This chapter is a gloss (a Marginalie) on one of Adorno’s last manuscripts, ‘Marginalien zu Theorie und Praxis’, the second part of ‘Dialektische Epilegomena’ which is an appendix to Stichworte. Kritische Modelle 2.1 Adorno notes that the ‘Dialectical Epilegomena’ belong in the context of Negative Dialektik and were drafted as notes for a lecture that was interrupted by student protesters and abandoned. The chapter attempts to find pleasure in the vertigo of the hard graft of the critique of labour, of the incessant praxis that is needed to create a world where all are free to float on water like Baloo the Bear, as much as they like. It follows the structure of the fourteen sections of Adorno’s text, in turns paraphrasing, glossing, expanding, exaggerating and having fun with. It is an Adorno play for one actor: Adorno’s Last Tape, as it were.2 It aims to demonstrate the ethics and the method of Adorno’s style: the object, which is here the text, is to be embraced and loved (because it is lovable). Adorno’s text demands to be heard out, and the demand is granted, in a posture of solā scripturā, as if Adorno could never be wrong. The actor does have second thoughts, though [mostly added in square brackets, as inner dialogue]: could Adorno be wrong? What about those sects, tribes and affinity groups who turn solā theoriā into an instrument of occult and esoteric identity-building? Aren’t they just as annoying as the obsessive-compulsive doers? ‘Marginalien’ is arguably Adorno’s definitive statement on theory and praxis, but one could be forgiven for thinking that he is being somewhat narcissistic treating this crucial problem only with a view to (his own) students. [Were they that important? Was he hurt? Is this an act of theory revenge? Was he not at all aware of other forms of praxis current at the time – migrant workers squatting factories, here, there and everywhere? Did it really escape his attention that there almost was another French Revolution?] The marginal notes on the marginal notes aim to transport this not-so-popular document into the present without adapting it too much, like one of those strange objects one finds on, or under, a beach. It might be useful to those who try not to turn the critique of labour into anything carrying the signature of labour.3
#1: Don Quixote won’t listen
Modernity is the dictatorship of the subject, and dictatorship makes stupid. For the practices of modern industry, the world is pure matter, material without qualities. The processing of the material is motivated, organized, legitimized by the market, which is constituted by the subjects and their social relationships: the materials have no say in it. Praxis in modern society is self-referential and locked into its own bubble: it directs itself at random and exchangeable objects like a deranged dictator. The subjects alone (or rather, the relationships between the subjects) constitute meaning; matter does not matter. Such dictatorship is pseudo-praxis. It is violent: it violates the objects. In pseudo-praxis, subjects rule the world like idiots.4 They don’t care. Praxis properly understood, by contrast, would receive its meaning as much from the objects as from the subjects. Proper praxis reconciles subject and object: what I as a subject want from the world is meaningfully related to and dependent on what the world is, which requires that I make a serious effort to understand the world.
The practical types, the machers, don’t listen – they cannot be reached by words of reflection, like the original modern Man of Praxis, the don of all doers, Don Quixote. They live in the bubble of their own subjectivity which they deem sovereign, their obsessive urge to do stuff, to imprint themselves on an otherwise meaningless world. They try to create a world in their own image which they can rule more easily. The demand that theory ought to be ‘useful for practice’ locks theory into the existing, blindly subject-centred conception of praxis. Usefulness can only be measured by the criteria of the existing world, the criteria of the existing subjects who, as personifications of its constituent forces, constitute and rule the existing reality. Mephistopheles, that is, the devil, tells a deliberate lie when he claims that ‘the tree of life is green’: it is not green, especially not when it is measured in gold. Nor is all theory grey, though: only to the extent that it stands in the service of a grey reality is theory grey.
The modern individual is born from hesitation, as illustrated by Hamlet, one of its prototypes: becoming an individual means de-automation, the overcoming of reflexes by reflection. It means not being a machine anymore. As such individuality is an impediment to praxis. Here is the rub, in the dialectic between on the one hand, the automated activist’s monomaniac assertion of subjectivity, shooting from the hip, making history, obsessed with giving form to a shapeless world, and on the other hand, the destruction of subjectivity, the elimination of the hesitation to act. The activist macher asserts a subjectivity that eats itself. Hesitation to do things, though, might result from the sense that being a doer makes us commensurate with a world of grey and dull things.
The rationality of the ever-same leads to the loss of experience and furthermore to the loss of the ability to make experiences. This damages praxis while it increases our longing for praxis. The less we are capable of it, the more we overvalue and fetishize praxis. The process of rationalization destroys spontaneity and produces an ever more abstract subjectivity. Practice appears the more important the more standardized it is, the more it follows a script that gives it legitimacy, the more exchangeable and representative it is, repeated and repeatable performance. Pseudo-praxis is closely related to pseudo-thinking. The delusional realities of some political mass movements of the twentieth century illustrate this: starting out from the demand that something needs to be done, false political practice reinforced false practices of perception, and pseudo-realities became bloody real. When thinking is reduced to practical, pragmatic reasoning in the service of a world-making subject, the question of reason stops being ‘what is reasonable?’, i.e. what does reason, imagined as an objective authority, command here, and becomes instead ‘what is, from the subjective perspective of my individual interests, the rational, i.e. the most advantageous thing to do?’ Reason thus diminished is condemned to making nothing more than images of the world as it is and to serving the attempt to keep it as it is, albeit on an expanded level. Although bourgeois society loves to celebrate the autonomy of the subject, its hostility to theory, that is, to sustained hesitancy in the form of reflection, undermines the subject. The strict conceptual separation of theory and praxis makes the latter arbitrary and the former powerless and irrelevant. Thinking is a practice: it is part of a particular, specific reality. No theory ever existed in a parallel universe: as it cannot, there is no need neurotically to emphasize that it does not do so. The demand that theory be practical maintains the delusion that theory could not be a practice, that it could exist outside the dirty world of praxis. It cannot. The question is whether theoretical practice is allowed to do its awkward, unpopular job within praxis, within the world, or whether it is banished from it.
#2: Theory is the praxis of freedom
Reflection, contemplation and hesitation interrupt action. Uninterrupted action is liable to become manic and blind, naïve and inhuman. The dialectic of theory and practice is not exclusively a problem of modernity: ‘Whoever does not want to romanticize the middle ages must trace the divergence of theory from practice back to the earliest separation of manual from mental labour,’5 that is, to the beginnings of civilization. Praxis evolved from labour. The concept of praxis emerged with human society, that is, when labour became more complex and included the production of the conditions of production. All praxis labours heavily from its descent from labour. Praxis is marked by unfreedom and renunciation. The pleasure principle and the longing for freedom are opposed to praxis. Art speaks truth to the extent that it constitutes a critique of praxis as unfreedom – it anticipates, as a glimpse, true praxis, liberated praxis. An image of the opposite extreme is that of the ant or the bee: they are horrifyingly serious about a practice they have not chosen to engage in. Emancipation begins when labour assumes an aspect of play and playfulness. Like ants and bees, actionists lack humour [except the collectivist Homeric group-laughter that is in fact a form of aggression].6 Lack of reflection is the signature of fetishized praxis that becomes the barricade preventing it from reaching its goals. Only praxis, though, can break the spell that praxis has put on humans, which is the real reason why fetishized, anti-theoretical praxis is such bad news: it ruins our attempts at non-fetishizing praxis. [If we could change the world through intense contemplation, we could simply ignore the actionists, sit back, focus our minds on the hostile real–abstractions that govern us, and chillax. The fact that theorists go to the effort of writing and rewriting long complicated essays on theory and praxis suggests that this is not an available option, unfortunately.] As the means are not neutral with respect to the ends, freedom cannot be won by entirely un-free means; therefore theory is a placeholder of freedom in the state of unfreedom – not unlike art. [The obverse is true, too, though: when art and theory are practical representations of freedom, then only practices that represent freedom can count as art and theory. This disqualifies most of the trash that currently goes by those names, from the pedantic-scholastic to the happy-chatty-networky.]
#3: Theory is labour, albeit labour of negativity
The practical types seem to think that theory makes too much work. They have a point: it requires the laborious praxis of resistance to the mainstream of thinking. The refusal of theory constitutes therefore some kind of a commitment to the pleasure principle, albeit a regressive and deformed one. Those who avoid the labours of theory are taking it easy. Their vibes earn them extra coolness kudos from their comrades. Those who relinquish their critical autonomy and join the coalition of the willing are saluted as advanced human beings. Contemporary political activists are moralistic: good intentions, being of good will is what matters to them. They replicate in this kind of moralizing thinking the eighteenth-century attitude of Kant who wrote an ethics pivoted on the intentions and volition of individuals. Already Hegel’s critique of Kant signalled that under the condition of increasingly closed totality, such an ethics is ever more irrelevant. Political reflection matters more than good intention. [Adorno seems to say here also that politics matters more than the praxis of the individual, which would include the praxis of autonomous reasoning by the individual against the collective. Section three seems to override individual autonomy by the emphasis on politics, albeit the former remains in place as the raison d’être of reflective, more-than-individualist politics. Means and ends are here not quite the same, except that the society that the individuals constitute always already inhabits them.] It is not enough to be a bunch of good, well-meaning individuals: to fight developed capitalism we need to be smart and well-studied.
As soon as praxis becomes the praxis of politics, though, repression of the individual by the generic becomes a real possibility. The praxis of the collective must not therefore scorn the individual. A higher form of praxis will have to overcome the dialectic of the two principal poles of bourgeois consciousness, Kant’s moral philosophy and Hegel’s philosophy of right. The discovery of such praxis requires theoretical reflection, not least the rational analysis of the situation, aiming to identify moments that might allow transcendence of, rather than adaptation to, reality. Through such reflection, theory becomes a practical productive force that has the capacity to change reality. Although the thinking individual may not be aware of it, thinking about anything that matters always starts from a practical impulse: a want, a need, pain, suffering. Those who think they live in the best possible world, or even just in one that is good enough, will not bother with thinking – why would they? In this general sense, all thinking is negative: no-one engages in any thinking (beyond the mere ordering of data) without a practical telos, a goal that aims to negate some negative reality. This does not imply, though, the unity of theory and praxis: neither can praxis tell theory what its practical telos ought to be nor the other way round, just as the subject cannot order the world of objects not to be different from the subject. ‘True praxis’ challenges domination that aims to impose identity on the world. Praxis that fails to do so is pseudo-praxis, assimilation to domination: passivity dressed up as praxis. [This seems to be a gloss on Hegel’s notion that ‘what is actual’, das Wirkliche, is reasonable, whereas not everything that just happens to be in existence necessarily deserves the name of Wirklichkeit, actuality. Conversely, this also means that what is reasonable should, and sooner or later will, exist, whereas the unreasonable parts of what currently exists are just inconsequential stuff that will disappear. Reality that is not reasonable is pseudo-reality, irreality dressed up as real and liable to implode soon, hopefully.]7
#4: Theory listens to the objects and splits the rocks
‘Praxis must respect the primacy of the object’ without, though, adapting to it: the subject must not submit to the object but realize the fact that the subject him- or herself is mediated by the object. This is the difficulty of praxis: being a subject while neither flag-wavingly cockily lording it over the world of objects nor grovelling before it. True praxis is a thin, thorny path manoeuvring between these two versions of failure. Praxis ‘well understood’ means that the subject mediates that which the object wants: the true subject acts as the object’s midwife, not its dominator, without becoming in turn dominated by heteronomy, that is, rule by a commandeering object. The object cannot tell us what it wants though, as its needs are already mediated by the societal totality. Sadly, the totality does not talk to us in plain, simple vernacular either: its strange abstract code can only be deciphered by theory. Praxis relies on theory therefore to know what the world asks the subject to do in the first place. Marx complained therefore not that the philosophers wasted so much precious time interpreting the world but that they only interpreted the world, without seeking to change it. As the world refuses to speak our language, interpretation is needed. The increasingly common hostility to theory is therefore really hostility to change. Desperately impatient praxis, too busy to stop, breathe and translate the world’s fragmented cuneiform code, becomes delusional, starving, frenetic, naked, invoking fake-theory that has lost its connection to truth the moment it submitted to praxis’s central command.
A well-calibrated quantum of delusion is what makes movements and collectives attractive to individuals who seek to get a grip on their personal insanity. Adorno references here the psychoanalyst Ernst Simmel:8 collective paranoia gives meaning and direction to private paranoia, deprives the latter of its power to disintegrate the individual and neutralizes the subject’s inability reflectively to accept real-world contradictions that refuse to be dissolved by the subject’s visions of harmony. Projections of unity and its fierce defence are a Band-Aid for schizoid dissociation. The paranoid, collectively sanctioned delusion grants pleasure but threatens the subject; the fetishization of the subjective moment of the historical process, of spontaneity, is a (not entirely unreasonable) reaction to the fact that theory is indeed powerless in the administered world, and reinforces this powerlessness. Without the mediation by theory, though, praxis is unable to read the world’s needs, and therefore runs on empty. The belief in the power of praxis in and of itself means the refusal to take proper account of how difficult the task really is in the face of an ever more closed totality. Only theory effects spontaneity.9 Praxis can only win any battle at all by locating the vulnerable spots where the cracks caused by the pressures of petrification become visible. Such praxis, suffused by theoretical reflection, aims to hit the sweet spots like the quarry worker who will split a block of slate by hitting it at exactly the correct angle. Hammering it abstractly, without attention to the concrete shape of the object, feigning action because we need to be seen to be doing something, will not split the rock.
#5: When the spirit goes playing, we see hope
The existence of spirit presupposes material labour and can therefore not in fact be separated from it. Nevertheless, the separation of theory and praxis is still an indicator of historical progress that leads beyond the blind predominance of material praxis. The fact that there are people in society who can live without having to do any manual labour is an injustice but as such also conjures up the idea that this should be possible for everybody – that in fact it is possible given the enormously developed forces of production. Ordering spirit to return to the barracks and workplaces is reactionary. It does not lead to the reconciliation of theory and praxis but to the reversal of spirit’s (as yet incomplete) emancipation, humanity’s re-subordination under praxis and production in a positivist-technocratic regime that spirit by definition means to oppose. [Having said that, many if not most really-existing intellectuals are of course perfectly fine with serving positivist technocracy]. Humans needed to gain sufficient distance from the ongoing, ever-repeated business of self-preservation, labour, production, in order to take sight of the goal, the abolition of domination in which the natural history of self-preservation perpetuates itself. Enthusiastically but prematurely moving to the synthesis of theory and praxis risks killing off the antithesis while it is no match yet for the thesis. Meanwhile, the elements of moderation, well-meaning, tenderness that can actually be found in praxis are already the first buds of its reconciliation with spirit. Praxis and production are driven to take on aspects of spirit by the difference and distance between them. Give up the relative autonomy of the spirit, and self-preservation will snap back into its bad old ways. Desublimation is the name, violence is the nature of the game.
#6: Theory rejects reform of the violent totality as much as violence against it
The sixth section begins with a sequence where Adorno seems to misquote a passage in which Marx (supposedly in a letter to Kugelmann which Adorno here probably quoted from memory, i.e. invented) warned against the ‘relapse into barbarism’, presumably (judging from the context) resulting from the wrong kind of revolution that could lead to the ‘collapse’ (presumably of civilization). Adorno suggests here that Marx’s (assumed) fear of a ‘relapse into barbarism’ expresses the ‘elective affinity between conservatism and revolution’: Adorno might have had in mind here Walter Benjamin’s idea that revolution is the ‘emergency brake’ that stops the progress into barbarity,10 a key idea of Critical Theory (especially since Dialectic of Enlightenment) that rejects the liberal and socialist belief in (automatic, predetermined, teleological) progress (and in this specific sense could seem ‘conservative’). The three sentences at the beginning of section six in which this idea is expressed [without Adorno’s customary clarity] would seem to support the widespread notion of the anti-revolutionary, quasi fatalistic character of Critical Theory after the Second World War, but they are followed, and cashed in, by one of those trademark key sentences that begin with a BUT: Adorno seems to be saying here that Marx may have been a bit conservative because a liberal civilization worth defending from collapse still existed in his time, but it does not anymore now. Auschwitz and Hiroshima put paid to that: the relapse has happened, civilization has failed; end of. There is no reason anymore for fearing the collapse. Hence Adorno counsels we do not need any more to heed the pathetic consolation that things could be worse. We must not accept bad reality for fear of a worse one to come, but rather we need to ‘work our way out of barbarism’. This is Adorno’s version of the vaunted ‘lesson’ of Auschwitz: forget reformism. Liberal moderation or democratic reforms did not win the war on barbarism. The rub is, though, that in the next sentence – at the next turn of the dialectical rollercoaster – Adorno posits violence as the principal characteristic of the barbarous reality that needs to be undone. In a period in which accelerated history moves at hypersonic speed, barbarism has infected all resistance to it. Many contemporaries agree that the barbarous totality can only be fought by barbarous means (which is ‘the lesson’ an affirmative reading of WW2 must arrive at – it took a Stalin, amongst others, to defeat a Hitler). Adorno grants somewhat unenthusiastically that in the context of the revolutions at the end of WW1, violence might have appeared justified to the ‘all too abstract’ longing for total change; after National Socialism and Stalinism, though, violence as such is unequivocally part of what needs to be changed. Society’s Schuldzusammenhang (the concatenation of guilt and blame) has become total; violence means submission to and participation in it when only rejection of the Verblendungszusammenhang (the blinding concatenation of ideologies and fetishisms) that maintains the totality can lead beyond the barbarous reality. Pseudo-radical praxis, that is praxis that partakes in the violent forms of practice exercised by the totality, only reboots the old horror. The philistine inanity that fascism and communism were the same thing has become true: bourgeois society, in whose political forms both partake, has made them the same (that is, elements of the same totality). This is not, though, an endorsement of the philistine celebration of the golden middle as a safe space: Adorno complains that whoever rejects raw and irrational violence (or violence as such, for that matter) will find him- or herself being pushed into the vicinity of that reformism that is equally responsible for the continued existence of the bad totality. No silver bullet exists that would provide a quick, explosive exit route from this quagmire, whereas ‘was hilft, ist dicht zugehängt’11: there are ways out, but they are well hidden.
#7: Theory lives from the experience of open-ended discussion that is not instrumentalized
Actionism is part and parcel of a trend prevalent in bourgeois society: instrumentalism, the fetishization of means over ends. The bourgeois carriers of instrumental rationality and its fetish of means are unapproachable. They do not listen but in turn accuse their opponents and victims of failing to listen. One of the instruments of their authoritarianism is the discussion, a classic-bourgeois social form which they have reduced to the status of a tactical weapon applied in the fight to octroy false consensus. [The praxis-fetishists and ‘issue entrepreneurs’12 resemble in this the managers of modern businesses, including universities, who have also learned how to disguise the handing down of the marching orders as a brainstorming with foregone conclusions. Employees of regular businesses are more likely to see through this kind of spectacle, though, as they are less likely to believe in the moral value of the goals of the enterprise.] The activists’ pseudo-discussions are matches between factions that aim to establish by combat which set of foregone conclusions will prevail, to the exclusion of any intellectual experiences of genuine, open-ended discussion.
#8: Major Tom is a cog in the ground-controlled machine
The administered societies of advanced industrial capitalism produce pseudo-activity as a form of opposition to themselves which they also celebrate. Similarly, they celebrate individuality, autonomy and personality at a point in time when they have all but falsified them. Pseudo-activity tends to take itself the more important the more removed it is from societal realities, having become unable even to perceive the proportion between itself and society at large. Fighting on the barricades is ridiculous when the enemy commands nuclear bombs; this is why they are permitted temporarily, from time to time, as games and spectacle. Personality cults grow the bigger the less personalities matter, and the less personality the leaders have. Oppositional pseudo-activity is condemned only for show: it is in fact welcome because it covers up the actual ineffectiveness of autonomous practice by individuals who struggle to form the independent wills that voluntarist politics would presuppose. The astronauts who circumnavigate the moon, as powerful an image of human achievement and agency as they come, can hardly be said to have been acting at all, as every movement they made was directed in minute detail by ground control: the image is one of collective, coordinated and hierarchical action in the context of a huge bureaucratic-technological machinery, not exactly one of free and autonomous will in the sense celebrated by nineteenth-century philosophy. This is our world; the ground-controlled astronaut is the latest human. The leaders of the protest movements mirror the characteristics of the administered world: they tend to be virtuosos of the rules of procedure, rulers of the agenda items. The supposed enemies of the state tend to fight for the institutional recognition of demands worked out and triangulated by a combination of committees. The overall societal process that makes the means colonize and marginalize the ends also makes instrumentalism usurp subjectivity (given that the latter is an end of sorts) and the particular characteristics of individuals: pseudo-activity and pseudo-revolution go together with pseudo-subjectivity.13
#9: Make my day, authority!
In section nine Adorno has some tough love for his students: the activism of the student movement is irrational when looked at in relation to the actual power in society which it hardly disturbs. Whence the seriousness with which such objectively irrational practice is pursued? Adorno asserts that many students are in fact desperately poor and thus do have a material interest in radical change, and also that the activists’ commitment to creating a pseudo-reality is objectively caused by society’s shutting down any other avenues to meaningful change. Mostly, though, he finds it must be explained psychologically: the dynamism of the drives ties down and makes effective in the individuals the ideologies which a brutal reality suggests. Adorno observes two psychological traits in the student activists: narcissism and authoritarianism. They have a huge interest in exploring their own emotional needs but are entirely affirmative about them, avoiding reflection and self-critique. Their own needs become the parameters of praxis, while they overestimate narcissistically their own societal relevance. At the same time they project an abstractly negative conception of authority onto the authorities, that is, their opponents, expecting them to be cold, distant and mechanical. When the authorities turn out not to be such (which might often have been the case in the more liberal spaces of 1960s Federal Republic, such as the Sociology Department of Frankfurt University where professors will have been nice, friendly and supportive), the student rebels react with spiteful anger, suggesting that they secretly wish the authorities to be properly authoritarian. Soft-mannered, liberal-minded authorities – like Adorno himself, one might surmise – are doubly despicable to the authoritarian character for not acting in the expected authoritarian manner. [The suicidal strategies of some militants subsequently in the 1970s to provoke the liberal state to show its true fascist colours could be seen as confirmation of Adorno’s group-psychological speculation.]
#10: Reason, by being increasingly rational, drives the techniques of self-preservation to the point of transcending self-preservation
Reason, or rationality, must be directed at the self-preservation of the human species, on which that of the individuals depends. Only when the reasoned reflection on reason (the self-reflection of reason) arrives at this limit-point (the reflection on humanity as the end, or telos, of reason) is it able to transcend its commitment to self-preservation, because the self-preservation of humanity means the self-preservation of the possibility of transcendence (which is the end, or goal, of humanity). The self-preservation of humanity is therefore the transcendence of self-preservation in the concept of humanity. [Adorno inserted here a handy two-page summary of everything you ever need to know about Max Weber.] Reason, or rationality, understood as anything less than this material-idealist conception, leads to the unhappy dialectic of the Weberian position that doggedly defends rationality in its stripped-down understanding as means-end rationality while simultaneously deploring that in its most highly developed real-world manifestation, bureaucratic-industrial capitalism, it becomes that depressing ‘casing hard as steel’ (‘stahlhartes Gehäuse’, in English better known in Talcott Parsons’ mistranslation as the ‘iron cage’). Weber wilfully obstructed the way out of this tragic situation by insisting that ends, goals and values must be chosen by the individual without any interference by reason (let alone science), while means must be chosen rationally-scientifically in a value-free manner in order to serve those irrationally determined ends. [Weber had to do this mental acrobatics so as not to become – perish the thought! – a socialist of sorts. Also theory that is determined to avoid its own obvious and necessary conclusions is hard work.]
#11: Theory helps countering the force of gravity concretely, positively exerted by the totality
Always looking on the bright side is a feature of ego-weakness. The whistling individual cannot muster the strength to reflect on his or her own powerlessness. Some actionists decry theory as abstract and therewith repressive, which is undeniably true: every discipline is by definition repressive. Unmediated breathless praxis is closer to oppression, though, than the thought that tries to take a breath. Only theory can determine what non-repressive praxis would look like, able to navigate between spontaneity and organization, resisting the bourgeois supremacy of means over ends. The technocratic reform of the university is not only the counterpunch to the student protests but also feeds on their logic: the conversion of academic freedom into customer service subjected to market-driven quality controls cunningly responds to the populist complaint that academics in their ivory towers produced abstract, out-of-touch, repressive and elitist theory that is little adapted to real-world problems. [If only . . .]
#12: Theory punctures the delusion that we are the good ones
Very few individuals ever genuinely make a conscious moral decision to sacrifice their lives for a cause that they must assume is likely to fail. Adorno gives as an example the 20 July 1944 conspirators, members of the German military elite who tried (and failed) to assassinate Hitler. They are famous because there were so few of them. There is a reason for this: Adorno suggests their heroism came from an immediacy that overcame the bourgeois coldness that is one of the normal defence mechanisms that allows individuals to survive the brutal reality of bourgeois society. Adorno illustrates the concept of bourgeois coldness by taking his own unheroic experience as a case in point: it was possible to bear the news about Auschwitz when and because one was tucked away safely in distant America. This experience of his own coldness leads Adorno to judge the moralistic demands of some of the student activists that one could not possibly sit back and watch the carnage in Vietnam without ‘doing something’ to be made in bad faith: one can watch these things. One can coldly analyse that one is powerless to materially influence (beyond simply protesting against) large-scale geopolitical events that play out as the local manifestations of the global dynamics of imperialism and the Cold War. Likewise, one must and can, against the impulses of justified moral outrage, acknowledge that the moral clarity of the Vietnamese cause is very different from the case of Auschwitz – in the post-Second World War world the globally accepted gold standard of genocide – as the Stalinist Vietcong was not exactly a textbook example of an innocent victim: its power was itself the reactionary result of brutal class struggle within Vietnamese society.14 [Adorno would probably have agreed that solidarity properly understood can only be with human beings, not with assorted Leviathans and Behemoths – state, military, party organizations.]15
No one can live in bourgeois society without a sufficient measure of bourgeois coldness, a key element of what Horkheimer termed ‘the anthropology of the bourgeois epoch’.16 To claim one lacked this coldness implies claiming one was already the humane being that can only be the result of revolutionary reformulation of what a human being is: humanity will be created by a reasonable form of society once it is achieved, by the absence of fear, if it will be at all. As things stand, our ability to identify with suffering strangers is low. [Talking of which: we hardly ever manage to acknowledge, let alone cope with, our own suffering. The ability to perceive actual strangers, be they suffering or in the pink, rather than what we project onto them, may not only depend on, but also increase, our ability to admit to ourselves our own suffering.] The misguided and arrogant claim to be so humane takes away from the necessity of revolutionary change: if you can be so good then everybody can. The reality is, though, that we cannot. Bourgeois society has constituted us such that we can live with the knowledge of all the evil for which we are fundamentally responsible. Therefore we make judgements and choices, and to make them well we need a theory or two rather than a sense of moral superiority and a strengthening of the dictatorship of conscience and superego. Our wish to be good must collide with our drive to self-preservation and happiness, and we better acknowledge this lest we become our own enemies. One cannot be too afraid of the world as it is; some will genuinely decide to sacrifice themselves but ‘making sacrifice a demand is part of the fascist repertoire’.17 Some will gain narcissistic pleasure from the commitment to a hopeless struggle but will find the rewards to be short-lived as the organizations that demand the sacrifice tend to give out different and opposing marching orders every so often. Adorno ends this section with a reference to Bertolt Brecht’s admission (quoted by Walter Benjamin) that he enjoyed making theatre more than making politics. Adorno applauds Brecht’s honesty and sarcastically contrasts it to the protest movements’ efforts to turn politics into (not very good) street theatre.
#13: Theory loosens belonging
The praxis fetish facilitates belonging. More recent social movements replicate the disciplinary attitude that was pioneered by the communist parties at a time when the historical situation still seemed open enough to make them seem plausible. [Like above, Adorno again grants that Leninist politics – here the politics of discipline and belonging – at least might have been worth considering in their own historical context at the end of the First World War, but does not commit to a full endorsement.] Standardized slogans are handed down by leaders. One must jump into the melting pot in order to belong. One must sign up by constantly signing things. Ideas are critiqued and rejected as ideologies not because one has practically experienced their falseness but because they are linked to the wrong interests. Through the opium of collectivity, fetishized practice obscures its own impossibility. Responding to critique with the reflex-like demand to declare ‘what is to be done’ instead then is the equivalent of asking for a passport.
#14: Theory breaks through enemy lines because it is not designed for that purpose
Theory and praxis are neither the same nor totally different. There is no straight line leading from the one to the other: the discontinuity between them is marked by something extra, an ‘addendum’ or jolt, something spontaneously encountered during the journey that had not already been in the hand luggage. Theory that simply summarized praxis would be ideology; praxis that simply enacted theory would be doctrinaire and untrue to theory. When Robespierre and St. Just attempted a practical application of Rousseau’s concept of the ‘general will’, it did not turn out anything like Rousseau might have expected. [Then again, though, Rousseau’s concept was not entirely innocent of its repressive Thermidorian interpretation.] Only the dialectical contradiction between theory and praxis can be fruitful. Theory as a moment of the totality can resist the latter’s spell to an extent – as a constituent part it is more than merely a means or an expression of the totality. Theory and praxis are not gradually, step by step to be translated into each other: they are opposites that suddenly explode and become the other. The theory most likely to become praxis is that which does not want it so much: theory must not be designed with application in mind. In this it resembles basic research in the sciences. Marx’s critique of political economy, the only theory that Marx fully developed, lacks any instructions on how to do what the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach claimed was its point: to change the world. Marx refused to provide theoretically grounded recipes for praxis or a positive outline of the classless society. Das Kapital contains plenty of polemics but no programme for action. One cannot derive from the theory of surplus value how to make the revolution (but it is essential to spotting and denouncing pseudo-revolutions). Marx was an anti-philosopher not least because he thought philosophy had no business giving instructions to revolutionaries; consequently, as an organizer and man of political praxis Marx did not deploy much complicated theory beyond the idea of the self-emancipation of the proletariat. (The latter means the same thing: the rejection of leadership by middle-class sophisticates and do-gooders). He kept his theory and his praxis at arm’s length which allowed the one to be the other’s Kraftquelle respectively – its source of energy. Reflecting on his own theoretical works, Adorno writes that their impact resulted from the fact that readers do not feel they were being sold a political programme. Dialektik der Aufklärung has no obvious practical purpose, and therefore does not provoke ‘sale’s resistance’. This is how it can work behind enemy lines like a Trojan horse,18 or indeed, like ‘the old mole’, the revolution, mentioned by Marx.19
Adorno’s final observation in this piece is revealingly weird: he asserts that the one thing in which theory and praxis are in fact identical is an obsessiveness that creates blind spots. Any critical theory must by necessity overestimate the importance of the particular object of its critique, as it can only work by obsessively focusing on a particular. This is the element of delusion in critical theory which warns against overdoing it. Yes, that is right: Adorno seems to be saying here, in the concluding section of one of his final texts, we should not get too obsessed with critical theory. [Now he tells us!]
Notes
1 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Marginalien zu Theorie und Praxis’, in Stichworte. Kritische Modelle 2 (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1969), 169–91; Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Marginalia to Theory and Praxis’, in Critical Models. Interventions and Catchwords, translated by Henry W. Pickford, introduction by Lydia Goehr (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 259–78.
2 As in Samuel Beckett’s play, Krapp’s Last Tape, https://archive.org/details/gov.ntis.ava19372vnb1.
3 I thank Werner Bonefeld and Chris O'Kane for their numerous helpful suggestions and observations in the reviewing process.
4 ‘Idiot’, as in the Greek word ‘idiotes’, ‘private person’. When idiots rule the world, they use private, selfish, subjective, instrumental reasoning as opposed to ‘objective reason’ that aims to work out the reasonable requirements of the object, the social world.
5 Adorno, ‘Marginalien zu Theorie und Praxis’, 172.
6 To counteract misunderstandings, it should be added that many other animals seem to be quite playful. Mandeville famously did not write ‘The fable of the otters’.
7 The etymology gives some useful hints as to the meaning of the word Wirklichkeit: it was first introduced as the German translation of Latin actualitas (actuality), which contains agere, to act. Actualitas is in turn a translation of Greek energeia (which gives us the English word ‘energy’ and which derives from ergon, from which also ‘work’ derives. [The Indo-European root of ergon had a ‘w’-sound at the beginning, a letter called ‘digamma’ which disappeared in classical Greek, so it was probably pronounced wergon]). Wirklichkeit, actuality, is not just anything that exists but it is what wirkt, what has effects, what works, what drives history forward. This brings us back to the theme of work, the process of civilization and (the critique of) labour.
8 Adorno refers to an essay by Simmel contained in a volume edited by Simmel himself, one of the key works of the classical theory of antisemitism (Ernst Simmel, ‘Anti-Semitism and Mass Psychopathology’, in Anti-Semitism: A Social Disease, edited by Ernst Simmel [New York: International Universities Press, 1946], 33–78).
9 ‘Spontaneity’, from Latin, spōns, ‘free will’. Spontaneity, consistent with Rosa Luxemburg’s use of the word, depends on experience, reflection and learning. Being swayed and triggered by events without mediation by theoretical reflection is the opposite of spontaneity.
10 Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften vol. I, 3 (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), 1232.
11 Adorno ‘Marginalien zu Theorie und Praxis’, 180.
12 McCarthy and Zald talk about ‘issue entrepreneurs’ as well as ‘entrepreneur[s] of the cause’ (John D. McCarthy and Mayer N. Zald, ‘Resource Mobilization and Social Movements: A Partial Theory’, American Journal of Sociology 82, no. 6 (1977): 1212–41, here 1215 and 1226).
13 Adorno’s theory might have given consolation to Tocqueville who took part in an actual revolution (albeit on the other side) and who admitted more than a century earlier to an embarrassing affliction for which, being a proper liberal, he failed to blame the totality, though: ‘Every time that a person does not strike me by something rare in his mind or sentiments, I so to speak do not see him. I have always thought that mediocre men, as well as men of merit, have a nose, a mouth, and eyes, but I have never been able to fix in my memory the particular form of these features in each one of them. I am constantly asking the names of these unknowns whom I see every day, and I constantly forget them; yet I do not despise them, only I consort with them little, I treat them as commonplace. I honor them, for they lead the world, but they bore me profoundly’ (Alexis de Tocqueville, quoted in Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop, ‘Editor’s Introduction’, in Tocqueville, Alexis de, Democracy in America [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002], xvii–lxxxvi, xxii).
14 Adorno could not have known In the Crossfire by Ngo Van, but he would have seen it as confirmation. Ngo Van, In the Crossfire. Adventures of a Vietnamese Revolutionary, edited by Hélène Fleury and Ken Knabb (Oakland and Edinburgh: AK Press, 2010 [2000]).
15 The concept of ‘solidarity’ (coined in the French Enlightenment context but as a political concept first developed in nineteenth-century Catholic social doctrine) refers to a kind of ‘solid’ interdependence or mutualism based on a sense of fundamental universal equality that makes the other’s suffering and interests my own and vice versa. As an individual I cannot express solidarity with a state; states have their own forms of solidarity which are called treaties, alliances, pacts and so on. ‘Solidarity with Vietnam’, ‘Solidarity with Israel’, ‘Solidarity with Palestine’ (the names of two states and a state in the making) are meaningless phrases unless one imagines oneself to speak on behalf of a state.
16 Max Horkheimer, ‘Egoismus und Freiheitsbewegung. Zur Anthropologie des bürgerlichen Zeitalters’, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 5, no. 2 (1936): 161–234.
17 Adorno, ‘Marginalien zu Theorie und Praxis’, 188.
18 Monique Wittig, ‘The Trojan Horse’, Feminist Issues 4 (1984): 45–9.
19 Marx uses the phrase ‘Brav gewühlt, alter Maulwurf!’ in chapter 7 of the 18th Brumaire. He seems to amalgamate here a formulation by Shakespeare, ‘Well said, old mole . . .’ (Hamlet Act 1, Scene 5) with its adaptation by Hegel: ‘Brav gearbeitet, wackerer Maulwurf!’ (in Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, Teil 3, Abschnitt 3, on one of the first pages of ‘Resultat’; Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Werke in zwanzig Bänden. Band 20 [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979], 455). Marx suggests here that Bonapartist counter-revolution will in the future reveal itself to have been a mere stepping stone on the overarching, methodical and dialectical trajectory of revolution.