INTRODUCTION

Art seems to speak to us. Anyone familiar with art will be familiar with the sensation that the artwork conveys something, and the feeling that what is conveyed is of significance. It gives us a desire to know—to “put our finger on”—just what it is the artwork has to say. An equally familiar experience is the ultimate futility of trying to give what the artwork conveys expression in our own words. We are invited, and ultimately rebuffed, by art. It refuses to enter into our language without remainder. One tempting response is to give the verdict that art merely seems to speak to us; it generates only a pretense of epistemic or cognitive value. Ultimately, one might be tempted to conclude, all the artwork has to offer is mere aesthetic stimulation.

Perhaps one of the enduringly valuable features of Adorno’s work on art is his refusal of this temptation. Art really does speak to us, Adorno claims, but in a highly complex and unusual way. What it seeks to convey resists complete expression in our concepts, in our language—but this is because what it seeks to convey is a critique of and an attack on our concepts. Artworks are true—and their truth is aimed against the falsity of our way of thinking, and designed to elude capture by that way of thinking.

On our common understandings of epistemology (the study of what it means for something to be true and how things come to known) and aesthetics (the study of artworks, their value, and how we react to that value), these two fields of inquiry are entirely distinct. The kinds of value in play are entirely different. The pleasure we find in, for example, listening to Beethoven’s String Quartet no. 16 in F Major seems to stand outside the question of whether that pleasure (or, more strangely still, that artwork) is true. Conversely, the value we find in the truth of statements concerning the world does not have any clear necessary relation to aesthetic value. Epistemology and aesthetics are distinct areas of inquiry—and we indeed find that they both have their own terms, and their own criteria of success. What it is to be true is not what it is to be aesthetically pleasing.

Given this, when I say that this book is an investigation into what Adorno understands truth to be, and how he understands truths to be produced, we might feel confident which of our two fields—epistemology and aesthetics, the study of knowledge and the study of art—this book should fall into. But this book is not only an investigation into epistemology; it is not even primarily an investigation into epistemology. It is an examination of Adorno’s work on both art and knowledge, on both what it is to be a true work of art and what it is to be a true work of philosophy. A full explanation of Adorno’s account of art is incomplete without a full explanation of his account of knowledge, and vice versa.

The deeper we enter into the topic of truth in Adorno, the broader it also becomes. Truth is produced by the mind coming to an understanding of the world, and how it stands in relation to that world. And so, before we understand what it means for something to be true, we need to understand how the mind relates to the world. In other words, we must have a conception of reason. It is in looking at Adorno’s understanding of reason and rationality that we can begin to see how truth could be entwined both with advanced philosophy and with “authentic” artworks.

Both reason and art, for Adorno, are historical—they are things that have come to be. Adorno finds the birth of reason and art in the distant past, close to the very beginning of human culture and society. They were both produced by the self-preserving cunning of a human organism faced with a terrifying world it desired to control. Adorno, in his investigation with Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment, found that reason was built on a refusal of the world. Reason rejects the particularity of objects—those qualities and properties unique to each object, and not found in any other—and engages the world only in terms of abstract universal qualities. We come to both think about and experience our world (and one another) in inflexible conceptual patterns. This allows us to better control them, to predict their behavior, and to feel that we have a complete knowledge of the world. Rather than relating to objects in their full particularity—in all the irreducibly particular qualities they hold out to us—we come to see them merely as tokens of types. Anything that resists this process, which concepts cannot straightforwardly subsume, becomes what Adorno calls “nonidentical” and concealed. “Nonidentity” resists the concept’s attempt to force it into abstract, preestablished patterns.

Our openness to the world, to its ability to surprise us and to refuse to fall into the conceptual patterns we force on it, is substantially lost. This loss is found in our relations to objects, to nature, to ourselves, and to one another. Modern life grows abstract, controlled, and cold. The openness to the world, to objects in their full particularity, which once underpinned all of our experience and thought, becomes “fugitive.” Largely exiled from reason, the main place this openness comes to take refuge is in art.

Truth is, ideally, knowledge of something external to us—of how the objects that our consciousness encounters are. But reason, for Adorno, is not primarily interested in how objects are. Reason is created in order to serve our self-preservation; and so it is primarily interested only in how objects can be controlled. And so the world as reason shows it to us is an appearance produced to facilitate control; and so we cannot trust reason alone to deliver true statements about the world and our relation to it. By being divorced from the impulses that took refuge in art, our reason increasingly moves away from proper contact with the world. We grow ever more adept at controlling our environment, and one another, and yet increasingly poor at knowing how they, and we, actually are. This kind of disconnection from the world, nature, and ourselves is not only an epistemic problem; it also means we are increasingly cut off from the needs and value of things, and increasingly cut off from knowledge of what is required for the true well-being of those things.

Ironically, it is the artwork where our main impulse to be open to objects as they actually are is nurtured. But that impulse is frustrated in the artwork, too—artworks are radically different from philosophy, from conventional rationality. They are, constitutively, mere appearances. And so, while they can grasp and exhibit the objects external to them, they cannot directly manipulate, investigate, or articulate that knowledge, as reason can. An attempt to directly communicate critical knowledge would lead to the artwork’s ceasing to be art, into its collapsing into philosophy or science. For this reason, art is not straightforwardly superior to reason. Reason increasingly fails to be in contact with its object; the artwork maintains this contact but cannot directly communicate it.

This shows us that reason and art, epistemology and aesthetics, are for Adorno deeply interrelated. They of course have a shared genealogy, as explored in Dialectic of Enlightenment. But they also form inverted pictures of each other’s strengths and weaknesses. Rationality allows us to form ever more complex ways of thinking about and investigating the world; but these innovations are coupled to a reason that dominates, rather than opens itself up to, particular objects. Art provides a refuge for openness to the particularity of objects; but, without directly engaging with the complex distortions of the rationality that underpins experience, the artwork has no clear way of articulating this knowledge to its audience.

Given that reason and art are each strong where the other is weak, it is not surprising that we find Adorno consistently claiming that both rational inquiry and art, accomplished properly, share features from each other. For example, Adorno notoriously claims that the measure of an artwork’s value is its “authenticity.” The authentic artwork accomplishes knowledge of “nonidentity,” and also criticizes and expresses the true structure of modern society. Authentic art is not accomplished by nonrational openness to the world; rather, artworks take on rational features in order to criticize rationality.

The rationality of artworks has as its aim opposition to empirical existence: The rational shaping of artworks effectively means their rigorous elaboration in-themselves. As a result they come into contrast with the world of the nature-dominating ratio, in which the aesthetic ratio originates, and become a work for-themselves. The opposition of artworks to domination is mimesis of domination. They must assimilate themselves to the comportment of domination in order to produce something qualitatively distinct from the world of domination. Even the immanently polemical attitude of artworks against the status quo internalizes the principle that underlies the status quo. ¹

There is a lot of complexity in this quotation, and in the course of this book I hope to unravel many of the perhaps puzzling terms Adorno employs. (“Mimesis,” for example, is a complex and elusive term I go on to disambiguate.) But what we can see, first of all, is that for Adorno the artwork cannot be truly understood—and its value not truly responded to—unless we also have a developed understanding of both the artwork’s own rationality and the critical relationship it stands in to rationality outside of the artwork. This places a very high demand on us as appreciators of art—but it also shows that the boundary between aesthetics and epistemology is porous, for Adorno. It is this admixture of rationality in the artwork that allows it, on Adorno’s account, to become true. Art is itself a kind of knowledge; more than this, it is also a criticism of how we normally go about trying to gain knowledge.

Just as the artwork and aesthetic response take on rationalized features in order to become eligible for being true, so too we find that reason, for Adorno, requires the addition of (broadly speaking) aesthetic elements. For Adorno, truth cannot be produced simply by following the structures of justification and entailment in rationality as we find it. This is because, as we have seen, reason as it currently stands is a controlling and world-refusing practice; it obscures, rather than fully divulges, the structure of the world. So a philosophy that was merely rational—which merely followed the rules of thought as we find them—would join in with this domination and occlusion of the world. This means that true philosophy must do more than follow the rules; it must bend and critique them in order to better get at the object of comprehension that has been distorted by them.

If we have to break or critique the rules, then we also need a justification for doing so. There needs to be a difference between incompetence (mere failures to use concepts in an appropriate way) and authentic philosophy (a principled refusal to use concepts in the accepted way, in order to successfully grasp the object). For Adorno, this justification comes not from reason as we find it, but from an openness to the object—a response to its particularity as we encounter it. This openness of response is made possible by “spontaneity,”² of a kind related to that openness which, in the case of art, allows for a more truthful relationship to the world around us. This spontaneous relationship informs us that concepts do not exhaust the nature of either the world or the people in it. We become aware of the existence of nonidentity and the failure of our concepts to grasp it.

This then leads us to need to accomplish something rather difficult. We must articulate in rational terms our experience and perception of the failure of rationality itself. In other words, we need to find some way to force reason into attacking itself and visibly displaying its own falsity. This leads Adorno to accentuate the formal and, as it were, aesthetic dimension of his own texts. The content of his texts becomes fused in an important way with their rhetorical form: “Dialectics—literally: language as the organon of thought—would mean to attempt a critical rescue of the rhetorical element, a mutual approximation of thing and expression, to the point where the difference fades…. In dialectics, contrary to popular opinion, the rhetorical element is on the side of content.”³

This tight relationship between form and content shows how, for Adorno, the practice of philosophy is not merely a matter of solving problems in our concepts as we find them, but is also a matter of producing a particular kind of experience in those who encounter it. Here again we see the boundary between art and aesthetic response (broadly understood) and philosophy being more porous than we might expect. A philosophical text’s being true is internally related to its having a fusion of its rhetorical form with its content, a feature more familiar from the philosophy of art. (Indeed Adorno’s claim above might bring to mind Cleanth Brooks’s work on the “Heresy of Paraphrase” in The Well-Wrought Urn.)

Both art and reason require an admixture of features of the other in order to aspire to “authenticity” and to produce true knowledge. True knowledge for Adorno is deeply related to the “nonidentical”—to those objects of experience that reason occludes. The key task is to make the nonidentical comprehensible or visible to reason—and we have seen that art and philosophy accomplish this task in part by becoming more rationalized and more aesthetically constructed, respectively.

“Nonidentity” is a deeply complex idea, about which many commentators disagree. What is certain is that nonidentity, by virtue of being something that concepts fail to subsume, is demonstrable proof that our way of thought is imperfect. It is proof that the world (of which we are a part) has qualities, needs, and value that our way of thinking misses out on and does violence to. If our way of thinking is wrong, so too might be our derivative ways of life. There are sources of value we increasingly neglect (and, indeed, Adorno saw the Holocaust as one example of a growing insensitivity to the value of human life itself). Coming to appreciate the existence of the nonidentical is a way of breaking through the illusory appearances generated by our concepts and coming to awareness of the harms our concepts make possible. In fixing the way we think, we might also fix the way we live.

As Adorno makes clear, both art and philosophy share as their central feature a striving to make nonidentity clear to us. And, as we have seen, in order to accomplish this task both art and philosophy must borrow from each other. In this book, I will elucidate and clarify some of the strategies that the artwork and the work of philosophy make use of in order to allow them to grasp and exhibit truth. This will lead us into novel arguments and exegetical findings on a number of scores. We will excavate some of Adorno’s deeper arguments (or, where Adorno is found to be entirely silent or incorrect, we will construct some of these arguments for ourselves), which bring into view precisely why Adorno found concepts to be falsifying, what he understood conceptuality and experience to be, and how these two positions jointly set a problematic of great complexity for Adorno’s understanding of truth.

In the course of these investigations, we will come to better understand Adorno’s account of philosophical texture (what he refers to as Gewebe) and what I will call the artwork’s aesthetico-logical processes of construction, and how these completely autonomous, blind processes of aesthetic and conceptual construction can become socially critical. These clarifications, and their entailments, will be of great value in coming to understand how some of Adorno’s more mysterious (or apparently contradictory) claims can fall out as comprehensible and true. They will show that the artwork, and the way in which the artwork is constructed, is deeply tied to social and conceptual problems.

On top of these investigations, we will finally come to an understanding of how Adorno understands experience of truth to be made possible by engagement with art or philosophy. We will find that there is a suitably unified account, in which the “performative” engagement of consciousness with the artwork, or the work of philosophy, will manipulate our use of concepts until they are forced to, in the course of this enactment, fail. This will give us a determinate and negative experience of the limitations of rationality, and solve the problem of communicating the falsity of rationality without having such communication falsified by rationality itself. This mechanism will be differentiated in the cases of art and philosophy; but it will also be sufficiently similar to be a unified account of the dependence of truth on performative engagement. This book does, I hope, provide a good many novelties and useful arguments in its approach to Adorno’s work on art, philosophy, and truth. But I understand the elaboration of his idea of performativity, and its role in the production of truth in art and philosophy, to be chief among this book’s contributions. (This idea of performance and performativity is a complex and novel one, with no clear answering term in English. This has forced me to borrow a term with some unhelpful preestablished connotations. Performativity, as I use the word, has no relevance to Austin’s or Butler’s use of the term or to performance studies.) It will bring us back to the idea that both art and philosophy—in their value, their truth, and the way in which they speak to us—borrow from each other, and are more deeply related than we perhaps suspect. The idea of performativity will help unlock just how it is that artworks speak to us, what it is they say, and how we might give it expression in our own words.

For Adorno art, philosophy, truth, and nonidentity all form a kind of mutually interpenetrating group. Insofar as we hope to comprehend one of the four of these terms, we are always led into discussion and investigation of the others. In this introduction, I have hoped to perhaps sketch out some of the very broad contours of these intimate interrelationships. There are, of course, many issues of deep complexity that arise as we turn to examine these interrelations further—not least of these will be the need to clarify what Adorno means by some of the basic terms in play. (What does Adorno mean by “truth,” as found in art and philosophy? What, exactly, is “nonidentity”?). I will turn to these matters in the book proper. But there is also an issue of rhetorical order in our investigation: If all of these four terms—“art,” “philosophy,” “truth,” “nonidentity”—are vital for the full comprehension of one another, where can we hope to start?

For Adorno, of course, the answer was that one does not “start” at all, in the sense of trying to find some foundational claim or position on which to build the rest of one’s philosophical understanding. Adorno infamously used “parataxis,” in which each sentence was intended to bear as much weight as any other; and the numbered sections or chapters of his books could (strictly speaking) be read in any order. This lead to his distinctive and difficult writing style. It also allowed Adorno to make often startling and valuable transitions in his analyses of various philosophical positions and cultural phenomena, moving across disciplinary boundaries and putting apparently unrelated kinds of evidence in conversation. But these kinds of shifts (and the kind of prose that facilitated them) rely on a fairly determinate, though often implicit, set of ideas about what it means for something to be true, about how our concepts might relate to the social world we live in, about how artworks relate to those concepts and that social world, about what counts as evidence and what does not, and so on.

In this book, it is these deeper questions I would like to uncover and examine. It is Adorno’s deeper position on these questions that can legitimate parataxis. As I am calling this deeper position into question, I feel justified in leaving Adorno’s rhetorical method to one side. But we are still left with the question of where to begin, nonetheless. Art, philosophy, truth, and nonidentity are all equally good starting points, and this book could be written from any one of them.

As you will see, my chosen starting point is epistemology. One of Adorno’s most beguiling claims is that art is a form of knowledge. Art speaks to us; and for Adorno, it says something deeply significant—significant philosophically, morally, and socially. In order to make sense of the claim that art expresses knowledge—expresses knowledge of nonidentity, no less—I have found it important to first clarify what we mean by “knowledge,” for Adorno. What does it mean to know? Why are our concepts so faulty, in his view? How do artworks, and how can we, undo or expose this faultiness? And how does nonidentity play into this picture, and what is it? In addressing these questions, we will gain a better grasp of Adorno’s general picture of concepts, of experience, and of the deep problems found in them that both art and philosophy will need to solve in order to make true knowledge possible.

Working through this question—of Adorno’s theory of knowledge and truth—will turn out to be quite demanding. Chapter 1 will first elucidate the genealogy that Adorno gave of the emergence of concepts. This account of the generation of conceptuality will be deeply important for the rest of our work, giving us a better understanding of Adorno’s metaphilosophical account of what concepts are and how they operate, and also of what the nature of experience is, for Adorno. Both art and philosophy are, for Adorno, processes that attain truth by intervening in and manipulating the conceptual structure of our experience. Cashing out Adorno’s genealogy of concepts, then, will clarify just how our experience can and must be conceptually mediated, and will begin to offer clues about how we should understand Adorno’s claims about aesthetic and philosophical truth.

Chapter 1 will also throw up a number of pressing philosophical problems. Adorno’s fragmentary treatment of these issues—of the emergence of conceptuality, of the role of society in determining how we conceptualize, how we think—leaves open a number of objections. It also leaves some spaces we will need to fill in for ourselves, in order to round out his account. Chapter 2 will be dedicated to addressing these issues, and giving us a better understanding of why truth is importantly bound up with social criticism and how the irrationality of our society is reciprocally reflected in, and reinforced by, the problems we find in our concepts and the developments we find in the arts.

With these elucidations made, we should have a good grasp of what reason is, for Adorno, how precisely it is entwined with sociohistorical problems, and what obstacles stand in the way of true experience and conceptualization of our world and ourselves. This then gives us a good position from which to understand how art and philosophy overcome these obstacles and make experience of the true possible. Chapters 1 and 2, then, serve to set the account of experience, of mediation, and of conceptuality, with which both art and philosophy must engage.

In chapter 3 we turn to see how, exactly, philosophy is held by Adorno to be able to overcome these obstacles. We begin by looking at Adorno’s unusual rhetorical method and his claim (quoted above) that rhetorical form becomes deeply entwined with the truth-value of philosophy. This importance of rhetorical form—which I term “texture” (after Adorno’s use of the term Gewebe)—is laid out and investigated here. While we find that Adorno’s philosophy texturally enacts the movement and failure of concepts in the course of trying to subsume and understand nonidentity, we will nonetheless see that we have not yet solved the problem of how faulty and distorting tools (concepts) can be used as a medium for the communication of the fact of their being so false and distorting. This leads us to chapter 4.

In chapter 4, I argue that Adorno has a consistent emphasis on the need for the text as we find it to be complemented by a “performance” (Durchführung) in consciousness, for the truth expressed by that text to emerge. Through a complex set of exegeses and arguments, I show that Adorno understands nonidentity to be graspable only through our performative enactment, in consciousness, of the movement and failure of concepts that is found expressed in the texture of the philosophical text. It is only the full interaction of the performative subject with the properly textured philosophical object that delivers an experience in which nonidentity is made palpable and the falsity of our way of reasoning (and derivative way of life) is made apparent.

Chapters 3 and 4, then, should give a new way into understanding Adorno’s account of truth, of conceptuality, of knowledge, and of performativity. This also serves to establish some of the important terminology and exposition that allow us to turn to the case of art. Adorno contends that art is a form of knowledge and an expression of the true. Now that we are confident in what Adorno understands knowledge, truth, and expression of the true to be, we can better understand his claim that art possesses and expresses truth. Chapter 5, the longest chapter of this book, works to show how what appear to be entirely epistemic and philosophical terms find clear use in understanding the artwork on Adorno’s account. Given that Adorno understands artworks to entirely “hermetically seal themselves off” from both society and epistemic issues more generally, this does of course require considerable argument and close reading. This will center on Adorno’s account of “aesthetic material,” “aesthetic construction,” and how these hermetically sealed areas can nonetheless be influenced by society through the account of mediation developed in chapters 1 and 2.

By the close of chapter 5, we will see that the artwork presents a kind of conceptually germane texture, just as the philosophical text does, which expresses the movement and failure of concepts. We will also find that it is the performative engagement of consciousness that allows for the artwork to generate a breakdown in the conceptual structure of the experience of the art appreciator. The resulting model of access to the true, as produced by performative engagement, will be found to be substantially unified with (if internally differentiated from) that found in philosophy. The key difference will be that the artwork accomplishes all of this indirectly, eschewing any direct intentional attempt to engage and criticize concepts. In examining this, we broach one of the most puzzling features of Adorno’s philosophy of art—his claim that artworks are “closed monads” that have no reference to the society external to them, but are nonetheless capable of knowing, critiquing, and expressing that society. In coming to an understanding of this position, we will develop a new understanding of Adorno’s account of artistic mimesis, artistic construction, and aesthetic analysis.

Chapter 5’s theoretical investigation into the truth of art will often confine itself to meta-aesthetic questions of the status of the parts of an artwork, of how the construction of an artwork might be sensitive to determination by socioepistemic matters, and so on. In chapter 6, as a counterbalance to this, I will look at two examples of how artworks, in their full particularity, can be profitably read and interpreted using Adorno’s theory of aesthetic truth. I first look at work from Adorno’s Nachlass on Beethoven and his strange contention that Beethoven’s work is Hegelian in substance. This allows us to see how Adorno was able to convincingly put his general remarks about art and its truth into conversation with the particular features of genuine and demanding artworks. Following from this, I turn to look at Proust. I find Adorno’s work on Proust unsatisfactory, and so move to show myself—through some original interpretive work—how Proust’s great novel can be profitably read in an Adornian manner and how it can also elucidate, and be elucidated by, Adorno’s position.