Notes To Literature

The aim of this introduction is to explain the appearance and significance of a new English edition of Adorno’s Notes to Literature, and to provide reasons for devoting your time to it—and to do so in terms other than those arising from the churning of what might, by now, be called the “Adorno Industry,” or the repackaging of philosophical texts within the broader academic Kulturindustrie.¹ By this, I mean not only the publisher’s entirely understandable need to sell books but also the broader cultivation of academic-intellectual “needs” that can be satisfied only by the production and circulation of more publications, which in turn contribute to the professional reputation of certain authors. Think, for instance, of the service fees paid nowadays to circulate or publicize academic work on the Internet.

A typical way that introductions to academic books achieve this aim is through a brief account of how a book such as this has achieved the status of a “classic” and with what implications. This can be done, for instance, by cataloguing the book’s influence in light of debates it has sparked. Allow me to immediately disappoint anyone expecting this approach in the following pages.

True enough, Adorno’s writings on art and his aesthetic philosophy continue to receive sustained and careful attention. From Notes to Literature alone, “The Essay as Form,” “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” “Extorted Reconciliation: On Georg Lukács’ Realism in Our Time,” “Commitment,” “Trying to Understand Endgame,” and other entries are already regarded as minor classics.2 Furthermore, there have already appeared a number of helpful reviews and discussions of these very volumes.³ Indeed, it is precisely because the quality of discussion is so good and so copious that I do not feel compelled to correct or revise it in this context. If anything, toward the end of this introduction, I will raise the question of whether—after at least thirty years of increasing interest in Adorno’s work—we are now confronting an inflection point, after which the scrutiny his work receives might shift in its tenor and focus.⁴

A common alternative strategy for introductions like this—detailing why the book is in danger of being forgotten and ought to be received as a major classic—seems equally uncalled-for. Adorno’s name has hardly fallen into obscurity. And the decision to republish Notes to Literature is not the expression, to my knowledge, of any need to rescue Adorno’s writings from oblivion. If you have found your way to this book—and have made it as far as this sentence—then you hardly need me to tell you that Adorno’s work is worth reading. Or, to make a related point less delicately, the fact that no book published in recent decades—including this one—will well and truly be lost (thanks to the all-preserving amber of the Internet) means that books now become forgettable, not by being paid insufficient attention, but by being undeletable.

Furthermore, if this occasion called for some thoughtful or expert notes on Adorno’s Notes to Literature, then that call would be best answered by an interpretive essay, published in an academic publication dedicated to the understanding of Adorno’s work. In other words, if explication de texte were the need to which this introduction responded, then its placement as introduction would be redundant or irrelevant, if not self-aggrandizing. After all, can the republication of a very lengthy text be justified, partly or wholly, by the brief interpretive commentary to which it is appended? Should an entire text be republished as an appendix to a commentary on it? Professional decorum alone would preclude my remarks from taking the form of “expert commentary,” whose rightful home is the preserve of specialized academic publications.

At the same time, perhaps a more direct—that is, a less decorous—reckoning with the burden of this introduction would admit that the republication of Adorno’s text is significant and defensible, in terms other than the needs of the “industry,” only if this introduction also turns out to be worth both the price of admission and the time and attention required to read it. I find this thought disquieting. It is, I imagine, familiar to any author who has aspired to write for a “public” that might extend beyond those who are bound—by affection, or by duty—to read one’s words.

Let me therefore begin by tarrying with this disquiet, by way of preparing the reader for Adorno’s essays and by confronting three issues in turn. First, I will try to show how the remarks above tumble into the concerns of Adorno’s Notes to Literature. Second, I will suggest areas in which Adorno’s reflections on the novel and lyric poetry resonate with contemporary discussions. Lastly, I want to interrogate the soundness of Adorno’s judgment about lyric poetry, when compared with his famous critique of jazz, in order to raise questions about the overall judgments on which Adorno’s philosophy of art rests.

Of course, these questions are patently visible—practically embedded into the “modern arts” after the decline of aristocratic or church patronage, or after the collapse of social-ritual justification for art practices.5 This has been the case since, say, Shakespeare or Bach or Mozart or Beethoven. Manifestly, the question for any commercially dependent artist, such as Shakespeare—who did not seem to expect his own plays to be received as “artworks,” and who made no known attempts to ensure their survival beyond his own lifetime—is: What nonreligious situations or actions might, if depicted aright, compel an audience to pay money to sit through a play? What, if anything, might make the experience worth their time and attention, not just their money? By the same token, a defense of the significance of Bach “against his devotees,” in Adorno’s sense, requires that Bach’s music capture our attention for reasons that exceed the religious rituals that occasioned their composition—without it being the case that the value of Bach’s music derives solely from the emerging marketplace for musical performance and composition.⁶

In sum, once religiously sanctioned social rituals are no longer credibly binding, the emergent market-based world—secular, capitalist modernity—requires any commercially viable artistic or philosophical “career” to work out whether anything human beings might do or achieve could be valuable beyond their role in the making of mass-market distractions or popular forms of entertainment.

Shakespeare, as we know, was not above turning out theatrical interludes that look like “mindless entertainment” for the so-called “groundlings” of London’s theater world—and which could even be called prototypical of the cultural industry products that Adorno decried. But Shakespeare, at least in part, also generated a viable career out of an ongoing attempt to see whether such “entertainment” could be compellingly interwoven with, or somehow reconciled to, meaningful artistic presentations concerning the deepest questions of his age. According to Adorno, Mozart, too, was still able to combine “high and low” music (“aria and song”) such that we can still glimpse in Don Giovanni’s Zerlina, for example, “a humanity untouched by feudal oppression and protected from bourgeois barbarism.”7 (Unlike Mozart, Shakespeare arguably came to see—by the time of The Tempest—that such reconciliation was no longer possible in or as composition and performance.⁸) What, then, is the price that art practices have to pay for “meaningfulness”—for “truth”—when they can no longer aspire to the “reconciliation” that Adorno saw as still available to Mozart? Especially if the modern artist must contend with the vagaries of the commercial marketplace, the loss of noncommercial support for artistic ventures?

Adorno’s Notes to Literature, like his writings on music and aesthetics more generally, chiefly engage these issues through reflections on high modernism—a shared artistic orientation that Adorno found in the work of musicians like Webern and Berg, in paintings by Klee and Picasso, and in the writings of Kafka, Beckett, Joyce, and Proust. Like Clement Greenberg, at least in this sense, Adorno sees modernist art as “critical”—artistically serious—in virtue of its highly formal properties, its autonomous development in a sphere it ekes out for itself.9 Nevertheless, unlike Greenberg’s view of modernist painting, Adorno does not see high modernist literature as fundamentally discontinuous with the earlier tradition just invoked. On the contrary, Adorno repeatedly draws a direct line from Shakespeare to Goethe’s classicism to modernist literature—“the Goethean tradition according to which something that speaks for itself has incomparably greater power than does an appended opinion or reflection” (320).¹⁰ Citing Shakespeare’s direct influence on Karl Kraus, for instance, Adorno describes how the formal autonomy of modernist art developed directly out of “an art so heightened that it can scarcely tolerate itself any longer” (320). For an image of such “heightened” art, no longer tolerating itself, just think of Prospero’s supreme artistic powers tumbling into the drowned art instruments and self-dissolving “charms” of the valedictory Tempest by Shakespeare.¹¹ Indeed, Goethe’s reelaboration of The Tempest in Faust II, which was being composed in the years that Hegel was lecturing on art in Berlin (and meeting fairly regularly with Goethe), testifies to the fact that Shakespeare’s Tempest was already being read two centuries ago as an allegory for the modern fate of art.¹²

More often than not, Adorno sees our experience of the autonomy of modernist art as pathological, even painful—an acknowledgment that artworks call for or express something we have been unable to make happen in our own social lives. For instance, the rash of “suicides” committed by early readers of Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther might be explained, from Adorno’s point of view, as a disturbing sign of the force of exactly that kind of painful acknowledgment. So, too, Kraus’s prose, Adorno writes, “cannot depict any state of affairs that is the way it ought to be without that state of affairs necessarily dragging along with the ignominy of the false state of affairs from which it was extrapolated” (320). Just as Adorno heard in the music of Webern or Berg the development of music’s autonomous formality, which does not allow itself to be incorporated into the “standards” of the culture industry, so too, he read in Goethe’s classicism an “autonomy of form” that resisted French neoclassicism of the same period.

The autonomy of form in Goethe’s Iphigenie is fundamentally different from French classicism, where language aids the civilizing element separately from and prior to any poetic process. Goethe’s language has to emerge along with the substance of the drama; this is what gives it the freshness of forest and hollow. Goethe had to deal with the problem peculiar to a literature thrown back on subjective experience: that of objectifying itself without participating in any objectivity that would serve as its foundation. (420)

The very possibility of meaningful subjective experience, Adorno wants to say, is analogous to the possibility of something like Goethe’s artistic endeavor: to express subjectivity in purely formal artistic terms that refuse participation in objective social life. Hence, modernist literature since Goethe is, for Adorno, a site of empirical, real subjective, or individual resistance.¹³ By the same token, this refusal is one moment of a kind of objective, indeterminate resistance taken up on behalf of whatever is “nonidentical” with the conventions of the culture industry. This kind of complex dialect—whereby art both “severs itself from empirical reality” and “is at the same time part of empirical reality and society’s functional context”—is what Adorno means by aesthetic autonomy.¹⁴ (Such passages raise the issue of a fundamental antinomy in Adorno’s philosophy; more on that below.)

Shakespeare and Goethe aside, Adorno’s emphasis on high modernism can admittedly seem “dated” if not irrelevant to contemporary readers. After all, high modernism in the arts—or, for that matter, any distinction between “high” and “low” art—seems awfully far from the contemporary production and reception of literature in the age of fan fiction, Amazon publishing, the Oprah book club, or for that matter YouTube or Netflix. So, too, the importance that Adorno attaches to his conception of artistic truth and to the autonomy of artistic form can seem remote from socially mediated issues of “identity” and “representation,” social justice and political advocacy, information transmission and marketing ploys that nowadays characterize most engagements with art and literature.

Adorno himself was, of course, well aware of this very disconnect, and he reflected upon it throughout his career. Although some of the essays collected in Notes to Literature date back to Adorno’s student days in the 1920s, the bulk of the essays were composed and assembled in the 1950s and 1960s, just when high modernism itself seemed to recede in the wake of pop art, minimalism, postmodernism, arte povera, and other contemporary movements.15 Just as Adorno’s Äesthetiche Theorie—based on material written during the 1960s—situates itself as a valedictory for the German philosophy of art, extending from Kant and German Idealism through Heidegger and Benjamin, so too, his writings on literature seek to understand high modernist works largely ex post facto, as if high modernist literature were the apotheosis of “literature” itself. Adorno seems to have been willfully oblivious to the literary works and practices that surrounded him during the years in which he composed most of Notes to Literature, and he was hostile to, or tetchy about, popular or mass art—works that try to “please” or provide enjoyment. In short, Adorno himself seemed to regard most contemporary literature as irrelevant to his own writing about literature, and vice versa.¹⁶

Nevertheless, if we take a few steps back, then Adorno’s potential relevance to contemporary discussions comes into focus. Let me then offer a few words about Adorno’s view of the novel and lyric poetry to clarify this—followed by some questions about Adorno’s judgment.

The birthplace of the novel is the solitary individual, who is no longer able to express himself by giving examples of his most important concerns, is himself uncounseled, and cannot counsel others. To write a novel means to carry the incommensurable to extremes in the representation of human life. In the midst of life’s fullness, and through the representation of this fullness, the novel gives evidence of the profound perplexity of the living. Even the first great book of the genre, Don Quixote, teaches how the spiritual greatness, the boldness, the helpfulness of one of the noblest of men, Don Quixote, are completely devoid of counsel and do not contain the slightest scintilla of wisdom.²⁰

Such “solitary individuals,” as Benjamin suggests, generate an intensifying focus on interior consciousness—for instance, Joycean “stream of consciousness”—in many modernist works of literature. For Lukács and Hegel, it was of course a deficiency of the novel (if not of the social world to which the novel belongs) to be thus reduced to a focus on the vagaries of, say, Bloom’s moods or musings in Ulysses—since the “stream” of Bloom’s consciousness would seem to take Joyce’s novel and its protagonist far from the concrete reality of the social world in which they are situated.²¹

However, for Adorno, the liquidation of Benjamin’s “solitary individual” turns out to be a strength of the modernist novel in the face of modern society. Here is Adorno making this point via Joyce and invoking Benjamin’s “The Storyteller” essay:

Second, as for Benjamin, so too for Adorno, the value of the novel’s narrative form has little to do with its narrating or storytelling ability. Identifying the rise of “cheap biographical literature” as the ideological defeat of the novel, Adorno is deeply suspicious of the idea that the meaning of a subject’s life can be redeemed by telling a story about that life, by the practice of “biography.” Consider, by contrast, well-known claims like the following from Hannah Arendt’s Human Condition: “Who somebody is or was we can know only by knowing the story of which he is himself the hero—his biography, in other words.”²⁴ Arendt’s claim has engendered much discussion.²⁵ Adorno, however, sees biography—the demand of rendering an individual’s life narratively, in words that cohere in a plot—as one of the most pernicious forms of “identity-thinking,” a way of denying the subject’s constitutive alienation in modernity. “For the more human beings, individuals and collectives, become alienated from one another,” writes Adorno, “the more enigmatic they become to one another.” He continues:

In Adorno’s view, modernist literature responds to this impulse, not by telling stories, but by its heightened attention to language—one might say in its surrender to language, as in Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake or Beckett’s Malone, for instance. In this way, modernist literature could be said to have become lyrical—or, to reveal our need for lyrical writing in ways that compel Adorno to see lyric poetry, finally, as the most apt form for the articulation of modern subjectivity.

And in fact, we read in “On Lyric Poetry and Society” (1957) that “only one who hears the voice of humankind in the poem’s solitude can understand what the poem is saying” (60). Or, as Adorno put it in his discussion of the poetry of Eichendorff, lyric poetry becomes universally meaningful—makes intelligible something of what it is to be a subject—by renouncing “the dominion of one’s own ego over one’s own psyche” (82). Poetry like Eichendorff’s “lets itself be borne along by the stream of language”—writes Adorno in a flourish that reminds one of Heidegger’s Die Sprache spricht (NL 1, 64).26 One way of considering this imagery—and I think this is close to Adorno’s thinking—is to see “language” here less as “text” or raw “given” than as “speech,” something appropriated by a speaking subject (as, of course, the German Die Sprache suggests), and hence as a kind of socially mediated practice, a relationship between address and addressee. In his close reading of the last stanza of Rudolf Borchardt’s poem “Pause,” for instance, Adorno goes out of his way to emphasize that “in everything he wrote he made himself an organ of language” (451). As Ulrich Plass points out in his commentary, “Adorno does not claim that the author is an organ of language”—“but, more precisely that he made himself into such an organ…in other words, language, in its purest poetic form, as Rauschen, is a product of poetic craft, of poetic making.”²⁷ Adorno is not, put differently, emphasizing some kind of Levinasian Le Dire or Derridean écriture. Nor is Borchadt’s Rauschen (“murmur,” “babble”) a Romantic form of “natural speech” (like children’s prattling or the babbling brook); rather, at stake for Adorno is the possibility of hearing oneself addressed by the poet, in the poem.

In one respect, the possibility that Adorno here attributes to lyric poetry is akin to his hope for the music of Berg or Webern—namely, that the poet might achieve a valuable form of social autonomy in making herself the instrument of formal language in much the way that the composers might make themselves into instruments or mouthpieces of musical autonomy. As Lydia Goehr has pointed out, the very title itself—Noten zur Literatur (Notes to Literature)—suggests the appropriateness of this analogy to music.²⁸ But in another respect, Adorno seems to see possibilities in lyric poetry that go beyond those of music—namely, what he calls the possibility of rescuing the genre of “epic,” or at least of folksong (Volkslied) in the era of modern subjectivity.²⁹

In such a rescue, the modern lyric poet does not just tap into some ancient font of objective, originary “language”—as, by contrast, Heidegger suggests when he writes of how “poetic dwelling” means that poets receive or remember this possibility “from the telling of language…only when and only as long as [the poet] respects language’s own nature.”30 Adorno’s conception is more dialectical—the poet subordinates herself to a language that she herself recuperates, or laboriously excavates. “The subject transfers its own strength, as it were, to what is naively understood as the medium of subjective expression, in order to subordinate itself then to that medium” (453). In other words, the poet does not so much pay homage to (or “respect”) the givenness of language as excavate—through philological care and sheer erudition—linguistic-collective practices, like epics or folksongs, to which the poet then submits. This is how Adorno understands Borchardt’s translation of Dante, for instance. Borchardt’s work is not just the idiosyncratic attempt of a single poet to breathe life into a dead language but the effort to use poetry for the sake of “the rehabilitation [Wiedergutmachung] of language” for others, too (453). Closer to our own time, we might think of the career of Seamus Heaney—his translation of Beowulf, or his “Sweeney Astray: A Version from the Irish” (1984)—in much the same way.³¹ The point is not that Heaney, or Borchardt, “really” resuscitates a dead language; rather, they breathe new life into a premodern genre, “epic” or “folksong,” and thus carry forward the objective (linguistic) site of a possible collective subjectivity. Lyric poetry, for Adorno, is a social practice that, through the subject’s (the poet’s) efforts, rescues past forms of objective collectivity—at least wherever the response to the poet’s efforts is sufficient, wherever the poem manages to be more than just the poet’s reverie. Here is Adorno making this last point with respect to Stefan George in the final two lines of “On Lyric Poetry and Society”:

The truth of George lies in the fact that his poetry breaks down the walls of individuality through its consummation of the particular, through its sensitive opposition both to the banal and ultimately also to the select. The expression of his poetry may have been condensed into an individual expression which his lyrics saturate with substance and with the experience of his its own solitude; but this very lyric talk [Rede] becomes the voice of human beings between whom the barriers have fallen. (73)

It might be the case that Adorno’s claim for lyric poetry, here and elsewhere, is rooted only in his sense of modernist poetry’s historically diagnostic dimension.³² But it strikes me that Adorno’s enthusiasm for the achievement of lyric poetry, as the above quotation makes clear, seems more boundless than that. His judgment seems to be that lyric poets like Mörike and George evince genuine communal possibilities out of the modernist ruin. As Eva Geulen puts it in her commentary, for Adorno modernist poetry seems to be “not one genre among others, but [rather] the genre that rescues and restores bygone or even non-existent…genres” that evoke a kind of collectivity of prebourgeois Volk.³³

Indeed, Adorno’s judgement seems unequivocal in this respect: “In the briefest of spaces,”—he writes about Mörike—“the lyric succeeds in doing what the German epic attempted in vain”—namely, it succeeds in reinvigorating a genre and hence a form of collective experience, even though it may be a genre that never existed in the first place.³⁴

Reread Adorno’s laudation of George, above. And then recall, for instance, the way in which Adorno had marshalled the same terms, of a possible reconstitution of collectivity out of folksong, in order to write witheringly—in “On Jazz” (1936)—of “the talk about intrinsic ‘archaic forces bursting forth within [Jazz],’ or whatever the phrases with which obliging intellectuals justify its production.” Whereas Adorno sees Mörike and George as achieving a genuine German “folksong,” he finds “highly questionable” the notion that “jazz has anything to do with genuine black music”:

Adorno’s reasoning here is puzzling, to me at least—since, as noted above, such “folkloric research” is precisely what poets like Mörike or Heaney or Joyce must also engage in, according to Adorno himself, irrespective of whether the “primordial” song excavated by such “research” is “genuine.” And it is difficult to see why at least that same principle would not apply to jazz, by Adorno’s own lights; or why (if not) the inappropriateness of the principle would not enter into Adorno’s discussion.

Adorno’s verdict is nevertheless unyielding—the “belief in jazz as an elementary force with which an ostensibly decadent European music could be regenerated is pure ideology.”³⁷ “Pure ideology” may well be an appropriate term for belief in jazz’s elementary regenerating power—I shall not litigate the point here—but, if “pure ideology” is an appropriate term, then it is hard to see why such a verdict would not apply to the lyric poetry of George or Mörike as well, given the reasons that Adorno himself offers for his own critical judgment.

Adorno’s further reasoning only deepens the bafflement. Music made by slaves or by those who “belong to the lower [social] level,” he avers, cannot be free.³⁸

Here we discover that, for Adorno, what is praiseworthy in Mörike and George, and contemptable in jazz, is not just that the German poets “really” manage to evoke epic tradition or potential collectivity, while the music of black slaves cannot achieve it. More precisely, what distinguishes jazz music from modernist lyric poetry, for Adorno, is the fact that jazz (Ur-jazz) springs from a psychological “primal structure” that is itself unfree, slavish—vital, but nevertheless in bondage.⁴⁰

However, the conclusion that jazz is unfree (“standardizing”) because it springs from a fundamentally slavish “psychological” “structure”—“the domesticated body in bondage”—turns out to not rest on a judgment about the music itself. It is, rather, the slavishness (or not) of its creators. Even without the racist implications, Adorno’s conclusions here—and this is the point I want to make—could be reached independently from any critical analysis of, or indeed any experience of, or composition of, a poem or song. That is, Adorno here collapses the space between maker and product—the space of culture—and in doing so he forecloses the possibility of any genuine judgment about the works and practices in question. Adorno’s argument about jazz, in sum, rests on prejudice, not critical judgment.

To be clear, I raise this not merely—as others have done—to lay an accusation of racism at Adorno’s door. Instead, I want to suggest that this should call Adorno’s other judgments about art into question, and alert us to a need for further scrutiny about his assessment of modernist art. For, in light of the evidence, it is far from clear that Adorno succeeds in making a coherent judgment about modernist art that would make sense of both jazz and modernist poetry by the terms and reasons Adorno himself sets for such judgments. And if the reasons for Adorno’s judgment are not at least coherent, in the minimal sense of not being prejudicial, with respect to both jazz and lyric poetry—and this is not the same as demanding that identical criteria must externally “apply” to both art forms—then we can reasonably question what Adorno’s judgment finally teaches about either art form.

Some have sought—apologetically, to varying degrees—to marshal Adorno’s philosophy in the service of a discussion of black expression and postcolonial cultural production. It has been argued that Adorno—given his overall views on art—should have seen emancipatory potential in jazz, in light of what he says about other lyrical and musical modernist practices.41 This view strikes me as too generous, and in that sense implausible—too generous because too quick to concede that Adorno’s overall judgment must be sound, however blinded he may have been by “ethnocentric provincialism” to the emancipatory dimensions of popular music (or popular culture).⁴² Rather than dismiss Adorno’s judgment of popular music as the result of mere prejudice—that is, rather than attribute his remarks to a localizable instance of prejudice that can be held at arm’s length—we should instead ask whether a prejudicial dimension extends to Adorno’s judgments of artworks more generally, including his writings on modernist literature. It is, in other words, premature to conclude that “jazz, too, is worthy of the judgment Adorno bestows on other forms of music or poetry”—at least, it is premature to marshal Adorno’s own philosophy for the sake of such a judgment. First, we should ask again whether Adorno’s more positive judgments about modernist art hold up under the pressure of the prejudicial assessment Adorno gives of jazz.

With this in mind, we should also recall that questions have been raised about the extent to which Adorno’s overall judgment about modernist art as a potential site of resistance to bourgeois-capitalist identification might rely on an unsophisticated view of the Enlightenment, and post-Kantian philosophy—especially on Adorno’s misunderstanding of both post-Kantian philosophies of art and late modernist art practices.⁴³ The most prominent critic of Adorno in this respect has been Robert Pippin, who points to what he calls “the basic antinomy in Adorno’s aesthetics”:

On the one hand, [Adorno’s] continuation of the attempt to regard artworks as connected to and potentially in a critical relation to the sociohistorical reality of the age and, on the other hand…his insistence on something like the formal purity of the modern aesthetic as such, autonomous and self-defining…. This is an antinomy in Adorno because he does not take sufficient account of the revolution in all modernist aesthetics announced and theorized by Hegel…the antinomy itself is based on a [basically Kantian] premise about the separability of sensible and intellectual faculties that came under severe and sustained attack after Kant, above all in Hegel, and the implications of that revision are visible not only in the philosophy and art theory of Hegel…but in the demands placed on the beholder by modernist works themselves.⁴⁴

It seems to me that any full defense of Adorno, going forward, would need to answer Pippin on at least two fronts. First, assuming one agrees (as I do) that Adorno’s philosophy of art relies on a Kantian premise about the separability of “intuitions” and “concepts” that Hegel sought to overcome, a defense of Adorno would have to show not only that Adorno was somehow right to see this antinomy as unavoidable but also that Adorno’s reasons for this can serve as support for his critical judgment about modernist artworks and practices, too.45 For, the value of Pippin’s criticism—and this is the point that I want to underscore here—is not simply his assertion that Adorno failed to fully grasp Hegel’s philosophy of art; it is also Pippin’s suggestion that this theoretical failure is inseparable from the ways in which Adorno’s response to the “demands placed on the beholder by modernist works themselves” itself was inadequate. More to the point: Pippin then backs up his critique with his own judgments about modernist artworks, judgments that thus contest Adorno’s theoretical stance by putting different critical judgments about modernist art in the fray.⁴⁶

This is a fray above which Adorno cannot stand. Philosophical diagnoses of art and modernity, in other words, must stand ready to let everything ride on the judgments to which they are attached, on whether or not the judgments respond adequately to the demands of modernist artworks and practices. Critical judgments about artworks do not merely “descend from” an independently developed theoretical apparatus, from which they might be disentangled. Theoretical insights are generated in the judgments. It is thus not possible to cast Adorno’s judgments into doubt, as I have started to do here, without putting his entire philosophy of art into question.