INTERRUPTIVE EXCURSUS

Rereading

ON THE “HERMENEUTICS OF SITUATION” IN NIETZSCHE AND ADORNO

In “Reading on the Left,” Christopher Nealon (alas, no relation) lays out a concise version of the Jamesonian drama I’ve been trying to stage here in Post-Postmodernism. Jameson is of course well known as a symptomatic reader, insofar as he is often reading for allegory, for a political unconscious or an inferred stance toward capitalism in texts that would seem otherwise to have very little to say about economics. As he infamously writes, “Every position on postmodernism in culture—whether apologia or stigmatization—is also at one and the same time, and necessarily, an implicitly or explicitly political stance on the nature of multinational capitalism today” (1991, 3). Given this stance, one could take Jameson’s project (as many people do) to be uncovering or exposing these buried, “symptomatic” economic imperatives secreted away within cultural artifacts. This, as I suggest at the outset, might be thematized as the “negative” pole of Jamesonian dialectical analysis—undermining and uncovering.

However, in addition to these symptomatic “depth” readings, Nealon highlights a second kind of “historical” reading practice in Jameson, one that’s especially evident in Jameson’s representation of “untimely” thinkers like Adorno and Sartre. (Recall that Adorno’s stock was not particularly high when Jameson published his Adorno book in 1990, at the fall of the Berlin Wall; and Sartre couldn’t have been less fashionable when Jameson was touting him in the high poststructuralist era). In short, precisely at the historical moment when “those thinkers seem discredited or superseded” (2009, 25), they become most useful again. At these historical junctures, Nealon argues, a Jamesonian “ ‘symptomatic reading’ involves figuring out how history and the text have come around to meet each other once again, how what once seemed like weakness in an argument, or in a mode of presentation, can come to find new force, or even truth, in a later period. . . . In these moments, Jameson’s symptomatic style of reading emerges not as a hermeneutics of suspicion but as a hermeneutics of situation—a kind of reading that proposes texts for our attention because they seem useful for historicizing the present” (25).

It is in this spirit of rereading thinkers (and the recent history of theory itself) not for any supposed truth-content or meaning, but for some useful tools in thinking differently, that I want to perform this interruptive excursus right in the middle of this book, and then go on to take up the question of theory qua theory in the present and the future. It should be obvious by now that the overcoding practice that I’ve borrowed from Jameson is precisely such a “hermeneutics of situation”—aimed at offering tools for thinking differently about the present, rather than primarily either exposing or undermining the supposed “truth” of this or that cultural position. Here in this excursus, I’ll be working with two figures (Nietzsche and Adorno) who are on the surface blisteringly hostile to the very idea of any kind of positive “situational” relations among thinking and capitalism. The overcoding experiment is to see if they may offer us some very valuable tools for rethinking those questions, specifically in and through consideration and deployment of the unique styles of Nietzsche’s or Adorno’s thought. In other words, following along from my opening gambit with Jameson, here I’m interested in leaning less on what Nietzsche and Adorno have to say about culture and economics (their negative, undermining exposure of its lies), than in how they say it—maybe in the service of wondering whether, as Deleuze asks, a person has to be sad to be militant? I begin with a brief untimely excursus on Nietzsche, and move on to discuss Adorno—two cranky “hermeneutics of suspicion” thinkers to be sure (especially when they turn to questions of culture and economics). But it’s precisely that kind of offhand, even gruff crankiness that I think offers us some stylistic tools in the present, and why I want to steal mon frère Nealon’s phrase “hermeneutics of situation” to think about ways to redeploy their thinking in the present. So what follows are two short experiments in theory that are played out stylistically in a slightly different way than the rest of this book, but that I think nonetheless sum up the ethos of the entire project and the practice of overcoding reading that it’s trying to develop through intensification. The corrosive, undermining “hermeneutics of suspicion” style of negative analysis practiced by both Nietzsche and Adorno has been well documented;¹ but, as I’m doing with Jameson throughout this text, I want to suggest that perhaps Nietzsche and Adorno’s less-discussed modes of affirmation or positivity—literally, the way they do their work, how it works rather than what it means—may be more useful to us in responding to our situation in the present.

Excursus 1: Nietzsche’s Money!

Confronted with the ways in which our societies become progressively decodified and unregulated, in which our codes break down at every point, Nietzsche is the only thinker who makes no attempt at recodification. He says: the process still has not gone far enough. —GILLES DELEUZE, “NOMAD THOUGHT”

It’s somewhat odd that Nietzsche’s corpus is looked upon as the cross-disciplinary progenitor of our contemporary “post-” world. For all its slippery descriptions and heterogeneous definitions, there is perhaps nothing more universally recognized as “postmodern” or “posthuman” than the triumph of consumption capitalism—the obliteration of humanist use-value and the concomitant domination of mechanistic exchange in this, the age of money as the ultimate general equivalent. Though there’s still a lot of disagreement on the microlevel—for example, over what constitutes posthumanist visual art, or what might be the distinctions between postmodern and post-postmodern literature—everyone seems to agree on the macrolevel that a certain style of consumption-based capital both puts the “posts-” in post-postmodernism and runs the “human” out of posthumanism.

One can, for example, see this consumption anxiety as the central conundrum of recent cultural studies in North America, which seems hopelessly stuck squabbling over what one might call (after Elvis Costello) the “I used to be disgusted, now I try to be amused” quandary: Are everyday consumer practices of “post-” society to be condemned as the inauthentic canalizing of desire by capitalist masters? Or are such practices to be celebrated as forms of subversive agency performed by savvy consumers? Following the Frankfurt School, are we to be “disgusted” by contemporary consumerism? Or, picking up on Michel de Certeau’s analysis of everyday subversion, are we to be “amused” by the multifaceted, posthumanist subjectivities that are born in and around contemporary economic practices?

So my starting point in reconsidering Nietzsche’s relevance for the “post-” world is here—or, rather, beyond this debate. The ubiquity of third- (or fourth-)wave capital is, for better or worse, what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari call the “body without organs” of our era of globalization, its most wide-ranging plane of consistency, the field within which the posthuman desiring machines of capital nomadically roam. As Deleuze and Guattari write about our globalized world, “The universal comes at the end—the body without organs and desiring production—under the conditions determined by an apparently victorious capitalism” (1983, 139). A capitalism that, they remind us, is “the only social machine that is constructed on the basis of decoded flows” (139). Capital, in other words, is simultaneously the “problem” we must learn to respond to, and the field of forces wherein that discontinuous response will be worked out or worked over: “Capital,” Deleuze and Guattari argue, “is indeed the body without organs of the capitalist” (10); and insofar as we are consuming producers, whether we like it or not, we are all de facto capitalists here at the beginning of what promises to be a very disputatious millennium.

Certainly, one way to revisit Nietzsche’s relevance at the contemporary post-post-moment would be to examine what his corpus has to say about these debates over economics and contemporary culture. But this introduces a bucket of problems right away: even his staunchest admirers might have to admit that Nietzsche has very little trenchant to say about consumerism and bourgeois culture—other than that he hates them both. In regard to a mandarin condemnation of popular culture, Nietzsche can often make Adorno look like Joe Sixpack. In fact, the bourgeois type is the most obvious figure in Nietzsche for the “base” individual, who looks only to accumulate wealth, work long hours, and please the herd at work. What he calls this “common type” lives quite happily “in the midst of an age of ‘work,’ that is to say, of hurry, of indecent and perspiring haste” (1982, 5). Such a base bourgeois type, it seems, cannot understand Nietzsche’s corpus at all, “cannot comprehend how anyone could risk his health and honor for the sake of a passion for knowledge” (1974, 78).

Indeed, insofar as the claim to Nietzsche as the grandfather of the post-isms makes any sense at all, he seems best understood as the grandfather of a certain strain of “aesthetic” post-ism, obsessed with questions of self-overcoming, performative subjectivity, living with multiplicity and flow. He is not, as far as I can tell, seen as the grandfather of much productive work on “economic” post-ism. One doesn’t often see Nietzsche cited in discussions of post-Fordism or post-Keynesianism, for example.

This short excursus is a modest attempt to change that. It seems to me that Nietzsche has much constructive to offer, even in his ambivalence, for a hermeneutics of situation designed to size up and respond to contemporary capitalism. Territorialized as it is on global flows of money, flexibly specialized labor markets, symbolic economies, transvaluation, and the dice throw that is the stock and futures markets, Nietzsche’s work should have much to tell us about the situation of transnational capitalism—the speeds and slownesses inscribed on the body without organs that is our world of global capital. More specifically, I’ll try to suggest that Nietzsche has much to teach us about capital’s most slippery symbolic materiality: money. Following Nietzsche in The Gay Science, perhaps today we should ask ourselves, “Do you understand this new law of ebb and flood” (1974, 76)?

To add an additional hurdle, I’d like to structure this excursus as that most contemporary of consumerist textual forms, the business “self-help” manual, much like bestsellers The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People or Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun. So the subtitle of this experiment is “The Five Most Will-to-Powerful Laws of Nietzschean Personal and Financial Growth.” All of which we’ll get to in a minute.

But first, another obstacle: Nietzsche’s critiques and comments concerning economics are not only mandarin, but they also seem hopelessly romantic and negative—a kind of neo-Wordsworthian pining for a life not territorialized on “getting and spending.” As Nietzsche writes, “The most industrious of all ages—ours—does not know how to make anything of all its industriousness and money, except always still more money and still more industriousness” (1974, 94). Or, as he writes about “the American lust for gold”: “The breathless haste with which they work—the distinctive vice of the new world—is already beginning to infect old Europe with its ferocity and is spreading a lack of spirituality like a blanket. Even now one is ashamed of resting, and prolonged reflection almost gives people a bad conscience. One thinks with a watch in one’s hand” (258–59). This particular critique—a kind of slacker’s critique of the “Man”—may seem oddly resentful, especially coming from our greatest proponent of amor fati and diagnostician of resentment. Some of Nietzsche’s sentiments, in fact, seem ready for easy translation to the jauntily resentful workplace antics of the comic strip Dilbert—a character whom nobody ever mistook for the Ubermensch: “Oddly,” Nietzsche writes, “submission to powerful, frightening, even terrible persons, like tyrants and generals, is not experienced as nearly so painful as is this submission to unknown and uninteresting persons, which is what all the luminaries of industry are” (107). Post-postmodern translation: Work sucks—and Nietzsche certainly knew a thing or two about remaining on disability for long periods of time.²

But, as true as it is, “work sucks” is not the First Law of Nietzschean Personal and Financial Growth, and I would hesitate quite a bit before suggesting that Nietzsche’s only practical advice for hacking the situation of contemporary capitalism is to complain about your boss’s incompetence or to Xerox your ass on the company copier. His critiques of modernity and its discontents—the triumph of clock time, the banalization of work, the leveling of all culture by the general equivalence of money—certainly suggest a refusal of work, but I think his intervention goes further than that: if we learn first and foremost from Nietzsche that one must diagnose a sick system if one is to “treat” it in any effective way, performing such a genealogy of capital will more fruitfully lead us to discovering lines of flight from that system, the Laws of Nietzschean Personal and Financial Growth.

For Nietzsche, money’s leveling effect on modern life is an extension of the triumph of general equivalence that he traces in the Genealogy and elsewhere: the capitalist, in other words, is the new ascetic priest. Capital continues and completes that special kind of violence that characterizes the triumph of the weak. As he writes in Daybreak,

For if one man employs false weights, another burns down his house after he has insured it for a large sum, a third counterfeits coins; if three-quarters of the upper classes indulge in permitted fraud and have the stock exchange and speculations on their conscience: what drives them? Not actual need, for they are not so badly off, perhaps they even eat and drink without a care—but they are afflicted day and night by a fearful impatience at the slow way in which their money is accumulating and by an equally fearful pleasure in and love of accumulated money. In this impatience and this love, however, there turns up again that fanaticism of the lust for power which was in former times inflamed by the belief one was in possession of the truth and which bore such beautiful names that one could thenceforth venture to be inhuman with a good conscience (to burn Jews, heretics and good books and exterminate higher cultures such as those of Peru and Mexico). . . . What one formerly did “for the sake of God” one now does for the sake of money, that is to say, for the sake of that which now gives the highest feeling of power and good conscience. (1982, 123)

Post-postmodern translation: God is soooooo money! And, as Nietzsche makes clear, this is the case not because God and money both represent something similar—far from it. What they represent or what lies behind them is wholly beside the genealogical point, because God and money are not metaphors or signifiers at all; rather, they’re modes of power. In fact, they are networks of interrelated practices that enact or attract the lowest forms of reactive force (swindling, counterfeiting, insider trading), fueling that “lust for power” that makes a mockery of the “will to power.”

It’s not surprising, perhaps, that this genealogy leads us to discover the First Law of Nietzschean Personal and Financial Growth: God is dead, but the NASDAQ remains volatile. Both God and money, in other words, have a common face or enact a common truism: it’s all about the practices of force and power, not about the states of truth or representation. Like God, an Internet or tech start-up NASDAQ stock doesn’t really represent anything at all—there’s nothing tangible or authentic “behind” it; but both certainly do comprise and enable certain kinds of command.

In short, as Deleuze and Guattari (those relentlessly post-post heirs to Nietzsche) insist, language is not primarily meant for interpretation, but obedience and resistance: “Writing has nothing to do with signifying. It has to do with surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to come” (1987, 4–5). One might say that the performative in Deleuze or Nietzsche doesn’t succeed negatively by showing the inevitable failure of the supposed constative; rather, it succeeds the old-fashioned way—as a positive deployment of force, as a provocation. For this reason, Nietzschean or Deleuzian amor fati is about transformation of the present, not about fatalistic acceptance of an inevitable future or pining for a golden past. The cash value of truth or representation is beholden to a deployment of force, rather than vice versa.

This leads us to consider Nietzsche’s most famous commentary on the interrelations between money and truth:

What is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms, in short, a sum of human relations which were poetically and rhetorically heightened, transferred, and adorned, and after long use seem solid, canonical, and binding to a nation. Truths are illusions about which it has been forgotten that they are illusions, worn-out metaphors without sensory impact, coins which have lost their image and now can be used only as metal, and no longer as coins. (1989, 250)

In recent commentary, this passage from “Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense” is often folded interpretatively back upon the essay’s larger point about conceptualization and the forgetting of an originary experience: the concept is base coin, the faded representation of a representation, the residue of a metaphor that is itself guilty of forgetting the originary experience. Because truth and money are twice removed from the unthematizable experience of singularity, the history of money thereby becomes a figure for the history of truth, as both dress up a historical regression—increasing abstraction and conventionalization—as “progress.” In Symbolic Economies, Jean-Joseph Goux argues along these lines that “the substitution of the concept for the image means a loss. . . . For Nietzsche, the imprinted head, the visible trace, is at the root of the concept; but from image to concept, what disappears, by attrition, is the vivacity of the impression. . . . For Nietzsche, the concept is a paltry reality in comparison with the image: it is an eroded, diminished, faded image—a cliché” (1990, 104, 105, 106).³

As compellingly “right” as Goux’s interpretation is as an example of the undermining hermeneutics of suspicion (the supposed truth is actually a lie), I would argue that the stake or upshot of Nietzsche’s intervention on coins and truth is not finally metaphors or images or falsifying significations at all. Rather, perhaps the stake of this passage (read for a hermeneutics of situation rather than suspicion) concerns the “binding” (verbindlich) function that confers an obligatory or compulsory signification upon this chaotic “mobile army” of discontinuous relations. Near the origin or far away from it—either way, it’s all about force. “Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense” is not merely a lament for lost original experience; rather, Nietzsche’s challenge is to affirm the fact that truth and lying are not treated in any serious way if they are treated moralistically or judgmentally—as if truth or lying referred to any preexisting moral standard. Money is akin to truth, then, not because both fail to represent some Urpsrung of preexisting value and thereby figure the loss of some kind of originary “vivacity.” Rather, both the worn coin and the clichéd truth show you the wisdom of the Second Most Will-to-Powerful Law of Personal and Financial Growth: What does not kill my portfolio only makes it stronger.

In other words, Nietzsche would always show us that markets (of money, of truth) are sites of struggle and risk: the coin, like the concept, (already) has a face—the Janus face of power, which is manifest in social exchange: measuring, calculating, valuing. Nietzsche’s intervention concerning truth and/as a coin teaches us that the value of truth or money is the product of a dynamic action, not the mere referencing of a static state. When one determines value, it finally doesn’t make any difference what’s printed on the coin or what one calls the truth—a thing’s value is enforced not by the thing itself, but from elsewhere, from a relation of social force and strife. As Antonio Negri holds in Marx beyond Marx, “Money has the advantage of presenting me immediately the lurid face of the social relation of value; it shows me value right away as exchange, commanded and organized. . . . Money has only one face, that of the boss” (1996, 23). Like the general equivalent that is the truth, Negri insists on the Nietzschean point that “money is a tautology for power. A power that extends everywhere” (35).

Recall, in this vein, Nietzsche from the Genealogy:

The feeling of guilt, of personal obligation, had its origin, as we saw, in the oldest and most primitive personal relationship, that between buyer and seller, creditor and debtor: it was here that one person first encountered another person, that one person first measured himself against another. No grade of civilization, however low, has yet been discovered in which something of this relationship has not been noticeable. Setting prices, determining values, contriving equivalences, exchanging—these preoccupied the earliest thinking of man to so great an extent that in a certain sense they constitute thinking as such: here it was that the oldest kind of astuteness developed; here, likewise, we may suppose, did human pride, the feeling of superiority in relation to other animals, have its first beginnings. . . . Man designated himself as the creature that measures values, evaluates and measures, as the “valuing animal as such.” (1967, 70)

This quotation leads us straightaway to the Third Nietzschean Law of Personal and Financial Growth: All good things are bathed in blood at their origin (including your TIAA-CREF Social Choice Account).

Nietzsche’s genealogical insistence on “thinking” as a kind of exploitation, a price-setting mechanism, shows us why the rampant consumerism of the postmodern is never about “choice”—or why more consumption oftentimes adds up to fewer choices: the ubiquity of consumption is a problem, everyone agrees, but one can’t simply accept or reject consumerism. As Deleuze and Guattari write, “Capitalism . . . proceeds by means of an axiomatic and not by means of a code” (1983, 251). So-called third-wave capital, for example, works according to the axiom “consume!,” and you really can’t choose to ignore or refuse that axiomatic pronouncement—it’s not up to “you,” whoever you might be. As Fredric Jameson explains, capital’s “axioms . . . are operational: they do not offer anything for commentary or exegesis, but are rather merely a set of rules to be put into effect” (1997a, 398). One doesn’t get to decide to denounce capitalism or appreciate it—or even really to comment on it or understand it. But you do have to respond to it, insofar as capitalism is all about axiomatic deployments of force—from its significations right through its border patrols. Contemporary capitalism, one might say in a slightly different idiom, is not the sort of thing that hides—it’s everywhere, all the time—so a depth-oriented hermeneutics of suspicion may not offer the most effective tools to diagnose it. If the truth’s not hiding, maybe it doesn’t need to be uncovered. Likewise, we all probably already recognize the hermeneutics of suspicion truism that driving a Prius or eating local foods is not actually to resist capitalism in any meaningful way (insofar as it’s just more consumption capitalism, all the way down); but it’s not clear that such a guilty realization or truth is worth much as a response to the totalizing situation of globalized consumption capital.

As amor fati teaches us, judgment and condemnation are weak tools indeed: condemning capitalism, like condemning thinking, will get you nowhere, and only catch you up in a kind of Habermasian “performative contradiction.” From where “outside” can you judge capitalism wholesale? Simply condemning something is the weakest, most resentful form of power’s deployment—the reactive puffing up of “human pride” and self-righteous “good feeling.” On a Nietzschean reading, exchange and valuation are clearly deterritorializing, “affirmative” values: the problem with modern or postmodern consumerism is that this notion of exchange or valuation gets territorialized on the human subject and the concomitant “feeling of superiority” that comes with possession and ownership. As Deleuze and Guattari write, “Capitalism is inseparable from the movement of deterritorialization, but this movement is exorcised through factitious and artificial reterritorializations” (1983, 303)—private property, subjectivity, the desire for control. Such reterritorializations configure the socius as a negative body without organs—closed, privatized, suffocating. And it is this junky body that haunts the air-conditioned totalitarianism of late, later, or just-in-time capitalism.

So, for Nietzsche, Deleuze, and Guattari, it seems one can broach the question of value only by attempting to leave behind the organic, the authentic, and finally the privilege of human consciousness itself, because the kind of subject we are is the most reactive pustule of resentment. As Nietzsche points out, “Our pleasure in ourselves tries to maintain itself by again and again changing something new into ourselves: that is what possession means” (1974, 88). Such a “ridiculous overestimation and misunderstanding of consciousness” (85) being the case, “how,” Nietzsche asks, “should explanations be at all possible when we first turn everything into an image, our image” (172)? Humans are reactive pockets of consumerist interiority, and that’s also why we have to become something else if we are to be capable of transvaluing values. The problem, in other words, is not capitalism but the style of subjectivity that capitalism has produced, selected for, and rewarded—appropriation, judgment, denunciation: these are the residues of humanism that must be overcome if bourgeois subjectivity is to be transvalued.

But in the service of this project (on the other side of the coin, as it were), we should keep in mind the fact that capitalism is a great deterritorialization machine. Response to its axioms is the social manifestation of force, flight, and reconfiguration. The electronic flows of multinational capital are perhaps our version of Nietzsche’s faceless coin, traded at a dizzying pace across national, monetary, and linguistic boundaries. It is this movement of capital, this flow, that forces us to confront a different kind of power, and thereby to search for something other than the weak weapons of humanism—the resentful judgments and condemnations of moralism. Recall Deleuze: “Judgment prevents the emergence of any new mode of existence. . . . It is not a question of judging other existing beings, but of sensing . . . whether they bring forces to us, or whether they return us to the miseries of war, to the poverty of the dream, to the rigors of organization” (1997, 135). Following in the footsteps of Nietzsche’s analysis of reactive force turning on itself in the will-to-nothingness (and thereby opening the possibility of an exfoliation of ascetic priesthood into overcoming-man), both Nietzsche and Deleuze urge us to find ways to surf capital out of capital, through the deployment of the Fourth Law of Personal and Financial Growth: Don’t moralistically denounce or judge capital, but rather experiment with its speeds and slownesses—see what (else) it can do!

“Which,” Deleuze and Guattari ask in Anti-Oedipus, “is the revolutionary path? Is there one? To withdraw from the world market . . . in a curious revival of the fascist ‘economic solution’? Or might it be able to go in the opposite direction? To go still further, that is, in the movement of the market, of decoding and deterritorialization? For perhaps the flows are not yet deterritorialized enough. . . . Not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to ‘accelerate the process,’ as Nietzsche put it” (1983, 239). As Nietzsche writes in his own ethical idiom, “I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking elsewhere [Wegsehen] shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer” (1974, 223, translation slightly modified).⁴ Little is clear on this itinerary, but it is clear that the only way out is through. A difficult navigation, but Nietzsche has some helpful advice: “I favor any skepsis to which I may reply: ‘Let us try it.’ But I no longer wish to hear anything of all those things and questions that do not permit any experiment” (115). “We have to improvise—all the world improvises its day. Let us proceed today as all the world does!” (95).

In the service of this project, perhaps we need to consider the prescription written out by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, where they outline “How to Make Yourself a Body without Organs” (BwO):

This is how it should be done: Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times. It is through a meticulous relation with the strata that one succeeds in freeing lines of flight, causing conjugated flows to pass and escape and bringing forth continuous intensities for a BwO. Connect, conjugate, continue: a whole “diagram,” as opposed to still signifying and subjective programs. (1987, 161)

This, the way through that is the only possible pathway out, is what amor fati teaches us as a concrete strategy for constructing a positive body without organs—as a map or a pack made up of lines of becomings, “populated by multiplicities” (30). Like any plane of consistency, the body without organs that is capital “is neither totalizing nor structuring, it is deterritorializing” (144), made up of lines of flight.

This leads us finally to the end of this first excursus/experiment, and the revelation of the Fifth and final Law of Nietzschean Personal and Financial Growth: You are a mutual fund, not a subject. So forget about enjoying your symptom; try diversifying your portfolio. And who is the one who can offer a toolbox for such becomings? Nietzsche—that dude is money!

Excursus 2: Speed and Slowness in Adorno’s
Minima Moralia

Prelude

If the Frankfurt School seems “dated” to many contemporary theorists, it may have something to do with the style of Frankfurt School analyses—often caricatured as heavy, labored, highly abstract, and humorless. The Frankfurt School seems slow, lumbering, a bit clumsy even. Adorno’s monograph on the “irrationality” of the LA Times astrology column is perhaps paradigmatic here: bringing a sophisticated and ultraserious brand of ideology critique to bear on astrology is a little like using a bazooka on an anthill. Really, shouldn’t there be more levity in such an analysis? And does Adorno seriously think he’s discovered something here? Isn’t virtually any reader of astrology columns stricken by the suspicion that “the stars seem to be in complete agreement with the established ways of life and with the habits and institutions circumscribed by our age” (1994, 59)? Can an exposé on the sinister ideology of the fortune cookie be far behind? Adorno’s unmasking hermeneutics of suspicion is, as I suggested previously about Nietzsche, probably not the most productive version of his work for responding to the present moment of ubiquitous, post-postmodern capitalism, whose unofficial theme song might just be Leonard Cohen’s “Everybody Knows” (“Everybody knows the fight was fixed / The poor stay poor, the rich get rich / That’s how it goes / Everybody knows”).

Difficult contemporary questions are raised by Adorno’s seemingly high-handed style of suspicious hermeneutics: Does treating cultural texts so laboriously—so slowly and didactically—offer any relevant tools to intervene in the fast world of late, later, or just-in-time capitalism? How, if at all, can the seeming slownesses of Adorno’s work be adapted to confront the speeds of contemporary culture? In taking up these questions here, I want to suggest that there’s another Adorno lurking beside his finger-wagging, stony persona. I argue that it’s precisely in close attention to and (re)deployment of Adorno’s style that one might find a more affirmative—dare I say speedy—Adorno at work: the style of Adorno’s hermeneutics of suspicion may offer more and better tools for what we’ve been calling the hermeneutics of situation, diagnosing and responding to the present.

My Dogma Ran Over My Karma

The fact that inversion or chiasmus is the dominant trope of Adorno’s thinking is so obvious that it scarcely seems worth mentioning—especially in Minima Moralia, where it’s prominently on display from the very beginning. The title itself is an inversion of Aristotle’s Magna Moralia or “Great Ethics”—though we should note a meta-inversion here at the very beginning, insofar as Aristotle’s ethics (based as it is on everyday exchanges like friendship, household matters, urbanity, and commerce) is itself already an inversion of an even “greater” (that is, more metaphysical) Platonic ethics. As we open Minima Moralia, the inversions continue in the text’s first sentence, where Adorno famously characterizes his work as a “melancholy science,” in chiasmic contradistinction to Nietzsche’s “joyful science” (again, itself already an inversion of idealist metaphysics). From the book’s epigraph (Kürnberger’s “Life does not live”) to its most famous sentence, “The whole is false” (1974, 50) (an inversion of Hegel’s dialectical dictum that only the whole is true), chiasmic reversal is all over Minima Moralia.⁵

It’s hard not to recognize this, I suppose. But the more thorny question is, what’s the upshot of Adorno’s chiasmic hermeneutics of suspicion? Clearly, Adorno’s is a highly performative discourse—the “form” of his thought can hardly be separated from its “content”—and it seems obvious that the interruptive and open-ended quality of chiasmus lends itself very well to a thinking dedicated to demonstrating that the whole is false: the chiasmus frustrates any kind of gathering into a unity—even the impossible unity that Hegel posits.⁶ In Minima Moralia, it seems that the reader is meant to confront contradiction qua contradiction—on the sentence level as well as the social level.

Indeed, if the bumper sticker or the advertising slogan is ideology writ small—the keenest expression of what Adorno calls “organized tautology” (66)—then the work of ideology critique would almost have to include a kind of negative or critical moment—a chiasmic slowness that interrupts the smooth movement of tautological self-reassurance. If, as Adorno writes, the culture industry “expels from movements all hesitation” (19), then chiasmus is clearly one way of reintroducing (at the level of form and content) an ethical hesitation into the otherwise too-swift movement to a conclusion. If “the splinter in your eye is the best magnifying glass” (50), then the chiasmic fragments of Minima Moralia would seem to be best understood as little splintering machines, magnifying contradictions by slowing thought down and deforming closure. And through his interruptive inversions, it seems that Adorno hopes actually to enact (rather than merely describe) his “minor ethics”; through a slowing down and breaking of ideological tautology, Minima Moralia hopes to “to teach the norm to fear its own perversity” (97).

Confronting the chiasmic slowdowns of Adorno’s thought, one might be forced to realize, “Damn! My karma is my dogma.” Or, as Adorno puts it, “Relativists are the real . . . absolutists” (128).

Slower Traffic Keep Right

OK, this makes a certain sense of Adorno’s odd “method” in Minima Moralia and makes him more recognizable within a series of postmodern family resemblances: this method of chiasmic interruption was, for example, the coin of the realm for American deconstruction;⁷ and certainly any Lacanian would recognize these kinds of chiasmic moves, where the rock of the real is finally shown to be contradiction itself.⁸ Or one might see Adorno’s method as a kind of ideology critique writ small—an open-ended “minor” critique of cultural ideologies, in contradistinction to the “major” determinist critiques of the economic base.⁹

But Adorno, like a chiasmic inversion of your drunk uncle Ted at a holiday dinner, will quickly make you reconsider those postmodern family resemblances. For example, on the deconstructive move of returning rights to the nonprivileged term within an opposition, Adorno’s discourse retorts: “In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so” (28). About psychoanalysis, Adorno likewise has very little kind to say: it’s the complete suturing of the social to bourgeois subjective ideology—it’s the karma that slows down to give your dogma a ride—and “he who calls it by name will be told gloatingly by psycho-analysis that it is just his Oedipus complex” (63). In fact, even the general project of slowing thought down to reveal its ideological contradictions seems to come under Adornian fire: “Serenity is becoming,” he writes, “the same lie that purposive haste already is” (99). Indeed, Adorno will go as far as to say that irony and ideology critique are literally impossible, insofar as both presuppose some chimeric notion of the real and some fiction of aesthetic or political distance: “The difference between ideology and reality has disappeared” (211).

So if the chiasmic reversals of the melancholy science aren’t attempts to highlight exclusion (not about the “underdog”); and if they’re not attempts to return a slowness or deliberation to thinking; and if they’re not exactly ideology critique either, then exactly what are they? What kind of hermeneutics of suspicion is this, if it doesn’t hold out the promise of a truth (possibly a negative one, the impossibility of truth) at another level? If, as Adorno writes, his aphorisms are meant to be active—if they “are all intended to mark out points of attack or to furnish models for a future exertion of thought” (18)—why would he want to depend so heavily on the slowness of a “melancholy” science? One usually doesn’t think of an ass-kicking melancholia: the Irish wake, at least as I’ve experienced it, hardly seems “to furnish models for a future exertion of thought,” and “Danny Boy” is hardly the kind of rousing protest song that might offer “points of attack.” So what exactly is the point or use-value of this melancholic slowing down?¹⁰

Speedball

Of course, Minima Moralia is not all slowness, chiasm, and slogan. Although not many people write about this, one of the things that always strikes me about Adorno is the ranting quality of his prose—the way it moves from the slowness of the chiasmic slogan to the speed of the seemingly uncontrolled rant. Consider, for example, part 1, no. 38 of Minima Moralia, “Invitation to the dance.” The section is named after Carl Maria von Weber’s piece, often touted as the first modern dance music. For Adorno, we can only assume that this section is not going to be sweetness and light, named as it is after a music that serves as precursor to the commodified dance music that he rails against elsewhere.

Not oddly, then, this section takes up what Adorno calls “the capacity for pleasure” and its supposed cultural liberation by psychoanalysis. The screed against the commodification of pleasure is recognizably Adornian (it is in fact the sort of thing that cultural studies scholars complain about all the time in Adorno), but as you read it, note (at least initially) how it’s very much not a melancholy lament that works by aphoristic “slowness.” Though it does begin with a slogan:

Prescribed happiness looks exactly what it is; to have a part in it, the neurotic thus made happy must forfeit the last vestige of reason left to him by repression and regression; and to oblige the analyst, [he must] display indiscriminate enthusiasm for the trashy film, the expensive but bad meal in the French restaurant, the serious drink and the love-making taken like medicine as “sex.” Schiller’s dictum that “Life’s good, in spite of all,” papier-mâché from the start, has become idiocy now that it is blown into the same trumpet as omnipresent advertising, with psychoanalysis, despite its better possibilities, adding its fuel to the flames. As people have altogether too few inhibitions and not too many, without being a whit the healthier for it, a cathartic method with a standard other than successful adaptation and economic success would have to aim at bringing people to a consciousness of unhappiness both general and—inseparable from it—personal, and at depriving them of the illusory gratifications by which the abominable order keeps a second hold on life inside them, as if it did not already have them firmly enough in its power from outside. . . . The admonitions to be happy, voiced in concert by the scientifically epicurean sanatorium-director and the highly-strung propaganda chiefs of the entertainment industry, have about them the fury of the father berating his children for not rushing joyously downstairs when he comes home irritable from the office. It is part of the mechanism of domination to forbid recognition of the suffering it produces, and there is a straight line between the gospel of happiness and the construction of extermination camps so far off in Poland that each of our countrymen can convince himself that he cannot hear the screams of pain. (62–63)

This is vintage Adorno, but not a vintage that gets the same critical attention as the chiasmic, “slow” Adorno. There is, of course, a kind of chiasm at work here: the discourse of commodified happiness is the discourse of the Holocaust. But if this particular “fast” or ranting Adorno gets any critical attention at all, it is generally the stuff that gets him painted as a snob or a prude: critics of Adorno often say something like “I take the point about the Holocaust—I’m down with that; but, hey, let’s not be so hasty in dismissing French restaurants and sex.”

Supposedly, Adorno doesn’t understand pleasure—this is, after all, the guy who said that “fun is a medicinal bath” (Adorno and Horkheimer 1993, 140). In order to argue this position against Adorno, however, one has to ignore the immense pleasure evident on the surface of this screed. It’s like a Lenny Bruce routine: it’s cranky and obsessive enough to be hilarious, even while it’s deadly serious. It in fact screams to be read as a kind of superego gone berserk—but that’s the inversion, no? The superego isn’t supposed to be berserk. If this passage is at some level an ode to the joys of “repression and regression” in the face of “fun,” flashy cultural surface effects, it certainly doesn’t practice what it preaches.

We could go on picking away at Adorno’s supposed high-culture biases, but I’m less concerned here with the content of this passage than with the form—though I hope finally to show how the two are inseparable. First, note that the way this passage is set up and the speed at which it makes links. It simply won’t allow you to slow down, isolate, and affirm some form of “entertainment” (whether it be film, drinks, or witty banter) without being chiasmically entangled and forced to respond to the passage’s other pole of engagement, the horror of the Holocaust. This passage seems to follow the Adornian “maxim that only exaggeration per se today can be the medium of truth” (1998, 99). In fact, this kind of ranting discursive “speed” and the outrageous linkages of this passage constitute a seemingly unruly—but actually quite deliberate—inversion of Adorno’s chiasmic “slowness,” and as such it seems yet another crucial role for the legacy of music in Adorno’s work. Certainly Schönberg interrupts the reassuring flow of the popular song by slowing it down; but he also interrupts the popular song by speeding it up—intensifying music to the point of provocation, in addition to undermining it to the point of stasis.

Speed and slowness are crucial composition techniques in music, and one of the primary ways in which music “means” something. In other words, in art—and recall Adorno, “Perhaps the strict and pure concept of art is applicable only to music” (1974, 223)—what something means is always inseparable from how it works, and this is in fact why immanent analysis is so important to Adorno’s aesthetics and his politics. Music never allows a simple answer to the question, “What does this mean?”

I want to suggest that Adorno’s “minor ethics” is a kind of “musical ethics” of speed and slowness—an ethics that does something, produces effects, over against the transcendental ethics of resentment, judgment, and condemnation. What Adorno insists about the dialectic and about aesthetics seems equally true for the discourse of ethics: you don’t use it; you become it. As Adorno suggests in his work on Beethoven, we don’t play music—rather, it plays us.¹¹ This, it seems to me, is finally what Minima Moralia is all about: not applying metaphysical ethical standards in a uniform way, but giving oneself over to the complexity of the situation, responding rather than handing down predetermined judgments. A symphony is no more contained in its notes than an ethics is contained in its rules.

Pot Calling the Kettle White: A Meta-interruptive

Meta-excursus on Adorno and Jazz

We all know the song, so just let me hum a few bars for you: Adorno has a tin ear for jazz, which he reads as a wholly commodified form; his Eurocentric high-culture biases—and, by extension, his latent antiblack racism—make him unable to hear jazz’s obvious abilities to be precisely the sort of challenging music that Adorno champions in his essays on atonal composition. If he weren’t such a snob or closet racist, he’d be giving it up for Monk or Bud Powell in the same breath in which he’s praising Schönberg.

Problem with this song: it seems to ignore that Adorno’s argument is pretty much the same as, for example, Amiri Baraka’s critique of jazz’s commodification in Blues People (1963)—where, in the famous chapter “Swing: From Verb to Noun,” Baraka shows how swing has been hermetically sealed and packaged for white listening audiences. Admittedly, Adorno doesn’t go out of his way to find out much about atonal jazz—he knows what he hears on the radio (Benny Goodman, the king of swing) and knows that it’s flatulent and reified. And, of course, one assumes you wouldn’t get very far with him arguing the merits of Cecil Taylor’s piano style over Glenn Gould’s—not so much because he’d disagree (though he probably would), but because he likely knew as much about Cecil Taylor as Charlie Parker knew about Gregorian chants. In any case, it’s important to remember that the jazz that Adorno critiques is not the atonal, “free” jazz that critics like Baraka tout—Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman.

In fact the swing that Baraka rails against is the jazz that Adorno hates—and they both say pretty much the same thing about it: swing is commodified slop; it’s music as noun, to be consumed, not as verb, to be responded to. Adorno calls it part of the “blind conformity of. . . radio-listeners” (1974, 36); Baraka sees it as a pillar of the “vapidity of mainline American culture” (1963, 182). Of course, nobody calls Baraka a racist—or at least no one calls him an antiblack racist—because of this critique, and he’s seldom accused of being too high culture for his own good.

So a word for the future of Adorno jazz critique: if you disagree with Adorno, be prepared to tell the world what’s so interesting or crucial about the swinging grooves of Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians—or, more important yet, have something affirmative to say about the current “swing revival” and its attendant accessorizing lifestyle products. In terms of commodified whiteness, the success of the Brian Setzer Orchestra or Big Bad Voodoo Daddy seems quite a large (if noxious) confirming flower on the kudzu vine of Adorno’s fifty-year-old analyses. Listening to the swing sounds of the Cherry Poppin’ Daddies on so-called alternative radio, one might even yearn for Tommy Dorsey: as Adorno notes, “Even the outdated, inconsistent, self-doubting ideas of the older generation are more open to dialogue than the slick stupidity of Junior” (1974, 22). Close excursus within excursus. We now return to our regularly scheduled program.

Speed Kills

Speed and slowness, then, work together to diagnose or name a situation. For example, if you want to know what an aphorism “means,” Adorno urges you to read it according to “its tempo, compactness, density, yet also by its tentativeness” (1974, 100). As in music, one extreme (slowness) doesn’t mean anything except in relation to the other (speed); and that relation must always be worked out immanently, in terms of a specific piece or situation and its social contexts. If slowness is primarily interruption of tempo or rhythm, then speed is primarily linkage to other cadences. And one might say that for Adorno there’s no shortage of haste in contemporary culture, but there’s certainly not enough speed. The slogan, for example, is always “false,” until it’s introduced into a larger field of multiple social and theoretical linkages. Or as Adorno writes, “The statement that things are always the same is false in its immediateness, and true only when introduced into the dynamics of totality” (235)—again, plenty of haste or “immediateness,” but not enough speed or cultural “dynamics.” Speed and slowness are dialectical elements of composition, but as extremes they allow no simple (or even complex) sublation. They enact the “dynamics of totality.”

Speed and slowness are, at some level, another set of names for Adornian mediation, but as musical terms they importantly have no essential or immediate link with the individual (karma) or the whole (dogma), and as such they comprise the watchwords for an ethics that doesn’t dictate, but rather works through and modulates extremes in a dialectical way. As Adorno writes in Three Studies,

For Hegel, mediation is never a middle element between extremes, as since Kierkegaard, a deadly misunderstanding has depicted it as being; instead, mediation takes place in and through extremes, in the extremes themselves. This is the radical aspect of Hegel, which is incompatible with any advocacy of moderation. (1993, 9, my emphasis)

Given this sense of dialectic, Adorno’s can never be an ethics that advocates any kind of moderation or the giving of cracker-barrel advice; his is not a dialectical or chiasmic slowing down for the sake of edification.¹² As he recalls about the leisure industry, the imperative to slow down is “a formula borrowed from the language of the nursing home, not of exuberance” (1974, 217). Oddly enough, then, “exuberance” seems to be a key animating principle of the melancholy science.

So the project of an Adornian minor ethics is not solely to limit, slow down, or truncate a too-hasty move to totalization. Certainly, such a slowing down is one effect of Minima Moralia, but the text itself demonstrates that there is no privileged or final way to produce “ethical” effects: slowing thought down would always have to be dialectically combined with speeding it up in other registers in order to establish the fluid dynamics of a complex, concrete singularity.

In and of itself, however, the dialectic is not a privileged mode of inquiry—just as chiasmus or inversion is not a trope that necessarily guarantees anything in the realm of ethics. As I suggested previously, the Adornian dialectic is a performative, rather than a constative, discourse. In other words, the dialectic “is” something only insofar as it produces effects; learning from the music that is a kind of template for the dialectic, the philosophical question “What does it mean?” will always be subordinated to the ethical question “What does it do?” Think here of Adorno’s interest in the slogan: Is the slogan a rightist or a leftist tool? For Adorno, this is the wrong question. Better, one might ask, What slogan? Uttered where and by whom? What effects does it produce? The slogan itself does not contain meaning or truth; however, they’re not simply false either—or they are true and false within a dynamic hermeneutics of situation, rather than within a supposedly timeless mode of hermeneutic suspicion. “Slogans . . . are the index of their own untruth” (1998, 41) precisely insofar as they attempt to downplay and simplify their own dynamic cultural interactions and linkages. Nike’s catchphrase “Just do it!,” for example, seems to index its own untruth pretty quickly: “Don’t do it without the proper accessories!”

Dialectic for Adorno is finally not an ontological or epistemological discourse. As he argues, “Just as the dialectic does not favor individual definitions, so there is no definition that fits it” (1993, 9). The dialectic is too “fast” to be defined; in fact, it is nothing other than a complex modality of speed, linkage, response. As Adorno sums up the work of dialectic in Minima Moralia, he insists that

limitation and reservation are no way to represent the dialectic. Rather, the dialectic advances by way of extremes, driving thoughts with the utmost consequentiality to the point where they turn back on themselves, instead of qualifying them. The prudence that restrains us from venturing too far ahead in a sentence, is usually only an agent of social control, and so of stupefaction. (1974, 86)

It is this insistence on the “driving” extremes of thought—the speed of linkage—that propels both the sentence and the dialectic forward, that projects thought and forces it to move both forward and back upon itself. Speed, rather than slowness, finally seems to be the immeasurable measure of dialectical ethics in Adorno.¹³ Indeed, if we follow this dialectical path, it seems best to describe his thought as both a Minima Moralia (a “minor” ethics of melancholia or originary loss), as well as a kind of “maxima immoralia”: an anti-ethics that proceeds by “venturing too far ahead” of transcendental and ideological certainties—an ethics of speed, affirmation, and futurity.

Speed as Hope

Inevitably, the question posed to the “slow” or “chiasmic” Adorno is the question of hope: sure, you can slow down ideological closure, frustrate totalization, keep open questions, relentlessly reveal the contradictions of capital; but how is that any kind of effective intervention? How does that interruption offer any hope to change things? In an already hopelessly contradictory society, to insist on contradiction and chiasmic impasse seems kind of like pissing in your wishing well.

In trying to answer such questions, Adorno will often write in a Benjaminian vein: “No other hope is left to the past than that, exposed defenselessly to disaster, it shall emerge from it as something different. But he who dies in despair has lived his whole life in vain” (1974, 167). Certainly, one could argue, Adorno’s insistence on slowness, contradiction, and chiasmus has an upshot in a kind of paradoxical Benjaminian “hope,” something like the “messianism without messianism” that dominates Derrida’s late thought (see, e.g., Derrida 1994). And, of course, such interruption is key to any post-Holocaust thinking, which must honor the dead precisely by standing in the way of any kind of “final solution.” This hesitation itself is a kind of hope.

But I’d like to suggest another kind of intense, post-postmodern hope in Adorno—not the hope of slowness as interruption, but the hope engendered by speed as linkage. Adorno insists throughout his minor ethics that the ethicist is inexorably caught up in the situation that she’s diagnosing; as he insists, “The detached observer is as much entangled as the active participant. . . . This is why the very movement of withdrawal bears features of what it negates. It is forced to develop a coldness indistinguishable from that of the bourgeois” (27). I’d argue that what Adorno here calls “coldness” is akin to what I’m calling “speed,” the necessity of linkage. If one always learns from Adorno that “there is no way out of entanglement” (28), then there are only situations, and tools for transforming them. Entanglement inexorably calls for critical response. Active, engaged praxis within existing conditions is the first and last principle of Adornian ethics.

Gillian Rose concludes her book on Adorno by arguing that “his ‘morality’ is a praxis of thought, not a recipe for social or political action” (1978, 148); and while I take her point (Adorno’s ethics doesn’t offer dogmatic courses of action), I think that the provocative quality—the speed—of his minor ethics is precisely a kind of recipe, or, as I suggested earlier, even a musical score: a set of organized potentials that must be performed, responded to, acted out. The recipe or musical score presents a set of provocations that must be modified—sped up or slowed down—in the process of “enacting” them at a specific time or place: even if you follow the recipe, the cake is never the same twice, just as the Goldberg Variations are different in each performance. And, importantly, such a notion of difference can’t merely be explained away by the individual idiosyncrasy of the cook or the performer; difference is always wrapped up and manifest in the complexities of social and contextual response. You don’t get to write the recipe or the musical score, but nevertheless it doesn’t simply control you. You have to respond to it, work with and around it, resist it at some points.

Certainly, the chiasmic Adorno shows us how negation or withdrawal is a response; but in the end Adorno also shows us that such withdrawal or slowness isn’t effective until it is dialectically coupled with an “extreme” movement of speed or affirmation. Critique is effective and ethical only insofar as it’s “forced to develop a coldness indistinguishable from that of the bourgeois”: cultural criticism is called not only to interrupt or critique, but literally to forge multiple linkages. As Adorno argues concerning cultural critique, “Repudiation of the present cultural morass presupposes sufficient involvement in it to feel it itching in one’s own finger-tips, so to speak, but at the same time the strength, drawn from this involvement, to dismiss it. This strength is by no means of a merely individual nature” (1974, 29).

In the end, or from the beginning, this necessity of involvement or response—this ethical “strength” of continued engagement, this coldness of future linkages—is what one might call the legacy of hope as speed in Adorno. While the slowness of chiasmic reversal ruins thinking as totalization and thereby offers its own kind of future hope, the movements of speed as linkage offer another kind of open-ended ethical “hope” in his texts: the tools for reinscribing culture elsewhere. As Adorno writes in one of his last essays, “Thought is happiness, even where it defines unhappiness” (1998, 293). And we learn from Adorno that it’s never too late for such a speedy critical intervention, no matter how dire the hermeneutics of situation may seem. “Hurry up, please. It’s time.”¹⁴