The German systems theorist Niklas Luhmann once described the attitude and altitude of abstract thought as follows: “This theory design pushes the presentation [Darstellung] to unusually high levels of abstraction. Our flight must take place above the clouds, and we must reckon with a rather thick cloud cover. We must rely on our instruments. Occasionally, we may catch glimpses below of a land with roads, towns, rivers, and coastlines that remind us of something familiar.” “But,” he continues, “no one should fall victim to the illusion that these few points of reference are sufficient to guide our flight.”1 When thinking works to push beyond what already has been thought, not in the merely additive sense of annexing or occupying new territory but in the sense of engaging with what remains unthought and perpetually in withdrawal, it may no longer be possible to rely upon our usual organs of sense perception. Does not the thinking that wishes to transgress what is customary and admissible to think fly without the burden or benefit of received models of orientation? Would orientation itself not have to be rethought, pried, for example, out of the hands of what in the recently reformed German university system often is referred to, in a perhaps prematurely triumphant tone, as Orientierungswissen, or orientational knowledge? Would this thinking not also require a reinscribing of orientation into the very question—indeed, as the very question—of the relation between thinking and orientation? And what implications might such a reinscription have for our various discourses of thinking orientation, such as spatial orientation, sexual orientation, and mathematical orientation? In what ways might this reinscription problematize our understanding, for example, of architectural orientation and its reliance upon the sun and cardinal directions to denote the directionality of a building? After all, the etymology of “orient-ation” can be traced back to “the Orient” as that which lies in the East. And might not our insistence upon such a moment of nonself-identity inadvertently undermine our orientation to person, place, and time as measured by a psychiatric mental status exam that seeks to ascertain whether symptoms of psychotic disorder, dementia, dissociative amnesia, or other such breakdowns in orientation might have occurred? One also thinks of what in the United States and elsewhere is called “student orientation,” an event that takes place before these same students go, in a hideous yet telling phrase, “shopping for classes.”
Georg Lukács’s well-known 1920 formulation of “transcendental homelessness,”2 which recalls Novalis’s early romanticist definition of philosophy as a perpetual homesickness, speaks to the question of orientation in modernity, as does Michel Foucault’s epistemic intuition that our “present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed.” “We are at a moment,” he continues, “when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points.”3 Although it might be argued that the category of the “far,” in the oppositional pair of the near and the far, has been increasingly eviscerated, since Foucault’s 1967 intuition, in favor of an (electronically mediated) experience of perpetual nearness, availability, and simulated presence—so that “farness” in the twenty-first century has, in a sense, ceased to exist—the question as to how to orient oneself in that reconfigured space of experience has hardly left us. On the contrary, what orientation may mean to the critical field today cannot but be thought in relation to the networks of a cultural and political paradigm sponsored by a relentless global technocapitalism, in which, as J. Hillis Miller reminds us, the orientational viability of critical thought today must measure itself against such heterogeneous threats as “global climate change . . . that may soon make the species Homo sapiens extinct,” a “global financial meltdown brought about by the folly and greed of our politicians and financiers,” “catastrophic unemployment,” “endless and unwinnable war,” “weakening local communities” undermined by the effects of “global telecommunication,” a perpetual onslaught of electronic devices, video games, and so-called social networks that “are rapidly diminishing the role literature plays in most people’s lives,” not to mention “our universities,” which, “like glaciers worldwide, are in meltdown mode, especially in the humanities.”4 Given this undeniable, and undeniably urgent, state of affairs, the temptation may seem great today for critical thinking to demand a strong orientational gesture, perhaps along the lines of what Fredric Jameson once called an “aesthetic of cognitive mapping” through which “we may again begin to grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confusion.”5 Such cognitive mapping, intended to locate the self in a system of relations that otherwise seems impenetrable and unnavigable, implies an orientational activity that allows an individual consciousness to assess its position and fundamental situatedness in a network of differences and shifting forces of attraction and repulsion.6
If the practice of critical thought today frequently feels called upon to apply the rigor of its conceptual movements to the orientational promise of promoting a cognitive map, what is the significance of Adorno’s work, which so often appears to complicate the project of orientation itself, especially in relation to the precinct of the aesthetic? Why is it that, when he casts his uncoercive gaze, he withholds any unequivocal affirmation of a stable cognitive map, resisting existing programs and available systems while, at the same time, locating this refusal precisely in, and as, the condition of possibility for the idea of a nonforeclosed futurity, an experience of life and cognition that is yet to come? We may find helpful hints by reflecting on an aspect of Adorno’s uncoercive gaze that is not usually discussed or even noticed: his abiding engagement with the question of orientation as such. In so doing, we will allow the thinking of orientation to open onto a set of broader theoretical and aesthetic concerns that preoccupy, even haunt, his writings.
Although Adorno never composed a single, sustained text on the question of orientation, a rigorous engagement with this concept nevertheless punctuates his corpus at decisive moments. The problem of orientation may well belong to those heterogeneous figures that are meant to bestow, from ever-shifting vantage points and under the auspices of constantly revised modulations, different names on the concerns of Adorno’s uncoercive gaze and his ways of thinking a philosophy concerned with the libera-tory potential of the nonidentical. Orientation belongs, we might say, to what Adorno’s former student, the philosopher Herbert Schnädelbach, considers one of the open secrets of his work: that “Adorno’s philosophy in truth consists of one single thought that, however, cannot be expressed in one sentence.”7 It is as if Adorno’s writing, underneath its far-reaching variety, tacitly enacted Heidegger’s belief—although Adorno himself may well have resisted this conjunction—that a genuine thinker thinks but a single thought, mobilized in legions of different guises and particular engagements throughout an oeuvre.
We might also suggest that the question of the general contours of these mobilizations has been lodged, directly or in a more mediated fashion, at the heart of recent commentators’ efforts to reorient our experience of Adorno’s singularity in relation to its particular (and often dissimulated) conceptual truth-content. For instance, the German philosopher Martin Seel argues that this singularity emerges in the ways in which Adorno’s thinking reinterprets a consciousness of contemplation that ultimately no longer is opposed to praxis but rather “keeps its distance from that with which it is concerned because it cares about that from which it gains its distance.”8 Adorno’s editor Rolf Tiedemann reminds us that the specific philosophical content of Adorno’s writing can “only rarely be grasped firmly with one’s hands [läßt . . . nur selten sich mit Händen greifen]” because it requires of the reader a congenial sunkenness into the subject matter in which we “receive no formulas and recipes . . . but first of all the instruction to re-embark on the path of thinking and once more to take upon ourselves the labor and effort of the concept.”9 And although the American philosopher J. M. Bernstein orients our understanding of Adorno’s often enigmatic thought by reconstructing from it a political and ethical theory that, after Auschwitz, revolves around the articulation of a new post-Kantian categorical imperative, the Belgian art historian and critic Thierry de Duve suggests that, paradoxically, we may learn how to relate to Adorno precisely by also learning to resist him—that is, by returning to a more nondialectical form of Kantianism.10 But prior to orienting ourselves to what Adorno’s multilayered and far-reaching oeuvre demands of us today, we would do well to orient ourselves to orientation itself. In fact, in Adorno’s case, orienting ourselves to the ways in which orientation calls for understanding—that is, its perpetual need for reinterpretation and reinscription—demands an abiding openness to one of the hidden preoccupations that subtly inflects his corpus.
If orientation belongs to those temporary and variegated concerns that nevertheless relate in fundamental ways to the core of Adorno’s uncoercive gaze as a whole, we should note from the outset that orientation itself assumes different shades of meaning throughout his texts. Often, the concept of an overly facile movement toward orientation is cast as the expression of a relentless instrumentality, even an inadmissible concession to—mobilizing a key phrase from the Dialectic of Enlightenment—instrumental reason itself. For instance, in his introduction to the controversy over positivism in German sociology, the so-called Positivismusstreit, Adorno argues that the view of science and scholarship (Wissenschaft) favored by positivism leads to an inhibition of radical thinking itself: “Its instrumental character, that is to say, its orientation according to the primacy of available methods [Orientierung am Primat verfügbarer Methoden] instead of the object and its interest, inhibits insights that concern scientific and scholarly method as well as its subject matter.”11 The process of orientation here is inextricably bound up with the affirmation of a ruling totality in which the experiential mode and the questioning mode of interpretive engagement are bracketed in favor of a scientific—or, more precisely, scientivistic—mimetic repetition that masquerades as proximity.
Along similar lines, Adorno, in his “Resumé Concerning the Culture Industry,” equates the process of facile or faux orientation to the perpetuation of a certain delusional context: “The most sophisticated defense of the culture industry today celebrates its spirit, which one may well call ideology, as a factor of order [Ordnungsfaktor]. It provides human beings in a supposedly chaotic world with something like measuring sticks for orientation [Maßstäbe zur Orientierung], and that in itself is said to be laudable.” Adorno adds: “But what they consider to be preserved by the culture industry is destroyed all the more thoroughly. The cozy old pub is demolished more by color film than bombs ever could . . . . No Heimat survives its adaptation by the films that celebrate it and that turn everything unique and distinctive, on which they feed, into something confusingly similar [alles Unverwechselbare, wovon sie zehren, zum Verwechseln gleichmachen].”12 Orientation, in this sense, lives off the semblance of providing an order that it itself, however, in actuality undermines. By calling attention to itself as the measure of what appears immeasurable, this form of orientation erases singularity in the name of fortifying it, eliding interpretability precisely by pretending to serve as that interpretability’s archive. What would be required to question orientation in a more deliberate fashion would also call upon us to enter a certain disorientation with respect to orientation, if what is meant by orientation is the setting into place of what can be thought, and experienced as thought, in the first place.
We find similar frameworks of analysis with regard to Orientierung in a variety of Adorno’s texts, from his exposition of the false orientation provided by daily newspaper horoscopes to the pseudo-orientation offered by popular forms of music that are not actually popular—that is, of the people—but propagated and mobilized by boardrooms and their business interests. To what extent might it be possible, then, to read a long stretch, perhaps the entire distance, of Adorno’s curvy path of thinking—from his Frankfurt dissertation on Husserl, completed at the tender age of 21, and his 1931 habilitation on Kierkegaard’s aesthetics, via Minima Moralia, The Philosophy of New Music, and Notes to Literature, all the way to Negative Dialectics and his posthumous Aesthetic Theory—as an open and infinitely demanding series of engagements with, and meditations upon, the question, now explicit, now hidden, of orientation itself?
When engaging issues such as orientation in Adorno’s thought, one would do well to remain faithful and vigilantly responsible to the perpetual difficulty posed by the fact that virtually all his writing issues from a seemingly concurrent and refractory attachment to both possibility and impossibility, affirmation and negation. As Derrida professes, “I admire and love in Adorno someone who never stopped hesitating between the philosopher’s ‘no’ and the ‘yes, perhaps, sometimes that does happen’ of the poet, the writer or the essayist, the musician, the painter, the playwright, or scriptwriter, or even the psychoanalyst.” He adds: “In hesitating between the ‘no’ and the ‘yes, sometimes, perhaps,’ Adorno was heir to both. He took account of what the concept, even the dialectic, could not conceptualize in the singular event, and he did everything he could to take on the responsibility of this double legacy.”13 In learning how to read the legacy of orientation, we too become heirs of the doubling of which Adorno himself is heir, a double inheritance in which possibility and impossibility can be neither conflated nor kept apart, a thinking that perpetually disavows its self-identificatory allegiances in order to become what it is or strives to be.
To orient ourselves, then, to the question of orientation in Adorno while also affirming the potentialities of disorientation in critical thought and aesthetics—still on the far side of Luhmann’s cloud line of visibility—we may turn to Kant, a thinker who was first brought into the center of Adorno’s intellectual orbit through Saturday afternoon readings of the Critiques with his older friend and later Frankfurt School colleague Siegfried Kracauer. Adorno would return to Kant again and again at decisive moments in his work. Though shunning the contemporary trends of German neo-Kantianism, Adorno maintained his abiding relationship to the other end of German Idealism embodied in the proper name Hegel. Adorno even devoted a series of lecture courses to Kant’s critical thought. Kant’s analytic conjunction of thinking and orientation occurs specifically in his 1786 essay, “Was heißt: sich im Denken orientieren?” (literally “What Is Called Orienting Oneself in Thinking?” and sometimes translated, a bit problematically, as “What Is Orientation in Thinking?”). Here, Kant not only intervenes in a quarrel between Moses Mendelsohn and Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi over Lessing and Spinoza; he also tacitly functions as a kind of orienting device for Western critical thought itself. Just as Adorno’s thinking provides an orientational framework for the first generation of Frankfurt School Critical Theory, both in its confrontation with, and in its problematization of, Kantian philosophy and facile mobilizations of orientation, Kant’s critical philosophy establishes what he calls a “signpost or compass” with respect to all who write and think in the wake of Kantian critique. It is perhaps no accident that the poet Hölderlin, in a remarkable letter written on New Year’s Day 1799 to his brother, ascribes a certain orientational function to the philosopher when he suggests that “Kant is the Moses of our nation, leading it out of its Egyptian exhaustion into the free, solitary desert of speculation.”14
If the Kantian project establishes critical concepts that cannot be derived from a priori interpretations of experience, yet are said to enrich and deepen our cognition of the relation among understanding, reason, and experience, then the abstract thought that is mobilized in this endeavor cannot be articulated apart from the category of orientation. Kant writes: “To orient oneself, in the proper sense of the word, means to use a given direction—and we divide the horizon into four of these—in order to find the others, and in particular that of sunrise. If I see the sun in the sky and know that it is now midday, I know how to find the south, west, north, and east.” “For this purpose, however, I must,” Kant continues, “necessarily be able to feel the difference within my own subject, namely that between my right and my left hands. I call this a feeling because these two sides display no perceptible difference as far as external intuition [Anschauung] is concerned.”15 Acknowledging that the process of orientation unfolds in constant interaction with a set of a priori coordinates, the objective data in the sky, Kant emphasizes the ways in which orientation becomes a matter of a subjective consciousness entering into a particular constellation not only with external orientational data but also, significantly, with itself. Thus, he argues,
in spite of all the objective data in the sky, I orient myself geographically purely by means of a subjective distinction; and if all the constellations, while in other respects retaining the same shape and the same position in relation to each other, were one day miraculously transposed so that their former easterly direction now became west, no human eye would notice the slightest change on the next clear night, and even the astronomer, if he heeded only what he saw and not at the same time what he felt, would inevitably become disoriented.16
Kant, extending his concept of orientation from space to thought—that is, from a mathematically defined entity to a logically defined one—locates the feeling of a need within reason itself, because “while ignorance is in itself the cause of the limits of our knowledge, it is not the cause of the errors within it.”17 Kant’s thinking of orientation, then, is predicated upon the premise that “to orient oneself in thought means to be guided, in one’s conviction of truth, by a subjective principle of reason where objective principles of reason are inadequate.”18
Although for Kant reason does not feel, it does impose on consciousness the experience of a felt need in thinking that itself cannot be justified within the limits of reason alone. In other words, reason’s mode of orientational thinking—along with the thought of freedom and the freedom of thought—imposes its own laws on itself, emphasizing the self-positing of autonomia (that which gives itself its own laws) over heteronomia (that which receives its laws from elsewhere). Therefore, “freedom of thought also signifies the subjection of reason to no laws other than those which it imposes on itself,”19 while at the same time “freedom of thought, if it tries to act independently even of the laws of reason, eventually destroys itself.”20 The constellation of stars that makes orientation thinkable in the Kantian sense thus always illuminates by reflecting a light that is both necessary and insufficient, providing a frame of reference for a model of relational orientation at whose core is lodged a self-referential concept of reason that works to sponsor an intimation of the moment at which a thinking and feeling consciousness finds itself placed into its setting.
It is this question of a consciousness having been placed into an orientational setting that also concerns another careful reader of Kant’s essay on orientation: Heidegger. In division one of Being and Time, on the spatiality of Being-in-the-World (paragraphs 22–24), Heidegger emphasizes that Kant’s model of orientation—as it unfolds in “Was heißt: Sich im Denken orientieren?”—does not take the ontologically constitutive role of Being-in-the-World quite seriously enough. Although Kant’s concern is with the subjective foundation of orientation as such, in Heidegger’s account the subjectivity of objective orientation is to be thought in terms of the essential directedness of Being-in-the-World as such (“wesenhafte Ausrichtung des Daseins überhaupt”) that is always already determined by the experience of finding oneself, and thinking about ways of finding oneself, in such and such a world.21 The later Heidegger’s poetically condensed statement, in Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens (“From the experience of thinking,” translated as “The Thinker as Poet”), also implicitly casts the Kantian concern with orientation in thinking in terms of a movement of thinking toward one element in the celestial constellation, the star: “Auf einen Stern zugehen, nur dieses. Denken ist die Einschränkung auf einen Gedanken, der einst wie ein Stern am Himmel der Welt stehen bleibt” (“To head toward a star—this only. To think is to confine yourself to a single thought that one day stands still like a star in the world’s sky”).22 In keeping with his conviction that a true thinker thinks, in the course of his variegated production, at bottom only a single thought, Heidegger’s image depicts the movement whereby orientation in thinking also can mean a decisive Einschränkung, or confinement, to a single arrested thought that will illuminate an otherwise obscure and unthought mode of dwelling in the world. Orienting oneself in relation to this ever-more-rigorous self-confinement of thinking also necessitates a reconsideration of what calls for thinking and of what thinking itself may impose upon, and require from, us when our orientational efforts no longer can take the history and authority of metaphysics for granted.
For Adorno, the radical thinking of critique can have no guiding image and no image to guide it, even and especially when it assumes the complex inheritance of the Kantian self-critique of reason. In his conceptual preface to a collection of essays concerning questions of art, aesthetics, and ideology, Ohne Leitbild. Parva Aesthetica—written, with the exception of the Chaplin essay, between the late 1950s and the mid-1960s—Adorno unhinges the very idea and tenability of a Leitbild or image capable of serving as a unifying orientational model. Wishing to submit to scrutiny “what the call for guiding images suggests [was es mit dem Ruf nach Leitbildern auf sich hat],” he writes: “If one calls for them, they are already no longer possible; if one pronounces them out of a desperate wish, they are transformed by a spell [verhext] into blind and heteronomous powers that only increase powerlessness and as such conform to totalitarian attitudes.” And Adorno continues: “In the norms and guiding images which, fixed and immovable, are said to aid human beings in achieving orientation in relation to intellectual production [zur Orientierung einer geistigen Produktion] whose innermost principle is, after all, freedom, what is reflected is only the weakness of the I over against circumstances which they believe themselves not to be able to control and the blind power of that which is.”23 Might not the premature call for orientation in thinking also function as the symptom of a foreclosure in whose name a normativity and affirmation of something that already exists anyway is given the tacit legitimacy of reflexive judgment? “Those who today oppose, in an incanta-tory manner, so-called chaos with a cosmos of values,” Adorno argues, “only demonstrate the extent to which this very chaos already has become the law of their own actions and mental images.” Instead, they might do well to realize that especially in the realm of the aesthetic, “artistic norms and criteria,” to the extent that they exceed their status as emblems of an a priori dogma, cannot be “finished,” cannot be complete, cannot provide guiding lessons and orientational norms that lie beyond their “own movement [eigenen Bewegung].”24 The self-reflexive orientational question of this eigene Bewegung, particularly and above all in the sphere of the artwork, will never leave Adorno.25
Another way of posing the question of an artwork’s movement or auto-movement in relation to issues of orientation is staged in the literary work of Kafka, an author to whom Adorno, like his early teacher and interlocutor Benjamin, devotes sustained reflection, as we saw in chapter 5. In a text from 1920 that Kafka’s friend and literary executor Max Brod later assigned the title “Kleine Fabel,” or “Little Fable,” Kafka writes:
“Ach”, sagte die Maus, “die Welt wird enger mit jedem Tag. Zuerst war sie so breit, daß ich Angst hatte, ich lief weiter und war glücklich, daß ich endlich rechts und links in der Ferne Mauern sah, aber diese langen Mauern eilen so schnell aufeinander zu, daß ich schon im letzten Zimmer bin, und dort im Winkel steht die Falle, in die ich laufe.”—“Du mußt nur die Laufrichtung ändern”, sagte die Katze und fraß sie.
[“Oh,” said the mouse, “the world is becoming narrower with each day. First it was so wide that I was afraid; I kept running and was happy that I finally saw walls to the left and right in the distance, but these long walls are rushing so quickly toward one another that I am already in the last room, and there in the corner stands the trap into which I am running.”—“You only need to change the direction of your running,” said the cat and ate it.]26
The three sentences that constitute Kafka’s deceptively simple text are too rich, too deeply nuanced, and too far-reaching for a full discussion here. After all, it behooves us to recall once again Adorno’s sentiment that Kafka’s work “expresses itself not through expression but by its repudiation, by breaking off. It is a parabolic system the key to which has been stolen . . . . Each sentence says ‘interpret me,’ and none will permit it.” Kafka’s sentences are closer to allegory than to symbol in that each “is literal and each signifies,” but, for Adorno, as we recall from our discussion of The Trial in chapter 5, these “two moments are never merged, as the symbol would have it, but yawn apart” in the perpetual deferral and non-coincidence that is the allegorical mode.27 We therefore might narrow our perspective on this allegorical text—reenacting, as it were, the relentless movement of narrowing that the mouse itself perceives—to the question of directionality and the attendant problem of orientation that saturate it. What the mouse initially perceives as the lamentable unidirectionality of its uneasy forward trajectory, caused by an intense anxiety regarding the world’s fundamental heterogeneity and potential unreadability (“First it was so wide that I was afraid [or anxious—“daß ich Angst hatte”]”), narrows into a vortex that propels the mouse along ever-more-quickly rushing walls straight into a trap. It is from the perspective of the cat, who perhaps has been observing the scenario all along, that the advice to change direction is uttered—but this very advice, only superficially intended to reverse the unidirectionality that leads the mouse into the trap, provides no viable alternative to the mouse. One might say that this figurative change of directionality unravels not only the meaning of the reorientation but also the meaning of meaning itself. Here, understanding is shown to be in perpetual need of understanding. At the precise moment when the cat interrupts the scene by violently devouring the mouse, both text and animal are terminated, leaving the hermeneutic determination of this termination both under- and overdetermined.
The figure of a change of direction that fails to provide any viable coordinates for orientation is made vivid from yet another perspective. The words that Kafka has the cat speak—“Du mußt nur die Laufrichtung ändern”—stage an intertextual allusion to the famous last line of Rilke’s 1908 poem “Archaischer Torso Appolos,” “Du mußt Dein Leben ändern” (“You must change your life.”)28 The laconic and apodictic declarative mode and mood of this statement, its tone, syntax, words, and style, conjure the image of a possibility. The promise of a new orientation appears to emerge in both Rilke’s and Kafka’s declarations, if a change of direction can be realized. “Du mußt nur die Laufrichtung ändern”—“Du mußt Dein Leben ändern.” Whereas Rilke’s line appears to provide no judgment as to the relative difficulty of this change of direction, Kafka’s line, through the addition of the adverb “nur” (“only”) seems to suggest that achieving this change of direction would be a relatively simple endeavor. But although the poetological vision of Rilke’s line appears to hold out the promise of redemption as a reward for the successful change of course by a determined consciousness, in Kafka’s version the evoked ease of the “nur” is negated by the consequences that follow upon its realization: the mouse’s death. Kafka’s “nur,” then, ultimately reveals itself as the quasi-theatrical staging of a scene of bad faith (in which the cat never had any intention of offering the mouse life-sustaining advice but only wished to further its own self-interest) or as the radical undoing of the actual possibility of a change of direction as such. If Kafka’s text is read as an allegory of its own unread-ability, this interpretation engages with the double necessity of seeking reorientation and failing to achieve it, which is to say, failing at something for which there are no known conditions of success. We might say that Adorno’s general diagnosis with regard to all of Kafka’s sentences (“Each sentence says ‘interpret me,’ and none will permit it”) is staged with particular force when Kafka’s sentences engage the vexed problems of directionality, orientation and reorientation, and the elusive promise of redemption that his sentences both engender and foreclose.
Had work on his magnum opus, the Aesthetic Theory, not been terminated by his untimely death in the summer of 1969, Adorno might have appreciated the 1988 literary prose text Zur Frage der Himmelsrichtungen (“On the question of cardinal directions”) by the German writer Reinhard Lettau, member of the famed Group 47 and close ally of Adorno’s friend and Frankfurt School colleague Herbert Marcuse.29 There, in the first scene of the text, the first-person narrator, standing on a roof overlooking the San Francisco Bay, finds his friend pointing westward to refer to the world of the East, causing the narrator to ponder whether east is always located in the East, west in the West, and so forth. The narrator spends the rest of the text wittily deconstructing the idea of orientation and the question of cardinal directions, but precisely with the objective still of orienting himself. Whereas the one who would set out to walk around the globe would see the East turn itself into the West with each step, the narrator whimsically, even grotesquely, ends up by locating the secret center of the world in a place where one would not have expected it: in the small German town of Erfurt, Lettau’s hometown in Thuringia, which emerges as the one reliable spot in the world, within the logic of the linguistic artwork, from which any and all geographical directions actually make sense.
Whereas Lettau’s narrator succeeds in identifying the secret center of the world and, by extension, the very practice of orientation itself—if only ironically—Adorno’s writing allows no such moment of imagined relief. For those seeking orientation, Adorno will hardly serve as a guide. No intellectual gyroscope emerges from his writing, no instrument that would ensure orientation and its navigating measurements. Instead, readers are asked to follow his uncoercive gaze, moving toward formulations of concrete thought and charting the paths of reading and thinking as unregimented, nonpredigested forms of experience. The extreme conditions of this icy-desert require their own orientational strategies and adaptive gestures. As Adorno stated in an interview only weeks before his death, “In my writings, I have never offered a model for any kind of action or for some specific campaign. I am a theoretical human being who views theoretical thinking as lying extraordinarily close to his artistic intentions.”30 He elaborates on this perspective by emphasizing that “philosophy cannot in and of itself recommend immediate measures” but that it rather “effects change precisely by remaining theory.” “I think,” Adorno confesses, “that for once the question should be asked whether it is not also a form of resistance when a human being thinks and writes things the way I write them. Is theory not also a genuine form of praxis?”31 To orient oneself properly with regard to orientation, then, also would mean not to allow the disappointment that attaches to disorientation to efface prematurely the transformative potential that suffuses both rigorous conceptual reflection and radical artistic experimentation.
Taking up and extending Adorno’s concern with orientation in thinking, we might say that no thinking is possible without some kind of orientation, if only a minimal, residual, hesitant attachment, a fleeting commitment, to the possibility of ordering space and locating sense within it. Yet what thinking, rigorously understood, demands always exceeds thinking itself, its orientation and localization, its justification and delimitation, its stable cognitive map. Within orientation, disorientation also lingers. Under Adorno’s uncoercive gaze, the artwork orients us precisely to disorientation.
Allowing oneself to be oriented toward disorientation also means orienting oneself toward a nonsaturated thinking to come. This orientation toward disorientation ultimately requires something of the double logic with which the artist, in another essay from 1967’s Ohne Leitbild, “Die Kunst und die Künste” (“Art and the Arts”), is obliged to approach his craft—that is, the double gesture that remains faithful to its treacherousness. The artist must, in a sense, know what he does and at the same time not know it; the genuine artwork always is something other than repetition to the extent that it is also “a thing among things,” a thing of “which we do not fully know what it is” (“von dem wir nicht wissen, was es ist”).32 In the end, the critical moment of orientation, like the artwork itself, can retain the challenge that it embodies only by interminably working both to posit and to displace its own space of reference.