Translators are the post-horses of enlightenment.
—Pushkin
The present volume is a critical edition of the two essay collections Adorno subtitled “critical models” and is based on the texts in the second part of volume 10 of his collected writings (Gesammelte Schriften: Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft II, edited by Rolf Tiedemann [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977]). Eingriffe: Neun kritische Modelle, was published in 1963 as volume 10 in the series edition suhrkamp; although Adorno had corrected the galleys, the second volume, Stichworte: Kritische Modelle 2, did not appear until shortly after his unexpected death in 1969, as volume 347 in edition suhrkamp. Also included here from volume 10 of the collected writings are two very late essays, “Critique” and “Resignation,” which Adorno had set aside for an eventual third volume of “critical models,” and an introduction to the lecture “The Meaning of Working Through the Past.” Finally, this edition provides a translation of the discussion between Adorno and his audience when he first gave this lecture; the discussion transcript was included in the essay’s initial publication though not in the subsequent book edition or in the collected writings. This document offers a vivid portrait of Adorno in the role of public intellectual, explicating himself ad hoc about what could be considered the practical motive of these essays: to promote political maturity by bringing reified consciousness to self-awareness. The purposefulness of that intention transcends the contingency of the occasions for which Adorno wrote many of these texts.
For the context underlying the genesis and development of these essays is Adorno’s enormous role as a public philosopher and cultural critic following his return to Germany in 1949. Indeed, with the publication of Minima Moralia in 1951 Adorno became virtually a popular author; in a letter to his friend and early mentor, Siegfried Kracauer, he ascribed his surprising success to a fortunate conjunction of a general cultural vacuum and the waning interest in Heideggerian themes and reveled in the freedom his new fame afforded him.1 And in 1963 he wrote with a mixture of pride and astonishment to his old friend that a paperback edition of Prisms (1955) was printed with a run of 25,000 copies, while Interventions appeared with an initial run of 18,000 copies; by 1969 the former was in its third edition and the latter had 33,000 copies.2 This popularity reflects Adorno’s resumption of the journalistic activities in mass print and radio he had pursued so robustly before the war.3 Incomplete documentation indicates that between 1950 and 1969 Adorno participated in more than 160 radio programs. While the medium of course lent itself to Adorno’s reflections on music, the overwhelming majority of his contributions was broadly intellectual, just as most of the essays collected here began as radio lectures. The Adorno emerging here is a far cry from the stereotypical mandarin aesthete; as his editor at Hessischer Rundfunk in Frankfurt recounts, Adorno told him:
“I want to be understood by my listeners” . . . [Adorno] thought that I, as “an expert,” knew better how to achieve that. It was, surprisingly, of the utmost importance that he be understood even and especially in a medium of the “culture industry.” The sound technicians who were responsible for recording him afterward had to repeat spontaneously and in their own words what he had said, and often there ensued a discussion that was much better and more comprehensible than the lecture he had just read into the microphone. We had to take care that when he came to the radio station, there were appropriate sound technicians who were able to justify their answers to him. It was preferable to postpone a session rather than Adorno having to forego the important discussion afterward with our assistant. Once we recorded one such discussion between Adorno and his sound technician without him or her noticing, and then played it back to them. He found himself “surprisingly good,” which meant a great deal in consideration of his demanding conceit, his pronounced skepticism toward the mass media, and his general aversion for organizations and institutions that shape opinion.4
Although at times he seemed to dismiss these lectures as modest bagatelles and occasional pieces quickly dispatched,5 Adorno nevertheless conscientiously reworked and published them, primarily in popular journals, which were read by well-educated citizens and those in positions of cultural and political authority, before finally collecting them in the new inexpensive paperback book form. His engagement in the mass media was a logical consequence of his eminently practical intentions to effect change.6 The concrete recommendations incorporated into several of these essays were meant as direct “interventions”; for example, along with other leading cultural figures Adorno was asked in 1969 for his position on the continued illegality and persecution of homosexuality in West Germany. The published anthology of responses included these introductory remarks to an extract from the essay “Sexual Taboos and Law Today”:
Kindest thanks for your lovely letter. What I have to say on the topic of sexual morality, in the most diverse spheres of the harm that it wreaks, can be found in the essay “Sexual Taboos and Law Today” in Interventions, and in “Morals and Criminality” in the third volume of Notes to Literature. Both works I sent immediately to Dr. Heinemann as soon as he took over the Ministry of Justice, asking him to read them in the context of plans to reform the penal law, and I received an extremely friendly response. At the moment I wouldn’t know what to add to what I have written there. That I most fiercely oppose every kind of sexual repression should in the meantime be more or less common knowledge, which I gladly confirm explicitly to you.7
In these essays perhaps more than anywhere else in his compendious oeuvre are the practical and political motivations of Adorno’s thought most visibly at work.
Those motivations in turn shape the structure and style of “critical models”: specific analyses that tactically employ the negative dialectical strategy he expounded and exemplified with three “thought models” in Negative Dialectics, by which a phenomenon or concept pretending to self-sufficient immediacy is discursively unmasked as a societally mediated, historical result. Present conditions are shown to contradict the reigning ideology, and—rather than being discarded for not representing reality—the ideology is taken ‘at its word’, as the as yet unfulfilled promise of its realization.8 When Adorno upholds that “the element of the homme de lettres, disparaged by a petty bourgeois scientific ethos, is indispensable to thought,” he is invoking a German tradition in neo-Marxist essayism that effloresced in the Weimar Republic but that reaches back via Nietzsche to the figure of the French Enlightenment moralist and the discursive form of the nonsystematic critique, as in Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary; in an analogy he repeats in his introduction to Catchwords, Adorno says of negative dialectics that “thinking as an encyclopedia, rationally organized and nonetheless discontinuous, unsystematic, loose, expresses the self-critical spirit of reason.”9
As a critical edition, this book provides an apparatus operating in a number of registers. Adorno’s footnotes appear at the bottom of the page, as in the original. The translator’s notes are intended for variable use and presume the educated general audience Adorno sought to engage. Contemporary cultural, political, and philosophical allusions are glossed, and particular linguistic ramifications of the translation vis-à-vis the original are discussed. Cross-references to Adorno’s other writings refer to his collected works (Gesammelte Schriften edited by Rolf Tiedemann with Gretel Adorno, Susan Buck-Morss and Klaus Schultz [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970–1986]) with the abbreviation GS followed by volume number and English translations where available. Variant texts of original radio broadcasts and earlier published versions are also indicated; while some of these variants are more substantial and telling than others, the criterion of completeness was followed. Adorno often reworked an essay a dozen times, and the notes provide a convenient means to follow the changes he made in public redactions to suit argument and occasion.10 Unless otherwise indicated, translations of German materials in the notes are mine.
This translation strives to convey as much of the syntactic density and semantic idiosyncrasy of Adorno’s style as English can sustain while still remaining intelligible. That style follows directly from its author’s intentions of doing justice to the object of his analysis. Presentation and exposition are not linear, but cumulative and dialectical, each descriptive moment standing equidistant from the phenomenon it is trying to ‘name’ by unfolding its conceptual and historical mediations. “Thought does not progress in a single direction; instead, the moments are interwoven as in a carpet. The fruitfulness of the thoughts depends on the density of the texture.”11 Hence paragraph caesurae fall not according to the principle of concision, but that of saturation; paragraphs are the periods of an essay. The “fear of page-long paragraphs,” Adorno called “a fear created by the marketplace—by the consumer who does not want to tax himself and to whom first editors and then writers accommodated for the sake of their incomes.” The texture of thought in an essay is equally expressed by the “physiognomic status” of Adorno’s punctuation, about which he wrote a miniature treatise including the dialectical functions of two of his preferred hieroglyphs: the semicolon, which as both pause and continuation is the image of sublation, and the dash, in which “thought becomes aware of its fragmentary character.”12 Dashes are used instead of parentheses because they “block off the parenthetical material from the flow of the sentence without shutting it up in a prison, capture both connection and detachment.” Likewise dashes set between sentences, a nineteenth-century typographic custom, “have something of the fatefulness of the natural context and something of a prudish hesitancy to make reference to it.” Out of the same resistance to the reified segregation of language and judgment Adorno eschews the use of quotation marks to indicate irony; the translation must try to capture the shift in tone, which in the hands of skillful practitioners such as Adorno and Karl Kraus is weapon enough to transfix stupidity. While Adorno could rely on the gender specificity of German to transform relative pronouns into the turning points of dialectical reversals and qualifications, the English translation must tolerate a brute repetition of nouns from which the original modestly refrains.
In his essay “On the Question: ‘What is German?’” Adorno himself takes a dim view of the prospects for translating German (idealist) philosophical vocabulary into English successfully. Depending on context, in this volume Geist is rendered as “spirit,” “mind,” or “intellect,” accordingly geistig as “spiritual” or “intellectual.” Moment, Hegel’s term for an essential element of a composite whole, is usually translated as “moment,” “element,” or “aspect.” Schein, appearance that is deceptive, is rendered as “semblance,” occasionally as “illusion.” Wissenschaft, “science,” possesses a larger semantic field in German than in English as it extends beyond the natural sciences to encompass all forms of academic and scholarly research. Hegelian Entäußerung, translated as “externalization,” is the development of consciousness through its immersion in what lies outside it, a process Adorno calls genuine Erfahrung, “experience.”13 In a different vein, Adorno’s confrontation with the student movement in several late texts draws on vocabulary specific to that time. In particular, “action,” “actionism,” etc. mean not planned activism but confrontation and agitation as a direct response to any political conflict.
One problem unique to an English language translation of Adorno lies in his frequent use of foreign words, a practice he justified in two essays after readers and radio listeners complained.14 In those cases, the word has been kept in the original Greek, Latin, French, English, etc., and italicized. Where such words appear within quotation marks in the German text they will be similarly marked. English originals are marked with an asterisk (*) and where Adorno provided his own German equivalent, it is italicized and placed in square brackets immediately following. Otherwise all square brackets include the original German or a short English explication at the discretion of the translator.
The publication information at the end of the book lists the earlier published and radio broadcast versions of each essay, together with any previous English translations. While I have profited from consulting the latter, all essays have been retranslated for this volume.
This book is in many ways a product “made in Germany.” Support from a Fulbright Fellowship and the Germanistic Society of America and subsequently a grant from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) sustained the project and the research involved. I would like to thank Rolf Tiedemann and Henri Lonitz of the Theodor W. Adorno Archiv in Frankfurt for permission to examine materials relating to these essays; the archives of Hessischer Rundfunk, Deutschlandfunk, Sender Freies Berlin, Süddeutscher Rundfunk, and Westdeutscher Rundfunk, for allowing me to listen to original radio recordings of Adorno or providing me with copies of the broadcasts; Ingrid Belke and the staff of the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach am Neckar for their assistance during my idyllic sojourn there to read Adorno’s correspondence; Karsten Harries and Geoffrey Hartman of Yale University, and likewise Winfried Menninghaus, Michael Theunissen, Albrecht Wellmer, and especially Christoph Menke of the Freie Universität, Berlin, for their support at key moments during the project; the Institut für Philosophie and the Institut für Hermeneutik of the Freie Universität for providing a congenial and generous intellectual environment; and Lennie Douglass in New Haven and Ina-Maria Gumbel in Berlin for invaluable administrative assistance. Sonja Asal; Gordon Finlayson; Lynne Frame and Rick Hoskins; Brian Jacobs; Martin Jay; Thomas Levin; John MacKay; Eberhard Ortland; Heather, Maureen, and Win Pickford; Colin Sample; Timothy Sergay; Gary Smith; Ruth Sonderegger; Rochelle Tobias; Eric Walczak; and an anonymous reader all helped in different ways to improve the quality of the manuscript. Ann Miller of Columbia University Press dispensed patient understanding and deadline remonstrances with uncanny finesse, and Sabine Seiler’s exactitude in copyediting was matched by her indulgence in discussing the metaphysics of punctuation across the internet. I would like to express my gratitude to Loren Goldman and Lydia Goehr for helpful comments. While the translation is deeply indebted to the responsiveness of all these people, whatever infelicities remain are the translator’s responsibility alone.
Henry W. Pickford
