ABBREVIATIONS
| AT |
Theodor Adorno. Aesthetic Theory. Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. London: Continuum, 2004. |
| DE |
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. |
| MM |
Theodor Adorno. Minima Moralia. Translated by E. F. N. Jephcott. London: Verso, 2005. |
| ND |
Theodor Adorno. Negative Dialectics. Translated by E. B. Ashton. Abingdon: Routledge, 2006. Negative Dialektik: Jargon der Eigentlichkeit. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1997. All quotations from ND will provide two page references—for the relevant pages in the Ashton translation and the original German text, respectively. |
INTRODUCTION
1. AT 370, emphasis mine.
3. ND 56/66, emphasis mine.
1. MODELS OF EXPERIENCE
2. Peter Dews,
Logics of Disintegration: Post-Structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory (London: Verso, 1998), 225–227.
3. ND 63–64/71–72, 71–72/78–79; Theodor Adorno, “The Essay as Form,” trans. Bob Hullot-Kentor, in
The Adorno Reader, ed. Brian O’Connor (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 101, 110.
6. Deborah Cook,
Adorno on Nature (Durham: Acumen, 2011), 66–68.
7. Immanuel Kant,
Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996), 168, 181.
9. For
finite beings like us.
10. “We then say that the conditions for the
possibility of experience are such as simultaneously conditions for the
possibility of objects of experience.” Kant,
Critique of Pure Reason, 228.
12. “Thoughts without content are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind.” Kant,
Critique of Pure Reason, 107.
16. “To the savage the world in general is animate, and trees and plants are no exception to the rule. He thinks that they have souls like his own, and he treats them accordingly.” James George Frazer,
The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (London: MacMillan, 1963), 111.
17. “For the same principles which the magician applies in the practice of his art are implicitly believed by him to regulate the operations of inanimate nature; in other words, he tacitly assumes that the Laws of Similarity and Contact are of universal application and are not limited to human actions. In short, magic is a spurious system of natural law as well as a fallacious guide of conduct; it is a false science as well as an abortive art.” Ibid., 11.
21. Adorno understands the operation of concepts to necessarily entail a reciprocal relation between the subject and object. This is, for Adorno, a transcendental fact about the functional prerequisites for the operation of concepts. O’Connor gives a nicely concise account of this: Brian O’Connor,
Adorno’s Negative Dialectic: Philosophy and the Possibility of Critical Rationality (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004), 54–59. As such, concepts can only ever be “loosely” arbitrary, in the sense that the objects to which concepts apply at least minimally determine the nature and scope of those concepts.
23. Theodor Adorno,
Dialektik der Aufklärung: Gesammelte Schriften 3, ed. Rolf Tiedemann with Gretel Adorno, Susan Buck-Morss, and Klaus Schultz (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997), 32.
28. G. W. F. Hegel,
Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller with analysis of the text and foreword by J. N. Findlay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 58.
34. It is notable that Adorno makes the link between conceptual employment and self-preservation fully explicit repeatedly throughout his work. For example, ND 277/273, 389/382, and AT 14, 184, 320.
35. Adorno, of course, worked on Husserl’s work at Oxford, prior to joining Horkheimer in the United States and beginning to write the
Dialectic. This work constituted an abortive attempt at a manuscript on Husserl’s epistemology, which was later revised and published as
Against Epistemology: Studies in Husserl and the Phenomenological Antinomies.
Against Epistemology largely draws its references from the
Cartesian Meditations and the
Logical Investigations. Adorno also studied Husserl under Hans Cornelius, in his first attempt to complete his
Habilitation. For a very lucid look at Adorno’s persistent interest in Husserl across his career, see Ernst Wolff, “From Phenomenology to Critical Theory: The Genesis of Adorno’s Critical Theory from His Reading of Husserl,”
Philosophy and Social Criticism 32, no. 5 (2006): 555–572. Miller also gives a good account of some of Adorno’s more specific criticisms of Husserl’s work: Jared Miller, “Phenomenology’s Negative Dialectic: Adorno’s Critique of Husserl’s Epistemological Foundationalism,”
Philosophical Forum 40, no. 1 (2009): 99–125.
36. Edmund Husserl,
Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969), 40.
39.
It would be an interesting project, which I cannot pursue here, to examine if this genealogy of reason is not intended at least in part to function as a rebuff to the ahistorical eidetic structures Husserl enumerates. Husserl’s model of the primitive structures of intention posits the fundamental structures of intention as importantly continuous with the more sophisticated and complex intentional structures that are placed upon them. Cf. Husserl’s logical ordering of the pre-predicative and predicative forms of experience and the relation between their associated eidetic structures in Experience and Judgement. Edmund Husserl, Experience and Judgement: Investigations in a Genealogy of Logic, rev. and ed. Ludwig Landgrebe, trans. James S. Churchill and Karl Ameriks (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973). Interestingly, Adorno rejects this in favor of an agonic, Hegelian model in which the primitive layer of intention, as well as its associated sense, is canceled and preserved, in bringing forth an opposed model of intention, namely, the dialectical concepts with which we are familiar. Adorno’s model quite directly rejects Husserl’s more “generative” conception of the increasing complexity of continuous intentional structures, in favor of a discontinuous model in which conceptual cognition proper is created in spite of primitive forms of intentional experience and breaks with those structures.
There is also the deeper problem that Adorno identifies with Husserl’s attempt to discover the basic structures of intention, namely, that this presumes that eidetic structures can be reliably extracted from their phenomena while retaining the capacity to seamlessly describe the features of those phenomena. Adorno, by contrast, claims that the phenomenal and the eidetic are contradictory: the former is irreducibly particular, the latter irredeemably abstract. Theodor Adorno, Against Epistemology: A Metacritique: Studies in Husserl and the Phenomenological Antinomies, trans. Willis Domingo (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), 86, 105–106. As such, phenomena can only be known through structures in a problematic fashion, as all structures (whether eidetic in the Husserlian sense or conceptual in the Adornian sense) abstract away from and distort the particulars (and experiences) that come under them.
40. There are clear resonances here between Adorno’s attempt to ground conceptual structures in deeper structures of pragmatic desire and impulse and Fichte’s own account of the emergence of reason. For a broad account of some of these similarities, see James Clarke and Owen Hulatt, “Critical Theory as a Legacy of Post-Kantianism,”
British Journal of the History of Philosophy 22, no. 6 (2014): 1047–1068.
2. THE INTERPENETRATION OF CONCEPTS AND SOCIETY
4. Immanuel Kant,
Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Lewis W. Beck (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1959), 448. English translation of
Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten.
8. Assuming that they employ the concept consistently. Adorno is not claiming that anyone who makes use of the concept of freedom will run into Kant’s difficulty—less talented philosophers will obscure the difficulty, or fail to follow through the logic of the concept until they encounter the problem in question.
9. It must not, of course, be forgotten that Adorno understands conceptual problematics as sociohistorically sensitive. As such, the “universality” he seems to appeal to is not atemporal, but indexically linked to a given period.
10. This is intimated in Adorno’s analysis of Kant on freedom. The incoherence that arose in the relation between freedom and causality is attributed to the irruption of bourgeois problematics into those concepts, rather than a dialectically inevitable contradiction internal to those concepts. Adorno does not have a Hegelian position in which philosophy is driven
entirely by the ongoing elaboration of the autonomous problematic internal to concepts.
11. DE 27; see also 7, 10, 11.
12. DE 10, emphasis mine.
15. The problematic nature of this account lies in Adorno’s rather free use of “nonidentity.” While his epistemological account of nonidentity is well grounded and cashed out extensively in both Hegelian and Kantian terms (among others), Adorno intends to transfer rationality’s intolerance of the nonidentical (that which “does not fit” under concepts) to social intolerance of human difference. While intriguing, this link is never expounded by more than allusive terms, and remains, in my view, one of the more intractable features of his work. Cashing out some of the detail of how we can meaningfully term the epistemological employment of concepts as morally harmful is more or less beyond the purview of this book, but I will provide some foundations to what Adorno may have had in mind in chapter 3.
16. Rolf Tiedemann brings this out: “Abstraction is untruth that is nevertheless true. Untrue, it deceives about the very things it depends on; full concretion. True, it is the precise expression of the fact that the concrete humans of commodity society are being swindled.” Rolf Tiedemann, “Concept, Image, Name: On Adorno’s Utopia of Knowledge,” in
The Semblance of Subjectivity, ed. Tom Huhn and Lambert Zuidervaart (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), 123–146, at 131. Concepts, while being delusive abstractions caused by social processes, nonetheless have a normative surplus that is capable of reflecting upon their grounds.
20. Cf. “In an individualistic society, the general not only realizes itself through the interplay of particulars, but society is essentially the substance of the individual.” MM 17.
21. Benzer summarizes this aspect of Adorno’s thought and his occasional failures in effecting it very well. See particularly Matthias Benzer,
The Sociology of Theodor Adorno (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 86–125.
22. In Adorno’s later work (
Negative Dialectics and
Aesthetic Theory, most notably) this commitment reappears in a more theoretical register, with less emphasis on concrete social relations, and more emphasis on mediating relations that obtain between concepts and their social context. Adorno’s later works are almost wholly metatheoretical, and as such this is not surprising. The metatheoretical and sociological lines of thought are continuous, however, as concepts for Adorno are importantly constituted by their sociohistorical context.
23. DE 24, emphasis mine.
26. A particularly serious example is Adorno’s claim that the autonomous, formal properties of authentic artworks mimic and criticize social content. Dahlhaus brings out this problem very clearly, and I turn to his articulation of it in chapter 5.
28. For a longer look at this problem, and some suggestions on how to solve it in an ethical context, see my paper “Interpretation and Circularity” (forthcoming in
Constellations).
32. P. F. Strawson,
Individuals (London: Routledge, 1990), 59.
38. “One may imagine, finally, that variations in the pitch of the master-sound are correlated with variations in other sounds that are heard, in a way very similar to that in which variations in the position of the tuning-knob of a wireless set are correlated with variations in the sounds that one hears on the wireless.” Ibid.
40. While Strawson takes himself to have replaced space with “an analogy of space” (ibid., 75), and hence not the category of space itself, this is not particularly compelling. What Strawson presents us with is the category of space repositioned without reference to visuality or extension. He takes such an alteration to be a forfeiture of the concept—equipped with the distinction between arrays and sets, however, one can rather take it to be the same set, merely with radically altered determining relations holding in that set.
41. While Strawson’s example operates without the sense of vision, there is no reason why the presence of the sense of sight should prevent the formation of a sound-world consciousness. The privileging of vision in our epistemological schema is contingent—it is perfectly conceivable that the sense of sight could be entertained but marginalized, and seen as largely a source of pleasure rather than information (analogously to our present employment of our sense of smell or taste).
42. Honneth brings this out nicely: Axel Honneth,
The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts (Cambridge: Polity, 2005), 96.
43. Axel Honneth,
Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea, with Judith Butler, Raymond Geuss, Jonathan Lear, and Martin Jay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 57.
44. Honneth draws extensively on the assertion that “All reification is a forgetting” (DE 191) to try to motivate this reading.
45. This clash, of Honneth’s placid assurance that a positive recognitive picture can be extracted from Adorno’s work with the rebarbative apophatic ethics of Adorno’s work itself, is nicely brought out in Bert van den Brink, “Damaged Life: Power and Recognition in Adorno’s Ethics,” in
Recognition and Power, ed. Bert van den Brink and David Owen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 79–99. Van den Brink is perhaps more optimistic than I concerning the usefulness of seeking recognitive structures in Adorno’s work at all, but convincingly finds a method of marrying recognition to Adorno’s overall normative negativism by redescribing recognition as a “moment of responsiveness to otherness” (ibid., 80), which makes momentarily clear the disconnection between extant social structures and true human flourishing.
46. Honneth,
Struggle for Recognition, 62–63.
49. “In the bourgeois economy the social work of each individual is mediated by the principle of the self…. But the more heavily the process of self-preservation is based on the bourgeois division of labour, the more it enforces the self-alienation of individuals, who must mold themselves to the technical apparatus body and soul.” DE 23.
53. Georg Lukács,
History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Merlin Press, 1971), 54.
54. Alfred Sohn-Rethel,
Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology, trans. Martin Sohn-Rethel (London: MacMillan, 1978), 48–49.
56. Adorno, in writing to Benjamin, notes that he has received an “extremely stimulating letter” from Sohn-Rethel who “has arrived at certain conclusions which are remarkably similar to my own current efforts.” Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin,
The Complete Correspondence, 1928–1940 (Cambridge: Polity, 1999), 162.
59. Honneth,
Reification, 58–60.
61. Lukács,
History and Class Consciousness, 193.
62. “It is the utility of a thing for human life that turns it into a
use-value.” Karl Marx,
Value: Studies, trans. and ed. Albert Dragstedt (London: New Park, 1976), 7.
63. “The fact that the substance of the exchange-value is something utterly different from and independent of the physical-sensual existence of the commodity or its reality as a
use-value is revealed immediately by its exchange relationship. For this is characterized precisely by the
abstraction from the
use-value. As far as the exchange-value is concerned, one commodity is, after all, quite as good as every other, provided it is present in the correct proportion. Hence, commodities are first of all simply to be considered as
values, independent of their exchange-relationship or from the
form, in which they
appear as exchange-values.” Marx,
Value: Studies, 8–9.
64. Karl Marx,
Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (Bloomsbury: Swan Sonnenschein, 1908), 42.
65. “The
social relationships of their labours are and appear consequently not as immediately social relationships of persons in their labours, but as objectified relationships of persons, or social relationships of objects. The first and most universal manifestation of the object as a social thing, however, is the metamorphosis of the product of labour into a commodity. The mysticism of the commodity arises, therefore, from the fact that the social determinations of the private labours of the private producers appear to them as social natural determinations of products of labour; from the fact, that is, that the social relationships of production of persons appear as social relationships of objects to one another and to the persons involved. The relationships of the private workers to the totality of social labour objectify themselves over against them and exist, consequently, for them in the forms of objects. To a society of commodity producers whose universally social relationship of production consists in their behaving toward their products as commodities (hence as values) and their relating their private labours to one another in this objective form as equal human labour, it is Christianity that is the most appropriate form of religion, with its cult of the abstract man—especially in its bourgeois development, Protestantism, Deism, etc.” Marx, Value: Studies, 37–38.
66. Susan Buck-Morss,
The Origin of Negative Dialectics (New York: Free Press, 1977), 144–145.
67. Theodor Adorno,
Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge: Polity, 1998), 11.
69. Hence “all reification is a forgetting.” DE 191.
71. “The whole which theory expresses is contained in the individual object to be analyzed. What links the two is a matter of substance: the social totality.” ND 47/57.
73. Marx,
Capital, 42–43.
74. Gillian Rose,
The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno (London: MacMillan, 1978), 46.
75. Rose,
The Melancholy Science, 48.
77. Adorno,
Beethoven, 43.
80. “We can no more save the absolute segregation of body and mind (which is tantamount to a secret supremacy of the mind) than we can save the idealistic hierarchy of data. Historically, in the evolutionary course of rationality and ego principle, the two have come into opposition to each other; yet neither is without the other. The logic of noncontradictoriness may fault this, but that logic is brought to a halt by the state of facts.” ND 196–197/197.
83. This will seem immediately fallacious. Intuitively, concrete particulars have determinate constitutions, the structures of which are closer in kind to some universals than others. However, one must bear in mind that primitive consciousness applies universals with a view to the complete subsumption of the object under the concept, the complete identity of the object with its concept. For universals of this kind, a particular can exhibit no aspect that recommends any universal other than the universal united to its whole particularity. The experience that these “absolute” universals make possible exhibits no fine-grained properties that could recommend the application of dialectical concepts. The transition to dialectical concepts (and its associated experience being furnished with conceptual distinctions, properties, and the like) is enforced by the consciousness.
84. O’Connor,
Adorno’s Negative Dialectic, 59–60.
86. For further clear examples of Adorno’s making use of thin determination, see ND 163/165, 82/89.
95. The correspondence between Adorno and Benjamin shows both Adorno’s (Adorno and Benjamin,
Complete Correspondence, 302) and Benjamin’s (Adorno and Benjamin,
Complete Correspondence, 293) use of this term in discussion with each other, as well as Benjamin’s approving compliment that Adorno’s work on Wagner has a “pregnant physiognomy” (Adorno and Benjamin,
Complete Correspondence, 257).
3. NEGATIVISM AND TRUTH
1. Adorno quite rightly denies that dialectical philosophy, for example, has a method (ND 144–145/148). This might lead one to suspect that Adorno’s philosophy cannot be articulated in a settled fashion, and therefore any conspectus of the sort I offered is culpably programmatic. As I will go on to show in this chapter, Adorno’s epistemological position entails that its
application to any given object cannot be anticipated in advance. But this is consistent with, and internal to, an articulable position on the nature of experience and the determinants of that experience.
2. Adorno takes Husserl to clearly instantiate problems intrinsic to all epistemologies and, accordingly, his critique of Husserl is in an epistemological register and couched in respectful terms. Heidegger, by contrast, is not merely held to have epistemological shortcomings; Adorno’s criticism of Heidegger is drenched in a tone of moral repulsion. One needs only to read three pages into the introduction to
Jargon of Authenticity before the following declamation is made: “Fascism was not simply a conspiracy”—although it was that—but it was something that came to life in the course of a powerful social development. Language [the language of authenticity that Heidegger epitomizes] provides it with a refuge. Within this refuge a smoldering evil expresses itself as though it were salvation.” Theodor Adorno,
The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. Knut Tarnowki and Frederic Will (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), 5.
3.
Largely found, of course, in Theodor Adorno, Against Epistemology: A Metacritique: Studies in Husserl and the Phenomenological Antinomies, trans. Willis Domingo (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), but also found continuously throughout Adorno’s work, for example, ND 69–70/77–78, 78/85–86, and Theodor Adorno, “Husserl and the Problem of Idealism,” Journal of Philosophy 37, no. 1 (1940): 5–18.
4. Adorno,
Against Epistemology, 1.
5. Adorno here, perhaps, sees in Husserl a continuation of that which he found valuable in the work of Hans Cornelius, his doctoral supervisor. Buck-Morss describes the core of Hans Cornelius’s work in this way: “To him the philosophical ‘subject’ was not a uniform, transcendental universal, but a unique living individual…. All knowledge was based on prior experience, hence it was never complete; philosophy was no closed system, and there were no ontological absolutes…. This amounted to the abrogation of a philosophical first principle (
prima philosophia) and it was one of the earliest and most constant tenets of Adorno and Horkheimer as well.” Buck-Morss,
The Origin of Negative Dialectics (New York: Free Press, 1977), 8. That there were limits to Cornelius’s “abrogation of a philosophical first principle” Adorno learned swiftly enough when his doctoral dissertation on the transcendental unconscious was quietly encouraged to be abandoned. Husserl’s method can be understood as compelling to Adorno just because it (until Husserl’s later work, at least) provides an avenue for philosophy free of rigorous transcendental method, in a fashion that Cornelius’s neo-Kantianism would not quite permit.
6. Adorno, “Husserl and the Problem of Idealism,” 11.
7. Adorno,
Against Epistemology, 4–5.
15. ND 406/398, emphasis mine.
17. This term also has connotations of the weave and weft of fabrics; Adorno’s employment of this term is presumably intended to connote the overdetermination of phenomena by the conceptual “constellation” that constitutes them.
23. Paddison develops this aspect of Adorno’ s account in an intriguing fashion in relation to Hindemith. Hindemith provided a systematic account of musical composition that picked out “natural” tonality. Max Paddison,
Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 67. While this provided an appreciable statement of the mores of traditional composition at that time, musical developments quickly demonstrated that musical tonal relations were in fact temporally determined and in flux (ibid., 93). Intriguingly, Adorno also extends this sociohistorically defeasible nature to analytic truths (ND 40/50). Adorno understands analytic truths not to derive their normative force from their autonomous nature simpliciter, but rather to be “peeled out of their variables.” This amounts to the claim that analytic truths are produced by their sociohistorical context; however, this context fails to change in the relevant fashion, and so analytic truths have (and will remain for the conceivable future) true. (This fixity is presumably bound up with the fixed features of all sociohistorical contexts—that is, the fixed corporeal and cognitive makeup of human beings.) Even the analytic remains temporally defeasible, then, for Adorno.
24. “Dialectics is the consistent sense of nonidentity…. What we differentiate will appear divergent, dissonant, negative for just as long as the structure of our consciousness obliges it to strive for unity: as long as its demand for totality will be its measure for whatever is not identical with it. This is what dialectics holds up to our consciousness as a contradiction…. Contradiction is nonidentity under the rule of a law that affects the nonidentical as well. This law is not a cogitative law, however. It is real…. Its agony is the world’s agony raised to a concept.” ND 5–6/17–18. Contradiction is constituted by the law of the external world, which also compels thought to “strive for unity,” that is, a seamless, wholly conceptual control of the world.
26. We saw this in Adorno’s account of Beethoven.
27. This sentence’s being true is compatible with the self-preserving nature of concepts. We might explain the agreement of simple claims like this with the way the world is in terms of self-preservation. Assertions concerning color, mass, and so on are sufficiently basic that the interest of self-preservation, as relevant to concept formation, does not introduce any delusive relationship to the object—it instead provides a satisfactory window onto how the object in fact is.
34. For example, ND 86–87/92–93.
35. Theodor Adorno, “The Actuality of Philosophy,” trans. Benjamin Snow, in O’Connor,
The Adorno Reader, 31–32.
45. ND 64/72, emphasis mine.
47. “Es folgt aber nicht rein aus diesem: die kritische Reflexion solcher Produktivität des Denkens ist selbst ein Inhalt der Philosophie.” ND 64/72. The “Produktiviät des Denkens”—translated by Ashton as “cogitative productivity,” literally “productivity of thought”—refers to the thought of agents, rather than impersonal bodies of thought, due to the reference of the term “Denkens” to thought in the process of being executed. The far more natural term for impersonal thought would be
Gedanke.
48. To reiterate what I pointed out in the introduction, the term “performativity” is not intended to have any linkage or resonance with Austin’s or Butler’s use of the term. Nor is it intended to be assonant with the idea of performativity in Theatre Studies.
4. TEXTURE, PERFORMATIVITY, AND TRUTH
1. “Aware that the conceptual totality is mere appearance, I have no way but to break immanently, in its own measure, through the appearance of total identity.” ND 5/17.
2. ND 5/17, emphasis mine.
3. ND 157/159–160, emphasis mine.
4. ND 406/398, emphasis mine.
5. ND 154–155/157, emphasis mine.
7. An example of this is Adorno’s attempt to view mass culture “not merely as a result of the encompassment of life in its totality” (MM 214) but rather as following directly from the development of artistic technique and expression at its highest levels. Wagner’s very movement into pure expression at the same time, due to a “historical tendency,” furthers the process of subjugating artworks to structures of mass culture. “The more masterfully an artist expresses himself, the less he has to ‘be’ what he expresses, and the more what he expresses, indeed the content of subjectivity itself, becomes a mere function of the production process” (MM 214). The artwork’s dominance over its materials, as necessitated by the submission to the demands of expression, in turn begins the processes of subjugating the particularity of aesthetic materials to processes, which Adorno sees as culminating in the production of mass culture. This problem of aesthetic form—its oppression of its materials—will go on to be important in chapter 5.
9. Correlatively, of course, one will require further elucidation on what precisely constitutes this performance, and how it relates to Adorno’s dialectical method.
10. This, of course, is an assertion concerning Adorno’s paradigmatic method. While Adorno, especially in his mature work, was capable of carrying this approach off, Adorno’s execution of this method did not always live up to this standard.
12. ND 56/66, emphasis mine.
13. Theodor Adorno, “The Essay as Form,” trans. Bob Hullot-Kentor, in
The Adorno Reader, ed. Brian O’Connor (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 101.
16. Adorno, “The Essay as Form,” 110.
17. Michael Inwood,
A Hegel Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 216.
18. Adorno, “The Essay as Form,” 110.
19. G. W. F. Hegel,
Wissenschaft der Logik II (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986), 551. I here use Angelica Nuzzo’s translation: Angelica Nuzzo, “Thinking Being: Method in Hegel’s Logic of Being,” in
A Companion to Hegel, ed. Stephen Houlgate Michael Baur (Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 132.
22. It is already clear that they cannot be united merely by the consciousness noting what happens to occur in the text—just as the rhetorical form is itself a philosophical content over and above the content of which it is composed (ND 56/66), so too is the cognitive performance itself termed a philosophical content over and above the philosophical argumentation it is engaging (ND 64/72).
28. See particularly DE 71–72.
30. ND 37/47, translation modified.
31. Theodor Adorno, “The Actuality of Philosophy,” trans. Benjamin Snow, in O’Connor,
The Adorno Reader, 32, emphasis mine.
32. Theodor W. Adorno,
Lectures on Negative Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Cambridge: Polity, 2008), 73–74.
34. I am not here dealing with Adorno’s “logical” argument for nonidentity, namely, his claim that predication displays the inevitable nonidentity of any conceptual relation to the world, given the nonidentity between object and predicate. I have given cause, in chapter 3, to distrust this argument.
35. Although there will be important points of differentiation, as the following chapter will make clear, I am not advocating the reduction of aesthetics and art to philosophy.
5. AESTHETIC TRUTH CONTENT AND OBLIQUE SECOND REFLECTION
2.
Adorno complains of Lukács, “What looks like formalism to him, really means the structuring of the elements of a work in accordance with laws appropriate to them, and is relevant to that ‘immanent meaning’ for which Lukács yearns, as opposed to a meaning arbitrarily superimposed from outside, something he objectively defends while asserting its impossibility.” Theodor Adorno, “Reconciliation Under Duress,” in Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso, 2007), 153. Lukács’s refusal to properly follow the formal properties of artworks entails the misconstrual of what political power and meaning the art has in its formal composition. Somewhat intriguingly, Adorno develops his criticism of the formal qualities of Brecht’s work in the opposite direction. He does not castigate Brecht’s attempt to interpolate political content, but rather claims that the falsity and crudity of Brecht’s politics negatively impact on the formal qualities of his work: “His work, with its often patent weaknesses, would not have had such power, if it were not saturated with politics…. The task of immanent criticism, which alone is dialectical, is rather to synthesize assessment of the validity of his forms with that of his politics…. Where Brecht distorts the real social problems discussed in his epic drama in order to prove a thesis, the whole structure and foundation of the play itself crumbles.” Theodor Adorno, “Commitment,” in Aesthetics and Politics, 186. Although he approaches Brecht’s failings in a different fashion, his criticism nonetheless in the end turns about a question of the formal failings of Brecht’s work. Brecht subjects the content of his art to arbitrarily overarching formal structures (the need to visibly “prove” a thesis); and this form is imposed without due care, as the facts that Brecht musters in order to satisfy this goal are in fact resistant to being employed in this fashion.
3. Adorno, “Reconciliation Under Duress.”
5. “Among the sources of error in the contemporary interpretation and critique of artworks the most disastrous is the confusion of the intention, what the artist supposedly wants to say, with the content [
Gehalt] of the work.” AT 197.
7. Adorno,
Lectures on Negative Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008), 74.
10. Hence the claim that “intention reduces it to identity.” Continuous experience, the precondition of the exercise of determinate intentions, presupposes the mediation of concepts in order to make experience continuous. Adorno returns to this thought elsewhere in claiming that “The correlative of intention is reification.” AT 354.
21. Cf. AT 96, 135, 137, 162; AT 237, 251, respectively.
24. Nicholas Jolley,
Leibniz (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005), 68–69.
31. Adorno often takes pleasure in locating the value of art in its complete refusal or betrayal of its author’s intentions. For example, on the poetry of Stefan George, it is the very failures of the artwork to realize its object that disclose the truth of that artwork: “George’s self-staged aristocratic posturings contradict the self-evident superiority that they postulate and thereby fail artistically; the verse ‘And—that we lack not a bouquet of myrrh’ is laughable, as is the verse on the Roman emperor who, after having his brother murdered, gently gathers up the purple train of his toga. The brutality of George’s social attitude, the result of failed identification, appears in his poetry in the violent acts of language that mar the purity of the self-sufficient work after which George aspired. In programmatic aestheticism, false social consciousness becomes the shrill tone that gives it the lie.” AT 323.
32. This of course carries the caveat that Adorno is referring to
authentic or
successful art (these categories being coextensive, for Adorno). It
is possible for artworks to incorporate heteronomous content intentionally, directly realize the intentions of the artist, and so on. But such events can only, in Adorno’s view, be to the detriment of the artwork’s status as art at all. There is the justified suspicion that Adorno is simply stipulating art of the kind he enjoys as “authentic,” and his accompanying definitions therefore fall prey to the “no true Scotsman” fallacy. However, as this chapter will show, this is uncharitable. Adorno is forced to posit a very specific kind of aesthetic organization and production as capable of producing artworks that evade the delusive influence of conceptuality, and artworks that fall below the level of formal rigor required will thereby forfeit any chance of producing an experience of the nonidentical. (This does, however, leave open for now the question of why the truth of artworks should be imbricated with their aesthetic quality.)
34. “Aesthetic materials” comprise both formal and nonformal items, for example, the use of a given note in musical composition is an aesthetic material. Formal features can also become aesthetic materials, as in the modernist reappropriation of compositional norms for use in parody, recontextualization, and so on. These formal structures (which once served as external compositional norms) now reappear in the artwork themselves as content.
36. Most often translated by Hullot-Kentor as “enigma”: “All artworks—and art altogether—are enigmas; since antiquity this has been an irritation to the theory of art.” AT 160.
37.
As ever, there is disconnection between the analogy and analogue. Riddles and Vexierbilde have a stronger relationship to an originating intention than artworks do. It is not plausible to think that Dali, in painting The Great Paranoiac, saw the picture puzzle simply emerge from the formal problematic of his materials. Rather, the originating idea was put to work to bend the aesthetic materials to making it possible. On the other hand, the fact remains that both riddles and picture puzzles are incapable of realizing themselves if their aesthetic materials do not have the requisite formal properties. While a painting that depicts a house, or a dolorous feeling, can be realized in many ways, a duck-rabbit is only constructable if there is some way in which the depiction of rabbits and ducks formally allows for the requisite ambiguity. If, counterfactually, ducks and rabbits had figures that were not amenable to the construction of a picture puzzle, no picture puzzle could be produced. This tight relationship between the existence of a riddle or picture puzzle and the intrinsic formal qualities of its materials does neatly illustrate Adorno’s theory of artistic creation.
Of course, this process of attempting to form a unified aesthetic whole is not necessarily completable. In fact, Adorno holds that the seamless aesthetic whole has been rendered impossible by sociohistorical developments. Therefore, any “authentic” attempt at aesthetic unity will necessarily fail, and display its failure in its incapability to form a seamless whole: “As little as art is to be defined by any other element, it is simply identical with form. Every other element can be negated in the concept of form, even aesthetic unity, the idea of form that first made the wholeness and autonomy of the artwork possible. In highly developed modern works, form tends to dissociate unity, either in the interest of expression or to criticize art’s affirmative character.” AT 186.
39. Jolley,
Leibniz, 66–67.
43. It is a very similar line of thought that leads Adorno to denounce the capacity of artworks to give pleasure and relief. This further form of “guilt,” which I will not go into in detail, concerns the artwork’s “feign[ing] the factual existence of reconciliation.” AT 177. The experience of the nonidentical afforded by philosophy was a “utopian” moment of cognition for Adorno. Similarly, the authentic artwork affords a vision of a utopian state of things, but is thereby culpable. Art—constitutively semblance, unlike philosophy—
resembles utopian organization of life, and thereby redounds to the good reputation of the false world that made this artwork’s utopian vision possible: “That is the melancholy of art. It achieves unreal reconciliation at the price of real reconciliation.” AT 68. (Philosophy, by contrast, reveals utopian potential in cognition; and this comprehension of the revisability of all normative and conceptual structures is critical, insofar as society is revealed as revisable, and hence disposable in the name of a more rational social organization.)
47. “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.” AT 370.
48. “The work is no longer to be the result of any pregiven form; flourishes, ornament, and all residual elements of an overarching formal character are to be renounced: The artwork is to be organized from below.” AT 142.
50. Gregg M. Horowitz, “Art History and Autonomy,” in
The Semblance of Subjectivity, ed. Tom Huhn and Lambert Zuidervaart, 259–287 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), 274, emphasis mine.
57. “No universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leading from the slingshot to the megaton bomb. It ends in the total menace which organized mankind poses to organized men, in the epitome of discontinuity. It is the horror that verifies Hegel and stands him on his head.” ND 320/314.
63. I do not have time to enter into this, but I should like to note that this explains Adorno’s assertion that form and content are not separable or unified, but rather dialectically interrelated (AT 194). The formal properties of aesthetic materials, and hence the resultant artwork, are nothing but the content of the aesthetic materials, appearing as form in the aesthetic nexus.
65.
I have presupposed throughout that Adorno understands artworks to provide specific criticism. There is another reading, which contends that Adorno conceives of the artwork as socially critical merely by virtue of visibly rejecting, or standing apart from, its social context. For example, Horowitz claims, “Autonomous art criticizes society just by being there because the ‘there’ where it is is no ‘proper’ place.” Horowitz, “Art History and Autonomy,” 264. The lack of propriety that art’s existence manifests is its failure to provide anything of use (for supporting evidence for this reading, see AT 321). The existence of an artifact or field of human endeavor that visibly fails to have instrumental worth amounts, it is claimed, to a criticism of a society organized according to the demands of instrumental reason. Skees also takes up this theme, terming the autonomy of the artwork an “image of freedom.” Murray W. Skees, “Kant, Adorno, and the Work of Art,” Philosophy and Social Criticism (October 2011): 17. This “image” is achieved through the artwork’s providing an “example of freedom from external determination.” Skees, “Kant, Adorno, and the Work of Art,” 17.
The line of thought exemplified by Skees and Horowitz is deeply problematic. As the artwork’s status as critique amounts to its failure to successfully provide anything germane to instrumental reason and social organization, two questions arise. The first of these is a worry over what serves to differentiate art from trash; all manner of phenomena fail to be useful—like cigarette butts, for example—but it would seem odd to thereby term them “critical.” Critique has an object and has a content or argument. Failure to provide use seems too thin to fulfill this minimal condition. The second, related problem is that this theory of art’s critical status does not seem to encompass the specificity of art’s status as critical. Which is to say, Adorno’s analyses disclose a belief that the artwork is critical in a way specific to it (cf. AT 122). The theory of criticism through disutility seems too generic, as it can be satisfied by any number of objects or cultural practices.
68. Carl Dahlhaus, “The Musical Work of Art as a Subject of Sociology,” in
Schoenberg and the New Music, trans. Derrick Puffett and Alfred Clayton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 243. Cited in Max Paddison, “Immanent Critique or Musical Stocktaking? Adorno and the Problem of Musical Analysis,” in
Adorno: A Critical Reader, ed. Nigel Gibson and Andrew Rubin (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 209–233, at 210.
69. Dahlhaus, “The Musical Work of Art as a Subject of Sociology,” 244. Cited in Paddison, “Immanent Critique,” 223.
70. Paddison, “Immanent Critique,” 222–223, emphasis mine.
71. Paddison,
Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 147, emphasis mine.
72. To be exact, it is the conflict between mimesis and rationality that Paddison introduces. However, as demonstrated by their respective association with expression and construction, it is mimesis that serves to open the artwork to the extra-aesthetic, whereas rationality (as expressed in construction and aesthetic technology) serves to motor the ongoing, autonomous development of aesthetic processes. There is a deeper sense in which the two poles mediate each other (that the processes of rationality are crystallized productions of mimesis, and that mimesis is only possible by means of these rational crystallizations). Cf. Paddison,
Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music, 146. However, for the purposes of this analysis, I will treat mimesis and rationality as separable, with the implicit caveat that, despite being distinct, they are ultimately moments in a dialectical whole.
74. There is also a more developed defense of this position on aesthetic mimesis, which I cannot give here for reasons of space. In short, it would appear that interpreting mimesis as being the artwork’s intentional, as it were, attempt to make itself like the world would result in a violation of the artwork’s autonomy, as well as the impossibility of aesthetic construction. The artwork would become a mélange of mimetically imported social content and autonomous aesthetic content—this would be in clear violation of Adorno’s claim that nothing can appear in the artwork without first being reduced to the artwork’s own categories: “Object in art and object in empirical reality are entirely distinct. In art the object is the work produced by art, as much containing elements of empirical reality as displacing, dissolving, and reconstructing them according to the work’s own law. Only through such transformation… does art give empirical reality its due.” AT 335. This self-same reduction to the artwork’s own autonomous categories prevents the appearance in the artwork of any mimetically imported content. One cannot read mimesis in this way, then, as it does not cohere with Adorno’s theory of the artwork.
75. Paddison,
Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music, 147.
76. “It is the sociohistorical content of the work mediated through its form which Adorno identifies, as far as one can understand him here, as the truth content of the work, and which is thus the
telos of his hermeneutics.” Paddison, “Immanent Critique,” 223.
78. Paddison, “Immanent Critique,” 224.
79. AT 363, emphasis mine.
85. AT 394, emphases mine.
89. Presuming the artwork and philosophical text are contemporaneous.
90. AT 175, emphases mine.
98. This equivalence, between the determining structures of experience and a given medium, was demonstrated at length in the case of philosophy (see chapters 3 and 4). As both philosophy and art are subject to the same determining influences, there is no need to fashion a new argument for the case of art; the argument concerning philosophy can be taken as applying in this case also.
6. BEETHOVEN, PROUST, AND APPLYING ADORNO’S AESTHETIC THEORY
4. Adorno,
Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), 11.
15. Theodor Adorno,
In Search of Wagner, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Verso, 2005), 21.
16. Adorno,
Beethoven, 44.
20. Most significantly, AT 83, 135, 175, 196; ND 55/64, 373/366, 374/367, 378/371.
21. Adorno also very briefly touches on Proust in
Meine stärkste Eindrücke 1953. Theodor Adorno,
Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 20, bk. 2, Vermischte Schriften, vol. 2, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, with the cooperaation of Gretel Adorno, Susan Buck-Morss and Klaus Schultz (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997), 734. This finds Adorno reconfirming Proust’s “central role” in his intellectual life, but however largely replicating the observations on Proust found in the two main essays.
22. Theodor Adorno,
Notes to Literature, vol. 1, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 174–175.
23. Marcel Proust,
Swann’s Way, book 1,
Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff (London: Penguin, 2000), 176.
25. Marcel Proust,
The Guermantes Way, vol. 3,
In Search of Lost Time, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, rev. D. J. Enright (London: Vintage, 2000), 226–231.
26. Adorno,
Notes to Literature, 1:178–179.
27. This illustration can be seen in Susan Buck-Morss,
The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), 100, titled “Fashionable People Represented in Public by Their Accroutements.”
29. Adorno,
Notes to Literature, 1:176.
30. The scene opens with Swann climbing what is, from the point of view of the description, an inhumanly colossal staircase, at the portals of which on each floor the day-to-day inhabitants stand at attention: “On the despicable, enormous staircase which Swann was at the moment climbing, on either side of him, at different levels, before each anfractuosity made in its walls by the window of the porter’s lodge or the entrance to a set of rooms, representing the departments of indoor service which they controlled, and doing homage for them to the guests, a gate-keeper, a major-domo, a steward (worthy men who spent the rest of the week in semi-independence in their own domains, dined there by themselves like small shop-keepers, and might to-morrow lapse to the plebian service of some successful doctor or industrial magnate), scrupulous in carrying out to the letter all the instructions that had been heaped upon them, [stood].” Proust,
Swann’s Way, 380–381. It is here that the great concentration of social power and capital that underwrites the lives of Proust’s characters is made unmistakably manifest; it is this power that invests the building with its colossal dimensions and contributes to the headiness and oddity of the experience that Swann undergoes.
31.
Adorno alludes to one such passage, in which the Princesse des Laumes (later the Duchesse de Guermantes) is seen at communion: Adorno, Notes to Literature, 1:178. The narrator is disappointed to see a Guermantes—a family he associates with the mythical figure of medieval legend, Genevieve de Brabante—in the flesh, bearing imperfections and flaws (her “red face” and “prominent nose,” and more fundamentally her appearing as a normal person). In his meditating on the nobility of her name, however, these imperfections eventually become virtues: “Whenever I brought my mind to bear on that face—and especially, perhaps, in my determination, that form of the instinct for self-preservation with which we guard everything best in ourselves, not to admit I had been in any way deceived—I found only beauty there… apart from and above that common run of humanity with which the sight, pure and simple, of her in the flesh had made me for a moment confound her.” Proust, Swann’s Way, 208.
32. Proust,
Swann’s Way, 403–407.
33. Proust’s correspondence informs us that this “little phrase” has its roots in Saint-Saen’s Violin Sonata no. 1 in D Minor, op. 75.
34. Proust,
Swann’s Way, 405.