were, with a promissory note on a validity claim that cannot be redeemed but only held indefinitely in trust, the Frankfurt School begin and end with a response to reification centred on the disenchantment of disenchantment. There is, to be sure, a profound connection in their work between rationalization and reification, spelled out especially in the Dialectic of Enlightenment. Enlightened disenchantment is tied to

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domination (and the eventual self-liquidation of the subject of domination in the administered society) in so far as enlightenment can recognize only what may be apprehended in unity. Under the rule of equivalence that undergirds the possibility of calculation, the dissimilar is made comparable as it gets reduced to abstract qualities (DE 6–8). Magic, which like purposive rationality pursues definite aims but not by self-distantiation, is compared favourably to scientific reason, under which the multiplicity of qualities falls victim to the identity of spirit and its correlative doctrine of the unity of nature (DE 10). The whole process seems to be set off by the very requirements of any subjectivity to labour in its drive to self-preservation. Reason and subjectification seem to be confused with reification itself, which only becomes progressively more perfect and seamless with every apparent advance in science, technique, morality, and popular enlightenment. In Habermas’s terms, instrumental rationality gets identified with reason as such. Yet Horkheimer and Adorno aver that their aim is to prepare for a ‘positive’ concept of enlightenment, one not entangled in domination (DE xvi). How can they make such a claim, yet see in the historical development of rationality so far nothing but ‘mythic fear turned radical,’ where ‘the mere idea of outsideness is the very source of fear’ (DE 16)? In this conception of the relation of reification and rationalization, the possibility of reification is not tied to category error and its functional institutionalization in the mediatization/colonization of a disenchanted, sufficiently rational lifeworld. It is tied instead to the necessary illusion of subjective sovereignty born when ‘the concept,’ discursive thought itself, becomes not only the medium of experience, but its criterion, when it is left to ‘pure reason’ to judge as to what is and what is not. But this is the very heart and soul of modern enlightenment, finding its highest and best expression in German Idealism, from Kant through to Hegel.7 It is no wonder that Adorno devoted his life to the destruction of idealism in all its forms. And it is ironic that his brightest student would regress into what might be termed, ironically, an idealism of linguistic intersubjectivity. For that is exactly what gives the Habermasian system its foundations (and it does have foundations, despite its intentions to be non-foundationalist): it has its foundations in the form of objectivity granted by the universal pragmatics of everyday speech, which performs exactly the role of a criterion of what is and what is not, a criterion that is ineluctable and therefore pure, if only ‘quasi’-transcendental.

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V Adorno and Horkheimer are far from giving up on reason and the concept as the medium of experience. Yet their relation to the Kantian ‘Copernican Revolution’ is far more subtle than that of Habermas. It should be clear enough by now that the Habermasian paradigm shift owes its possibility to the first Copernican turn, only transposed into the medium of the development of linguistic intersubjectivity. For Adorno, however, Kant’s forms of subjectivity are not cognitive ultimates; with progressive experience he believes that cognition can break through them, as it did in what he calls the Einsteinian ‘prison break’ in physics (ND 187).8 There are strong hints of this in the first chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment, but the main work of separating the concept as medium of experience from the identitarian faith in the concept as the criterion of experience is done in Negative Dialectics. This separation cannot be done all at once, nor can it produce a formula or procedure to be relied upon. It represents what Adorno calls a ‘logic of disintegration’ of the prepared and objectified forms of the concept given to the cognitive subject (ND 145). Yet the critique of identity cannot lead to its vanishing; instead, identity is to undergo a transfiguration, a qualitative change in which elements of affinity with the object ‘come to live in identity’ (ND 149). ‘The ideal of identity is not to be discarded’ (ND 150). The perpetual and fragile outcome of negative dialectics, of the relentless and endless pursuit of the notion (perhaps the only one that gets ‘begged’) that no concept goes into its object without a remainder (ND 5), is a disenchantment of the concept aimed at ‘nothing but full, unreduced experience in the medium of conceptual reflection’ (ND 13). The disenchantment of the concept is the ‘antidote’ to philosophy (ND 13). All of Adorno’s own ‘spleen,’ the defence of rhetoric in philosophy, the rant against system, the most minute attention to what is overlooked, the truth of exaggerations, the parataxis and irony, the defence of more subjectivity in cognition – all of these necessary and telling ‘details’ of negative dialectic are animated by and devoted to the task of de-reifying the ability to discriminate, the ability without which reason cannot exist (ND 43–5). The destruction of idealism means the perpetual destruction of conceptual frameworks that function as reified schemata of experience, not only because these express not only the false Sovereignty of the Subject, but because they express the fear of outsideness as such. Philosophy is belly turned mind; idealism is the rage worked up by the hunter

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against its prey (ND 22). Yet the very discrimination that makes the reason of reification possible has as its postulate, according to Adorno, a capacity to experience the object. The concept is thus, potentially, also a ‘haven’ for the mimetic element (ND 45). Thus, Kant’s first Copernican revolution, which put the subject at the centre of a universe its own a priori categories constitute, requires a second Copernican revolution: the ‘priority of the object’ as understood by ‘materialism.’ According to Adorno, dialectic becomes materialistic only with the passage to the object’s ‘preponderance’ (ND 192) or ‘priority.’9 This is not a reversal, however, of the hierarchy of subject and object assumed in idealism and repeated often enough in the history of Marxism, but an attempt to abolish the possibility of hierarchy between them (ND 181). Neither subject nor object are even to be taken as cognitive ‘ultimates,’ since both are seen as abstractions, as thought products, but irreducible to some ultimate unity. The two are not to be pieced out of any mysterious ‘third,’ as is the case with Kant’s transcendental apperception (ND 174–5). Against idealism Adorno maintains that the object is not a subject, but that the subject is an object; yet this mediation of the subject by objectivity does not negate thinking (ND 181). ‘The elements of independence and irreducibility in the mind may well accord with the supremacy of the object. As soon as the mind calls its chains by name, the chains it gets into by chaining others, it grows independent here and now. It begins to anticipate, and what it anticipates is freedom’ (ND 390). Its ‘independence,’ in other words, is never total and it cannot therefore set itself up as the criterion of existence, no matter how universal its mediation of experience. Thus, a minimum of the thing outside the subject will suffice to spoil the subject’s claim to totality (ND 183), a claim it effects as soon as it sets itself up as ultimate criterion, as soon as it is ‘enlightened.’ The ‘negative fact that the mind, failing in identification, has also failed in reconcilement, that its supremacy has miscarried, becomes the motor of its disenchantment’ (ND 186). And this miscarriage of supremacy cannot arise without the thrust, built into the concept, for identity. Thus, the history of enlightenment is also the history of its disenchantment, although the process of disenchantment is not progressive and cumulative. The restoration of materialism on the basis of the preponderance of the object is the doctrinal core of negative dialectics. Or, according to Adorno, since such dialectics eschews relativism, without claiming certainty or the primacy of anything, it approaches doctrine and ‘will give offense’ (ND 34). It will give offence all the more since it admits to the

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requirement of immediacy (ND 182). Yet the immediate ‘knowledge’ that gets it going is actually ‘the consistent sense of non-identity’ (ND 5), a sense that relies on the discrimination of qualities without which the concept itself is impossible. Cognition, identity, and the concept thus require sensibility and suffering. If Adorno’s shade will forgive me: I think therefore I feel; and I feel therefore I think. ‘Genetically, the consciousness that has achieved independence, the epitome of what is done in cognitive performance, has branched off from the libidinal energy of the species’ (ND 185; also 202). The part that suffering has to play in negative dialectics is no accidental, external admixture, no intrusion from, or bow in the direction of an extra-rational sense of compassion. Both suffering and compassion are at the heart of reason. ‘The need is what we think from, even when we disdain wishful thinking’ (ND 408). The force of the categorical imperative is transposed from law and self-identical universality to the physical, which is what ‘tells our knowledge that suffering ought not to be, that things should be different’ (ND 203), and the aim of a reconciled society, one in which reification were truly undone, ‘would be to negate the physical suffering of even the least of its members, and to negate the internal reflexive form of that suffering’ (ND 203). Although we think from need, we do not exactly think in categories supplied merely by bare and abstract need, but in social and historical categories, categories and frameworks that have become an ‘imprisonment’ in our ‘survival mechanism’ (ND 180). Yet seeing mind as an activity makes it intratemporal and historic; and seeing it as this activity is for Adorno exactly that second reflection which ‘breaks the supremacy of thinking over its otherness, because it always is otherness already, within itself’ (ND 201). ‘Only if the I on its part is also the nonI does it react to the non-I. Only then does it ‘do’ something’ (ND 201).

VI Even this cursory and partial excursion into negative dialectics should be able to shed some light on Habermas’s claim that the Frankfurt School blurs the contours of reason by relying on a non-discursive mimesis to function as a ‘placeholder’ for objective reason.10 For Adorno et al. reason has never been objective; to this extent Habermas is correct to see in Dialectic of Enlightenment, at least, something like a conflation of rationalization and reification, an ‘identification’ of reason with instrumental rationality. Yet the objectivity Adorno has in mind to

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effect via negative dialectics is nothing like ‘an encompassing societal rationality’ such as those guaranteed by the old metaphysical traditions. The ‘ideal of discrimination’ is aimed at admitting and ‘secularizing’ the mimetic element, at opening it to doubt and thus blending it with the rational (ND 45). He is under no illusions that philosophy and art are to lose their separate contours and functions and knows that ‘the affinity’ of philosophy to ‘art does not entitle it to borrow from art’ (ND 15). In philosophy the mimetic element, once admitted, constantly belies the accomplishment of identity and makes discrimination, especially critical discrimination, possible. In art ‘mimetic behaviour does not imitate something but assimilates itself to that something. Works of art take it upon themselves to realize this assimilation. They do not imitate the impulses of an individual in the medium of expression, much less those of the artist himself. At the same time, artistic expression carries out the judgement of history which has condemned mimesis as an archaic mode of behaviour, a judgement that finds mimesis falling short of cognition; that finds mimetic assimilation falling short of identity; that finds mimesis falling short period – except in art, which absorbs the mimetic impulse and the critique of that impulse by objectifying it.’11 Thus, aesthetic mimesis is not the non-discursive, but objective, form of a ‘reason which is beyond reason,’ even though it is allied with negative dialectics in the elaboration of the conditions of hope. Nor is it a post-individualist form of morality, even though it has ‘moral implications, in that brutality against things is potentially brutality against human beings. Art by definition negates crudeness, the subjective nucleus of evil, coming out on the side of its opposite, i.e. the ideal of elaboration. It is through this – and not through the pronouncement of moral tenets or by bringing about some moral effect – that art partakes of morality, linking it to the ideal of a more humane society’ (AT 329). Negative dialectics and art are not replacements for an objective criterion supplied by ‘pure’ reason, even though they are, for Adorno, linked, and linked in extraordinarily complex ways in their separate mutual dependencies upon mimesis. Thus, in this respect the Habermasian critique, even as moderated for example by Wellmer, that Adorno overloads art as a model for reconciliation,12 appears simply misplaced. They seem to project onto Adorno the unfulfilled lack expressed in Habermasian theory for a guarantee of full meaning, for the unity of reason that Habermas makes a requirement of de-colonization/de-reification. For Adorno, art and spirit are necessary complements (AT 197). The elaboration of the relationship between these two

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in Adorno’s work has barely begun. Neither art nor negative dialectics are pure criteria for the identification of reification. The very search for such a criterion belies the notion of a second Copernican turn and the priority of the object. Thus Adorno, although speaking about something quite different, could have been predicting the linguistic turn in critical theory when he says, ‘What is called “communication” today is the adaptation of spirit to useful aims and, worse, to commodity fetishism’ (AT 109).

VII At last, there is the charge that by conflating the historical development of rationality with reification, Horkheimer and Adorno subscribe to a catastrophic view of history. The truth of Habermas’s strategy in dealing with reification lies here, in the notion of a differentiation in abstracto between reason and reification that gets systematically developed in social-theoretical terms as the distinction between the logic and the dynamics of development. Yet in his rush to secure this distinction, Habermas overlooks the fact that this is a distinction that Horkheimer et al. do not refuse, but about which they are ambiguous. It is a distinction entirely compatible with their view of history. It is made systematically by Marx in his critique of Hegel’s conflation of alienation with objectification, and later by Marcuse in Eros and Civilization. The latter, at least, can simultaneously claim that reification (as surplus repression) can be traced to the very hominization of the species yet not be identical with reason, because reason’s history, at the level of its most basic schematizations and in its self-understanding, is not over. Horkheimer and Adorno are much less explicit about this because, as Adorno goes some distance to clarify in Negative Dialectics, ‘[i]t lies in the definition of negative dialectics that it will not come to rest in itself, as if it were total. This is its form of hope’ (ND 406). Twenty years earlier they expressed this in inverted terms: ‘[N]ot existence, but knowledge is without hope’ (DE 27–8).

NOTES 1 Max Horkheimer and T.W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum, 1988), xv (hereafter DE). 2 Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1: Reason and the

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7 8 9 10

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Rationalization of Society, trans. T. McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1983), 372 (hereafter TCA1). Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, trans. T. McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987), 327 (hereafter TCA2). This is the case even with two of the best critical responses to Habermas within the tradition of critical theory to date: S. Benhabib, Norm, Critique, and Utopia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986) and J.M. Bernstein, Recovering Ethical Life (New York: Routledge, 1995). See Jürgen Habermas, ‘Philosophy as Stand-In and Interpreter,’ in K. Baynes, J. Bohman, and T. McCarthy, eds, After Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987), 313; see also TCA2 398. For a more detailed consideration of these and other problems in Habermas’s concept of reification consequent upon his trisection of rationality, see A. Horowitz, ‘The Comedy of Enlightenment: Weber, Habermas and the Critique of Reification,’ in A. Horowitz and T. Maley, eds, The Barbarism of Reason: Max Weber and the Twilight of Enlightenment (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 195–222, and A. Horowitz, ‘“Like a Tangled Mobile”: Reason and Reification in the Quasi-Dialectical Theory of J. Habermas,’ Philosophy and Social Criticism 24.1 (1998): 1–23. See Robert B. Pippin, Modernism as a Philosophical Problem (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1991), esp. chap. 2. T.W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (New York: Seabury Press, 1979) (hereafter ND). T.W. Adorno, ‘Subject and Object,’ in A. Arato and E. Gebhardt, eds, The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (New York: Urizen Books, 1978), 497–511. This is a claim that remains absolutely central to the criticism of Adorno that comes from Habermas and followers such as Wellmer. See, e.g., A. Wellmer, ‘Adorno, Modernity and the Sublime,’ in Max Pensky, ed., The Actuality of Adorno (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1997), 112–34. T.W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), 162 (hereafter AT). Albrecht Wellmer, ‘Reason, Utopia and the Dialectic of Enlightenment,’ Praxis International 3 (July 1983). See the excellent discussion of Wellmer in L. Zuidervaart, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory: The Redemption of Illusion (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), 276–307.

9 Politics beyond Speech: Communication and the Non-identical m a rtin m o rr is

The utopia of cognition would be to open up the non-conceptual with concepts, without making it their equal. T.W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics

According to Habermas’s well-known critique of Adorno, the communicative potential contained in the wordless gesture of art can never be sufficiently clarified to serve the purposes of a critical theory that maintains a clear link between the cognitive (Erkenntnis) and action. The good sociality that has been repressed, damaged, and distorted by instrumental reason and capitalist reification can be recovered only indirectly, for to name or identify it would immediately reify it. While Adorno always maintained that a proper experience of the non-identical was still possible and indeed essential for any adequate critical theory, he did so obliquely, performing the contradiction of identity–nonidentity in the very form of his philosophical presentation. He regarded this ‘philosophy of the limit’1 as necessary in order to be true to the concept and to preserve the possibility of reconciliation. Accordingly, he called for a ‘justice of cognition’2 mindful or capable of recalling the non-identical nature in subjects and objects.3 Habermas, however, thinks that the ‘magically invoked’ mindfulness of nature in the subject that discloses the possibility of reconciliation cannot, in the end, be very useful for a critical theory with practical-political aspirations because such an appeal risks blurring the contours of reason.4 It blurs the contours of reason precisely because there is an eternal mysteriousness to the nature that is ‘draped in black’5 in the aesthetic and that therefore requires a different kind of comprehension than that afforded by con-

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ceptual reason. Philosophical reason as conceptual inquiry reaches its limit and must somehow be transformed if it is to do justice to its objects. For Habermas, the transformation that Adorno’s negative dialectic offers amounts to a continual, non-systematic ‘exercise’ or ‘drill,’6 a helpless circling about that amounts to a dead end. Habermas has sought to provide a renewed normative foundation for critical theory through a communications theory turn. He reveals a communicative rationality immanent to speech action that cannot be assimilated to instrumental or strategic reason and argues that the protection and enhancement of such communicative rationality and its resources provides the best approach to democratic reform within our ‘post-metaphysical’7 context. Communicative freedom provides for him the normative purchase for the critique of reification and rationalization in modern societies that critical theory holds to be one of its central aims. I would like to provide a brief account of Habermas’s normative position, focusing on communicative rationality, in order to contrast this with Adorno’s critique of communication. I argue that Habermas’s theory will always fall short of its aim of renewing the vision of radical democracy without the kind of resources that Adorno’s aestheticcritical theory provides. A strict reading of Adorno’s and Habermas’s theories will suggest paradigmatic incompatibilities – indeed, such a paradigmatic distinction is precisely what Habermas sets out in his major treatments of Adorno’s work (TCA1 366–99; PDM 106–30). Taking a critical perspective on this paradigmatic distinction, I have argued elsewhere that Habermas does not sublate first-generation Frankfurt critical theory as he claims, but instead takes a wholly different route that sacrifices much of what is valuable in Adorno’s work.8 While I stand by this assessment, I want to suggest here that certain inadequacies in Habermas’s position might nevertheless be addressed usefully by drawing on Adorno’s aesthetic theory in place of the rather impotent gestures towards liberal political culture that Habermas has made in his recent work.

I The most powerful aspect of Habermas’s communication theory brings together speech pragmatics, phenomenology, and systems theory in order to reveal the unique social-bonding achievements of rational human speech. As a critic of instrumental or functionalist reason, Habermas recognizes the limits of formalist or analytic approaches to ratio-

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nality. The rationality Habermas is interested in defending for its normative potential – communicative rationality – is said to be of a different order to instrumental, strategic, functional, or formal logic. Communicative rationality draws on a pragmatic logic immanent to speech action that concerns intersubjective or subject–subject relations, and is therefore to be distinguished from the ‘mono-logic’ of instrument, strategy, or power that characterizes the subject–object relation. The intersubjective relationship brought forth in speech action indicates a specific kind of cooperation between subjects that is absent in other social relations – namely, a cooperation based upon the achievement of free and non-coerced agreement on the validity of what is said. By contrast, the instrumental relationship describes all those actions towards nature, things, and people-treated-as-objects-or-things that seek technical control. Similarly, strategic action indicates a subject’s manipulation of objects, people, circumstances, or conditions for the purposes of achieving a specific goal advantageous to the subject. In neither case is an orientation towards the validity of what is said or done by the acting subject required in the responses of those acted upon. Nature is speechless in its response to human action (al-though it is by no means mute, as the vocal and bodily gestures of animals in response to human treatment testify), and people treated as objects or subjected to strategic manipulation are not motivated by an orientation towards validity but by empirical causes such as threat, reward, affect, or simply outright coercion. Recognizing the validity of a speaker’s utterance, Habermas believes, requires the free and non-coerced consent of the hearer in order for the utterance to be meaningful in the communicative sense. According to Habermas, this distinction between communicative and strategic-instrumental rationalities reflects two general modes of action integration in society that occur through corresponding media. Communicative interaction occurs in a fully differentiated and grammatical language – natural human language – in which claims to validity can be offered and redeemed by speakers and hearers. A claim to validity entails an orientation towards truth, towards seeking truth, according to Habermas. It is internally contradictory to make a claim to validity without also claiming truth for the statement within the appropriate context. The meaningfulness of the claim to validity demands an orientation towards truth. But achieving validity requires recognition – one’s claim must be redeemed by another – and thus communicative interaction always involves an intersubjective relation. Communicative rationality indicates the reasoning exchange between speakers and

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hearers through which validity is established and this needs a differentiated linguistic medium. Strategic and instrumental action, on the other hand, can also occur through the mediation of language. But without the requirement for an orientation towards validity, the meaningfulness of the communication is governed by objectified or empirical factors. For example, the use of money as a medium of communication allows the coordination of the activities of vast numbers of people who orient themselves towards strategic success (as investors, managers, etc.) and towards acquiring income for the needs of everyday material life (as workers). The social subsystem called the economy is facilitated by communication mediated by money that relieves people from having to judge the validity of their action on the basis of communicative rationality. They judge instead according to calculation. Another prominent example is the sphere of political administration, which is mediated by power. The mediation of power likewise does not require an orientation towards validity for its success since the law is guaranteed by coercive force. People orient themselves towards the dictates of power again for empirical reasons, which allows the strategies and instruments of the administrative state to coordinate social action without communicative content. Money and power are mediations of social action that are ‘delinguistified’ in the sense that their rationalities have empirical force and do not entail the special reasoning (the orientation towards validity) associated with linguistically mediated interaction. Of course, the media of money and power need to be legitimated by the achievement of communicative rationality, since background agreement on the validity of money and of law are required in order to free these media from their embeddedness in ethical contexts, or from the context of their historical emergence as autonomous systems in the great chain of being. Following Niklas Luhmann, this emergence describes the replacement of stratified traditional societies dominated by religious-metaphysical world views with a modern society of differentiated subsystems coordinated by different media.9 Habermas’s desire (in sharp contrast, we should note, to Luhmann) is to recognize a qualitative distinction between social action coordinated by de-linguistified media such as money and power and that coordinated by linguistic interaction oriented towards agreement on validity, and to privilege the latter over the former. Communicative action, then, is always intersubjective. This means not only that such freedom and autonomy can only be conceived in

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social contexts, but that the principal sphere of social interaction is that in which individuals exchange claims to validity because it is primarily (not solely) through the reproduction of validity that cooperative action is made meaningful in a non-instrumental, non-objectifying way. Social analysis must avoid either an empiricist reductionism in which meaning is understood to be generated by the event of communication governed by its specific media and structure or as an ‘effect’ of power circulated through the discourses and practices of the social. Neither approach allows a purchase on the special motivation of uncoerced mutual understanding and agreement activated via the cognitive domain in the acts of speech. Habermas focuses on communicative interaction in order to demonstrate its priority – if by no means its dominance – in human sociation and to draw from this sphere a normative perspective on society as a whole. Let us examine the notion of communicative rationality more closely in order to account for this claim concerning the socially bonding force of speech itself. Every utterance, Habermas argues, contains claims to validity through which a speaker simultaneously takes up distinct relations towards the world and towards present or potential hearers. We make claims about the external, objective world of nature that take the form of claims to truth, the social world of intersubjective relations as claims to normative rightness, and the inner, subjective world of our personal experience, states, or intentions as claims to sincerity or truthfulness (TCA1 100). Each relation and corresponding claim can become the primary theme in an utterance, with the others remaining in the background, or they can appear bound together. For Habermas, the point of the claim to validity offered in every utterance is that it must either be redeemed (accepted), rejected, or left unresolved by the hearer. Those are the three logical options presented by validity claims – one must either respond with a yes or no, or leave the claim undecided. Communicative action has occurred whether or not the hearer accepts the validity claim offered, for even if it is rejected or left undecided the presumption is that the hearer has understood the claim in order to reject or defer it. The hearer has been enjoined by the speaker in a cooperative search for truth through rational linguistic exchange that aims at reaching agreement. Communicative action thus enacts an orientation towards ‘mutual understanding and agreement’ (Verständigung). This demonstrates that there is an important responsibility built into communicative action that is internal to the idea of autonomy. To make a claim to validity is to accept the responsibility to provide, if necessary, ‘convincing reasons that would stand up to a hearer’s criticism of the

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validity claim’ (Habermas, TCA1 302). This is the ‘warranty’ (Gewähr) the speaker provides as a condition for claiming validity. The effect of this warranty is to bind speakers and hearers rationally. Drawing on G.H. Mead’s communications notion of ‘taking the role of the other,’ such a communicative event is possible only when a speaker is able to assume the perspective of the hearer on himself as he who has made the claim. He is then always prepared to argue his claim. In this way, speakers and hearers constitute a ‘language community’ – they are bound together not only by shared traditions, commitments, knowledges, ways of life, and so on, but by this practical feature of language use that constantly involves them in actions oriented towards mutual understanding and agreement. All traditions, commitments, knowledges, and ways of life are reproduced in modern societies primarily through the on-going operation of communicative acts. The content of communicative utterances is hence always historical, but the structure of the speech action and its presuppositions transcend this content. What is philosophically crucial here for Habermas’s overall theory is the recognition that this individual autonomy – which is always bound up in intersubjective activity – ought to be the basis of all enduring post-traditional social solidarities because communicative freedom generates the binding-bonding rational force that is the condition of possibility for such post-traditional solidarity. The autonomy of communicative subjects is thus internally related to their solidarity as communicating subjects in a language community. It is just this binding power of speech action that Habermas thinks ought to be recognized by the language community as the basis for the legitimate enactment of binding law and for the acceptance of legitimate authority. This rational ‘force’ of speech action informs what Habermas calls the unforced force of the better argument. It is now clear that this rational force of social coordination is distinguished fundamentally from the force of the ‘facticity’ (Faktizität) of life on the basis of its enactment of freedom and equality understood now in the intersubjective terms of the reciprocity and truth-seeking moments of communication. Instead of the motivation of self-interest or self-preservation, there is the motivation for achieving mutual understanding and agreement that is internal to the achievement of cognitive meaning in speech.

II Habermas presents the demand for rationally reaching understanding and agreement in very strong terms: the modern, enlightened rational

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actor must now be oriented towards claims to validity and be willing to comply with ‘the force of the better argument’ on pain of social irrelevance or dysfunction. Denying this binding-bonding force, now that it has been discovered at the level of the pragmatic logic of speech, entraps the speaker in what Habermas calls a ‘performative contradiction’ (PDM). There are well-known social and psychological pathologies associated with denying or ignoring connections with others – megalomania and paranoia are only among the most extreme. The broken social bonds behind such pathologies lie at different levels and in different domains, which require linguistic as well as other forms of therapy if they are to be addressed. Habermas contends that if the constitutive connections with others that communicative action establishes are not similarly respected, mental illness or social pathologies associated with social disconnection will be the result.10 The force of the claim to validity, while meant as a progressive, classunspecific force – an ‘unforced’ force – is still a force. One may wonder what kind of force could assure the rational form found in validity, a force internal to validity itself. The force of the better argument is somehow present in the properties that allow its better-ness to be recognized in the first place, since it cannot be external to this event. The crucial question is how this respect for the better reason in an argument can be separated from the meaning of the argument itself. How is it that we are convinced (überzeugt) because of the argument and not because of something else? If the rational force derives its meaning from the binding power of truth-seeking through the raising and redeeming of validity claims, then it does not manifest itself independently and is instead, I want to suggest, a product of Habermas’s social-theoretic assumptions regarding the social bond. There is an implicit circularity in Habermas’s analysis: rational discourse involving validity claims is binding in a socially integrative way because communicative social integration is achieved through the rational redemption of validity claims. It is ‘always already’ socially bonding because raising and redeeming validity claims is cognitively binding on social actors in the pragmatic sense that it enables their autonomous social coordination. Indeed, for Habermas, this cognitively binding achievement should ideally become the basis of social bonding over the other non-cognitive forms of social bonding. But Habermas’s social-theoretic assumptions, I contend, depend far more closely on the structure and form of late modern capitalist society than they do on the principle of a free and open society in and of itself. This

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is despite the fact that he emphasizes the fallibility of all validity claims, which entails that all knowledge is, in principle, open to criticism. I would like to offer a symptomatic reading of Habermas’s theory as entailing too great a concession to the requirements of capitalist society. Capitalism is founded on the exchange of stable, identical meanings and performative communicative constraints, all of which operate under a principle of excess. The capitalist system of exchange must always produce excess as a condition of its continued existence. Indeed, anything that directly challenges the circulation of exchangeable meanings, capital accumulation, or the performative roles required by capitalist exchange is either assimilated into this exchange through the extension of the system or, if that proves impossible, suppressed. The continued expansion and intensification of commodification processes remains an alarming phenomenon associated with globalization (I do not want to imply that the operation of commodification processes exhausts the meaning of globalization). Habermas understands the operation of capitalism and state (or administrative) power in terms of the autonomous, de-linguistified systems media of money and power. These systems are capable of operating in a relatively stable, ‘normfree’ condition. But the cyclic and crisis-ridden nature of capitalist economic development creates dysfunction in the spheres coordinated by the circulation of money. Crises in accumulation can be solved by expansion of the system into new areas or they can be ameliorated by the state, in which case accumulation crises become transposed onto the state as ‘fiscal crisis’11 or ‘legitimation crisis.’12 The steering problems of both the economy and the state can be addressed by ‘colonizing’ the communicative resources of the lifeworld – and we might think of the increasing commodification of culture or the compensations of the welfare state that substitute consumerism and clientalism for citizenship as examples of such colonization. As a result of this colonization of communicative resources, however, pathological side-effects are experienced in the lifeworld of social subjects who find it harder and harder to generate sufficient (rational) meaning in a world that is, for them, increasingly mediated by money and power. Capitalism, for Habermas, along with the coordinating power of the state, has its place as one of the ‘survival imperatives’ necessary for democracy, but must be kept in check by democratic institutions if the communicative power that is also required by democracy is to be protected from such colonization. The task, Habermas argues, is ‘to erect a democratic dam against the colonizing encroachment of system impera-

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tives on areas of the lifeworld.’ According to Habermas, the problems of individual and social pathology are not indicative of too much rationality – the repression or domination of social rationalization processes themselves – but rather indicate a domination of systems media logic, which results in a deficiency of the right kind of reason. What is required here is precisely the ‘political mobilization and utilization of the communicative force of production’ in a proper balance with the two other ‘control resources’ – money and power – so that the former maintains priority over the latter.13 In contrast to Habermas’s balanced-systems theory perspective, Adorno considered communication to be mere distraction from the ability to hear what cannot be communicated: ‘[E]verything that is called communication nowadays is only the noise that drowns out the silence of the spellbound.’14 As a result of the totalizing pressures of capitalism, this same ‘communication,’ he said elsewhere, ‘is the adaptation of spirit to utility, with the result that spirit is made one commodity among the rest; and what today is called meaning participates in this disaster’ (AT 74). Adorno is warning against the reification or fetishization of the communicative exchange of meaning as the proper representation of the social bond. He is not only referring to the way in which communication facilitates people’s adaptation to the system or how the free exchange of identical meanings has come to stand in for communicative freedom; he is also re-theorizing the critical concept of ideology, which under late capitalism can no longer even be properly identified as an ideology in the way that the forced or ‘false’ consciousness of ideology critique was distinguished from ‘true’ consciousness. Ideology, for Adorno, is no longer independent as a socially necessary ‘semblance’ (Schein), but rather has, in the form of socially necessary ‘communication,’ turned into the social ‘cement’ (Kitt) itself (ND 348, translation modified). Adorno could not but condemn this, although he was generally unable to see properly how popular culture could be genuinely liberatory or work against this reifying operation because his perspective tended to be blocked by an overdrawn distinction between ‘high’ and ‘mass’ culture. In any case, he really only had a small inkling of the kind of society that was about to follow his own epoch in which the possibilities of ideological resistance mediated by popular culture would become clearer. But the upshot of my introducing Adorno’s critique of ‘communication’ is to suggest that Habermas has – certainly against his own intentions – allowed just this social ‘cement’ of the bonding immanent to

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useful social coordination to put pressure upon the idea of reaching understanding free from the ‘intellectual forced march’ of systemic logic.15 Under everyday pressures that demand agreement and consensus for the sake of socially useful or productive action coordination, normal speech becomes that which carries on ‘the world’s business – describing, urging, contracting, etc.’ (PDM 201; Habermas is here quoting Richard Ohmann approvingly in the context of a critique of Derrida). This is a ‘facticity’ that is allowed to enter the core of Habermas’s orientation towards validity: ‘Under the pressure for decisions proper to the communicative practice of everyday life, participants are dependent upon agreements that coordinate their actions’ (PDM 198). But the orientation towards validity ought not to suffer from or be judged in the terms of the constraints of socially useful coordination. The rational constraints Habermas wishes to identify in his concept of language use are too much like these functional constraints. The ethical force of communicative action thus seems to be a philosophical formulation that imitates too closely the constraints and requirements of social functionality or socially useful coordination pressures, pressures that are a requirement of social existence under capitalism but may not be a requirement for a modern or postmodern human sociality in itself. What we need to do instead is open up this kind of functionality to criticism. Habermas’s theory is predisposed to this tendency to imitate the functionality of socially useful communication owing to the way the linguistic turn is made. The orientation towards truth-seeking based on validity claims relies on cognitive achievements being translated into social bonds. The kinds of mutual recognition that are embodied in people’s affirmation of shared ways of life will include the recognition of the ‘better’ arguments that validate such ways of life. But the argumentative force informing the validation cannot be exhausted by such cognitive recognition. Why one may affirm a particular way of life instead of another cannot remain at the cognitive level, even though there may be many reasons for preferring the one to the other. There is so much more to social bonding action than its cognitive moment, because our preferences always contain sensual, affective, and aesthetic elements that resist rational or functional explanations. The forms of mutual recognition and affirmation that represent and embody shared ways of life cannot be subsumed under abstract rules for the coordination of communicative action, because they contain indelible aesthetic, gestural, and affective forms that themselves require a different kind of interpretative response. It is necessary to have a self-reflective response

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to these aesthetic and affective moments of communication that could redeem their liberatory moment. They have proved capable of generating motivations for totalitarianism as well as democracy, which Adorno well understood in his analysis of the manipulations of the culture industry. Habermas hence overemphasizes the idealized identical ascriptions of meaning and consensuality at the expense of the many alternative forms of communication that might have ethical and political bearing, but most importantly at the expense of an adequate purchase on the kind of communicative context in which a discourse ethics could hope to realize itself. In his recent work on political theory, Habermas is well aware that very specific background conditions are required in order for the discourse theory of democracy to work. Indeed, he calls for the consolidation of a ‘sociopolitical culture’ in which ‘forms of communication adequate to practical reason’ are able to flourish. The complexity of rational communications in the public sphere demand ‘a background political culture that is egalitarian, divested of all educational privileges and thoroughly intellectual.’16 Although the kind of society that democracy demands ‘can blossom only in an already rationalized lifeworld,’17 this rationalized lifeworld will reflect the substantive effects of the rational domination achieved by speech itself, which I have been arguing imitates the socially necessary coordination requirements of modernity too closely. The gesture towards the intellectualized, liberal political culture made by Habermas appears impotent in the face of such demands. The rational binding power of speech will, therefore, not be enough to resist the substantive forces of instrumentalization and reification that can still manifest themselves in the force of arguments. A rather different idea of mutual recognition not restricted to the communicative rationality of merely successful self-formation, social interaction, and coordination is required to escape these limitations. As a consequence, the idea of a more extensive and open public sphere must also be recovered in which non-cognitive forms of communication can inform understanding. Adorno refers to the ideal drawn from Hegel of ‘non-argumentative thought’18 as something of an antidote to the systemic force of communication. This will require a rather different kind of political-cultural context than that which Habermas thinks is required to support discourse ethics. It is not fallibility or the criticizable nature of all knowledge that is decisive for conceiving the kind of activity and context in which the force of the better argument could realize its claim to be an unforced

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force. Following Adorno, it is instead the non-identical or dialectical nature of language itself. The deceptively simple insight that the object does not go into the concept without remainder does not solve the issue it names. Adorno knew this well. For although Hegel saw the necessity of the non-identical for identity to exist and, conversely, that ‘there is a need for the concept in order to become aware of the nonconceptual, the nonidentical,’19 the naming of the non-identical ought to have more effect and implication than simply the cognitive insight that the non-conceptual is now the concept of the non-identical. The starting point for a critical communications theory ought to be this insight into the dialectical nature of language, but it should not remain satisfied with this. Language, like art, exists only because of its nonidentical nature and this is bound up with its use as communication. ‘As an expression of the thing itself, language is not fully reducible to communication with others. Nor, however ... is it simply independent of communication ... Language as expression of the thing itself and language as communication are interwoven. The ability to name the matter at hand is developed under the compulsion to communicate it, and that element of coercion is preserved in it; conversely, it could not communicate anything that it did not have as its own intention, undistracted by other considerations.’20 The response to this contradictory communication calls for a difficult, perplexing, and paradoxical approach that is capable of holding both moments in tension without resolving the tension. For Adorno, naturally, the experience of art can inform such an approach to language and communication, although it does not replace or substitute for informed, critical reflection, which always requires conceptual interpretation. Adorno wishes to preserve the ‘enigmaticalness’ (Rätselcharakter) of art as a key experience in reflective contemplation, and it is clear that there is much more to this experience than can be measured according to those experiences or characteristics associated with the one-sided cognitive values of clarity and explicitness that Habermas emphasizes. Indeed, it is on this crucial point that the most important ‘paradigmatic’ difference between Habermas and Adorno is found.21 I should like to suggest that the experience of enigmaticalness likewise ought to inform the public use of reason – what, following Habermas, we have been calling communicative action. Adorno thinks of artworks as a kind of écriture, but they are ‘hieroglyphs for which the code has been lost, a loss that plays into their content’ (AT 124). It is to this enigmatic nature or lost meaning that the

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appeal is made for the potential source of a genuinely reconciled social condition. While it is not an appeal that can be made directly or expressed in conventional symbolic logic, its communicative power is inspired instead by the utopian desire to abolish the fear and suffering that are the most elemental experiences associated with domination. Fear and suffering ‘speak’ unequivocally to the spirit: ‘Weh spricht: ”vergeh!”’22 Habermas mistakes an endless circling about that he associates with the negative dialectic for a practical validity claim, but it is instead an analysis of the condition of conceptual thought become aware of itself within the context of social domination. From an Adornian perspective, therefore, mutual recognition should express and promote an awareness and openness to non-identity, a receptiveness to otherness, because it is the relation to non-identity that is universally present as the potential binding power in all languageuse. It is really all the consequences that follow from language conceived in dialectical terms that best allows the freedom and autonomy of communicating individuals to emerge beyond their socially useful actions. Hence, I would contend, such opening up has crucial importance for the conditions and processes through which people give themselves their laws ‘in accordance with insights they have acquired intersubjectively.’23 Adorno’s responsibility to otherness and the other is expressed in his aesthetic theory that calls for justice for cognition itself. Habermas identifies responsibility in the offer of the speech act. Neither responsibility is, in principle, mutually exclusive, and I think they can be interpreted as complementary as long as the instrumentalization or forced march of socially useful communication is controlled. The equality that must be acknowledged philosophically due to the non-identical basis of all subjectivity gestures towards a substantive solidarity, but only and always negatively. The opening up that is prompted by the perception of non-identity requires an awareness of solidarity beyond speech and communication in order to retain its democratic commitment. Such an experience is also necessary to avoid the potential sacrifice of others for the glory of a particular aesthetic or affective vision that would turn the use of reason from its awareness of the other and otherness. I think the theory of communication could evoke such a dimension if we approach culture and cultural products in a much more dialectical fashion and seek to allow the ‘remembrance of nature within the subject’24 to become the unforced force within our communications.

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NOTES 1 D. Cornell, The Philosophy of the Limit (New York: Routledge, 1992). 2 M. Morris, Rethinking the Communicative Turn (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 60–4. 3 M. Horkheimer and T.W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. E. Jephcott (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002), 32. 4 J. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. F.G. Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987), 117–18 (hereafter PDM). 5 T.W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. R. Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 135 (hereafter AT). 6 J. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1, trans. T. McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 385 (hereafter TCA1). 7 J. Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking, trans. W.M. Hohengarten (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992). 8 Morris, Rethinking the Communicative Turn. 9 N. Luhmann, Social Systems, trans. J. Bednarz, Jr, with Dirk Baecker (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995). 10 See, e.g., J. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2, trans. T. McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987), 141–6. 11 J. O’Connor, The Fiscal Crisis of the State (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1973). 12 J. Habermas, Legitimation Crisis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1976); C. Offe, Contradictions of the Welfare State (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984); and Offe, Disorganized Capitalism (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985). 13 J. Habermas, ‘Further Reflections on the Public Sphere,’ trans. T. Burger, in C.J. Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), 444–5. 14 T.W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (New York: Seabury Press, 1973), 348 (translation modified; hereafter ND). 15 T.W. Adorno, Hegel, trans. S.W. Nicholsen (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), 141. The following discussion of social-coordination pressures in Habermas’s theory follows and extends the critique developed by R. Coles, Rethinking Generosity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), chap. 3. 16 J. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, trans. W. Rehg (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), 489–90. 17 Ibid., 371. 18 Adorno, Hegel, 141. 19 Ibid., 147.

232 Martin Morris 20 Ibid., 105. 21 See Morris, Rethinking the Communicative Turn. 22 Quoting Nietzsche; T.W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1966), 203. 23 Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 445–6. 24 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 32.

10 Adorno’s Aesthetics of Reconciliation: Negative Presentation of Utopia or Post-metaphysical Pipe-Dream? donald a. burke

Since the inception of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt in 1923,1 members of the institute such as Leo Lowenthal, Walter Benjamin,2 Herbert Marcuse, and Theodor W. Adorno have investigated the relationship between art and politics. For second-generation critical theorists such as Jürgen Habermas and Albrecht Wellmer, artistic production and reception, together with professionalized art criticism, constitute one of three differentiated spheres of cultural modernity. Adorno claims that art possesses a cognitive character insofar as it is able to present a truth that exceeds the false totality, that is, the fully administered society (verwaltete Welt). Whereas Adorno operates within a Hegelian framework insofar as the work of art alludes to an absolute that nevertheless remains absent, Wellmer operates within a Weberian-Habermasian framework that situates the work of art within a realm of finite spirit and in a structure of intersubjective communication.3 Wellmer attempts to reorientate Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory within a Habermasian paradigm of intersubjective communication. However, Wellmer’s ‘stereoscopic’4 reading of Aesthetic Theory does such violence to Adorno’s text that his attempt ultimately fails. The design of Wellmer’s critique is very different from the design of Adorno’s theory. Not only do the versions of critical theory proffered by Adorno and Habermas rest on incompatible philosophical assumptions,5 Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory is explicitly at odds with a theory of communication. Albrecht Wellmer’s attempt to reorientate Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory within a theory of communicative action fails on at least two counts. First, Wellmer’s assertion that art is implicitly part of the finite spirit that operates at the interstices of the three spheres of validity falls into the same paradox as Habermas’s theory, which will be examined be-

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low. Wellmer follows Habermas in the view that the differentiated dimensions of reason must relate to one another for communicatively shared meaning to be achieved in everyday communication. Wellmer construes ‘an internal relationship between aesthetic, cognitive, and moral-practical enlightenment.’6 For Wellmer, the work of art expands the communicative potentials of recipients, though this can only occur in a situation in which the work of art is uplifted from a metaphysics of reconciliation and viewed instead from the perspective of the effects the work can have on the recipient. Ultimately, the difference between Adorno’s theory and Wellmer’s critique has to do with the distinct uses to which they put the work of art. For Adorno, the work of art can lead to a subtle change in consciousness that is the ultimate precondition for constituting the collective subject who could bring about real social change. Since Habermas and Wellmer abandon the hope for revolution and ultimately restrict the notion of praxis to non-coercive communication, the work of art takes the role of handmaiden to an Enlightenment project in which art contributes to a stock of knowledge on which participants in unlimited communication communities can draw. Although Adorno privileges production over reception in theorizing the social character of art, he does not ignore the effect of the work of art. However, rather than construing the function of art as intervening ‘in a complex network of attitudes, feelings, interpretations and evaluations,’7 Adorno grants to the work of art the capacity to intervene in reified consciousness. Whereas Habermas and Wellmer presuppose an inprinciple, unlimited, ideal, non-coercive communication community in which the work of art participates in communicatively shared meaning, Adorno construes the work of art as the other of the empirical world. As such, the work of art can act as an intervention in reified consciousness, the presupposition of establishing a non-coercive communication community in the first place.

1. Habermas and the Communicative Redemption of Modernity According to Habermas, the destruction of religious and metaphysical world views8 that Max Weber diagnosed in Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions renders the philosophy of consciousness, on which Adorno’s version of critical theory relied, untenable. For Habermas, whereas religion and metaphysics equally attempt to construct unified world views, the increasing rationalization of the world renders any claim to totality chimerical: ‘Philosophy can no longer refer to the

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whole of the world, of nature, of history, of society, in the sense of a totalizing knowledge.’9 Although Habermas follows Weber insofar as the former adopts the latter’s thesis regarding the differentiation of modern rationality into a plurality of spheres of value, Habermas criticizes Weber’s pessimistic view of rationalization, which Habermas regards as informing Adorno’s totalizing critique of instrumental reason. Habermas argues for a paradigm shift in critical theory; that is, a shift away from the philosophy of consciousness towards an intersubjective philosophy of language. With this shift Habermas attempts to recover hidden traces of communicative rationality, elements of which he finds in such diverse thinkers as the early Hegel and Marx, George Herbert Mead, Emile Durkheim, and Talcott Parsons. For Habermas, the limitation of first-generation critical theory consists in the fact that Horkheimer and Adorno’s unrelenting attack on Occidental rationality involves a performative contradiction that undermines the very basis of philosophical social criticism. Furthermore, Horkheimer and Adorno’s conception of modernity does not allow for the differentiation of purposive rationality (Zweckrationalität) and communicative rationality. Although Adorno radicalizes Max Weber’s analysis of rationalization, which the former equates with reification, Habermas systematizes Weber’s differentiation of forms of rationality, not all of which are reducible to purposive rationality. In addition, Habermas distinguishes between purposive activity, that is, labour, and communicative action, thereby redefining ‘the Marxist notion of political practice.’10 With this tempered appropriation of Weber and Marx, Habermas believes he is able to put forth a theory that not only avoids the performative contradiction inherent in totalized critique, but also allows room for a form of practice not subject to purposive rationality.11 The linguistic turn that characterizes second-generation critical theory is only one part of a more encompassing shift in the thought of Habermas from that of his predecessors Horkheimer and Adorno. The way in which the two generations theorize modernity betrays a broader differentiation in their respective approaches. Whereas Adorno has an unwavering critique of philosophical and scientific modernity, which he sees as converging in identifying thought, Habermas and Wellmer differentiate forms of rationality that are said to operate according to their own internal logic (Eigengesetzlichkeit), yet are brought into a balance and mutual interplay that contribute to an on-going social learning process. Put otherwise, modern science, moral and legal philosophy, and art criticism are all part of a more encompassing enlight-

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enment project that contributes to an ever-increasing stock of knowledge that can be drawn upon at will. Although Adorno was equally influenced by the thought of Max Weber, nothing of the kind can be found in Adorno’s theory. As late Enlightenment philosophers, Habermas and his followers attempt to realize the ideals of modernity in an age that likes to think of itself as postmodern. For Habermas, the project of modernity is incomplete, and radical critiques of reason – such as those Horkheimer and Adorno put forth in Dialectic of Enlightenment, as well as the critiques gathered under the rubric of post-structuralism – abandon a tradition that has not been given adequate scope to deliver on its promises. Although Habermas does not subscribe to the philosophy of history underlying the enlightened thought of a Kant or a Condorcet, according to which humanity has entered on a sure course of progress towards scientific advancement, moral betterment, and happiness, he does accept the view that the inner logics of the cognitive-instrumental, moral-practical, and aesthetic-expressive spheres of validity manifest themselves in an on-going collective learning process, a process in which it is still possible to participate. With the progressive rationalization of culture, these three spheres of validity proceed according to their own internal logic, each administered by a culture of experts; that is, those who are supposedly ‘more adept at being logical in these particular ways than other people are.’12 Although the three distinct spheres of validity proceed according to an inner logic that is specific to each sphere, the three spheres are brought into some sort of balance and interplay, despite the tension in which they stand to one another. Habermas describes the integration of the differentiated as the communicative rationality of the lifeworld that brings that which has become autonomous back into a nontotalizable ‘interplay.’13 Habermas would like philosophy, on behalf of a renewed tradition of everyday practice, to ‘help set in motion the interplay between the cognitive-instrumental, moral-practical and aesthetic-expressive dimensions that has come to a standstill today, like a tangled mobile.’14 In everyday communication, cognitive meanings, moral expectations, subjective expressions and evaluations must relate to one another. Communication processes need a cultural tradition covering all spheres – cognitive, moral-practical and expressive.15

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Asher Horowitz has argued that Habermas provides no basis for demonstrating how the three differentiated spheres of validity relate to one another, or, specifically, ‘of how the world might be discerned in all three relations simultaneously.’16 To be sure, Habermas insists that when one raises a claim to validity in any one of the spheres of validity, one simultaneously evokes the other two as well: ‘[W]ith every speech act oriented to reaching understanding exactly three validity claims are raised’ (TCA1 310). However, rather than evoke a Hegelian concept of totality, Habermas accepts ‘Weber’s central assertion to the effect that the metaphysically conceived unity of reason had fallen apart once and for all with the separation of cultural value spheres, each with its own inner logic; and that it couldn’t be put back together again, not even dialectically’ (TCA1 357). Yet in the final section of The Theory of Communicative Action Habermas declares that the independent spheres of rationality somehow mutually evoke one another in quasi-dialectical fashion: The mediation of the moments of reason is no less a problem than the separation of the aspects of rationality under which questions of truth, justice, and taste were differentiated from one another. The only protection against an empiricist abridgement of the rationality problematic is a steadfast pursuit of the tortuous routes along which science, morality, and art communicate with one another. In each of these spheres, differentiation processes are accompanied by countermovements that, under the primacy of one dominant aspect of validity, bring back in again the two aspects that were at first excluded.17

Habermas does not offer an explanation as to how the differentiated spheres of validity communicate with one another – he simply states that they strive towards a unity ‘that might be established this side of expert cultures, in a nonreified communicative everyday practice’ (TCA2 398). This unity is a quasi-transcendental presupposition of communicative rationality and is not to be sought in untenable metaphysical world views. Rather than ground the differentiated moments of reason in a foundationalist claim to objective reason, Habermas speaks of a ‘felicitous coherence of different theoretical fragments’ (ibid.). The fallibility of a theory is apparent in the degree to which it fails to cohere with other theories. It should be clear that Habermas is entangled in an irresolvable paradox. Habermas, for whom Adorno’s thinking leads to a dead end owing to the performative contradictions

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of negative dialectics, simply states that the three spheres of validity relate to one another yet simultaneously claims that they cannot be brought back into a unity. Whereas Asher Horowitz claims that Habermas’s theory is ultimately quasi-dialectical in that it must mediate the differentiated spheres of validity – even though Habermas opts for terms such as balance and interplay18 rather than unity – Christoph Menke views the aesthetic in terms of a fundamental antinomy. According to Menke, modern aesthetics has developed according to two corresponding lines of reflection. On the one hand, the aesthetic is taken to be one modern form of enquiry alongside others. Aesthetic discourse unfolds according to its own internal logic and stands in a position of autonomy vis-à-vis nonaesthetic discourse. On the other hand, the aesthetic exceeds non-aesthetic rational discourse and cannot be brought into interplay with the differentiated plural rationalities. Aesthetic discourse ultimately subverts non-aesthetic discourse: ‘[T]he aesthetics of negativity ... brings to the fore the discourse-subverting logic of aesthetic experience.’19 While the former position (aesthetic autonomy) does not preclude the interplay of aesthetic discourse with non-aesthetic rational discourse, the latter position (the sovereignty of art) holds that the aesthetic sets itself off from and subverts the discourse of the other disciplines. Enhancing the value of the aesthetic on the basis of arguments involving its modern character thus also disputes any claim that aesthetic experience, now released to pursue its own internal logic, can ever be brought back into a lifeworld-based integration, into an interplay with the other differentiated dimensions of reason. The relation of the differentiated aesthetic to the other dimensions of reason cannot take the form of an interplay within the communicative rationality of the lifeworld because its total negativity cannot be set in a relation of coexistence, let alone of coordination with nonaesthetic discourses.20

According to Menke, Adorno’s conception of aesthetic experience problematizes the interplay of aesthetics vis-à-vis non-aesthetic discourses. For Menke, Habermas mistakenly views the function of Adorno’s aesthetics as stemming from a romantic standpoint, as opposed to a modernist aesthetic that does not valorize the aesthetic as a problem-solver of the aporiae of non-aesthetic discourses. Rather than speaking about an interplay between aesthetic and non-aesthetic discourses, Menke claims that aesthetic negativity is in a relationship

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of interminable crisis vis-à-vis non-aesthetic discourses: ‘And this is precisely what characterizes Adorno’s concept of aesthetic spirit (more accurately termed romantic than Hegelian): the fragmentation of a unity nonetheless continuously sought.’21 Through his reading of modern aesthetic discourse as involving both autonomy and sovereignty, Menke has problematized the quasi-transcendental presupposition of communicative reason. A related problem involves the relation between the culture of experts and everyday processes of communication. While each sphere of validity is administered by a culture of experts, their mutual implication (which Habermas insists is not a dialectical unity) contributes to an on-going social learning process that is to have a transformative impact on everyday life. In this way, the ideals of the Enlightenment, administered by experts, though as by stealth brought back into the everyday life of lay people, can at last be realized – or at any rate further progress towards their realization can be made. However, it is far from apparent in Habermas’s theory just how the culture of experts exerts an influence on quotidian communicative practice. Indeed, Habermas claims that with the elitist splitting off of expert cultures from everyday praxis, ‘the threat increases that the life-world, whose traditional substance has already been devaluated, will become more and more impoverished.’22 In consequence of this professionalization, the distance between expert cultures and the broader public grows greater. What accrues to a culture by virtue of specialized work and reflection does not come as a matter of course into the possession of everyday practice. (TCA2 326) It is not the differentiation and independent development of cultural value spheres that lead to the cultural impoverishment of everyday communicative practice, but an elitist splitting-off of expert cultures from contexts of communicative action in daily life. (TCA2 330)

In ‘Modernity versus Postmodernity’ Habermas claims that the surrealist attempt to sublate art into the praxis of life ultimately failed because the surrealists focused on one aspect of validity alone. Habermas attempts to demonstrate the way in which artworks can be received by the layperson in illuminating ways: ‘[A]esthetic experience ... not only renews the interpretation of our needs in whose light we perceive the world. It permeates as well our cognitive significations and our norma-

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tive expectations and changes the manner in which these moments refer to one another.’23 Whereas the surrealist revolt against the culture of the experts failed to take into account the mutual interplay between the aesthetic-expressive, moral-practical, and cognitive-instrumental spheres of validity, the layperson can only reappropriate the culture of the experts from the perspective of a trisected communicative rationality governing the lifeworld. The three dimensions of rationality that constitute the lifeworld are part of a more encompassing communicative rationality, as opposed to the functionalist reason that operates in the capitalist economy and the modern state. Habermas carefully distinguishes between cultural and societal processes of modernization. Whereas cultural modernization proceeds according to the tripartite logic of communicative reason, societal modernization advances according to purposive rationality. For Habermas, the limitation of first-generation critical theory, among other things, consists in the fact that Horkheimer and Adorno collapse the distinction between communicative reason and functionalist reason by construing Western rationality as fully instrumental: ‘In the totally administered society only instrumental reason, expanded into a totality, found embodiment’ (TCA2 382). Habermas’s version of critical theory involves protecting structures of the lifeworld from colonization (as opposed to mere mediatization)24 by imperatives that properly belong to the capitalist economy and the modern state. According to Habermas, capitalist modernization tends to reify processes of symbolic social reproduction. In his discussion of Talcott Parsons, Habermas claims that Parsons’s systems theory does not resolve the tensions between lifeworld and system. Consequently, Parsons was unable to analyse the pathological effects that growing systems complexity can have on structures of the lifeworld: ‘I am referring here to the deformations that inevitably turn up when forms of economic and administrative rationality encroach upon areas of life whose internal communicative structures cannot be rationalized according to those criteria’ (TCA2 285). According to Habermas, capitalist economic processes and bureaucratic state administration are subject to quite different imperatives from those that operate in the lifeworld: The point is to protect areas of life that are functionally dependent on social integration through values, norms, and consensus formation, to preserve them from falling prey to the systemic imperatives of economic

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and administrative subsystems growing with dynamics of their own, and to defend them from being converted over, through the steering medium of the law, to a principle of sociation that is, for them, dysfunctional. (TCA2 372–3) The occasions for protest and discontent originate exactly when spheres of communicative action, centred on the reproduction and transmission of values and norms, are penetrated by a form of modernization guided by standards of economic and administrative rationality; however, those very spheres are dependent on quite different standards of rationalization – on the standards of what I would call communicative rationality.25

Since Horkheimer and Adorno’s dystopian vision of the fully administered society does not allow for the differentiation of types of rationality, they are unable to provide a standpoint from which to pursue gains in communicative rationality: ‘In the administered world, artworks are only adequately assimilated in the form of the communication of the uncommunicable, the breaking free of reified consciousness.’26 According to Habermas, cultural modernization has set free the internal logic of the cognitive-instrumental, moral-practical, and aesthetic-expressive spheres of validity, each of which contribute to an on-going social learning process by contributing to the culturally stored body of knowledge on which it is possible to draw in communicative processes: ‘The lifeworld also stores the interpretive work of preceding generations’ (TCA1 70). According to Horowitz, ‘one of the principal claims in favour of the superiority of modernity is the cumulative learning which [Habermas] claims it allows within each domain of rationality.’27 Furthermore, participants engaged in non-coercive communicative action contribute to symbolic social reproduction: ‘Under the aspect of reaching understanding, communicative acts serve the transmission of culturally stored knowledge ... [C]ultural tradition reproduces itself through the medium of action oriented to reaching understanding’ (TCA2 63). Despite a differential distribution of cultural knowledge, which is already administered by specialists, the universe of possible events and initiatives is well circumscribed spatiotemporally and thematically; thus the collectively available situation interpretations are stored by all participants similarly and can be narratively called upon when needed. (TCA2 156) Acting within the framework of a culture means that participants draw

242 Donald A. Burke interpretations from a culturally secured and intersubjectively shared stock of knowledge in order to come to an understanding about their situation and to pursue their respective aims on this basis. (TCA2 219)

Furthermore, the three spheres of validity, despite proceeding according to their own internal logic, reciprocally implicate one another: Communicative action relies on a cooperative process of interpretation in which participants relate simultaneously to something in the objective, the social, and the subjective worlds, even when they thematically stress only one of the three components in their utterances ... Even when an utterance clearly belongs only to one mode of communication and sharply thematizes one corresponding validity claim, all three modes of communication and the validity claims corresponding to them are internally related to each other. Thus, it is a rule of communicative action that when a hearer assents to a thematized validity claim, he acknowledges the other two implicitly raised validity claims as well. (TCA2 120–1)

As opposed to construing Western rationality as such as instrumental in the manner of Weber, Horkheimer, and Adorno, Habermas and Wellmer defend the emancipatory potentials of modernity through a call for continuous rationalization of the propensity to intersubjective communication. As one of the impulses of modernity, the aesthetic-expressive sphere of validity can contribute to unleashing the communicative potentials of participants engaged in non-coercive communication. Since Habermas consistently refuses to treat in depth the role of art in the evolutionary impulses of modernity,28 we must look to the work of Habermas’s close colleague Albrecht Wellmer for a more thorough analysis of the aesthetic sphere of validity.

2. Wellmer’s ‘Reconstructive’ Reading of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory In ‘Truth, Semblance, Reconciliation,’ Wellmer formulates a position that brings Habermas’s emphasis on the interplay of multiple rationalities and the reception aesthetics of Hans Robert Jauss (as well as the criticisms of Adorno advanced by Peter Bürger and K.H. Bohrer) into a constellation. Horowitz and Menke have raised serious objections to the quasi-dialectical, quasi-transcendental, and quasi-foundationalist paradigm of communicative reason. According to Wellmer, the differ-

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entiation of the spheres of cultural modernity expresses an ‘irreversible cultural learning process’29 in which artworks take on the function of expanding the communicative boundaries of the recipient. For Wellmer, the social significance of a work of art lies in its reception in an intersubjective context that can then have a transformative impact on everyday processes of communication.30 For Wellmer, this transformative impact of art can only take place in an intersubjective context of aesthetic reception, in which the percipient receives artworks from the perspective of the lifeworld and relates them to cognitive meanings and moral expectations. H.R. Jauss cites the communicative functions of art in evidence against Adorno. There is good reason why Adorno does not refer to these, namely that it is only possible to pose questions about reception and communication in connection with art if we first question the unequivocal interrelationship that Adorno constructs between reality, utopia and the work of art.31

In Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics Jauss writes of Adorno’s aesthetics of negativity that ‘the path of progressive negativity as a categorial frame is inappropriately one-sided in its emphasis on what is social in art, for it leaves out communicative functions.’32 It is not that Adorno does not refer to the communicative function of art. Rather than seeking the social significance of art in the field of reception, Adorno locates art’s social character in artistic production: The objectivation of art, which is what society from its external perspective takes to be art’s fetishism, is itself social in that it is the product of the division of labor. That is why the relation of art to society is not to be sought primarily in the sphere of reception. This relation is anterior to reception, in production. (AT 228) Art, however, is social not only because of its mode of production, in which the dialectic of the forces and relations of production is concentrated, nor simply because of the social derivation of its thematic material. Much more importantly, art becomes social by its opposition to society, and it occupies this position only as autonomous art. (AT 225)

Paradoxically, Wellmer claims that it is art’s autonomy – that is, its emancipation from its cultic function – that allows for it to contribute to

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gains in communicative rationality: ‘[O]nly as autonomous can art still generate that surplus by which for moments the world in a state of disenchantment may be re-enchanted again, by which the dried riverbeds of ordinary communication may be flooded and the meaningstructures of the everyday world be shaken up.’33 Just as Wellmer overlooks those passages in Adorno that stigmatize the communicative function of art, so too does he overlook those passages in which Adorno approaches something like a theory of intersubjectivity: Expression approaches the transsubjective; it is the form of knowledge that – having preceded the polarity of subject and object – does not recognize this polarity as definitive. (AT 111) Literary forms, by their direct and ultimately inescapable participation in communicative language, are related to a We; for the sake of their own eloquence they must strive to free themselves of all external communicativeness. (AT 168) The We encapsulated in the objectivation of works is not radically other than the external We, however frequently it is the residue of a real We that is past. (AT 238)

Artistic production precedes aesthetic reception. So too does transsubjective expression precede the polarity of subject and object. However, Adorno’s remark regarding the transsubjective nature of artistic expression ought not to be construed as advocating a role for art in intersubjective communication: ‘In spite of the most subtle modifications, bourgeois idealist philosophy has been unable epistemologically to break through solipsism. For normal bourgeois consciousness the epistemology modeled on it was of no consequence. For this consciousness art appears necessary and directly “intersubjective”’ (AT 42). One of the ways in which Wellmer’s reading distorts Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory is by reading Adorno’s aesthetics from the perspective of reception theory. This is not to say, however, that Adorno neglected artistic reception: ‘[I]f art is freed from consideration of its recipient, its sensual facade becomes increasingly a matter of indifference’ (AT 196). As a Marxist, Adorno is more interested in locating the social aspect of the work of art in the dialectic of the relations and forces of production. In his analysis of Adorno’s remarks regarding the increasing spiritualization of modern art, Wellmer observes that

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[t]he opening up of art, its constant revolt against its traditional limits, which Adorno analyses under the heading of its spiritualization, corresponds to that opening up of ordinary discourses, which Habermas has diagnosed in the communicative thawing (‘making fluid’) of traditions, and in what he calls the communicative ‘rationalization’ of the life world.34

By reading Adorno’s notion of the increasing spiritualization of art (that is, that the modern work of art is driven to expand the existing concept of art) through Habermas’s theory of ‘the communicative “rationalization” of the life world,’ Wellmer reads past Adorno’s critique of communication, to which I will return in section 3.35 Following Habermas here tout court, Wellmer claims that the ‘communicative “rationalization” of the life world’ to which the work of art contributes takes place in a state of mutual complementarity of the three spheres of validity that characterize cultural modernity: In the subtext of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, precisely at those points where Adorno analyzes the invasion of the sublime into modern art, the contours of an alternative to the main thesis of the Dialectic of Enlightenment become visible. According to this alternative thesis the dialectical relationship between subjectification and reification would have to be replaced by an internal relationship between aesthetic, cognitive, and moral-practical enlightenment. Modern art, modern science, and philosophy, and a modern form of democracy based on universalist moral principles move into a relationship of mutual correspondences and mutual complementarity: aesthetic, cognitive, and moral-practical enlightenment become visible as different spheres into which the emancipatory impulse of modernity has differentiated itself.36

Horowitz and Menke have problematized the presupposition of mutual complementarity of the spheres of validity in second-generation critical theory. However, the communicative function Wellmer attributes to the work of art is even more problematic than the quasi-dialectical interplay of the spheres of validity. If ... the spiritualization of art and therefore the emancipation of the subject in Adorno’s sense are related to changes in the communicative relationships between the individuals in a post-traditional society, the assimilation of new layers of experience and of reality through modern

246 Donald A. Burke art, layers of experience and reality which Adorno describes as being ‘inimical’ to spirit, may be seen as carrying a potential for opening up the communicative relationships to themselves ... The emancipation of art could then be related to a possible communicative opening up of social relations.36

I am willing to grant that if the first clause of the preceding quotation is true, then Wellmer’s argument is both sound and valid. However, I would like to bring into question the correspondence Wellmer constructs between Adorno’s notion of the spiritualization of art, on the one hand, and the ‘changes in the communicative relationships between the individuals in a post-traditional society,’ on the other hand. Wellmer overzealously construes an internal connection between art’s progressive spiritualization and changes in everyday communicative processes. In ‘Truth, Semblance, Reconciliation’ Wellmer makes the same point from the perspective of reception aesthetics: Adorno ... did not concede to modern society what he had conceded to art, namely that enlightenment has liberated possibilities of ‘extending the limits of the subject’ (G. Schwab) as well as unleashing possibilities of reification ... [I]f this point is taken, the way is open to making a connection – not only in historical, but also in functional terms – between the reflexively opened forms of modern art and the ‘expanded boundaries’ of the receiving subject.38

However, Adorno’s defence of authentic autonomous art is not compatible with an aesthetic theory that attaches extra-aesthetic demands on the work of art, whether these demands entail communicating maxims or facilitating intersubjective dialogue. Extending Kant’s notion of purposiveness without a purpose, Adorno writes: ‘What is social in art is its immanent movement against society, not its manifest opinions ... Insofar as a social function can be predicated for artworks, it is their functionlessness’ (AT 227). Adorno ‘foregoes a functional analysis because he suspects that behind it lies the attempt to subject art to externally determined purposes.’39 Much to the chagrin of Jauss and Wellmer, Adorno abstains from attaching a communicative function to the work of art because he adheres to a certain concept of aesthetic autonomy and locates art’s relation to society in production rather than reception. According to Wellmer, the ‘reflexive opening-up of literary forms’40

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expands the boundaries of the recipient who is able to synthesize the meaninglessness of the modern work of art ‘in an arena for non-violent communication.’41 Lambert Zuidervaart has summarized Wellmer’s paradigmatic turning of Adorno on his head when he states that for Wellmer ‘the work of art should be construed as a medium of communication rather than a model of reconciliation.’42 Adorno does not construe a relation between art’s spiritualization and the ‘making fluid’ of communicative potentials. Rather, the work of art intervenes in reified consciousness, the necessary first step in constituting the collective subject necessary for the abolition of toil: Artworks exercise a practical effect, if they do so at all, not by haranguing but by the scarcely apprehensible transformation of consciousness ... [A]rt itself is objectively praxis as the cultivation of consciousness; but it only becomes this by renouncing persuasion ... [A]rtworks correspond to the objective need for a transformation of consciousness that could become a transformation of reality. (AT 243)

Marcuse expresses a similar view in The Aesthetic Dimension: ‘Art cannot change the world, but it can contribute to changing the consciousness and drives of the men and women who could change the world’;43 ‘art is also the promise of liberation ... It invokes an image of the end of power, the appearance (Schein) of freedom. But only the appearance; clearly, the fulfillment of this promise is not within the domain of art.’44 Of course, Adorno and Marcuse remain entangled within a philosophy of consciousness and a ‘framework of the critique of instrumental reason’ (TCA2 350) that Habermas believes he has rendered inoperable. Whereas Adorno and Marcuse locate the practical/functional aspect of art (in those few places in which Adorno addresses this issue) in the transformation of consciousness that is necessary to change the world, Habermas and Wellmer speak of the value of the aesthetic sphere of validity in its capacity to expand the boundaries of the communicating subject. Not only does the paradigm of intersubjective communication replace the paradigm of consciousness that has allegedly exhausted itself. More significantly, Habermas and Wellmer are no longer interested in a radical transformation of existing society: ‘Everyday communicative practice is not compatible with the hypothesis that everything could be entirely different’ (TCA2 132). In his critical theory, Habermas makes far too many concessions to capitalism:

248 Donald A. Burke Marx is convinced a priori that in capital he has before him nothing more than the mystified form of a class relation. This interpretation excludes from the start the question of whether the systemic interconnection of the capitalist economy and the modern state administration do not also represent a higher and evolutionarily advantageous level of integration by comparison to traditional societies. (TCA2 339)

Whereas Adorno speaks of the liquidation of the individual under a monolithic culture in late capitalism, Habermas adheres to the necessity of social integration under systemic imperatives. According to Habermas, Adorno’s monolithic critique of reason does not allow for the differentiation of cultural and economic forms of modernization and rationalization. For Adorno, mass communication and the culture industry have so thoroughly reified and standarized consciousness that he is unable to formulate a theory of non-coercive communication. If speculation on the state of reconciliation were permitted, neither the undistinguished unity of subject and object nor their antithetical hostility would be conceivable in it; rather, the communication of what was distinguished. Not until then would the concept of communication, as an objective concept, come into its own.45

Whereas Adorno considers interpersonal relations to be thoroughly reified in the period of late capitalism, thus precluding the possibility of non-coercive communication this side of reconciliation, Habermas restricts the reification of interpersonal relations to ‘systematically distorted communication’ (TCA2 388). For Adorno, art exists in an a priori polemical relationship to reality and criticizes the standardized world by its mere existence. Because he views communicative processes as thoroughly ossified, Adorno does not put forth an aesthetic theory that views the work of art as contributing to the communicative rationality governing the on-going collective learning process. Rather than construing the work of art as contributing to a theory of communication, Adorno claims over and over again that art must resist communication. Throughout Aesthetic Theory Adorno rails against attaching a communicative role to the work of art. Wellmer attempts to work out a ‘stereoscopic’ reading of Adorno that would uproot the best insights of Aesthetic Theory from the dialectical stasis in which they are enmeshed in order to make them serviceable to a theory of communication. However, Adorno’s dialectical approach to aesthetics is indicative of the

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strength of his theory, not of its weakness. Furthermore, Adorno’s theory resists a reading that presupposes a utopia of non-coercive communication. In what follows I would like to present a series of dialectical constructions from Aesthetic Theory in which Adorno puts forth a critique of communication. Specifically, this section will argue that (1) Adorno’s original thinking of the relation between art and natural beauty proleptically anticipates and refutes Habermas’s charge of totalizing critique by putting forth a theory of mimesis; (2) the dialectic of semblance and expression similarly resists a reading from the perspective of communication; and (3) Adorno’s conception of authentic autonomous art is the result of the dialectic between l’art pour l’art and committed art.

3. The Redemption of Dialectical Aesthetics A. The Dialectic of Mimesis and Rationality Within the context of his discussion of natural beauty, Adorno construes an internal relation between art and natural beauty. This internal relationship is not simply one of imitation, however. By historicizing the concept of nature, Adorno construes an affinity between natural beauty and the work of art insofar as both are deemed evanescent. Art, however, objectifies the evanescent and requires philosophy to distil its truth content. [A]rt is not the imitation of nature but the imitation of natural beauty ... Art does not imitate nature, not even individual instances of natural beauty, but natural beauty as such. This denominates not only the aporia of natural beauty but the aporia of aesthetics as a whole. Its object is determined negatively, as indeterminable. It is for this reason that art requires philosophy, which interprets it in order to say what it is unable to say, whereas art is only able to say it by not saying it. (AT 71–2)

According to Adorno, art and philosophy mutually require one another. This is not to say, however, that Habermas is correct when he approvingly cites Baumeister and Kulenkampf: ‘Negative dialectics and aesthetic theory can now only “helplessly refer to one another”’ (TCA1 384). The enigmaticalness of the work of art requires philosophy for its decipherment. For Adorno, art and philosophy both have rational and mimetic aspects, though this in no way implies that Adorno

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construes an identity between art and philosophy: ‘A philosophy that tried to imitate art, that would turn itself into a work of art, would be expunging itself.’46 Rather, art and philosophy are both oriented towards a future reconciliation with nature in a utopia that can only be presented, though not concretized, negatively: ‘Art is no more able than theory to concretize utopia, not even negatively’ (AT 32). For Adorno, the mutual dignity of nature and the work of art consist in their anticipation of that which does not yet exist.47 ‘The shame felt in the face of natural beauty stems from the damage implicitly done to what does not yet exist by taking it for existent. The dignity of nature is that of the not-yet-existing; by its expression it repels intentional humanization’ (AT 74). The work of art anticipates something like a state of reconciliation of spirit and nature; or, rather, the work of art can act to bring about the ‘remembrance [Eingedenken] of nature within the subject.’48 For Habermas, this remembrance/mindfulness of nature is ‘magically invoked.’49 The state of reconciliation, as the yet-to-exist, cannot be imbued with human meaning, for that would transgress the absolute alterity of reconciliation and would constitute a further act of violence against nature. Rather than communicate meanings, the work of art anticipates a state of reconciliation that can only be communicated indirectly: ‘For communication is the adaptation of spirit to utility, with the result that spirit is made one commodity among the rest; and what today is called meaning participates in this disaster’ (AT 74). For Adorno, the artwork cannot be understood in terms of communication, for that would violate art’s autonomy and subject art to instrumental rationality, against whose imperatives the work of art stands in protest. Art is not the Other of reason as such. Rather, art is the Other of the empirical world while it is simultaneously the Other of instrumental rationality. The mimetic element, which, for Adorno, is operative in both art and philosophy, allows for, indeed is the prerequisite for, drawing conceptual distinctions.50 According to Adorno, there is a ‘mimetic element of knowledge’ in the discriminating mind that ‘alone gets down to the infinitesimal’ (ND 45). ‘To represent the mimesis it supplanted, the concept has no other way than to adopt something mimetic in its own conduct, without abandoning itself’ (ND 14). For the sake of utopia, identification is reflected in the linguistic use of the word outside of logic, in which we speak, not of identifying an object, but of identifying with people and things. Dialectics alone might settle the Greek argument whether like is known by like or by unlike. If the thesis

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that likeness alone has that capacity makes us aware of the indelible mimetic element in all cognition and all human practice, this awareness grows untrue when the affinity – indelible, yet infinitely far removed at the same time – is posited as positive. In epistemology the inevitable result is the false conclusion that the object is the subject. Traditional philosophy believes that it knows the unlike by likening it to itself, while in so doing it really knows itself only. The idea of a changed philosophy would be to become aware of likeness by defining it as that which is unlike itself. (ND 150)

For Adorno, language itself possesses a double character in that it has both significative and mimetic-expressive elements: ‘[B]y virtue of its significative element, the opposite pole to its mimetic-expressive element, language is chained to the form of judgment and proposition and thereby to the synthetic form of the concept.’51 Whereas Adorno recognizes the ineluctable role of rhetoric, even in philosophical prose, Habermas wishes to bracket off the ‘Dionysiac force of the poetical’ in favour of ordinary language use in which participants raise criticizable validity claims in a cumulative learning process. Because he is unwilling to admit a non-significative role to ordinary language use and holds that mimesis serves as a placeholder for a reason that is before reason, Habermas claims that Horkheimer and Adorno are not logically able to put forth a theory of mimesis. However, were Habermas to recognize the rhetorical nature of all language,52 he would be forced to concede that there is not an unsublatable opposition between mimesis and rationality. Art is bound up with rationality insofar as it participates in the dialectic of mimesis and rationality: ‘Art’s disavowal of magical practices – its antecedents – implies participation in rationality’ (AT 53). Art is a stage in the process of what Max Weber called the disenchantment of the world, and it is entwined with rationalization; this is the source of all of art’s means and methods of production; technique that disparages its ideology inheres in this ideology as much as it threatens it because art’s magical heritage stubbornly persisted throughout art’s transformations ... The sentimentality and debility of almost the whole tradition of aesthetic thought is that it has suppressed the dialectic of rationality and mimesis immanent to art ... The survival of mimesis, the nonconceptual affinity of the subjectively produced with its unposited other, defines art as a form of knowledge and to that extent as ‘rational.’ (AT 54)

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According to Habermas, Horkheimer and Adorno introduce the concept of mimesis as a placeholder for ‘a reason that is before reason’ (TCA1 382). As the Other of reason, the capacity of mimesis cannot be rationally understood: The paradox in which the critique of instrumental reason is entangled, and which stubbornly resists even the most supple dialectic, consists in this: Horkheimer and Adorno would have to put forward a theory of mimesis, which, according to their own ideas, is impossible ... The rational core of mimetic achievements can be laid open only if we give up the paradigm of the philosophy of consciousness – namely a subject that represents objects and toils with them – in favor of the paradigm of linguistic philosophy – namely that of intersubjective understanding or communication – and put the cognitive-instrumental aspect of reason in its proper place as part of a more encompassing communicative rationality. (TCA1 382, 390)

Habermas is mistaken in construing the mimetic capacity as the ‘sheer opposite of reason’ (TCA1 390). Asher Horowitz has argued that whereas Habermas regards Adorno’s use of mimesis as a placeholder for objective reason, Habermas himself ultimately evokes such a placeholder in the transcendental presupposition of a ‘decentred lifeworld ... and “rational interconnectedness” of the three spheres of possible validity.’53 It appears at times as if Habermas is wearing philosophical blinkers and is only able to see a totalizing/critique of reason where real distinctions are drawn: ‘Art is rationality that criticizes rationality without withdrawing from it’ (AT 55). Whereas Habermas sees in the self-reflection of the Enlightenment only its self-decapitation, Adorno takes great pains to show that self-reflexive philosophy does not expunge reason: ‘But neither can we hypostatize the leap, as Kierkegaard does, lest we blaspheme against reason’ (ND 182). ‘The self-reflection of enlightenment is not its revocation; it is corrupted into revocation only for the sake of today’s status quo’ (ND 158). We cannot, by thinking, assume any position in which that separation of subject and object will directly vanish, for the separation is inherent in each thought; it is inherent in thinking itself. This is why Heidegger’s moment of truth levels off into an irrationalist weltanschauung. Today as in Kant’s time, philosophy demands a rational critique of reason, not its banishment or abolition. (ND 85)

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In his critical philosophy, Kant employs reason to set limits to the claims of rationalist metaphysics: ‘Nothing worse could happen to these labors than that someone should make the unexpected discovery that there is and can be no a priori cognition at all. But there is no danger of this. It would be tantamount to someone’s wanting to prove by reason that there is no reason.’54 Of course, this is precisely what Habermas accuses Adorno of doing. Whereas Habermas and Wellmer circumscribe art within a structure of communicative reason, Adorno’s aesthetics of negativity allow for a dialectic between art and rationality in which art simultaneously participates in rationality as one autonomous domain among others and exceeds rationality by bringing to appearance that which reason cannot exhaust. B. The Dialectic of Semblance and Expression In the dialectic of semblance and expression, the unity that the work of art attempts to bring to expression is itself semblance: ‘No artwork is an undiminished unity; each must simulate it, and thus collides with itself. Confronted with an antagonistic reality, the aesthetic unity that is established in opposition to it immanently becomes a semblance’ (AT 105). The elements of an artwork grind away at each other and as they strive toward unity, the unity that is achieved reveals itself to be spurious: ‘this condemns aesthetic reconciliation as aesthetically specious’ (AT 105). Spirit is not represented negatively in the work of art. Rather, the spirit of an artwork is nothing other than the relation of the sensuous elements to one another. ‘Artworks are semblance in that they externalize their interior, spirit, and they are only known insofar as ... their interior is known’ (AT 109). Essence, spirit, interior: these are the words with which Adorno describes the processual character of art that is revealed in appearance. Since the unity of the work of art is semblance – ‘no whole is actually achieved’ (AT 108–9) – the work of art is not to be synthesized by a transcendental subject (recipient) either. Rather, the interior, the essence, the spirit, the dialectic between universal and particular that immanently takes place in the artwork is that which appears: But in artworks, appearance is that of essence, toward which it is not indifferent; in artworks, appearance itself belongs to the side of essence. They are truly characterized by that thesis in Hegel in which realism and nominalism are mediated: Art’s essence must appear, and its appearance

254 Donald A. Burke is that of essence and not an appearance for-another but rather art’s immanent determination. Accordingly, no work of art, regardless what its maker thinks of it, is directed toward an observer, not even toward a transcendental subject of apperception; no artwork is to be described or explained in terms of the categories of communication. (AT 109)

Albrecht Wellmer, for whom the work of art is implicitly part of a structure of intersubjective communication, seems to overlook passages such as these in which Adorno explicitly remonstrates against attaching a communicative role to the work of art. C. The Dialectic of l’art pour l’art and Committed Art In two distinct passages from the final section of Aesthetic Theory entitled ‘Society,’ Adorno formulates a position between l’art pour l’art and committed art, both of which Adorno construes as ideological. Adorno claims that l’art pour l’art’s concept of beauty all too easily lends itself to commodification and kitsch (AT 237), whereas he criticizes committed art for communicating maxims – which is ultimately authoritarian (AT 242). For Adorno, authentic autonomous art is the third element of a triad, of which l’art pour l’art and committed art are the antithetical remainders. Autonomous art is not midway between two extremes, but rather a self-conscious art aware of its embeddedness in the dialectic of the relations and forces of production, prefiguring a state of reconciliation that is beyond the scope of art to actualize: ‘Art’s double character – its autonomy and fait social – is expressed ever and again in the palpable dependencies and conflicts between the two spheres’ (AT 229); ‘What is social in art is its immanent movement against society, not its manifest opinions’ (AT 227). For Adorno, the status of art in an antagonistic society is uncertain and can only be assured of its right to exist by refusing to take on a propagandistic function. Art can only rest assured of its functionlessness by renouncing communication. If art cedes its autonomy, it delivers itself over to the machinations of the status quo; if art remains strictly for-itself, it nonetheless submits to integration as one harmless domain among others. The social totality appears in this aporia, swallowing whole whatever occurs. That works renounce communication is a necessary yet by no means sufficient condition of their unideological essence ... The acute reason today for the social inefficacy of artworks – those that do not surrender to crude propaganda – is that in

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order to resist the all-powerful system of communication they must rid themselves of any communicative means that would perhaps make them accessible to the public. (AT 237, 243)

For Wellmer, Adorno’s idea of reconciliation, as well as his emphasis on modernist works of art that are inaccessible to the public for whom the works could possibly serve an emancipatory role, places an unbridgeable gap between Adorno’s conception of the history of permanent catastrophe and the realization of the utopia that is possible given the development of productive forces in late capitalism. Much has been made of Adorno’s so-called elitism, though in many of these complaints there is not an adequate understanding of Adorno’s defence of advanced modern works of art. Ultimately, Adorno’s conception of authentic autonomous art is part of his overarching critique of communication, for only those works that are aware of their status as social products yet refuse to communicate maxims can avoid being used for ideological purposes. If it is the case that artworks in the tradition of l’art pour l’art as well as politically committed works à la Brecht or Sartre are equally ideological; if it is only works that refuse to communicate meanings that are authentically autonomous, the question arises: What are the characteristics of such works? It has often been noted that Adorno considers the atonal compositions of Arnold Schoenberg and the black comedies of Samuel Beckett to be the highest achievements of the advanced modern in the fields of music and drama, respectively. In his discussion of the hermetic poetry of Paul Celan, Adorno remarks that Celan’s works do not communicate meanings or attempt to express the experience of suffering, which is ultimately unrepresentable. ‘Artistically people can only be reached any longer by the shock that imparts a blow to what pseudo-scientific ideology calls communication; for its part art is integral only when it refuses to play along with communication’ (AT 321). In leaving the horror that permeates their works unnamed, Beckett and Celan forestall any positive transcendence or sublimation that would rationalize the irrational. According to Adorno, through its autonomous form, Celan’s poetry distances itself from the thematic material treated in the poems. Hermetic works register the guilt of art that continues to exist in a post-catastrophic situation in which the very existence of art is precarious. These works acknowledge suffering but do not in any way attempt to sublimate it through subjecting the experience of suffering to aesthetic form. The language of Celan’s poems does not

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communicate meanings: ‘It is that of the dead speaking of stones and stars’ (AT 322). Conclusion I have attempted to highlight some of the theoretical weaknesses of second-generation critical theory, as well to provide a defence of Adorno’s conception of autonomous art that resists a reading from the perspective of a theory of communication. While Habermas’s emphasis on the decolonization of the lifeworld might have some merit from the perspective of liberal politics, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory provides a wealth of material on which to build a more radical social theory. Although some critics of Adorno have lamented his withdrawal into the aesthetic sphere, which remains largely disconnected from mass social movements, Habermas fails to offer any position other than resignation to the continued existence of capitalism. Granted, neither Adorno nor Habermas were able to provide a pathway to revolutionary action, for which they were severely chastised by their own students in the late 1960s. Adorno discounted the revolutionary ambitions of the student activists, which has been a source of great irritation to many Marxists who are unwilling to accept the sad truth that real social change is not yet on the horizon. Whereas Habermas ultimately retreats from revolutionary action by transforming the Marxist notion of praxis into a theory of communication, Adorno’s theory remains one largely untapped source of inspiration for radical social theorists who do not regard the status quo as in any way necessary.

NOTES I would like to thank Ian Balfour, Asher Horowitz, Peter Odabachian, and Michael Palamarek for reading and commenting upon an earlier version of this essay. 1 See Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown and Co., 1973), 10. 2 Although Benjamin published many articles in the Institute’s journal, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, he did not officially become a member of the Institute until Horkheimer and Adorno attempted to bring him to the United States. His name was added to the list of members on the Institute’s

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4

5 6 7 8

9

10 11

12 13

14

15 16

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official letterhead in 1940. See Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin: The Complete Correspondence 1928–1940, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 341. See Albrecht Wellmer, ‘Adorno, Modernity, and the Sublime,’ in The Actuality of Adorno: Critical Essays on Adorno and the Postmodern, ed. Max Pensky (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 112–34, here 121. See Albrecht Wellmer, ‘Truth, Semblance, Reconciliation: Adorno’s Aesthetic Redemption of Modernity,’ in The Persistence of Modernity, trans. David Midgley (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), 1–35, here 35. See Axel Honneth, ‘Communication and Reconciliation,’ Telos 39 (1979): 45–61. See also Martin Morris’s contribution to this volume. Wellmer, ‘Adorno, Modernity, and the Sublime,’ 122. Wellmer, ‘Truth, Semblance, Reconciliation,’ 22. Equally important here is Auguste Comte’s diagnosis of metaphysics as an intermediate stage between theological and positive philosophy. See Auguste Comte, Introduction to Positive Philosophy, trans. Frederick Ferré (Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill Co., Inc., 1970), 7. Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1, Reason and the Rationalization of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 1 (hereafter TCA1). Honneth, ‘Communication and Reconciliation,’ 59. Despite their theoretical differences, Adorno and Habermas were in agreement in their nearly unequivocal condemnation of the student movement. Jürgen Habermas, ‘Modernity versus Postmodernity,’ New German Critique 22 (Winter 1981): 3–14, here 8. Christoph Menke, The Sovereignty of Art: Aesthetic Negativity in Adorno and Derrida, trans. Neil Solomon (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998), 252. Asher Horowitz, ‘“Like a tangled mobile”: Reason and Reification in the Quasi-Dialectical Theory of Jürgen Habermas,’ Philosophy and Social Criticism 24.1 (1998): 11. Habermas, ‘Modernity versus Postmodernity,’ 10–11. Horowitz, ‘“Like a tangled mobile,”’ 13. See also Asher Horowitz, ‘The Comedy of Enlightenment: Weber, Habermas and the Critique of Reification,’ in A. Horowitz and T. Maley, eds, The Barbarism of Reason: Max Weber and the Twilight of Enlightenment (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 195–222, and Asher Horowitz, ‘Mystical Kernels? Rational Shells?’ this volume. J. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2, Lifeworld and Sys-

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18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

27 28

29 30

tem: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, trans. T. McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987), 398 (hereafter TCA2). ‘[E]veryday practice ... is wholly reliant upon the interplay of cognitive with moral-practical and aesthetic-expressive elements’ (TCA2 326). Menke, The Sovereignty of Art, 163. Ibid., 252. Ibid., 24. Habermas, ‘Modernity versus Postmodernity,’ 9. Ibid., 12. See Horowitz, ‘“Like a tangled mobile,”’ 5 and ‘Mystical Kernels? Rational Shells?’ 206. Habermas, ‘Modernity versus Postmodernity,’ 7–8. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 196 (hereafter AT). Cf. Walter Benjamin, ‘On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,’ in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), 314–32, here 331: ‘For language is in every case not only communication of the communicable but also, at the same time, a symbol of the noncommunicable.’ Horowitz, ‘“Like a tangled mobile,”’ 14. ‘For the sake of simplicity, I shall leave to one side here the role structures of the artistic enterprise and of the artistic-literary public sphere’ (TCA2 319); see also the comment to the same effect in the preface to The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987): ‘I have had to limit the theme; these lectures do not treat modernism in art and literature’ (xix). In the latter text, Habermas claims that writers such as Nietzsche, Bataille, and Derrida, as well as the surrealists, overburden the emancipatory potential of artistic modernism by failing to demonstrate the way in which artworks and aesthetic validity claims implicate the cognitive-instrumental and moral-practical spheres of validity. Wellmer attempts to demonstrate the mutual implication of the aesthetic and cognitive spheres in ‘Truth, Semblance, Reconciliation,’ 22. Lastly, see ‘Modernity versus Postmodernity’: ‘The idea of modernity is intimately tied to the development of European art; but what I call “the project of modernity” comes only into focus when we dispense with the usual concentration upon art’ (8). Wellmer, ‘Truth, Semblance, Reconciliation,’ 30. It should be pointed out that Pieter Duvenage, in his recent book Habermas and Aesthetics: The Limits of Communicative Reason (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003), makes the point that Habermas restricts ‘the validity of art to the

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31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

46

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creative subjectivity of the author or creator to a kind of subjective production aesthetics’ (96); ‘in Habermas’s later work on communicative reason [that is, Habermas’s The Theory of Communicative Reason, in which Duvenage locates the second phase of Habermas’s aesthetics, as opposed to the first phase, which Duvenage finds in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere] ... aesthetics is interpreted as a model of production aesthetics that cancels the communicative space between artist and public’ (104–5). The fact that Habermas speaks of ‘aesthetic-expressive rationality’ should indicate that his later aesthetics are more oriented to an aesthetics of production. In this sense, Wellmer’s aesthetics clearly cannot be simply equated with that of Habermas, since Wellmer is interested in the extent to which the artwork can contribute to expanding the communicative boundaries of the receiving subject. Wellmer, who does adhere to Habermasian communicative rationality, is equally influenced by the reception aesthetics of Hans Robert Jauss. See Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982) and Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982). Wellmer, ‘Truth, Semblance, Reconciliation,’ 16. Jauss, Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics, 16. Wellmer, ‘Adorno, Modernity, and the Sublime,’ 124. Ibid., 122. See also Morris’s article in this volume. Wellmer, ‘Adorno, Modernity, and the Sublime,’ 122–3. Ibid., 123. Wellmer, ‘Truth, Semblance, Reconciliation,’ 20. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 10. Wellmer, ‘Truth, Semblance, Reconciliation,’ 20. Ibid., 20. Lambert Zuidervaart, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), 284. Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), 32–3. Ibid., 46. T.W. Adorno, ‘Subject and Object,’ in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (New York: Continuum, 1982), 497–511, here 499. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), 15 (hereafter ND).

260 Donald A. Burke 47 For a criticism of this aspect of Adorno’s theory of natural beauty see Jauss, Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics, 20–1. 48 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002), 32; or see Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1993), 40. 49 See Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 119–20. 50 See also Asher Horowitz’s contribution to this volume. 51 T.W. Adorno, ‘Parataxis: On Hölderlin’s Late Poetry,’ in Notes to Literature, vol. 2, ed. Rolf Tiedemann. trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 109–49, here 130. 52 Although a meta-critique of Habermas’s critique of Derrida’s critique of logocentrism is clearly beyond the scope of this paper, it should be pointed out that Habermas does concede a rhetorical element of philosophy, though his distinction between ‘normal’ language and ‘abnormal’ language (see Duvenage, Habermas and Aesthetics, 98) precludes a levelling of the genre distinction between philosophy and literature that he locates in Derrida’s work: ‘Literary criticism and philosophy have a family resemblance to literature ... in their rhetorical achievements. But their family relationship stops right there, for in each of these enterprises the tools of rhetoric are subordinated to the discipline of a distinct form of argumentation’ (The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 209–10, quoted in Duvenage, 85). In Habermas’s formal, pragmatic philosophy of language ‘the (“normal”) language of communicative action is portrayed as the primary mechanism of social integration (in modern societies), whereas “abnormal” language is of a second nature. As Cooke [M. Cooke, Language and Reason: A Study of Habermas’s Pragmatics (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994)] indicates, when “normal” language is preferred over “abnormal” language, then it implies that language oriented towards understanding is the original version, while other language modes ... are parasitic on it’ (Duvenage, Habermas and Aesthetics, 98–9). 53 Horowitz, this volume, 206. 54 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 10.

PART FOUR Aesthetics and Culture

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11 On Adorno’s Aesthetics of the Ugly pam e l a l e ac h

The pain in the face of beauty, nowhere more visceral than in the experience of nature, is as much the longing for what beauty promises but never unveils as it is suffering at the inadequacy of the appearance, which fails beauty but while wanting to make itself like it. This pain reappears in the relation to artworks. Involuntarily and unconsciously, the observer enters into a contract with the work, agreeing to submit to it on condition that it speak. In the pledged receptivity of the observer, pure self-abandonment – that moment of free exhalation in nature – survives.1 T.W. Adorno

Disparaging the seductiveness of classical beauty, modern art depicts human alienation and indicts contemporary society. Yet Adorno attests that, through its autonomy and radical truth content, such art witnesses to a world that can and should be other than it is (AT 177). ‘Works of art, even literary ones, point to a practice from which they abstain: the creation of a just life.’2 The ugly, deployed as a technique of resistance, has afforded modern art the potential to articulate political truths. It has raised an ethical consciousness of objective needs repressed by the administered society. Challenging the liberal notion of an ‘original position,’ art’s depiction of the ugly affords no space for dispassionate distance. The voyeur in each of us gapes at her own undoing. The ugly implicates us, while negatively reviving the ethical power of the aesthetic articulated by Kant as the analogy of beauty and goodness. Adorno’s attention to the ugly gives particular substance to the larger power of his negative aesthetics. This paper seeks to highlight in his thought the political fertility

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of the ugly by going behind beauty’s semblance, confronting its historicity, and engaging the potential for transformation opened by modern art’s more substantive truth. What emerges is a dialectical, even redemptive ugliness, set within a retrieved aesthetics that gestures firmly in the direction of a ‘more humanly worthy society.’ Behind the Beauty–Reason Nexus Already in Kant aesthetic value exists in beauty understood as an analogy of reason. While industrial progress widens the vistas of social dislocation, an encroaching ugliness, beauty is relegated to a utopian condition, preserved primarily in art and philosophy. It no longer purports to reflect lived sensuous experience. Yet subversively, art’s relative autonomy from social conditions establishes it as a place of refuge, and a sublimated replica, for those who are conscious of what is being lost experientially. Implicitly or explicitly, the consciousness dawns with modernity that the pursuit of beauty masks its own social costs. To disrupt the injustices of the status quo means to upend the reason–beauty nexus, the core of the traditional aesthetic that has itself become instrumental: cubism, dadaism, and surrealism are such expressions. Richard Wolin argues that ‘by seemingly revelling in the ruins and debris of social life, modernism seeks, in accordance with the idea of ideology-critique, to confront the appearance of reconciliation and well-being which society projects with the fetid underbelly that lies at its core in fact.’3 This ‘negativity’ of modern art employs as its agency no intrinsic ugliness of its own but only the cruelty of the world. In modernism ugliness becomes a technique that unseats the comfortable primacy of beauty in favour of alertness to other realities and possibilities. Thus, not merely vacuous, ugliness presents a negative aesthetic as counterpoint to traditional aesthetics that have been reduced and abstracted to an ethereal theory of the beautiful (AT 51). Art becomes a vehicle for enlightenment where it makes tangible, visible or audible what is remembered of the primordial frisson of nature (AT 53, 80). Adorno’s attention to mimesis incorporates his transposition of Kant’s study of the sublime. Through ‘mimesis,’ a residual or echo effect, as through the sublime, comes a glimpse of nature. That glimmer is a reminder for Kant of both ‘the starry sky above me and the moral law within me.’ Yet the effect of the Kantian sublime is ultimately an affirmation of the constituent subject, the ‘I,’

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who on the strength of his domineering reason reduces the world to his own image. Adorno’s analogy of mimesis exposes a daunting dissonance in the superficial harmony of Kantian sublimity and in bourgeois existence. Mimesis is a reminder of the powerful and repressed nature that still lurks behind civility, and of the tyranny that has cost us – and produced – our selves. Albrecht Wellmer suggests that ‘the philosophy of reconciliation ... forms the crown of Adorno’s thought,’ pointing to Adornian assertions of truth as verification of his orientation to metaphysics and idealism.4 But rather than retreating into idealism, by historicizing truth and by inverting the subject-object priority, Adorno comprehends the potency of the migration of the sublime into the aesthetic. Although mediated by the bourgeois paradigm, mimesis provides a glimpse of what may be behind and beyond identity thinking (which reduces the object to the subject). It intimates a way forward that may yet overcome the perpetual compromises of the status quo. Mimesis, the secret dimension of art, has its strength in its defiance of the Enlightenment subject’s instrumental reason. The affinity of mimesis to the mythic and the cultic enables it to confront rationality, but the outrage of art’s enchantment cannot be obliterated by its opponents. It is paradoxically by renouncing ‘truth’ as socially defined, by freeing itself from the constraints of identity-thinking, that art turns its magical residue to the task of political enlightenment (AT 58). In modern political theory the state of nature becomes increasingly a condition of privation. Yet, as Rousseau discovered, even in this discourse nature is free in comparison with culture, because it has escaped the most pernicious forms of ‘progressive’ domination. Privation reflects the contradictions of an essentially private and economically oriented society. That emptiness arises from the subject’s hall of mirrors that reflects only itself. Recognizing privation, the ugliness of what nature has been made into, modern art’s representation of the negation of traditional ways of life implies for Adorno an opening. The repression of inner and outer nature is depicted in the unsatisfied needs that are a constant element of modernity and modern art. The content of all art is marked by this pain, a poignant subtext to even the harshest pieces. That ‘pain in the face of beauty’ is for what beauty never unveils, indeed conceals, about the injustices of life under capitalism. ‘The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art. What the enemies of modern art, with a better instinct than its anxious apologists, call its negativity is the epitome of what

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established culture has repressed and towards which art is drawn’ (AT 19). However, this perverse attraction creates a momentary opening for a reconciled alternative. The attempts of the bourgeois aesthetic to conceal the ugliness and contradictions of the social fabric reveal its connections to fascism. Beauty’s spell reverts to ugliness through fear of what reason dominates. Adorno observes that ‘the more torture went on in the [Nazi] basement, the more insistently they made sure that the roof rested on columns’ (AT 49). By denying itself formal beauty, modern art subversively evades the economy of utility (commercial or political), and sidesteps the function society reserves for art, to tart up a toxic social context. Despite bourgeois indignation and the desire to conceal the overwhelming evidence, the wreckage of capitalism spreads and ugliness is reproduced, not by ideologues, but as an expression of its own failure to renounce its repressive relation to nature (AT 47–8). At this juncture the truth of such ‘ugliness’ is beautiful, preferable to a deceptive but abstract beauty. The bourgeois despising of the ugly, but refusal to end it, is countered by critical aesthetics’ tolerance of the rebuke of ‘degenerate’ and refusal to confirm misery as inevitable (AT 48–9). The Politics of Semblance In the midst of a world dominated by utility, art indeed has a utopic aspect as the other of this world, as exempt from the mechanism of the social process of production and reproduction ... What is other is swallowed up by the ever-same and yet survives in it as semblance: semblance even in the materialist sense. (AT 311)

The ‘semblance character’ is the superficial appearance or façade that an artwork exposes to the world, its ‘out’ side. ‘Semblance’ suggests an imitative or mimetic function, as in the French faire semblant, to pretend. Reason and empirical science have too often mistaken what is experientially given in the first instance – form – to be the essence or totality of the object. Recognition of the semblance character of art is a realization of non-identity, that art cannot be reduced to its formal appearance, its intention or idea. A substantial residue will nonetheless remain. Modern art models the pathological relationship of the social whole and part in a manner that makes that relation more visible. Adorno construes its aesthetic as a witness to the pain of what has been repressed and as a testimonial to untapped human potential. By recalling that

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‘other’ dimension, nurtured through the effect of mimesis, art testifies to the truth of existence as sensuous and particular rather than as universal and abstract. This witness has not only a cognitive but also a political function. The possibility of experience rests on the preservation and awareness of these bitter traces. Where existence becomes synonymous with utility, there will be no ‘other’ because all will be reduced to total identity, the objective of capitalist production. Modernism’s aesthetic records the ugly: the twisted character of a society that is blindly, numbly inhabited by its citizens. For this reason Adorno suggests that the more art is understood, the less it is enjoyed (AT 13). In this context, ugliness in art becomes a subversive mirroring technique. Awareness begins by rejecting the claim that people participate in the bourgeois social order for pleasure (AT 312). The dawning consciousness, the hideousness, of the scope of hidden pain and injustice must bring profound discomfort. The substantial, or ‘in’ side, is unveiled, a messy germ of living hope, hibernating unseen beneath the perfect but deadening beauty of the ideal. Historicized Aesthetics As the ‘historical voice of repressed nature,’ constituent subjectivity, or the ‘I,’ is the object of Adorno’s critique, made visible through unsightly cultural depictions of its sacrifice. He terms the ‘I’ ‘the internal agent of repression’ (AT 245). The emancipation of society into a more ‘humanly worthy’ context would demand that the hegemony of the subject ‘I’ be broken. Art persistently batters away at the subject’s tyranny and is able at times to go behind it, often subconsciously, to solicit the solidarity of the natural itself. One element of art’s truth is the affirmation of residual subjective experiences that oppose this ‘I’ (AT 246). The reinstatement of nature in the historical order is a primary condition for the definitive demotion of the subject in favour of his own incarnated humanity. The realization afforded by art’s perception of natural beauty enables resistance to the domination of the subject and its rationality. Through the lesson of natural beauty, the artwork retrieves something of nature by transforming the aesthetic attitude into productive labour. To discuss the aesthetic and the historical in the same breath is to challenge an Enlightenment tradition that has figured the aesthetic as ahistorical. Aesthetic values are timeless as recorded in ‘art history,’

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which has exhibited a lacuna where even its own ‘history’ is concerned. Much of European art has been complicit in concealing what a broader aesthetic spectrum would reveal through the ugly: its essential, dialectical historicity. Many, including Heidegger, have responded to this betrayal by rejecting aesthetic theory. Bernstein describes the Heideggerian view that the categories of traditional aesthetics ‘– above all, form, matter, and aesthetic experience (of beauty, pleasure, etc.) – consider the art work in terms of the metaphysics of presence, that is, in terms which make thinking the essence of art historically, art’s essence as historical, impossible.’5 Bernstein reads Adorno as concurring that aesthetics must be overcome. But another reading appreciates in Adorno a kind of extension and reflection of the aesthetic tradition rather than its complete elimination. The Adornian project develops a historically cognizant aesthetic, building upon its dialectical character. The imputed ‘timeless’ quality of artworks emerges as an aspect of their complicity. Modern art seeks to crack this semblance open by exposing, in part through the technique of the ugly, art’s historicity. In the nineteenth century, all masterpieces appeared as anachronisms: in serving the purposes of idealism they had coldly divorced themselves from the sensuous and social world. Wolin suggests that for Hegel, art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past. Thereby it has lost for us genuine truth and life, and has rather been transferred into our ideas instead of maintaining its earlier necessity in reality and occupying its higher place. What is now aroused in us by works of art is not just immediate enjoyment but our judgment also.6

Kant’s universal character of the aesthetic is reread by Hegel as specifically historical. But Kant retains pleasure in the sublime and a reflexive notion of subjective judgment that occasionally outwits reason. Hegel by contrast inaugurates art into the realm of Absolute Spirit, consolidating its philosophical status and further relegating the material. By preserving its beauty he expands its ugliness, reflected in idealism’s justification of human alienation. Benjamin expands upon the idea of an aesthetic history, suggesting that the artistic techniques of a given era inform the ‘mode of produc-

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tion’ of the artwork. With Adorno he regards bourgeois modernity as having forced artworks into new relationships with artists and society – not least through mass production and consumption. Yet by expanding the concept of ‘production’ to encompass reception and interpretation of the artwork, Benjamin and Adorno reconfigure the debate by refuting the myth of the artist’s genius as ex nihilo. They provocatively link the historicizing of human capacities to the repression of nature through an anthropology of sense perception.7 This historical insight illuminates the ongoing and collective social process of ‘making’ and remaking the artwork (including its received and interpreted significance). The artwork is understood, no longer as a monad, but as an outcrop of social relationships. Its truth content is articulated from its newly de-hypostatized condition – which taps into the remainder represented by spirit and mimesis. This reconciliation with eros, which embraces the ugly and the beautiful, may yield a new eros for a new historical juncture. Adorno’s attention to the content of the artwork marks a significant addition to the historicizing of art, offering ‘a perception of the internal historicity of the work.’8 He exposes the material grounding of what Hegel essentialized as entirely spiritual. The particular inner substance is recognized as historical and socially mediated. In the course of production and reception it engages in a ‘silent dialogue’ with other works and the larger social context. An authentic work of art cannot be brought into equilibrium; its flux and its ongoing productivity lie in the trace of unresolved antinomies (AT 85). For Adorno the content of the artwork is nothing less than history sedimented within it. As records of historical struggles, all artworks contain the scars of the contradictions of the social fabric – a myriad of ugly traces.9 The capacity of autonomous artworks for critique lies in their incomplete subjection. The longings and needs they portray function as the collective memory; herein consists their truth content – it is history crystallized in the artwork. A retrieved, ‘negative’ aesthetic demands consciousness of this immanent history (AT 85). Ironically, in terms of traditional formalism, the work’s appearance represents less and less of the total work, which dynamically defies definition. It remains ‘under construction’ until it ‘dies,’ when all critical reception ceases (AT 4). The actual artefact gains irrelevance and becomes no more than a ‘husk’ once its truth content is realized (AT 131–3).

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The Shudder of Truth The relation of politics to all aesthetics is grounded in the truth content of the artwork (AT 335). We have seen how, in the face of the formalism of aesthetic theory, Adorno leads a charge in favour of an alternative materialist aesthetics that upholds the centrality of the object and gives voice to the ugly repression of its content. The ‘success’ of the aesthetic is the extent to which the artefact gives expression to the content that hides in every form (AT 138). With such claims, Adorno counters the scientism that asserts its ‘neutral’ truth as discrete from the fact of an untrue society. In contrast with scientific ‘neutrality,’ he emphasizes the moral dimension of the truth claims of art. While science can be seen as the past-oriented pursuit of truth as the given (whose ‘truth’ as a totality Adorno questions), art is the future-oriented, ethical pursuit of the potential alleviation of suffering. His ‘truth’ lies in a temporally limited insight, in the momentary and fragmentary cognition entailed by a technique that explores the painful and unsightly gap between the concept and the object. Hegel construes art as an objective bearer of truth. For him art is the first phenomenal manifestation of Spirit, the reconciled subject and object in sensuous form. This dual role of Spirit in b(e)aring the unreconciled remainder and its repression becomes significant to Adorno. He is moved by the understanding that artworks are a source of the non-discursive knowledge Kant calls ‘judgment,’ with the potential to get behind subjective interests. Yet the Kantian emphasis on reception grounds the aesthetic in the subject, because subjective reason, through its relation to both universality and necessity, is for him the basis of all objectivity. The thing-in-itself, substantive nature, cannot be known. Adorno seeks to offset the constituent subject’s centrality by showing that aesthetic feeling is derived from the object, from the I’s astonishment at what is apprehended, something both determinate and aconceptual (AT 164). He deconstructs the subject’s priority as imposed and historical rather than natural. Through art, Adorno argues, ‘consciousness recognizes the limitedness of the limitless self-sufficient progress as an illusion of the absolute subject’ (AT 224). Yet since subject and object have been separated by the prevailing ideology, art necessarily relies on the subject for its refuge and as its possibility (AT 169). Tragically, the work of art has been conflated into this subjectivity, where beauty fully revealed is hideous, because of its deceit. Only when the object beyond the subject is apprehended can one grasp art’s political

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truth. Adorno thus objects to the epistemological separation of sensuality and intellect, nature and reason, implicit in Kant’s aesthetic. For Adorno, modern art witnesses to the potential for their continuity (AT 174). His claim that artworks articulate truths challenges the subjective basis of aesthetics. Yet this may not inaugurate the ‘post-aesthetic’ era J.M. Bernstein invokes when he suggests that ‘the experience of art as aesthetical is the experience of art as having lost or been deprived of its power to speak the truth.’10 Rather, Adorno exposes modernity as a distinctively aesthetic condition, in which the aesthetic itself has undergone a dramatic transformation under the impinging conditions of capitalism. This violent, ugly process enables the artwork to articulate its content through form, making truth momentarily visible. The inconsistencies of society are symptomatic of the irrationality of the rationally instrumentalized order. To challenge this irony, modern art depicts the extremes that push the rational to become an irrational caricature of itself. Spirit or aura functions as the remainder of what is fully human, a marker for the possibility of a reconciliation of inner and outer nature. Yet Adorno cautions that ‘Nature, to whose imago art is devoted, does not yet in any way exist; what is true in art is something nonexistent’ (AT 131). Adorno recognizes the decadence of capitalist consumerism through his aesthetics of the ugly. Modernism peels back the plastic coating to expose the duplicity to which art has fallen prey ... that of elaborately concealing the truth of non-identity. Ugliness as rupture sears the consciousness of the denying subject. Engagement with modern art reawakens the shudder that forces a confrontation with one’s humanity in the face of the non-identical. That convulsion affords a link to what has been lost, to nature and to needs that go unrequited, by dispelling the subject’s artificial distance from both his context and himself. This shudder that jolts consciousness out of its reified state is recalled in the mimetic edge that cuts a wound deeply through aesthetic experiences. That the artwork has a life and truth content of its own apart from the volition of the subject is central to Adorno’s engagement with the ugly. At its strongest, the aesthetic experience possesses the remarkable power to disrupt the cruel domination of the subject, and thus to salvage both subjectivity and the aesthetic object. The shudder of the sublime can briefly break the spell and, through awe and horror, foreshorten the subject’s distance. In glimpsing the truth of the artwork, she may apprehend her own truth.

272 Pamela Leach The instant of this transition is art’s highest. It rescues subjectivity, even subjective aesthetics, by the negation of subjectivity. The subject, convulsed by art, has real experiences; by the strength of insight into the artwork as artwork, these experiences are those in which the subject’s petrification in his own subjectivity dissolves and the narrowness of his self-positedness is revealed. (AT 269)

Saving the subject from her bondage to herself is an important facet of the ugly’s political potential. Adorno emphasizes the salvage of the sensuous particular, the basis of all aesthetic experience, in a world where the universal and abstract have long dominated, and where fragmented production processes have eclipsed human creativity. This eclipse of the particular has facilitated the expansion of the exchange mentality, where persons or objects become indistinguishable and therefore fungible, or as in the Holocaust, entirely dispensable. Under such circumstances, the authentic artwork alone may function as a placeholder where human uniqueness and diversity have been eroded. Redemptive Ugliness Only when the aesthetics of the ugly takes effect does the power of negative aesthetics begin to play itself out. With this terrain of struggle, a newfound recognition becomes possible. The terror which Schönberg and Webern spread, today as in the past, comes not from their incomprehensibility but from the fact that they are all too correctly understood. Their music gives form to that anxiety, that terror, that insight into the catastrophic situation which others merely evade by regressing. They are called individualists, and yet their work is nothing but a single dialogue with the powers which destroy individuality – powers whose ‘formless shadows’ fall gigantically on their music.11

Rather than being merely the projection of the ‘I,’ the ugly (which the subject has long disowned) takes the sublime beyond Kant and invites the return of nature. This challenges the subject’s domination, despite its force and scale. The awe of ‘the starry sky above me,’ that is, of human insignificance in the manifold of nature, thus far concealed by Western civilization’s inflation of heroic subjectivity, invokes the mimetic shudder. By touching a deep place that frisson can awaken consciousness of what is lost and cancel the distance that the subject has

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taken from her inner and outer nature (AT 269). The legacy of Kant’s sublime in Adorno’s thought is made more negative with the awareness that nature is hideously suppressed in the course of mastery. So, paradoxically, ‘suffering, not positivity, is the humane content of art.’12 A necessary resistance to bourgeois morality, Adorno calls cruelty the ‘original sin of art.’ Art fails to absolve society of its misdeeds: modern art implies this Nietzschean moment. The forming of the artwork is the violent reflection onto the artistic material of the pain that issues from the social – both the bane of art and a source of its dynamism (AT 49–50). To be wounded by art is to have the illusion of totality lifted and to be reintegrated in and by the orphaned remainder or, Donald Kuspit suggests, to be brought into dialectical awareness. Art’s appeal is to what Hegel terms ‘the unhappy consciousness,’ an awareness of one’s sorry state.13 Art is also reflexive insofar as it does not spare any potential victims, even mutilating itself. Adorno invokes Homer’s tale of Penelope as an allegory for this reproductive pain. While by day she creates, at night Penelope re-enacts the ahistorical hideousness of the eternal return, unravelling what she has knitted by day, endlessly inflicting her loss upon herself and her creativity (AT 186). Yet ultimately art is cruel only because it uses ugliness as a vehicle to air and move beyond the socially unreconciled wounds of society. This entails the inevitable confrontation of society with its own damaging actions, the masochism of society itself. However, in this context the culture industry offers a seductive diffusion of the pain both of society and of avant-garde art, by parodying a real catharsis and prolonging the sublimation of suffering (AT 237–9). Ugliness, by contrast, serves as a political and aesthetic technique that prevents the backsliding to which impressionism succumbed. What is ugly is situated squarely outside the zone of pleasure, entertainment, or profit, and yet demands attention, compelling the receiver into awareness of her own relation to the blight the artwork unveils. From this surprising experience comes the ‘pledged receptivity’ of the observer, who thus gains new access to nature. The resulting ‘self-abandonment’ leads dialectically, paradoxically, to a new and deeper fulfilment. Adriana Benzaquén notes that ‘negative thinking ... marks the space of an absence. That absence, however, is not to be filled with images or given a positive content; it is to remain as absence, as possibility.’14 Adorno gives bite to that absence by piercing the sullen ubiquity of semblance, assaulting the receiver into renewed political productivity. Unlike the cherubim and pearly gates of traditional Western art, nega-

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tive aesthetics offers no literalist vision of an afterlife. But it does suggest that all of bourgeois art depicts the carnage of human prehistory. Art’s critical function is not in providing a blueprint for praxis so much as in modelling the possibility of one. Ultimately, Adorno admits that ‘art is no more able than theory to concretize utopia, not even negatively’ (AT 32). The political role that art can play is indirect and temporally bound. Yet what artworks evoke does not dissipate, but rather ‘the process enacted internally by each and every artwork works back on society as the model of a possible praxis in which something on the order of a collective subject is constituted’ (AT 242). The ugly in art thus works as a catalyst for political subjectivity. Art’s spiritual surplus, a ‘mysterious’ entity that surpasses its semblance and somatic side, originates in its exile by progressive culture. This surplus residue represents a distortion, an alienation, whose content must be reintegrated with the work itself. A reconciliation of the universal with the particular, of the rational abstract with sensuous specificity, entails both transcendence and preservation. The insights presented by works of art constitute judgments, as Kant suggests. Adorno observes modern art going beyond Kant’s limitation in a two-staged reflection. These artworks acknowledge the spiritual as a neglected surplus that has been systematically denied mediation. They then employ the imagination to challenge the existent as the only possibility and, through a dialectical approach, evoke a utopia of reconciliation beyond the conflict and contradiction of the present.15 When works of art acknowledge the spiritual, the opportunity arises to envision the release of the natural and the sensuous from their repressed condition. The reconciliation in question is also an assertion of the possibility of an ineffable, non-conceptual truth that nonetheless can be mediated and articulated. The totalizing, synthetic and constructive character art assumes in the face of the fallen nature of the empirical world lends it an affinity with the concept of redemption, for by providing a refuge for those aspects of reality which are commonly denied a home, by exposing those elements to the regenerative powers of aesthetic form, art symbolizes the condition of salvation to which they will accede in a better world.16

Far from the abstraction of Hegel’s ‘Spirit’ while true to something within it, Adorno’s ‘spirit’ is a humanizing force (AT 113). It addresses

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inherent contradictions: both what is taboo and what has not yet been preformed by society. He sees spirit as art’s ‘vital element,’ the intuitive aspect, of which the aura is a part. Spirit can be construed as a non-linear process that reflects the tensions between art’s elements, providing the dialectical basis for critique. To know the artwork is to know spirit as process; spiritual process breaks through the rigidity of form and semblance in genuine works. Art’s spiritual dimension is the remainder expunged from its material identity; its acknowledgment represents the recovery of suppressed differentiation. Spirit accelerates the crisis of art by bringing into the foreground the hideous, individuating residue of society’s totalizing logic (see AT 88–93, 108). Spirit confirms the lack of identity between artworks and their phenomenal manifestation, and makes them enigmatic to scientistic and empiricist thinking. It denies the atomistic ideology of liberal rationality in favour of a humanized, socialized alternative that seeks to reconcile the ‘I’ with its ‘We.’ [I]n aesthetic images precisely that is collective that withdraws from the I: Society inheres in the truth content. The appearing, whereby the artwork far surpasses the mere subject, is the eruption of the subject’s collective essence. The trace of memory in mimesis, which every artwork seeks, is simultaneously always the anticipation of a condition beyond the diremption of the individual and the collective. (AT 130–2)

Conclusion Adorno evokes a newfound cognizance of the damage done in the course of ‘progress,’ and of the complicity of modern individual subjectivism. His oeuvre suggests a critical awareness that modernity casts a shadow upon itself and upon its own future through its domination of humanity and nature. Art is not merely passive in its resistance. Deploying the ugly as a technique, it prompts rage at what has been lost and at what has been renounced (AT 240). The engagement of autonomous modern art with a transformed aesthetic is thus more than the preservation of a possibility. The aesthetic of the ugly prefigures the concretizing of that possibility. A ‘humanly worthy society’ must arise from social labour. Adorno views art as part of that labour process, not least for its contribution to critical consciousness. History is written in the artwork in ways that resist false narratives. Negative aesthetics affords the insight that art-

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works can enable intellectual emancipation, constituting a critical stage in total emancipation. The resulting critical consciousness may redress the alienation of the individual from others and from his species-being. This thesis, grounded in ugliness, has not always been well received. George Friedman, in suggesting that Adorno edges towards a fascist aestheticizing of the political,17 does not admit that Adorno turns beauty upon its head in the name of humanity. But no longer, after his aesthetic theory and what it evokes, can one construe the privileging of the aesthetic as either apolitical or as necessarily authoritarian. Artworks’ ‘truth content cannot be separated from the concept of humanity. Through every mediation, through all negativity, they are images of a transformed humanity and are unable to come to rest in themselves by any abstraction from this transformation’ (AT 241). Adorno revives art as a symbol of morality, but in a manner far removed from Kant’s formulation. The morality of art resides not in the idealist notion that its beauty parallels reason, as Kant imagined. Art now represents the possible reconciliation of society with its other, renewed hope for the transcendence of suffering, and the potential for the development of a new self- and socially conscious political subject. Art is mediated by objective society, and through this historical relationship it articulates both conditions and possibilities. Its deployment of the ugly heightens the clarity required to confront the dialectical character of existence at this historical juncture. Art is true in so far as what speaks out of it – indeed, it itself – is conflicting and unreconciled, but this truth only becomes art’s own when it synthesizes what is fractured and thus makes its irreconcilability determinate. Paradoxically, art must testify to the unreconciled and at the same time envision its reconciliation ... Only in this process is its We concretized. (AT 168)

NOTES 1 T.W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. R. Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 73 (hereafter AT). 2 T. W. Adorno, ‘Commitment,’ in Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt, eds, The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (New York: Continuum, 1992), 317.

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3 Richard Wolin, ‘The De-aestheticization of Art: On Adorno’s Aesthetische Theorie,’ Telos 41 (Fall 1979): 106, 114. 4 Albrecht Wellmer, ‘Adorno, Modernity, and the Sublime,’ in The Actuality of Adorno, ed. Max Pensky (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1997), 126. 5 J.M. Bernstein, The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), 77. 6 G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, vol. 1, trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 11, as cited in Wolin, ‘The De-aestheticization of Art,’ 116. 7 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’ in Hannah Arendt, ed., Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1968), 222. 8 John Frow, ‘Mediation and Metaphor: Adorno and the Sociology of Art,’ Clio 12.1 (Fall 1982): 60. 9 Cf. Wolin, ‘The De-aestheticization of Art,’ 121. 10 Bernstein, The Fate of Art, 4. 11 T.W. Adorno, ‘On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening,’ in Arato and Gebhardt, eds, The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, 298–9. 12 Lambert Zuidervaart, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory: The Redemption of Illusion (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), 306. 13 Donald B. Kuspit, ‘Critical Notes on Adorno’s Sociology of Music and Art,’ Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 33 (Spring 1975): 324. 14 Adriana Benzaquén, ‘Thought and Utopia in the Writings of Adorno, Horkheimer and Benjamin,’ Utopian Studies 9.2 (198): 151. 15 Cf. Wolin, ‘The De-aestheticization of Art,’ 118–24. 16 Ibid., 122. 17 Zuidervaart, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, 20.

12 ‘Three-Minute Access’: Fugazi’s Negative Aesthetic coli n j. ca mpbel l

In other chapters in this volume, the question is raised of the meaning of the ‘communicative turn’ Habermas and his followers have introduced with regard to the critical theory of Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin, and Marcuse. For the Habermasian Albrecht Wellmer, Adorno’s rejection of popular music as a potential medium for liberating praxis is symptomatic of his larger rejection of the goal of achieving communicative praxis through art and philosophy.1 Adorno, it is implied, did not approve of popular music forms, did not permit popular music artists the high honour of being included, with Schoenberg, in the salons of ‘true resistance’ to instrumentalization of the human lifeworld. Wellmer could remind us here that Adorno argued pessimistically that popular music is so deeply integrated with the mechanisms of the culture industry that it can offer little or no resistance to instrumental-administrative power. In fact, we could go further: Adorno insisted that popular music’s supposed rebelliousness or vitality, which he called ‘pseudoactivity,’ only serves to reinforce the power of the collective: In America, it is just the so-called liberals and progressives whom one finds among the advocates of light popular music, most of whom want to classify their activity as democratic. But if regressive hearing is progressive as opposed to the ‘individualistic’ [i.e. high-art] sort, it is only in the dialectical sense that it is better fitted to the advancing brutality than the latter. All possible mould has been rubbed off the baseness, and it is legitimate to criticize the aesthetic residue of an individuality that was long since wrested from individuals. But this criticism comes with little force from the sphere of popular music, since it is just this sphere that mummifies the vulgarized and decaying remnants of romantic individualism.2

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This essay, which is also about a punk band from Washington DC, called Fugazi, is intended to help in the effort of clarifying precisely why Adorno was so critical of popular music. I do not intend to show that Adorno would have approved of Fugazi’s version of punk rock music; in fact, I suspect that he would have hated it. I think that the issue of ‘whether Adorno would have approved’ clouds readings of Adorno’s view of popular music, and stems from a basic misreading of Adorno’s theory, which is intimately connected with the demand for ‘communicative gains’ in art, whether it is phrased in explicitly Habermasian terms or cast in one of the identity-politics moulds that dominate cultural studies today.3 Asher Horowitz hits the mark when he highlights the connections among Adorno’s ‘spleen,’ the truth of exaggeration, the rant against system, and the task of ‘de-reifying the ability to discriminate.’4 Ian Mackaye, incidentally, vents his own less-educated spleen on the issue of communication on Fugazi’s first full-length album, Thirteen Songs: ‘There were no truer words than when spoken / Let that stand as it should / There was nothing left when broken / We grab anything when we fall ... Promises are shit / we speak the way we breathe.’5 Behind Habermasian praise for the communicative gains to be found in art is the logic of bureaucratic-institutional approval and disapproval. Surely, if Wellmer asserts that communicative gains might be found in some popular music, he reserves the authority to assert that some others offer no such gains. In fact, I think it is entirely possible that Habermas or Wellmer might approve of Fugazi, whose involvement in various kinds of ‘left’ political activism marks their separation from fascist punk tendencies. We should be clear: this is approving, albeit against neoconservative objections, of an intellectual and artistic elite in the universities and galleries – whether it actually is, or only ideally should be, state-approved. Is this approval not ultimately only the flipside of the logic of the neo-liberal state itself, a bureaucratic reaction-formation generated by the extension of commodity-logic to every sphere of life? The question remains of how it would be substantially different from what Thomas Frank has lambasted (in an admittedly less-than-inter-subjectively rational essay) as ‘that whole flatulent corpus of “cultural studies” that seeks to appreciate Madonna as some sort of political subversive.’6 The culture industry’s most amazing feature is its ability to unify apparent opposites, including postmodernist cultural studies and its Habermasian-rationalist opponents. Adorno’s ‘disapproval’ of popular music aims in a direction radically

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different from the liberal spirit trumpeted by the culture industry – a spirit that appears to have largely supplanted the left’s dream of a classless society in the opening years of the twenty-first century. This difference is registered by Wellmer and Habermas only in terms of ‘totalizing fatalism.’ And it is true; Adorno’s critique of popular music and jazz at times seems awfully total. His essay ‘Perennial Fashion – Jazz’ ends with the assertion that the jazz artist’s expression is reducible to a simple masochistic formula: ‘I am nothing, I am filth, no matter what they do to me, it serves me right.’7 This is, for Adorno, a form of aesthetic expression from which the possibility of Utopia, the sensual fulfilment the music promises, has entirely disappeared. In the reification of their musical experience jazz fans reflect the players; they ‘are expected to want only that to which they have become accustomed and to become enraged whenever their expectations are disappointed and fulfillment, which they regard as the customer’s inalienable right, is denied.’8 Perhaps the most damning assertion, one that is often only partially comprehended, if at all, by Adorno’s critics, is that the fans are somewhat aware of all of this, that ‘the population is so accustomed to the drivel it gets that it cannot renounce it, even when it sees through it halfway.’9 It is undeniable that the explosion in which punk rock was born – which Dick Hebdige has suggested was a collision between early 1970s hard rock and heavy metal and the reggae and ska music transported from the Caribbean to England10 – only represents an intensification of the dialectical tendencies Adorno already perceived in the emergence of jazz as a popular art form in the early twentieth century. In fact, the whole development of what has been called ‘rock and roll,’ from the career of Elvis Presley and the cult-like obsession that has followed it to the success of today’s blatantly prefabricated ‘divas’ and their ‘punk’ counterparts,11 follows the same pattern. A form of aesthetic rebellion in the ghettos (the voice of the slave that in raising itself is able to represent its suffering to itself, and in that way see the light of redemption) is co-opted and promoted as a wildly successful commercial product. In Adorno, the negative outcome, the renewed victory of an enemy Walter Benjamin insisted ‘has not ceased to be victorious,’12 all but vitiates the dialectical origin. This problem, and not racism, is what motivates Adorno when he argues in ‘Perennial Fashion – Jazz’ that the African American spirituals, to which the mass phenomenon of jazz can trace at least part of its origin, were themselves marked by a central contradiction – they ‘combined the lament of unfreedom with its oppressed confirmation.’13 If

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jazz, as the heir of the old spiritual music, actually preserved that central tension, then it would not be the target of Adorno’s anger. One should not read the absence of his expressed ‘approval’ of black American spiritual music in the Jazz essay to mean that Adorno thinks it is the same as jazz music. The question is what difference polite compliments from a European academic would make to a people who have been deprived not only of freedom, but also of the means of expressing its absence. Jazz, Adorno says, does not combine the old spiritual lament with the confirmation; it annihilates the lament in the gigantic, machinelike commercial ‘fusion’ that is its epitome and its basic model. It must be admitted that with heavy metal and hard rock in general, every technical fetish in jazz is intensely magnified. In jazz, Adorno claims, African elements, real improvisation – within which the imagination could ‘roam freely and without inhibition’14 – are all too often just dressing, ‘a form of manneristic interpretation,’15 for the strict schematics of the popular song. Rebellious gestures, sounds, and words that have been taboo in traditional Western musical taste become marked by a kind of blind, sadomasochistic obedience, tacked on as an ‘ornament’ to the skeletal format of the tune. In the schematics of heavy-metal guitar playing, the unlikely improvisatory virtuosity of early blues players, associated with half-buried African religious practices, is fetishized to an unprecedented degree.16 Jimi Hendrix’s idiosyncratic and largely uncontrived antics have been converted into a rigid doctrine of the successful performance. The extended guitar solo has been institutionalized, an opportunity for the musician to do before an audience of thousands precisely what many of the audience members do themselves, alone in their bedrooms. Guitar magazines, filled with tablature (play-guitar-by-numbers), along with the schools where jazz and heavy-metal guitar are among the course offerings, provide ‘musical traffic signals’ by which an army of guitar hacks can play their favourite ‘improvisations’ at home, complete with every mistake and transient harmonic, even instrument feedback.17 The desire Adorno finds buried in jazz, for a ‘higher potency feudalism,’ which ‘fosters the illusion that the twentieth century is ancient Egypt, full of slaves and endless dynasties,’18 is all the more evident in heavy metal, although the authoritarian historical referent is more often medieval Europe. The technological veil of studio production presents a ‘mythical mirage of eternity,’19 the liquidation of a history of sacrificial moral oppression by its conversion into pure spectacle: performers kill animals on stage, rape and torture are simulated. Its less-inebriated

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creators have defended the ‘show’ by explicit reference to its escapism, the need its working-class fans have for a good time, to safely express the anger that the sanitized, ‘politically correct’ world prohibits them from feeling. In fact, heavy metal is simulated fantasy, an effect created by the intensification of castration symbolism to a degree that allows fans to regress behind the reality principle itself. Even after the The Osbournes, given enough psychedelic drugs and the right environment, Ozzy Osbourne really is a ‘master of reality.’20 The fantasy is in fact always partly real, reflecting the persistence of brutal patriarchal violence at the heart of civilized ‘democracy,’ the wish to regress to its imaginable extremes, always hidden after the party is over in terms of ‘just rocking out.’ In his telling paper ‘On Your Feet or On Your Knees: Theodor Adorno and Heavy Metal,’ Ted Gannon manages, while adequately representing Adorno’s central arguments (better than many cultural and communications studies writers have managed to do), to perfectly demonstrate the intense castration anxiety characteristic of heavy metal. Gannon says of Adorno that ‘his whole notion of this “castration symbolism” in jazz is enough to make “even the mildest (male) jazz fan pause” ...! – and perhaps search for a more “manly” form of music.’21 It is as if Adorno's criticism is what is responsible for the guilt in Gannon’s pleasure. Neurotically, he lets Adorno criticize, and then tries to preserve from that criticism the ironic-carnivalesque Blue Oyster Cult. People often blame Adorno for the police they have found installed in their own eardrums, as if he was condemning them with extreme prejudice for enjoying something as stupid and relatively harmless as listening to ‘Don't Fear the Reaper’ in a Taco Bell parking lot. It is true; Adorno would not want you to forget that this is stupid. But even more importantly, he would hope that you would not allow the meagre, if real, instinctual satisfaction doing so gives you (and it is real, hence its power) to make you feel so guilty that you forget how much greater satisfaction might be possible in changed historical circumstances: ‘The possibility of individual shelter and of a security which is, as always, questionable, obstructs the view of a change in the situation in which one seeks shelter.’22 Attacks on Adorno for being moralistic or highbrow are ultimately passive-aggressive projections of guilt feelings the critics already bore within themselves, of precisely the guilt that Adorno identifies as the necessary counterpart of the world-administered art. Adorno does not set himself above this guilt, hence his anger. For everyone involved, the implicit point of orientation ought to be the badness of

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the status quo, the guilt that we learn in ‘The Concept of Enlightenment’ is a ‘context of social delusion.’23 Cultural Studies theorist Deena Weinstein, to whom Gannon refers in his paper with regard to the ‘ecstatic’ component of heavy-metal experience, has described heavy metal’s lyrical effect as ‘Dionysian’: Sex in heavy metal is anything but respectable, a truth made evident in such song titles as Krokus’s ‘Mister Sixty-Nine’ and the Scorpions’ ‘He’s a Woman, She’s a Man.’ Women are rarely given personal names. They are essentially and exclusively sexual beings, often groupies such as the Scorpions’ ‘Backstage Queen’ or prostitutes such as those inhabiting Iron Maiden’s ‘22, Acacia Avenue.’ Physical beauty is not important; some of the women celebrated in heavy metal song, like AC/DC’s Rosie (‘Whole Lotta Rosie’), who weighs more than nineteen stone (180 lbs.), and Krokus’s ‘Smelly Nelly’ would normally be considered unattractive or even sexually repulsive ... When AC/DC sings ‘Shoot to Thrill’ or Krokus intones ‘Long Stick Goes Boom,’ they are bringing sex under the sway of a more general Dionysian impulse. Sex is an emblem of youthful male power, a mark of prowess as well as pleasure.24

Now, if heavy metal were truly Dionysian, it would pre-empt a central claim of Adorno’s theory of the music produced by the culture industry – that it undermines the possibility of taming the instincts precisely by shattering the experience of instinctual pleasure. Long arguments could be had over whether ‘exceptional’ female figures in these songs only prove the patriarchal rule – or simply refer to the ‘settle for what one can get’ mentality of the modern adolescent sexuality that is now a universal fetish. Whatever their meaning, what is completely missing from Weinstein’s account is the fact that this ‘Dionysian’ release is, for the masses of fans, purely representational – song lyrics, record covers, and music videos – and therefore not Dionysian. Her account, like that of many cultural studies critics, misses the distinction between representation and reality that the culture industry has always insisted is meaningless.25 And so it is not surprising that the self-portrait Gannon includes in his article is of him ‘thinkin’ I’m BOC’s lead guitarist’ (emphasis mine). In its own incoherent and infantile way, Metallica’s song ‘Master of Puppets’ perfectly illustrates the extreme development of rock music as a popular form under capitalism, even though it was recorded by the band long before their most ridiculous excesses.26 The song’s organiza-

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tion is mathematically precise, and it is strangely long – twice as long as most popular songs. It features the transition from an opening ‘sadistic thrash’ section, through to an ‘impassioned-tragic’ guitar solo section, followed by the twin-guitar pyrotechnics of yet more guitar solos, and is finished by a reprise to make sure that the attentive listener hasn’t forgotten where the whole thing starts and ends. The lyrics, an ‘emotional’ account of drug abuse, deploy an overall strategy – encouraging the listener to identify alternately with a sadistic ‘master of puppets’ and with his masochistic victim – that reflects the position of the band relative to their marketers and their fans, as well as to the objective content of all their other music. They appear to ritualistically glorify the experience of drug addiction while they (and their loyal headbanging fans) assert they are being critical of it. In fact they glorify nothing but violence and rigorous control. Everyone is fodder for the malignant social machine, and so one must identify with that machine, whether sadistically or suicidally. The refuge provided by irony (laughing at the band’s stupidity while enjoying their excesses) is not available to people whose lives are actually defined by the kind of sadomasochistic experience Metallica bring to upper-middle-class America – in the form of simulated fantasy. Drummer Lars Ulrich’s painfully embarrassing plea on behalf of the music industry against Napster in July 2000 showed the true meaning of his band’s often-professed ‘dedication to the fans’: But how can we embrace a new format and sell our music for a fair price when someone, with a few lines of code, and no investment costs, creative input or marketing expenses, simply gives it away? How does this square with the level playing field of the capitalist system? In Napster's brave new world, what free market economy models support our ability to compete? The touted ‘new paradigm’ that the Internet gurus tell us we Luddites must adopt sounds to me like old-fashioned trafficking in stolen goods.27

This dedication is to tickets purchased and records sold, and the band’s most serious concern is preserving the system of abstract exchange to which they are metaphorically and musically wired. They are completely blind to the difference between the system and the people it subsumes. By the 1990s, even the questionable rebellion against authority characteristic of heavy metal’s rejection of traditional morality, the naive fantasy of moral-sexual release that was in some way represented

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in Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin, was finally recuperated. The real foundations of heavy metal, rock and roll, and all popular music – a ‘level playing field’ where a tiny minority of performers are massively funded and marketed to a global audience of utterly passive listeners – now rise to the surface.28 Dear reader: do I exaggerate? Have I omitted all the exceptions to the rule? If, as Adorno said, in ‘psychoanalysis nothing is true except the exaggerations,’29 then it follows that there is truth in exaggerations. The fact that Adorno’s critique of jazz may have been exaggerated is made clear by statements he makes in a chapter on popular music from Introduction to the Sociology of Music: On the other hand (if I may paraphrase a pretty line coined a generation ago by Willy Haas for literature) there is still some good bad music today, along with all the bad good music. Under the pressures of the marketplace much genuine talent is absorbed by popular music and cannot be entirely crushed even there. Even in the thoroughly commercialized late phase primary ideas, beautifully arched melodies, pregnant rhythmic and harmonic turns will be encountered, particularly in America. But the spheres can only be defined from the extremes, not from the transitions, and besides, even the most gifted escapades within popular music are marred by considerations paid to the appointed guardians of salability.30

It would be entirely misguided to take this kind of statement as a ‘softening’ on the part of a hardened, bitter defender of the tradition. Rather, it clearly indicates the need represented in all of Adorno’s thinking, which is always being compelled in either one direction or the other according to social conditioning. A clear sense of the fragility of negative dialectics suggests the correct reading of Adorno’s fiercest criticism of popular music, which is so clear in the ‘On the Fetish-Character in Music’ essay: Perhaps a better hour may at some time strike even for the clever fellows [popular musicians]: one in which they may demand, instead of prepared material ready to be switched on, the improvisatory displacement of things, as the sort of radical beginning that can only thrive under the protection of the unshaken real world. Even discipline can take over the expression of free solidarity if freedom becomes its content. As little as regressive listening is a symptom of progress in consciousness of freedom, it could suddenly turn around if art, in unity with the society, should ever

286 Colin J. Campbell leave the road of the always identical. Not popular but artistic music has furnished a model for this possibility.31

My thesis is that Fugazi put Adorno’s way of thinking in a different key. The band is legendary for their minimal stage presence. Mackaye asks at the start of the show that the house lights be raised so that the band and the audience can see each other. To open the show, he announces, ‘Hi, we’re Fugazi from Washington DC.’ For years, Fugazi ticket prices were bound by a self-imposed limit of six American dollars. Fugazi have as much as possible rejected the world of North American popular music, which is a commercial enterprise through and through even for the independents. They conceive of themselves, just as many commercial and popular musicians do, as doing something ‘artistic.’ But only Fugazi observe that ‘Merchandise keeps us in line / Common sense says it’s by design / what could a businessman ever want more / than to have us sucking in his store?’32 Their name, a Vietnam-era slang word meaning ‘fuck-up,’ appears to resonate with the emphasis Adorno places on masochism in jazz: ‘I am nothing, I am filth, it serves me right.’ In their appearance – close cropped hair, often shaved to the scalp, militaristic clothing, used and abused musical instruments – do they not live up to their name? ‘You say I need a job / I’ve got my own business / you want to know what I do? / None of your fucking business / but now I’m lying here knowing that business / I had a name, but now I’m a number.’33 The lyrical and musical content of their paramilitary ‘Fugazi’ discipline contradicts the aesthetic form it has been violently wrenched into. By way of comparison, the lyrical and musical content of pseudo-radical bands like Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave is essentially identical with their violent aesthetic image – and therefore with the enemy they purport to oppose. Adorno insisted that the undeniable power of aesthetic semblance comes with a double bind: to be removed from reality, it must absorb and repeat the most violent (and ugly) elements of that reality. Its emancipation from the bonds of the administered world comes with the price of faithfully replicating its power – faithfully enough to break through the countercultural fantasies that are its fascistic underside. The fact that Fugazi emerged from a social context of gang violence really only underlines this fact. The writing of Mackaye’s lifelong friend Henry Rollins has the same ‘virtue of clarity’ that Marinetti’s Futurist manifesto had for Walter Benjamin: ‘If I were in the jungle,

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they [my critics] would be in the pot and I’d be stirring, that’s for fucking sure ... There’s nothing special about me. If I can get this far, I would be very surprised if you couldn’t get twice as far. Fuck them. Keep your blood clean, your body lean and your mind sharp.’34 Speaking of a new crew of bouncers hired at a club where his first band Minor Threat were playing, Mackaye himself had stated unapologetically, ‘Those motherfuckers were leaving with blood pouring. To me, that was justified aggression because it’s our stage, that’s the way it is.’35 The full meaning of Ian Mackaye’s youth-gang origins only becomes clear when considered in relation to the stage performances for which Mackaye has become famous, as well as resented: As if overwhelmed by the pent up ugliness of two years, a hunched-over Mackaye screamed, ‘No more pain, no more pain, no more pain’ over and over. Then he sprang up and unleashed a riveting diatribe: ‘No more bullshit! No more fucking punk rock dicks! No more fucking alcohol shit! No more common American teenager shit! No more sitting home watching TV all day! No more ‘get drunk and party all fucking night’ bullshit! No more fucking pain!’36

Adorno comments: What expression has in common with repression is that its movement is blocked by reality. That movement, and the whole complex of experience of which it is a part, is denied direct communication with its object. As expression it achieves unfalsified manifestation of itself and so of the resistance to it, in sensuous imitation. It is so strong that it suffers modification to a mere image, the price of survival, without mutilation on its outward path. In place of the goal, and of subjective, censorial ‘elaboration,’ it sets an objective, polemical self-revelation.37

In a society as totally administered as North America’s there is no longer room for the comfortable professionalism of authentic art. The violence of the system is systemically removed from the people who would be in the best position to express its truth. As far as I am concerned, Fugazi’s achievement stands alongside Beckett’s and Kafka’s, in that they have faithfully expressed the violence at the heart of North American civilization, hidden from even its most enlightened liberal critics, in the dark opening years of the twenty-first century. And they are dark years indeed for punk rock. Punk rock, of course,

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has lived through many deaths. ‘Punk is dead’ has been a key motto in the life of punk – the exaggerated, excessive denunciation of the entire established scene in favour of those who are outsiders, and who can offer something radically new by virtue of being outside: ‘this margin walker wants a clear view / this margin walker wants a clear shot.’38 In a sense, all of punk rock’s years have been dark. But only the most blinkered, optimistic fan could argue that anything good is growing in the scene right now. Its permeation by the Internet has only removed the sense of open possibility that animated the independent punk scene of the 1980s. Now, the future is now. Punk rock’s success is always its death knell, and it has never been more successful. Punk, as a vibrant and open-ended aesthetic practice, was made possible by the persistence of puritanical morality, racism, and a general aesthetic conservatism in the Anglo-American world, where it first found its voice. It arrived in a place where surrealism and other radical art movements had always been foreign imports. It was largely ignored, seen as unmusical, undesirable, unmarketable trash for nearly fifteen years by large-scale music concerns – during the heyday of heavy metal – and existed in a kind of parallel world alongside the mainstream of the culture industry. Heavy-metal musicians, for all their excesses, maintained a commitment to the work ethic in their technical mastery and professionalism, which punk rockers had unceremoniously abandoned in favour of explosive, intimate energy they thought the culture industry could never assimilate. Adorno’s words for the underground may be excessively pessimistic, but whatever the authentic energy of punk rock from the 1970s and 1980s, it has to be admitted that in the long run he was right about the absorptive power of the culture industry. Since Kurt Cobain’s breakthrough (followed a few years later by his suicide and a public note, worth quoting: ‘I know what I have done’) nascent independent networks of production and distribution, often only opposing petit-bourgeois ideals to the enormity of the productive apparatus, have been destroyed or assimilated. Starting in the late 1980s, major labels relentlessly bought out the most popular and productive independent bands, and then dumped all but a few when it was realized that most would not sell the millions of units necessary to make them worthwhile investments. In the meantime, a relatively diverse intersubjective ‘community,’ or potential community, that had been developing in the interstices of the culture industry was shattered, or else transformed imperceptibly into a market demographic. In an interview with CBC Radio’s Patti Schmidt, Mackaye tells the story:

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Once I was doing this interview and I got into this metaphor, you know, the way I kind of perceived it, which was – it was like a valley, full of small gardens. Everyone had their own garden, they could make, sort of enough food to sort of take care, you know, sustenance, you know, good healthy food. They took care of their soil and it was good, fertile soil – healthy, nutritious and all this sort of stuff. And someone came along, some company came along and said, ‘well hey, can we buy this garden?’ And they did, and it grew incredible produce, and then word got out – ‘hey, there’s this really fertile soil here in this valley,’ and then all the factory farmers just sort of descended on the valley, and just bought all the land up, you know, bought as much as they could. And, you know, raped the land, just plundered it. Bled it dry, and then went to the next valley. There was just a few people that tried to hang onto the garden. That’s the way I’ve always looked at it. I understand that there was money to be made, but that’s the end of the story then, once that happens, that’s the end. They’ll come in, they’ll give you a lot of money, you’ll do the dance, and when they’re done with you, they’re gone. And that’s nothing new, the labels have been doing that for ever and ever and ever and ever. And I was kind of struck by the arrogance of some of the people who thought that they had, like, the oneup on the labels, they thought like, well, we’ve got it figured out this time – ‘they won’t be able to pull the same sort of krap with us.’ But of course, you know, they all got beat up. You can’t beat a trillion-dollar company.39

The transience of punk is attested to by the fact that many of the most successful profiteers are the same people who, in the beginning, had aimed to break the system. Fugazi’s success in this situation has consisted in setting limits to their success. They too could have been celebrities. Details ran a special feature on them in the mid-1990s, and for a time (after Nirvana’s Nevermind catapulted punk rock into the mainstream) their song ‘Waiting Room’ made playlists in the North American dance clubs. They rejected many offers from record labels combing the underground for the ‘alternative.’ All of their albums are still produced by Dischord Records, which Mackaye still runs with his friend Brian Baker out of a house in Washington, DC. Every album can still be purchased directly from them, post-paid, for ten dollars. Fugazi’s most recent (and likely last) album The Argument (2001) is a clear and unambiguous document of a band who never compromised and never wanted big-money revenge, even when everything they had helped to invent was copied and sold.40 The Argument is equally an illustration of the old philosophical principle of Minerva’s Owl, an

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already-retrospective document of the life of a community that never got the chance to be more than an extension of the punk aesthetic. Coming at a time when Fugazi are no longer able to play live shows (two of the band members are now responsible fathers), The Argument is actually comparable to the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band; it is a concept album. Until now Fugazi have eschewed the option of aesthetic totality in their albums. The thematically fragmentary nature of their earlier albums points to the fact that the ideal of communication of a message has never dominated Fugazi as it does most other ‘political’ music acts, from Rage Against the Machine to Ani DiFranco. But it is hard to say whether the totality that is The Argument is intentional or whether it just emerges as a mimetic response to the state of punk rock and of the world: When the bit pulls tight the grip is sewn into the reins you can’t breathe it out you’ll just breathe it back again come on mental pack your chambers full for no reason you can name a boil-in-bag blood supply you know it’s murder on the veins oh can’t you feel it now? viva viva viva life and limb viva viva viva threatening hey we want our violence doubled no but really in a loving way hey we want our violence doubled no but really want it right away41

An extended musicological analysis here does not have the meaning it would have for seriously composed music. Popular music, especially punk, is actually much closer to theatre than it is to serious, composed music, where a refined focus on the sound of the music itself has been developed. Nevertheless, it is worthwhile noting some musical highlights. The song begins with a country twang, a major chord played over an almost honky-tonk drum lick. This beginning reflects the theme – essentially, America – perfectly, and crystallizes at the end of the second verse in the lines ‘the national temper / don’t you know it’s written on your face.’ The country-music beginning is fractured from the

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outset. The beat shifts immediately into loose 4/4 surf-punk, and the voice and guitar, bereft at first of any other musical accompaniment apart from the drums, combine to suggest in the most minimal terms possible a tense, foreboding melody in D minor. It turns out there are almost no major chord changes in the song; the chorus simply adds depth to the extended D minor tonality. Where the popular grungepunk/hard rock trend would be to ‘milk’ this quiet and repetitive beginning for a ‘shock and awe’ conclusion, Fugazi round the song out with a limpid, awkward blues guitar solo, followed by a reprise of the chorus. The song concludes – following a brief section where the melody is shifted in relation to the rhythm and taken up in turn by Joe Lally’s bass – with a perfunctory clapping of the hands. The tense and claustrophobic atmosphere of ambivalent, potential violence that runs through the song, combined with the blues and country music overtones, form a theatrical tableau with the lyrics, an expression of the numbing violence of everyday life in terrorized twenty-first-century America, much as Beckett’s Endgame expressed the parallel destruction of family and self, which has only progressed since his day. Adorno would not have loved Fugazi’s music. They stand among the hardest punk rockers, and the individuality and spontaneity of their best compositions is marked with the same kind of violence and amplified power that marks hard rock and heavy metal generally. For Adorno, as is evident in his critique of Stravinsky, this kind of musical violence goes beyond aesthetic semblance, because the language of music is so immediate. But even immediacy, he would also remind us, is mediated as soon as conceptual thought is on the scene. While the many genres of the culture industry are a parody of diversity, Adorno never claimed that everyone ought to like the same music. The category of taste may be obsolete, but Adorno does not allow this fact to prevent him from expressing his own love for music, for sharing his musical experience as something non-negotiable, not subject to communicative exchange. Love for any music, as well as hatred of bad music that perverts and uses that love, is not fully subject to rational exchange because it partakes so thoroughly of the non-subjectivizable, the nonidentical. Hence the eternal arguments among punk fans about who is ‘more authentic.’ Too many academics are as intimidated by Adorno’s taste, just as too many punks are intimidated by Mackaye’s ‘authenticity.’ Both give examples, not a plan. While some of their songs, especially Mackaye’s ‘position statements,’ approach the level of didacticism that marks almost all other

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bands that incorporate a political message into their work, Mackaye and Fugazi have refused to limit their songwriting to any overriding ‘themes.’ They have never subordinated songs without communicable themes to those with them (as would likely have happened if they had had major label distribution). ‘Burning,’ from their first album, illustrates this a-thematic approach: There’s something acting on this body Something goes in when nothing comes out And someone’s acting on this information But nothing’s registered from this location From this site that I sense that I am, in asking What is this burning in my eyes? I wanted a language of my own My lips sucked empty and I mouthed the lines Of this crowd that surrounds me Punctured and parceled I fold my hand To this site that I sense that I am in asking What is this burning in my eyes?42

How can one identify, without the problem of bathos arising, the ‘theme’ of this song? I would argue that few have been able to bring out what is hidden in these words as well as Adorno, whose writing about Schoenberg and Webern applies just as well to Fugazi: ‘Their music gives form to that anxiety, that terror, that insight into the catastrophic situation which others merely evade by regressing.’43 Where other political bands cannot avoid the trap of representing themselves, or the causes they promote, as the cure to the world’s problems, Fugazi again and again have opted for upping the ante, in making music that liberates the listener from pain only by bearing witness to it without compromise.

NOTES 1 A more intensive analysis of Wellmer’s theory of art and politics can be found in Donald Burke’s paper in this volume, ‘Adorno’s Aesthetics of Reconciliation.’ 2 T.W. Adorno, ‘On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening,’ in Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt, eds, The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (New York: Continuum Publishing, 2000), 294.

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3 Please refer to Shane Gunster’s essay in this collection for an in-depth treatment of popular culture and the interpretation given it in cultural studies. 4 In his contribution to this volume, Horowitz explains that Habermas has displaced the problem of overcoming reification by means of ‘linguistic intersubjectivity’ and ‘decentred rationality.’ 5 ‘Promises,’ Thirteen Songs (Dischord Records, 1988–9). 6 Thomas Frank, ‘Alternative to What?’ in Commodify Your Dissent (New York: Norton, 1997), 153. 7 T.W. Adorno, ‘Perennial Fashion – Jazz,’ in Prisms (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983), 132. 8 Ibid., 124. 9 Ibid., 126. 10 The case studies in Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Routledge, 1998) portray in wonderful detail the racial antagonisms and hybrid working-class forms out of which punk music emerged in 1970s England. But as David Huxley argues persuasively in his article, ‘“Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” Anarchy and Control in The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle,’ in Punk: So What? ed. Roger Sabin (New York: Routledge, 1999), Hebdige’s classic account is marred by a residual claim to the very category of authenticity that the ‘revolt into style’ was intended to subvert. 11 The reader will indulge the author in considering as examples whatever new ‘punk artists’ and plastic ‘divas’ are in current rotation when this volume has been published. 12 Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History,’ trans. Harry Zohn, in Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 255. 13 ‘Perennial Fashion – Jazz’, 122. 14 Ibid., 123. 15 Ibid., 122. 16 The apocryphal story of Robert Johnson’s meeting with the devil at the crossroads has often been referred to by musicians like Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page who show his influence – and have made millions doing it. 17 Adorno, ‘On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening,’ 290. This practice reached a remarkable extreme in the early 1990s when Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit,’ a song consisting of four sloppily played chords and two single notes, was transcribed in full in magazines like Guitar Player, so that every one of Kurt Cobain’s (frequent) errors could be precisely repeated by cover bands everywhere. The author is not afraid to admit he was himself a ‘repeater.’ 18 ‘Perennial Fashion – Jazz,’ 126.

294 Colin J. Campbell 19 Ibid. 20 Cf. Black Sabbath, Master of Reality (1971). 21 At http://www.usd.edu/~tgannon/hm.html. Gannon’s reference here is to Harry Cooper’s ‘On Uber Jazz: Replaying Adorno with the Grain,’ October 75 (1996): 99–133. 22 ‘On the Fetish-Character in Music,’ 294. 23 Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 2000), 41. 24 Deena Weinstein, Heavy Metal: A Cultural Sociology (New York: Lexington Books, 1991), 36. 25 Please see Shane Gunster’s article in this volume for a treatment of Adorno’s theory of difference within and beyond culture. 26 This is the title track from Metallica’s Master of Puppets (Elektra Records, 1986). The more recent excesses include playing with a full symphony orchestra, a spectacle where the extremes of popular and ‘classical’ music meet in a way even Adorno may not have foreseen. 27 The entire text of Ulrich’s address to Congress can be found at http:// www.yourcongress.com/ViewArticle.asp?article_id=407. 28 A case in point is Aerosmith’s performance at the 2004 Super Bowl, surrounded by cheerleaders waving red, white, and blue streamers in unison – ‘Dream on, dream on ...’ 29 Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (New York: Verso, 1997), 49. 30 Theodor Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, trans. E.B. Ashton (New York: Seabury Press, 1976), 32. It is worth asking whether these elements of Adorno’s thinking have been ignored by most readers because if they took them into account it would be impossible to reduce him to a caricature. 31 ‘On the Fetish-Character in Music,’ 298. 32 ‘Merchandise,’ Repeater + Three Songs (Dischord Records, 1990). 33 ‘Repeater,’ Repeater + Three Songs. 34 Henry Rollins, Get in the Van (Los Angeles: 2.13.61 Publications, 1994), 249. 35 Ian Mackaye, quoted in Dance of Days: Two Decades of Punk in the Nation’s Capital (New York: Soft Skull Press, 2001), 83. 36 Ibid., 184–5. 37 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 213. 38 ‘Margin Walker,’ Thirteen Songs. 39 Transcribed by Colin J. Campbell from a CBC Radio digital recording,

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available at http://www.bravenewwaves.ca/bnmedia/archive_i_imckaye .shtml. Of course, as Mackaye and Picciotto sing in ‘Merchandise’ (from Repeater), ‘you are not what you own.’ ‘Life and Limb,’ The Argument (Dischord Records, 2001). Fugazi, ‘Burning,’ Thirteen Songs. ‘On the Fetish-Character in Music,’ 298–9.

13 A World of Difference: Adorno and Cultural Studies sh a n e gun ster

Adorno’s work on mass culture has not fared especially well in recent years. As the star of cultural studies rose in the 1980s and 1990s, the culture-industry thesis was abandoned as an arrogant, embittered, and irrelevant polemic, exemplary of an elitist mode of critique ill suited for exploring the diversity of contemporary culture. These days it largely survives as a kind of intellectual relic within cultural studies, routinely included within many anthologies and survey courses as the ‘classic’ (i.e., outdated) critique of mass culture. Its tone, method, and conclusions have acquired negative pedagogical significance as illustrations of how not to study culture. In contrast, Stuart Hall and the Birmingham School’s model of cultural studies, emphasizing the active and creative ways in which people take a variety of pleasures and meanings from popular culture, appears as a welcome theoretical and political advance over Adorno’s one-dimensional pessimism. Even within critical theory, sympathetic critics caution that the mass-culture writings are best located historically as a singular response to the fusion of Hollywood, liberal democracy, and Fordist capitalism that emerged in the 1930s and grew to maturity following the Second World War.1 Adorno’s aesthetics and philosophy figure prominently in the recent renaissance of first-generation critical theory, while an uncomfortable silence surrounds the culture-industry thesis:2 its aggressive tone seems embarrassingly out of place amidst the more cautious, localized, and ‘democratic’ analysis offered by cultural studies. Where the massculture writings are taken up, the emphasis is upon a close reading of Adorno’s infamous critique of jazz.3 Though such work accurately traces the limits and historical specificity of this encounter, it also tends to restage the broader critique of mass culture as a misguided attack on

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a particular musical tradition: Adorno’s failure to engage fairly with the genuine complexity of jazz effectively indicts the culture-industry thesis in its entirety. I want to challenge the conventional dismissal of Adorno’s work on mass culture, arguing that it remains highly relevant both as an intellectual interlocutor for cultural studies as well as furnishing important insights into contemporary culture. A systematic accounting of the culture-industry thesis requires far more space than this chapter can offer (and I have undertaken such work elsewhere).4 Instead, I propose we look to how the concept of difference is used to distinguish between cultural studies and critical theory. In the first place, this focus will give us a good sense of why many in cultural studies are so quick to dismiss Adorno and the Frankfurt School. More importantly, though, it also enables an exploration of how the critique of Adorno is often predicated upon a fundamental misreading of his theoretical claims. We begin from the point of view of cultural studies, investigating the charge that the culture-industry thesis is unable to navigate a postmodern cultural landscape characterized by the endless proliferation of difference. As we shall see, this charge flows out of three interrelated assumptions that ground most forms of cultural studies: the (relative) autonomy of culture, semiotic polysemy, and active cultural consumers. In the remainder of the chapter we look to how one might draw upon Adorno’s work in developing a response to these claims by assessing the contrasting ways in which cultural studies and critical theory conceptualize difference. While the former looks almost exclusively to the relation between signs within discrete semiotic structures, Adorno’s principal concern is the relation between those structures and that which they signify: in other words, between subject and object. His attack upon ‘sameness’ within mass culture must therefore be located within the broader philosophical critique of identitarian thinking that lies at the core of his work. In addition to raising important theoretical questions about difference that almost never appear within cultural studies, Adorno’s work is helpful in developing a critical perspective on the logic of reproduction and simulation that underlies the development of digital cultural technologies within the culture industry. From Frankfurt to Birmingham: Eclipsing Adorno Reflecting upon the origins of cultural studies, Hall once wrote that ‘[t]he rapid displacement of Lukács, Goldmann and the “Frankfurt

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School” by the French structuralists is one of the most intriguing episodes in recent English intellectual history.’5 Although the Birmingham School never does engage with the Frankfurt School in any sustained fashion,6 its ‘displacement’ is an inevitable consequence of how the adoption of structuralism as a governing theoretical problematic redefines culture as a relatively autonomous set of practices with their own discrete logic. For Hall and others associated with the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), this shift enables them to move beyond the sprawling cultural histories of figures such as Raymond Williams and E.P. Thompson that had hitherto dominated the critical study of culture in Britain. Where Williams and Thompson insist upon treating culture as an integral part of a social totality, the Birmingham School deploy theorists such as Louis Althusser to argue that culture and ideology possess a specific effectivity and discrete, internal logic that must be studied in isolation from other processes and structures. Meaning arises within language via the semiotic relations between signs: it is this specific set of interactions, rather than the external relations between culture and that which is ‘not culture,’ that receives analytic priority in cultural analysis. If the weakness of [Williams and Thompson] was their tendency to dissolve the cultural back into society and history, structuralism’s main emphasis was on the specificity, the irreducibility of the cultural. Culture ... was itself a practice – a signifying practice – and had its own determinate product: meaning. To think of the specificity of the cultural was to come to terms with what defined it ... as a practice: its internal forms and relations, its internal structuration.7

In addition to vanquishing the vague, imprecise cultural Marxism pioneered by Williams and Thompson, Althusser’s dense theoretical apparatus abandons the simplistic class reductionism sweepingly attributed to most other forms of Marxist cultural analysis, including the so-called ‘Western Marxism’ of Lukács and the Frankfurt School. Collapsing economic determinism into class reductionism, British cultural studies is sceptical that any attempt to sketch the relation between culture and economy within a Marxist problematic could do anything other than mechanically derive the ideological significance of a cultural object from the social origins of its production. For example, Adorno is castigated for adopting a ‘simple reflective model of the relationship between art and the economic level.’8 Today this theoretical disposition

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takes the form of a lingering hostility to the work of those who claim that the political economy of the media is a key factor in defining its cultural and ideological significance.9 Instead, cultural studies continues to insist that culture be treated as a fundamentally distinct sphere of human activity with its own rules and processes, categorically rejecting the idea that economic processes exercise a determining influence over the role of culture in everyday life.10 For cultural studies the fundamental principle that governs the operation of all semiotic structures is difference. This assumption arises in part out of Ferdinand de Saussure’s paradigmatic break with earlier forms of linguistics that instals difference as the core logic underlying language: a sign only acquires significance within a semiotic system based upon its differences from other signs. Structuralist theorists such as Claude Lévi-Strauss broaden the application of this framework to all forms of human culture and communication, elevating difference as the constitutive principle of all meaning. Where structuralism tends to define these differences as fixed and stable, however, cultural studies conceptualizes the relations between signs as essentially fluid and unstable. Signs are inherently polysemic. Developing a seminal distinction between denotative and connotative levels of meaning, for instance, Roland Barthes insists that a particular image may have numerous ideological effects depending upon the multiple associative pathways that reside within culture. As he famously puts it in ‘The Death of the Author,’ ‘we know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single, “theological” meaning (the “message” of the AuthorGod) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash.’11 Taken up with great enthusiasm by the Birmingham School – Hall describes his work as initiating a ‘new problematic’ at the CCCS12 – Barthes helps cultural studies preserve its commitment to the autonomy of cultural practices while avoiding the rigid functional excesses that haunt Althusser’s structuralism. Similarly, the appropriation of V.N. Volo’inov and Antonio Gramsci reinforces a fluid conception of culture as the pre-eminent site of social struggle, nurturing forms of resistance and difference that would not be tolerated within the political or economic spheres. The masses, writes Iain Chambers, have become individual historical subjects, at least in western capitalist societies, not so much through the representative organs of parliamentary democracy (a fairly limited institution, especially in Britain), but through

300 Shane Gunster the diverse modalities of urban popular culture. It is there that the greatest exercise in the powers of individual and local choice and taste has been realized, effectively remaking the field of culture in a far more extensive fashion than the presence of the ‘masses’ in the more restricted field of politics has so far achieved.13

Noting Volo’inov’s ‘decisive and far-reaching impact on our work,’ Hall explains how his ‘account counterposed the exercise of cultural power through the imposition of the norm in an attempt to freeze and fix meaning in language to the constant eruption of new meanings, the fluidity of heteroglossia, and the way meaning’s inherent instability and heterogeneity dislocated and displaced language’s apparently finished character.’14 Elsewhere he notes that ‘[t]he ideological sign is always multi-accentual and Janus-faced’15 and that ‘[m]eaning is polysemic in its intrinsic nature.’16 As objects, events, or practices pass through language and culture and become signs, they necessarily acquire a range of different and often contradictory meanings given the flexibility and instability of all systems of meaning. For many in cultural studies, individual and collective agency is the primary catalyst in activating semiotic polysemy. The Birmingham School’s celebrated work on youth subcultures, for instance, describes how subordinate social groups creatively appropriate and transform the meaning of the culture industry’s products. Defined as ‘the reordering and re-contextualisation of objects to communicate fresh meanings,’ the structuralist notion of bricolage is deployed with great effect in influential texts such as Dick Hebdige’s Subculture,17 offering an innovative approach to theorizing the fluid, mobile cultural formations that emerged with such prominence during the social and political upheaval of the 1960s. Positioned as an expression of human agency, the identification of cultural difference acquires normative significance as a measure of the intellectual’s respect for the intelligence of the average person. ‘Ordinary people,’ Hall famously insists, ‘are not cultural dopes,’18 invoking a democratic sensibility that echoes throughout cultural studies as a founding mantra. ‘There is no mass culture,’ writes John Fiske (paraphrasing Raymond Williams), ‘there are only alarmist and pessimistic theories of mass culture that, at their best, can shed light only on the industrial and ideological imperatives of the powerbloc, but none at all on the cultural processes by which people cope with them and either reject them or turn them into popular culture.’19 In other words, attending to the cultural differences of everyday life keeps faith with the constant struggle to extract meaning and pleasure

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from hegemonic cultural institutions. It champions discrete forms of agency that involve new patterns of thought, action, and feeling that contain the latent promise of broader social and political transformation. Above all, it abandons the judgmental disposition of traditional cultural criticism, rejecting the hierarchical ordering of difference in exchange for a respectful sensitivity to all forms of difference in which people have invested themselves and which they appropriate in countless innovative ways. At this point it is not difficult to see why Adorno’s critique of mass culture has so little credibility within cultural studies. Leaving to one side the contempt that Adorno attracts solely for his aggressive, polemical style, the culture-industry thesis is faulted for attributing far too much power to the commodity form in explaining the properties and effects of mass culture. It exaggerates the homogenization of cultural objects, activities, and experiences at the hands of capital, thereby trivializing the substantive differences that exist between specific commodities as well as the range of effects those commodities have as they are consumed in diverse expressive and communicative environments. The dismissal of all differences between commodities as ‘pseudo-individualization’ unconvincingly positions Adorno himself as the judge of what is to be considered authentic difference and what is condemned as yet another species of the ‘ever-same.’ The passage of time only compounds this problem given the sheer diversity of cultural commodities now widely available, leaving the culture-industry thesis helpless to do anything other than attack all forms of mass culture as hopelessly commodified. At one level, these criticisms raise important questions about Adorno’s lack of sensitivity to the nuances of popular culture, reminding us that there is always more to culture than the economic conditions under which it is produced and consumed. But insofar as their treatment of Adorno’s conception of difference is confined to a single dimension, they sponsor a premature dismissal of critical theory that largely fails to engage with the core theoretical propositions of the culture-industry thesis. In the remainder of this chapter we will discuss the broader critique of difference that emerges from Adorno’s work when the mass culture writings are positioned alongside his account of identitarian thinking. Identity and Difference in Mass Culture ‘All difference,’ Adorno writes of mass culture under the spell of exchange, ‘degenerates to a nuance in the monotony of supply.’20 The

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culture-industry thesis proposes that the production of culture as a commodity for exchange elevates a particular dialectic of difference and sameness as the governing principle of all cultural creation. On the one hand, goods must be standardized to ensure efficient production, ease of marketing, and rapid consumption: ‘[E]very detail is substitutable; it serves its function only as a cog in a machine.’21 Describing popular music, Adorno argues that most songs share a common underlying musical structure, each composed according to the same formulaic patterns to ensure that they fit smoothly into pre-existing listening habits. On the other hand, marketability also demands that such repetition be hidden beneath the illusion of individuality, difference, and novelty. The dialectic between new and old is a constant feature of all forms of culture, but the culture industry sets into motion a promotional logic that enforces a premature resolution of this tension. ‘To be plugged, a song-hit must have at least one feature by which it can be distinguished from any other, and yet possess the complete conventionality and triviality of all others.’22 Both within and across cultural products, the inconsequential or ‘pseudo-individual’ variations are deliberately exaggerated as a necessary correlate to the increasing tyranny of dominant styles. David Kendall, a television producer with Warner Bros., echoes Adorno’s diagnosis almost exactly. In pitching an idea, he notes, ‘You’d always say it is unique. You would say it is a unique twist.’ Yet he simultaneously asserts that there is no such thing as ‘great, original, breakthrough television [because] [i]t is all about reacting to other things.’ Of the network executives that ultimately control which programs are financed and aired, he observes ‘The only thing they know that works is something that has worked. So they will try and clone what has happened before and keep the writers and producers in the reins.’23 Kendall’s description echoes Horkheimer and Adorno’s own words almost exactly: the culture industry ‘rejects anything untried as a risk. In film, any manuscript which is not reassuringly based on a best-seller is viewed with mistrust.’24 Adorno’s use of terms such as ‘pseudo-individuation’ is frequently attacked as evidence of an elitist disposition because it seemingly requires the superior judgment of a critic to distinguish between ‘true’ and ‘false’ difference. However, it is actually proposed less as a strategy of cultural critique and more as a means of defining the structural pressures imposed by commodification upon all forms of cultural production. Nevertheless, Adorno is justifiably condemned for applying an

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unduly restrictive schematic in the unilateral and categoric dismissal of all forms of difference between cultural commodities as insignificant. Bernard Gendron persuasively argues, for example, that the conventions of European classical music against which Adorno measures the merits of popular music are ill suited for conceptualizing the specific types of difference that play a central role in those musical traditions. It would be absurd, for example, to conclude that traditional Western African music is backward because its harmonic and melodic schemes are considerably more elementary than those of European classical music. Harmony is simply less important in African music than are rhythm, vocal expressivity, and participation. An African ethnocentrist might well condemn European music for its lack of sophistication in the latter three categories.25

As Adorno notes with respect to serious art, cultural criticism ought to proceed immanently by way of an analysis of how a particular object expresses, works upon, and transcends the conventions of its aesthetic genre. The art object is never merely an example of an artistic style: rather, its specificity acquires meaning in a dialectic of identity and difference by which it constructs a relationship with that style. A true accounting of difference, in other words, demands adequate knowledge of the broader cultural genealogy of any given object, irrespective of the extent to which it is commodified. Adorno’s abrupt and ill-informed dismissal of jazz stands as compelling evidence that he often lacks this knowledge, leading to a generalized indictment of all differences within mass culture that is simply unsustainable. However, semiotic difference is not the only or even the main form of difference that occupies his attention. Cultural studies emphasizes the differences that arise within language and culture out of the fluid interaction between signs. The difference between culture and ‘the real,’ however, is largely dismissed as both irrelevant to the production of meaning and symptomatic of the expressive/reflective epistemologies of naive humanism. ‘Reality exists outside language,’ Hall writes, ‘but it is constantly mediated by and through language: and what we can know and say has to be produced in and through discourse.’26 Non-discursive reality only enters consciousness after it passes through practices of representation. Accordingly, the study of culture must focus upon the relations between and among those practices. Hall readily admits that ‘in the end the position dodges or ducks the question of any

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fixed or verifiable distinction between the real and the discursive, or between the discursive and the extradiscursive. I don’t know where that extradiscursive is. I regard the extradiscursive as a kind of wager. It’s a kind of bet that the world exists, which cannot be proven in a philosophical sense.’27 Conversely, theorizing this relation forms the lynchpin of Adorno’s entire philosophical and aesthetic enterprise. Throughout his writing the principal objective is the recalibration of human sensitivity to forms of alterity that are not reflected in semiotic difference. Indeed, he fears that the cultural prominence of such difference often provides little more than ideological assurance that all forms of difference continue to survive and flourish. With bold, speculative strokes, Dialectic of Enlightenment sketches a radical counter-history of human evolution in which the suppression of difference in reason and society have catastrophic implications for the natural and social world. Initially born out of desperate attempts to control a hostile and terrifying nature, human societies develop forms of reason and belief that enclose the world in representative systems of growing complexity, ultimately enhancing their capacity to predict, manipulate, and dominate the natural environment. As this power grows, so too does the illusion that real, material, historical subjects and objects can be adequately and completely represented through concepts. Humanity accommodates its fear of the unknown by conceptually eliminating whatever cannot be integrated into its own rational structures. Anything that can be classified or quantified can be (theoretically) subjected to human knowledge and control; anything that cannot serves only as a reminder of the limits of knowledge and experience, invoking primordial memories of a time in which humans lived in terror in an uncontrollable environment. The other must be integrated, banished to the sphere of art and fantasy, or liquidated. At its most extreme, this is the logic of the Holocaust: ‘Genocide is the absolute integration ... Auschwitz confirmed the philosopheme of pure identity as death.’28 Against the dangers of identitarian thought Adorno offers a tenuous alliance between critical thought and aesthetic practice that champions the difference between the real and its representation in language and culture. In Negative Dialectics the essence of dialectical thought is defined as an awareness that ‘objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder.’29 Under his stewardship, it navigates a tortuous course between asserting the primacy of the object as a bulwark against the narcissistic subsumptive fantasies of idealism and affirming

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the impossibility of objective knowledge to counter notions advanced by positivism and the social sciences. Difference, then, is defined as that which dialectical thought never stops striving to comprehend but which perpetually eludes its grasp. Serious art participates in this endeavour by reminding humanity of a materiality that is real but which cannot be adequately represented, subsumed, or abstracted under conceptual systems. The mimetic rationalities of art actively incorporate the sensuous qualities of the world within their very forms, thereby serving as ‘the most drastic argument against the epistemological separation of sensuousness and understanding.’30 Art functions as a kind of repository of difference that would otherwise be cast aside and forgotten: ‘[A]esthetic identity seeks to aid the non-identical which in reality is repressed by reality‘s compulsion to identify.’31 Beauty, argues Adorno, is the ‘characteristic of escaping from the fixed concept.’32 The sensual, non-conceptual particularity of art keeps alive the memory of an ‘indissoluble “something”‘33 that exists beyond all efforts to give it conceptual expression. As it engages with art and tries to make sense of it, thought is driven to think itself and become self-reflexive: identification remains as thought‘s constitutive operation, but it loses its pretence to omnipotence by recognizing the limitations that inevitably attend all acts of thinking. Most importantly, art teaches humanity to suspend its fear of the unknown by learning to accept and value the existence of differences that lie forever beyond the limits of human understanding. ‘The reconciled condition would not be the philosophical imperialism of annexing the alien. Instead, its happiness would lie in the fact that the alien, in the proximity it is granted, remains what is distant and different, beyond the heterogeneous and beyond that which is one‘s own.’34 Cultural studies commonly credits Adorno with the view that the trivial differences of mass culture function as a diversionary tool for capitalism, providing escapist fantasies to disguise the misery and exploitation people experience in their daily lives. Yet he actually argues something rather different. The quest for profits motivates the culture industry to produce commodities that can be quickly consumed in a variety of contexts to maximize their circulation. There is, in other words, a demand for ‘pre-digested’ culture: objects and practices that harmonize with existing conceptual frameworks and belief systems minimize the cognitive and affective demands placed upon the audience, thereby accelerating the ease with which they can be promoted and consumed. ‘The active contribution which Kantian schematism still expected of subjects – that they should, from the first, relate sensu-

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ous multiplicity to fundamental concepts – is denied to the subject by [the culture] industry. It purveys schematism as its first service to the customer.’35 The content of mass culture is extensively organized, sorted, and classified at the point of production, leaving little that does not mimic pre-existing conceptual schematics. Thus, the cognitive dimension of cultural experience is limited to the simple recognition of how particular objects (e.g., character types, plot lines, harmonies, etc.) are exemplary of fixed universal categories. ‘The composition hears for the listener.’36 To disguise this arbitrary restriction of the cognitive process and cultivate the illusion of novelty, the entertainment industry develops increasingly sophisticated media technology to multiply the force and type of sensual stimuli with which it can bombard the consumer. The profusion of such stimuli require constant attentiveness to process the visual, aural, and tactile sensations that are produced at any given moment: sustained thought on any particular aspect or moment is impossible because of the sheer volume of details to be rapidly absorbed and sorted. Use of simplistic conceptual patterns to organize an environment of totalizing sensual stimulation produces a relation of immediacy between culture and consumer. The apparent facticity and concreteness of cultural commodities is accentuated: they appear self-contained and autonomous, enabling discrete moments of ‘complete experience’ in which the subject perceives itself to be directly engaged with the object in an unmediated fashion. Popular music’s unrestrained stimulation of affect, for instance, ‘leaves no room for conceptual reflection between itself and the subject and so it creates an illusion of immediacy in the totally mediated world.’37 Furthermore, the developmental logic of media technology strives to eliminate the distance between consumer and culture, delivering ever more totalizing forms of cultural experience in which we are invited to lose ourselves in the moment. Yet for Adorno the elision of the distance between subject and object is entirely ideological: ‘[T]hought may only hold true to the idea of immediacy by way of the mediated, but it becomes the prey of the mediated the instant it grasps directly for the unmediated.’38 Critical thinking depends upon a subject that is able and willing to recognize the difference between thought and the real, sustaining a tension between them to energize reflection upon their mutual unrealized potential. ‘Knowledge does not consist in mere perception, classification and calculation but precisely in the determining negation of whatever is directly at hand.’39 Awareness that an object might be something other than what

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it is constitutes the emancipatory core of linguistic (and other forms of) expression: primitive animistic traditions foreshadow a dialectical semiology that enables the determinate negation of the immediacy of the status quo, and introduces a speculative dimension to the contemplation of the existent. If the tree is addressed no longer as simply a tree but as evidence of something else, a location of mana, language expresses the contradiction that it is at the same time itself and something other than itself, identical and not identical. Through the deity speech is transformed from tautology to language. The concept, usually defined as the unity of the features of what it subsumes, was rather, from the first, a product of dialectical thinking, in which each thing is what it is only by becoming what it is not.40

‘The value of a thought,’ observes Adorno, ‘is measured by its distance from the continuity of the familiar. It is objectively devalued as this distance is reduced; the more it approximates to the pre-existing standard, the further its antithetical function is diminished.’41 As the illusion grows that culture and reality come to mirror each other, this speculative dimension of semiotic expression is lost. Tempted by the seductive promises of the culture industry to proceed directly to existence, nature, self, or pure being, people sacrifice the reflexive distance afforded by thought and submerge themselves in the pseudo-immediacy of the cultural moment. In the face of such immediacy, culture’s capacity to act as a repository for difference and non-identity fades before the relentless reproduction of reality. In opposition to simplistic Marxist accounts of capitalist culture as false consciousness, Adorno maintains that ‘there are no more ideologies in the authentic sense of false consciousness, only advertisements for the world through its duplication and the provocative lie which does not seek belief but commands silence.’42 In other words, the problem with the culture industry is not that it deceives people by distracting them from reality, but that it does not provide a sufficiently powerful distraction to stimulate the imagination to dream about new forms of thought, being, and difference. ‘It is not because they turn their back on washed-out existence that escape films are so repugnant, but because they do not do so energetically enough, because they are themselves just as washed-out, because the satisfactions they fake coincide with the ignominy of reality, of denial. The dreams have no dream.’43 Modelled upon a positivist epistemology that obsessively replicates

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pre-existing categories of experience as accurately as possible, mass culture offers images of a natural, ‘thing-like’ world that is static and unchanging. From the perspective of dialectical thought, this iconic fidelity to reality or, more accurately, to the prevailing patterns of cognition and affect through which reality is experienced, blinds humanity to the possibility that the world might be different from what it is today. In particular, it represses sensitivity to forms of difference that could cultivate awareness of the explosive potential frozen within commodities and the reified social relations of capitalism. Adorno’s relentless critique of identitarian thinking is invaluable in making sense of the evolution of new cultural technologies within capitalism. The continuing prevalence of realism as the dominant mode of cultural expression ensures that the aesthetics of digital media production are efficiently mapped over a framework of thought and experience in which the distinction between concept or image and object is progressively reduced. Whether the thing depicted is a dinosaur from the past, a spacecraft from the future, or a city street from today is irrelevant: all that matters is that the representation be understood and experienced as a perfect replica or simulation; or, more precisely, as the best possible replica that current cultural technology can produce. ‘Imagination is to be replaced by a mechanically relentless control mechanism which determines whether the latest imago to be distributed really represents an exact, accurate and reliable reflection of the relevant item of reality.’44 Irrespective of the authenticity of the duplication, the culture industry lends its might to the systematic eradication of anything that might signify the flawed or partial quality of signs and concepts: ‘[R]eality is always constructed with an infantile attachment to the mimetic and then “photographed.”’45 Unlike Jean Baudrillard and his disciples, who fixate upon the tautological referentiality such cultural systems can imply, Adorno emphasizes how erasing the distinction between concept and object leads to the repression of any sense that the latter’s materiality and potentiality always evade any and all attempts to give them positivistic expression. Such conceptual totalitarianism effectively purges traces of non-identity from the cultural landscape. In a suggestive reading of ‘cyberspace,’ Julian Stallabrass argues that its primary intent and effect is to reproduce bourgeois dreams of total knowledge, ‘to survey the world from one’s livingroom, to grasp the totality of all data within a single frame, and to recapture a unified knowledge and experience.’46 New cultural technologies participate fully within the Enlightenment’s program of ridding itself of all things

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that cannot be quantified (or digitized): ‘The transparency of meaning in cyberspace, the absolute match between concept and appearance, is a utopian feature that stands in marked contrast to the real world of meaningless detail and redundant matter.’47 Such a dynamic not only emerges from the identitarian tendencies of modern reason, but also reproduces and affirms the logic of equivalence enforced by the commodity form. Contrary to the hopes of many that new media might reinvigorate the relations between body and consciousness, embodied experience is often one of the first casualties of such technology. The mythological appeal popularized by advocates of cyberspace to abandon the imperfections and limitations of embodied identity mimic capital’s dream of erasing the ‘friction’ of labour and nature as impediments to the production and circulation of value. The objectives of digital design and reproduction, notes Gary McCarron, frequently go beyond the exact duplication of an original towards its improvement by reducing or eliminating the ‘noise’ that make an object less than perfect. Such a project, he argues, flows out of a capitalist political economy of technology driven by the ‘subjugation of individual acts of labour and the elimination of all traces of the relations of production.’48 Beyond this programmatic intensification of the commodity as fetish (i.e., completely displacing it from the social relations in which it was conceived and produced), one can simultaneously read this trend of digital production, reproduction, and enhancement as promoting the deliberate and systematic excision – at a microscopic level – of all traces of contingency, excess, and ‘otherness’ from cultural texts. Even more dangerous than the limitations this elimination of difference imposes upon cognition is the accompanying libidinization of identity. As one of the primary venues through which libidinal energies are discharged, mass culture furnishes a plethora of objects explicitly designed to accommodate the easy projection of consumer fantasies. Complex conceptual and representational strategies that foreground the distance between subject and object require the disciplined and unpleasurable sublimation of libidinal energies into more abstract cognitive processes. The culture industry, by contrast, constructs and promotes an infantile psychic dynamic in which the crisp perfection of mass culture facilitates its entry into consciousness as objects of simplistic and immediate self-gratification. As we are taught to take pleasure from the progressive elimination of ‘noise’ from all forms of culture, a powerful desire for identity emerges that has enormous potential implications for how we understand and experience our

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social and material environment. Consider, for example, how the digitized construction of ‘perfect’ human bodies fuels a massive health and beauty industry that promises men and women the chance to eradicate that which distinguishes them from these idealized images. Worshipped as objects of sexual desire, these images stimulate an erotic economy in which the discharge of libido comes to depend upon the virtual elimination of difference. Beyond the spectacular productions of the mass media, the desire for identity is thereby woven into everyday practices devoted to the minimization of bodily properties, habits, and functions that do not fit the ideal. Irrespective of the diversity of types that constitute ideal conceptions of beauty – that is, the quantity or range of differences between ideal types – Adorno fears the cultivation of a generalized aesthetic disposition that defines beauty itself as the elimination of difference between concept and object, as ‘the false identity of universal and particular.’49 Culture, Capitalism, and Difference ‘Capital has fallen in love with difference,’ remarks Jonathan Rutherford; ‘advertising thrives on selling us things that will enhance our uniqueness and individuality ... From World Music to exotic holidays in Third World locations, ethnic tv dinners to Peruvian knitted hats, cultural difference sells.’50 The culture industry thrives on the organized seeding of vast fields of semiotic difference that maximise the volume and rate at which commodities are harvested and exchanged. In countless ways, the polysemy of the sign has become both functional for and a function of capitalism itself. Accordingly, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt caution, ‘[t]he affirmation of hybridities and the free play of differences across boundaries ... is liberatory only in a context where power poses hierarchy exclusively through essential identities, binary divisions, and stable oppositions. The structures and logics of power in the contemporary world are entirely immune to the “liberatory” weapons of the postmodernist politics of difference.’51 This is not to say that all forms of difference are equally the product of power or have become irrelevant to human emancipation. However, it does suggest that the unconditional valorization that concepts such as difference and semiotic polysemy have traditionally enjoyed within cultural studies must come to an end. After all, as one of the founding members of the CCCS admits, the ironic effect of portraying consumers as cultural ‘bricoleurs’ who take from cultural commodities what they wish

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is to replicate the view of capitalism which capitalism would most like us to see: the richness of the marketplace and the freely choosing consumer. The other side – the structures of production and the inequalities of access to the marketplace – are missing, and these absences emphasize the ‘freefloating’ quality of the sign, making it available for any use or meaning that may be attached to it.52

Attending to this ‘other side’ requires a critical assessment of cultural difference. How does one assess the merits, substance and reality of difference? How does one describe difference, understand it, experience it? Are there different types of difference, each playing different roles and having different kinds of effects? As I have argued in this chapter, Adorno’s critique of mass culture offers a valuable set of conceptual resources to explore these questions. Admittedly, the culture-industry thesis stands fairly accused of using excessively narrow and static criteria to adjudicate between ‘real’ and ‘false’ difference. In many cases, Adorno’s sweeping condemnations are of little use in understanding and appreciating the specificity, complexity, and social significance of many cultural commodities and the diversity of practices through which they are consumed. Yet his work remains immensely instructive in theorizing aspects of difference (or the lack thereof) that are either neglected or dismissed by most forms of cultural studies. Tracing identitarian patterns of thought and desire to the core of the culture industry, he develops a compelling account of how commodification directly expresses itself through a highly specific cultural logic that maximizes certain types of difference at the expense of others. Positioning the writings on mass culture in the broader context afforded by his work on philosophy and aesthetics promotes a rethinking of the relation between culture and economy that moves beyond the interest-based theories of ideological manipulation that often dominate critical media studies. As a comprehensive account of the totality of all cultural processes under capitalism, the culture-industry thesis fails. But as a means of theorizing the systemic pressures imposed upon culture by the commodity form, it has no equal. Sketching the intimate symbiosis that evolves between identitarian thought on the one hand and the logic of exchange on the other furnishes a provocative theoretical framework in which to think through how culture blends the desire for one into desire for the other. ‘Equivalence itself becomes a fetish’53 – a secret fetish, though, that appears openly as an insatiable lust for novelty and difference that can be devoured as pris-

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tine simulacra, leaving no perceptible trace of the indissoluble otherness – the ‘remainder’ – that (negative) dialectics insists pervades all thought and being. Adorno attends to the complex dialectic between identity and difference with a speculative intensity foreign to most in cultural studies, which renders his work more valuable than ever in a time when difference lies all around us yet is nowhere to be found.

NOTES 1 See, for example, Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno, or, the Persistence of the Dialectic (New York: Verso, 1990), 141–4, and Peter Uwe Hohendahl, Prismatic Thought: Theodor W. Adorno (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 127–9 and 145–7. 2 In a recent issue of New German Critique dedicated to the contemporary significance of Dialectic of Enlightenment, for example, not a single essay treats the chapter on the culture industry at any length. See New German Critique 81 (Fall 2000). 3 See, for example, Nick Nesbitt, ‘Sounding Autonomy: Adorno, Coltrane and Jazz,’ Telos 116 (Summer 1999); Evelyn Wilcock, ‘Adorno, Jazz and Racism: “Uber Jazz” and the 1934–7 British Jazz Debate,’ Telos 107 (Spring 1996); Harry Cooper, ‘On Uber Jazz: Replaying Adorno with the Grain,’ October 75 (Winter 1996); James Harding, ‘Adorno, Ellison and the Critique of Jazz,’ Cultural Critique 31 (Fall 1995); J. Bradford Robinson, ‘The Jazz Essays of Theodor Adorno: Some Thoughts on Jazz Reception in Weimar Germany,’ Popular Music 13.1 (1994); and Ulrich Schönherr, ‘Adorno and Jazz: Reflections on a Failed Encounter,’ Telos 87 (Spring 1991). 4 See my ‘Revisiting the Culture Industry Thesis: Mass Culture and the Commodity Form,’ Cultural Critique 45 (Spring 2000) and Capitalizing on Culture: Critical Theory for Cultural Studies (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004). 5 Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural Studies and the Centre: Some Problematics and Problems,’ in Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972– 1979, ed. Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe, and Paul Willis (New York: Routledge, 1992), 284n. 6 My own systematic review of the relevant literature by the Birmingham School did not reveal any substantive treatment of critical theory other than a single article that contained a rather harsh dismissal of Adorno’s work on culture in favour of Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin. See Phil Slater, ‘The Aesthetic Theory of the Frankfurt School,’ Working Papers in Cultural Studies 6 (Autumn 1974). Douglas Kellner confirms this absence in ‘Critical

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9

10

11 12 13

14 15 16

17 18 19 20 21

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Theory and Cultural Studies: The Missed Articulation,’ in Cultural Methodologies, ed. Jim McGuigan (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1997), 37n. Hall, ‘Cultural Studies and the Centre,’ 30. Steve Burniston and Chris Weedon, ‘Ideology, Subjectivity and the Artistic Text,’ in On Ideology, ed. Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1978), 207. See the classic exploration of these issues in the exchange between Nicholas Garnham, ‘Political Economy and Cultural Studies: Reconciliation or Divorce?’ and Lawrence Grossberg, ‘Cultural Studies vs Political Economy: Is Anybody Else Bored with This Debate?’ in Critical Studies in Mass Communication 12.1 (March 1995). Two thorough treatments of this dynamic within cultural studies are Janice Peck, ‘Itinerary of a Thought: Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies and the Unresolved Problem of the Relation of Culture to “Not Culture,”’ Cultural Critique 48 (Spring 2001) and Dan Schiller, Theorizing Communication (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author,’ in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Noonday Press, 1977), 146. Stuart Hall, ‘Introduction to Media Studies at the Centre,’ in Culture, Media, Language, 119. Iain Chambers, ‘Waiting on the End of the World?’ in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (New York: Routledge, 1996), 205. Stuart Hall, ‘For Allon White: Metaphors of Transformation,’ in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, 297, emphasis added. Stuart Hall, The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left (New York: Verso, 1988), 9, emphasis added. Stuart Hall, ‘Ideology and Communication Theory,’ in Rethinking Communication, vol. 1: Paradigm Issues, ed. Brenda Darvin, Lawrence Grossberg, Barbara J. O’Keefe, and Ellen Warteila (Newbury Park: Sage Publications, 1989), 47, emphasis added. Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (New York: Routledge, 1994). Stuart Hall, ‘Notes on Deconstructing the Popular,’ in People’s History and Socialist Theory, ed. Raphael Samuel (Boston: Routledge, 1981), 232. John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 1989), 177. Theodor Adorno, ‘Cultural Criticism and Society,’ in Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981), 21. Theodor Adorno, with the assistance of George Simpson, ‘On Popular Music,’ Studies in Philosophy and Social Science 9 (1941): 19.

314 Shane Gunster 22 Ibid., 27. 23 ‘Interview with David Kendall, Warner Bros. Televsion,’ in Making and Selling Culture, ed. Richard Ohmann (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1996), 62. 24 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 106. 25 Bernard Gendron, ‘Theodor Adorno Meets the Cadillacs,’ in Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture, ed. Tania Modleski (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 31. 26 Stuart Hall, ‘Encoding/Decoding,’ in Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–1979, ed. Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe, and Paul Willis (London: Hutchinson, 1980), 131. 27 Stuart Hall, with Ian Angus et al., ‘Reflections upon the Encoding/Decoding Model: An Interview with Stuart Hall,’ in Viewing, Reading, Listening: Audiences and Cultural Reception, ed. Jon Cruz and Justin Lewis (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994), 267. 28 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), 362. 29 Ibid., 5. 30 Adorno, cited in Shierry Weber-Nicholsen, Exact Imagination, Late Work: On Adorno’s Aesthetics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), 18. 31 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 4. 32 Ibid., 76. 33 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 135. 34 Ibid., 191. 35 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 98. 36 Adorno, ‘On Popular Music,’ 22. 37 Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, trans. E.B. Ashton (New York: Seabury Press, 1976), 46. 38 Adorno, ‘The Essay as Form,’ trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor and Frederic Will, New German Critique 32 (Spring/Summer 1984): 167. 39 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 20. 40 Ibid., 11. 41 Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (New York: Verso, 1996), 80. 42 Adorno, ‘Cultural Criticism and Society,’ 34. 43 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 202. 44 Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, ‘The Schema of Mass Culture,’

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46 47 48

49 50

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trans. Nicholas Walker, in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J.M. Bernstein (London: Routledge, 1991), 55. Adorno, ‘Letter to Walter Benjamin, March 18, 1936,’ in Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence, 1928–1940, trans. Nicholas Walker, ed. Henri Lonitz (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 131. Julian Stallabrass, Gargantua: Manufactured Mass Culture (New York: Verso, 1996), 41. Ibid., 42. Gary McCarron, ‘Pixel Perfect: Towards a Political Economy of Digital Fidelity,’ Canadian Journal of Communication 24 (1999): 235. Also see Andrew Herman and John H. Sloop, ‘“Red Alert!” Rhetorics of the World Wide Web and “Friction Free” Capitalism,’ in The World Wide Web and Contemporary Cultural Theory, ed. Andrew Herman and Thomas Swiss (New York: Routledge, 2000). Horkheimer and Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, 95. Jonathan Rutherford, ‘A Place Called Home: Identity and the Cultural Politics of Difference,’ in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), 11. Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000). John Clarke, New Times and Old Enemies: Essays on Cultural Studies and America (London: HarperCollins Academic, 1991), 85. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 12.

14 ‘On the Morality of Thinking,’ or Why Still Adorno asha varadharajan

In ‘Aspects of Hegel’s Philosophy,’ Theodor Adorno offers a salutary corrective to the conventional academic ‘appreciation’ that presumes to ‘assign the dead person his place’ in the pantheon of philosophers ‘because one has the dubious good fortune to live later.’1 The centenary of Adorno’s birth, which was celebrated in 2003, has, predictably enough, resulted in a spate of scholarly reflections designed to take stock of Adorno’s intimidating oeuvre in light of the pressing concerns of the present. It is precisely this sort of routine academic gesture that Adorno condemns as ‘arrogance’; instead, the proper question (his own subject is Hegel) should be ‘what the present means in the face of [Adorno].’2 My point here is not to accuse academic critiques of Adorno’s writings of such ‘arrogance’; rather, I want to find a way to deploy the dialectical reversal contained in his injunction to potential interlocutors as the informing principle of my own musings on this occasion. It is no accident, of course, that Adorno’s corpus should capture ‘the educated imagination’ (to borrow Northrop Frye’s phrase) in the current critical conjuncture. For his part, Adorno would not have been immune to the irony that the ‘administrated rationality’3 of the culture of excellence embodied in the university should succumb to the lure of ‘open thinking.’4 While the predicament of reified consciousness in our time is perhaps only qualitatively different from that of Adorno’s, this aggravated continuity between successive historical moments should give us pause. Adorno’s animadversions against culture’s forced isolation from ‘the naked necessity of life,’5 on the failure of autonomy in ‘a fully manipulated, calculated, and integrated society,’6 and on intellectuals as ‘salaried and honoured nuisances’7 are much too familiar to

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bear repeating. These reminders of Adorno’s sustained attack on the delusions of ‘culture’ and the smug satisfactions of ‘administration,’ however, frame my attempt to confront the claim Adorno’s philosophy ‘makes to truth’8 and explain why intellectual labour within universities cannot but occur in the shadow of his reflections. If I might be permitted a somewhat exaggerated move, I want to imagine what it would be like to reveal the world ‘in the messianic light’ of Adorno’s philosophy.9 Rather than redeem Adorno’s corpus from its inevitable blindspots, I hope to make his thought the ‘standpoint of redemption’ (MM 247). This deliberately overblown gesture might go some way towards comprehending what is at stake in refusing what Adorno identifies as the arrogance of mere appreciation. I am aware that what follows becomes a personal meditation on what Adorno has meant in my own intellectual trajectory and what he might mean to critique attuned to ‘sounds of sadness and revolt.’10 I hope, nevertheless, that my ruminations will render ‘the strain and toils’11 of his thinking intelligible (in Adorno’s strict sense of the term) rather than only explicable, susceptible to a hermeneutics of suspicion, or applicable. ‘Life in its coloured reflection’12 When I wrote Exotic Parodies: Subjectivity in Adorno, Said, and Spivak (1995), Adorno’s writings were not in vogue in the field of post-colonial studies. I would hazard that this is still the case with the honourable exceptions of Edward Said, Neil Lazarus, Benita Parry, and Fred Dallmayr, to name only the most illustrious. The recent resurrection of Adorno’s work in multiple venues and disciplines has, of course, seen renewed interest in his contributions to The Authoritarian Personality and in his relatively random remarks on difference in its various guises, but he continues to be alluded to rather than engaged with and, apart from what appears to be Adorno’s consistent investment in the politics of non-identity, it is still true that ‘the limitation of his material to the sphere of European culture may seem irrelevant in a period profoundly interested in other voices and other perspectives.’13 I hope that this blanket statement on my part will be proved mistaken, and I am certainly aware that the field of the post-colonial is simply too amorphous to exclude Adorno by definition; for the purposes of this essay, however, and in the continuing spirit of discerning the ways in which the substance of post-colonial reason might still appear ‘indigent’ (MM 247) in

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the face of Adorno’s exact imagination, I shall focus on ‘On the Historical Adequacy of Consciousness’ (1983),14 ‘The Essay as Form’ (1991),15 ‘On the Use of Foreign Words’ (1992),16 and Hegel: Three Studies (1993). To figures like Edward Said, and I suspect to the bulk of those designated as minority intellectuals, what has seemed most attractive and enlightening about Adorno has been his cogent expression of the metaphorical and literal condition of expatriation, his defence of critical homelessness, his attention to the persistence of memory and the unconscious of history, and his evocation of suffering in the very opacity of his thought. For these intellectuals, the remarkable and curious dynamism of Adorno’s prose (Said, for instance, would develop the implications of Adorno’s musicology into a contrapuntal aesthetic) that nonetheless limned a posture, a form of comportment, an attitude, was perhaps most compelling. In other words, Adorno made it imperative that a necessary political intransigence did not congeal into an impervious and immobile philosophy. Elsewhere I have described the potential of affect, particularly in Adorno’s more aphoristic moments, for the articulation of contradiction and resistance.17 Here the more elusive sentiments of shame, love, and ascesis become resonant companions to dwelling in the post-colonial without lapsing into the confessional mode more common to narratives of exile, of which I have often been guilty myself. This brief excursion into the appeal of the shape of Adorno’s thought for the re-membering of the post-colonial serves as a prelude to a polemical grappling with texts rarely placed front and centre in the exhaustive attention granted the questions of difference and minority in recent years. Indeed, it might be safe to say that the potential of both has been exhausted without being satisfactorily represented! These casual provocations notwithstanding, my observations in this essay are probably more pertinent to cultural studies as the vaunted site of a certain radical utopianism. In other words, the ill-defined and unstable protocols of post-colonial discourse have already spilled over into domains of culture and politics that are not specifically devoted to discerning the legacy of colonialism, imagining national or diasporic community, rooting out ‘underdevelopment’ and defending subalternity, tracing the conjunction between exile and cosmopolitanism, or proposing alternative modernities to offset the more egregious consequences of global capitalism and transnational migration. Even this admittedly potted history of the discipline of post-colonial studies encapsulates the welcome deterritorialization of the field and

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suggests why it has come to be identified with a global commitment to the eradication of suffering and to the making of new worlds. As is also probably obvious, the challenge of the post-colonial has been to the ‘dialectic of enlightenment’ that Adorno and Horkheimer made their consuming concern. The current attention to the biopolitical, to the subject as ecological necessity rather than historical contingency, also, of course, draws on the Frankfurt School’s persistent critique of instrumental reason’s destruction of the delicate balance between the human and the natural. These remarks serve as a prelude to a rather unorthodox attempt on my part to posit the form and content of ‘the postcolonial’ as paradigmatic of cultural critique in the current historical moment; that is, any refusal to ‘plug in, turn on, and cop out’18 in these arduous times necessarily partakes of the post-colonial as I have described it, if only because the global face of culture and politics wears its scars. More to the point is the extent to which a renewed attention to these texts would insist, as Adorno never tired of doing, on the distinction between ‘integrating the power of the existent into thought and merely capitulating before it’ (HAC 102). This caveat applies not only to the familiar ploys of ideology critique but to Adorno’s own formulations as well; that is, what might be novel in his work would lose its potency if it were transformed into the next bromide in critical cultural studies. My intention, therefore, is to determine whether my idiosyncratic choices among Adorno’s writings might shake something loose in critical discourse, turning the actuality of the domain of the cultural once again into an ‘open and unsecured realm’ (HAC 103) ripe with possibility. ‘The nerves, the sensitive feelers of historical consciousness’ ‘On the Historical Adequacy of Consciousness’ disinters the question that lies dormant within the dialectical reversal that animates my inquiry. In his discussion with Peter von Haselberg, Adorno postulates the conditions for and contours of what he calls ‘progressive consciousness’ in order to address the problem von Haselberg raises of the adequacy of consciousness ‘to the time in which we live’ (97). This problem, one might recall, is central to what Adorno dismisses as mere appreciation, but it is one he is fully aware he cannot ignore in the effort to confront the temporality of and in consciousness. Rather than consider the adequacy of consciousness in regard to its object, Adorno prefers to think ‘the historical adequacy of consciousness’ (97, emphasis in

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original). He shifts the emphasis from a certain disposition towards reality to the ‘obligatory imperative of the intellectual disposition ... to be modern in an extremely serious and obligatory sense’ (98). This characteristically cryptic statement identifies, to my mind, a mode of intellectual responsibility crucial to the present we inhabit. Adorno argues that the concept of the most progressive consciousness in any given historical epoch must be thought in conjunction with the problem of the concept of progress itself. This doubled move entails a chiasmus of sorts; that is, the progressive consciousness of an age must account for the problem of the concept of progress without sacrificing the progress of that concept. Cultural studies has always been allied with a progressive consciousness. As the outbreak of violence all over the world has shown, however, the progressive character of consciousness must absorb within itself ‘regressions of great magnitude ... the return of things past’ (HAC 99) if it is to remain true to the thought of the new. It is thus that the consciousness of progress becomes insight into the nature of historical process itself that is always and inevitably contaminated by regression. In Adorno’s trenchant account of the dialectic between progress and repetition, historical process is revealed to ‘be no process at all, but rather merely the bad return of the same’ (HAC 99). If this formulation is in danger of being no more than an elegant rewriting of the adage ‘there’s nothing new under the sun’ or ‘the more things change, the more they stay the same,’ it is presented with a view to altering the predictable definition of progressive consciousness. This fidelity to historical repetition, Adorno suggests, means that the consciousness of regression is not retardation but progress. But Adorno and von Haselberg do not stop here. The latter remarks that the recognition of atavisms and barbarisms in a progressive age is not enough because the mere identification of the culprit neither diagnoses the problem nor dispels its enchantment. The trick is to unravel the constellations that reconfigure the atavism in question rather than proceed to challenge it with the same old weapons of analysis. It is here that Adorno offers a provocative variation on the commonplace strategy of spooking prevailing ideologies with their historical counterparts. He comments instead that ‘one is confronted by the ghost of a ghost, by the shade-like return of something which had already lost its substance at its first appearance, and in this derivative actually-no-longer-believing-in-themselves of such ideologies one would be much more able to find a point of attack’ (HAC 100). While

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the essay does not elaborate on how this tactic might be developed, it does explain why the historical compulsion to repeat the crimes of barbarism survives both moral opprobrium and rational or empirical evidence to the contrary. I have chosen to focus on an essay that might seem too slight to bear the weight of Adorno’s philosophy of history because it exposes the vanity of progressive consciousness in the same instant that it makes a persuasive case for its necessity. Reading this essay was a chastening experience because it clarifies the manner in which a radical discourse can believe itself to be succumbing to the momentum of history, all the while reserving the most progressive consciousness for itself (HAC 102). Adorno powerfully and modestly reveals his own complicity in this regard when he speaks of his penchant for thinking that is ahead of the possibility of its reception and of its realization. Such thinking, he acknowledges, is impotent rather than progressive. By the same token, however, and here one encounters a more familiar and witty Adorno, thinking that submits itself to the power of the existent ‘would like to forbid the spirit every aperçu’ (102), thus making objectivity an ‘impediment and sabotage to thought’ (102). This could be read as no more than a trite plea for play, experiment, and speculation, but I would like to suggest that it has a particular relevance for progressive discourse’s function within the institution as the naysayer, as that which confronts the flight of thought with the ‘gravity of being’ (von Haselberg’s phrase, HAC 102). This remains the most challenging task for cultural criticism, wherein the dialectic between affirmation and negation remains lopsided rather than reciprocal. Adorno and von Haselberg conclude their discussion with a return to the subjectivity that they had hitherto posed as historically inadequate rather than historically inadequate to objectivity. The critical consciousness inhabits the gap between these two positions; ‘how to speak about what it bespeaks’19 requires ‘the most extreme refinement and exertion of subjectivity’ (HAC 102). In the most aleatory section of the dialogue with von Haselberg, it is this strenuous notion of subjectivity that Adorno names ‘idiosyncrasy’ and that I have referred to earlier as affect. Adorno speaks of ‘innervation’ and ‘idiosyncrasy’ (100) as the reactions through which progressivity can be experienced; that is, consciousness intuits ‘that for which the time has come’ (100). These nervous articulations become the basis for a concept of ‘tact,’ for an unsentimental comprehension and acceptance of historical impossibility, and for a sublimation of blind reactions into theory (101). This is a

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fascinating moment in the conversation because it risks the irrationalism of idiosyncrasy in order to elevate it to the indispensable condition of progressive consciousness. In other words, idiosyncrasy becomes the name for the experiential dimension of thought, and if one recalls Adorno’s fondness for nerval reactions in his choice of language (‘The authentic artists of the present are those in whose works the uttermost horror still quivers,’ for example),20 one is hardly surprised to find that the mark of progressive consciousness is its visceral absorption in historical flux. It is thus that Adorno hopes to make the antithesis between the material and the epistemological disappear. This antithesis performs a somewhat different function in Minima Moralia’s definition of ‘the dialectic of tact’ (35–7), which also serves to explain further Adorno’s enigmatic allusion to the return of ideologies that have already lost their substance at their first appearance. The locale for the operation of tact shifts from the nerve centre of progressive consciousness to the ‘saving accommodation between alienated human beings’ (MM 35, emphasis mine). Tact, therefore, is necessarily a social saving grace in interpersonal relationships that can do nothing other than cement the prevailing social order. As Adorno elucidates further, tact was already a form of renunciation even in Goethe’s day, a sacrifice of the possibility of ‘total contact, passion and unalloyed happiness’ (36). The affirmation of tact, for both Goethe and Adorno, is nothing other than the espousal of ‘the ineluctable course of history, the inhumanity of progress, [and] the withering of the subject’ (36). If this seems like rather an overwhelming burden for an unexceptional sentiment/action like tact to bear, that is precisely the point. Adorno declares that tact has joined forces with that from which Goethe imagined it would save us. What was once a form of consideration and respect in a hierarchical society has now become the ruin of a convention that is present without being intact. The human exercise of tact has merely succeeded in making power ‘triumph even in the most intimate constellations’ (MM 37). In other words, ripping the scab of tact off the wound of alienation and the inevitability of renunciation only succeeds in uniting tact with all that remains tacit in the naked exercise of power. In these circumstances, even the caricature of tact, the parody of conventional forms, or the exercise of ceremonial politeness detached from the privilege it betokens would be preferable. This meditation on tact becomes an alternative way of imagining the intersection of the material with the epistemological or between the domains of society and psyche. Adorno elevates a humble form of

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human behaviour, ‘accommodation’ (MM 35), into a structural law of ‘blind conformity’ (36). Structural laws, as Adorno clarifies elsewhere,21 determine and are modified by the facts in which they manifest themselves. Tact, in this instance, acquires a dialectical character not only because it enunciates social tendencies, but because it is itself imbued with the agonizing inhumanity of those dominant tendencies that function indubitably as laws. When one returns to the title of this section in Minima Moralia, and is faced with ‘the dialectic of tact’ rather than tact itself, it is no longer possible to fetishize either tact or the structural laws it serves to express. Instead, tact encompasses within itself the historical or structural constituents of a ceremonial form of human etiquette, its erosion by the very conditions that made it necessary, and its evolution into the benign face of ‘direct domination’ (37). ‘On the Historical Adequacy of Consciousness’ and ‘On the Dialectic of Tact’ might then be perceived as complementary fragments of an emergent constellation in the force field of progressive consciousness. They give the lie to the mechanical laws of historical causality by evoking the sound and movement of ‘past torment’ (MM 49), by painting drab thought with the colour and untidiness of emotion, and by making the meanest forms (etiolated conventions) of human behaviour rend the social fabric in order to in(augur)ate the future. ‘The last hope for thought,’ writes Adorno, is ‘a gaze averted from the beaten track, a hatred of brutality, [and] a search for fresh concepts not yet encompassed by the general pattern’ (MM 67–8). I would like to think that the word ‘aversion’ bears the mark of the mutilation of ‘wrong life’ (MM 39) that propels the human subject to divert the course of history; ‘aversion’ oscillates between hatred and diversion in order to demonstrate how the adequacy of consciousness’s response to the present precipitates its inadequation to the present. Incalculable ‘innervation’ (hatred of brutality) merges with the intuition of obsolescence, or, the historical inadequacy of consciousness exposes the historical inadequacy of the present. The question remains, however – if historical consciousness has thus far concerned itself with genealogical excavations in the belief, with Walter Benjamin, that living is ‘a leaving of traces,’22 how does it learn to trust its innervations rather than the suffering encrusted in the sedimentations of history? Adorno’s challenge here is of a piece with his admiration for Benjamin’s capacity ‘to express the universal through extreme particularity,’23 to transform himself into ‘an arena for intellectual experience’ (EF 13) through which ‘spirit’ is mediated.24 While this

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challenge might seem abstract in the extreme, it bears pondering if only because the dominance of identity politics in recent years (regardless of whether one has in mind ‘the personal is the political’ in feminist discourse, performativity in queer studies, ‘who can speak for whom’ in post-colonial studies, or the peregrinations of class in the production of the academic subject) has made it virtually impossible to deploy the crucial distinction at play here – between self-consciousness and the consciousness of self – in the interests of a truly cutting edge in radical politics. I will have more to say about the manner in which Adorno’s writings tremble portentously between the necessity of self-divestiture and the lure of self-mortification. For the moment, however, I want to emphasize the significance of Adorno’s and von Haselberg’s contemplation of the twin problems of historical obsolescence and epistemological adequacy. The conclusion of the conversation between Adorno and von Haselberg, after the fashion of Adorno’s best work, turns the problematic of history and consciousness on its head. In other words, what begins as a privileging of the historical over the epistemological adequacy of consciousness ends with a rejection of the criterion of adequacy as well as with a castigation of history as the ‘fetter’ (HAC 103) upon its own potential that, conveniently enough for von Haselberg’s wily companion, can only be released by idiosyncratic thought that ‘shoot[s] subjectively into an open and unsecured realm beyond objectivity’ (103). Moreover, in an interesting return to the experiential dimension of thought, Adorno asserts that the potential lying in objectivity is ‘close enough to touch’ (103), thus returning us to the nerval reactions that must be raised to the level of consciousness before historical potential can be detected. It is at last clear that objectivity can only become adequate to (historical) possibility if it keeps faith with both idiosyncrasy and consciousness. Thus is the dialectical reversal that makes ‘the very essence of whatever is the case’ (103) accountable to idiosyncrasy (in my terms, the present in the face of Adorno) revealed. ‘The liquidation of the particular’ In ‘Translating the Untranslatable,’ the introduction to the English translation of Adorno’s Prisms (1983), Samuel Weber offers perhaps one of the best explanations of ‘conceptual concreteness’ and of the inherent hostility of the English language to the density with which thought and articulation interpenetrate each other in Adorno’s corpus. Weber writes:

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‘In English what is concrete is what is immediate, tangible, visible ... [C]ontemporary English does not tolerate the notion that what is nearest at hand may in fact be most abstract, while that which is invisible, intangible, accessible only to the mind may in fact be more real than reality itself.’25 Concreteness, for Adorno, lies in ‘the dynamic nature of thought,’ and Adorno’s unusual choice of words ‘designate[s] moments, stages of the mind on its way to truth.’26 My pursuit of ‘idiosyncrasy’ partakes of Adorno’s challenge to the deformations of empiricism in that it is intended to disclose idiosyncrasy’s meaning and potential in the conceptual mediations that simultaneously conceal and delineate its contours. Adorno identifies this move as the distinction between seeing the light and seeing what is illuminated (epigraph from Goethe’s Pandora in ‘The Essay as Form’ 3). Indeed, I hope to keep this distinction in suspension and in motion as I write. My reading of ‘On the Historical Adequacy of Consciousness’ has isolated the nervous impulses that ground and must be sublimated into the idiosyncratic consciousness before it can ‘[open] out onto intersubjectivity [as the dialectic of tact], history and utopia’;27 I have, however, bracketed the reconfiguration of the dialectic between the particular and the universal implicit in Adorno and von Haselberg’s challenge to ‘the liquidation of the individual’ in posing the necessity of idiosyncrasy.28 If, as I have suggested earlier, idiosyncrasy becomes a nodal point for the mediation of what is at best a fragmentary and elusive totality, the form such idiosyncrasy would take becomes crucial in its attempt to reconstruct the universal in the guise of stubborn particularity. While much of Adorno’s work defends individuality, particularity, or subjectivity with a peculiar combination of shame and passion in the face of what Minima Moralia calls ‘unspeakable collective events’ (18), ‘The Essay as Form’ is perhaps the only sustained example of unqualified affirmation of the particular in the name of the universal. Not surprisingly, this affirmation occurs in a piece devoted to the examination of the shape of thought rather than of its object. Adorno’s paradoxical claim, as many readers are aware, is that the shape of thought engenders its object, or the dynamism of the essay captures a glimpse of the hesitant dawn of truth. I read ‘The Essay as Form’ not so much as an aesthetic manifesto as a superb unravelling of the logic of difference lodged in the dialectic between the universal and the particular, or as an incomparable demonstration of ‘tarrying with the negative’ (to borrow Slavoj ~iÌek’s much-abused phrase). Adorno’s ire is levelled against the notion that

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philosophy must be ‘clothed in the dignity of the universal and the enduring – and ... perhaps the originary.’ The particular, in this scenario, becomes important only insofar as it ‘exemplifi[es] universal categories.’ Instead of mediating the universal, the particular is condemned to illuminate it, thereby becoming ‘transparent’ in the process (EF 12). The essay, in Adorno’s estimation, becomes the quintessential expression of ‘the spontaneity of subjective fantasy’ and of the revolt against ‘objective discipline’ (13). This polemic on behalf of the essay resists the ‘reconciliation under duress’ (title of an essay by Adorno in Aesthetics and Politics)29 between the ‘man with his feet on the ground’ and the ‘man with his head in the clouds’ demanded by the erstwhile practitioners of philosophy. On the contrary, Adorno turns his rejection of first and ultimate principles into the hallmark of ‘interpretation’ (EF 13) that burrows beneath the façade of what masquerades as objectivity in order to hit upon, precisely, the truth of the matter. Idiosyncrasy manifests itself as ‘luck and play’ (13) that, in turn, display true responsibility to the object (15) because their anti-systematic character allows them to protest both the reification of consciousness and the neutralization of objects into commodities. In other words, the fragmentary character of the essay is the mark of its fidelity to the ‘moments in which [the object] has its life’ rather than to the brute opacity or putative lifelessness of the object (14). Adorno’s intimate celebration of the formal components of the essay is also his tribute to the essay in the light of the universal it eagerly desires and rigorously refuses. His own writing is, of course, itself a model for the essay form he advocates, but what is less obvious is Adorno’s attempt to mimic the movement of the universal in the essay’s adherence to the jagged, uneasy, tentative, and impudent logic of the particular. How does the essay, according to Adorno, retreat from the universal and how does the universal in turn become the standpoint of redemption from which the flaws of the particular are exposed? While Adorno claims that the essay abjures both the dissolution of the object into its constituent elements and the whole that emerges from those elements, his own abandonment of the elemental as ‘an infinity of the wrong kind’ is less certain (EF 14). The enemy, for Adorno, is the ‘depraved profundity according to which truth and history are incompatible and opposed to one another’ (EF 10). By insisting that truth has a ‘temporal’ core, Adorno brilliantly succeeds in clothing the particularity of history in the mantle of ‘ontological dignity’ (10). Put more informally, Adorno sneaks the enduring

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and the originary in through the backdoor of the ephemeral. Or, as Adorno would have it, the essay ‘tries to render the transient eternal’ (11). The opposition between truth and history corresponds to that between conceptuality and facticity, to the assumption of the adequacy of the concept to the object it purports to describe. The essay operates according to the conjunction between truth and history and the disjunction between concept and object. To borrow the formulations of ‘On the Historical Adequacy of Consciousness,’ idiosyncrasy opens onto history but shoots beyond objectivity. In contrast to the formulation in ‘On the Historical Adequacy of Consciousness,’ however, objectivity does not sabotage thought but constitutes its raison d’être. Adorno’s logical moves are never to be taken at face value. If particularity resides in idiosyncrasy that overshoots its mark in one instance, it is to be found in the antagonistic character of social totality (objectivity) that underwrites the breaks in and through which the essay moves in the other. But one cannot stop here. The essay’s violation of the laws of thought might appear to privilege the enigma of the object; rather, such violation releases its conceptual power to illuminate that aspect of the object that has remained invisible to orthodox philosophy. The essay’s imagination, in other words, does not escape the realm of concepts to find its home in objects; its function is negative – to use the coercion of concepts against themselves in order to ‘pry open’ the unaccommodated and unaccommodating object. Adorno does not mask the violence of this manoeuvre in order to orchestrate the progression in his own argument from the essay’s preliminary blindness to objects to its concluding fascination with what remains blind in objects. What ‘The Essay as Form’ names as ‘heresy’ (23), then, transfigures idiosyncrasy’s risky capacity to be off the mark into the daring and anticipation that releases objects and concepts from their own untruth. The arena for this transfiguration is the form of the essay itself that is both vulnerable to error and in love with the truth, that pays homage to the eternal in the voice of the ephemeral, and that makes the magic and danger that reside in objects appear in desecrated concepts. My exposition thus far has concentrated on the guiding principle of the essay as form, its desire ‘to move culture to become mindful of its own untruth’ (EF 20), and has touched only obliquely on how the essay achieves this goal. The quotation I have just cited could hardly be equalled in its pithy encapsulation of the objective of cultural theory. Ironically, the style of cultural studies,30 however winning or innovative, has rarely, if ever, been an emulation of the paratactic and gnomic

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Adorno, who thinks in constellations and aphorisms. Cultural studies continues to steer a rocky course between what Adorno calls the ‘suspiciousness of false profundity’ and the lure of ‘slick superficiality’ (EF 5), the luminaries in the field take to heart Adorno’s cautions about focusing on ‘the historical mediations in which the whole society is sedimented’ (11), and anyone with any pretension to the practice of cultural critique remains mindful of the need to challenge ‘official thought’ (17), to communicate with patience and persistence the manner in which even pockets of resistance bear the stamp of a repressive totality. The trouble, however, is that all these no doubt commendable initiatives adopt or adapt the content of Adorno’s philosophy rather than its radical character as form. My aim here is not to ponder the historical, cultural, or social reasons for such a neglect of Adorno’s formal protocols for praxis, but to reiterate their potential. The challenge of ‘The Essay as Form,’ to put it bluntly, is whether thought can knowingly entangle itself in the untruth of existence and emerge unscathed. How can the individuality of consciousness emerge from its inevitable mediation ‘by the overarching experience of historical humankind’ (10)? And if we live in a world in which, even more than in Adorno’s day, ‘culture displays its character as advertising’ (MM 47), can critique ever divest itself of catchwords for long enough to capture the memory of the archaic and the passion of originality (modified use of MM 47)? It seems odd, to say the least, in a world where the medium most emphatically is the message and massage, that more writing that ‘takes presentation more seriously’ (EF 12) does not emerge. If the prophetic character of Adorno’s thought, his commitment to the excoriation of an administered world, has itself been reduced to the level of cliché and no longer inspires, can that inspiration be found in the ‘methodical [unmethodical]’ (13) character[s] of his eloquence instead? The density of the texture of critique in Adorno derives not only from the articulation of concepts in configuration with others (EF 13) but from replacing definitions with the process (experiential, mnemonic, and intellectual) through which they are produced (12). Moreover, this interweaving of concepts is itself only the subjective arrangement of an antagonistic and heteronomous totality that eludes discursive logic and presents itself as immanent. In a telling moment in ‘The Essay as Form,’ Adorno describes the ‘prevailing form of reason’ as that which thrives on ‘the illusion of a simple and fundamentally logical world’ (15), and one need hardly venture very far in the contemporary world of media

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culture to see how even the most radical challenges to the status quo fail to relinquish this illusion. The difficulty of writing in a manner that illuminates the world without succumbing to simple explanations, that reveals the ubiquity of the system in the very unpredictability of its manoeuvres, and that deploys idiosyncrasy as a confrontation of the system with its dialectical opposite rather than as a feeble and inevitable byproduct of a fully manipulated society is, of course, exactly the point. The contemporary world condemns the essay, as Adorno conceived it, to ineffectuality because its partial, fragmentary, and contingent character seems inadequate to the all-consuming character of totality. By the same token, the overweening ambition of the essay to make heresy its ‘innermost formal law’ (23) and to find ‘a moment of something inextinguishable’ (17) in a world that has all but capitulated to the dictates of instrumental reason and the delusions of the culture industry seems both vain and impossible. ‘German words of foreign derivation are the Jews of language’ But all is not lost if one holds fast to the thought of the negative in Adorno, to the (im)possibility that gives actuality its reason for being. In an easy-to-miss metaphor in ‘The Essay as Form,’ Adorno describes the essay’s task of interpretation as ‘marked with the yellow star of one who squanders his intelligence in impotent speculation, reading things in where there is nothing to interpret’ (EF 4, emphasis mine). Since, as I have already established, both ‘On the Historical Adequacy of Consciousness’ and ‘The Essay as Form’ go on to venerate ‘impotent speculation,’ I want to consider the significance of Adorno’s attempt to daub the non-identical form of the essay with the colour of the defeated in the Nazi triumphalist version of the dialectic between victor and vanquished. While Adorno moves on to make the essay the harbinger of that which remains unassimilable to this dialectic (see also MM 151) rather than that which has been destroyed by it, the yellow star permeates the subjective fantasy of and in the essay with ‘the objective wealth of meanings’ (EF 4) that attach themselves to the fate of history. In this sense, speculation acquires a phenomenal character because the essay absorbs the weight of the historical dynamic it seeks to outwit. I want to elaborate upon this intriguing moment by way of ‘On the Use of Foreign Words’ in order to negotiate, if not overcome, the impasse between ‘the bad old order’ and ‘the non-existent alternative’ (MM 245) with which the last section concluded.

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‘On the Use of Foreign Words’ would ordinarily be read in conjunction with Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator’ as complementary discussions of the battle for and against purism in the history of language. I am aware that this is a reductive formulation of Benjamin’s enterprise that has assumed metaphysical proportions in the critical profundity that has been devoted to it since its appearance. I isolate the most obvious aspect of their work in order to situate my own intervention in the debate as well as to acknowledge the rather unstable ground of the ‘impotent speculation’ I construct here. While my contentions may not have constituted the intent or indeed content of Adorno’s essay, I believe he would not have disapproved of its import, as I adumbrate it. His struggle to find truth devoid of aesthetic semblance (see ‘The Essay as Form’) authorizes, I would suggest, my own attempt to grapple with words that escape their conceptual determinations or, as Adorno would probably explain it, with words that both share in the guilt of society and embody, within their innermost structure, its brutal, unresolved antinomies.31 ‘On the Use of Foreign Words’ might also be interpreted as the linguistic complement to ‘On the Historical Adequacy of Consciousness.’ Adorno questions the prevailing version of linguistic history in which the ‘distinction between foreign and home-grown words is tolerantly denied’ (UFW 286). He objects to envisaging historical process as a stream into which foreign words flow without break or pause. The principles of continuity and assimilation dominate so that the difference of foreign words is no longer even heard or has been appropriately silenced. Foreign words become the counterparts to idiosyncratic consciousness because they make the organic form and regular rhythm of language yield to the ‘pressure of ... autonomous expression’ (287). The subjective defiance of linguistic convention becomes, in Adorno’s scheme of things, the informing principle of foreign words, which, in turn, ‘become the bearers of subjective contents: of the nuances’ (287). Idiosyncrasy in this essay is transfigured into ‘untranslatability,’ into the expression of subjectivity that ‘cannot simply be dissolved in meaning’ (287). Adorno is careful to acknowledge that the attention to nuance is not enough because it may only work to privilege the laws of purism; that is, linguistic nuance enhances the charm and refinement of the original if it simply functions within the framework of assimilation or opposition (288). Adorno maintains that a whole new conception of language is needed in order to legitimate foreign words. One expects Adorno to

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make the familiar claim that the linguistic echo generated by the presence of foreign words awakens objects hitherto ‘rejected, faded, and petrified’ (UFW 287) and reminds history of that which has been buried and forgotten. Or, one can readily imagine him augmenting his unremitting contempt for melting pots that invite martyrdom rather than democracy (MM 103) with the untranslatability of foreign words hostile to assimilation. Adorno is content neither with the protocols of tolerance and opposition nor with the haunting or underground presence of words that makes linguistic meaning undecidable and linguistic purity contaminated, hybrid, and derivative. Both these possibilities, however commendable, render foreign words ‘harmless’; the task of the translator, instead, is ‘to release their explosive force’ (UFW 286). Herein lies the surprising turn that Adorno’s essay takes – what is generally believed to account for and appreciate foreignness serves to deny it. What remains appealing for Adorno is the use to which foreign words that cannot be incorporated or translated and that do not illuminate the blindspots of history can be put. He describes these words as ‘foreign bodies assailing the body of language’ (288). While this formulation produces an altogether different frisson in the current climate of ‘terror,’ Adorno connects the assault of foreign words with the ‘incursion of freedom’ (again a phrase not without its potent ironies in the current historical conjuncture) (UFW 289). For Adorno, the life of language cannot be conceived in organic (natural) terms and must be reproduced in the register of artificiality, performance, and manufacture, in what he terms elsewhere and with different meaning ‘the lie of the human.’ Language, in other words, belongs to the order of second nature, of humanity in the grip of the historical domination of capitalism. In a fascinating gesture, Adorno removes language from the realm of memory and thrusts it into the arms of utopia. The foreignness of words, their indomitable strangeness, indicates the gap between words and things, but is also the only allegorical means by which those things, and the human beings who use them, can be transported ‘home.’ Foreign words, therefore, do not need to be granted legitimacy by the graciousness of purism; rather, their legitimacy lies in their expression of alienation, in their suspension between ‘grasping thought and manifested truth’ (288). This latter categorization of their function transforms the complexion of historical consciousness as well as the nature of language. Language, as an act of naming, is balanced precariously between ‘crystallization and disintegration’ (UFW 288) because it conjures up the dim outlines of

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a society still to come. But Adorno does not dwell on the customary pleasures of the evocative power of constellations; instead, the foreign word becomes the instrument of reason and the agent of disenchantment. The mythic power of foreign words has come to reside in ‘a hidden language that ... overtakes, overshadows, and transfigures the existing one as though it were itself getting ready to be transformed into the language of the future’ (291). Rather than consign foreign words to memory, Adorno insists on the historical obsolescence of organic language instead. It has become commonplace to link Adorno’s thought with homage to memory, to the past torment that resides in things, but here the rhythm of organic words is interrupted and derailed by foreign ones at whom they stare, ‘inconsolably past, prehistoric and mythological’ (291). The power of foreign words remains irreducibly ‘negative [and] dangerous’ because such power only crystallizes in the moment of disintegration; however, the moment of determinate negation also releases the ‘promised power’ of foreign words that render organic words inconsolably anachronistic (291, emphasis mine). At the risk of repeating myself, I want to underline the sleight of hand that alters the significance of anachronism in Adorno’s representation of historical consciousness. Foreign words are by definition anachronistic because their presence has become ‘naturalized’ (UFW 286) in the host or ‘pure’ language. As such, they acquire the status of remnant or echo, or their defeat by the remorseless flow of the linguistic stream makes them appear ‘impoten[t], irrelevant, eccentric, [or] derisory’ (MM 151). Adorno’s intention in both the segment from Minima Moralia and in ‘On the Use of Foreign Words’ is to convert the fading memory of foreign words into the fate of linguistic and/or historical potentiality, to make them the means of outwitting the linguistic and historical dynamic that appears to have swallowed them. It is this trajectory of disintegration and crystallization that Adorno and von Haselberg would articulate as the serious and obligatory sense of the modern underpinning historical consciousness in their critical conjuncture. The radical shift that takes place in ‘On the Use of Foreign Words,’ to my mind, is that only words that purism can neither ‘digest’ nor ‘excise’ are designated as foreign. Moreover, these are words that ‘do not even carry the expression of their own past’ (288). It is this quality of the unknown, that these words are ‘not open to any calculus,’ that is their ‘true justification’ (291). Foreign words do not participate in the dialectic between historical adequacy and historical adequacy. On the contrary, they constitute the judgment of history. Organic language

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‘gleams painfully’ (290) in the light of foreign words that relegate it to obsolescence while transforming it into the language of the future. The tables are unceremoniously turned because organic language will be left with none of the consolations it once offered foreign words – the charm and refinement of nuance, the pleasures of corruption, the enchantment of memory, or the imperviousness of untranslatability. To complicate matters still further, Adorno wishes to elicit the difference between the anachronistic and the obsolete – the untimely character of foreign words makes them inescapably anachronistic but never obsolete – because he wishes to retain in them their explosive capacity to shatter the walls that keep human beings ‘[imprisoned] in preconceived language’ (289). The monotonous flow of organic language in ‘a single historical process’ (286), on the other hand, condemns it to obsolescence because purism is incapable even of expressing, as foreign words do, the riven character of society. Adorno attributes the ‘inhuman, fetishistic commodity character’ of foreign words ‘by which the purist is rightly offended’ (UFW 289) to the division of labour that makes the use of foreign words the privilege of education or the product of the increasing rationalization of society that ‘dismembers’ (289) Greek and Latin into scientific terminologies. The purist’s solution is to restore to language its integral quality, unsullied by foreign words. Adorno’s solution is rather different: foreign words abjure the prescribed choice between the cultivation of education and the integrity of organic language in order to embrace that which operates ‘beneath the sphere of culture but without fusing with the body of language’ (290). Moreover, Adorno returns to art, which he continues to affirm as protest against reification, as the site in which foreign words as quotations help ideas that have become detached from the ‘life process of society’ (290) to survive. In true dialectical fashion, Adorno redeems both the natural (that which exists beneath the sphere of culture) and the rational (that which resides in the realm of culture currently detached from ‘life’ and society) character of language in his paean to foreign words. If the nuance of foreign words once hinted at the life of things denied the alienated subject, their alien-ness to language in the utopian moment promises the subject’s return to that life and that knowledge. Both the title of this section of my essay (from MM 110) and its opening metaphor are not even implied in ‘On the Use of Foreign Words.’ I believe, nevertheless, that this juxtaposition of metaphor and idea expounds the latter’s more inscrutable moments when Adorno endows

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foreign words with utopian promise rather than dwell only on their historical origins or contemporary (in)significance. This interpretation becomes even more compelling when one remembers the poignant section that accords foreign words the allegorical power to transport ‘things’ home and that is of a piece with the many ruminations in Minima Moralia that centre on the ‘mutilations’ (33) of migration or that imagine writing as the storeroom for the ‘refuse and lumber’ of the past that has grown ‘flat and stale’ with time (87). I think what distinguishes ‘On the Use of Foreign Words’ from its redoubtable counterparts is that it manages to make its prose vibrate with the intensity of the history and the trauma of the decimated subjectivity it strategically leaves untold. If ‘The Essay as Form’ and the aphorism in Minima Moralia lift and drop a seemingly casual metaphor without further elaboration and in the faint hope that the shock it first induces will cast a pall over or infect with substantial horror the abstractions that remain, ‘On the Use of Foreign Words’ is equally daring in its obliqueness. Foreign words awake thought ‘by the memory of what has been missed’ (MM 81). A habitual ploy in cultural theory devoted to the eliciting of ‘subjugated knowledges’ and the remapping of cultural and historical memory becomes something else in Adorno’s mind's eye. While memory is accustomed to resuscitating that which can never be regained, it functions here as anticipation. In other words, the memory of loss is the birth of historical opportunity. It is this twist to Adorno’s thinking that makes it possible to think Jewishness, for example, outside of the historical dialectic that vanquished Jews in Adorno’s day. Foreign words in this essay correspond with the ‘cross-gained, opaque, unassimilated material’ of which Adorno writes in Minima Moralia, that which ‘transcends ruling society’ because it does ‘not fit properly into the laws of historical movement’ (151). Adorno expels foreign words from the movement of historical potentiality rather than use them to alter its course, he makes them obtrude from rather than infiltrate the borders of linguistic purity, and he proposes that their misshapen, recalcitrant, and untoward aspect bequeaths them with the power to realize an unnatural beauty. It is crucial to remember Adorno’s provocative assertion that foreign words do not even carry the expression of their own past (the tried and tested way to honour absence and fragments in current thinking). His focus, therefore, is not on the recuperation or reinvention of the past but on the promise of the future. Their very presence is testament to rather than expression of past suffering, but their position as excremental resi-

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due reveals how the historical dynamic that seemingly rode roughshod over them might still be outmanoeuvred. In other words, foreign words in their very untranslatability articulate protest rather than torment, however mute(d). Here, I would argue, is an-other way to think difference and its incommensurability with the knowable. If, as Adorno avers in Minima Moralia, ‘the value of a thought is measured by its distance from the continuity of the familiar’ (80), he defends foreign words at their worst, when they widen rather than bridge the temporal and linguistic gap between their foreignness and the purism of organic language. Rather than dwell on the inhospitality of organic language, Adorno attends instead to the negative and dangerous portentousness of foreign words that assail its body, paradoxically seeking to erode or dismember it rather than simply demanding entry on their terms. Adorno associates this assault with the incursion of freedom, with signifying how history takes place in language (see MM 219), and with making the practice of language and thought accountable to those whom the historical dynamic has rendered both homeless and irrelevant. I want to recommend, against the grain, that the meaning of the current predicament of progressive consciousness be elicited in the face of Adorno’s justification of foreign words. In Adorno’s pantheon of iridescent particularity, foreign words, like the essay, resist their absorption into the momentum of the universal, just as their force can only be realized in their antithetical function (see MM 80–1). What is often elided in considerations of the function of the negative in Adorno’s philosophy is that he thinks the promise of the negative in conjunction with its danger and is just as likely, in his reflections on a topsy-turvy world, to render the two sides to which everything can be reduced identical rather than dialectically opposed. Adorno’s world, like ours, was dominated by the surrender to violence, not only in the barbarism that produced Nazism but in the ‘truly irrational predestination of a society held together by brutal economic inequality’ (MM 186). This latter condition can only be said to be exacerbated in our times. If Nazism has acquired paradigmatic rather than exceptional value since the Second World War, the globe might be said to appear today as a palimpsest of war zones, each layer of which is bidding fair to rival if not overtake the havoc wrought by the Nazis. The logic of Minima Moralia is underwritten by two baleful realizations about the morality of thinking and the dissemination of power: ‘the norms which condemn the present world are themselves the fruits of its iniquities’ (MM 187) and ‘domination is propagated by the domi-

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nated’ (183). The first of these captures the radically compromised position of the critic of culture. If I may return for a moment to my earlier comments on discursive logic as a critical norm that media or academic culture seems reluctant to relinquish, I want to suggest, with Adorno, that critique can no longer cling, however unconsciously, self-consciously, or indeed sincerely, to the ‘forms of free, detached, disinterested appraisal’ because the violence that prompts such critical contemplation ‘in reality annuls [it]’ (57). Adorno proceeds to hold out for a supple traffic between the ‘power of others’ and ‘our own powerlessness’ as the ‘almost insoluble task’ remaining to the critic of culture (57), but I would suggest that the current predicament of culture precludes such a fine balance. How does thought incorporate the violence of the world in the interstices of its form without resigning itself to the fate of the world? What would gnarled, tortured phrases accomplish that le mot juste could not? Adorno’s point, after all, is that the irrationalism of industrial or technological society is its reason, that the law by which society reproduces the forces and relations of production has become elevated to a moral principle and, as such, the law of society is invulnerable to the countervailing logic of morality. Can the thinker ‘be at every moment both within things and outside them’ (MM 74)? As Adorno himself remarks wryly, such a posture would make the thinker liable to the reproach that she has ‘no definite point of view’ (75). The complications in Adorno’s adumbration of the plight of cultural criticism must not be underestimated. The current historical moment cannot afford to take seriously Adorno’s perception that the norms of a society may be supported by its iniquities rather than serve as the means to transcend them. After all, the success of recent challenges to the policies of George Bush or Tony Blair have depended on holding them accountable to norms in whose name they claimed to be waging ‘the war on terror.’ If norms do not function as the conscience of society or even as its contrary, then Adorno seems to be raising the disturbing question whether norms are ‘the lie by virtue of which [a world whose essence is abomination] persists’ (MM 113). This is the bleak conclusion that neither Adorno (in his most pessimistic moments) nor the cultural critic in the current historical conjuncture can permit himself or herself. I would like to hazard the suggestion, nevertheless, that abiding by and with that conclusion might constitute the impossible morality of thinking today. The ‘unalleviated consciousness of negativity’ (MM 25) is common to idiosyncrasy, ‘the essay as form,’ and the explosive force of the for-

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eign word in their common function as ‘broken promise[s] of a new beginning’ (MM 93). Each of these embodiments of the particular rebukes the universal with the impossibility of its legitimation. By the same token, however, the insurgence of the particular only exposes ‘[t]he fact that human beings are absorbed by the totality without being humanly equal to it’ (MM 220). The investment of the particular with truth does not, sadly, obviate its impotence or prevent the historical dynamic from remaining oblivious to its potential. The even more incisive conclusion that Adorno draws, from observing how Jewish victims identified with their executioners, is that slave morality is still the master morality (187) and that domination, therefore, is propagated by the dominated. In these troubling sections of Minima Moralia, Adorno explores the potential collapse of negation as well as the relapse of the nuance of the foreign word, the fragment of the essay, or the feelers of historical consciousness into forms of connivance with the project of totality. Rather than read these sections as further confirmation of the despair rather than hope that animates Adorno’s writings, I would prefer to see them as leading the way to a true comprehension of the limits of our present. In ‘Don’t Exaggerate’ (233–5 in MM), Adorno introduces the totality he deliberately keeps in abeyance in the three essays I have examined thus far. If, as I have elaborated, these works seek to render the particular immune to the machinations of the universal, to keep alive within the remorselessness of the historical dialectic the memory of its victims, or to orient the movement of language, history, and consciousness to the (failed) promise of the yellow star, this section from Minima Moralia attempts the opposite – to illumine the fate of the particular in the ominous shadow of the murderous totality that sought to extinguish it. Adorno also turns his passionate intervention into an implicit attack on the consolation derived from the false immediacy of particulars in the face of the inaccessibility of the universal. Adorno writes that the perspective of totality, what we might call the long view, aligns itself with apologists for the status quo who counter every ‘criticism of tendencies in modern society’ with the ‘invariability of history’ (233). The obligation to be modern that Adorno and von Haselberg identified, to summon up indignation against present cruelties, then, becomes embarrassingly naive and merely hysterical because it has not availed itself of the knowledge of both the inevitability and the obviousness of recurrent disaster. In a pertinent move, Adorno shows how historical consciousness readily becomes the accomplice of ‘the persistent mo-

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mentum of existence’ rather than a remonstration against its depredations (233). The significance of this move cannot be emphasized enough in the current political climate because complexity in critical analysis so often veers between insisting on the unprecedented nature of contemporary examples of violence and the complacent enumeration of historical precedent. Adorno dismisses the false opposition between ‘the cult of the new’ (‘Late Extra’ in MM 235) and ‘the eternity of horror’ (234), because it fails to highlight the progress of the historical dialectic as an ‘intensification of antagonisms’ (234). Neither option, he claims, goes far enough because neither will concede that the death camps were ‘the ultimate calamity’ (234). Adorno is not simply accruing the privileges of martyrdom to the Jews as we might to the colonized or enslaved or to the victims of ethnic cleansing or, indeed, of the ‘war on terror,’ but fashioning a grasp of totality in the shape of the eternity of horror. The difficult task at hand, for Adorno, is making the ‘infernal machine that is history’ (MM 234) the object of our steadfast gaze without succumbing to the cynicism that meets every new calamity with a version of ‘been there, done that.’ How, in other words, does idiosyncratic consciousness confront the eternity of horror with the novelty of its renewed articulation? The persistence of horror, Adorno declares, ‘is realized as constantly different, unforeseen, exceeding all expectation’ (234); that is, the newest avatar of horror is the realization rather than the contradiction of its eternity. Adorno distinguishes this perception from one that treats the infernal machine of history as a form of incremental repetition because the latter makes it impossible to explain the specific difference between historical appearances of horror as well as pre-empting the contemplation of ‘the true identity of the whole, of terror without end’ (235). Acknowledging the ‘growth of horror,’ then, can so readily lead to empty analogies between past and present that are the product of mere ‘cold-hearted contemplation’ (235). This strategy of extracting what remains unchangeable from the unforeseeable becomes, for Adorno, ‘the smoke-screen behind which whatever is tangible and therefore assailable is lost to sight’ (234). Adorno proposes, instead, a double-pronged tactic – Auschwitz enables one to interpret the teleological latencies of history just as the future that has not yet come to pass preserves the non-identity of its historical moment in denouncing what has come to pass. The infernal machine of history is exposed in the backward glance that Auschwitz casts just as it obscures the vision of a future in which the death camps will not happen again. The eternity of horror, therefore, is both true and

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false. It is false in its guise of immediacy and true if mediated by the dynamics of totality, or false if it is only a devious means to preserve equanimity in the face of disaster and true if it reveals itself as a memory of past horror and a premonition of terror without end. The identification of victims with their executioners is of particular relevance in our world, where the dominated seem to reinvent tactics of violence and sacrifice with as much gusto as the dominators. While we would have no difficulty in confirming the relevance of Adorno’s theory of history, or of the fate of difference in the dialectic of the same, the clarity with which Auschwitz could be and should continue to be denounced seems to escape our own attempts to come to terms with a world in which violence has become the preserve of both oppressor and oppressed. How can the thought of non-identity be maintained in conjunction with the sensitivity to the growth of horror if means blot out ends, the particular outdoes the bloodthirstiness of the universal, self-destruction coincides with the destruction of others, and the incursions of freedom dissolve into terrorism by other means? Foreign bodies continue to circulate in the bloodstream of dominant cultures just as their mobility threatens the enclaves of state, nation, language, and religion, but it is not clear that their ascribed status as outcasts, assailants, or parasites produces a just recognition of their claims to legitimacy or provokes a détournement of the laws and values of host societies or the global economy. In this scenario, assimilation and the mealy-mouthed tolerance of difference might be the least of their problems. If one wishes to remain faithful to the promise of foreign words (in their guise as the innervations of idiosyncrasy, the vengeance of the particular, or the memory of suffering), however, Adorno’s philosophy becomes more indispensable than ever. The course of the world does not so much contradict the tenor of his philosophy as emphasize its necessity. Only writing fuelled by the desire ‘to hold ultimate calamity in check’ (MM 234) can survive both the awful knowledge that Auschwitz was that calamity and that there is more and worse to come. Thought, in short, must keep the broken promise of new beginnings.

NOTES 1 T.W. Adorno, ‘Aspects of Hegel’s Philosophy,’ in Hegel: Three Studies, trans. S.W. Nicholsen (Cambridge, Mass., and London: MIT Press, 1993), 1. 2 Ibid.

340 Asha Varadharajan 3 T.W. Adorno, ‘Culture and Administration,’ trans. Benjamin Snow, Telos 37 (Fall 1978): 97. 4 T.W. Adorno, ‘Resignation,’ in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. H.W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 293. 5 Adorno, ‘Culture and Administration,’ 94. 6 T.W. Adorno, ‘Those Twenties,’ in Critical Models, 47. 7 T.W. Adorno, ‘Cultural Criticism and Society,’ in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983), 20. 8 Adorno, ‘Aspects of Hegel’s Philosophy,’ 2. 9 T.W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1991), 247 (hereafter MM). 10 Russell Jacoby, ‘Negative Psychoanalysis and Marxism: Towards an Objective Theory of Subjectivity,’ Telos 14 (Winter 1972): 22. 11 Adorno, ‘Aspects of Hegel’s Philosophy,’ 21. 12 The titles of this essay and its sections are taken from Minima Moralia ([1951] 1974) and Hegel: Three Studies ([1963, 1971] 1993). I have not appended page numbers except on one occasion, partly because my deployment of these phrases involves a speculative leap or two and partly because I want these phrases to resonate in contexts other than the ones in which they appear. I have also occasionally modified or employed certain phrases from Adorno without referring to their sources for similar reasons. I am also hoping that readers well versed in Adorno’s texts will be brought up short by the unfamiliar use to which those phrases have been put. 13 Shierry Weber Nicholsen, ‘Subjective Aesthetic Experience in Adorno and Its Historical Trajectory,’ Theory, Culture & Society 10 (1993): 89. 14 T.W. Adorno and Peter von Haselberg, ‘On the Historical Adequacy of Consciousness,’ Telos 56 (1983): 97–103 (hereafter HAC). 15 T.W. Adorno, ‘The Essay as Form,’ in Notes to Literature, vol. 1, trans. S.W. Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 3–23 (hereafter EF). 16 T.W. Adorno, ‘On the Use of Foreign Words,’ in Notes to Literature, vol. 2, trans. S.W. Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 286–91 (hereafter UFW). 17 See Asha Varadharajan, ‘Indigent Dwelling, Itinerant Thought,’ Politics and Culture 1 (2004). 18 Gil Scott-Heron’s variation and Timothy Leary’s ‘tune in, turn off, drop out’ operate as alternative representations of counterculture with continued currency in cultural studies. 19 Jacoby, ‘Negative Psychoanalysis and Marxism,’ 5. 20 Adorno, ‘Those Twenties,’ 48.

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21 See T.W. Adorno, ‘Is Marx Obsolete?’ trans. Nicholas Slater, Diogenes 63 (Fall 1968): 1–16. 22 T.W. Adorno, ‘Correspondence with Benjamin,’ trans. Harry Zohn, New Left Review 81 (Sept.–Oct. 1973): 55. 23 As quoted in Nicholsen, ‘Subjective Aesthetic Experience in Adorno,’ 120. 24 See also ibid., 119. 25 Samuel Weber, ‘Translating the Untranslatable,’ in Adorno, Prisms, 12. 26 Ibid. 27 Nicholsen, ‘Subjective Aesthetic Experience in Adorno,’ 95. 28 Ibid., 119. 29 T.W. Adorno, ‘Reconciliation under Duress,’ trans. Rodney Livingstone, in Fredric Jameson, ed., Aesthetics and Politics (London: NLB, 1977). 30 See Douglas Kellner’s ‘Minima Moralia: The Gulf War in Fragments,’ in Journal of Social Philosophy 24.2 (Fall 1993): 68–88 for a rare, compelling attempt to recast Minima Moralia in light of contemporary events. Kellner claims that his essay evokes the media version of the Gulf War through a collage of fragments, but he cannot sustain his rejection of discursive logic. While this ‘failure’ makes for a passionate commentary on the opaque machinations of power that passed itself off as transparent, it also reveals the ‘impossibility’ of Adorno’s injunction to stick with arbitrary and irrational complexity without reducing it to logical explanation. Thus, for example, Kellner reports the incredulity of the media concerning the paucity of the Iraqi response, but cannot bring himself to leave it at that and proceeds to challenge that incredulity. In other words, he cannot let his essay weave the veil of ideology through the media fragments without infecting that ideology with the thought of totality. 31 See Adorno, ‘Cultural Criticism and Society,’ 26–32.

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PART FIVE Ecology

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15 Adorno and Ecological Politics andrew biro

In her influential survey Environmentalism and Political Theory: Toward an Ecocentric Approach, Robyn Eckersley discusses what she calls the ‘failed promise’ of the critical theory of the Frankfurt School. Eckersley notes that ‘Critical Theory has not had a major direct influence in shaping the theory and practice of the Green movement.’1 This might seem surprising, she continues, given that ‘two of its [critical theory’s] central problems – the triumph of instrumental reason and the domination of nature – might have served as useful theoretical starting points for the Green critique of industrial society.’2 Eckersley then suggests some possible reasons for the Frankfurt School’s lack of influence: One might note, for example, the early Frankfurt School’s pessimistic outlook (particularly that of Adorno and Horkheimer), its ambivalence toward nature romanticism (acquired in part from its critical inquiry into Nazism), its rarefied language, its distance from the imperfect world of day-to-day political struggles (Marcuse being an important exception here), and its increasing preoccupation with theory rather than praxis (despite its original project of uniting the two).3

Of all the theorists of the Frankfurt School, and indeed perhaps of all twentieth-century leftist political theorists, it is Theodor Adorno who stands most strongly accused by this judgment.4 For each of the reasons Eckersley offers for critical theory’s lack of influence on the environmental movement, Adorno’s work offers innumerable examples. One could cite Adorno’s infamously difficult style, the cultural mandarinism evident in his writings on the culture industry and on jazz music, the 1969 incident in which he called the police and had them arrest a

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group of students (including his own doctoral student) for occupying the Institute for Social Research’s offices, or simply his claim (in Negative Dialectics) that [a]ll post-Auschwitz culture, including its urgent critique, is garbage ... Whoever pleads for the maintenance of this radically culpable and shabby culture becomes its accomplice, while the man who says no to culture is directly furthering the barbarism which our culture showed itself to be. Not even silence gets us out of the circle. In silence we simply use the state of objective truth to rationalize our subjective incapacity, once more degrading truth into a lie.5

In spite of all this, however, I would like to suggest that Eckersley is correct to see the possibility of an ecological politics informed by critical theory (and, in particular, by Adorno’s critical theory) as a ‘promis[ing]’ possibility. Moreover, I would like to suggest that the reasons for the ‘failure’ of that promise to be kept may lie more with the ecocentric perspective endorsed by Eckersley and others than with the putative shortcomings of Adorno’s critical theory. In other words, I will be arguing that what Eckersley characterizes as reasons for the ‘failure’ of critical theory to find an audience among ecological activists, while not entirely unproblematic, are nevertheless important for grounding an ecological politics that is adequate to the context of advanced industrial (or late capitalist) society. The remainder of the chapter, then, is organized into three sections. In the first, I shall attempt to sketch out in a bit more detail the ecological themes in Adorno, focusing in particular on the two ‘central problems’ that Eckersley identifies: ‘the triumph of instrumental reason and the domination of nature.’ In the second section, I will re-insert some critical distance between Adorno’s thought and much of contemporary ecological thought by explaining Adorno’s understanding of ‘nature.’ In the third and final section, I will return to reconsider the environmentalist critique of Adorno, and suggest that the blame for the ‘failed promise of critical theory’ does not rest entirely on the shoulders of the critical theorists themselves.

1. Instrumental Reason and the Domination of Nature Adorno’s views on the triumph of instrumental rationality and the domination of nature are perhaps best approached by beginning with

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Dialectic of Enlightenment, a work collaboratively written with Max Horkheimer while the two were in exile in the United States during the Second World War. The context is, of course, important, as the book represents the authors’ attempts to come to terms with the horrific barbarism that had emerged out of the very heart of European civilization. Adorno and Horkheimer argue that it is instrumental reason, the disenchantment of the world, or ‘Enlightenment’ itself, that leads to the blind reproduction of social domination and the domination of nature evident in totalitarian society.6 Rather than simply freeing people from dependence on (and subjection to) the vicissitudes of nature, for Adorno and Horkheimer, reason in fact provides only the ‘cold rays’ under which ‘the seed of the new barbarism grows to fruition.’7 It is important to be clear, however, that Adorno and Horkheimer are not simply proposing a rejection of enlightenment. Clearly, a critique of fascism that ended up valourizing irrationalism would hardly be worthwhile. Rather, they propose to point out the ways in which reason or enlightenment is implicated in domination, with a view to the possibility of a form of reason that is not so implicated. They note in the introduction to Dialectic of Enlightenment that ‘[t]he accompanying critique of enlightenment is intended to prepare the way for a positive notion of enlightenment which will release it from entanglement in blind domination’ (xvi). They thus argue that the problem with the enlightenment project is ultimately its lack of reflexivity: ‘enlightenment’ critically examines everything, except itself. ‘The point is ... that the Enlightenment must consider itself, if men are not to be wholly betrayed’ (xv; emphasis in original). As Simon Jarvis explains, ‘The point is that positivistic and rationalistic conceptions of enlightenment are not enlightened enough. They present us with an idea of reason which is actually mythical, rather than fully rational, because it suppresses, rather than reflecting on, its own relation to myth and tradition.’8 With the argument that supposedly opposing concepts (‘enlightenment’ and ‘myth’) contaminate one another, we can see why Adorno’s philosophy is frequently seen as a sort of ‘proto-deconstructionism.’ This is perhaps most evident in Adorno’s understanding of language. One of the themes of Dialectic of Enlightenment is the inadequacy of all attempts at representation, and the violence that is done through representation and the covering up of its inadequacies. Because they are abstractions, words can never refer to exactly what they are supposed to.9 Furthermore, conceptual thinking necessarily denies the specificity of the various diverse things that are lumped together in the same cate-

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gory. Thus, for Adorno and Horkheimer, by forcing objects into conceptual categories in order to instrumentalize them, conceptual thinking (a form of instrumental rationality) occludes the specificity of the objects. A particularly compelling instance of this erasure of specificity is to be found in Homer’s Odyssey, ‘the basic text of European civilization’ (DE 46). Odysseus survives his encounter with the cyclops Polyphemus only by cunningly denying his individuality: he tells Polyphemus that his name is ‘Nobody’ (oudeis), so that when he blinds the cyclops and escapes, aid for the cyclops is not forthcoming because he is yelling ‘Nobody has blinded me!’ The cyclops’s downfall thus lies in his inability to distinguish between word and thing.10 But for Adorno and Horkheimer, it is not a coincidence that this ‘enlightened’ capacity to distinguish, which is what allows Odysseus to escape, can only occur through self-denial. Indeed, the entire story of the Odyssey is one in which the protagonist survives through self-denial in one episode after another. Survival through self-denial is perhaps the paradigmatic instance of the violence exacted by the separation of concept and thing. ‘Man’s domination over himself, which grounds his selfhood, is almost always the destruction of the subject in whose service it is undertaken ... The history of civilization is the history of the introversion of sacrifice’ (DE 54–5). But correcting the failure of enlightenment to see ‘its own relation to myth and tradition’ (as Jarvis puts it) does not simply consist in reading enlightenment back into the earliest texts of western civilization. Rather, this last can be done because Adorno and Horkheimer understand enlightenment, or demythologization, as a means of controlling nature, which itself stretches back to the beginnings of humans’ social existence. In spite of their inadequacies, representational systems are powerful tools or instruments. Even though language or mathematics can never adequately represent the world of objects, they nevertheless allow for survival through the instrumentalization of the objects conceptualized. Knowledge is thus a form of power over objects, and ‘Enlightenment behaves toward things as a dictator toward men. He knows them in so far as he can manipulate them’ (DE 9). At this point the distinctions between critical theory and deconstruction, as well as the common ground between critical theory and ecology, may be more apparent. While deconstruction points to the necessity of language’s bracketing of the referent, Adorno’s critical theory allows for the possibility that a more reflexive reason might be non-instrumental, and that a non-instrumental form of reason might allow for a more adequate approach to the object.

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It is for this reason – the possibility that is held out for the existence of a non-dominating form of reason – that Adorno’s critical theory remains much more concerned than does deconstruction with the domination of nature. At the most general philosophical level, Adorno argues that the separation of subject and object, while real enough as an expression of the current human condition, ‘must not be hypostasized, not magically transformed into an invariant.’11 Similarly, the domination of nature that is inherent in the ‘crude confrontation of subject and object’12 may yet be replaced by a ‘proper’ relationship between subject and object, a reconciliation between human beings and nature that would be ‘the realization of peace among men as well as between men and their Other. Peace is the state of distinctness without domination.’13 The prototype of such a reconciliation is to be found in works of art, which ‘wrest themselves from domination’14 in their refusal to succumb to instrumental reason (‘purposiveness without purpose,’ as Kant puts it). For Adorno, therefore, the possibility of ‘distinctness without domination,’ or of a reconciliation with nature, rests on the possibility of a non-instrumental form of reason. But the treatment of nature in strictly instrumental terms is not something that can be separated off from instrumental rationality more broadly conceived. And the latter extends for Adorno all the way into conceptual thinking itself. Just as the domination of nature is predicated on an instrumentalization of nature that denies its specificities, conceptual thinking obliterates the specificity of the things that are gathered under the concept. For Adorno, what Marx identified as the ‘fetishism of commodities’ that treats quantitative exchange-value as though it were a natural attribute of objects, extends much more broadly than simply economic categories, into our very way of thinking. It is for this reason that Adorno suggests the need ‘to get rid of concept fetishism’ (ND 12). Concepts become fetishized to the extent that we fail to recognize that ‘all concepts, even the philosophical ones, refer to nonconceptualities, because concepts on their part are moments of the reality that requires their formation, primarily for the control of nature.’ Adorno’s broadening of the Marxian critique is further evident in his claim that ‘the ineffable part of the utopia [which] defies subsumption under identity’ is to be articulated with what Marx identified as the opposite of exchange-value, namely ‘use-value’ (ND 11). In the critique of conceptual thinking, we can see the reasons for Adorno’s difficult style of writing. It is not that Adorno writes in a difficult manner out of some sort of desire to dissociate himself from the

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unwashed masses, or because he was incapable of doing otherwise. Gillian Rose notes that for Adorno, as we have just seen, concepts, as ordinarily used, are distorting and mask social reality. Adorno thus had to find an alternative way of using concepts, and the relation of a thought or a concept to what it is intended to cover, its object, is problematic. It follows from this that standard modes of communication are also inadequate, since they depend on the ordinary use of concepts ... Adorno insists that expressing the relation of the thought to its object should be prior to any concern with ease of communicating that thought.15

Consider his refusal to define his terms in advance: understanding, Adorno says in an early essay that we shall have occasion to return to momentarily, ‘can not be given in preliminary definitions but only in the course of analysis.’16 Definitions are problematic because they fix understanding, and foreclose the possibility of a dialectical understanding that sees objects as bearers of processes, and since they are the product of historical processes, as subject to historical change. Giving definitions in advance, and always using the same word to mean the same thing, in other words, is a form of reification – a freezing of words and concepts that sees language as simply a tool: to write in this way, for Adorno, would be to engage a form of instrumental rationality, and thus to further the domination of nature. Borrowing a term from Walter Benjamin, Adorno suggests instead understanding concepts in a ‘constellation’: ‘Cognition of the object in its constellation is cognition of the process stored in the object’ (ND 163). It is Adorno’s hope that coming to terms with a concept’s relationality with other concepts can allow us to see concepts not as reified and ahistorical (‘mythic,’ in the terms of Dialectic of Enlightenment), but rather as the evolutionary (historical) product of an ongoing dynamic interaction within a linguistic or conceptual environment: its constellation, or what we might call the ecology of the concept, thus ‘illuminates the specific side of the object, the side to which a classifying procedure [i.e., instrumental rationality] is either a matter of indifference or a burden’ (ND 163). Adorno is thus a thinker who is not only attuned to the destructiveness of the domination of nature, but who also argues quite forcefully that the domination of nature is rooted as deeply as our way of thinking about the world around us. Moreover, Adorno’s attempts at excavating a different, more sensitive approach to the world, emphasize relationality – a key concept in ecological thought more generally.

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2. Adorno’s Understanding of Nature If the foregoing has sought to emphasize the commonalities between Adorno’s project and ecology, we may now turn to examine some of the differences. We can begin by taking Adorno’s understanding of ‘nature’ itself. Recall that Eckersley had observed that one of the reasons for critical theory’s failure to catch on among ecological thinkers was the Frankfurt School’s refusal to romanticize nature. Much (although certainly not all) of contemporary environmental thought, by contrast, explicitly draws inspiration from a romantic view of nature, either through the inspiration that the sublimity of ‘unspoiled wilderness’ can offer (a theme that is found in North American ‘nature writing’ in particular, a tradition that stretches back virtually unbroken to the middle of the nineteenth century) or through the valourization of rural (often subsistence agriculture–based) life, in contrast with what is seen as the ultimately unsatisfying materialist rat race offered by life in the polluted, noisy, hectic, crowded, alienating, crime- and disease-ridden – in a word, unnatural – city. For Adorno, though, understandings of ‘nature’ are always rooted in determinate social conditions, and appeals to ‘nature’ – not least romantic appeals to the goodness of unspoiled wilderness or a ‘more natural’ mode of human existence – are reliant upon, and in some sense projections of, determinate social values. ‘Times in which nature confronts man overpoweringly allow no room for natural beauty; as is well known, agricultural occupations, in which nature as it appears is an immediate object of action, allows little appreciation for landscape. Natural beauty, purportedly ahistorical, is at its core historical’ (AT 65).17 Given this understanding, Adorno’s case cannot be made on the basis of an appeal to ‘natural facts.’ Facts are quite simply not accessible without the intervening mediation of social relations, and any claim to have unmediated access to the natural world (whether in positivism, Heideggerian ‘neo-ontology,’ or the writings of John Muir) can only be described, for Adorno, as ideology, or the rationalization of existent social relations that are predicated on domination. Going even further than Georg Lukács’s claim that social relations are experienced as natural (that reified social relations constitute a ‘second nature’), Adorno states his thesis in his early essay ‘The Idea of Natural History,’ as follows: If the question of the relation of nature and history is to be seriously posed, then it only offers any chance of solution if it is possible to compre-

352 Andrew Biro hend historical being in its most extreme historical determinacy, where it is most historical, as natural being, or if it were possible to comprehend nature as an historical being where it seems to rest most deeply in itself as nature.18

Adorno wants to reject, in other words, any claim to a radical distinction between the natural and the social: just as knowledge of nature cannot be completely voided of any social content, there can also be no such thing as a purely social object.19 All interactions with the natural world are mediated by social relations, and all social interactions are mediated by our interaction with nature. But in ‘The Idea of Natural History’ Adorno is not so much concerned with the relationship between the natural and the social, as with the relationship between the natural and the historical. That Adorno here places ‘nature’ in a constellation with ‘history’ helps us to see what Adorno means by ‘nature’ and why he wants to avoid the romantic conceptions of it. As we have seen, to attempt to provide a singular definitive answer to the question ‘What is Adorno’s conception of nature?’ would be to run counter to Adorno’s entire project. But while Adorno does want to argue that all definitions are in some sense reifications, he is certainly not against the use of language or even concepts,20 and he is also aware that, in an essay in particular, ‘it would be wrong always to begin at the beginning.’21 Adorno’s own preliminary attempt at defining nature, therefore, can at least afford us a starting point for understanding his resistance to nature romanticism: [W]hat has always been, what as fatefully arranged predetermined being underlies history and appears in history; it is substance in history. What is delimited by these expressions is what I mean here by ‘nature.’ The question that arises is that of the relationship of this nature to what we understand by history, where history means that mode of conduct established by tradition that is characterized primarily by the occurrence of the qualitatively new; it is a movement that does not play itself out in mere identity, mere reproduction of what has always been, but rather one in which the new occurs; it is a movement that gains its true character through what appears in it as new.22

Translated into the perhaps more familiar terminology of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, written a little over a decade later, ‘nature’ becomes ‘myth,’ and ‘history’ can be rendered as ‘enlightenment.’ As was suggested earlier, it is a mis-characterization of the text’s basic argument to see Dialectic of Enlightenment as simply an attack on enlight-

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enment. The argument is presented as a critique of enlightenment (in the sense of pointing to its limits), but is also a critique of enlightenment’s opposite, namely myth. In the introduction, the authors make the twosided claim that ‘myth is already enlightenment; and enlightenment reverts to mythology’ (DE xvi). The second part of this claim, as we have seen, suggests that the program of radical scepticism or demythologization leads to the erasure of qualitative difference and the mathematization of nature, as everything is instrumentalized by being placed within a matrix of exchange (or ‘barter’)23 relations. This triumph of instrumental rationality thus reaches its apotheosis in the domination of nature and the ‘liquidation of the individual’ – which occurs literally in the fascist death camps and in spirit in mass society generally. The claim that ‘myth is already enlightenment,’ by contrast, suggests that instrumental rationality, and hence domination, does not begin with modernity, but is ‘coeval with sociality.’24 Odysseus’s attainment of subjectivity through self-renunciation marks him as the ‘prototype of the bourgeois individual’ (DE 43 and passim). But this enlightened renunciation cannot be simply contrasted with the ‘mythic’ notion of sacrifice: sacrifice itself is ‘the prototype of Odyssean cunning’ (50). Thus, for Adorno and Horkheimer, ‘the notions of sacrifice and renunciation [contain] the difference as well as the unity of mythic nature and enlightened mastery of nature’ (xvi; emphasis added). This pairing of myth and enlightenment, or of nature and history, as being both opposites and a unity, is most apparent in what Adorno and Horkheimer call the ‘quintessential paradox of the [Homeric] epic.’ This paradox is ‘the fact that the notion of homeland is opposed to myth – which the fascist would falsely present as homeland’ (DE 78). Earlier in the text, the authors suggest that it is the ‘end of nomadic existence’ that fixes a social order and the division of labour (14): if we were to search for an ‘origin’ for the domination that is ‘coeval with sociality,’ we might find it here.25 Nature is thus paradoxically the eternal recurrence of the same (‘the mere reproduction of what has always been’ in the citation from the early essay, above) and yet is also to be contrasted with the ‘fixed’ existence of post-nomadic social life. But while in the early ‘Idea of Natural History’ essay Adorno suggests that ‘nature’ is identified with ‘myth’ (both are associated with the absence of history, or of the qualitatively new), in Dialectic of Enlightenment he and Horkheimer are at pains to distinguish nature from myth: ‘Novalis’ definition, according to which all philosophy is homesickness, holds true only if this longing is not dissolved into the phantasm of a lost remote antiquity, but represents the homeland, nature itself, as

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wrested from myth’ (DE 78). The opposition of nature and history could be used to posit the identity of myth with nature, but this opposition of nature and history (and thus the identity of myth and nature that follows from it) is then exploded by the Dialectic of Enlightenment’s argument that ‘myth is already enlightenment’ (or that mythic sacrifice is a prototype of exchange relations) – that myth is already an attempt to dominate nature. While enlightenment narratives identify myth with nature, these fail to see that ‘Aboriginal myth already contains the aspect of deception which triumphs in the fraudulence of Fascism yet imputes the same practice of lies to the Enlightenment’ (DE 45). In spite of what enlightenment narratives might have us believe, ‘nature’ and ‘myth’ must, in fact, be ‘wrested’ apart. If nature is to be distinguished from history (in the sense that historical narratives represent the domination of nature), then nature can be identified with ‘myth,’ or the absence of historicity. If, however, ‘myth’ turns out to be ‘already enlightenment,’ or another mode of nature domination, then nature must be something else again. ‘The homeland’ is to be identified with ‘nature itself’ rather than with what is falsely presented as ‘the homeland’ in fascist propaganda (i.e., the fixity of post-nomadic life that is in fact the basis of domination and ‘that grounds the human alienation in which originates all homesickness and all longing for the lost primal state of man’ – DE 78). But immediately after asserting this, Horkheimer and Adorno continue: ‘Homeland is the state of having escaped.’ Even though the domination of nature, whether in enlightened or mythic forms, is predicated on alienation, nature cannot be identified with the homeland, or a state anterior to alienation, since ‘all longing and all homesickness are directed’ to ‘the settled life and fixed property’ – a condition that is already one of alienation from nature (DE 78). Nature, in other words, cannot be accurately presented as a ‘state’ or a foundation upon which social life and domination are erected. In fact, it seems impossible to arrive at an accurate positive representation of nature at all. This point is made explicitly in the discussion of ‘natural beauty’ in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory: The boundary established against the fetishism of nature – the pantheistic subterfuge that would amount to nothing but an affirmative mask appended to an endlessly repetitive fate – is drawn by the fact that nature, as it stirs mortally and tenderly in its beauty, does not yet exist ... The dignity of nature is that of the not-yet-existing. (AT 74)

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This being the case, nature then becomes something that cannot be perceived in any sort of straightforward fashion. The object of art, ‘natural beauty as such ... is determined negatively, as indeterminable’ (72). The sensory apparatus – recalling the young Marx’s claim that ‘the cultivation of the five senses is the work of all previous history’26 – must be thoroughly transformed: ‘the language of nature is mute, art seeks to make this muteness eloquent’ (AT 78). But this sensory transformation is perhaps not as straightforwardly progressive as Marx imagined: ‘Nature in a sense can only be seen blindly, the aesthetic imperatives of unconscious apperception and remembrance are at the same time archaic vestiges incompatible with the increasing maturation of reason’ (69). Adorno and Horkheimer’s insistence that ‘the homeland’ be identified with ‘nature itself’ should thus be read as a tactical concession, rather than an ontological assertion. At the same time, this tactical logic must be reconciled with the critique of instrumental reason. If, in spite of its inadequacy, we are to consider ‘nature itself’ as the homeland, then (and in spite of his scathing criticisms of the products of the culture industry), Adorno might agree with the claim of one of Hollywood’s best-known fantasies: The Wizard of Oz. Adorno himself once described his exile in the United States as an experience of being transported to a fantastical yet disturbing and alienating land (‘I felt a little as if I were in Kafka’s Nature Theater of Oklahoma’),27 and his experience in America then in turn made it impossible for him to experience his return to Germany as any sort of comfortable ‘homecoming.’28 Similarly, a character who is mystically whisked away (from a state that borders on Oklahoma) to a strange, fantastical land, and yet who longs to return to a place that is only presented as bleak and grey (these sequences, unlike the rest of the film, are shot in black and white), where she lives with a couple who are not her biological parents, would surely also be aware of the impossibility of a positive representation of ‘nature itself.’ A return to the homeland, to ‘nature itself,’ is a utopian impossibility: quite literally, ‘there’s no place like home.’29

3. Ecologizing Thought, or, Adorno and Environmental Politics Reconsidered This discussion of Adorno’s understanding of nature not only can serve to elucidate the reasons behind his suspicions of a romanticized view of nature, but also more generally can serve to illustrate his philosophy’s

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emphasis on non-identity, or on the recognition of that in the object which eludes conceptualization. The thesis that nature cannot be positively represented, but can only be understood negatively, in its relation to a constellation of other concepts (history, myth, enlightenment, alienation, property), in other words, is a particular expression of Adorno’s materialist dialectic: ‘The name of dialectics says no more, to begin with, than that objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder ... Dialectics is the consistent sense of nonidentity’ (ND 5). This non-identity, which finds its social expression in the domination of nature and in alienation, is what drives the dialectic. Adorno’s criticism of Hegel, therefore, is that the latter’s idealism allowed the dialectic to be ‘cut short’ by claiming ‘solidarity with the institutions, against their bases in the social process’ (ND 337) – the static against the dynamic, or, in Marxist terms, the state against civil society. The persistence of such antagonisms (not only between the state and society, but also between classes within society, and between society and nature), is what demonstrates that we have not arrived at the ‘end of history,’ and that the future may hold the promise of the appearance of something new. In terms of a relationship with nature, for Adorno this ‘something new’ must mean not only a reconciliation with nature, but also a (historical) break from nature, or an assertion of the distinctiveness of humanity, a recognition that social relations can be other than ‘second nature.’ Such a historical break would require, as Adorno puts it, breaking out from ‘the natural-historic cares we share with beetles’ (ND 389). As Shane Gunster in his contribution to this volume notes, it is a distinctively cultural realm, critical thought, driven by an engagement with art, which ‘teaches humanity to suspend its fear of the unknown.’30 It is grounded in nature, as ‘[n]atural beauty is the trace of the nonidentical in things under the spell of universal identity.’ But as we saw above, Adorno’s aesthetic theory understands natural beauty as a historical category, its appreciation dependent on an evolved set of social-historical circumstances, which can then allow for the suspension of fear, or a break out of the second nature that reproduces the first nature that we share with beetles. This is the escape that is offered by the social relations constellated by the work of art: ‘In the pledged receptivity of the observer, pure self-abandonment – that moment of free exhalation in nature – survives’ (AT 73). Domination, including the domination of nature, is predicated on an understanding of the human condition as a mere extension of the natural world, or a denial that the

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realm of culture is or could be in any fundamental sense different from nature. And that nature is one that mirrors the violence of a social order grounded in domination. From the capitalist marketplace as an arena ruled by the ‘law of the jungle’ to sociobiology, the ideology of domination ‘is projected upon animals by modern biology in order to exonerate the people who abuse the animals; the ontology of beasts apes the age-old, always newly repossessed bestiality of men’ (ND 348). The appearance of something new, a new relationship with nature that is not predicated on the domination of the latter (a ‘newly repossessed barbarism’ or the ‘natural’ reproduction of what has always been), however, would require a change in our very way of thinking. Adorno proposes a negative dialectical model as a way of thinking that might be capable of using the ‘coercive’ power of conceptual thinking without reifying concepts, or what Susan Buck-Morss calls ‘a process of dialectics without identity.’31 The emphasis on the negative moment of dialectics over the positive moment of identity would allow us to approach the object, avoiding the identitarianism implied in the positing of concepts, by deploying concepts in evolving, interactive constellations. While the use of constellations, or a negative dialectic, can in this sense be understood as an ecological mode of thinking, as I have tried to suggest, it is also worth emphasizing that ‘ecology’ in this sense has at least as much to do with history or the social as it does with nature. But Adorno also insists that such a new way of thinking cannot be understood as simply a transformation of people’s ideas. In spite of his emphasis on the rooting of domination in modes of thought, Adorno remains a materialist, not an idealist, and Adorno’s political aesthetics are grounded in social theory rather than fantasy. Instrumental rationality’s dominance as a mode of reason is rooted in the social division of labour. This material factor is what leads to the damaged forms of subjectivity that are only capable of instrumentalizing the world, pinning it down in order to apprehend it. It is equally clear that for Adorno changes in the mode of thinking, in subjectivity, and in social relations must be understood together, or as a constellation: ‘The chances are that every citizen of the wrong world would find the right one unbearable; he would be too impaired for it’ (ND 352). The insistence that a reconciliation with nature can only be achieved through a change in social relations that is so fundamental that it transforms human subjectivity and our very mode of thinking, serves to

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emphasize Adorno’s distance from much of contemporary (and even ‘radical’) environmental thought. On the other hand, the awesome scope of this project also helps us to understand his pessimism, and his apparent unwillingness to engage with ‘day-to-day’ political struggle,32 much of which could, from this perspective, be seen as complicit with domination, insofar as it is rooted in instrumental rationality. Fredric Jameson has suggested that in spite of the fact that he died in 1969, Adorno’s philosophy is most appropriate to the end of the twentieth century.33 While Jameson is mainly concerned to recuperate Adorno’s version of Marxism, the same point can be made about an Adornian ecological politics, as well. Like Eckersley, orthodox Marxists have seen Adorno’s emphasis on theory and his distance from quotidian political struggle as evidence of elitism and an abandonment of a transformative political project. Adornian theory, the charge goes, dooms its followers to paralysis by setting impossibly high standards, demanding ‘a proletariat tutored in Beckett as well as Marx.’34 But the force of so construing it, as Jameson points out, is precisely what makes Adorno’s theoretical intervention so important for the contemporary moment, where critique, even of the most radical sort, seems to be so easily co-opted and commodified. It is only an ecological politics that insists on the sorts of far-reaching changes that Adorno insisted on, a politics that insists on seeing the domination of nature as rooted in reason itself, and as something that will persist as long as social antagonisms persist, a politics, in short, that calls for the ecologization of conceptual thinking itself, that can lead us to any sort of reconciliation with nature. The recent fate of ‘sustainable development’ is instructive: at the term’s inception a couple of decades ago it was the radical rallying cry that might save the earth from capitalist depradation. But the concept has now been colonized by multinational corporations, whose real interests lie only in the sustainability and development of profits, regardless of the human and ecological costs these impose. Instead of invoking a historic new era of humanity’s harmonious interaction with the planetary ecosystem, ‘sustainable development,’ like enlightenment itself, has turned out to be nothing more than the reproduction of the blind natural cycle of domination. The failure of the promise of sustainable development, like the failure of so many other promises, might be said to rest in the cunningness of the exploitation of the distinction between the word and the thing. An ecological politics that can keep the promise of its name, then, must be one that is capable of ecologizing thought itself.35

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NOTES 1 Robyn Eckersley, Environmentalism and Political Theory: Toward an Ecocentric Approach (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 98. 2 Ibid., 99. 3 Ibid. Eckersley also suggests that the direction taken by the Frankfurt School’s ‘second generation’ (in particular Jürgen Habermas) has restricted the usefulness of critical theory for informing an ecological politics, especially insofar as Habermas has rejected the possibility of a ‘reconciliation with nature.’ Following Murray Bookchin, Eckersley thus notes that the incongruity of Habermas’s position with ecological politics stems from Habermas’s ‘theoretical break’ from the first generation of Frankfurt School theorists (see Murray Bookchin, ‘Finding the Subject: Notes on Whitebook and Habermas Ltd.,’ Telos 52 [1982]: 78–98). This view of Habermas is not in dispute here. 4 A good summary of the numerous criticisms of Adorno (including, but not limited to, the ones to be discussed here) by American commentators is to be found in Martin Jay, ‘Adorno in America,’ New German Critique 31 (Winter 1984): 158–60. For a defence of Adorno on this score, see Russell Berman, ‘Adorno’s Politics,’ in Adorno: A Critical Reader, ed. Nigel Gibson and Andrew Rubin (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 111. 5 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), 367 (hereafter ND). 6 As the claim that domination is rooted in reason suggests, however, the argument is intended as a critique of modern society more broadly, rather than simply fascism. While there are of course important differences, Adorno and Horkheimer nevertheless see disturbing similarities between fascist societies like Nazi Germany and liberal-democratic capitalist ones like the United States. 7 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1987), 32 (hereafter DE). 8 Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 1998), 22; emphasis in original. 9 For example, in a discussion of Rousseau, Paul de Man argues that ‘[t]o the extent that all language is conceptual, it always already speaks about language and not about things. The sheer metonymic enumeration of things ... is an entirely negative moment that does not describe language as it is or used to be at its inception, but that dialectically infers literal denomination as the negation of language. Denomination could never exist by itself although it is a constitutive part of all linguistic events. All language is lan-

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10 11

12 13 14 15 16 17

18 19 20 21 22 23

24 25 26

27 28

guage about denomination, that is, a conceptual, figural, metaphorical metalanguage.’ Paul De Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 152–3. DE 60. The story of Odysseus’s encounter with the cyclops is told in more detail on 65–8. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Subject and Object,’ in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978), 499. Ibid., 502. Ibid., 500. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 77 (hereafter AT). Gillian Rose, The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno (London: Macmillan, 1978), 11–12. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘The Idea of Natural History,’ trans. Bob Hullot-Kentor, Telos 60 (Summer 1984): 111. A similar argument is made in William Cronon, ‘The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,’ in Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: W.W. Norton, 1995). Adorno, ‘Natural History,’ 117; emphasis in original. Jarvis, Adorno, 47. Conceptual thinking is seen by Adorno as necessary, as ‘the coercion of thought is the medium of its deliverance’ (ND 48). Adorno, ‘Natural History,’ 111; on Adorno’s preference for the essay form, see Rose, Melancholy, 14–15. Adorno, ‘Natural History,’ 111. This term occurs frequently in the English translation of Negative Dialectics, in particular. Jameson suggests, however, that this rendering of Tauschverhältnis is among the translator’s ‘most urgent howlers’ and that a better translation would be ‘“exchange system” (very much as in “exchange value”).’ Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno, or, The Persistence of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 1990), x. Jarvis, Adorno, 27. Adorno elsewhere is highly suspicious of the search for the ‘origin’ (ND 155–6). Karl Marx, ‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,’ in Karl Marx: Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton (New York: Vintage, 1975), 353. As quoted in Jay, ‘Adorno in America,’ 157. Ibid., 161–5.

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29 I would like to thank Jonathan Warren for drawing my attention to the remarkable text cited here: Salman Rushdie, The Wizard of Oz (London: British Film Institute Publishing, 1992), 57. Rushdie also suggestively notes that Kansas is represented through simple geometric figures, that ‘home and safety are represented by such geometrical simplicity, whereas danger and evil are invariably twisty, irregular, and misshapen’ (21). One might also argue that through this representation of Kansas as both a place where nature is controlled through the imposition of geometric regularity and a place that is colourless and alienating (Dorothy is swept up by the tornado because she is trying to run away), the film restages the dialectic of enlightenment itself. 30 Shane Gunster, ‘A World of Difference: Adorno and Cultural Studies,’ p. 305 above. 31 Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute (New York: The Free Press, 1977), 58. 32 For a view of Adorno that rather emphasizes ‘the genuine moments of political substance in his work,’ see Berman, ‘Adorno’s Politics.’ Lambert Zuidervaart’s contribution to this volume shares a similar concern to see Adorno’s philosophy as intimately concerned with societal transformation. 33 Jameson, Late Marxism, 5. 34 Ben Agger, Gender, Culture, and Power: Toward a Feminist Postmodern Critical Theory (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1993) 150. Agger elsewhere seeks to defend Adorno against such charges, however: see Ben Agger, The Discourse of Domination: From the Frankfurt School to Postmodernism (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1992), 14–39. 35 Earlier versions of this chapter were presented at the 1999 meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association, and to the Acadia University Philosophy and Public Affairs Group in 2003. In addition to the helpful feedback received on both of those occasions, the paper has also benefited from comments by Asher Horowitz, Shane Gunster, Steven Hayward, and an anonymous reviewer solicited by the publisher. A somewhat different (and considerably longer) version is to be found as chapter 5 of my Denaturalizing Ecological Politics: Alienation from Nature from Rousseau to the Frankfurt School and Beyond (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005).

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Notes on Contributors

editors Donald A. Burke is a doctoral candidate in the Graduate Programme in Social and Political Thought, and a graduate diploma candidate at the Canadian Centre for German and European Studies, both at York University. He is completing a dissertation on German idealist aesthetics, Romanticism, and Modernism, focusing especially on Hegel’s Aesthetics and Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory. Colin J. Campbell is a doctoral candidate in the Graduate Programme in Social and Political Thought at York University. He is currently writing a dissertation on Georges Bataille, René Girard, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau concerning the intersections between the theory of religion and political theory. Kathy Kiloh is a doctoral candidate in the Graduate Programme in Social and Political Thought at York University, where she is writing a disseration entitled ‘Embodied Ethics and an Other Politics: Mimesis and Radical Passivity in Adorno and Levinas.’ Michael K. Palamarek is a doctoral candidate in the Graduate Programme in Social and Political Thought at York University and Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Brock University. He is currently preparing a dissertation on the dialectical connections between labour and language in Theodor Adorno and Mikhail Bakhtin. Jonathan Short is a doctoral candidate in the Graduate Programme in

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Social and Political Thought at York University. He is completing a dissertation on the social theory of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben that explores the themes of potentiality, subjectivity, and language. contributors Andrew Biro is Canada Research Chair in Political Ecology and Environmental Political Theory at Acadia University. He is the author of Denaturalizing Ecological Politics (University of Toronto Press, 2005) as well as numerous articles and book chapters on environmental politics and theory. Deborah Cook is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Windsor. She is the author of Adorno, Habermas, and the Search for a Rational Society (Routledge, 2004), The Culture Industry Revisited: Theodor W. Adorno on Mass Culture (Rowman and Littlefield, 1996), and The Subject Finds a Voice: Foucault’s Turn toward Subjectivity (Peter Lang, 1993). Samir Gandesha is Assistant Professor of Modern European Thought and Culture at Simon Fraser University. He is currently working on a book-length project on Adorno’s critique of Heidegger as well as coediting (with Lars Rensmann) Understanding Political Modernity: Comparative Perspectives on Hannah Arendt and Theodor W. Adorno. His work has also appeared in New German Critique, Philosophy and Social Criticism, Thesis Eleven, Theory, Culture & Society, The European Legacy, and Theory and Society and in a number of edited books. Shane Gunster is Assistant Professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. He is the author of Capitalizing on Culture: Critical Theory for Cultural Studies (University of Toronto Press, 2004). His work has also appeared in Cultural Critique, The Review of Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies, Fast Capitalism, and Television and New Media. Asher Horowitz is Professor of Political Science at York University. He is the author of Rousseau, Nature, and History (University of Toronto Press, 1987), co-author (with G. Horowitz) of ‘Everywhere They Are in Chains’: Political Theory from Rousseau to Marx (Nelson, 1988), co-editor (with T. Maley) of The Barbarism of Reason: Max Weber and the Twilight of Enlightenment (University of Toronto Press, 1994), co-editor (with G.

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Horowitz) of Difficult Justice: Commentaries on Levinas and Politics (University of Toronto Press, 2006), and author of ‘The Weak Messianic Power’: Ethics, History and Liberation in Levinas, the Frankfurt School and Benjamin (Duquesne University Press, forthcoming 2007/8). Pamela Leach is Assistant Professor of Political Studies and convenor of the Arts and Sciences at the Canadian Mennonite University. In addition to articles on Theodor W. Adorno and Hannah Arendt, her current research and recent publications focus critically on the political impacts of the security paradigm. She has published non-academic works in the fields of international development, prisoner advocacy, and environmental planning. Martin Morris is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. He is the author of Rethinking the Communicative Turn: Habermas, Adorno and the Problem of Communicative Freedom (SUNY Press, 2001). Asha Varadharajan is Associate Professor of English at Queen’s University. She is the author of Exotic Parodies: Subjectivity in Adorno, Said, and Spivak (University of Minnesota Press, 1995) and of published essays on the transnational university, multiculturalism and indigineity in Canada, working-class fictions, nomad thought, transnational feminism, narrative violence, and literary biographies of Eric Idle and Nick Hornby. She is currently at work on two books, Violence and Civility in the New World Order and Enchantment and Deracination: The Lure of Foreignness in Contemporary Cinema. Her writing and research encompass the biopolitics of citizenship, the globalization of culture, the conjunction of religion and violence, and the politics of representation in media and visual cultures. Lambert Zuidervaart is Professor of Philosophy, Institute for Christian Studies at the University of Toronto. His book publications include Social Philosophy after Adorno (Cambridge University Press, 2007), Artistic Truth: Aesthetics, Discourse, and Imaginative Disclosure (Cambridge University Press, 2004), Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory: The Redemption of Illusion (MIT Press, 1991), and The Semblance of Subjectivity: Essays in Adorno's Aesthetic Theory (MIT Press, 1997), co-edited with Tom Huhn.