Adorno : A Critical Guide 9781847603548

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ADORNO A Critical Guide

JENNIFER RICH HEB ☼  Philosophy Insights: General Editor, Mark Addis

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Adorno A Critical Guide

Jennifer Rich

HEB ☼ Humanities-Ebooks

© Jennifer Rich, 2015 The Author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Cover photo: we gave been unable to identify the copyright owner of the photograph of Adorno but will gladly take appropriate steps if the owner of such copyright advises us. First published by Humanities-Ebooks, LLP, Tirril Hall, Tirril, Penrith CA10 2JE http://www.humanities-ebooks.co.uk The Pdf Ebook is available to private purchasers from http://www.humanitiesebooks.co.uk and to libraries from Ebrary, EBSCO and MyiLibrary.com.

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Contents Introduction The Non-Identity of Identity The Critique of Enlightenment and the Culture Industry The Concept of Enlightenment The Culture Industry On the Fetish Character of Music and the Regression of   Listening Elements of Antisemitism: the Limits of Enlightenment

6 6 9 9 13 18 23

The Consolation of Philosophy

34

Subject and Object Negative Dialectics

34 42

Art as a Form of Freedom The Essay as Form Arnold Schoenberg: the Immanent in Music Aesthetic Theory Theory and Practice: the Collision of the Real Adorno and the Student Movement

56 56 61 68 74 74

Conclusion

79

Bibliography

80

Primary Sources Secondary Sources About the Author

80 81 82

Introduction The Non-Identity of Identity In an interview in the Jewish New York newspaper, The Forward (7 September 1980), my mother recounted her experience as a Jewish child in Nazi-occupied Romania. Jewish residents of Bucharest—the capital city of Romania—were required to give one of their rooms of their house or apartment to a German soldier. My mother lived in two-bedroom apartment, and her family did just this: a German soldier throughout the war occupied one room—my mother’s. German soldiers would come and go, but one stuck in my mother’s memory. He was a tall, blond, handsome lieutenant and a proud member of the Nazi party (others soldiers that were quartered with my mother were not necessarily members of the Nazi party). As such, he was, most likely, a firm believer in Hitler’s indictment of Jews in general: that they were a cancer eating away at Germany and had to be removed; that they were indeed subhuman, more like vermin than people. And yet— even though he must have held these beliefs as a member of the Party—he was fond of my mother who was about five-years-old at the time. He even walked her to kindergarten each day, holding her hand. When my grandfather was arrested for not having the right kind of blackout curtains in his bedroom, this officer made sure that he was released from jail. In her interview, my mother remarked that had this officer been assigned to a concentration camp, he would have acted quite differently. No doubt, he would have been as vicious as most of the other officers at such camps were. He would have seen the Jews as they were seen generally by Germans and others in Europe at the time—as subhuman, and as

  A Critical Guide  7

deserving of extermination. But, living with a Jewish family, his view—whether he was conscious of it or not—was complicated. He saw the individual within the general stereotype. He saw that Jewish children could also be as cute and as charming as nonJewish German children. In short, he saw the particularity of the individual as opposed to being blinded by the stereotypical or the categorical. My mother became a contradiction of sorts for him. She, and perhaps her family in general, refused to be interpolated (understood) within a generalized category that subsumed all Jews under one identity—as subhuman, as a cancer, as Other. In this way, she became a moment of “non-identity” within a generalized identity. This is not to say that the lieutenant, after walking my mother to nursery school, decided that Hitler was wrong, tore off his uniform, and began to conspire against his own country. But, certainly, my mother and her family must have served as an identificatory itch—a remainder that could not be encapsulated comfortably within the general view of Jews at the time. Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno would, most likely, view this irony as an instance of what he would call non-identity in identity, the basis of his philosophical system. Born in 1903 of a JewishCatholic family, Adorno keenly felt the effects of World War II. He and his colleagues were forced to flee Germany, and this experience informed most of his work during and after World War II. In one of his most important works, written with Max Horkheimer, Adorno and Horkheimer clearly set out the central goal for their critical and philosophical practice. This goal is both simple and magnificent in its reach and ambition. In their words, they set out to discover “why mankind, instead of entering into a truly human condition, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism” (xi). This question—the “why” of barbarism—informs Adorno’s works. Adorno makes use of psychology, epistemology, and even musicology to answer this question, but it is, in general, a profoundly philosophical question. Why, Adorno implicitly asks, would a philosophical system that promised to disabuse humans of the superstitious, religion-laden thinking not lead

8  Theodor W. Adorno

to freedom of thought, to an ability to see both the general and the particular? Why, instead, does enlightenment thinking—positivism and even scientific reasoning—lead instead to a new kind of barbarism—one that does not burn people at the stake, but instead, more insidiously, uses science and technology to build crematoriums and gas chambers? Answering these questions involves an interrogation into the failure of the enlightenment and the abuses of capitalism. In order to understand Adorno’s profound discomfort with the enlightenment (and its partner in crime, capitalism) we need to investigate his and Horkheimer’s critique of enlightenment modes of thought. Both Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno were members of a group of philosophers associated with the Frankfurt School of Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany. The Frankfurt School was committed to a rigorous critique of society from a predominantly neo-Marxist and interdisciplinary perspective. Its members came from both the social sciences and the humanities; they were philosophers (Horkheimer, Adorno, Hans Cornelius, Herbert Marcuse), sociologists (Leo Lowenthal, Erich Fromm) as well as historians and political scientists (Friedrich Pollock and Otto Kircheimer). While Adorno was influenced and worked with other members of the Frankfurt school in a limited capacity, his most important intellectual partner was Max Horkheimer, the director of the Frankfurt school and a philosopher and sociologist. Horkheimer and Adorno authored the Dialectic of Enlightenment together, a withering critique of enlightenment thinking and an introduction to their own mode of critical thought—dialectics.

The Critique of Enlightenment and the Culture Industry The Concept of Enlightenment Adorno and Horkheimer were both working within and against a philosophical tradition that originated with Immanuel Kant and the dialecticism of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.1 It is also important to note that the political theories of Karl Marx—in particular, Marx’s notion of exchange value—heavily influenced Adorno and Horkheimer’s methodology. As part of a neo-Marxist school of thought, Adorno shared Marx’s belief that capitalism was the predominant form of social and economic domination. Unlike Marx, Adorno did not believe that economics was the sole determinant of social relationships, but he was always cognizant of the way in which historical and material conditions affected consciousness. For example, in trying to understand the Nazi lieutenant’s relationship with my mother and with antisemitism, Adorno would have interrogated his material and historical context: He would have investigated how this lieutenant was embedded in a complex web of social and economic relationships that made National Socialism and the demonization of Jews appeal to him and that made these viewpoints seem logical and reasonable. One key Marxian principle that Adorno consistently uses in his work is that of exchange value. The Communist Manifesto perhaps provides the most dramatic illustration of the social effects of exchange value: 1  Kant and Hegel’s philosophy will be discussed more fully below in the consideration of Adorno’s Negative Dialectics.

10  Theodor W. Adorno The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors,” and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment.” It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.  (https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/ communist-manifesto/ch01.htm#007 )

Here Marx claims that capitalism, instead of freeing individuals from the fetters of feudalism, has instead substituted new handcuffs—those of exchange value. All human relationships are now economic relationships. They are calculated in terms of their economic value to the people involved. Workers in a factory, for example, are not hired for their bonhomie but for their speed and efficiency. In this system, a labourer can be unsentimentally ”let go” if he or she cannot keep up with the speed or demands of the factory floor, or even of the corporate office. All of the emotions that form a human community, such as empathy or compassion, are enemies in this calculus of economic value. The extraction of surplus value is of sole importance. Surplus value is the amount of value that a product can be sold for above and beyond the cost of wages.1 The more products produced in the shortest time with the lowest wages generate the greatest surplus value. This extraction of surplus value is the capitalist’s sole goal. Wages and time are his or hers greatest enemy. (This is why it should come as no surprise 1  Surplus value may be illustrated thusly: if a worker that is paid $10.00 an hour can produce something in one hour that can be sold for $25.00, he or she has produced $15.00 in surplus value.

  A Critical Guide  11

that most brand-name clothing is now manufactured in countries with almost non-existent labor laws and with distressingly low wages.) According to Adorno and Horkheimer, capitalism’s inhuman calculus of expropriation is a logical extension of the overall enlightenment project. While the history books tend to view the enlightenment as an escape from the blindfolds of superstition and religion, ushering in the twin deities of science and reason, Adorno and Horkheimer have a very different reading. Of the quintessential enlightenment thinker, Francis Bacon, they have this to say: Despite his lack of mathematics, Bacon’s view was appropriate to the scientific method that prevailed after him. The concordance between the mind of man and the nature of things that he had in mind is patriarchal: the human mind, which overcomes superstition, is to hold sway over a disenchanted nature. Knowledge, which is power, knows not obstacles: neither in the enslavement of men nor in compliance with the world’s rulers. (DE 4)

At first glance, this statement may not seem so damning. After all, what’s wrong with the human mind “hold[ing] sway” over nature? Isn’t this what leads to scientific innovation, to medical miracles, and to the discoveries that have made the world a better and safer place for millions of people? Adorno and Horkheimer’s answer would most likely be “yes, but.” The ‘but” in their response is borne not out of the results of the scientific revolution but is a response to its epistemological methods. Their objection to the enlightenment lies with the kind of thinking that it necessarily produces. In order to “hold sway over disenchanted nature,” the latter must be tamed—both actually and philosophically: “On the road to modern science, men renounce any claim to meaning. They substitute formula for concept, rule and probability for cause and motive … number became the canon of the Enlightenment” (DE 5). To make the world understandable, thinking itself must also be tamed. This taming involves the invocation of categories and

12  Theodor W. Adorno

concepts, and the wholesale interpolation of the world of ideas, of things, of anomalies into these categories and concepts: “To the enlightenment, that which does not reduce to numbers, and ultimately to the one, becomes illusion; modern positivism writes it off as literature” (DE 6). We can now see a connection between this kind of domination and capitalism. In fact, they are almost inseparable conceptually. In the same way that capitalism does away with the human, with the incommensurable, so does the enlightenment. Anything that cannot be measured, cannot be reduced to a certain exchange value, to a calculus of equivalency, has no place. It is dismissed out of hand as a useless anomaly, as an illusion, as, in some cases, a form of insanity. The implications for humanity are chilling. If, for example, the nuclear family is considered categorically normal in enlightenment thinking, then what do we do with the family that is comprised differently? If there are only two sexes, then what do we do with those who fall naturally somewhere in between these two sexes? If the multiplicity of nature must be categorized, what do we do with humanity? How do we fit the multifarious nature of the human experience into prefabricated notions and abstractions? What, indeed, is lost in the process? For Adorno and Horkheimer, the loss entailed in enlightenment thinking is tragic. It is an epistemological disaster of mythic proportions because it is thinking itself that is lost in the configuration of categories. As Adorno and Horkheimer note, factuality wins the day; cognition is restricted to its repetition; and thought becomes mere tautology. The more the machinery of thought subjects existence to itself the more blind its resignation in reproducing existence… . The World as a gigantic analytic judgment, the only one left over from all the dreams of science, is of the same mold as the cosmic myth which associated the cycle of spring and autumn with the kidnapping of Persephone. (DE 27)

Here Adorno and Horkheimer reveal the lie of the enlightenment. Rather than being a form of true knowledge, it is another form

  A Critical Guide  13

of myth making. Instead of the gods of the Ancient World, the enlightenment ushers in new gods—that of positivism, empiricism and the resultant categorization of the natural world. In ways that anticipate the later work of Jacques Derrida,1 Adorno and Horkheimer deconstruct (take apart) enlightenment principles and reveal them to be as dependent upon myth and to be as rigid and dominating as the superstitions these principles were supposed to destroy. The Culture Industry One of the pernicious effects of enlightenment thinking is that it functions as an almost inescapable means of mass deception. In partnership with late capitalism, its manipulation of social relationships of production and of thinking in general leads to a situation where “critical thinking is threatened with extermination” (Jay 38). Martin Jay describes the slow demise that Horkheimer and Adorno discern in critical thinking as a move from Vernunft to Verstand—from “synthetic and substantive reasoning to merely analytical,” reasoning stripped of revolutionary potential: The Enlightenment had inadvertently produced its opposite for two basic reasons. First, instrumental reason was closely related to the exchange principle in which everything was reduced to an abstract equivalency in the service of universal exchange. Second, the culture industry, for Adorno and Horkheimer, serves as an all-consuming means of deploying instrumental reason—a kind of thinking that is concerned 1  Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) was a French philosopher active in the late twentieth-century. He is considered the father of deconstruction, a methodology that attempts to reveal the aporias that undermine structuralist thought. One of his most important works is “Structure, Sign and Play in the Human Sciences”. In this work, he investigates the epistemology through which a structure can be thought of as a “structure.” Through this consideration, he interrogates disciplines (such as Philosophy) that depend upon structuring principles. In this way, he may be seen as continuing the critique of conceptualization inaugurated by Adorno and Horkheimer, although it is important to note that he did not see himself as following in their philosophical footsteps.

14  Theodor W. Adorno solely with function and economic identity. (Jay 29)

The culture industry was far less developed in 1944 when Adorno and Horkheimer wrote this piece than it is today. They had only to contend with movies and radio; television was a rarity and personal computers and the Internet non-existent (and indeed perhaps inconceivable at the time). Nevertheless, these thinkers discerned processes of manipulation in their culture industry that we can still see today, if we look closely enough. The victim of the culture industry in Adorno and Horkheimer’s understanding is the individual. He or she is the object of mass deception. The culture industry cynically treats individuals as “individuals”—as subjects who have distinct and original thoughts and emotions—but in its functioning it reduces these subjects into “consumers”—creating a culture that, in fact, robs individuals of individuality and forces them (unconsciously) to accept what is offered to them: The man with leisure has to accept what the culture manufacturers offer him. Kant’s formalism still expected a contribution from the individual, who was thought to relate the varied experiences to the senses to fundamental concepts; but industry robs the individual of his function. (DE 125)

The culture industry pre-empts thought and individuality by doing the thinking for its consumer: “Not only are the hit songs, stars and soap operas cyclically recurrent and rigidly invariable types, but the specific content of the entertainment itself is derived from them and only appears to change. The details are interchangeable” (DE 125). This can be easily seen in the contemporary culture industry. Millions sit captivated by the next series of The Bachelor or The Bachelorette in the US and abroad, but these shows are always the same; the only change is the contestants involved. Proclaiming the route to true love, the shows lull us once again into a romantic vision that is manufactured and controlled in all of its variety. The one emotion, in fact, that is unpredictable, and that is perhaps the defining quality of the individual—fall-

  A Critical Guide  15

ing in love—is reduced to a formula that is endlessly repeated for audiences year after year. It is no accident that the show is, in fact, a failure—of the eighteen matches “made in heaven,” only two couples have married and are still together as of this writing.1 The reader may rightly ask at this point, “Who cares? “I know that I’m the object of some manipulation, but I enjoy it. Why is it a problem”? The false assumption in all of these questions is that the psychological manipulations of the culture industry are short-lived. Once we step out of the movie theatre, or turn off Facebook, we are ourselves again: we are individuals. In fact, the culture industry is insidious. It never stops its influence. Our consciousness is not affected for the moment but is in fact shaped by the culture industry and the values that it promotes. Once we step out of the movie theatre, we don’t stop being a consumer, and we have consumed more than a storyline. We have consumed a whole framework for our own understanding of ourselves and the world around us. We have consumed categories within which we now fit ourselves and through which we see others: The might of industry society is lodged in men’s minds. … From every sound film and every broadcast program the social effect can be inferred which is exclusive to none but is shared by all alike. The culture industry as a whole has molded men as a type unfailingly produced in every product. All the agents of this process, from the producer to the women’s clubs, take good care that the simple reproduction of his mental state is not nuanced or extended in any way. (DE 127)

The culture industry controls its products so that its consumer can be controlled. No discordant ideas, no challenging assumptions, may be allowed to penetrate the silver screen or the broadcast station. Just as Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (a renaissance composer) was confined to certain chord progressions to produce 1  For an up-to-date discussion of Bachelor and Bachelorette (USA) contestants, see  http://www.eonline.com/photos/6410/bachelor-bachelorette-status-check-findout-who-s-still-together

16  Theodor W. Adorno

the right mood of devotion in his listener, so too are the consumers of the culture industry constrained to certain plot or story lines. Lest this all sound too conspiratorial, we must ask why Adorno and Horkheimer believed that such control was a goal of the culture industry? Whom does it benefit? The answer to this is unclear, but in short form, we may say that it benefits those who benefit from the continued production of consumers as consumers. In other words the culture industry benefits those who, in Marxian terms, own the means of production—the CEO or the stockholders of a certain company. It also benefits those who benefit from the status quo. For the purpose of the culture industry is just that—to reproduce ad infinitum the status quo, and to make the status quo seem absolutely natural to the consumer. To do so, it provides products that allow consumers freedom from thinking too much—freedom from reflection. It compels them to keep consuming and to stop thinking. It tells them that their lives, however lived, are bearable and that there is always an escape. For Adorno, pleasure—both the production of discontent and content—is wholly controlled by the culture industry: the illusory escape from the banal is never achieved but is always promised: “the diner must be satisfied with the menu” (DE 139). Unsatisfied, but promised satisfaction, the diner is on an incessant quest for nourishment but is only rewarded in each quest with the same catalogue of options. Pleasure is endlessly deferred to the newest production, the newest movie, that promises its fulfilment. In his article, “How to Look at Television,” Adorno reconfirms the almost mesmerizing effect of mass media upon cognition. Bemoaning the sameness of t.v. programs—their obsessive non-deviance from a predictable story-line and outcome—Adorno notes that the audience’s sensibilities are dulled not only while watching television, but in general: The more stereotypes become reified and rigid in the present set-up of the culture industry, the more people are tempted to cling desperately to clichés which seem to bring some order

  A Critical Guide  17 into the otherwise understandable. Thus, people may not only lose true insight into reality, but ultimately their very capacity for life experience may be dulled by the constant wearing of blue and pink spectacles. (CI 171)

Television, like Jazz, leads to regressive thinking for Adorno. It is also serves as a dangerous distraction, leading people away from thinking about the real world around them and into fantasy lives of the television producer’s making. Television also instantiates an ethics of its own in its audience. As an example, Adorno cites a television show about an underpaid school-teacher. The television show ignores the bleak material conditions of this teacher— the fact that she is almost starving—and instead focuses on her charm and good naturedness. The underlying message for Adorno is chilling: Society doesn’t have a responsibility to provide adequate renumeration for schoolteachers or other similar professions. It’s OK to be paid a starvation wage because, in Adorno’s words, “you can cope with your frustration in a humorous way …. In other words, the script is a shrewd method of promoting adjustment to humiliating conditions by presenting them as objectively comical …” (CI 167). Indeed, in this drama, the heroine is a heroine precisely because she doesn’t complain about her material circumstances and is funny and charming even on an empty stomach. Television thus produces regressive cognition—a kind of black and white thinking that refuses to examine the reality of the material conditions of existence. For Adorno, media such as television might make a difference if they were courageous enough to show “how the life of ordinary people is affected by terror and impotence than to cope with the phoney psychology of the big-shots … “ (CI 173). For Adorno, such a focus would be revolutionary since social change does not occur within a context of complacency and (discontented) contentedness. The latter notion of a discontented and restless contendeness is all too familiar nowadays in the 21st century, Smart Phone era. Confronted with real social interaction, with the reality of our lives, we slink back and hide behind

18  Theodor W. Adorno

our phones—the promise of Facebook or Youtube or Instagram allowing us to somewhere else—and sometimes someone else—a somewhere which is never where we actually are. On the Fetish Character of Music and the Regression of Listening For Adorno, one of the most objectionable examples of the culture industry in practice is Jazz. Written in 1948, “On the Fetish Character of Music and the Regression of Listening,” refers to a specific type of Jazz music popular at the time—what we might now think of as “swing”.1 This is important to note as many commentators have objected to Adorno’s focus on Jazz and have suggested that his animus towards this form of music has more to do with racism and elitism than anything else. As we will see below, Adorno is just as critical of classical music (such as the works of Igor Stravinsky) as he is of Jazz. There is less elitism in his analysis than a deep suspicion of the workings of the culture industry. This suspicion involves a clear rejection of the notion that Jazz or “popular music” emanates from the masses and is an expression of their particular aesthetic and a rejection of imposed cultural norms. In his article, “The Culture Industry Reconsidered”, Adorno explains the genesis of the term “the culture industry” and its importance in understanding his critique of “mass” culture: The term culture industry was perhaps used for the first time in the book Dialectic of Enlightenment, which Horkheimer and I published in Amsterdam in 1947. In our drafts we spoke of ‘mass culture’. We replaced that expression with ‘culture industry’ in order to exclude from the outset the interpretation agreeable to its advocates: that it is a matter of something like 1  It is important for the contemporary reader to understand the kind of “Jazz” that Adorno is critiquing in his essay. Although his opinion about Jazz might not have differed, when he wrote the essay, he was not exposed to its more sophisticated forms. Were he writing today, I would hazard to guess that he would take aim not so much at Jazz as at other products of the music industry, such as pop music.

  A Critical Guide  19 culture that arises spontaneously form the masses themselves, the contemporary form of popular art. (The Culture Industry, 98)

Far from being an expression of individual freedom and subjectivity, Adorno sees Jazz as just another tool of the culture industry. He notes in the “Culture Industry Reconsidered” that “the concoctions of the culture industry are neither guides for a blissful life nor a new art of moral responsibility, but rather exhortations to toe the line, behind which stand the most powerful interests” (CI 105). This notion flies against the interpretation en vogue in the 1940s that Jazz was a form of “dance-floor democracy,” flattening out social distinctions and ushering in new relationships of equality between the races and social classes.1 Critics of culture tend to view the products of popular culture as having a liberatory etiology. For example, African-American popular music, such as rap, is seen as originating in mass resistance to racism and to white supremacy in the United States. Its commercialization is imposed later on by those that see it as a commodity that has value in the market place. For Adorno, however, the culture industry is an industry from the outset. There are no origins of resistance or liberation in Jazz music, for example. The culture industry—in all of its forms—is always already the culture industry. The genesis of mass culture cannot be located in the masses but in those who control the masses—those who benefit from the commodification of culture. For Adorno, Jazz and “popular” culture in general are not separable from their commodification. Popular culture in and of itself is simply a product to be 1  One of the most predominant forms of Jazz dance, mentioned frequently in Adorno’s article, the Jitterbug, originated in African American dance halls. By the late 1930s, white Americans would visit African-American dance halls to learn the “jitterbug” and bring it back to their own suburban dance halls. The term “jitterbug” is itself indicative of the quasi-rebellious nature of this dance form. As the lyric below suggests, to become a Jitterbugger, one needs to partake of alcohol and to slough off all pretentions to propriety: “If you’d like to be a jitter bug, / First thing you must do is get a jug, / Put whiskey, wine and gin within, / And shake it all up and then begin. / Grab a cup and start to toss, / You are drinking jitter sauce! / Don’t you worry, you just mug, / And then you’ll be a jitter bug!” (Cab Calloway, 1939)

20  Theodor W. Adorno

consumed, and it is this consumption that is fetishized and not the product itself: The woman who has money with which to buy is intoxicated by the act of buying. In American conventional speech, having a good time means being present at the enjoyment of others, which in its turn has as it only content being present. The auto religion makes all men brothers in the sacramental moment with the words: ‘this is a Rolls Royce,’ and in moments of intimacy, women attach greater importance to the hairdressers and cosmeticians than to the situation for the sake of which the hairdressers and cosmeticians are employed. (CI 39)

The “fetish character” of the culture industry—whether embodied in music or a Rolls Royce—resides in the sacralising of exchange value rather than in the appreciation of the product itself. Consumption is that which is venerated and it is the relations of consumption that determine the relationships that we have with the products we buy and those who sell them. In order to make this point, Adorno refers to Marx’s own discussion of commodity fetishism and its effect on social relationships: Marx defines the fetish character of the commodity as the veneration of the thing made by oneself which, as exchange value, simultaneously alienates itself from producer to consumer—‘human beings’.… The consumer is really worshipping the money that he himself has paid for the ticket to the … concert. (CI 38)

But, what about taste? Even if the woman referenced above is “intoxicated” with the act of buying, she still has to choose what to buy. Isn’t taste, then, a moment of subjectivity, of the individual consciousness asserting itself in the market economy? Adorno, predictably, says no. Taste is also something that is regulated by the culture industry. Our tastes are imposed upon us and we acquiesce to this imposition with every purchase and with every moment we consume the products of the culture industry. In fact,

  A Critical Guide  21

revolutions in taste—to not like what one is supposed to like—are seen as suspicious, almost as a species of anarchy in this marketbased ideology: If the value of taste in the present situation is questioned, it is necessary to understand what taste is composed of in this situation. Acquiescence is rationalized as modesty, opposition to caprice and anarchy… . [I]f the liquidated individual really makes the complete superficiality of conventions his own, then the golden age of taste has dawned at the moment when taste no longer exists. (CI 40)

Although the liquidation of the individual is arguably present in all forms of the culture industry—film, radio, or theatre (apart from a few exceptions)—Adorno’s focus in this essay is on music. In the consumption of music Adorno discerns perhaps the greatest acquiescence and destruction of the subject. He blames the culture industry and its requisite fetishism of the commodities it produces, but he also blames the listeners. The production of fetishized music—Jazz, light music, and so forth—has its counterpart: the regression of listening. Consumers of music have become willingly infantilized. They listen for what they know and reject what is unfamiliar or challenging to their ears and tastes: [I]t is contemporary listening which has regressed, arrested at the infantile stage. Not only do the listening subjects lose, along with the freedom of choice and responsibility, the capacity for conscious perception of music, which was from time immemorial confined to a narrow group, but they stubbornly reject the possibility of such perception… . They listen atomistically and dissociate what they hear, but precisely in this dissociation they develop certain capacities which accord less with the concepts of traditional aesthetics than with those of football or motoring. (CI 46)

This regression is not so much a form of laziness; rather it is a willed ignorance. This notion may seem counterintuitive (why

22  Theodor W. Adorno

would anyone willingly regress?), but Adorno points out that regression is dependent upon repression. Leisure time, for Adorno, is not a moment where one can be oneself but is rather a compulsion to be what one is expected to be. This work of fulfilling expectations and of concomitantly repressing desires which run counter to such expectations are exhausting endeavours. As Adorno notes in a pithy commentary on the “jitterbug”: “for someone to be transformed into insects they require as much energy as might well suffice to transform them into human beings” (qtd in Jarvis, 76). And yet, regression and infantilization are easier, psychically, than subjectivity. Music which requires a subjective response—one not mediated by the culture industry—is terrifying because it requires one to adopt a meta-conscious understanding of one’s own consciousness and tastes. It is far easier to stay within a bubble than to examine one’s behaviour in it from without. Because of this, Adorno explains why avante garde music, which refuses interpolation in the culture industry and which requires thought, is so violently rejected: The terror which Schoenberg and Webern1 spread, today as in the past, comes not from their incomprehensibility, but from the fact that they are all too correctly understood. Their music gives form to that anxiety, that terror, that insight into the catastrophic situation which others merely evade by regressing… In music … collective powers are liquidating an individuality past saving, but against them only individuals are capable of consciously representing the aims of collectivity. (CI 60)

For Adorno, it is just this anxiety—this momentary introspection— that the culture industry tries to prevent in its audience. The culture industry’s goal is to pre-empt thought not to inspire it. Those products that fall outside of this category are naturally met with hostility and suspicion by the dominant purveyors of culture. 1 

Max Webern was also a serialist composer, like Arnold Schoenberg. Adorno admired him greatly and spent time studying with him in his (Adorno’s) youth.

  A Critical Guide  23

Elements of Antisemitism: the Limits of Enlightenment Horkheimer and Adorno did not limit their analysis of enlightenment only to the products of the culture industry. They also explored deep societal prejudices, such as anti-Semitism. They saw anti-Semitism1 as yet another indicator of the failure of the enlightenment project. Horkheimer and Adorno’s analysis of anti-Semitism was originally planned to be part of a much larger project that examined the history of this prejudice from the medieval world to the 1940s. The historical context of the 1940s and the composition of the Dialectic of Enlightenment made their consideration all the more urgent, however. It should be understood that this piece does as its title suggests: it considers elements of anti-Semitism, the ideological building blocks per se, some of which fit together nicely to give a seemingly comprehensive and coherent account of this prejudice while other elements seem more speculative. “Elements of Anti-Semitism” is thus less of a conclusive history of this intransigent prejudice than an examination of how anti-Semitism operates currently. Nonetheless, Horkheimer and Adorno’s belief that this prejudice (and its rabid resurgence in Nazi Germany) is another form of domination bound up with the enlightenment project supports the general thesis of their analysis in The Dialectic of Enlightenment. The urgency of their consideration is announced in the first sentence of their analysis: “For some people today anti-Semitism .

1 

The term “antisemitism” is more commonly used in scholarship than the term “anti-Semitism.” The latter conveys a false sense that this prejudice is directed to all members of the “semitic” race. Semitic does not, in fact, refer to a race and is not a race: It is a linguistic community. The hyphenated version, however, suggests that “Semitic” is an identificatory category like a race. In this way, the term is misleading. Anti-Semitism with a hyphen also implies that this hatred is not solely directed towards Jews but towards everyone who is defined as “semitic,” including those of Arab descent. In fact, antisemitism has always referred to the hatred of Jews and to no other racial group. Because Horkeimer and Adorno use the term anti-Semitism, however, I will retain it in my discussion. But it is best for the reader to know the problematic nature of the use of this term. In my opinion, it is far better and more accurate to use the non-hyphenated version as I do in the introduction to this text.

24  Theodor W. Adorno

involves the destiny of mankind; for others it is mere pretext” (DE 168). The latter group are those who benefit from the wholesale persecution of a group of people but who do not necessarily believe that this persecution is a cure for the ills of mankind. The former—fascists—believe (or proclaim to believe) that the Jews “are an opposing race, the embodiment of a negative principle. They must be exterminated to secure happiness for the world” (168). In keeping with this latter belief, Horkheimer and Adorno, with tragic irony, characterize the Jews as “chosen”, not by God but by those who “brand them as absolute evil”. They are thus now “chosen” as the “absolute object of domination pure and simple” (168). This focus on the Jews allows those who are fascist in character—desiring the unmitigated and inhuman subjugation of their fellow men—a convenient outlet. Of course, according to fascists, they are not the bad ones for desiring the total domination of the Jews: the Jews are the ones that make fascism inevitable. Total domination must occur in order to save the world from their (the Jews’) evil. Lest eliminationist anti-Semitism seem a spurious outgrowth of a moment of historical time, Horkheimer and Adorno are careful to suggest that the present time (1940s) is but a moment in a long history of anti-Semitism. The question that animates their essay is simple: “why the Jews?” Or “what are the cultural and psychological benefits that accrue from demonizing this particular group of people?” According to Horkheimer and Adorno, the concept of the Jew in and of itself is consistently undermining of the prevailing ideology of a particular time and place. The “Jew” becomes that which perpetually questions the rightness of any ideology whether Christian or fascist: Anti-Semitic behavior is generated in situations where blinded men robbed of their subjectivity are set loose as subjects. For those involved, their actions are murderous and therefore senseless reflexes, as behaviorists note—without providing an interpretation. Anti-Semitism is a deeply imprinted schema, a

  A Critical Guide  25 ritual of civilization; the pogroms are the true ritual murders … The idle occupation of killing confirms the stubbornness of the life to which one has to conform, and resign oneself (DE 171).

Horkheimer and Adorno’s claim that anti-Semitism is a ritual of civilization reminds us of Walter Benjamin’s famous assertion in his Theses on the Philosophy of History: “there is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” The paradoxical nature of Benjamin’s statement is clear: civilization is rooted in domination and violence; for Horkheimer and Adorno, this violence is frequently directed towards Jews. The Jews are targeted because they represent that which is inassimilable within the reigning ideology of a particular time. In some early Christian writings, for example, the Jew is decried as “stubborn” and dangerous for not recognizing Christ as the messiah.1 In this view, their existence is a constant and an unbearable insinuation that Christianity has failed in its overall mandate—to convert unbelievers and to recognize Christ as the saviour of the world. Yet there is something convenient about anti-Semitism that makes it paradoxically disconnected from the Jews themselves. Horkheimer and Adorno suggest that anti-Semitism is an outlet; it provides the “civilized” person with an acceptable outlet for their anger—a feeling that must be defused because it is Verboten within whatever ideology the particular notion of civilization rests. Anti-Semitism, although frequently irrational—nothing material is gained by the practice—“panders to the need to destroy,” to a kind of deranged and ever-present violent id that is the enemy of ideologies. If this id is not turned outward, it becomes a threat to those within the ideology—whether it is National Socialism, or Christianity, or Enlightenment rationality. The particular loci of the Jews in history—as economic middle-men, as deniers of “Christ,” as defenseless, as Other—spotlight them as appropriate 1  Martin Luther characterized Jews as stubborn in his infamous polemic, The Jews and Their Lies (1543).

26  Theodor W. Adorno

repositories for vitriol and anger. Their purpose for the non-Jew is to serve as an outlet. Their Jewishness is beside the point: There is no genuine anti-Semitism, and certainly no such thing as a born anti-Semite. The adults to whom the cry for the blood of Jews has become second nature do not know the reason why any more than the young people who are called upon to spill that blood … The hatred felt by the led who can never be satisfied economically or sexually, knows no bounds. Their hatred cannot be worked off because it can never be fulfilled. (DE 171)

By saying that there is no “genuine anti-Semitism” Horkheimer and Adorno do not mean that there is no hatred for Jews. The Jews become a target for pent-up anger and aggression because, unfortunately, they are in the right place, and in the right time to fulfil this function: [T]he true benefit for the Volkgenosse lies in collective approval of his anger. The smaller the actual advantages are, the more stubbornly he supports the movement against his better judgment. Anti-Semitism has proved immune to the argument of inadequate “profitability”. It is a luxury for the masses” (DE 170).

Because of the accidental nature of this hatred—its seeming randomness—Horkheimer and Adorno believe that people are not born hating Jews: Anti-Semitism is not an innate prejudice; rather, those who hate Jews learn to do so. And, it should be noted, that even anti-Semites, can separate the individual Jew from the category of Jews, in general, the latter of which is, in itself, an anti-Semitic creation: “The Jews” do not exist, in and of themselves; this is a concept that, like all concepts, inevitably loses its relationship with the particularity of the object. In fact, the Jews become no more than a reflection of their subjugator’s most loathed

  A Critical Guide  27 parts of themselves: “the portrait of the Jews that the nationalists offer the world is their own self-portrait.” (DE 168)

This portrait is painted in the hues of barbarism, of greed, and of an unquenchable need for domination. But, what, according to Horkheimer and Adorno, are the particular injustices that necessitate the Jews as scapegoats? As I allude to above, the Jews become serviceable as outlets for anger for economic reasons as well as religious ones. While the Jews used to be protected by the state when they functioned as economic “intermediaries”—tax collectors, creditors for the monarchy, and so forth—they were abandoned when their services in this way were no longer needed. Because of this economic identity, as intermediaries, as the “colonizers for [capitalist] progress,” the Jews became an embodiment of all that is exploitative within the capitalist system. As Horkheimer and Adorno note, the curse of the Jews is that perforce “they carried capitalist ways of life to various countries and drew upon themselves the hatred of all who had to suffer under capitalism… Commerce was not their vocation but their fate” (DE 175). In this way, the Jews became an object of what might be understood as resentiment. The frustrations of those subjugated by capitalism are projected onto them. It was not the state that was the problem, or even the captains of industry, it was the Jewish merchant—the in-between economic functionary— who inspires the greatest hatred. Nietzsche’s concept of ressentiment (resentment) nicely captures this dynamic between the antiSemitic frustrated victim of capitalism and the Jews. Consider the following contrast that Nietzsche makes between the noble man and the man deranged by ressentiment: How much reverence has a noble man for his enemies!—and such reverence is a bridge to love.—For he desires his enemy for himself, as his mark of distinction; he can endure no other enemy than one in whom there is nothing to despise and very much to honor! In contrast to this, picture ‘the enemy’ as the man of ressentiment conceives him—and here precisely is

28  Theodor W. Adorno his deed, his creation: he has conceived ‘the evil enemy,’ ‘the Evil One,’ and this in fact is his basic concept, from which he then evolves, as an afterthought and pendant, a ‘good one’— himself! (http://www.inp.uw.edu.pl/mdsie/Political_Thought/ GeneologyofMorals.pdf)

The man of ressentiment projects his abhorrence for himself outward onto an object and, in this way, saves himself from a selfannihilating self-hatred. In fact, ressentiment provides a negative self-identity: the man of ressentiment can console himself in his supposed superiority to the one that is the object of his (or her) hatred. Horkheimer and Adorno never directly reference Neitzsche in this work, but their discussion of fascist-inspired paranoia reverberates with Neitzsche’s understanding of the psychology of ressentiment: Paranoia is the symptom of the half-educated man. For him, all words become part of the delusive system … to force meaning upon the world which makes him meaningless; but at the same time to defame the spirit and experience from which he is excluded and to attribute to them the guilt of the society which excludes him …. In a stereotyped manner, halfeducation reaches out in its fear for the formula which is best suited to it in order soon to provide a rationale for evil … (DE 195-196)

Trapped within a system that “cloaks” the exploitative nature of the labour contract, the paranoid man ignores the real cause of his own victimization—the robbery of the surplus value that he produces for the capitalist machine in which he works—and instead points to the Jews as the source of his despair. The Jew is the one that is called the thief even though his or her role in capitalism is on the margins, that of an intermediary at best. The Jews thus become the targets of paranoia. Horkheimer and Adorno also make use of certain concepts in psychoanalysis to understand anti-Semitism. In particular, they focus on the psychological phenomenon of repression and

  A Critical Guide  29

projection in their work. In this regard, they rely heavily on the work of Sigmund Freud and his conception of the ego. Briefly, for Freud, the ego was constituted of three parts—the superego or the “conscience”, the ego or one’s everyday identity and the “id”, the desires (sexual and violent) that must be repressed in order for society to function. The ego—or the conscious self—is always in a battle of sorts between the “id” and the “superego”. The latter acts as one’s conscience—as the “enlightened part of ourselves” while the other falls into the realm of barbarism and selfish desire. The ego must keep a careful balance between the two: it must repress those aspects of the “id” that supervene the superego and individual/societal conscience.1 The maintenance of this precarious balance frequently involves repression and projection. Repression often requires an outlet and this outlet can take the form of projection. Horkheimer and Adorno see anti-Semitism as a prejudice that is psychically “based on false projection”, one that can take the form of what they call “repressed mimesis.” They define mimesis as that “which imitates the environment .… For mimesis the outer world is a model which the inner world must try to conform to: the alien must become familiar” (DE 187). Mimesis as a form of imitation as suggested by the word itself, but it is also a method through which people adapt to their surroundings. Mimesis thus changes over time: archaic forms of mimesis (such as the practice of animal sacrifice) differ radically from contemporary forms (the practice of monogamy or corporate culture). Mimesis always necessitates a form of repression (“for mimesis the outer world is a model which the inner world must try to conform to”). Because of its inherently repressive injunction, mimesis frequently fails in its essentially civilizing function and requires outlets for these failures to become culturally acceptable: But in fascism this behavior [paranoia] is made political; the 1  For a full discussion of Freud’s theory of the ego, the superego, and the id, see his “The Ego and the Id” (1923) and Civilization and its Discontents (1930).

30  Theodor W. Adorno object of the illness is deemed true to reality; and the mad system becomes the unreasonable norm in the world and deviation from it a neurosis. The mechanism which the totalitarian order uses is as old as civilization. (DE 187)

Fascism becomes a new form of mimesis. Rather than repressing those violent and/or sexual impulses, fascism provides a culturally acceptable form for their expression: the persecution of the Jews. In the mimetic imagination of fascism, the Jews become representative of all that is rejected by the new fascist order. They become that which is most akin to rejected nature and the rituals associated with a primitive existence. Against the Jew, the fascist gentile can feel civilized; all of the latter’s expressions of an incipient barbarism may be blamed upon the Jews and their provocations: Anti-Semites gather together to celebrate the moment when authority permits what is usually forbidden, and become a collective, only in that common purpose … the purpose of the fascist formula, the ritual discipline, the uniforms, and the whole apparatus, which is at first sight irrational, is to allow mimetic behavior.… Hitler can gesticulate like a clown; Mussolini strike false notes like a provincial tenor, Goebbels talk endlessly like a Jewish agent whom he wants murdered …. Fascism is also totalitarian in that it seeks to make the rebellion of suppressed nature against domination directly useful for domination. (DE 184-185)

This permission for archaic forms of mimetic behaviour to flourish is, for Horkheimer and Adorno, that which makes fascism so seductive for the everyday person. This seductive appeal also suggests the limits of the enlightenment: The enlightenment fails because, in the last analysis, mimesis flourishes. And yet, this mimesis is not uncontrolled; it is, in fact, highly regimented. Fascism provides well-organized mechanisms for the release of mimesis: The fascist formula is not one of freedom but of directed

  A Critical Guide  31

and organized hatred. It is the permission to act as the Other (the “id” in oneself, so to speak) while condemning the Other at the same time. This seemingly paradoxical ideology is best understood if we turn to Horkheimer and Adorno’s discussion of the role of the senses in the persecution of the Jews and the practice of mimesis. One longstanding anti-Semitic stereotype prevalent in Germany was that the Jews had a particular smell. If one had a good Aryan nose, one could sniff out the Jew in one’s midst. This wasn’t simply a matter of hygiene; according to the propaganda at the time, the smell of the Jews was in their essence and no amount of scrubbing could get rid of it.1 For Horkheimer and Adorno, the anti-Semite who seeks out the Jew’s smell in order to eradicate it is indulging in a usually prohibited type of mimesis that is made acceptable by his or her overall mission— to destroy the Jews: There is no anti-Semite who does not basically want to imitate his mental image of a Jews, which is composed of mimetic cyphers … Of all the senses, that of smell—which is attracted without objectifying—bears clearest witness to the urge to lose oneself in and become the “other.” … The prohibited impulse may be tolerated if there is no doubt that the final aim is its elimination … Anyone who seeks out “bad” smells in order to destroy them may imitate sniffing to his heart’s content, taking unrationalized pleasure in the experience. (DE 184)

The continuation of anti-Semitism does not just rest on the use of this hatred as an outlet. What is unique about anti-Semitism, for 1 

Even before the Nazi era, the expression “Alle Juden stinken!” (All Jews stink) was popular enough to penetrate into children’s folklore. According to Andrei

Oisteanu in his book, Inventing the Jews: Antisemitic Stereotypes in Romanian and Other Central-East European Cultures (2009), there were even olfactory anthropologists, such as Gustav Jaeger (1880) and Hans Gunther (1930), who worked to support the claim that “there was such a thing as a hereditary foeter

Iudiacus and tried to demonstrate that the nature of the Jewish race was such that by necessity the Jews gave off an unpleasant odour which was uniquely theirs” (Oisteanu 68).

32  Theodor W. Adorno

Horkheimer and Adorno, is its non-self-reflective quality. The fact that anti-Semitic feelings and actions are encouraged by the fascist state only exacerbates the ignorance of the motives behind these actions. The non-self-reflective quality of anti-Semitism is what also makes it so dangerous and so durable. Anti-Semitism as such exposes the limits of the enlightenment and illustrates the fact that barbarism (domination) is always part and parcel of the enlightenment project. For Horkheimer and Adorno, anti-Semitism simply confirms their overall thesis—that the enlightenment, far from freeing people from suspicion and irrationality—depends upon just these elements for its perpetuation and for the domination of the natural and social worlds: The morbid aspect of anti-Semitism is not projective behavior as such, but the absence of it from reflection. When the subject is no longer able to return to the object what he has received from it, he becomes poorer rather than richer. He loses the reflection in both directions: since he no longer reflects the object, he ceases to reflect upon himself, and loses the ability to differentiate. (DE 189)

The non-reflective capacity allows for ideologies that are clearly politically motivated to go unchecked and unchallenged. The absence of reflection is not simply limited to the Jews, however. In their closing statements, Horkheimer and Adorno note that because of mass industrialization and the effects of commodity fetishism, even Jews themselves become the victims of what they call “ticket-thinking” ideologies. Such is the economic and political order that all decisions are already made for the individual; individuation and the sense of identity shrivel and the individual becomes a simple cog in a vast machinery of commodification: “As industrial society progresses and is supposed to have overcome its own law of impoverishment, the notion which justified the whole system, that of man as a person, as a bearer of reason is destroyed” (DE 204). In his stead is the ticket-taker, the man or woman who simply stands in line and takes whatever ticket

  A Critical Guide  33

is afforded to him or her—whether it is that of commodities (the automobile fresh off the assembly line), political ideologies (fascism, communism) or mass culture.

The Consolation of Philosophy Subject and Object In an oft‑cited remark, Adorno claimed, “all reification is a forgetting.” Part of a letter written to Walter Benjamin in 1940 (and also appearing at the end of The Dialectic of Enlightenment), this remark concerned the totalizing ethos that Adorno felt characterized knowledge‑production in Western thought, particularly Western knowledge’s rigid separation of “subject” and “object.” The relationship of subject and object, for Adorno, determines philosophical understandings of the place of the subject in the natural and social worlds. In conceptualizing the place of the human, philosophers, whether from idealist or materialist schools, think dualistically and antagonistically. The subject is either dominated or dominating. The object is similarly either dominated or dominating. The two are in a struggle for hegemony and victory is predicated upon the particular thinker/philosopher’s standpoint. The Subject and Object’s predominance in philosophy—and what they reveal about particular philosopher’s viewpoints—make them worth investigating for Adorno. In “Subject and Object,” Adorno explores the meanings of these two terms and the ways in which they continually undermine any attempts to rigidify them into two distinct (non-overlapping) categories. As such, these terms provide a rich critical ground for Adorno not only to critique the hegemonic epistemologies of Western philosophy but also to pose an alternative—a reconciliation of sorts between the two contested and contesting terms. In the separation of the subject and object, Adorno discerns the sine qua non of a totalizing epistemology—the domination of the

  A Critical Guide  35

analyzed object by the analyzing subject. This domination entails a hostile dismissal of heterogeneity within the object. Thus, the subject “subjects” the object by apprehending it within a paradigm that bases itself on the normative requirements of enlightenment epistemology: “Defining means that something objective, no matter what it may be in itself, is subjectively captured by means of a fixed concept” (AR 139). Definition is a process of hypostatization of the object; thus, all definitions are inherently violent because they erase heterogeneity. Enlightenment thought is predicated upon such a hermeneutics of definition, particularly what Adorno called its “tyranny of identity”: In philosophical terms, the domination of the object by the subject is expressed both in positivism and idealism. In the former, a subjectivity stands coolly part from its object in order to manipulate it; although seemingly passive, the positivist subject really has an instrumental relationship to the world, a world on which it unreflexively projects the scientifically ascertainable traits it claims merely to discover. (Jay 63)

Because of the mechanics of reification, what is presented as the whole, as a totality, is always (already) the critical extrapolation from the part. This process of extrapolation for the constitution of a “universal” is the thought-process of a reifying epistemology.1 Reification may be pinpointed as the methodological basis of an enlightenment epistemology precisely because such an epistemology is a paralyzed dialectic—one that in its very ontology must not move, but purposely stays within isolation/abstraction and creates 1  It is important to note that Adorno’s understanding of epistemology is bound up with an analysis of the effects of capitalist relations of production on epistemology. Thus, when Adorno discusses “enlightenment” epistemology, he is—at the same time—talking about the effects of capitalism and the division of labor on Western thought-processes and analytical paradigms. It is in this way that he can be seen carrying on the work, albeit with considerable variation, of Georg Lukács in History and Class Consciousness.

36  Theodor W. Adorno

an illusion of a whole. This illusion of the whole is the forgetting of the whole. Lest we go too far and think that subjects and objects are simply manifestations of a false epistemology, Adorno does believe that a separation between the two exists. He concedes that the separation of the subject and object is “both real and illusory” (AR 139). The way in which their separation is conceptualized is the real object of Adorno’s critique. In other words, Adorno’s focus in not on their separation per se, but on how this separation is thought about. In metaphysics, for example, the subject sees itself as both the particular and the general. The person sees his own personhood—the particularity of his life, as well as believing that his consciousness is part of a “consciousness in general”—something that she shares with other humans that make her a part of the human condition. The moment of abstraction, however—the moment when an individual consciousness posits itself as part of something more abstract and more general—is the moment that the subject objectifies itself. The subject as Subject becomes an object. It becomes something that is apart from the particularity of the subject’s life and is epistemologically loosed from her control. For realists, the opposite holds true, in Adorno’s reading. Realists seem to valorize the object at the expense of the subject. Adorno reveals, however, that positivism/empiricism (both philosophical outgrowths of realism) do not in fact focus on the object. They instead manipulate it and as such, valorize the subject much more so than transcendental metaphysics seems to do: The object is much more a subjectless residue than what the subject posits. The two contradictory definitions fit into each other: the residue, with which science can be put off as its truth, is the product of their subjectively manipulated procedures (“Subject and Object” 56).

In Negative Dialectics (1966), Adorno makes a similar point regarding materialism and its reduction of the object to a static and ahistorical entity:

  A Critical Guide  37 The reduction of the object to pure material, which precedes all subjective synthesis as its necessary condition, sucks the object’s own dynamics out of it; it is disqualified, immobilized, and robbed of whatever would allow motion to be predicated at all. (ND 91)

If neither realism or transcendentalism can adequately account for the subject/object relationship but instead reify one at the expense of the other (usually the subject), then what can be the relationship of these two? How can the subject remain a subject and allow the object to remain an object? Is the only possibility a divorce where never the twain shall meet? This may seem like an answer, but upon further consideration, it is not possible. Subject and object are ontologically entwined: the subject constitutes the object as much as the object constitutes the subject. It is only the recognition of their mutual interdependence that can allow us to glimpse the two through what has heretofore blinded us to their mutual dependency, i.e. positivism/empiricism (primacy of the object) and metaphysics (primacy of the subject). The model that Adorno wishes to adopt is not antithesis but reconciliation. In a famous remark, Adorno argues that “man is a result not an eidos” [essence]. This statement refers to the historicizing processes of both the subject and the object. Reconciliation demands that historicization and socialization are not rendered invisible. The subject thus has the responsibility of receiving the object as it is without attempting to place it within prefabricated categories. Abstractions only do violence to objects, as they disallow a dynamics of change and render the object inert and ahistorical. For reconciliation to occur, the object must be recognized as a dynamic entity, existing and absorbing the historical and social determinants that create it. The subject, similarly, has to register its own historical and social location. It has to critique itself and its own approach to the object. The subject cannot assume that its own approach is virginal—untainted by the socio-historical context and ideologies that envelop it and ignorant of the ways it has

38  Theodor W. Adorno

constructed the object as object: But then the object, along Kantian lies, is what has been posited by the subject, the web of subjective forms cast over the unqualified Something; and finally it is the law that combines the phenomena, disintegrated by their subjective re-relation, into an object…. It is that law, according to Kant, which the subject prescribes to nature; in his conception, it is the highest peak of objectivity, the perfect expression of the subject as well as its self-alienation: at the peak of its formative pretension, the subject passes itself off as an object. (AR 147)

Just as the subject posits the object as an object, imprisoning it within categories of the subject’s making, the subject also creates itself as an object through the same means. The alienation of the subject from both the object and itself make both in some sense identical; the subject posits itself and the object as transcendental. The subject may intend to do this to the object but not to itself. It is blind to the way in which it hypostasizes its own identity. It must be said at this point that Adorno does not reject transcendentalism as flawed thinking. In fact, he thinks it is unavoidable. The subject, in thinking about itself, must always represent itself in the abstract; the object is also subject to the same epistemological move. Yet, transcendentalism cannot be allowed to remain transcendental indefinitely. It must be reminded of its individuation—of the starting point and ending point that make the transcendental possible. The concept of transcendentality reminds us that thinking, by dint of its immanent moments of universality, transcends its own inalienable individuation. The antithesis of the university and particular too, is both necessary and deceptive. Neither one exists without the other—the particular only as defined and thus universal; the universal only as the definition of something particular, and thus itself particular. Both of them are and are not. This is one of the strongest motives of non-idealist dialectics. (AR 149)

  A Critical Guide  39

For Adorno, reconciliation—the ability to appreciate the mutual particularity of both subject and object—is achieved through acknowledging the object’s primacy. It is not the subject that must rule and define the object; rather, the opposite is true—with a qualification. Reconciliation functions through mediation. The subject must acknowledge that it is at all times mediated—defined and differentiated--through its relationship to the object. The object too is similarly changed or affected by its relationship to the subject. Through mediation, the old mythos of an original “subject” outside of history may be rejected and the historical groundedness of both subject and object comes to the fore: Fate, myth’s mandate to nature, comes from social tutelage, from an age in which no eyes had yet been opened by selfreflection, an age in which the subject did not exist. Instead of a collective practice conjuring that age to return, the spell of the old undifferentiatedness should be obliterated. Its prolongation is the sense of the identity of a mind that repressively shapes its Other in its own image …. In its proper place, even epistemologically, the relationship of subject and object would lie in the realization of peace among men as well as between men and their Other. Peace is the state of distinctness without domination, with the distinct participating in each other. (AR 140)

Without this concession, this reconciliation—the realization that difference is not to be subsumed but to be exposed (perhaps even celebrated) and investigated—the subject and object will remain as two in a constant state of never-ending divorce—of a separation that makes both move further and further from each other and from understanding: “The subject erects that block [historically amassed block] by claiming supremacy of the object and thereby defrauding itself of the object. As truly non-identical, the object moves farther from the subject the more the subject ‘constitutes’ the object” (AR 147). Lest we go too far in the other direction, Adorno also warns

40  Theodor W. Adorno

against the hypostatization of the object. To do so would also be to indulge in a “transcendental illusion” that brings us further and further away from reconciliation. While the exaltation of the subject was a mistake of idealism, the similar deification of the object is the error of empiricism/positivism: It is accordingly easy to look on the subject as nothing—as was not so very far from Hegel’s mind—and on the object as absolute. Yet this is another transcendental illusion. A subject is reduced to nothing by its hypostasis, by making a thing of what is not a thing…. The subject is more the less it is, and it is the less the more it credits itself with objective being. As an element, however, it is ineradicable. After an elimination of the subjective moment, the object would come diffusely apart like the fleeting stirrings and instants of subjective life. (AR 149)

The eradication of the subject or object is not possible. Nor is it possible to subsume one within the other. As we have seen, the moment the subject attempts to do so by setting itself up as transcendent, it objectifies itself—it becomes an object in and of itself. The moment the object tries to de-subjectify itself, it puts itself under erasure. It cannot be understood or even apprehended by a knowing subject; it becomes, in Adorno’s word, “non-sensical”. This word has two meanings: the object as non-sensical becomes devoid of the sensibility of the subject (apprehending the object) and thus devoid of sense—of the ability to be understood. Only through an epistemology of immanence in experience—of seeing the subject and object as they are in their historical and social contexts—is reconciliation possible. It is solely through reconciliation that real knowledge also becomes possible: [S]ociety is immanent in experience, not an allo genos [self reflection]. Nothing but the social self-reflection of knowledge obtains for knowledge the objectivity that will escape it as long as it obeys the social coercions that hold sway in it, and does not become aware of them. Social critique is a cri-

  A Critical Guide  41 tique of knowledge, and vice versa. (AR 143)

Immanence in experience allows for the “itch” of self-questioning that enables inquiry to progress without reverting to metaphysical obfuscations that render the particularity of the object and subject under erasure. Adorno expresses this need for constant and unremitting selfcritique more pithily in Minima Moralia, noting, contra Hegel that “the whole is the untrue” (50). Rather than striving for a quasi-utopian synthesis of antimonies that shape the social world as Hegel does (the whole), Adorno rather directs our gaze upon the rifts that threaten to sunder social cohesion. It is within these rifts that knowledge and cognition resides: “perspectives need to be generated in which the world distends and alienates itself, reveals its rifts and cracks in exactly the way it will one day appear, needy and disfigured, in the light of the Last Judgment” (Minima Moralia, 147) Such a perspective is immanent in its location. It does not derive knowledge from above—looking down upon the objects under examination—but rather from within these objects. This perspective attempts not to gloss over or excuse contradiction but instead lays it bare. Immanence allows one to connect with objects and individuals empathetically rather than critically. The critical is not abandoned but is supplemented with compassion and is thus given a new kind of moral and intellectual rigor: “The whole purpose of thinking is to achieve such perspectives without arbitrariness and intellectual violence, solely through empathy with objects” (Jameson 42). The simplicity of this statement belies its achievability. Indeed, true empathy is impossible because it always already involves a form of negation. The moment critique seems to exhaust its subject—the moment of empathy—is the moment when the critique must turn towards itself and undergo a rigorous self-examination. As Adorno notes in Minima Moralia, “Nothing less is demanded of the thinker today than that he should be both within things and out of them …” (74). In other words, all attempts at categorization or reduction of an idea to the comprehensible

42  Theodor W. Adorno

or the digestible are necessarily compromised. This compromise is not something that should be resisted but should be embraced. The splinter in one’s own eye is the moment of critical self-reflection. For Adorno, there is no idea that can be understood without it being in some sense unthought—without an almost tragic loss of its communicability. The need for self-reflection at every moment of reflection is what distinguishes Adorno’s approach and what forms the basis of his discussion of philosophical methodology in his most important work, Negative Dialectics. Negative Dialectics Negative Dialectics is Adorno’s attempt to explore and provide an answer to the question of how critical thinking can be achieved without resorting to idealism, in whatever form the latter takes— Kant’s a priori synthetic categories or Hegel’s notion of the Absolute. Adorno’s discussion in Negative Dialectics proceeds through a critique of Kant and Hegel and then a discussion of his own notion of a negative dialectics. It is a work worthy of years of study and has itself been the subject of books devoted solely to its explication. For our purposes, I will discuss Adorno’s critiques of Kant and Hegel briefly and then move on to his concept of “negative dialectics”. In his preface to Negative Dialectics, Adorno boldly declares that “Negative dialectics is a phrase that flouts tradition” (ND xix). By “tradition”, he means Western philosophical tradition and the tendency to attempt through metaphysics to “achieve something positive.” Ironically, dialectics in its traditional form does not do away with the negative but rather uses the negative (or its negation) to achieve the positive. For Adorno, it is dialectic’s negation of the negation—its insistence on synthesis (a la Hegel) that is the problem. In fact, for Adorno, negation is what must be preserved in order for philosophy to be authentic, to be a concrete reflection of the real everyday lives and experiences of human subjects. Concretion is not achieved effortlessly, however. It in fact neces-

  A Critical Guide  43

sitates an accounting of philosophy as it has been practiced heretofore and a prospectus of how it might be practiced in the future. To make this point, Adorno includes Walter Benjamin’s comment on one of the former’s earlier works: In 1937, when the author had completed his Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie [Against Epistemology: A Metacritique] the last chapter of that publication moved Walter Benjamin to remark that one had to “cross the frozen waste of abstraction to arrive at concise, concrete philosophizing.” Negative Dialectics now charts such a crossing in retrospect … this largely abstract text seeks no less to serve authentic concretion than to explain the author’s concrete procedure. (ND xix)

The inspiration for Adorno to “cross the frozen wastes of abstraction” again is a peculiar one. He is moved to do so because philosophy has failed. However, instead of this failure being a death knell for philosophy, it is, for Adorno, an opportunity to reawaken and reinvigorate the field. The failure of philosophy resides in its “break[ing] its pledge to be at one with reality” (or at least close to it). Here Adorno is thinking both of Hegel and Marx. Hegel’s vision of “the absolute” ultimately demands the suppression of the particular: “The unification of the Many within the One without the former’s dissolution can ben achieved only by living it that is, by man’s self-elevation from finite to infinite life” (F.G. Copleston, Vol. vii, p. 165). Similarly, even though Marx’s political philosophy promised to “turn Hegel on its head” and interpret history from within the economic structure and class relations of the bourgeois state, its promise was also never fulfilled. The proletarian revolution had not come about by 1966, the publication date of Negative Dialectics, and it looked very unlikely that it would ever arrive. But, for Adorno, these failures do not lead to despair but instead provide the opportunity for a needed self-inspection: “Philosophy [paradoxically] lives on because the moment to realize it was missed. The summary judgment that it had merely interpreted the world, the resignation in the face of reality had crip-

44  Theodor W. Adorno

pled it in itself, becomes a defeatism of reason after the attempt to change the world miscarried” (ND 3). What is left for philosophy is a critique of itself. It is “obliged” in Adorno’s words, “ruthlessly to criticize itself” (ND 3). In fact, for Adorno, philosophy’s “task” is to consider whether philosophy is possible at all. In other words, can critical thinking be critical without a system? Is it possible to make claims about the world and about human life in the world without recourse to the systematic frameworks such as idealism or transcendentalism? Before we can understand Adorno’s attempt to answer these questions, we should make explicit what is implicit in all of them: a sustained and rigorous critical denunciation of transcendentalism. We have already considered Adorno’s critique of transcendentalism in both The Dialectic of Enlightenment and “Subject and Object.” In these works, Adorno is deeply suspicious of categorization and dualism. He feels both of these epistemological “ticks” hinder knowledge. But, it is important to understand the basic arguments of transcendentalism, both in Kant and Hegel, in order to unpack Adorno’s critique fully. These précis of Kant and Hegel will necessarily be incomplete and reductive but should be helpful for the reader to understand the philosophical background and context of Negative Dialectics. Kant/A-Priori Synthetic Categories

Any discussion of critical thinking and its possibilities must grapple with Immanuel Kant’s work, particularly his Critique of Pure Reason. This work proposed a notion of conceptualization that is not based in experience. Writing after David Hume, an empiricist who insisted that all knowledge (except for a priori analytic knowledge) is derived from experience, Kant proposed that there were certain categories of thought that were not analytic but did not directly derive from experience.1 For Kant, these 1  Analytic a priori thoughts are those in which the predicate is included in the subject or can be derived from the subject. They are self-evident and usually defini-

  A Critical Guide  45

concepts, which he described as a priori and synthetic, were the epistemological framework needed to understand other concepts that might be derived from experience. In a famous analogy, Bertrand Russell claimed that we might consider a priori and synthetic categories as “blue-tinted spectacles” which we can never take off and which colour the way we see the world.1 The philosopher is aware that she is wearing blue-tinted spectacles and thus knows that her understanding of the world is always mediated. She can have no understanding of objects as “things in themselves.” Her understanding will always be mediated by the epistemological apparatus (blue-tinted spectacles) that she brings to bear upon them when she considers them. Such a priori synthetic intuitions (as Kant would call them) include causation, space, time, and so forth. If we consider causation, we understand that causation is not limited to a particular experience but may be applied to all experience. Every event must have a cause. Causation, as an intuition, thus comes to us at the moment of an experience that necessitates the notion of causation for the experience to be understood. F. G. Copleston, a key historian of philosophy, makes an important qualification regarding a priori knowledge: Pure a priori knowledge does not mean knowledge which is explicitly present in the mind before it has begun to experience anything at all: It means knowledge which is underived from experience, even it if makes its appearance as what we would ordinarily call “knowledge” only on the occasion of experience. (Copleston, Vol. VI, p. 217)

For Kant, then, direct knowledge of the “thing-in-itself” is tional in character. One good example is “a bachelor is an unmarried man.” The predicate “unmarried man” is contained in the subject “bachelor.” Mathematical propositions fall into this category such as 2+2=4. Some do not, however, and this is one of the reasons Kant had difficulty with understanding only analytic categories as a priori (before experience). 1  See Bertrand Russell’s chapter “How A priori Knowledge is Possible” in his book, Problems of Philosophy. A link to this chapter may be found here: http:// www.ditext.com/russell/rus8.html.

46  Theodor W. Adorno

impossible. It is always mediated by the intuitions that we bring to it (our blue-tinted spectacles). Predictably, for Adorno, the notion of a priori synthetic categories is meaningless and takes us far away from a full understanding of the world around us. His argument against Kant is quite simple: Knowledge without experience is simply not possible. To posit such knowledge is to engage in metaphysical (above and outside of the physical world) speculation that only undermines real and vigilant critical thought. Adorno even goes so far to suggest that Kant’s intuitions are fantasies of sorts, seemingly innovative at first glance, but only really “relics of an older metaphysics”: Kant boasts of having surveyed the Isle of Cognition, but its own narrow selfrighteousness [sic] moves that isle into the area of untruth, which he projects on the cognition of the infinite. It is impossible to endow the cognition of finite things with a truth derived, in its turn, from the absolute—in Kantian terms, from reason—which cognition cannot reach. At every moment, the ocean of Kant’s metaphor threatens to engulf the island. (ND 384)

Adorno is here objecting to the self-referential character of Kant’s intuitions. He is also objecting to the implication that all experience is mediated through “intuitions”, as Kant calls them. To say that intuition is necessary for cognition is to blind ourselves to the real possibilities of experience and also to posit categories which are created out of nothing. In the style of Shakespeare’s character, King Lear, Adorno would assert that “nothing [can] come of nothing”: There can be no concept which is divorced from experience. Such divisions only recapitulate the enlightenment-inspired domination of the natural world by Reason. They also handicap critical thinking by suggesting that objects are unknowable in and of themselves. Simon Jarvis also notes that Adorno sees the Kantian object as mimicking the commodity form. Adorno, he claims, does not think that all this [Kant’s epistemology] is simply the

  A Critical Guide  47 result of a mistake on Kant’s part. He argues that Kant’s inquiry into the conditions of the possibility of experience truthfully bears witness to certain structural features of modern naturalhistorical experience. The Kantian object (Gegenstand) produced by ‘pure’ conceptual activity upon the material of intuition closely resembles the commodity as a supposed product of ‘pure’ or abstract labour. (Jarvis 157)

This historical contextualization of Kant’s theory is in line with Adorno’s overall project—to make philosophy account for itself in terms of its historical and social context. In this way, Adorno’s critique of Kant is informed by Marx and the latter’s understanding of the modes of production that predominated during a certain period of time. Through this kind of contextualization, concepts are made to account for their contextual particularity and are (thus) not allowed a universality that transcends the historical moment. By contextualizing Kant in this way, Adorno attempts to show that Kant’s intuitions are not transcendent and universal but a result of the influence of particular social and economic relationships upon thinking. All thought—even so-called intuitions— carry within them the residue of their historical entanglement. Hegel: The Absolute/Geist

Adorno was indebted to Hegel for the theory and methodology of dialecticism. Hegel’s major aim was to delineate how philosophy can systematize consciousness and through doing so “realize … the infinite in and through the finite” (Copleston, Vol. VII, 172). The way to attain this goal, for Hegel, was through dialectics. In this view, ideas must be considered both for themselves and for the ways that they inevitably contradict themselves. This dual consideration is dialectics in practice. The goal of dialectics is not to rest in this tug of war between the idea and its contradiction but to reach a point of synthesis, where the idea and its contradiction can both be understood. This is not to say that the contradiction

48  Theodor W. Adorno

is erased; rather the thinking process itself reaches a point where both the idea and its opposite exist simultaneously. The goal of human consciousness is to understand any idea as subsisting both in itself and in that which contradicts it: [I]n speculative philosophy the mind must elevate itself from the level of understanding in the narrow sense to the level of dialectical thinking which overcomes the rigidity of the concepts of the understanding and sees one concept as generating or passing into its opposite … If for the understanding concepts A and B are irrevocably opposed whereas for the deeper penetration of dialectical thought A passes into B and B passes into A, there must be a higher unity or synthesis which unites them without annulling their difference. (Copleston, Vol. VII, 175).

Unlike Kant, where the goal of reason is to understand the way in which the mind works upon objects, Hegel’s goal is to understand the way the mind works as consciousness. The goal of a consciousness that is enlightened is to be able to achieve a standpoint where it can appreciate the “identity-in-difference” of all ideas or concepts. Hegel dispenses with Kant’s notion that we can never know the thing in itself and instead proposes that through dialectics we can know both the thing in itself and the thing that is not itself—its “identity-in-difference”. For Hegel, it is only through dialectics that consciousness can reach a state of freedom, one where individuals understand that the particularity of his or her experience is part of a universal consciousness that moves towards greater and greater reason (or enlightenment). Freedom thus consists in self-knowledge as well as knowledge of things. It is an apprehension of the “world as it really is” rather than understanding (à la Kant) the world to be made up of objects that we can never really know. Freedom is also knowledge of one’s own mind. Hegel best describes this notion of self-consciousness in his discussion of the differences between the Ancient Egyptian and Greek views of knowledge:

  A Critical Guide  49 That this mind of the Egyptians presented itself to their consciousness in the form of a problem is evident from the celebrated inscription in the sanctuary of the Goddess Neith: ‘I am that which is, that which was, and that which will be; no one has lifted my veil’… . In the Egyptian Neith, truth is still a problem. The Greek God Apollo is its solution; his utterance is: ‘Man, know thyself.’ In this dictum is not intended a selfrecognition that regards the specialities of one’s own weaknesses and defects: it is not the individual that is admonished to become acquainted with his idiosyncrasy, but humanity in general is summoned to knowledge. ( https://www.marxists. org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hi/history3.htm#011 )

If humanity is summoned to knowledge, we may ask who or what is doing the summoning? Hegel’s answer is simple: Reason. For Hegel, history and consciousness are inextricable. They are bound together in the pursuit of what he calls the Absolute or Spirit,1 or the collective knowledge of our own knowledge: This self-contained existence of Spirit is none other than self-consciousness—consciousness of one’s own being. Two things must be distinguished in consciousness; first, the fact that I know; secondly, what I know. In self consciousness these are merged in one; for Spirit knows itself. It involves an appreciation of its own nature, as also an energy enabling it to realise itself; to make itself actually that which it is potentially. According to this abstract definition it may be said of Universal History, that it is the exhibition of Spirit in the process of working out the knowledge of that which it is potentially. (https://www.Marxists.org/reference/archive/ hegel/works/hi/history3.htm#011 )

History is thus gripped within a particular teleology—the “process of working out the knowledge of that which it is potentially.” 1  Hegel uses the terms “the Absolute” and “Spirit” interchangeably in his works. The Absolute is a form of knowledge as well as a description of consciousness. It can be said to be ‘the mind knowing itself in the shape of mind’ or the selfconsciousness of consciousness.

50  Theodor W. Adorno

In other words, history is the coming to being of Spirit—its selfactualization as a self-knowing Subject, or as Hegel puts in in the conclusion of his Phenomenology of the Mind, “the mind knowing itself in the shape of mind.” This may be seen as a metacognition that borders on the divine, but Hegel restrains us from classifying the Absolute as a god or as godlike. The Absolute rests in the objects of the world and not above them. And yet, the Absolute only realizes itself when it understands that the real object to be known is itself: Consciousness had to shape the world intellectually, to classify and order it, before knowledge was possible. So-called ‘material objects’ turns out to be not things existing quite independently of consciousness but constructs of consciousness … At the level of self-consciousness, consciousness become aware of the laws of science as laws of its own creation, and so for the first time the mind had itself as the object of its scrutiny. (Singer 70)

In his Phenomenology, Hegel traces the ways in which our consciousness works upon objects. The text’s conclusion is that the true understanding of consciousness is through attaining metaconsciousness—an understanding of the way consciousness constructs reality. Although Hegel shies away from deifying reason, it becomes a quasi-god in his view of the way in which the mind creates the real (the objects in our world): The only Thought which Philosophy brings with it to the contemplation of History, is the simple conception of Reason; that Reason is the Sovereign of the World; that the history of the world therefore, presents us with a rational process. This conviction and intuition is a hypothesis in the domain of history as such. In that of Philosophy it is no hypothesis. It is there proved by speculative cognition, that Reason … is Substance, as well as Infinite Power; its own Infinite Material underlying all the natural and spiritual life which it originates, as also the Infinite Form, — that which sets this Material in motion.

  A Critical Guide  51 It supplies its own nourishment and is the object of its own operations. (https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/ hegel/works/hi/history3.htm#011)

It should be clear that for Adorno the Absolute’s absorption of “identity-in-difference” would pose a problem. While Hegel’s dialectics is far more successful than Kant’s in preserving the objectivity of the object (its independence from the subject) it still ends in a quasi-deified metacognition that promises to capture contradiction (identity-in-difference) in conceptual categories. For Adorno, such a dialectics, like the enlightenment project, swallows difference and obscures the particularity of the object. Adorno even suggests that Hegel’s valorization of the “identityin-difference” is a kind of philosophical straw man, one that does not stand up to close inspection. “The Hegelian system,” Adorno claims “in itself was not a true becoming; implicitly each single definition in it was already preconceived. Such safeguards condemn it to untruth” (ND 27). Adorno here objects to the notion that the process of becoming leads to truth. In fact, Adorno’s view is that Hegel’s dialectics, rather than privileging identity in difference, captures it in categories that are already existent and that are static in nature. There is no progress; there is a simple apprehension and domination of things as they are. Adorno’s solution to this state of things—his prescription to reinvigorate philosophy and to enable it to become close to conceiving of the “thing in itself”—is to accept and even celebrate negation. Rather than Hegel’s negation of the negation (his sublation or purification of the thesis and its antithesis) Adorno insists that the object can never be purified cognitively. There is no concept that can capture the object; in his words: “[t]o begin with… objects do not go into their concepts with out leaving a remainder.…” (ND 5). Because of this, dialectics, for Adorno, must never be the negation of the negation but rather its preservation. To use Hegelian terminology, dialectics for Adorno is the negation of the negation of the negation: “Dialectics is the consistent sense of non-identity.” It

52  Theodor W. Adorno

does not purify contradiction rather it consistently “indicates the untruth of identity, the fact that the concept does not exhaust the thing conceived” (ND 5). The preservation of the particularity of the object—of its remainder that may never be captured is crucial for Adorno. It is only this kind of respect towards objects and towards their independence from the conceptual categories of philosophy (or science) that will make philosophy relevant to “practical life” and also accountable to the way in which it is influenced by the economic and social relations of production that are dominant at the time. For Adorno, philosophy must not only consider the world but also—at the same time—consider itself. If philosophy fails to do so it falls into a cocoon-like idealism that that obscures the historical relativeness of philosophy itself: Ideology lies in wait for the mind which delights in itself, … for the mind which all but irresistibly becomes an absolute to itself. Theory prevents this.… Theory and mental experience need to interact. Theory does not contain answers to everything; it reacts to the world, which is faulty to the core…. Mobility is of the essence of consciousness; it is no accidental feature. It means a doubled mode of conduct: an inner one, the immanent process of which is the properly dialectical one, and a free, unbound one like a stepping out of dialectics. (ND 30–31)

Ideology is the attempt to systematize the world so that it is contained and dominated. Ideology is a powerful lure for thinkers because, while (usually) complex, it is ultimately systematic, and can provide a full accounting of the diversity of objects and ideas. It also has the self-satisfaction of closure. But in this closure (or the illusion thereof), it inevitably loses its connection with the real world that it purports to explain. Real philosophy must never abandon its real world referents. It must, in fact, remain immanent in experience so as to resist the siren song of ideology. It must also be satisfied with its own open-endedness, with its inevitable fail-

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ure of explanation. In fact this failure is what must be valourized for Adorno. Explanation and conceptualization is that which does violence to the real world. Both are disgusted by difference—by the remnant that cannot be encapsulated—and attempt to do away with it at all costs, even at the cost of truthfulness. In the section of Negative Dialectics entitled “After Auschwitz” Adorno discusses the dangers of a philosophy that attempts to negate the negation. Indeed such attempts lead not to clarity or freedom but to a figurative and literal genocidal integration: Genocide is the absolute integration. It is on its way wherever men are levelled off—“polished off,” as the German military called it—until one exterminates them literally, as deviations from the concept of their total nullity. Auschwitz confirmed the philosopheme of pure identity as death…. Even in his formal freedom, the individual is as fungible and replaceable as he will be under the liquidators’ boots. (ND 362)

For Adorno, the experience of Auschwitz—both as an extermination camp and as a representative of the attempted extermination of a whole people—makes metaphysics impossible. After Auschwitz, philosophy cannot responsibly conceive of a sensical relation, however attenuated, between the particular and the general. There is no generalizable explanation, for example, that can encapsulate the experience of the survivors and victims of the Holocaust that can be offered that does not again do violence to them; for Adorno, such explanations inevitably erase the individual (as genocide attempts to do) and replace unique human suffering with an inadequate and obfuscating quasi-parable. Genocide is absolute integration because it, like metaphysics, destroys the subject. It destroys the realness of human experience and is deaf to the suffering of individuals. Somewhat sarcastically, Adorno notes that Hitler provides us with a new categorical imperative1: “A new categorical imperative 1  Kant’s categorical imperative is best summed up by his pithy statement in his 1785 work, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals: “Act only according to that

54  Theodor W. Adorno

has been imposed by Hitler upon unfree mankind: To arrange their thoughts and actions to that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen” (ND 363). This new categorical imperative must be at the forefront of philosophical investigation even if it forces philosophy, and especially metaphysics, to confront its refractory opposite—materialism. For Adorno, “Auschwitz” has undermined all pretentions to culture, or to humanity. The supposed ideals of “German” culture, of the enlightenment, of metaphysics have, for Adorno, burned in the crematoriums along with the bodies. After Auschwitz, we are left with the image of man as he is: brutal and suffering. It is the task of philosophy to reacquaint itself, to try to know the human in all of its misery and brutality. Immanence requires that we reside in the “stench”; we must not ignore that, as Adorno notes (quoting Brecht), the “mansion” (culture, metaphysics, idealism) is built of “dogshit” (ND 366). After this rather bleak conclusion, the question may be “what now? Can we make change by being hyperaware of the dangers of ideology in whatever form the latter takes? What, indeed, can philosophy do if it remains in the stench? If we look closely, we actually have an embarrassment of riches: what we have left are the tools and the theoretical foundation for a sustained and rigorous cultural critique, one that we will see Adorno actively deploying in the next few chapters. Adorno’s dialectical methodology means that we are always self-conscious. We never lose the immanence of our own location—what he calls the “objective context of delusion.” This positioning enables us to pinpoint delusion when it occurs. It allows us to be vigorous watchdogs of our own fall into ideology. It also calls on us—as a new categorical imperative—to preserve the voices of those who would be silenced within identimaxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.” In other words, if acted upon, all of one’s potential actions should be considered as if they would become a law governing others’ behaviors. In this view, if you believe that it is acceptable for you to lie out of convenience, for example, that would mean that you believe that lying is permissible for anyone to do if it makes things easier for the person lying.

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tarian thinking. In this way, Adorno anticipates the critical methods of movements that have emerged from the experience of the “Others” in our society—the women’s movement, the civil rights movement, and the lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer movement. All of these have as their common goal to resist all-inclusive /exclusive categorizations. To be queer, for example, means both to be sexually different but also to challenge the very bases upon which gender differences are based. We might even venture to say that Adorno may be the first philosopher to inaugurate a “queer” dialectics—one that remains in difference, in the incommensurable, and celebrates both.

Art as a Form of Freedom The Essay as Form If the culture industry pre-empts thought, then how does real thinking happen? Does it even happen at all? When is the subject loosed from the controls of the culture industry? As we will see in the next section, Schoenberg (and Webern to a certain extent) become the embodiments of resistance to the culture industry. Their music allows the (willing) listener to escape the fetters of commodity fetishism and regressive listening. Their music, indeed, allows one to access a subjectivity, one that is not regulated by the culture industry. In the essay, Adorno, somewhat surprisingly, finds a form that could accommodate the working out of ideas in a dialectical fashion. This is surprising because the essay is usually not a forum for exploration but exposition. In the academy, it usually consists of ideas that are fully worked out in order to create a coherent argument, not a space where contradictions—a negative dialectics— usually find their articulation. Adorno, however, found this form ideal for the exploration of ideas in a way that would not render their intricacies invisible. He did, however, acknowledge that the essay is not usually seen in the academy as a site of exploration, but rather a space where exploration should be closed off: Despite the weighty perspicacity that Simmel and the young Lukács, Kassner and Benjamin entrusted to the essay, to the speculative investigation of specific, culturally predetermined objects, the academic guild only has patience for philosophy that dresses itself up with the nobility of the universal, the everlasting, and today—when possible—with the primal: the

  A Critical Guide  57 cultural artifact is of interest only to the degree that its serves to exemplify universal categories, or at the very least allows them to shine through—however little the particular is thereby illuminated. (AR 93)

This attempt to make the essay express the universal rather than paying attention to the particular is, for Adorno, to go against its natural habitude. The essay does not allow for consolidation but instead provokes “resistance”. Although written by human actors with intention, the essay has a life of its own and is presented by Adorno as something ultimately uncontrollable by human actors. In one section, Adorno even anthropomorphizes the essay into a child—one who is curious and careless of limitations: The essay … does not permit its domain to be prescribed. Instead of achieving something scientifically, or creating something artistically, the effort of the essay reflects a childlike freedom that catches fire without scruple, on what others have already done…. Luck and play are essential to the essay. It does not begin with Adam and Eve but with what it wants to discuss; it says what is at issue and steps where it feels itself complete—not where there is nothing left to say. (AR 93)

As an entity that plays and shifts within its form, it is innately hostile to positivism and other enlightenment modes of thought that require the strict regulation and control of subject matter. As such, the essay is also unsuited to philosophy that stresses the eternal rather than the ephemeral. The Platonic insistence that the true subject of philosophy is the unchanging is inimical to the essay form: “the essay shies from the violence of dogma, from the notion that the result of abstraction, the temporarily invariable concept indifferent to the individual phenomenon grasped by it, deserves ontological dignity” (AR 99). The essay, Adorno further suggests, is formless. It does away with formalist attempts to contain its investigatory impetus. Rather than being contained within subject matter of the author’s choosing, the essay “freely associated what

58  Theodor W. Adorno

can be found associated in the freely chosen subject” (AR 99). In so doing, the essay undermines the positivist idea that thought can be contained in concepts or can be developed linearly and without recourse to itself. The essay demands a circular thinking process. That which is thought is at the same time unthought—questionable and questioned by the essay form itself. These characteristics are only, of course, found in good essays. The essay’s worth for Adorno depends upon its freedom of intellectual movement and the way in which it operates dialectically. This will be further explained in a moment. The bad essay, in contrast, is not really an essay at all. It is really positivism in disguise. As such, this form only skims the surface of the objects of its consideration. Non-essays become one more mechanism in the distillation of the culture industry. Rather than exploring an idea dialectically— exposing that which underlies them socially and the contradictions that undermine the totality of an idea—the ‘non-essay’ “embroils itself only more intently in the culture industry and it falls from the conspicuousness, success and prestige of products designed for the market place” (AR 94). This kind of essay serves not as a medium for critical investigation but as an advertisement for the creations of the culture industry. In particular, Adorno holds up for ridicule “non-essays” about culture. These, he claims, have “promoted the neuturalizing transformation of cultural artifacts into commodities …” (AR 95). While such works may seem to be unfortunate accidents, they are quite dangerous for Adorno. Like the culture industry, these essays are not written for the critical reader but for the consumer: “Torn from the discipline of academic unfreedom intellectual (geistege) freedom itself becomes unfree and sets itself to work in the service of the socially performed needs of its consumers” (AR 95). As such these works do violence to the object that they purport to consider. They deform it to fit the aesthetics of the consumers for which the writer is writing. In so doing, the essay abdicates its responsibility to be true to the intricacies of the object and instead bows to the needs of the generalizable.

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The good essay must be inoculated with dialecticism. This is not the dialecticism of Hegel, however, that attempts to resolve antimonies and reach a fully coherent whole. Adorno’s dialecticism is one that revels in contradiction; it searches out and explores moments of non-identity in its constant interrogation of seemingly fixed and seamless identities. It does not capture the object, but rather allows the object to express itself in all of its non-cohesive contradictoriness. The object is thus always a non-object—the particular is allowed its freedom from being captured within whatever epistemological category is supposed to contain it. In this way, the form of the essay allows its subject matter the freedom from extrapolation and abstraction: “Higher levels of abstraction invest thought neither with a greater sanctity nor with metaphysical content; rather the metaphysical content evaporates with the progress of abstraction, from which the essay attempts to make reparation” (AR 99). The essay’s form is not suited for the hypostasization of objects or for the resolving of contradiction. It is the expression, in its form, of Adorno’s aphoristic inversion of Hegel: “the whole is the untrue”: The essay simultaneously suspends the traditional concept of method. Thought acquires its depth form penetrating deeply into a matter, not from referring it back to something else. … The essay freely associates whatever can be found associated in the freely chosen object. (AR 99)

The essay’s ability to associate freely allows for the kind of dialecticism that rejects a holistic end. The dialecticism of Adorno’s essay consistently historicizes, socializes, and resists conclusions that close off further exploration or investigation. The object of the essay is something that can be said to be turned round in the author’s hand, examined closely, without judgment or prefabricated conceptualizations: “The essay comes so close to the here and now of the object, up to the point where that object, instead of being simply an object, dissociates itself into those elements in

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which it has its life” (AR 102). These elements are precisely the historical and social location of the object—its context in all of its contradictory richness. They are also the way in which the object is embedded in the relations of exchange and production that characterize a society at a certain moment. Adorno never forgets the way in which exchange relationships permeate every aspect of social life and thinking. In fact, this principle of exchange is a constant in his understanding of the social and historical context. Adorno gestures to this complexity: “In opposition to the cliché of the “understandable,” the notion of truth as a network of causes and effects, the essay insists that a matter be considered, from the very first, in its whole complexity; it counteracts that hardened primitiveness that always allies itself with reason’s current form” (AR 103). It is because of this reluctance to be understood that the essay, in Adorno’s view, is less of a “continuum of operations” (like science, positivism) and is more like a “carpet” in which the “aspects of the argument interweave” (AR 101). Indeed, Adorno stresses the immediacy of the essay—its necessarily unplanned and serendipitous process of creating meaning. It is a carpet never fully woven, but always in the process of being fashioned. Quoting Max Bense, Adorno models for us the ideal essayist, He writes essayistically who writes while experimenting: who turns his object this way and that who questions it, feels it, tests, it thoroughly reflects on it, attacks in from different angles, and in his mind’s eye collects what he ways, and puts into words what the object always allows to be seen under the conditions of established in the course of writing. (AR 104)

Although this sounds like a scientific approach—the object being the object of an experiment—questioned, touched, reflected upon—Adorno insists that no finite conclusions may be drawn from this examination. In ending his essay, Adorno points out that the form of the essay is characterized by contradiction, and resists any attempt at resolution. Indeed, the final line of the essay confirms the heterodox form of the essay:

  A Critical Guide  61 For the happiness that Nietzsche found holy, the essay has no other name than the negative. Even the highest manifestations of the intellect that express happiness are always at the same time caught in the guilt of thwarting happiness as long as they remain mere intellect. Therefore, the law of the innermost form of the essay is heresy. By transgressing the orthodoxy of thought, something becomes visible in the object which is it orthodoxy’s secret purpose to keep invisible. (AR 110)

Through the valorization of the negative, the essay escapes one of the most dangerous pitfalls of enlightenment thinking: Reification. Arnold Schoenberg: the Immanent in Music It is important to remember that Adorno was as devout a musician and music critic as he was a philosopher. His philosophical and musicological interpretations are, in fact, complementary: It is, in some ways, easier to understand Adorno’s philosophy by considering his views on musical composition than his philosophical critiques. Critics such as Martin Jay, for example, have characterized Adorno’s philosophy in terms of music—his is an “atonal philosophy deeply indebted to the compositional techniques of the Schoenberg school” (Jay28). Very early in his career, Adorno was fascinated by the new music of the Schoenberg school, particularly their focus on atonality and later, serialism or (twelve-tone) compositional technique. Adorno’s admiration for this school came about somewhat serendipitously: He attended a performance of Alban Berg’s opera, Wozzeck, and was startled by the revolutionary possibilities afforded by Berg and Schoenberg’s music. He soon became a music student of Berg and wrote prolifically about Schoenberg, Berg, and other composers in their circle. For Adorno, Schoenberg’s compositional technique was a welcome break from the maudlin expressiveness of 19th century music that he saw appealing to emotion rather than thinking.

62  Theodor W. Adorno

Adorno admired the cognitive rigor demanded by Schoenberg’s compositions. He felt, in fact, that this rigor—the demands on thinking that listening to this music entailed—was a model of the kind of immanent critique that he believed should characterize philosophical thinking. Unlike the products of the culture industry, Schoenberg’s music does not provide easy fodder for the listener. Instead it demands that both the composer and listener engage dialectically with the material—“transforming both itself and the very idea of the object thereby” (AR 280). Thus, Schoenberg’s own method itself was, for Adorno, an example of dialectics in practice. Like the philosopher who thinks of an idea and yet must act as a gadfly to his own conclusions, Schoenberg’s music too engages in just this kind of immanent (from within) dialectical critique: [H]is music springs from creative fervour, not consuming desire, and is insatiable in its giving. Although all the artistic materials with which he could prove himself were borrowed properly, he produces his own material as well as its resistances, driven incessantly by the disgust of everything he produces which is not entirely new. (AR 284)

Schoenberg’s music entails critical self-reflection. His goal, unlike other composers, is not to satisfy the audience, but to unsettle them—to make them think of music as something to be experienced and studied, not passively but actively: “His [Schoenberg’s] melodic imagination scarcely ever contented itself with a single melody; all simultaneous musical events are treated as melodies, which make them more difficult to grasp” (AR 285). Contra the culture industry, Schoenberg eschews easy melodies and musical categories. His compositions are almost impossible to categorize by using the usual musical paradigms: his polyphony resists polyphony, for example, because it “function[s] with real parts, not with camouflaging counterpoint” (287). Indeed, for Adorno, Schoenberg music is characterized by “identity in nonidentity” (AR 287).

  A Critical Guide  63 The more dissonant a chord, the more sound contained—sound effective by virtue of their differentiation from each other and in the quality of the differentiation itself—the more polyphonic is this chord. The predominance of dissonance seems to destroy the rationally, ‘logical’ relationship. Dissonance is more rational than consonance, insofar as it articulates with great clarity the relationship of the sounds occurring within it—instead of achieving a dubious unity through the destruction of those partial moments present in dissonance, through ‘homogenous’ sound (AR 59).

Schoenberg’s music—in particular his atonality and the concomitant rejection of tonal synthesis—also allows for the subjective to pierce through. What is discordant is not hidden in his compositions but is emphasized and thus allowed to demonstrate clearly its relationship with the other sounds. In this way, dissonance allows the listener to be shocked out of her melodic complacency: As Adorno notes “[Schoenberg’s] is music of the intellectual ear” (AR 290). Adorno’s appreciation of Schoenberg was not unproblematic, however. He was uneasy with Schoenberg’s later serial or twelvetone compositions.1 While he respected the intellectual rigor of these compositions, he felt that their emphasis on the internal structure of the compositions profoundly compromised their dialectical richness. Twelve-tone technique suppressed what Schoenberg’s earlier compositions elaborated—“the angst of the eviscerated subject” (Jay 151). The structuring principle of these compositions led to failure with regard to representing the hushed voices of the subjected subject: “Music becomes the result of processes to which the materials of music have been subjected and the perception of which in themselves is blocked by music” (PNM 61). According to Adorno, the twelve-tone row functions as a master whipping recalcitrant notes into an instrumental order. Its logical 1  Twelve-tone serialism is a method of compositing that employs the twelve-tone row. The twelve tones of a chromatic scale (c, c#, d, d#, e …) are used in particular sets of rows to achieve an ordering structure for the composition.

64  Theodor W. Adorno

consistency denies the key element that music has to offer the listening human subject: The total rationality of music is its total organization. By means of organization, liberated music seeks to reconstitute the lost totality—the lost power and responsibly binding force of Beethoven. Music succeeds in doing so only at the price of its freedom, and thereby it fails. Beethoven reproduced the meaning of tonality out of subjective freedom. The new ordering of twelve-tone technique virtually extinguishes the subject. (PNM 69)

The irony is that organization is supposed to lead to further expressiveness—to the release of the truth content in and through music. Instead of doing so, it leads to its own failure. In his article on Schoenberg, “Arnold Schoenberg 1874–1951,” Adorno notes the tragic irony of the artist who seeks systematization as means for expression: Schoenberg [using the method of serial composition] is threated by the nemesis of what Kandinsky describes as follows: ‘The artist thinks that, having “finally found his form”, he can now continue to create works of art in peace. Unfortunately, even he himself, does not usually notice that from this moment (of “peace”) on, he very rapidly begins to lose this finally fond form’. This so because each work of art is a force field, and just as the act of thought cannot be separated from the truth-content of the logical judgment, works or art are true only in so far as they transcend their materials preconditions… But in denying themselves self-reflection and making themselves static, they become moribund and cripple the very impulse that produced the system in the first place. (AR 297)

While Adorno is critical of serialism, he admires Schoenberg as one of few composers who could access what he calls an “expressive core”, one that “identified with the terror of men in the ago-

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nies of death under total domination” (AR 303). Adorno finds these moments especially prevalent in Schoenberg’s operatic monodramas, such as Erwartrung (1909) and Survivor from Warsaw (1948). Of these two compositions, Adorno writes, That which the feebleness and impotence of the individual soul seemed to express testified to what has been inflicted on mankind in those who represent the whole as its victims. Horror has never rung as true in music, and by articulating it music regains its redeeming power through negation. The Jewish song with which the Survivor from Warsaw concludes its music as the protest of mankind against myth. (AR 303)

Adorno here references the central Jewish prayer (the Shema) that is sung at every service and is the key declamation of Jewish religious identity. In the context of Schoenberg’s piece, it serves as a moment of protest against the Nazi regime to which the imagined survivor was subjected and also, more generally, as an impassioned articulation of the human within the context of genocide. If Adorno viewed Schoenberg’s twelve-tone row as a potential force of subjective domination, his opinion of Stravinsky’s music was that it was the quintessential medium for the erasure of the human in music. Adorno’s vitriol against Stravinsky is well known; he could not tolerate Stravinsky because he found in his music a faux liberty, an empty and indeed hypocritical attempt to break with traditional modes of aesthetic expression without really doing so. For Adorno, Stravinsky was a traitor. He seemed to be moving in a new direction, one that challenged the status quo and the listener, but he didn’t really do so if one considered his music carefully. This was a worse “crime” than those composers who make no such pretentions to originality: In contrast to Schoenberg, Stravinsky’s music is uncritically affirmative and conformist in that it “reacts vehemently against any impulse not visibly determined by society. He shares with Schoenberg the project of rationalizing music, but

66  Theodor W. Adorno Stravinsky tries to achieve this end through a suspect authenticity derived from society, the character of being so and not otherwise. (Marsh 152)

For Adorno, Stravinsky’s neo-classism (his importation of elements reminiscent of the styles of past composers) in his compositions is a cowardly from confronting the real potential of music to reveal “the deep structures” of society and the human (Marsh 153). While Schoenberg’s music is always an attempt to be true to its own compositional techniques while at the same time achieving, if flittingly, an articulation of human subjectivity (the expressive core), Stravinsky abandons the human and the individual in favour of the collective. His music thus becomes emblematic of a fascist mind-set, one not concerned with the individual and his or her experience but with the domination of all elements that dare challenge the status quo. Adorno’s reading of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring illustrates his deeply held prejudice against Stravinsky’s music. The sacrifice of the maiden in this piece, in particular, provokes his ire; he sees this moment as a confirmation of the collective over and against the individual, a call, in fact, to the suppression of the individual in favour of the collective. Adorno’s view is controversial and has been vociferously challenged by both musicians and musicologists (including Schoenberg!) because it seems to misunderstand the innovation of Stravinsky’s music/choreography and its seeming intent: In most productions, the maiden’s dance is choreographed as a frenzied escape from the pressure of the collective, accompanied musically by insistent and harrowing rhythmic instrumental cacophony. Her movements signal resistance to her “destiny” until the final abrupt chord when she collapses at the feet of her victimizers. The audience’s reaction to Stravinsky’s work at its premiere also belies Adorno’s reading of its essentially conformist character. The the outrage that greeted the Sacre’s first performance made Stravinsky leave the auditorium and much of the music was

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drowned out by the cries of protest from the audience. In a contemporary review, The New York Times reports that “Parisians Hiss New Ballet” and that the Manager “Has to Turn Up Lights” as a means “to stop hostile demonstrations as the Dance goes on” (NYT, 7 June 1913). Rather than a conformist, Stravinsky is viewed by most music critics as ushering in a second avante garde in music. In Donald Jay Grout’s words, a well-known music historian, “The Sacre is undoubtedly the most famous composition of the early 20th century … it had the effect of an explosion that so scattered the elements of musical language that they could never again be put together as before” (Grout, History of Western Music, 204). Given these reactions it is hard to endorse Adorno’s view of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring as an affirmation of collectivity and fascism; some, in fact, see his reading as an instance of closemindedness and even ideological blindness: By a certain stretch of the imagination, the Russian Stravinsky might have been seen as a prefiguration of a new collective subject instead of a regressive objectivism. But, of course, Adorno’s imagination stretched in a very different direction and Stravinsky become the composer of fascism malgre lui … Adorno only saw primitivist regression combined with sadomasochistic authoritarianism in Stravinsky’s music. It would be hard to argue that his instincts were wrong when it came to the Soviet Union, but in musical terms, what might almost be called his fetishization of the dying bourgeois subject meant he was closed to any potential alternatives. (Jay 153)

However ground breaking on the surface, Stravinsky’s “flight to neoclassicism”—his primitivism—undermined the progressive thrust of his composition for Adorno. Thus, even though Stravinsky introduces new chords and rhythmic variations scarcely imaginable at the time, this element of his music is an instance of regression, which only makes the work all the more palatable to the dulled sensibilities of its bourgeois audience.

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Aesthetic Theory Near the end of his life, Adorno turned his full attention to his magnum opus about two subjects dear to him: aesthetics and philosophy. It was unfinished at the time of his death and published posthumously as Aesthetic Theory. Even though Adorno did not finish his text, enough of it was written to give the reader a rather full understanding of his conception of the dialectical relationship between aesthetics, society, and philosophy. Rather than trying to subsume one subject into the other, such as one might do if one were to consider the philosophy (or sociology) of art, Adorno wished to investigate how aesthetics is, in itself, a form of philosophy and a form of redemption. This is not to say that Adorno viewed aesthetics as a medium to escape the material and social relations of its production. Rather, he viewed art as also enabling the kind of introspection that Adorno demanded of philosophy in his work, Negative Dialectics, discussed above. For Adorno, art may tell us about itself, but it, like philosophy, is also a means for telling us about society, about resistance, and about what defines and constrains its own production. In his introduction to Aesthetic Theory, Adorno notes that Art can be understood only by its own laws of movement, not according to any set of invariants. It is defined by its relation to what it is not. The specifically artistic in art must be derived concretely from its other; that alone would fulfill the demands of a materialistic-dialectical aesthetics. Art acquires its specificity by separating itself from what it developed out of; its law of movement is its law of form. (AT 3)

In keeping with the general framework of this consideration of Adorno, we will consider the parts of his Aesthetic Theory that discuss the relationship of art and society. Our question here is motivated by Adorno’s own—to what extent can art be autonomous? To what extent can art escape the fetters of the culture industry and what sort of art is able to do so?

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It is important to note that Adorno does not believe that any art can fully escape the material relations of production that produce it. Art always registers its own birth pangs. When it purports to refuse to do so, it only fetishizes these birth pangs all the more. Even art that is part of the art for art’s sake movement cannot, even for a moment, escape its own genealogy in relations of material exchange: In purely formal terms, prior to any analysis of what they express, art works are ideological because they a priori posit a spiritual entity as thought it were independent of any conditions of material production … In so doing art works cover up the age-old culpability that lies in the divorce of physical from mental labour. (AR 243)

Somewhat ironically, Adorno sees art’s essentially materialist character as an inextricable element of their truth content. The moment that art attempts to escape its genealogy it refuses its own inevitable fetishization; it attempts to conceal the physical labour and the attendant relations of production that are part and parcel of its creation. Art works that embrace this fetishization are ones that have the greatest power of social resistance. They don’t attempt to hide their social etiology through theory but rather embrace it. Their power of social resistance comes not from self-idolization but in their acquiescence (and even celebration) of their essentially useless use-value. The fetish character of art works is a condition of their truth including their social truth. The principle of being-for-other only seems to be antagonistic to fetishism; in reality it is the principle of exchange, and therein lies concealed real domination. Freedom from repression can be represented only by what does not succumb to repression; residual use value, only by what is useless. Works of art are plenipotentiaries of things beyond the mutilating sway of exchange, profit and false

70  Theodor W. Adorno human needs. (AR 244)

Adorno believes that artwork has the potential to impact society, but this impact is predicated on the degree to which art works can both represent society and also free themselves from that representation. Works that are purely replicative—that simply work to reproduce as faithfully as possible the conditions of lived experience—have limited value for Adorno. These works, he claims, are “smitten with silence” because they are unable to bring about in the viewer a personalized experience but rather only reproduce the collective world-view. Works that stray too far from realism—such as surrealism or German expressionism—are similarly of little effect for Adorno. Though they be shocking at first and force the audience to interrogate assumptions about aesthetics, these works are soon tamed through commodification. Even as radical a figure as Salvador Dali1 is ultimately a disappointment for Adorno: “In the end, somebody like Salvador Dali was able to become a kind of jet-set painter, … of a generation that prided itself on being ‘sophisticated’ in an era when critic conditions seemed to have given way to stability” (AR 246). The fashionability of someone like Dali belies the radical potential of his art. The degree to which his art is able to be commodified (and thus unproblematically exchangeable in the market place) neutralizes the social interrogation that his work might have inspired. The potential radicalness of a work of art—its ability to be a site of critical investigation—is thus also dependent on the degree to which art defines as economically useless—outside of the usual framework of social relations of production and reproduction. For works of art to have some value beyond that of exchange, they need to produce what Adorno describes as a “tremor” in the viewer or audience. This tremor is best described as a moment of discomfort. The audience of the artistic piece is shaken for a moment out 1  Salvador Dali was one of the most famous artists in the Surrealist movement of the 1920s and 1930s. He also collaborated on projects in film and other media and quickly became a celebrity of the art-world, much like Andy Warhol in the 1960s.

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of complacency; this moment of tremor is the fetal heartbeat, so to speak, of the birth of a spirit of social interrogation, questioning, and change. This tremor does not lead to revolution, in Adorno’s mind, but it is the dawning of a new kind of consciousness that leads sometimes to the creation of a critical consciousness in the viewer: A legitimate subjective response to art is a sense of concern (Betroffenheit). Concern is triggered by great works. Concern is not some repressed emotion in the recipient that is brought to the surface by art but a momentary discomfiture, more precisely a tremor (Erschutterung), during which he gives himself over to the work. He loses his footing, as it were, discovering that the truth embodied in the aesthetic image as real tangible possibilities. (AR 258)

For Adorno, the artist that he views as most capable of producing such tremors is Franz Kafka. Kafka is unique in that his work does not unthinkingly mesmerize the viewer or reader (as does an author like Adalbert Stifter or a composer like Ludwig Van Beethoven), but rather uses his realism to create a kind of consciousness of the “bizarrenesss” and irrationality of the everyday world: “Kafka is a good example here,” Adorno notes in describing the way in which art can be socially significant via a “content that articulates itself in formal structures”: Nowhere in his [Kafka’s] work did he address monopoly capitalism directly. Yet by zeroing in on the dregs of the administered world, he laid bare the inhumanity of a repressive social totality, and he did so more powerfully and uncompromisingly than if he had written novels about corruptions in multinational corporations. (AR 247)

The experience of reading Kafka, for Adorno, is the experience of the tremor. The familiar is radically defamiliarized and thus notions of the normal social world are put under strain. This process is not a politicized one though, even though the emotional

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effects may lead to political awareness. Unlike Brecht, Kafka is not a propagandist, for Adorno. His is not the aesthetics of the explicit, but rather a ground-breaking implicit critique of the social relations that form us. Adorno admires the subtlety of Kafka, and sees this as one of his greatest accomplishments. Adorno contrasts the approach of Kafka to that of both Brecht and Beethoven. He disparages the former’s strategy because of the explicitly propagandistic etiology of his work. He rejects Brecht’s “didactic posture” and “intolerance of ambiguity” and sees in his work another form of domination—albeit ultimately one that aims at freedom rather than subjugation, even if it fails. He credits Brecht with instituting a “self-consciousness” in works of art even though he believes that Brecht’s approach is too heavy-handed for any social-changing effect to occur. He notes that for art works to have “any social influence at all,” they must not “harangu[e],” but rather subtly “chang[e] consciousness in ways that are ever so difficult to pin down” (AR 256). Somewhat surprisingly, Adorno sees Beethoven as guilty of the same kind of approach as Brecht. He points to the ninth symphony (and especially the chorus) as an instance of artistic browbeating: Works like the Ninth Symphony exert a mesmerizing influence; the power they have by virtue of their structure is translated into power over people. After Beethoven, art’s power of suggestion, originally borrowed from society, has rebounded on to society and become propagandistic and ideological. (AR 259)

And yet, even Beethoven, with his “this is how it is” allows for a “subjective tremor” to break through. Even though the music, for Adorno, is “affirmative”—embracing the status quo and even perpetuating it—it also unwittingly “exposes untruth.” The untruth that it exposes is the ego’s patina of independence from the forces-that-be. It is in this untruth—this wormhole into subjectivity—that art allows for truth: “The subjective experience of an opposition to the ego is a moment of art’s objective truth”

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(AR 259). Art also contains within it a moment of immanence—a sometimes conscious sometimes unconscious consciousness of its own conditions of production and a critique of these relations of production. This self-consciousness is borne out of the particular historical and social context in which the artwork takes form. The authorial intent here is beside the purpose. The artwork itself takes on a political life of its own even if it seems to be depoliticized. The plays of comedies of Pierre de Beaumarchais at a different time and place might have had no overt political impact; their historical context allowed them to exert the political and historical shifts with which they are now credited. Thus, as Adorno notes, “the immanence of society in art is not the immanence of art in society” (AR 249). The direction is not that of social influence upon art, but rather art’s sometimes witting and sometimes unwitting influence upon society—the tremors that the art works evokes in its audience and that can sometimes lead to wholesale political and social change.

Theory and Practice: the Collision of the Real Adorno and the Student Movement In the 1960s during the student movement in Germany, Adorno was placed in an unenviable and tragic position; apparently, his writings had inspired the student movement and especially those factions that arose as a response to the Shah of Iran’s visit to Germany and events such as the emergency measures taken by the West German government, the Vietnam War, US racial strife, and the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Adorno first seemed to back the students—fearing that Vietnam and the increasingly conservative German parliament—were other “Auschwitzes” waiting to take place. The university was also an object of student protest at this time. Members of the student movement viewed the university not as a source for change but as a calcifying entity. The following vignette is a good example of the students’ critiques of the university. In November of 1967, a ceremony in honour of the university rector was disrupted by the action of the increasingly politicized students. Two students representatives brought what become a celebrated banner into the largest lecture hall in the presence of the body of academic staff. It bore the motto: ‘Beneath their robes; the mustiness of two thousand years’. (Müller-Doohm 450)

In this context, Adorno’s work and lectures were, at first, important sites of inspiration for students. Adorno even interrupted one of his lectures to speak about an incident in which a student was killed by a police officer, and the police officer was not charged

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in his death. He declared in no uncertain terms his sympathy with the students and his suspicion of the police: “If the police officer cannot be condemned because it has not been possible to find him guilty in accordance with the law, the guilt of his superiors is all the greater” (Müller-Doohm 453). Soon, however, words were not enough: the leaders of the main organization for students, Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (SDS) pushed Adorno to become involved through actions and not just words. The students’ tactics were not to Adorno’s liking, however; although he sympathized with their general critique of the status quo. In a meeting that he and Horkheimer arranged with students after the student’s death referenced above, the two tried to make it clear to the group that extremist actions do not automatically accord with the principles of liberation. Horkheimer asked the students rhetorically, “whether the claim made by Asian potentates to base themselves on the doctrines of communism had not degernated into a macabre farce when these doctrines were ocopared to the ideas of their founders” (Müller-Doohm 454). While the question was meant to be thought provoking and to urge the SDS to a more considered strategy, the students viewed it as a rejection of their movement and philosophy. To express their disappointment they engaged in what Adorno would call infantile gestures” that alienated him from their cause. They disrupted his lectures; they occupied the seminar rooms of the Frankfurt institute; they began to abuse him in leaflets widely distributed to other students. These actions, for Adorno, made the students’ tactics no different from those of the national socialists. Those who did not conform to freedom were treated as traitors and vilified. Of course the students did not recognize themselves as the source of a new breed of authoritarianism—from the left. Theirs was a cause of liberation and those in their way were simply obstructionists, or worse, quasi-fascists. In one scathing pamphlet they accuse Adorno and his colleagues of the latter:

76  Theodor W. Adorno Critical theory has been organized in such an authoritarian manner…that its approach to sociology allows no space for to organize their own studies … We are fed up with letting ourselves be trained in Frankfurt to become dubious [halbseiden] members of the political left who, once their studies are finished, can serve as the integrated alibis of the authoritarian state. (Müller-Doohm 464)

The relations between Adorno and the students took a turn for the worse when the latter decided to occupy the seminar rooms of his beloved Frankfurt institute in a show of defiance against the institute’s seeming attitude of inaction in the fight for change. In January 1969 after several sit-ins, Adorno and his colleagues called the police to clear the students from the institute and to pursue a charge of trespass against the leader of the student movement, Hans Krahl. While such an action might seem surprising, Adorno along with the directors of the institute issued a memorandum to explain their decision. Their rationale was simple. They refused to be bullied by those on the left as they had been by those on the right. They also urged that students resist “their own criminalization” and work towards more effective and lasting means of change in the university and in German society. It may seem strange that a philosopher who was so deeply critical of society and authoritarianism should, in the last instance, seem to call on the very forces that are the representatives of the authoritarian state—the police, or university administrators— when confronted with quasi-revolution—with an attempt to put theory into practice. It is indeed somewhat difficult at first to make sense of Adorno’s refusal to join forces with the student movement. Some answers may be gleaned, however, if we consider his words. In 1969, Der Spiegel, a popular German magazine, interviewed Adorno about the student movement in a piece appropriately titled, “Don’t be Afraid of the Ivory Tower” (“Keine Angst Vor Dem Elfenbeintrum”). In it, the interviewers press Adorno about his reactions to the student movement. They ask him, “don’t

  A Critical Guide  77

you like the way that the students are challenging you; don’t you like their political aims”?1 They press him on why he refuses to join in the student movement. The interviewers ask him: Critical theory doesn’t want the things how they are. The SDS learned that from you. The status quo is not ok. But now professor you refuse to take action. Is this just a theory with not practice? Is it just a liturgy that one recites without doing anything practice as a result? (Der Spiegel v. 19, 1969)

Adorno’s responses are instructive. They clarify for the readers of Der Spiegel (and his philosophy) his view of his role in social change. His replies to his interviewers contain a constant refrain: “In my writings, I never wrote down a model for any physical violence (practical actions) it was always theory… I’m a theoretical man who likes theoretical thinking” (Der Spiegel). Later when asked how one changes society without “a single action,” Adorno replies with the same argument: I don’t have an answer for that. Answering the question what should I do? Mostly I can answer I don’t know. I can just try to analyze what it is. Then they say to me that when you criticize, it’s your duty to show how to improve things. That is not right; it’s like a pre-judgment. I can criticize, but I don’t provide a solution, and I don’t have to provide a solution. (Der Spiegel)

In this interview, Adorno firmly rejects the notion that his theoretical writings have a direct and necessary connection to action. He acknowledges that he has made a theoretical model, but not one which can be used to generate uncritically Molotov cocktails of resistance. For Adorno, the ivory tower is his home, and he is not ashamed of it. He believes that in the domain of critical thought a division of labour is appropriate—those that are thinkers do not necessar1  My sincere thanks to Caroline Schirmer for her excellent translation of this interview.

78  Theodor W. Adorno

ily have to be doers. It is enough for Adorno to launch a Molotov cocktail in words rather than actions. For him, actions—even with the right intentions—can be dangerous. They can stupefy rather than enlighten, and it is this kind of stupefaction of which he ultimately believes that the student movement is guilty: “The thinking of the right of minorities is not here anymore. If I think differently than the students, then it’s impossible” (Der Spiegel).

Conclusion Adorno died soon after the interview with Der Spiegel. He suffered a massive heart attack during a vacation that was much needed after his interactions with a now hostile student movement. In a letter to Herbert Marcuse written in June 1969 he bemoaned the hostility he now felt, likening it to that which he felt as a Jew in pre-World War II Germany: “Here in Frankfurt the word professor is used to dismiss people, to ‘demolish’ them, much as the Nazis used the word “Jew’” (http://www.critical-theory.com/ letters-adorno-marcuse-discuss-60s-student-activism/). In the end, Adorno might be said to have been felled by his own self-imposed identity. Within the student movement as within society in general, he was the philosopher of the particular, of the non-identical, of the incommensurate. Within these categories of negation, he gained his critical power. And yet, this refusal to be interpolated into a philosophical or ideological system, ultimately exhausted Adorno. His was a life wherein all too often he felt surrounded by those who would destroy him if they could. It is perhaps fitting to end with a quotation from a poem written after his death by his friend, Marie Luise Kaschnitz, a poem that best captures the imposed self-alienation of Adorno and its devastating consequences. He died of himself … No one needed To push him into his grave In this radiant summer. He had long been sad He fell. (qoted in Müller-Doohm, 484)

Bibliography Primary Sources Adorno, Theodor. Aesthetic Theory. Trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. [cited as AT] Adorno, Theodor. The Culture Industry. Trans. J.M. Bernstein. New York: Routledge, 1991. [CI] Adorno, Theodor. Negative Dialectics. Trans. E.B. Ashton. New York: Continuum, 1995. [ND] Adorno, Theodor and Walter Benjamin. The Complete Correspondence, 1928-1940. Edited by Henry Lonitz. Trans. Nicholas Walker. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Adorno, Theodor. Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life. Trans. E.F.N. Jephcott. New York: Verso, 2005. Adorno, Theodor. Philosophy of New Music. Trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006 [PNM] Horkheimer, Marx and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. J. Cummings. New York: Continuum, 1994. [DE] Keine Angst Vor Dem Elfenbeintrum, Der Spiegel, v. 19, 1969 Interview with Theodor W. Adorno. O’Connor, Brian. Ed. The Adorno Reader. New York: Blackwell Publishing, 2000. [AR]

Secondary Sources Arato, Andrew and Eike Gebhardt. The Essential Frankfurt School Reader. New York: Continuum, 1994. A collection of key essays from the members of the Frankfurt school, including works by Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Benjamin, among others. Bernstein, J.M. Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001. A sustained discussion of Adorno’s major philosophical and theoretical contributions. Eagleton, Terry. Walter Benjamin or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism. New York, Verso, 1994. An overview and discussion of Walter Benjamin aesthetic and philosophical works. Grout, Donald J. History of Western Music, Seventh Edition, New York: Norton, 2008. Huhn, Tom, Editor. The Cambridge Companion to Adorno. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004. A collection of accessible and informative essays covering Adorno’s philosophical, theoretical and musical oeuvre. Jarvis, Simon. Adorno: A Critical Introduction. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2007. A well-research and extremely learned discussion of Adorno’s aesthetic, dialectical, and social philosophies. Jay, Martin. Adorno. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984. An incisive and illuminating discussion of Adorno’s key works, including his biography. ——. The Dialectical Imagination. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996. An informative and accessible history of the beginnings of the Frankfurt school and its associated Institute for Social Research from the years 1923-1950. Müller-Doohm, Stefan. Adorno: A Biography. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. A detailed and comprehensive biography of Adorno that incorporates excellent discussions of his work.

About the Author Jennifer A. Rich is an Associate Professor in the Department of Writing Studies and Composition at Hofstra University. She offers courses in the rhetoric of feminism, the history of rhetoric, Women’s Studies and composition. She has published widely in the area of writing studies, rhetoric, critical theory, Shakespeare, and women’s studies. She is also the author of Critical Theory: an Introduction and Modern Feminist Theory in the Humanities Insights Series

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Humanities Insights Insights available at: http://www.humanities-ebooks.co.uk/ General Titles Critical Theory: An Introduction Modern Feminist Theory An Introduction to Rhetorical Terms

Genre FictionSightlines Octavia E Butler: Xenogenesis / Lilith’s Brood Reginal Hill: On Beulah’s Height Ian McDonald: Chaga / Evolution’s Store Walter Mosley: Devil in a Blue Dress Tamora Pierce: The Immortals Tamora Pierce: Protector of the Small

History Insights Oliver Cromwell The British Empire: Pomp, Power and Postcolonialism The Holocaust: Events, Motives, Legacy Lenin’s Revolution Methodism and Society The Risorgimento

Literature Insights Austen: Emma Conrad: The Secret Agent T S Eliot: ‘The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock’ and The Waste Land English Renaissance Drama: Theatre and Theatres in Shakespeare’s Time Faulkner: Go Down, Moses and Big Woods’ Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury Gaskell, Mary Barton Hardy: Tess of the Durbervilles Heller: Catch-22 Ibsen: The Doll’s House Hopkins: Selected Poems Hughes: New Selected Poems Larkin: Selected Poems Lawrence: Selected Short Stories Lawrence: Sons and Lovers Lawrence: Women in Love

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