Things Beyond Resemblance: Collected Essays on Theodor W. Adorno

From Minima Moralia to Metacritique of Epistemology (Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie)¹ the titles of Adorno’s works are intentionally concrete forms. They seek to title emphatically, as names: “A title must hit home like a name.”² For Adorno the title becomes a name in the mediation of art and concept, presentation and concept: Aesthetic Theory is a theory of aesthetics, a theory that is itself aesthetic. Philosophy of New Music (subjective and objective genitive) is a philosophy of music, one that is itself somehow musical. These titles claim that the work they contain is the presentation of the object itself. Aesthetic Theory is the aesthetic’s own theory just as Philosophy of New Music is new music’s own philosophy. In the title, then, as in the work, the mediation of concept and presentation establishes a unity of thought and object. Rather than functioning denotatively, the title as name is to be a microcosm of the work. To the extent that the title embodies what occurs beneath it, it closes itself off to the marketplace. Paradoxically, however, the aesthetic element through which this occurs, by permitting the essay’s concepts to enter into a relation in which they may achieve their cognitive aim, at the same time makes the essay vulnerable to the boutique, to an abstract autonomy that, in its empty difference, signals its conformity. The title Prisms, for example, as Adorno recognized, fails on just this account. Thinking back on it regretfully, Adorno sensed that Prisms could be a shop just next-door to Le Motif.³

“The Essay as Form”⁴ was written over five years and finally published in 1958 as the lead essay of Adorno’s collected literary studies, Notes to Literature (Noten zur Literatur). Adorno counted it among his most successful works. As the title insists, it is not a study on the essay but the presentation of its form. As a self-conscious act of naming, the essay per se “wants to help language in its relation to concepts, to grasp these concepts reflectively in the way they are already unconsciously named in language.”

Aiding language to name consciously what it otherwise names unconsciously originates in and develops a psychoanalytic reflection. It is of pressing importance to understand fully what Adorno meant by this and how he carried out this translation of psychoanalysis in his theory of language. But this concern must be set aside as secondary since any comprehension of how Adorno sought to translate a psychological dimension into an objectively social concept of truth would have to be predicated on an understanding of the other major source of Adorno’s theory of the essay as name, Walter Benjamin’s study of the Baroque play of lamentation, the Trauerspiel. Benjamin’s Trauerspiel study itself developed in relation to the idealist struggle to recover the possibility of objective truth from its nominalist-empiricist critique.⁵ Inextricable from the ingenuity of Kant’s work was precisely that it incorporated its nominalist opponent by turning the nominalist claim that the idea is strictly a function of subjective reason against nominalism by taking its own thesis to the limit. Kant reestablished a doctrine of ideas as the basis of thought’s claim to objective truth by showing that objectivity itself issues from thought.⁶ This subjective recuperation of theological contents, ultimately the possibility of identity, was a Protestant, radically inward recovery of Greek philosophy. The objectivity of the idea was formulated subjectively. A peculiar part of this history is that it was a Pietist Protestant movement—whose own tradition had origins in nominalism and itself potentiated nominalism by the doctrinal exclusion of Greek philosophy from theology—that developed by reappropriating Greek philosophy. Benjamin, working after the collapse of the idealist synthesis, was related to this movement in that he also attempted to recuperate theological contents through a reappropriation of Greek thought. But rather than a Protestant-Greek synthesis, Benjamin produced a Jewish-Greek synthesis: “In philosophical contemplation, the idea is released from the beauty of reality as the word, reclaiming its name-giving rights. Ultimately, however, this is not the attitude of Plato, but the attitude of Adam, the father of the human race and the father of philosophy.”⁷ The name is an idea in that it is a form. The idea is a name in that it is expressive. The idea as name is an expressive form. According to this doctrine, the presentation of the form releases the name. Like the idealist doctrines of the idea, Benjamin’s work was also conceived in opposition to nominalism, although the focus of his critique was distinct. It was concerned with nominalism’s refutation of the expressive content of language. According to the nominalists, the concept expresses nothing of its object. Here nominalism and idealism are unwittingly mediated in one another. Idealism’s ultimately deductive form also vitiates expression, even where, as in Hegel, its effort is to let the concept speak; the Hegelian dialectic ultimately sublates expression by the full self-presence of the spirit in absolute knowledge.⁸ Critical therefore of both nominalism and idealism, yet fundamentally allied with the latter, Benjamin developed a doctrine of ideas that attempts to recover the expressive content of language in a fashion that, with idealism, justifies thought as part of the recovery of metaphysical contents. It intended to rationally gain a content that is more than rational.

The prologue of the Trauerspiel study presents Benjamin’s program for the construction of ideas and is itself a model of the process defined by the program. Although it has rarely been noticed, the preface is written in parallel with the larger study of the Trauerspiel. Just as the larger study attempts to recover the name Trauerspiel, the preface means to recover “idea” per se as a name. The prologue proceeds by using the force of identity to gain the immanent tension—or form—of the word. It intends to reenliven the idea by presenting the antinomical contents of the word idea in the history of idealism beginning with Plato, a content that includes the opposition of truth and knowledge, truth and doxa, as well as that of truth and phenomena. The result of this presentation may be summarized in an image. The idea is to phenomena as is an expression to a face. This relationship of the former to the latter is not deductive. An expression must be presented, not summarized or deduced. This presentation is possible only as that of the object’s features, its elements, as the tension within and among the elements. Gaining this tension is the work of concepts that, insofar as they are restricted to grasping the antinomical content of elements, and are at the same time freed from any deductive hierarchy, permit the object’s expression to appear as the form of these antinomical extremes. The concepts mediate the expression by arranging the phenomena in itself while allowing the order of the material to be subject to the work’s objective form. For this reason there are no summaries in Benjamin’s work. Either the idea appears or it does not.

The idea is constructed in opposition to natural history. Once the “idea is established, then the presence of the inauthentic—that is to say natural historical past and subsequent history is virtual.”⁹ The construction of the idea, then, is the recovery of the expressive form from extensive history. Benjamin’s “Epistemo-Critical Prologue,” however, does not explain the form of this history, “natural history.” Its comprehension requires going over to the larger study where—since Benjamin deals with literary forms as models of history—it is found to be a central aspect of Baroque drama. This study of the Baroque follows the history of literature from the supersession of a mythical context of nature in Greek tragedy to the return to a natural context in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Benjamin demonstrates this return of history to nature in every figure of the Baroque by tracing out its antinomical content. Post-Reformation allegory itself—the form of the Trauerspiel—is characterized by just this “peculiar mixture of nature and history.” What Benjamin discerns in allegory is its double aspect. On one hand he finds in it the essential mechanism by which history regresses to a mythical state of nature: allegory dominates nature; it represents “the triumph of subjectivity and the onset of an arbitrary rule over things.”¹⁰ Yet allegory is also the critique of domination. In it thésis (positing, convention) becomes the expression of physis: “It may not accord with the authority of nature; but the voluptuousness with which signification rules, like a stern sultan in the harem of objects, is without equal in giving expression to nature.”¹¹ In allegory the force of the illusion of human autonomy, knowledge, is turned against itself and presents the only form of transcendence possible in a radically secular condition, the collapse of illusion. In this moment of collapse, nature gains a moment of expression and is referred beyond secular immanence. The allegorical play of lamentation expresses the moment of transience in which the semblance of human autonomy dissolves. It is the form that—just as does the idea in general—transforms history, specifically Baroque history, into truth. The presentation of the form of this collapse is the idea of the play of lamentation and at the same time the recovery of the expressive content of Trauerspiel as a name. Trauerspiel, then, is the critique of natural history by way of radical natural history. The prologue and the literary study of the play of lamentation converge on many levels, but most importantly in the problem of the opposition of idea and natural history. The prologue seeks to restore idea—as the form in which the word is expressive—from natural history, that is, from the extensive philosophical history of idealism, just as the larger literary study wants to recover the expressive content of Trauerspiel from literary history. Both words, idea and Trauerspiel, had been obscured by secular history qua significative language. The presentation of the form of transcendence in the word recovers the word itself. Just as Adam’s names are inseparable from what is named by referring nature to creation, so the research of ideas as names restores the relation of culture to the divine by gaining the expression of nature. This process is the recovery of origin (Ursprung), the symbolic name: the revivification of the Adamic language in which sign and image are unitary.

From the perspective of the Trauerspiel study, Adorno’s “The Essay as Form” would need to be the presentation of an idea, an expressive form, as the memory of essay as a name, and this is largely what transpires in Adorno’s study. Just as Benjamin reenlivens the “idea” by developing the relation of concept and presentation, so the “Essay as Form” makes the idea of the essay dynamic, with similar results. The essay is distinguished from art in that the medium of its attempt to be the full experience of its object is conceptual and it is distinguished from science in that it produces knowledge that is more than subjective definition. As these aspects of the essay are differentiated, a tension in the concept develops: the essay is not only opposed to science, as immanent criticism it shares a conceptual medium with science. But because the essay refuses to produce a conceptual hierarchy, it must arrange and fit together the elements of its object that it immanently develops; the essay therefore shares with art its aspect of presentation. Further, just as Benjamin presented allegory as the singular form of transcendence available to the Baroque, Adorno presents the essay as the singularly adequate form of social criticism. And, again, just as the study of the play of lamentation moves from an original mythic context to a second mythical natural embeddedness, so does Adorno’s philosophy of history in which he locates the essay form. In opposition to Benjamin, however, Adorno does not conceive of the presentation of the essay form as a recuperation of origin (Ursprung), of the symbolic name. By the radical critique of any first principle, all origin is criticized as ideology. In “The Essay as Form” words directed against Heidegger also implicitly touch Benjamin: “For the essay, culture is not some epiphenomenon superimposed on being that must be eliminated, but rather what lies underneath is itself artifical (thései), false society. Thus, for the essay, origins have no priority over the superstructure.”

This central conflict between Adorno and Benjamin—explicit ever since Adorno’s “The Idea of Natural-History” (1933)—was most fully developed in Dialectic of Enlightenment, which was written partially as a history of the name per se. In this work Adorno refuses to conceive of the name as a pristine symbol, whose recovery would be that of God’s creative language in which image and sign, word and object are unitary. The name, rather, is itself positioned within the dialectic of enlightenment: “The cry of terror with which the extraordinary is met, becomes its name.”¹² The name fixates the unknown vis-à-vis the known and at the same time establishes the first dualization of nature necessary to its domination. The name is not just obscured by significative language, as Benjamin held; it already has a significative aspect that challenges its own unity with its object. Like all knowledge, the name is phobic. As the model of reflection, it wants to vanquish fear by proscribing the fearful; it itself bears the principle of immanence. The terror frozen in the name becomes the fetish symbol of the privilege that enforces the division of labor. This division of labor progressively separates image from sign as the division of science and art. Philosophy, hypostatizing domination, raises the concepts in which this division of labor is sedimented to the level of universal ideas; it formalizes the division of sign and image, giving it a secondary position because of the mimetic element by which it is bound to nature. The universal concepts of philosophy themselves, however, eventually fall to the same criticism that philosophy once leveled at art. Ultimately “there is said to be no difference between the totemic animal, the dreams of the ghost seer, and the absolute idea.”¹³ Operational statements—language fully separated from its object—substitute the neutral sign and formula for the concept. This completes the mechanism necessary to the domination of nature but regresses by the same token to a bare state of nature. Unable to reflect on its course of domination, having excised the universal contents of language as superstition, thought is stranded in the position of mythic terror in which it has no alternative but to affirm the status quo of measureless domination. The course of enlightenment—the progress in domination of the name—is therefore the transformation of first nature into second nature, the establishment of a second mythical context.

Through the lens of Adorno’s philosophy of history, sparkling clearheadedness turns out to be depersonalized fear, though it is not to be supposed that this fear would be assuaged by confusion. A new unity of image and sign, as conceived by Benjamin, would not escape the dialectic of enlightenment. The name as symbol is not an alternative. Yet this critique did not intend a complete break from Benjamin. The possibility of solving the dialectic of enlightenment required the recovery of the expressive content of language from the nominalist process of secularization in a form that would make good on idealism; that is, in a form that would justify thought as something other than a power of domination, the only alternative to which would be irrationality. The recuperation of reason demanded a form of thought that could claim to gain its object’s expression in concepts; or, as Adorno would put it, make the object’s expression binding in its concepts. This had been the project of Benjamin’s doctrine of ideas. Adorno transformed this doctrine by criticizing its ontological claims, which had unwittingly located itself in the dialectic of enlightenment. Adorno carried out this criticism by pursuing a relationship between allegory and Hegel’s logic, which emerged in consequence of the rejection of prima philosophia. By the critique of first philosophy, the critique of any first principle, determinate negation can no longer be conceived as the positive result of the negation of the negation. It becomes instead the form in which every concept, by its own claim to identity, cancels its self-identity. Identity thus becomes the force of allegory: by its claim to self-identity, the illusion of self-identity—that is, autonomy—is destroyed. Where Hegel’s dialectic gains identity through difference, Adorno—utterly at odds with any espoused philosophy of difference—hopes to break open the immanence of identity through the recuperation of sameness. This is difference through identity. The move away from Benjamin to Hegel therefore returns to a transformed Benjamin. Hegelian logic becomes a form of the play of lamentation while Benjamin’s doctrine of the name surrenders the research of origin. Immanent critique, Adorno explains in the “Essay as Form,” becomes the self-conscious critique of natural history, of society’s embeddedness in mythical nature. Adorno writes:

[The essay’s] proper theme is the interrelation of nature and culture. It is not by coincidence that . . . the essay immerses itself in cultural phenomena as in a second nature, a second immediacy, in order through persistence to remove the illusion of immediacy. . . . The essay’s impulse . . . is critical: through confrontation of texts with their own emphatic concept, with the truth that each one intends, even in spite of itself, to shatter (erschuettern) the claim of culture and move it to remember its own untruth—the untruth of its ideological facade which reveals culture’s bondage to nature. Under the glance of the essay, second nature becomes conscious of itself as first nature.

Like post-Reformation allegory, this is a program of criticism that turns knowledge against itself. Thésis becomes the expression of physis, allowing Adorno to both effectively quote Hegel and yet mean a seventeenth-century allegorical form: “Thought holds true to the idea of immediacy only by way of the mediated.” Radical determinate negation becomes the self-consciousness of natural history. Through the concept’s self-criticism it destroys its own facade and becomes the memory of nature.¹⁴ In Adorno’s philosophy of history the recovery of this expressive content—the expression of natural history—establishes the single possibility for the ratio to become reasonable. Thought recovers the goal of domination—freedom from fear—that was expressed in the initial terror of an overpowering nature but was excised in the development of technical control over nature. The name in Adorno’s work is allegory in the form of immanent critique.

“The Essay as Form” presents the essay as a form for demonstrating the collapse of culture into nature by the shattering of any semblance of meaning. This closely parallels the central idea of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, which likewise presents a logic of the shattering of meaning.¹⁵ For Adorno, the experience of important art, of art that is actually art, is a reversal of the Kantian sublime.¹⁶ Rather than being an experience of the autonomy of the self, such as Kant conceived, the experience of emphatically modern art is that of the self’s collapse, a frisson that destroys the self-preservative ego’s semblance of culture and reveals history as nature. This direct parallel of Adorno’s study of the essay as form and his aesthetics is implied by the location of the essay between concept and art. As has been seen, Benjamin also developed the relation between critical form and art. Yet the mediation of concept and the aesthetic differs for Adorno and Benjamin as follows from their contradictory formulations of the aesthetic. Adorno’s rejection of the research of origin was of a piece with his valuation—in opposition to Benjamin—of autonomous art. There are therefore further formal consequences to Adorno’s critique of the research of origin in “The Essay as Form.” For Adorno the element of presentation is covalent with that of the autonomy of form and thus the “idea” itself is transformed. Adorno writes that the essay is an idea “in that it does not capitulate, does not bow down before what merely is.” It gains this autonomy paradoxically. Through the immanent rational mimesis of its object, in making the object’s expression binding in its concepts, the essay becomes self-mimetic. The self-reflective somersault of “The Essay as Form” is paradigmatic: the essay as form is itself an essay; it develops the content of the essay by immanent criticism as immanent criticism. The criterion of the essay’s interpretive form is therefore “the compatibility of the interpretation with the text and with itself and its power to release the object’s expression in the unity of its elements. The essay thereby acquires an aesthetic autonomy.” The essay’s critical force develops its autonomy: “The demand for the primacy of consciousness over being is dishonored. That does not mean that primacy is surrendered to existence.”¹⁷ This establishes the critical relation of the essay as form to metaphysical contents. As Adorno repeatedly put it, the question of metaphysics is: “Can that really be all?” In alliance with Kant and the whole of modern idealism, “The Essay as Form” remains in the tradition of metaphysics by canceling it. Its critical force qua its autonomy makes it more than the status quo. By contravening the claim to the absolute autonomy of thought, the essay becomes mimetic of its object and, by the same account, critical in that it presents the object’s self-criticism. Where metaphysics, by its claim to otherness, obscurely presents the given once removed, the essay as form, by critical mimesis, becomes actually other. In this sense the essay as form, as Adorno writes, “attempts to make reparation” for the loss of metaphysical content.

The second way in which presentation and autonomy are mediated in Adorno’s “The Essay as Form” is in the introduction of modern compositional techniques.¹⁸ Just as Schoenberg in “Erwartung” discovered a new principle of composition in density, which the equalization of every element in chromatic space allowed him to achieve in that it dissolved the abstraction of melody and harmony, the horizontal and vertical aspects of music,¹⁹ so Adorno developed density as a principle of writing by criticizing the rigid distinction of horizontal and vertical aspects of thought, its discursive and associational aspects, through the equivalence of every element in the essay. It is not surprising that techniques of modem composition should be found in “The Essay as Form.” Musical composition and discursive thought had the same problem to solve: composition according to the hierarchical tonic chord resulted in the collapse of tonality and the increasing irrationality, uncomposability, of music, a loss of the adequacy of the large form to the detail. Likewise thought dominated by the hierarchical, subordinating concept, for which material is always reduced to examples of concepts, became increasingly irrational in the loss of the adequacy of form and content. Density as form not only releases music from the obligation of completing every dissonance with a consonance and ultimately completing every work with the sound of ultimate repose, it allows the essay to refrain from completing a deductive context that is an image of harmony established over the head of its content. In free atonal music it replaces a form whose model is a repetitive and fateful nature with a compositional form whose idea of nature is one of plentitude while in the essay it allows immanent criticism to develop as a microcosm of the tension of its object by which the essay—like the title—becomes a name.

As a name, according to Adorno, the essay is a critical microcosm of society just as the title as name is a microcosm of the essay. The essay’s critical force depends on its autonomy. To gain its object’s tension it must close itself off to the marketplace. But this autonomy must be self-canceling. The essay only becomes expressive and points beyond itself in the tension-filled pause. The element of autonomy, however, is at the same time the temptation of the form to sacrifice its tension, to dig in its heels and demand a life exclusively of its own. Every sentence in the “Essay as Form” is full to the limit; the title itself, quietly enigmatic, is one of Adorno’s best. Yet at the same time, certain phrases barely straddle the line between the trenchant and the sententious. In phrases like “the moment of irresponsibility, in itself an aspect of every truth that does not exhaust itself in responsibility towards the existent, makes itself responsible”²⁰ or “torn loose from the discipline of academic unfreedom, spiritual freedom itself becomes unfree”—important as they are—the defender of atonality seems to pound the tonic, however he might explain the rhetoric. One has a sense of having heard it before, even while reading it for the first time. The recognition of the putatively new as the archaic in these phrases indicates their relation to the boutique title. Adorno’s critics, claiming to represent the social, chalk up such phrases to his high-handedness. In a substantially different context, criticizing contemporaries who claimed that Hegel’s dialectic was marred by his political accommodation, Marx had better insight into what is involved in these lines: “Philosophy succumbs internally to the defects that it fights external to itself.”²¹ The critique of Adorno’s high-handedness has been and will be that this aesthete blurred art and concept. The important critique of Adorno is, rather, that the more antagonistic and opaque society becomes, the more the attempt to name it will incline the essay toward metabasis. The essay will harden itself against what it fears will mythically engulf it. The boutique moments in Adorno’s work, the points where it shines exorbitantly, are those where society prevails in refusing to allow itself to be seen for what it is.