Right Listening and a New Type of Human Being

ADORNO’S Aesthetic Theory is currently the object of considerable interest in this country. This is a good thing, but puzzling too. And it is this puzzle that here deserves to be addressed. The book is more distant from us than might be indicated by the immediate response the new translation has found. It, and Adorno’s philosophy as a whole, involve a way of making distinctions, types of distinctions, and experiences that are inimical to these shores; in our own heart of hearts, down home, they rub us the wrong way. If Adorno’s pronouncements on jazz have notoriously aggravated many, and by the power of hearsay alone, without almost anyone having read the relevant essays or wondered what music exactly he was criticizing or what he might have been right about in his disparagement of big band jazz, this is only the barest indication of his capacity to bother us. Of the musical compositions that might spontaneously occur to the inner ear of the overwhelming majority of the American readers of this essay—themselves an educational elite—there might not be a single song that would have resounded in Adorno’s own ear as other than “trash,” and as so stereotypical and faulty in its construction that the puzzle for him would have been how anyone could distinguish one tune from another. To our minds this must represent some special grudge Adorno held against all things popular. Yet this was not at all the case. For neither did Adorno like Dvořák, Hindemith, Elgar, Debussy, Stravinsky, or Sibelius, among many, many others. And there was much he found wanting in Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern as well. Adorno may have been as dissatisfied with each and every composition—with music and indeed art altogether—as anyone has ever been. This dissatisfaction has an implication that is so remote from us that it verges on the unintuitable this side of the Atlantic: for if Adorno was dissatisfied with all existing art, it was because he was intent on finding the one right art work, the one that would be the art work. In other words—and this is the thought that more than any other in all of aesthetics has the ability to press the mind of our commercial tribe between thumb and forefinger: Adorno thought not just that one work of art may be liked better than another, but that this one work would be, in itself, better than another.

This was not momentary bad manners that slipped into an otherwise distinguished philosophy, any more than St. Augustine absent-mindedly lost track of the main point of his theology when he admonished his readers that one can love the wrong thing. Adorno’s philosophy conceived as a whole seeks the primacy of the object. His critique of the judgment of taste is inextricable from this central philosophical intention, not as one element compelled to conform to an overriding thesis but as the originating impulse of that thesis. His philosophy of the primacy of the object has its source in the experience of one art work as superior to another. It could not be otherwise. There is no other basis, one side or the other of the continental divide, on which to understand or sympathize with the intensity of his thought. Without an ear for emphatic music, for music that means to be the music, every line Adorno wrote echoes hollowly convoluted or blindly exaggerated. The philosophy of the primacy of the object itself derives from the audibly urgent primacy of one art work over another in a mind that is prepared to hear it. Not to be pugnacious, but blunt: our minds, in general, would rather not hear this primacy; even when we sense it, we do not feel right about it or know what to make of it. Though we insist on having our preferences, and consider the freedom to like and dislike inherent to democracy, these preferences are limited to the judgment itself. Whatever we find to like in an art gallery we want to assume someone else might with equal justification dislike it. And we suppose that what someone else likes, we might just as well, and with equal justification, dislike. In the morality of our everyday aesthetics, what is important to us is that one likes and dislikes and is at any moment ready to call a truce over the objective claim of the distinction rather than insisting that one has put hands on what all the world must acknowledge as the one right thing. We are sure that anyone who would argue that taste should subserve the object—that the object itself wants to be the one and only right thing, that if seen or heard “correctly” the correct object would be chosen and the “wrong” one dismissed—is streaked with authoritarianism.

In the everyday aesthetics of North Americans, the author of the Authoritarian Personality would be an autocrat, and when he lived in the United States he was experienced as that by many. This is so plausible to us—to those who are certain that many paintings are required to cover the many walls—that something must be said at the outset to make Adorno’s position even momentarily worth considering. On this score, though Adorno will not find many allies among art consumers, he does have many among artists. Here is what Francis Bacon (the painter, not the philosopher) has to say on the topic of what one might have a taste for: “Of course what in a curious way one is always hoping to do is to paint the one picture which will annihilate all the other ones, to concentrate everything into one painting. . . . I’ve got an obsession with doing the one perfect image.”¹ And, in fact, the Centre Pompidou prudently reserves one wall for each of Bacon’s paintings, as if neighbors in any proximity, even framed and under glass, might otherwise be eaten alive. It should not, however, be supposed that such a claim to being the only art work is exclusive to art works with explicitely ferocious imagery. Even Wallace Stevens, who thought that modern poetry must “speak words that in the ear / In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat, / Exactly, that which it wants to hear” had tolerance exclusively for one poem.² Thus in “Credences of Summer” he wrote that “One day enriches the year. One woman makes the rest look down” only because that poem tests itself,³ as a credence of poetry, by its capacity to transmute these ultimate elements of natural beauty—one woman, one day—into the poem’s own claim to being the one poem. But why then, if there is only to be one work, are there so many art works? From the perspective of art—from the perspective of a genuinely monstrous productive energy such as Picasso’s—the answer is that there is a multiplicity of works only out of wanting the one art work.

If this momentarily suffices to grant Adorno’s position a degree of tolerance, still we are hardly ready to accept it. It is not ours. And if, as claimed, Adorno’s position is central to his aesthetics and to his philosophy as a whole, and if we are still prepared to have much to do with either, we must come to terms with the foreignness of his critique of taste. It will not, however, help this discussion to focus immediately on this question of a taste for the one right art work. This would involve us just as soon in a narrowly tangled dispute. The aim, rather, is to sketch the foreignness of Adorno’s aesthetics to us in several dimensions, including national levels, and then come back to this specific problem. We cannot approach it meaningfully until we have collided as openly with Adorno’s thought as we do implicitly. This antagonism is worth investigating. If the interest in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory is puzzling, it is just as certain that there is an urgency right now in understanding the work correctly, for what it really has to say. This would not be recognized by pretending that Aesthetic Theory is waiting to embrace us at the gate.

I

To begin, then, to discern the alienness of Adorno’s work, the broadest reason for this is just that the book is an utterly speculative work, an aesthetics. Aesthetics is itself the most remote region of philosophy, and in that remote region, Aesthetic Theory, if one went to look for it, would be found at the vanishing point, the distant limit. In its complexity, in its sometimes hermetic, Pythian expression, the book stands at the philosophical maximum. In its very tone, as is reputed, the book portrays itself as a philosophy, which to be philosophy at all would need to be the only philosophy. And, while Aesthetic Theory is located at that limit, in absolute distance and tone, we are located at the other extreme, at the philosophical minimum. We would not only shy away from the warmonger aesthetics of a Francis Bacon, we would not even join in an arm wrestle over the difference between stoicism and skepticism. What would bother us, on the contrary, is if we learned that some contemporary of that seminal third-century Greek skeptic, Sextus Empiricus, had been denied “the right to say it,” whatever it might have been. Then we are ready to go to war, and not with paint either. It is this mix of avoidances and proclivities that marks us, under the banner of civilization, as the least philosophical people that ever walked the earth. If this is not self-evident, if there is doubt, notice how right this second, in your own reading sensorium, just this mention of the word civilization—an irredeemably philosophical concept—may already have caused the inner hackles to stir. “What do you mean”—the inner voice of the inner hackles asks—“by ‘civilization’”? Who is “civilized” and who is not? And who are you to say which is which? But, whatever the answer to this string of questions, whatever civilization may mean, the main point—that we are the unphilosophical—is hardly unprecedented. To Tocqueville, for instance, it was preeminently obvious: “Americans—he wrote—have no school of philosophy peculiar to themselves.” And later he added, “Less attention is paid to philosophy in the United States than in any other country of the civilized world.”⁴

Allow Tocqueville’s pronouncement to antagonize us a bit so we can overhear the inner voices of the lurking national audience in us all get mad and, though basically disinterested in philosophy, demand: “Who is to say who is philosophical and who is not?” Tocqueville, who certainly considered himself a philosophical man, apparently felt prepared to make the distinction. And his answer is valuable because, as will be seen, it helps differentiate the tradition in which Adorno worked from anything North American. Thus, when Tocqueville distinguishes the philosophical from the unphilosophical, he shapes this as a distinction between the “philosophical ideal” and its opposite—the thought of an American. But how, we want to ask, does the philosophical ideal think? Tocqueville calmly answers: as does the deity. Then how does the deity think? There is reason to hesitate at this moment in acknowledgment of a general hesitation. The line of reasoning pursued does not produce a climate that the unspeculative are generally pleased to inhabit. But here, anyway, is Tocqueville’s lucid response on the question of divine ideation: when the deity thinks, he does not, for instance, view the human race collectively. Rather, he sees individuals, each separately, each in the resemblances that make each like his fellows as well as in the differences that make him unlike his fellows.⁵ The thinking of the deity, in other words, is the fully articulated perception of the one and the many. The deity is not ever obliged to make unlike like, or to subsume the particular to the general in order to know it, but thinks emphatically only, so that in place of concepts there would effectively be only proper names: in such a mind a painting perceived as a painting would have to be the painting as nothing else made of paint and canvas could be.

The deity, therefore, has no need of normative or general ideas. General ideas are, rather, the necessary instruments of the frail human mind; they are what the mind has recourse to when it has no other way to grasp reality. This frailty, Tocqueville points out, is the exaggerated characteristic of the unphilosophical American mind. It is the fate of the mind most exclusively shaped by the pressure of equality. For under this pressure every mind is necessarily suspicious of every other mind, since in this circumstance each mind is necessarily in competition with every other mind, and thus no mind can accept anyone else’s judgment as its own. Rather, each intelligence seeks to control each of its judgments with the tenacity of a hermit. This narrow American type of intelligence, out of its weakness—says Tocqueville—is compelled to insist on wanting to answer every question on the basis of its own self. Deprived of any historical resonance by the democratic break from tradition, this mind has no alternative but to take itself to be a general self. Therefore the American has such a strong propensity for general ideas, those that—contrary to divine ideation—demonstrate little articulation of the one and the many.⁶

Without examining Tocqueville’s speculations step by step, each of us in the privacy of our own isolated reading caves may recognize enough of ourselves in this foreign philosopher’s social analysis to acknowledge that he discerned something of a national power of mind: it is the capacity of the principle of equality, demanding absolute competition, to isolate and compel each of us to want to answer any and every question autarchically. On the basis of what appears to be a ruthless individuality, however, we all the same produce ever more general ideas, deprived of the articulation of the one and the many in which particularity could be experienced. It is a function of this generality that what we most want to do when we think is to conclude that all things that confront us are the “same.” In this affirmation is our affinity for a suburban Buddhism and an eagerly contorted yoga. It helps lay down the tracks for the perception that what the individual seeks to do in a market economy must be good and right for everyone else. It may even be perceived as a blessed surprise, as the form of our own most involuntary self-transcendence, which it is since it entirely fails its own desideratum of individuality. Thus, nothing is more obvious to us, for instance, than that all that sounds might as well be called music, that every ragged list of words might as well be called a poem, that wherever people accumulate is a civilization; we are obliged to insist, and are most proud of ourselves when we insist, and feel the power of a certain kind of nation when we insist, for instance, that everyone who thinks is already a philosopher, to the extent that anyone might want to bear that appellation. This power of the general is what we consider “transgressive” and the pursuit of “difference” when the Guggenheim Museum mashes together a display of Armani suits with Cézannes, flatwear and motorcycles.

II

The tradition of thought that Tocqueville expresses—in the choice between thinking like the deity and thinking like an unphilosophical American—is not shy in its preference. Even feeling partly revealed by it, Americans might suspect Tocqueville of being anti-American. Nonreligious Americans may themselves intuit something heretical in Tocqueville’s supposition that he knows that and how the divine thinks. And precisely this suspiciousness of religious heresy in a philosophical undertaking is what is needed here to be able to study Adorno’s work in the self-consciousness of our own national comprehension. In this frame of mind, consider, for instance, the most quoted passage from Minima Moralia:

The only philosophy which can be responsibly practised in face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption. . . . Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light.⁷

The urgency of this passage, which can be felt to this moment by any voice willing to experiment with it, is the alarm that what has transpired may never be known for what has occurred. These lines have been much quoted only because one can hardly help but quote them. All the same, it is not sure that, this side of the Atlantic, we realize what we are dealing with in this passage. Notice in fact that, even though the passage doesn’t seem complicated, it is not obvious how to understand it. Clearly, Adorno insists that the one, the only possible, philosophy, must aspire to a divine vantage as a surrogate for a messianic light to come. But if we take Adorno at his word—if, for instance, we begin to conclude that he held that philosophy must entrust itself to the light shed by some messianic plenipotentiary on the order of John the Baptist, the glare of misinterpretation becomes prohibitive. The passage is not a work of theological fervor. It does not want us to bend at the knee. On the contrary—and here we have arrived at a set of boundary lines that are not always so available to the eye—Adorno can invoke the messiah qua philosopher just because as a philosopher Adorno was not a religious man. Though he had the bearing of a priest back of the lectern, it was a philosopher’s lectern he stood back of. Thus the passage cannot be interpreted to say that philosophy should take up the stance of John the Baptist, but as a demand that John the Baptist should be a philosopher. And Adorno was only able to urge this in the confidence that as a philosopher he would not invoke the magical contents of what he named. This prerogative was his as a capacity that he inherited, as did the whole of European philosophy—Tocqueville included—as it came into receipt of a theology shaped by the thought of antiquity and transmuted by the Enlightenment. The turning point in this secularization was, of course, romanticism, that profane mysticism, which, as we can now see in Adorno’s passage, wanted to conjure the image of divine light not to behold the deity as its source above, but to illuminate a damaged nature below. The passage exhorts us to the secular act of a genuinely isolated, elite individual who without a doubt seeks another world, but not that recommended by any church.⁸ Adorno’s philosophy thus was able to be as full of theology as was Kierkegaard’s, without his being any more a believer than Kierkegaard was—the single distinction being that Kierkegaard struggled to be a believer and Adorno did not.

III

Adorno was only able to write this much-quoted passage in Minima Moralia because he had no need to worry, as would an American, that at dawn on the day of publication a millenarian congregation would be there to greet him in his kitchen for prayers, cookies, and a march on the canyon—to view those aforementioned rifts and crevices—in expectation of the messianic light. It is noticeable, in fact, that any effort to situate Adorno’s passage in an American context makes comic ironies fan out in every direction. For instance, a rigorously trained American philosopher in scrutinizing Adorno’s passage might reject it out of hand, as hocus-pocus, and hardly philosophical. But the magical intensities presumed of Adorno might verily be the beam in the beholder’s own eye. For it is here, this side of the Atlantic, that the magical claim of these theological concepts has remained undiminished, not on Adorno’s side. And, to bring the American situation more into focus, this same philosopher-reader—who, on the job, back of the lectern, might look like a dentist—having made short shrift of Adorno on the grounds of symbolic logic, could well lock up his professional office for the week, looking forward to joining the chorus at church on Sunday. American philosophy, in contrast to European philosophy, is shaped by the ramifications of a national order that, in its primary desire to protect religious freedom, established religion as the truth of the private sphere, thus isolating religious thought from the process of enlightenment. This is why, statistically, by documented sightings alone, the Virgin Mary in any given year spends more time on American shores than in Italy or in the whole of western Europe.

IV

For North Americans, aesthetics is the most remote dimension of philosophy. As a preeminent American Kant scholar, Robert Paul Wolff, for instance, would proudly announce to his yearly Kant seminar that he had never read the third critique. It was dispensable—he said—and anyway, he preferred lying on the sofa watching James Bond movies. In the German tradition, by contrast, aesthetics inevitably becomes the keystone of any philosophical construction. Thus Adorno necessarily stood at the apex of his intellectual ecclesia as a priest of art. This is not a metaphor. And here, however much the problem is to make Adorno as foreign as possible, described as a priest of art he will necessarily become inscrutable to the point of nondescript. For without special study, the office—a priest of art—is unknown to us. These words are not combined in our language. In German thought, however, intimations of the office go back as far as Cusanus, and the institution emerges full blown in Wackenroder and Tieck’s seminal romantic work, Outpourings of an Art-Loving Friar. Notice that the title of this book must catch the American ear entirely off guard. To read the book is to encounter the vision of art taking the place of divine mediation. Art, the good friar explains, “must come before love . . . for art is of heavenly provenance.” Or again: “Art must become a sacred love or a loved religion. . . . Earthly love may then take its place after art.”⁹ Theologically, art has here taken the place of Christ, by whose sacrifice human love becomes possible.

It must be emphasized that in the whole of American thought there is nothing like this. In the first place, there are hardly any comparable philosophical speculations on the topic. And if one consulted the epochly correlative volumes of American romanticism one would discover that the American movement is in fact distinct from the European movement specifically by the hesitant, muted presence of any kind of art religion. Adorno illuminates this difference when he writes, in his Beethoven, that in the nineteenth century the European middle class prayed while listening to Beethoven.¹⁰ In those concert halls the magical aspect of religion was preserved as a kind of aesthetic ecumenicalism that was one level on which a solution to the wars of religion was found. In its ideal of a person of taste, the middle class was united, beyond the bloody nation-mangling struggles of the reformation. For Europe, the greatest hopes became lodged in aesthetic hopes. By contrast, Americans simply pray when they pray, and that is often. Though they may sing in church, they have rarely experienced music as a secularization of the divine; in their historiographical imagination, because it postdates the division of art into high and low, art does not originate, as it does obviously for all Europeans, in religious imagery. Otherwise the United States would not have been so able to become the primary world purveyor of industrial literary and musical entertainment.¹¹ And neither would an Americanist, who sought an elite intellectual to compare directly with the aesthetical romantic elites of European romanticism find anyone closer than perhaps Thoreau, who would listen to Bach in ecstasy and then get drunk.

When Adorno informs us on European habits of aesthetic prayer, there is no doubt that he himself prayed in this fashion. As proof the whole of Aesthetic Theory might be cited. But, for something that comes more in a nutshell, note that he accounted for Hitlerism by a loss of the experience of emphatic art: “It is the lack of experience of the imagery of real art, partly substituted and parodied by the ready-made stereotypes of the amusement industry, which is at least one of the formative elements of that cynicism that has finally transformed the Germans, Beethoven’s own people, into Hitler’s own people.”¹² However much one wishes the thesis were true, it is well known that some number of SS officiers were as proud of their powers of Mozart on the pianoforte as of their cruelty in the bunker. But it is the starkness of a contrast that is at issue here: for Adorno, and out of a centurywide European development, the most profound human hopes, theological hopes, took shape as aesthetic hopes. Only in this context could Adorno’s challenge to the possibility of “poetry after Auschwitz” hit so central and common a European nerve that ever since the whole of his philosophical writings—in newspapers, journals, and many books—have been known by that one maxim. Aesthetic Theory itself is nothing but an extended meditation on that question, and the implications of an envisioned, catastrophic end to art. In the United States, however, if one wanted to formulate an even vaguely compelling equivalent of that maxim, one that risked something comparable, it might read on a Holiday Inn marquee along a Georgia highway: “Is there Jesus after Auschwitz?”

V

If Adorno’s thinking is recognizably alien to our own, it is worthwhile to turn attention to the obverse, and recognize our foreignness to him. When he came to the United States in 1938, about a century after Tocqueville and much in his tradition in the critique of equality as well as in his regard for the idealist concept of truth, Adorno found himself involved in a study of how music is transformed when it is mass-reproduced by radio transmission. In the early decades of radio’s development, and most of all in the thirties and forties, the American democratic left hoped that radio would finally lift the stain of privilege from cultural treasure so that, along with the scions and chauffered arriving at a Carnegie Hall performance of Beethoven, so would—in the language of the times—the farmer’s wife in Iowa, just by being at home next to her radio receiver.¹³ Adorno, however, dissented from the democratic left’s hopes. He perceived that subordinating music to the principle of equality would not universalize cultural treasure but neutralize it. For the mechanism of radio transmission, the vehicle of commercial equality, so damaged music that all it accomplished was to change cultural treasure into the fetish of cultural goods. In 1941, however, after he completed what he could of this study, Current of Music, Adorno turned his attention from the depredations of radio transmission to a consideration of the recent transformation of the recipients of radio broadcasts, the listening inhabitants of this country.¹⁴ And in a study entitled “The Problem of a New Type of Human Being” he no longer argues that it is a major social concern what radio transmission does or does not do to the music itself. The issue is that the kind of person that had emerged in the United States is one that culture is no longer capable of cultivating. Given this new type of human being, the fiction could no longer be maintained that it was progressive and humanistic to encourage men and women to hear Beethoven symphonies, read Milton, or meditate appreciatively on Raphael’s Madonnas. Culture itself had entered into such opposition to the real conditions of life that it could no longer fulfill its age-old hope of humanizing the individual.

Adorno was aware that these observations, though in some regard they took up where Tocqueville left off, were in their extremity of formulation unprecedented. No one had previously considered that the nature of the person could be so transformed historically that culture would become inadequate to humanity. Adorno went on to describe whom he thought we are, these people who are beyond culture’s power to cultivate. Whereas culture presupposed an autonomous individual—Adorno observed—the contemporary American has been so overwhelmed by real and constant anxiety, has been so broken in on by heteronomous forces, that this autonomy and its capacity to breach subjectivity’s own claustrum could no longer be presumed. Adorno thought that this incapacitation of the person began in earliest childhood, and he noted several aspects of what he believed had happened: First, the world no longer provides actual images to the American child, but only images that arrive with the insignia of their own untruth stamped on them; second, the objects of action have all become technical objects that primarily demand adaptation to their own instructions; third, the collapsed family no longer provides a buffer between society and person, which is part of why the American child is flooded with anxiety; fourth, the traditional language of people has been supplanted by a language of advertisement that no longer fulfills but instead leaves people speechless. Furthermore, and fifth, libido is directed toward tools, so that the world of things becomes a substitute for images. And sixth—which Adorno thought most important—is the transformed relation of people to their own nature, their own bodies. A society of sports had developed, he found, that had suspended the longstanding cultural taboo on naked physical power. This has been responsible for efforts to convert cultural objects into categories of physical performance. The translation of novels into films would, for instance, be a variant of this.

The discernment of these six aspects of a new type of human being is genuinely provocative and substantially advances Tocqueville’s study of the dynamic in which identity obviates the capacity for anything but the general. Each element deserves lengthy consideration, as does the idea in general of persons who are no longer to be cultivated, in the sense of gaining a capacity to be involved in what is other than the self. But, just touching on several of Adorno’s observations, it seems evident, for instance, that North Americans are at once swamped with images and bereft of image, that some part of the comfort found by adolescents in ostensibly destructive fantasies of exploding computer-envisioned missiles against electronically illustrated aliens is secured in masterful obedience to narrowly rule-driven, bureaucratic structures. It would, in further confirmation of Adorno’s observations, be hard for many Americans to think of when the sight of rigorously exercised arms was not de rigueur even for concert musicians performing in décolleté. Certainly, as Adorno might have pointed out, it is the libidinization of portable devices that infuses them with such honored positions on restaurant tables as people sit down to meet, as if it is the devices who are getting together to chat. And, again, confirming Adorno’s sixth point, the interactive museum machinery that now claims to make holdings accessible to visitors largely serves, instead, to surrogate experience with sports-modeled kinetic activity.

It might be worthwhile, here, in fact—even at the risk of a degree of awkwardly self-conscious essayism—to use something of this neomuseum style of infused, kinetic interest to concoct a kind of self-test on the exactitude of Adorno’s third claim on the ontogeny of this new type of human being: namely, that we are not to become cultured individuals because we have been broken in on too many times. Corroboration is not hard to find, though the following miniature psychological test for regression—which would be the overarching tendency of such a self—requires at least that each reader find some equivalent to a phrase like Lone Ranger to experiment with. These words themselves may suffice and will be used here for demonstration. But, if not, a swelteringly voiced Hey Dude, or some similar phrase will work equally well. And at a loss there is no need to look farther than, for instance, a fragment from that first popular song that one heard and remembers having hated, until it was so consistently repeated that one started playing it oneself—an event that is now a primordial phenomenon at the beginning of adolescence. Take that rhythmical song fragment or the phrase Dude or Lone Ranger and notice how it works back of the eyes, along the cheekbones, stretch out in it, regard it with a bodily, sportive interest, and wonder where it got its familiarity with you. This may take some time and is not to be rushed. But wonder most of all: what of this sense of familiarity—as if it would serve as the basis of familiarity with most anyone—exists? For if in this observation the discovery is made that, other than to repeat it, there is no actual familiarity in that fragment; if there would be nothing to say to someone to follow up on the prompt “remember the Lone Ranger” or how “Dude” was said or how we remember “that song”; if the memory turns out to have nothing particular to it, as to how life was one way rather than another way, then what is being perceived as familiarity is only the memory trace of regression. What stands as a plenipotentiary of familiarity is a moment when the self could no longer hold out against the pressure of what was forced on it. Much of what we have in our heads at this point—regardless whether the reader is among the group that in this country would make up an intellectual elite: professors, deans, graduate students—has this quality rather than any quality at all of being our memories. And, if the test is over now, we can conclude that what might just have been felt—including the crooked grin, maybe the sense of something yellow on the face, along with whatever disappointment with the quiz itself—is how Adorno thought that “new type of human being,” who is not to become a cultured individual, would feel.

VI

Adorno would not have minded this way of making a sport of regression. He was not a rigorist. He did not conclude his reflections on a “new type of human being” by insisting that some way must be found to return miscreants to culture. Resentment’s preoccupation with “high and low” culture was not ever Adorno’s mentality. On the contrary, his approach to the postcultural human, as to any situation, was to try to discover what new powers the transformed moment might capably release. For Adorno, the only way out was through: even the expectably contented mid-American guffaw over Adorno’s athletic disinclination would have been dialectically worthy. Thus Adorno concluded his essay by listing what powers this new type of human being might have, among which he mentions a cold readiness for sacrifice, a cleverness in the struggle with mega-organizations, and a speechless preparedness to do what is decisive.

Perhaps in the war years several of these powers were actualized. But, whatever came of that, and whatever of those powers may indeed be ours, this discussion has now come around to consider more closely Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory. For his approach to the capacities of the “new type of human being” closely parallels what he considered to be the fundamental capacity of art: it is the possibility of turning the powers of the world against itself. This is a dialectical way of putting something that fits our—genuinely undialectical—ears better as Wallace Stevens would put it, speaking of poetry, when he wrote that it is a “violence from within that protects us from a violence without.”¹⁵ It could not be more obvious, but there are no other powers adequate to reality than those of reality itself. Again, as Stevens put it, “reality is the only genius.”¹⁶ Thus, just as in his study of the “new type of human being” Adorno tried to discern a way to militate its powers against those in which they originated, in his aesthetics he thought, similarly, that art itself must turn the violence against the violence, but in the realm of illusion. For it is only in the realm of illusion that the violence against the violence would itself be free of violence. Only there could it be shaped as the articulation of the one and the many, in which what is brewing in us all—which is for sure, if not only, a disaster—can possibly appear in such a way that, whoever is capable of concentrating on it, rightly exclaims, “if it only were.” Art is the conceivable point at which the brewing disaster becomes inextricable from “if it only were,” the image of reconciliation. Or to condense it again: art is the effort to shape the truth in the form in which it can rightly be longed for, in that moment when the body is covered with goosebumps. It is because there is a discernible difference between the false shudder and the true shudder that an aesthetics that is devoted to the primacy of the object claims that one art work can be, and absolutely must seek to be, better than any other art work. The process of each and every art work that emphatically undertakes to be art is the process by which the work destroys its own illusion.¹⁷ In Benjamin’s terms, certainly the origin of Adorno’s aesthetics, every work ruins itself for the truth. Even the most stereotypical tune, by bringing itself to a close, however predictably, insists that there should only be one art work. Because art seeks the utterly real, no art work can tolerate any other work, let alone its illusion-bound self. To presuppose many works, a diversity of art works, is to assume that art is finally no more than an illusion, good at best for covering those many walls waiting for decoration. Thus Adorno’s dissatisfaction with each and every art work was his alliance with each one as it seeks to be the only art work. If there is anything despotic in this intention, it is a despotism of the desire for the particular and real in opposition to what simulates it.

VII

It is worth thinking back to Adorno’s list of the powers apposite to a new kind of person who is not to be cultured. Note that he did not enumerate probable powers of patient translation or a discernible eagerness to study Aesthetic Theory. But he might have seen this coming, had he thought about it. In his own genuinely haughty, uncompromising style, shaped by disdain for the philistine, he could have written, “Textbook dialectics—only the excluded can be needed.” Aesthetic Theory could only have been written on the basis of Adorno’s return to Germany from the United States. The book stands in utter opposition to what we are. This formed the potential for the book to become more important here than in Germany, a potential that is now urgent. This is not to say that we need Aesthetic Theory so we can pretend to be priests of art or speculative philosophers. Neither is in the offing. But, at this moment, Aesthetic Theory could provide the basis on which to experiment with ways that taste can be disputed and the correlative impulse to develop an exactitude in listening, what Adorno called “adequate listening.” As he wrote, “It is more essential for the listener to please the Beethoven symphony than for the Beethoven symphony to please him.”¹⁸ Ears adequated to this level of differentiation, that would listen for what is emphatic in art and take its side, in opposition to all that is not—might tolerate for a moment such arch apothegms as “right listening means above all the overcoming of the current false listening”¹⁹ and even discover Adorno to be correct that jazz as he knew it, then synonymous with sweet and swing, was the reggae of the thirties and forties. And that the howl today over Adorno’s antipathy to that bland music obscures a wide-eyed contemporary aversion to advanced jazz, which is a genuinely marginal music that has internalized the entire development of twelve-tone music that Adorno once championed, that is itself hardly played on “all jazz” radio stations, and whose minuscule listenership is more restricted than that of so-called classical music. Aesthetic Theory could become a power of differentiation to let things drop; to dig in one’s heels with a willful disinterest in amusement; to let the many movies spool silently elsewhere without worrying that one is being left behind by having missed them; to protect the museums from the Armani and motorscooters; to notice that what now makes our toes tap and our faces light up with miscellaneous recognition is no one’s memory; to act on the impulse to protect ourselves—or our imagination anyway—as the power over possibility, from what otherwise uses that power to break in on us almost second by second to defeat that possibility.