Adorno's Theory of Philosophical and Aesthetic Truth 9780231542203

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Models of Experience
2. The Interpenetration of Concepts and Society
3. Negativism and Truth
4. Texture, Performativity, and Truth
5. Aesthetic Truth Content and Oblique Second Reflection
6. Beethoven, Proust, and Applying Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Adorno’s Theory of Philosophical and Aesthetic Truth

columbia themes in philosophy, social criticism, and the arts

columbia themes in philosophy, social criticism, and the arts Lydia Goehr and Gregg M. Horowitz, Editors advisory board Carolyn Abbate J. M. Bernstein Eve Blau T. J. Clark

Arthur C. Danto John Hyman Michael Kelly Paul Kottman

Columbia Themes in Philosophy, Social Criticism, and the Arts presents monographs, essay collections, and short books on philosophy and aesthetic theory. It aims to publish books that show the ability of the arts to stimulate critical reflection on modern and contemporary social, political, and cultural life. Art is not now, if it ever was, a realm of human activity independent of the complex realities of social organization and change, political authority and antagonism, cultural domination and resistance. The possibilities of critical thought embedded in the arts are most fruitfully expressed when addressed to readers across the various fields of social and humanistic inquiry. The idea of philosophy in the series title ought to be understood, therefore, to embrace forms of discussion that begin where mere academic expertise exhausts itself; where the rules of social, political, and cultural practice are both affirmed and challenged; and where new thinking takes place. The series does not privilege any particular art, nor does it ask for the arts to be mutually isolated. The series encourages writing from the many fields of thoughtful and critical inquiry.

list on page 247

ADORNO’S THEORY OF PHILOSOPHICAL AND AESTHETIC TRUTH

Owen Hulatt

Columbia University Press New York

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2016 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hulatt, Owen, author. Title: Adorno’s theory of philosophical and aesthetic truth / Owen Hulatt. Description: New York : Columbia University Press, 2016. | Series: Columbia themes in philosophy, social criticism, and the arts | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016006294 | ISBN 9780231177245 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780231542203 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Adorno, Theodor W., 1903–1969. | Truth. | Truth (Aesthetics) | Aesthetics. | Knowledge, Theory of. Classification: LCC B3199.A34 H844 2016 | DDC 121.092—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016006294

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 jacket design: Rebecca Lown

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments vii Introduction

ix

1. Models of Experience 1 2. The Interpenetration of Concepts and Society 3. Negativism and Truth

27

77

4. Texture, Performativity, and Truth

105

5. Aesthetic Truth Content and Oblique Second Reflection 135 6. Beethoven, Proust, and Applying Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory 189 Notes

209

Bibliography 233 Index 239

ACKNOWLED GMENTS

The ideas developed in this book are the product of many years of thought about not only Adorno, but also many related philosophers falling both within and without the “Continental” tradition. I would like to thank here the many people with whom I have shared discussions, mutual interests, and fruitful disagreements over these years, and from whom I have learned so much. I am very grateful to Brian O’Connor and Peter Lamarque for their detailed and sympathetic criticism on ideas about art and philosophy that have found expression in print both here and elsewhere, and also for their continual advice and encouragement. Brian and Peter are not only preeminent in their field, but also genuinely warm men I am very pleased to know. A great many of the ideas in this book were first discussed with James Clarke, and explored and sharpened through many exacting arguments, reading groups, and exegeses. I continue to be grateful for his insight. I must also give special thanks to Fabian Freyenhagen. In our correspondence we have discussed a great number of ideas and papers, and Fabian’s detailed, incisive, and constructive criticism—even and especially on those areas where we do not agree—has always redounded to the benefit of my thought and work. Both Fabian and Brian read over a complete draft of this book, and what clarity it has is at least partially

v iii

ac kn ow le d g m e n t s

owed to them. I also thank Matthias Rothe for his very helpful comments on an earlier draft of this book. I have also been very fortunate, more generally, to be able to discuss philosophy with my colleagues at York. The Department of Philosophy at the University of York has a strong tradition of detailed and clear engagement with the history of philosophy—a tradition in which I hope this book stands. I have benefited from discussing the history of philosophy with a great number of my colleagues in this vein, most especially Tom Baldwin, Mike Beaney (with whom I first read Husserl), and Tom Stoneham. I am very grateful to Lydia Goehr for her support and encouragement for my submitting a proposal to Columbia University Press, and for her guidance and counsel throughout the process. I also thank Gregg Horowitz, Christine Dunbar, and Wendy Lochner, for all of their guidance and forbearance in the course of my preparing this book for publication. Elements of chapters 4 and 5 draw on, and significantly rework and expand on, parts of my earlier paper “Critique Through Autonomy: Of Monads and Mediation in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory,” in Aesthetic and Artistic Autonomy, ed. Owen Hulatt (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 171–197. Brendan Harrington is a deeply talented philosopher and truly great friend whom I am proud to know. The pleasure of discussing philosophy is nothing measured against, in friendship, the experience of understanding and being understood. My parents, my sister, and my grandparents have all been integral to my life, in the love, upbringing, and values they have given me. I am very grateful to them, and am sure all our life together finds some reflection, however oblique, in this book. Finally, Lauren, my wife—to simply offer thanks seems too meager. I can only say that my life, let alone the things that occur in it, would lose its color, its savor, and its point without her. At time of writing, our daughter is a few months from being born. She has been restless from the first time we saw her, like her parents. I hope she has her mother’s goodness. We are both looking forward to our first meeting, and I dedicate this book to her.

INTRODUCTION

Art seems to speak to us. Anyone familiar with art will be familiar with the sensation that the artwork conveys something, and the feeling that what is conveyed is of significance. It gives us a desire to know—to “put our finger on”—just what it is the artwork has to say. An equally familiar experience is the ultimate futility of trying to give what the artwork conveys expression in our own words. We are invited, and ultimately rebuffed, by art. It refuses to enter into our language without remainder. One tempting response is to give the verdict that art merely seems to speak to us; it generates only a pretense of epistemic or cognitive value. Ultimately, one might be tempted to conclude, all the artwork has to offer is mere aesthetic stimulation. Perhaps one of the enduringly valuable features of Adorno’s work on art is his refusal of this temptation. Art really does speak to us, Adorno claims, but in a highly complex and unusual way. What it seeks to convey resists complete expression in our concepts, in our language—but this is because what it seeks to convey is a critique of and an attack on our concepts. Artworks are true—and their truth is aimed against the falsity of our way of thinking, and designed to elude capture by that way of thinking. On our common understandings of epistemology (the study of what it means for something to be true and how things come to known) and aesthetics (the study of artworks, their value, and how we react to that

x

introduction

value), these two fields of inquiry are entirely distinct. The kinds of value in play are entirely different. The pleasure we find in, for example, listening to Beethoven’s String Quartet no. 16 in F Major seems to stand outside the question of whether that pleasure (or, more strangely still, that artwork) is true. Conversely, the value we find in the truth of statements concerning the world does not have any clear necessary relation to aesthetic value. Epistemology and aesthetics are distinct areas of inquiry—and we indeed find that they both have their own terms, and their own criteria of success. What it is to be true is not what it is to be aesthetically pleasing. Given this, when I say that this book is an investigation into what Adorno understands truth to be, and how he understands truths to be produced, we might feel confident which of our two fields—epistemology and aesthetics, the study of knowledge and the study of art—this book should fall into. But this book is not only an investigation into epistemology; it is not even primarily an investigation into epistemology. It is an examination of Adorno’s work on both art and knowledge, on both what it is to be a true work of art and what it is to be a true work of philosophy. A full explanation of Adorno’s account of art is incomplete without a full explanation of his account of knowledge, and vice versa. The deeper we enter into the topic of truth in Adorno, the broader it also becomes. Truth is produced by the mind coming to an understanding of the world, and how it stands in relation to that world. And so, before we understand what it means for something to be true, we need to understand how the mind relates to the world. In other words, we must have a conception of reason. It is in looking at Adorno’s understanding of reason and rationality that we can begin to see how truth could be entwined both with advanced philosophy and with “authentic” artworks. Both reason and art, for Adorno, are historical—they are things that have come to be. Adorno finds the birth of reason and art in the distant past, close to the very beginning of human culture and society. They were both produced by the self-preserving cunning of a human organism faced with a terrifying world it desired to control. Adorno, in his investigation with Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment, found that reason was built on a refusal of the world. Reason rejects

introduction

xi

the particularity of objects—those qualities and properties unique to each object, and not found in any other—and engages the world only in terms of abstract universal qualities. We come to both think about and experience our world (and one another) in inflexible conceptual patterns. This allows us to better control them, to predict their behavior, and to feel that we have a complete knowledge of the world. Rather than relating to objects in their full particularity—in all the irreducibly particular qualities they hold out to us—we come to see them merely as tokens of types. Anything that resists this process, which concepts cannot straightforwardly subsume, becomes what Adorno calls “nonidentical” and concealed. “Nonidentity” resists the concept’s attempt to force it into abstract, preestablished patterns. Our openness to the world, to its ability to surprise us and to refuse to fall into the conceptual patterns we force on it, is substantially lost. This loss is found in our relations to objects, to nature, to ourselves, and to one another. Modern life grows abstract, controlled, and cold. The openness to the world, to objects in their full particularity, which once underpinned all of our experience and thought, becomes “fugitive.” Largely exiled from reason, the main place this openness comes to take refuge is in art. Truth is, ideally, knowledge of something external to us—of how the objects that our consciousness encounters are. But reason, for Adorno, is not primarily interested in how objects are. Reason is created in order to serve our self-preservation; and so it is primarily interested only in how objects can be controlled. And so the world as reason shows it to us is an appearance produced to facilitate control; and so we cannot trust reason alone to deliver true statements about the world and our relation to it. By being divorced from the impulses that took refuge in art, our reason increasingly moves away from proper contact with the world. We grow ever more adept at controlling our environment, and one another, and yet increasingly poor at knowing how they, and we, actually are. This kind of disconnection from the world, nature, and ourselves is not only an epistemic problem; it also means we are increasingly cut off from the needs and value of things, and increasingly cut off from knowledge of what is required for the true well-being of those things. Ironically, it is the artwork where our main impulse to be open to objects as they actually are is nurtured. But that impulse is frustrated

xii

introduction

in the artwork, too—artworks are radically different from philosophy, from conventional rationality. They are, constitutively, mere appearances. And so, while they can grasp and exhibit the objects external to them, they cannot directly manipulate, investigate, or articulate that knowledge, as reason can. An attempt to directly communicate critical knowledge would lead to the artwork’s ceasing to be art, into its collapsing into philosophy or science. For this reason, art is not straightforwardly superior to reason. Reason increasingly fails to be in contact with its object; the artwork maintains this contact but cannot directly communicate it. This shows us that reason and art, epistemology and aesthetics, are for Adorno deeply interrelated. They of course have a shared genealogy, as explored in Dialectic of Enlightenment. But they also form inverted pictures of each other’s strengths and weaknesses. Rationality allows us to form ever more complex ways of thinking about and investigating the world; but these innovations are coupled to a reason that dominates, rather than opens itself up to, particular objects. Art provides a refuge for openness to the particularity of objects; but, without directly engaging with the complex distortions of the rationality that underpins experience, the artwork has no clear way of articulating this knowledge to its audience. Given that reason and art are each strong where the other is weak, it is not surprising that we find Adorno consistently claiming that both rational inquiry and art, accomplished properly, share features from each other. For example, Adorno notoriously claims that the measure of an artwork’s value is its “authenticity.” The authentic artwork accomplishes knowledge of “nonidentity,” and also criticizes and expresses the true structure of modern society. Authentic art is not accomplished by nonrational openness to the world; rather, artworks take on rational features in order to criticize rationality. The rationality of artworks has as its aim opposition to empirical existence: The rational shaping of artworks effectively means their rigorous elaboration in-themselves. As a result they come into contrast with the world of the nature-dominating ratio, in which the aesthetic ratio originates, and become a work forthemselves. The opposition of artworks to domination is mimesis of

introduction

xiii

domination. They must assimilate themselves to the comportment of domination in order to produce something qualitatively distinct from the world of domination. Even the immanently polemical attitude of artworks against the status quo internalizes the principle that underlies the status quo.1 There is a lot of complexity in this quotation, and in the course of this book I hope to unravel many of the perhaps puzzling terms Adorno employs. (“Mimesis,” for example, is a complex and elusive term I go on to disambiguate.) But what we can see, first of all, is that for Adorno the artwork cannot be truly understood—and its value not truly responded to—unless we also have a developed understanding of both the artwork’s own rationality and the critical relationship it stands in to rationality outside of the artwork. This places a very high demand on us as appreciators of art—but it also shows that the boundary between aesthetics and epistemology is porous, for Adorno. It is this admixture of rationality in the artwork that allows it, on Adorno’s account, to become true. Art is itself a kind of knowledge; more than this, it is also a criticism of how we normally go about trying to gain knowledge. Just as the artwork and aesthetic response take on rationalized features in order to become eligible for being true, so too we find that reason, for Adorno, requires the addition of (broadly speaking) aesthetic elements. For Adorno, truth cannot be produced simply by following the structures of justification and entailment in rationality as we find it. This is because, as we have seen, reason as it currently stands is a controlling and world-refusing practice; it obscures, rather than fully divulges, the structure of the world. So a philosophy that was merely rational—which merely followed the rules of thought as we find them—would join in with this domination and occlusion of the world. This means that true philosophy must do more than follow the rules; it must bend and critique them in order to better get at the object of comprehension that has been distorted by them. If we have to break or critique the rules, then we also need a justification for doing so. There needs to be a difference between incompetence (mere failures to use concepts in an appropriate way) and authentic philosophy (a principled refusal to use concepts in the accepted way,

xiv

introduction

in order to successfully grasp the object). For Adorno, this justification comes not from reason as we find it, but from an openness to the object—a response to its particularity as we encounter it. This openness of response is made possible by “spontaneity,”2 of a kind related to that openness which, in the case of art, allows for a more truthful relationship to the world around us. This spontaneous relationship informs us that concepts do not exhaust the nature of either the world or the people in it. We become aware of the existence of nonidentity and the failure of our concepts to grasp it. This then leads us to need to accomplish something rather difficult. We must articulate in rational terms our experience and perception of the failure of rationality itself. In other words, we need to find some way to force reason into attacking itself and visibly displaying its own falsity. This leads Adorno to accentuate the formal and, as it were, aesthetic dimension of his own texts. The content of his texts becomes fused in an important way with their rhetorical form: “Dialectics— literally: language as the organon of thought—would mean to attempt a critical rescue of the rhetorical element, a mutual approximation of thing and expression, to the point where the difference fades. . . . In dialectics, contrary to popular opinion, the rhetorical element is on the side of content.”3 This tight relationship between form and content shows how, for Adorno, the practice of philosophy is not merely a matter of solving problems in our concepts as we find them, but is also a matter of producing a particular kind of experience in those who encounter it. Here again we see the boundary between art and aesthetic response (broadly understood) and philosophy being more porous than we might expect. A philosophical text’s being true is internally related to its having a fusion of its rhetorical form with its content, a feature more familiar from the philosophy of art. (Indeed Adorno’s claim above might bring to mind Cleanth Brooks’s work on the “Heresy of Paraphrase” in The Well-Wrought Urn.) Both art and reason require an admixture of features of the other in order to aspire to “authenticity” and to produce true knowledge. True knowledge for Adorno is deeply related to the “nonidentical”—to those objects of experience that reason occludes. The key task is to make the nonidentical comprehensible or visible to reason—and we have seen

introduction

xv

that art and philosophy accomplish this task in part by becoming more rationalized and more aesthetically constructed, respectively. “Nonidentity” is a deeply complex idea, about which many commentators disagree. What is certain is that nonidentity, by virtue of being something that concepts fail to subsume, is demonstrable proof that our way of thought is imperfect. It is proof that the world (of which we are a part) has qualities, needs, and value that our way of thinking misses out on and does violence to. If our way of thinking is wrong, so too might be our derivative ways of life. There are sources of value we increasingly neglect (and, indeed, Adorno saw the Holocaust as one example of a growing insensitivity to the value of human life itself). Coming to appreciate the existence of the nonidentical is a way of breaking through the illusory appearances generated by our concepts and coming to awareness of the harms our concepts make possible. In fixing the way we think, we might also fix the way we live. As Adorno makes clear, both art and philosophy share as their central feature a striving to make nonidentity clear to us. And, as we have seen, in order to accomplish this task both art and philosophy must borrow from each other. In this book, I will elucidate and clarify some of the strategies that the artwork and the work of philosophy make use of in order to allow them to grasp and exhibit truth. This will lead us into novel arguments and exegetical findings on a number of scores. We will excavate some of Adorno’s deeper arguments (or, where Adorno is found to be entirely silent or incorrect, we will construct some of these arguments for ourselves), which bring into view precisely why Adorno found concepts to be falsifying, what he understood conceptuality and experience to be, and how these two positions jointly set a problematic of great complexity for Adorno’s understanding of truth. In the course of these investigations, we will come to better understand Adorno’s account of philosophical texture (what he refers to as Gewebe) and what I will call the artwork’s aesthetico-logical processes of construction, and how these completely autonomous, blind processes of aesthetic and conceptual construction can become socially critical. These clarifications, and their entailments, will be of great value in coming to understand how some of Adorno’s more mysterious (or apparently contradictory) claims can fall out as comprehensible and

xvi

introduction

true. They will show that the artwork, and the way in which the artwork is constructed, is deeply tied to social and conceptual problems. On top of these investigations, we will finally come to an understanding of how Adorno understands experience of truth to be made possible by engagement with art or philosophy. We will find that there is a suitably unified account, in which the “performative” engagement of consciousness with the artwork, or the work of philosophy, will manipulate our use of concepts until they are forced to, in the course of this enactment, fail. This will give us a determinate and negative experience of the limitations of rationality, and solve the problem of communicating the falsity of rationality without having such communication falsified by rationality itself. This mechanism will be differentiated in the cases of art and philosophy; but it will also be sufficiently similar to be a unified account of the dependence of truth on performative engagement. This book does, I hope, provide a good many novelties and useful arguments in its approach to Adorno’s work on art, philosophy, and truth. But I understand the elaboration of his idea of performativity, and its role in the production of truth in art and philosophy, to be chief among this book’s contributions. (This idea of performance and performativity is a complex and novel one, with no clear answering term in English. This has forced me to borrow a term with some unhelpful preestablished connotations. Performativity, as I use the word, has no relevance to Austin’s or Butler’s use of the term or to performance studies.) It will bring us back to the idea that both art and philosophy—in their value, their truth, and the way in which they speak to us—borrow from each other, and are more deeply related than we perhaps suspect. The idea of performativity will help unlock just how it is that artworks speak to us, what it is they say, and how we might give it expression in our own words. For Adorno art, philosophy, truth, and nonidentity all form a kind of mutually interpenetrating group. Insofar as we hope to comprehend one of the four of these terms, we are always led into discussion and investigation of the others. In this introduction, I have hoped to perhaps sketch out some of the very broad contours of these intimate interrelationships. There are, of course, many issues of deep complexity that arise as we turn to examine these interrelations further—not least of these will be the need to clarify what Adorno means by some of the basic terms in play. (What does Adorno mean by “truth,” as found

introduction

xvii

in art and philosophy? What, exactly, is “nonidentity”?). I will turn to these matters in the book proper. But there is also an issue of rhetorical order in our investigation: If all of these four terms—“art,” “philosophy,” “truth,” “nonidentity”—are vital for the full comprehension of one another, where can we hope to start? For Adorno, of course, the answer was that one does not “start” at all, in the sense of trying to find some foundational claim or position on which to build the rest of one’s philosophical understanding. Adorno infamously used “parataxis,” in which each sentence was intended to bear as much weight as any other; and the numbered sections or chapters of his books could (strictly speaking) be read in any order. This lead to his distinctive and difficult writing style. It also allowed Adorno to make often startling and valuable transitions in his analyses of various philosophical positions and cultural phenomena, moving across disciplinary boundaries and putting apparently unrelated kinds of evidence in conversation. But these kinds of shifts (and the kind of prose that facilitated them) rely on a fairly determinate, though often implicit, set of ideas about what it means for something to be true, about how our concepts might relate to the social world we live in, about how artworks relate to those concepts and that social world, about what counts as evidence and what does not, and so on. In this book, it is these deeper questions I would like to uncover and examine. It is Adorno’s deeper position on these questions that can legitimate parataxis. As I am calling this deeper position into question, I feel justified in leaving Adorno’s rhetorical method to one side. But we are still left with the question of where to begin, nonetheless. Art, philosophy, truth, and nonidentity are all equally good starting points, and this book could be written from any one of them. As you will see, my chosen starting point is epistemology. One of Adorno’s most beguiling claims is that art is a form of knowledge. Art speaks to us; and for Adorno, it says something deeply significant— significant philosophically, morally, and socially. In order to make sense of the claim that art expresses knowledge—expresses knowledge of nonidentity, no less—I have found it important to first clarify what we mean by “knowledge,” for Adorno. What does it mean to know? Why are our concepts so faulty, in his view? How do artworks, and how can we, undo or expose this faultiness? And how does nonidentity play into

xviii

introduction

this picture, and what is it? In addressing these questions, we will gain a better grasp of Adorno’s general picture of concepts, of experience, and of the deep problems found in them that both art and philosophy will need to solve in order to make true knowledge possible. Working through this question—of Adorno’s theory of knowledge and truth—will turn out to be quite demanding. Chapter 1 will first elucidate the genealogy that Adorno gave of the emergence of concepts. This account of the generation of conceptuality will be deeply important for the rest of our work, giving us a better understanding of Adorno’s metaphilosophical account of what concepts are and how they operate, and also of what the nature of experience is, for Adorno. Both art and philosophy are, for Adorno, processes that attain truth by intervening in and manipulating the conceptual structure of our experience. Cashing out Adorno’s genealogy of concepts, then, will clarify just how our experience can and must be conceptually mediated, and will begin to offer clues about how we should understand Adorno’s claims about aesthetic and philosophical truth. Chapter 1 will also throw up a number of pressing philosophical problems. Adorno’s fragmentary treatment of these issues—of the emergence of conceptuality, of the role of society in determining how we conceptualize, how we think—leaves open a number of objections. It also leaves some spaces we will need to fill in for ourselves, in order to round out his account. Chapter 2 will be dedicated to addressing these issues, and giving us a better understanding of why truth is importantly bound up with social criticism and how the irrationality of our society is reciprocally reflected in, and reinforced by, the problems we find in our concepts and the developments we find in the arts. With these elucidations made, we should have a good grasp of what reason is, for Adorno, how precisely it is entwined with sociohistorical problems, and what obstacles stand in the way of true experience and conceptualization of our world and ourselves. This then gives us a good position from which to understand how art and philosophy overcome these obstacles and make experience of the true possible. Chapters 1 and 2, then, serve to set the account of experience, of mediation, and of conceptuality, with which both art and philosophy must engage. In chapter 3 we turn to see how, exactly, philosophy is held by Adorno to be able to overcome these obstacles. We begin by looking at Adorno’s

introduction

xix

unusual rhetorical method and his claim (quoted above) that rhetorical form becomes deeply entwined with the truth-value of philosophy. This importance of rhetorical form—which I term “texture” (after Adorno’s use of the term Gewebe)—is laid out and investigated here. While we find that Adorno’s philosophy texturally enacts the movement and failure of concepts in the course of trying to subsume and understand nonidentity, we will nonetheless see that we have not yet solved the problem of how faulty and distorting tools (concepts) can be used as a medium for the communication of the fact of their being so false and distorting. This leads us to chapter 4. In chapter 4, I argue that Adorno has a consistent emphasis on the need for the text as we find it to be complemented by a “performance” (Durchführung) in consciousness, for the truth expressed by that text to emerge. Through a complex set of exegeses and arguments, I show that Adorno understands nonidentity to be graspable only through our performative enactment, in consciousness, of the movement and failure of concepts that is found expressed in the texture of the philosophical text. It is only the full interaction of the performative subject with the properly textured philosophical object that delivers an experience in which nonidentity is made palpable and the falsity of our way of reasoning (and derivative way of life) is made apparent. Chapters 3 and 4, then, should give a new way into understanding Adorno’s account of truth, of conceptuality, of knowledge, and of performativity. This also serves to establish some of the important terminology and exposition that allow us to turn to the case of art. Adorno contends that art is a form of knowledge and an expression of the true. Now that we are confident in what Adorno understands knowledge, truth, and expression of the true to be, we can better understand his claim that art possesses and expresses truth. Chapter 5, the longest chapter of this book, works to show how what appear to be entirely epistemic and philosophical terms find clear use in understanding the artwork on Adorno’s account. Given that Adorno understands artworks to entirely “hermetically seal themselves off ” from both society and epistemic issues more generally, this does of course require considerable argument and close reading. This will center on Adorno’s account of “aesthetic material,” “aesthetic construction,” and how these hermetically sealed areas can nonetheless

xx

introduction

be influenced by society through the account of mediation developed in chapters 1 and 2. By the close of chapter 5, we will see that the artwork presents a kind of conceptually germane texture, just as the philosophical text does, which expresses the movement and failure of concepts. We will also find that it is the performative engagement of consciousness that allows for the artwork to generate a breakdown in the conceptual structure of the experience of the art appreciator. The resulting model of access to the true, as produced by performative engagement, will be found to be substantially unified with (if internally differentiated from) that found in philosophy. The key difference will be that the artwork accomplishes all of this indirectly, eschewing any direct intentional attempt to engage and criticize concepts. In examining this, we broach one of the most puzzling features of Adorno’s philosophy of art—his claim that artworks are “closed monads” that have no reference to the society external to them, but are nonetheless capable of knowing, critiquing, and expressing that society. In coming to an understanding of this position, we will develop a new understanding of Adorno’s account of artistic mimesis, artistic construction, and aesthetic analysis. Chapter 5’s theoretical investigation into the truth of art will often confine itself to meta-aesthetic questions of the status of the parts of an artwork, of how the construction of an artwork might be sensitive to determination by socioepistemic matters, and so on. In chapter 6, as a counterbalance to this, I will look at two examples of how artworks, in their full particularity, can be profitably read and interpreted using Adorno’s theory of aesthetic truth. I first look at work from Adorno’s Nachlass on Beethoven and his strange contention that Beethoven’s work is Hegelian in substance. This allows us to see how Adorno was able to convincingly put his general remarks about art and its truth into conversation with the particular features of genuine and demanding artworks. Following from this, I turn to look at Proust. I find Adorno’s work on Proust unsatisfactory, and so move to show myself—through some original interpretive work—how Proust’s great novel can be profitably read in an Adornian manner and how it can also elucidate, and be elucidated by, Adorno’s position.

Adorno’s Theory of Philosophical and Aesthetic Truth

1 Models of Experience

Adorno claims that art, “authentic” art, is true. This is a provocative enough claim for any philosopher to advance, and difficult enough for us to make sense of. But this is compounded in Adorno’s case by the fact that it is not immediately clear what precisely it means, for Adorno, for something to be true. Adorno’s epistemology—his account of what claims can be true and what there is to be known—is knotty and complex. It seems at least plausible that his claims about the truth of art are related to his understanding of what it means for things like assertions and philosophical systems to be true. (And our investigation in this book will show this to be so.) But until we have a firm grasp of that epistemology—of what exactly Adorno takes nonaesthetic truth to be—we will not be able to know what this relation is or whether Adorno is making a literal, analogical, or merely rhetorical claim. So, it seems that understanding Adorno’s claim that art is true requires us first to cash out and explain what he means by “truth”—and this requires us to inquire into his epistemology first. Any introductory gloss on Adorno’s epistemology will point out that Adorno has a “negative” account of truth—that he denies that the truth is positively expressible and rather confines himself to a negative project of uncovering and analyzing falsehoods, inconsistencies, antinomies, and aporiae. While I think this picture is not quite right, it serves as a broad sketch to begin with—Adorno holds, in the main, that

2

models of experience

concepts and objects are in fact in conflict. Our experience and thought are communicated through concepts. But these are, for reasons I will bring out in detail in this chapter, faulty tools; and so the world is communicated to us in experience and thought in a faulty fashion. Thought takes itself to exhaustively grasp the world, but in fact misconstrues it. We cannot, then, positively express the true—we must rather analyze our concepts and theories and demonstrate their falsity, by finding where they break down and fail. I say that this picture is not quite right, as not all of Adorno’s philosophy fits this model of complete negativism, broadly accurate though it is. For example, Adorno has a penchant for making what appear to be direct, positive statements of fact (the analyses of Minima Moralia are particularly significant in this regard). Still more significant is Adorno’s account of truth in philosophy and art. As it will turn out, these two spheres—the epistemic and the aesthetic—are not as divorced from each other as we might conventionally expect. Indeed, Adorno understands them to be characteristically aiming at the same thing—the “nonidentical.” Both “dialectical” philosophy and artworks1 are capable of instantiating this “nonidentical,” and doing so is internally related to their being true. This idea of the “nonidentical” is a notoriously difficult concept in Adorno’s work, and I will unpack and clarify it as we go. For now, we can note that Adorno defines nonidentity as something constitutively uncapturable by concepts—as begrifflos. “Nonidentity” is something that the concept is incapable of capturing and, for reasons that we will enter into shortly, this rebuff to conceptuality is held to be highly important by Adorno. We are told by Adorno that philosophical analysis should not merely remain negative and trace a “logic of disintegration”2 in the continual failure and breakdown in concepts. Rather, philosophy should try to somehow model nonrational experiences of this nonidentical. This modeling—by a conceptual practice of something constitutively nonconceptual—should be accomplished at least in part by philosophy’s use of rhetorical form.3 Likewise, we are told that artworks can express the truth through nonrational means, and in doing so can express the same truth-content as philosophical works.4 So we are not in an epistemic blank about Adorno’s idea of aesthetic and epistemic truth—in either case, we are told that it is a matter of capturing, or in some way

models of experience

3

exhibiting, “nonidentity.” And we can also see that some important points of commonality can be drawn between philosophy and art; in either case, the target is the same, namely, the nonidentical. We can also see that both philosophy and art borrow from each other to an extent—the content of philosophy acquires a dependence on rhetorical form, and the form of art is employed in order to express the same truth-content as philosophy. From this thumbnail sketch, what we can see in the first instance is that both art and philosophy seem to share an insurmountable task— to “capture” and make cognitively palpable something that is constitutively opposed to and uncapturable by concepts. Or, to use Adorno’s phrase, their task is to “identify the nonidentical.”5 As we will see, both art and philosophy are constitutively conceptual disciplines for Adorno. If their truth is internally related to capturing the nonidentical, and the nonidentical is constitutively nonconceptual, we must begin—if we want to understand how art and philosophy could be true—by trying to understand the parameters of the discussion. What, exactly, are concepts for Adorno? What does it mean to be “nonidentical,” or begrifflos? If we want to understand how art can be true—or even what “truth” in general means to Adorno—we must first work upward to this question by clarifying some of these basic ideas. We must begin, then, with Adorno’s theory of the concept, and inquire into just what concepts are for Adorno, and why it is that concepts prevent us from properly comprehending objects in the world. An investigation into the nature of the concept for Adorno will simultaneously be an investigation into the nature of experience. This is because, on the one hand, all experience for Adorno comes through concepts; concepts mould and model our experienced world. But, more than this, for Adorno concepts are contingently formed by reacting to the pragmatic structures that are bound up with that experience. As Cook notes in Adorno on Nature, Adorno does not conceive of concepts as atemporal features of human experience.6 Rather, Adorno understands concepts and the use of our reason as emerging out of pragmatic human practices. Concepts are not formed entirely autonomously within our heads, but rather, he argues, they are formed in negotiation with the pragmatic needs and situation of the person who employs them.

4

models of experience

This understanding of conceptuality has significant consequences for Adorno’s theory of truth in both art and philosophy. While Adorno gestures toward this conception of rationality consistently, it is given the clearest exposition in Dialectic of Enlightenment, written with Max Horkheimer. The aim of the Dialectic was to provide a genealogy of reason and conceptual thought that was capable of explaining the persistence of irrationality in what were apparently wholly rationalized forms of life. In providing this account, Adorno and Horkheimer revisited the genealogical origin of reason, and attempted to bring out how this origin served to determine the ongoing nature of concepts and conceptual employment. It is in examining this genealogy of reason that we can gain a better understanding of the account of concepts and conceptual behavior that underpins Adorno’s work.

Dialectic of Enlightenment— Kant and the Genealogy of Reason In this chapter I will clarify Adorno’s understanding of what concepts are, how concepts work, and what their relationship is to those objects they apply to. Much of the oddity and complexity of Adorno’s position on these matters can be helpfully brought out by contrasting his account with that of Kant. Construed roughly, Kant’s Transcendental Deduction argues that the conceptual (“categorial”) mediation of experience is absolutely necessary for the experience of finite beings. This necessity is predicated on certain features of theoretical reason—most saliently, the transcendental unity of apperception and the prerequisites for continuous experience. Kant recognizes that experience consists in discrete moments, and that each of these discrete moments are characteristically experienced as belonging to an “I.” In order to unify these discrete experiences (and discrete “I”s) as experiences of a temporally enduring I that can recognize itself across these discrete experiences, one must employ a judgment that is capable of synthetically unifying the common features of these discrete experiences.7 There is a finite set of forms of judgment (elaborated in the Metaphysical Deduction), each of which has a categorical (“conceptual”) counterpart. These categories serve to unify these discrete experiences in judgment, and thereby

models of experience

5

make possible a unified, continuous experience belonging to a single identified and consistent “I.”8 These forms of judgment, then, serve to “stitch” together discrete moments in accordance with the continuity that they find exhibited across them. Each form of judgment (category) addresses a distinct form of continuity (continuity in extension, number, and so on). If the categories were confronted with phenomena that could not be synthesized in judgment, could not be stitched together, the phenomena therefore could not be experienced; the experience of the phenomena could not be unified across time, and the unity of apperception that is constitutive for experience could not be achieved. Experience is therefore necessarily conceptually mediated, for Kant.9 From this rather rough-and-ready sketch of Kant’s position, we can draw two key points. First, conceptual mediation is unqualifiedly necessary for experience of an object—in the absence of conceptual mediation, experience itself is impossible. Second—and this point will become relevant at the beginning of the next chapter—Kant’s phenomenal ontology (his account of what objects there are to be experienced) is strictly limited by the transcendental conditions on one’s experiencing this ontology. To put this in a different way—to exist as phenomena, objects must be experiencable; accordingly, any phenomenal existent that does not or cannot conform to our categories therefore simply is not a phenomenal existent.10 So, we have from Kant a conceptualist account of experience. For Kant, conceptuality is necessary for the unification and continuity of experience; and nonconceptual experience of an object is impossible. From this conceptualism, we can draw two claims. (1) The application of concepts is necessary for continuous unified experience, and (2) experience of an object that is not conceptually mediated is impossible. We will see that in Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno mirrors the general structure of Kant’s account; however, while Adorno argues for claim (1), he will jettison claim (2). While Adorno argues that conceptuality is necessary for experience, he also accepts that experience not mediated by concepts is possible. In order to prevent this from being merely contradictory, Adorno is obliged to finesse the meaning of the terms employed. Adorno does this by finessing the meaning of the term “experience” in each of these two claims, as well as modifying the force of the necessity of the conceptuality of experience. To anticipate,

6

models of experience

Adorno does this by translating Kant’s demonstration out of the theoretical and into the pragmatic. Adorno holds the conceptuality of perception to be pragmatically rather than unqualifiedly necessary and, moreover, pragmatically motivated. Similarly, an experience that is not conceptually mediated is held to be possible by Adorno but pragmatically unsustainable. This difference from Kant will lead to Adorno’s positing concepts as not transcendentally necessary, or intrinsically truth-apt, but rather products of self-preservation. A particularly striking example of Adorno’s acceding to claim (1) can be found in Negative Dialectics, where Adorno asserts that “without concepts, that experience [individual experience] would lack continuity.”11 This is, of course, a sentence with very strong Kantian resonance, presumably by design.12 Given the strong Kantian tenor of this assertion, it comes as some surprise that Adorno does not equate the continuity of experience with its possibility and go on to accede to claim (2). Adorno does not directly assert his denial of (2), and does not directly assert that nonconceptual experience is possible. In order to see his denial of (2), we will need to enter into Dialectic of Enlightenment’s outline of the nature and genesis of conceptuality.

Concepts and the “Cry of Terror” We find in Dialectic of Enlightenment an overdetermined, and at points undisciplined, attempt to give a philosophical, anthropological, and sociological account of the emergence of reason. As we will see, the history of reason Adorno gives is likely intended to be both real (modeling broadly some actual historical events) and ideal (modeling relations of priority and causation between concepts and ideas); likewise, it has both phylo- and ontogenetic elements. This will become important in chapter 2. Adorno’s account begins with the claim that conceptuality originated in a primal experience of terror, caused by mankind’s inability to comprehend its immediate surroundings. The terror is caused not by an illusion, but by “the real preponderance of nature in the weak psyches of primitive people.”13 At the outset of this account, then, there is opposed a set of natural properties and processes and an individual whose “weak psyche” is not set up to be able to withstand interaction

models of experience

7

with this complexity. This overbearing complexity, which the natural world presents to the primitive individual, creates a “noonday panic fear in which nature appeared as all-powerful.”14 There are clear parallels between the account that Adorno and Horkheimer offer here and the one given by James Frazer in The Golden Bough. (Frazer is referenced explicitly in Philosophy of New Music, Adorno’s monograph on music, which was explicitly conceived by Adorno to serve as a “detailed excursus to Dialectic of Enlightenment.”)15 Frazer understood primitive fear to be rooted not in delusion, but in an incapability to distinguish between physical processes and processes guided by intentionality.16 Nature appears threatening and “all-powerful” as in its complexity it appears as a threatening being outside of the control of the primitive consciousness. Accordingly, prehistoric religious behavior is understood by Frazer to be not mere irrationality, but rather an early stage in the maturation of rationality itself.17 Adorno and Horkheimer’s account in Dialectic of Enlightenment parallels this approach very closely, understanding primitive religious behavior to be importantly continuous with the rational structures that determine modern rationality.18 Unlike Frazer, however, Adorno and Horkheimer place this account in a more explicitly philosophical register, claiming that this terror of nature derives from inadequacy in the conceptual structure of experience. This idea—that primal fear derives from a lack of conceptual sophistication rather than simple emotional distress—can be firmed up by looking at Adorno and Horkheimer’s account of what sufficed to address and remove this terror. The terror that Adorno and Horkheimer pick out is allayed through an increase in the sophistication of the conceptual tools with which the primitive consciousness is able to interact with nature. The terror is overcome by the primitive’s beginning to fix “the transcendence of the unknown in relation to the known.”19 As the use of the term “transcendence” signifies, the terror of the encountered unknown is here deriving from the encountered natural world’s ability to transcend the epistemological categories (and, hence, control) of the primitive consciousness confronted with it. This then opens the question of how this “transcendence” can come to be “fixed.” If a collection of natural events and processes manifests a threatening epistemological excess, what is required is a means of reducing this excess. The experienced world must become subsumable,

8

models of experience

understood as governed by comprehensible laws, types, and processes. Adorno takes the view that this procedure, of reducing a menacing efflorescence of radically particular, uncontrollable objects and events to tokens of a limited number of kinds and to the operation of a limited set of laws, is not achieved through investigation and induction. In other words, we did not create the kind of conceptual knowledge that allowed us to manipulate the world by discovering that the world exhibited regular features and then basing our concepts on that discovery. Rather, the individual imposes these concepts and general classes onto the field of his or her experience, and forces the phenomena into regular congruence with them. For Adorno, concepts originate in a basic desire to control and limit the phenomena we experience: Of course, mental representation is only an instrument. In thought, human beings distance themselves from nature in order to arrange it in such a way that it can be mastered. Like the material tool which, as a thing, is held fast as that thing in different situations and thereby separates the world, as something chaotic, multiple and disparate, from that which is known, single and identical, so the concept is the idea-tool which fits into things at the very point from which one can hold of them.20 For Kant, concepts were autonomous, by which I mean they followed their own internal principles, and their behavior was explained only in terms of these principles. For Adorno, by contrast, concepts are “tools” that work in service of an extraconceptual project—namely, the project of mastering and manipulating the individual’s environment. The form and use of concepts are heteronomously and instrumentally determined by the needs of self-preservation. Adorno assumes that, because of this, the application of concepts will also entail a reduction in the phenomenal presentation of the objects they are applied to. Concepts reduce the “chaotic, multiple” particularity of the world to the “known, single, and identical.” This allows the consciousness to get an instrumental purchase on the world and to manipulate it. This theory of concepts as “idea-tools” that instrumentally reduce the complexity of phenomenal experience dovetails with Adorno’s assertion that the threatening “transcendence” of natural processes became “fixed.” The

models of experience

9

concept, for Adorno, is precisely that which serves to “fix” the kind of chaotic particularity in nature that appeared to be threateningly beyond the control of the primitive consciousness. Adorno seems to be folding into his account the thought that concepts are at least loosely arbitrary in their operation.21 Concepts, which serve to make continuous experience possible and also determine the content of that experience, are primarily functionally linked to the service of pragmatic demands. As a consequence, concepts do not necessarily model the external world accurately; indeed, they gain a great deal of their use precisely through the obfuscation of the immediately presented phenomena (as was seen in the problem of the threatening “transcendence” of natural processes that concepts “fix”). And so concepts, on Adorno’s view, distort their objects, due to their being joined to a primarily pragmatic, rather than truth-apt, way of interacting with the world. It’s not at all clear why Adorno feels entitled to this view. It is not necessary that epistemological processes driven and determined by pragmatic demands should distort their objects. Indeed, if Adorno understands concepts to be in service of self-preservation, we should expect a high level of accuracy in the modeling of one’s environment, just insofar as the true nature of one’s environment is highly germane to the likely success of one’s attempt to control it and preserve one’s self. And so Adorno’s account looks inconsistent, here—Adorno takes it that this genealogy of concepts is at least partially, if not wholly, responsible for the inaccessibility of the world as it is in itself. But this doesn’t seem to follow from the claims he has advanced. Remember that both philosophy and art are designed to intervene into our form of experience, to countermand the falseness of our concepts and deliver an instantiation of the nonidentical. If we are to understand this, we had better first understand why concepts falsify their objects, in order to understand how philosophy and art can undo this falsification. And so before we move further, we need to consider again why Adorno’s account of concepts leads, in his view, to the falsification of objects. What Adorno has claimed so far is that some concepts are formed not in response to autonomous demands or unqualified necessity— as in Kant—but rather in response to instrumental demands (the

10

models of experience

demands of self-preservation). But it’s not yet clear which concepts are, and which are not, supposed to be understood as formed in response to these pragmatic needs. We might still understand some basic categories (like, for example, quantity and relation) to be autonomous and unqualifiedly necessary. We could then hold that the instrumental, selfpreserving categories are generated at a higher level, forming naturalkind terms, for example. In other words, we might still want to preserve a broadly Kantian distinction between transcendental concepts (those concepts necessary for any experience whatsoever) and empirical concepts (those typing concepts formed in response to natural kinds and the like). Indeed, this distinction looks appealing, as some kinds of concept intuitively seem more important in the constitution of experience than others. In addition, Adorno’s account just seems to apply mostly to empirical concepts—the invention of typing concepts in order to type and order kinds of objects. And so we might think that Adorno has merely given a reasonably interesting anthropological account of how more specific concepts emerged out of a desire to control one’s environment, but an account that has left the more fundamental or transcendental concepts untouched. However, if we understand Adorno as maintaining this distinction between empirical and transcendental concepts, the claim that the state prior to these concepts being generated was accompanied by “terror” seems very odd. (Encountering new sets and kinds of particulars and having to apply new typing concepts rarely engenders fear; zoos would presumably be less popular if this were the case.) What we will find is that Adorno in fact rejects the distinction between transcendental and empirical concepts altogether; to see this, and to better demonstrate Adorno’s rejection of Kant’s claim (2), one needs to further explore the account of conceptuality given in Dialectic of Enlightenment. This will also shed light on why concepts ineluctably falsify their objects.

Conceptuality and Language Intriguingly, and in a fashion that requires some unpacking, Adorno further develops his account of the nature and emergence of concepts by merging it with an account of the emergence and nature of language. Characteristically this account, which has a number of

models of experience

11

reasonably complex ramifications and claims, is developed by Adorno and Horkheimer in the space of a single paragraph. This paragraph comes early in their account of the epistemological niceties concealed in the religious behavior of “preanimistic” primitive societies. Taking the stance that this preanimistic religious behavior (which solicits control of natural processes through worship and sacrifice) is not irrational, but rather the earliest instance of rationality attempting to control and cognize the world, Adorno and Horkheimer claim that this first step is simultaneously constituted by the emergence of language and concepts: The split between animate and inanimate, the assigning of demons and deities to certain specific places, arises from [the] pre-animism [inculcated by man’s original terror]. Even the division of subject and object is prefigured in it. If the tree is addressed no longer as simply a tree but as evidence of something else, a location of mana, language expresses the contradiction that it is at the same time itself and something other than itself, identical and not identical. Through the deity speech is transformed from tautology into language. The concept, usually defined as the unity of the features of what it subsumes, was rather, from the first, a product of dialectical thinking, in which each thing is what it is only by becoming what it is not. This was the primal form of the objectifying definition, in which concept and thing became separate, the same definition which was already far advanced in the Homeric epic and trips over its own excesses in modern positive science. But this dialectic remains powerless as long as it emerges from the cry of terror, which is the doubling, the mere tautology of terror itself.22 Three claims are made here, which, once played out, have important consequences for Adorno’s theory of truth in both philosophy and art. These are (A) the claim that “the concept and thing became separate,” (B) the claim that the original terror of nature occasions the transition from “tautology into language,” and (C) the claim that the concept is inherently dialectical, as in it “each thing is what it is only by becoming what it is not.” Ordered in this fashion, these three claims

12

models of experience

build on one another, and I shall consider them in series. (The rhetorical order of the above extract inverts the logical order, as is common in Adorno’s work.) Adorno’s assertion (A), that the concept and thing “became separate,” entails that this relation (of separation) between concept and thing is something that came to be. It follows from this that if they have become separated, they must at a given point have been united. The term “thing” is here intended to refer to a specific, particular object—in the original text, Adorno employs the singular term Sache, rather than the term Sachen, which would denote general collections of things.23 So, we are being told that each concept was united with a single particular. Adorno also points out that this unity of concept and particular thing obtains prior to the emergence of what he calls the “objectifying definition.”24 By implication, then, this stage is also prior to the emergence of the general terms and classes that are required in order to construct definitions. This opens the question of what Adorno means when he says that concepts and particulars are unified. Usually, we might take concepts and particulars to be “unified” when particulars satisfy the definition of a generalizable concept and hence “fall under” it. But this, of course, is not a real and complete unity—the concept remains abstract and universalizable, and can range over and apply to any number of objects that satisfy its definition. This kind of “unity” cannot be what Adorno has in mind, as the generalizable concepts required to construct abstract definitions are not available. For a concept to be united to a particular, while having no general or abstract classes or concepts to employ, it must in some sense merge with or reiterate the full specificity of that particular. This unity of concept and thing would appear to be, at this stage, the unity of each specific object with a concept of its very own, with no concepts ranging over more than one object. This reading is confirmed, and lent greater detail, by considering Adorno’s claim (B). Claim (B) asserted that the emergence of the concept was accompanied by a transition “from tautology to language.” Adorno links these phenomena; he implies that the unity of the concept and thing forced the use of tautology, and prevented the emergence of a fully featured language: “Through the deity [that is, through the “preanimism” of magical behavior] speech is transformed from

models of experience

13

tautology into language. . . . This was the primal form of the objectifying definition, in which concept and thing became separate.25 This claim immediately strikes one as odd, in that Adorno is holding tautology and language to be opposed phenomena. Tautologies, together with contradictions, are conventionally held to be limiting cases of language use, rather than external to, or somehow opposed to, language itself. Tautologies are internal to language itself, and so the question of “transform[ing] from tautology into language” seems to not make sense. This serves to tip us off to the fact that Adorno is using the term “tautology” in a heterodox way. To get at what he might mean, we need to consider why Adorno runs together the oppositions “tautology/language” and “unity of concept with particular/separation of concept and thing.” A conceptual manifold devoid of general classes and populated entirely by concepts united to particulars would only be able to generate utterances that expressed nothing but those particulars. For any available concept, its meaning would be wholly constituted by the simple specificity of a single object; and the expression of that concept would amount only to a primitive kind of naming. To get at why a language of this kind can be meaningfully termed “tautological” and why this tautological nature is opposed to conventional language, we need to see that this “tautological” language has been stripped of the kind of modal and hermeneutic structure that we need in order to construct informative, defeasible, and truth-apt claims. If all of our concepts are united to particulars, with no general concepts available for use, we cannot meaningfully describe and investigate the world. Let’s work through a quick example, making use of one of Adorno’s “tautological” concepts. Let us take the term “wylt” to be a concept united with a particular, referring (only and wholly) to a particular object. A (Barbara) syllogism has the form: All a are x n is an a n is an x The term “wylt” cannot be conjoined to any other term in this syllogism, just because there is no concept with any generality to allow such

14

models of experience

a sentence to be constructed. Let us substitute “wylt” for n. Required for the successful completion of the syllogism will be the insertion of two genera in place of a and x. However, our conceptual tool kit will at this point be wholly constituted by concepts of the same type as “wylt.” Which is to say, every concept will be completely exhausted by one specific object’s properties, and could not be generalized to apply to other objects; we would have no type/token distinctions to make use of. With the complete unification of concepts and particulars, we could not perform syllogisms (and so arrive at new knowledge about objects as exhibiting types or general properties), as the general concepts required to fill a and x are unavailable. The base issue here is that any language which is informative and which has a truth value which goes beyond the necessarily true (tautological) or necessarily false (contradictory) relies upon the employment of the contrast between the universal and particular. Universals are not unified with only one single particular, but can range over them; and so we can use them to articulate and inform us about the properties of particulars. In an epistemological stage before the formation of universals, proper informative language use (as opposed to the tautological employment of “concepts” that we just examined) seems impossible. To use a “tautological concept,” in Adorno’s sense, is only to name the particular unified to it. In this sense, the unity of a concept and thing is not true conceptuality at all. These tautological concepts cannot range over multiple objects, nor can they judgmentally synthesize discrete moments into continuous experience. (I will enter into this in more detail below.) It is now clear why Adorno terms this epistemological/linguistic stage “tautology”—the utterance (or thought) of the concept serves to exhaust any possible assertion about its object. The tautological concept is necessarily true, as it only functions to name (and perhaps evoke) the specific experienced object to which it is unified. Language, as a tool for informative expression, has need of modal complexity, a distinction between particular and universal, and an ability to make defeasible, truth-apt claims. As Adorno’s “tautological” concepts are unified with particulars, the language they make possible has none of these features. We can now see why Adorno opposes this “tautology” to language—it has none of the necessary features of a conventional, explanatory language.

models of experience

15

Directly after Adorno makes claim (B) (concerning the transition from tautology to language), he goes on to make claim (C): “The concept, usually defined as the unity of the features of what it subsumes, was rather, from the first, a product of dialectical thinking, in which each thing is what it is only by becoming what it is not.”26 He follows this with the important claim that “dialectical” concepts constitute “the primal form of objectifying definition,” which allowed man to “[emerge] from the cry of terror.”27 This account of the concept is clearly intended to inform us about the epistemological tool that allowed for the emergence from the threatening “transcendence” of natural processes. Given that claim (C) follows directly from claim (B) in the text, this account is also, by implication, intended to demonstrate how the “tautological” stage was overcome. (This implies that the cry of terror and the tautological stage detailed in claim (B) are related, an implication I will follow up below.) Adorno says that the dialectical concept entails that “each thing is what it is only by becoming what it is not.” It is worth noting here that we are being told that an alteration in the conceptual mediation of experience amounts to an alteration of the nature of the “thing” that the concept applies to. For Adorno, alteration in the conceptual mediation of experience is thereby an alteration of the phenomena, the thing as experienced. Adorno conceives of concepts a having a dual role, both being applicable theoretically, in the formation of accounts of phenomena, and continually active passively, in mediating the objects of experience. This will go on to be important. As claim (C) is unpacked further, the tightly wound dialectical irony, in which objects are only comprehended by virtue of quite literally becoming what they are not, is developed by means of this theory of the dual role of the concept. This is best approached through first reconsidering the earlier problem of the unity of the tautological concept and thing. In this unity, the object’s specific particularity was experienced in full; as the mediating concept united itself to the full specificity of the object, the mediating concept thereby (one can infer) constituted the experience of that object such that no feature of the object’s specificity was occluded. Ironically, this conceptually adequate relation between subject and object, while allowing for full experience of the object in its specificity, destroyed any chance of an epistemologically adequate

16

models of experience

relationship between the subject and object. In the absence of general classes, knowledge of objects could not be formed, beyond mere acquaintance with a particular (this acquaintance not being differentiated into knowledge of articulated properties and the like). While the thing remained “as it is” at this stage, this same fact precluded knowledge of the object “as it is,” as the conceptual manifold was devoid of the structures required to make inductions and defeasible statements. This particular point in Adorno’s account of the genesis of conceptuality in the Dialectic can, in my view, be profitably read against Hegel’s account of the dialectical failure of sense-certainty in the Phenomenology. Sense-certainty attempts to grasp and to discursively think (or “say,” as Hegel often puts it) the “knowledge of the immediate or of what simply is.”28 This attempt to directly apprehend the universal is, as Hegel points out, dependent on “apprehending [the object . . . without] trying to comprehend it.”29 Any attempt to manipulate the object cognitively would interpose obfuscation between the subject and object (or so sense-certainty thinks, at this point); and so sensecertainty attempts to know objects in their full immediacy, without use of mediating universals. Just as in Adorno’s unity of concept and object, the intention is laudable—to cognitively access the object in its purest immediacy. However, just as Adorno claims that tautology devolves into language in the course of trying to know the object, so too does Hegel posit a similar epistemological shift brought about by the intrinsic features necessary for language and discursive thought to apprehend the object. Sense-certainty proves an unsustainable form of epistemological and experiential relation to the world just because the object cannot be grasped without the intercession of universals: “If they actually wanted to say ‘this’ bit of paper which they mean, if they wanted to say it, then this is impossible, because the sensuous This that is meant cannot be reached by language, which belongs to consciousness.”30 Just as the unmediated relationship between concept and object is for Adorno defeated by pragmatic considerations (Adorno seeing the pragmatic project of control as internal to cognition), Hegel sees sense-certainty as defeated by its incapability to fulfill its purely epistemological function: “In the actual attempt to say [the particular], it would therefore crumble away; those who started to describe it would not be able to complete the description.”31 As soon

models of experience

17

as a “description” of the particular is begun, consciousness is forced to acknowledge that, regardless of its approach, universals must be used—and so the pure immediacy of the “This,” which sense-certainty tries to express, “crumble[s] away.” Aside from Adorno’s folding of heteronomous pragmatic concerns into cognition itself, the most important difference between Hegel and Adorno is the ultimate inference each philosopher makes from the impossibility of directly expressing the particular. Adorno sees the particular as beyond the concept, and hence as possessing a utopian character—being beyond conceptual subsumption, it thereby provides a glimpse of the contingency and revisability of the fundamental concepts that govern experience and the possibility of the circumvention of the falsity of the conceptual whole. Whereas, for Hegel, the particular that “is called the unutterable is nothing else than the untrue, the irrational, what is merely meant.”32 Adorno asserts that due to the inability of the united concept and object to fall into an adequate epistemological relationship, the concept and thing “became separated.” As his association of the separation of concept and thing with the introduction of “objective definitions” makes clear, this separation is constituted by the introduction of concepts that abstract away from their particulars. Which is to say, concepts now work in the conventional, nontautological fashion as universals. With this separation, one instantly acquires a web of universal, general concepts, none of which has intrinsic reference to a specific object. On the previous “tautological” model, one “knew” an object simply by virtue of uniting a specific concept with a specific object. The concept existed only as a token that signified a specific object. While the concept was reduced to a mere token in this way, the object, by contrast, was experienced in its full specificity. The separation of concept and thing reverses this state of affairs. The object is now (theoretically and experientially, due to Adorno’s account of the dual role of concepts) reduced to a mere token. The object becomes a token that signifies the various agreements and disagreements with various universals (“is a dog,” “is loyal,” and so on), and is only known and communicable insofar as we comprehend these agreements and divergences. The concept, by contrast, takes on a much richer content—it now has its own semantic content that outstrips the

18

models of experience

objects to which it applies. We can define and articulate our concepts; and these definitions are given in general terms. The concept no longer derives its sense from a specific object; rather, it holds its semantic content in abstraction from any actually existing object, and takes on a life and content of its own. This is what explains Adorno’s claim that “each thing is only by becoming what it is not.” The tautological form of conceptuality was unable to articulate to consciousness the full complexity of object’s constitution. Having no general concepts, we could not identify properties, nor could we articulate the genuine commonality displayed by multiple objects that fell under the same general class or exhibited the same properties. While the object was not distorted by the concept, then, it was nonetheless not fully realized experientially or theoretically, due to the absence of universals. With the separation of the concept and the thing, the object is only experienced insofar as it is mediated by, and in agreement with, universals that abstract away from the specificity of objects. The object as experienced “becomes what it is not” because the full specificity of the object is neglected; the object is now cognized only in terms of its agreement or divergence from universals. At the same time, however, the object can become “what it is” through becoming articulable and comprehensible through this extensive web of universals. It is these universals that allow proper, informative knowledge of objects to be possible. This is what compels Adorno to call the concept “dialectical from the very first”—the concept is compelled, in order to achieve greater epistemological adequacy, to dialectically reverse its attempt to know the object. Beginning by trying to fully unify concepts and objects, consciousness is instead forced to separate them; rather than capturing the full specificity of objects through unifying concepts to them, universals are formed that break with objects, but allow knowledge of them to be articulated. The form of conceptuality that Adorno in claim (C) says results from this dialectic is reasonably conventional—it is a theory of concepts as abstract universals, through which particulars are comprehended. It is however notable that these concepts do not, as conventionally thought, consist in “the unity of the features of what [the concept] subsumes,”33 according to Adorno. This is not logically entailed by

models of experience

19

the theory of conceptuality that has just been offered. If general concepts are universals that are abstracted from particulars, it would seem likely, in fact, that concepts would consist in the “unity of the features” of those particulars they range over. Adorno’s denial of this is predicated on his belief that concepts do not in fact model particulars perfectly, but rather distort and occlude those objects they apply to. Some of the grounds for this belief have been elaborated above, in that the conceptual mediation of perception no longer allows for the full specificity of an object to be mediated to the subject. However, he has a more developed position concerning the tendency of concepts to occlude objects, which will be developed in more detail in the following chapter. For now, we can note that concepts are, on Adorno’s understanding, formed according to the demands of self-preservation, rather than any intrinsic concern for accurately modeling the world. As such, while the object is known insofar as it is held to satisfy given universals, the universals it satisfies may not be grounded in any actual properties of the object in itself. They may be gross distortions of the object, these distortions deriving from the functional demands of the agent’s self-preservation. For Adorno, in separating the concept from the object, we are not necessarily releasing the object into a web of concepts, all of which have genuine reference in the world. Rather, we are placing the object into a mediating web of concepts, some of which will be delusive, with no actual ontological foundation in the subsumed objects themselves. Claims (A), (B), and (C) were intended to show how the primitive consciousness was capable of escaping the “original terror” of the “transcendence” of the unknown. As the generation of conceptual universals has been identified by Adorno as that which “fixed” the “transcendence of the unknown,” it is clear that this original terror was generated by the absence of conceptual mediation, by a kind of experience not governed by universals. In elaborating these claims, Adorno has rejected Kant’s claim (2), that experience not mediated by concepts is impossible. Rather, Adorno has taken the view that experience of objects was originally not conceptually mediated. This vastly complicates the apparent Kantian tenor of his position, and throws into question the nature of the necessity that Adorno is allotting to the conceptuality of experience.

20

models of experience

The “Cry of Terror” and Pragmatic Necessity Adorno clearly assents to Kant’s claim (1). However, given that Adorno sees experience without conceptual mediation as possible, it is also clear that he does not see conceptual mediation as straightforwardly transcendentally necessary, which opens the question of what kind of necessity is in play. We can clarify this by looking again at the original nonconceptual experience, which Adorno associated with the primal “cry of terror.” As we have seen, Adorno associates the beginning of the use of universals with a “cry of terror.” This is more than a mere rhetorical device; he is gesturing toward a transcendental account of conceptual mediation that is grounded in pragmatic, rather than theoretical, requirements, namely, the pragmatic requirement of self-preservation.34 The “cry of terror,” which is occasioned by the unity of the concept and thing, derives from the complete inability of the agent to exercise control over his or her environment and to obtain the satisfaction of his or her needs. Adorno, like Kant, holds that conceptual mediation is necessary for continuous experience. The tautological stage (in which concept and thing were united) was devoid of abstract universals. Concepts derived the entirety of their sense from their token role as significations of the particulars they were united to. Hence, these concepts were incapable of providing the epistemological structures necessary to effect judgments capable of unifying discrete experiences. They contained no generalizable criteria that could be grounds for a unifying judgment. This being the case, experience at this stage was discontinuous. I want to suggest that it is just this discontinuity that occasioned the “cry of terror.” The idea that concepts are occasioned by a cry of terror, this cry of terror itself being a reaction against discontinuous, unmediated experience, can be firmed up by revisiting Adorno’s account of the unity of concept and thing. As has been said, for Adorno concepts have a dual role—being used both theoretically and in determining the character of the subject’s experience. Given that the unity of the concept and thing precludes the generation of any universals or abstract concepts, the agent’s experience would accordingly not contain experiences of universalizable properties, classes, or types. While Adorno does claim

models of experience

21

that this represents a “unity” of concept and thing, the effect of this “unity” means that experience cannot be conceptually mediated or structured, as these unified “concepts” are incapable of extending judgments across discrete objects or even—as I will show below—discrete experiences of the same object. Rather, objects would have appeared as radically particular, completely unanalyzable into properties, parts, or relations. This implies that experience across time of these objects could not be synthesized into a continuous form. For particulars, which are experienced without differentiated properties, to be experienced continuously across time (that is, for discrete temporal experiences of such particulars to be subject to a synthesizing judgment), the conceptual distinction between an object and its experienced aspect must be available. If a change in presented aspect is not taken to be a change in presented object, the subject must possess a conception of the object that is not exhausted by its exhibited aspects. This returns us to Adorno’s assertion that concepts must be dialectical in order to make knowledge possible; the concept of the experienced object must not be fully identical to that experienced object, but rather must outstrip it. It is remotely possible that Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations formed an influence on this subterranean aspect of the account propounded in Dialectic of Enlightenment.35 Here’s a classic Husserlian statement of the kind of problem that confronts Adorno: Looking straightforwardly, we have perhaps the one unchanging shape or color; in the reflective attitude, we have its manners of appearance (orientational, perspectival, and so forth), following one another in continuous sequence. Further-more, each of these manners of appearance (for example: the shadowing forth [Abschattung] of the shape or color) is itself an exhibition of [Darstellung von] the shape, the color, or whatever the feature is that appears in it. Thus each passing cogito intends its cogitatum, not with an undifferentiated blankness, but as a cogito with a describable structure of multiplicities . . . which, by virtue of its essential nature, pertains to just this identical cogitatum.36 Husserl appreciates that the object, despite presenting a multiplicity of aspects, is nonetheless phenomenally experienced as a unity, an enduring

22

models of experience

single, stable object. Husserl explains the appearance of unity in this multiplicity by positing experienced multiplicity as structured by underlying structures of synthetic judgment. The key is the continual action of protention; experiences of all enduring objects are accompanied by a protentive anticipation of the “horizon” of possible changes that this object can undergo; those changes that take place internal to this anticipated horizon allow for the continuous identification of an enduring object through the alteration of its presented aspect.37 (Retention also plays a central role; retention retains the prior presented aspects of the object together with their protentional horizons, allowing for the retrospective identification of the present moment as being within the protentional horizon of the prior moment, and so the identification of this present moment and its prior as being of the same object.) For Adorno, it is perhaps possible that such a conception of the object (with its distinction between the apparent object and the aspects of the object that are concealed) could be sustainable without appeal to the universals that are ex hypothesi unavailable at this “tautological” stage. The concept that is united to the particular could, in a Husserlian fashion, have an implicit horizon of possibilities, which the particular’s change over time would fall within. There is, at this point, the pressing question of whether such a horizon could be populated with possibilities without the use of universals; it is difficult to formulate possibilities (and enumerate the similarity criteria that pick them out as possibilities pertaining to the same thing) without the use of concepts that are not united to particulars. There are perhaps arguments available in either direction on this point. In Dialectic of Enlightenment there is textual evidence that some version of this issue has occurred to its authors, and prompted them to decide their response: “The cry of terror called forth by the unfamiliar becomes its name. . . . The doubling of nature into appearance and essence, effect and force . . . springs from human fear.”38 We have seen that the “cry of terror” and “human fear” refer to the discontinuous form of experience that the primitive consciousness, with its unity of concept and thing, is subject to. It is because and out of this discontinuity that consciousness acquires some fundamental dichotomies, which cause experience to become “doubled.” The

models of experience

23

distinction between “appearance and essence . . . [and] effect and force” is generated. Given that these dichotomies are created—they “spring from” the fear that the discontinuous experience caused by tautological concepts generated—we may draw the conclusion that they were not present at the initial, tautological stage of experience. From this we can infer that the unity of concept and thing was not accompanied by a distinction between substance and accident, or a distinction between cause and effect (“effect and force”). Both of these distinctions seem to be functional prerequisites for a distinction between objects and appearances. Without these notions, experiencing the world as causally governed (and hence experiencing changes as explicable with regard to one’s agency, physical position, and the like) is also impossible. Since these basic conceptual dichotomies were unavailable, it would seem impossible for primitive consciousness to individuate particulars across time at the tautological stage. The upshot of this is that, before the emergence of the dialectical concept, consciousness lived in a world entirely without an ontology of persistent objects. The primitive consciousness was not equipped with the epistemological structures required to differentiate between changes in apparent properties and changes in objects. Consciousness could not synthesize discrete experiences as experiences of the same object, as it was unable to distinguish between changes in appearance and changes in object. This lends further sense to Adorno’s claim that natural processes were experienced as “transcenden[t]” and as in need of being “fixed.” Given the epistemological helplessness of the primitive consciousness, natural causality must have occurred as an entirely incomprehensible whirl of radically particular and nonpersistent objects, which was entirely opposed to the incipient rationality with which the primitive consciousness attempted to cognize it.39 This in turn throws light on Adorno’s identification of this experience of full discontinuity with a “cry of terror.” Consciousness was confronted by an experiential field wholly devoid of fixed points and fixed objects with which to orient itself. The subject was entirely vulnerable and at the mercy of incomprehensible processes that likely presented themselves as driven by incomprehensible patterns of intention. The “cry of terror,” then, is driven by the incompatibility between the subject’s epistemological

24

models of experience

structures and the subject’s pragmatic requirement for safety, autonomy, and material essentials. This in turn sheds light on why Adorno holds conceptuality and the conceptual mediation of experience to be necessary. The acausal, discontinuous form of experience that the primitive consciousness underwent was not transcendentally unsustainable. There are no reasons why the primitive consciousness could not remain arrested at that stage— experience remains possible, even if it is both discontinuous and bereft of a persistent ontology. It would seem that the discontinuous experiential stage is pragmatically unsustainable. The subject is unavoidably thrust into the project of identifying and manipulating regularities in his or her environment by virtue of the intrinsic pragmatic requirements for a creature of his or her type, being a creature with organic needs (food, water, and the like). These needs are pressing, and cannot be satisfied without the comprehension, control, and manipulation of one’s environment. These needs force the agent into the project of attempting to control his or her environment, which he or she can only achieve through subsuming particulars under universals.40 The necessity of the conceptual mediation of experience, then, comes not from its being a transcendental condition of the possibility of any experience whatsoever, but from its being a transcendental condition of the possibility of the subject’s project of self-preservation. This pragmatic entanglement of concepts with self-preserving ends reappears in an increasingly explicit form across Adorno’s oeuvre. For example, in Negative Dialectics, Adorno’s last major work published during his lifetime, we have the strident assertion, “In truth, all concepts, even the philosophical ones, refer to nonconceptualities, because concepts on their part are moments of the reality that requires their formation, primarily for the control of nature.”41 This assertion is useful, on the one hand, because it clears away some worries one might have about identifying assertions made in an early collaborative work (with Horkheimer) with the position Adorno held in his mature, noncollaborative work. On the other hand, this assertion also serves to make explicit some of the problematic features of Adorno’s broader use of the account contained in the Dialectic. The account in the Dialectic, couched as it is in explicitly historical-cum-genealogical language, often appears as a kind of phylogenetic account. Adorno and

models of experience

25

Horkheimer take us through the distant origination of rational faculties, using historical texts like the Odyssey (in an often problematic fashion) to provide something on the order of proof. These historical, phylogenetic facts (about the distant origins of conceptual rationality, about the entanglement of early concepts with the desire for self-preservation) are implicitly held both in the Dialectic42 and across Adorno’s own later work to provide explanations of the nature of contemporary concepts and conceptual employment and the problematics internal to modern rationality. The account in the Dialectic (both in its explicit form and in the implicit account that I have brought out in this chapter) gives broadly compelling reasons to think that some initial set of concepts originated from a pragmatic crisis, and were originally constructed in order to satisfy some set of pragmatic demands (more broadly, the desire for self-preservation). However, stretching the account to have explanatory force when applied to all concepts (as Adorno does in the quote above) seems to exceed the warrant obtained by the argument gleaned from the Dialectic, which strictly applies to basic categories like appearance/essence and cause/effect. Indeed, it seems to entangle Adorno in a genetic fallacy of the first order. This is a problem that will occupy a great deal of the next chapter. Beyond the intrinsic interest in Adorno’s claim that conceptuality proper is bound up with the demands of self-preservation, we can note that his argument has problematized the medium in which the relationship between the subject and object is realized. The conceptual structure that allows for the continuous identification of particulars, as well as the manipulation and control of those particulars, constitutes the content of the experience of those particulars. However, these conceptual structures are not internally constructed with a drive toward the accurate modeling of their objects. Rather, they have been generated from a pragmatic crisis, and are oriented only so as to continue to hold off such pragmatic problems. Objects are cognitively accessed, then, through concepts whose aim is self-preservation, rather than truth. This holds open the possibility that the demands of self-preservation and truth may diverge, and hence the subject’s experience may occlude the genuine nature of the object. This possibility is indeed realized, as I will demonstrate in the next chapter, and this has significant

26

models of experience

consequences both for Adorno’s theory of conceptuality and for our understanding of how the nonidentical can hope to be realized by means of these concepts in both art and philosophy. At the close of this chapter, we have derived from Adorno a model of experience. The relationship between subjects and objects in experience is complex, indirect, and fraught with the potential for error. Both art and philosophy will realize their potential for truth, I will argue, by intervening in experience—in manipulating and correcting the conceptual structures that govern our experience. But, of course, the truth of art and philosophy is not merely about concepts; it is about society, history, ethics, and more besides. The structures and problems we find in our concepts are, for Adorno, intimately related to the structures and problems we find in our social lives. In the next chapter, I will clear up some problems raised in this chapter, and then move to unpack and explain how Adorno can take concepts to reflect society, despite their often having no intention of doing so and no apparent connection to sociohistorical processes or concerns. This will prepare the ground for understanding why features of artworks can, for Adorno, be said to be sociohistorically critical, and why philosophical problems are never merely philosophical problems, in his view.

2 The Interpenetration of Concepts and Society

In chapter 1 we sought to clarify what Adorno understood concepts to be. We found that concepts, for Adorno, were “idea-tools,” and their use was necessary due to our pragmatic commitment to self-preservation and the control of our environment. With this account in hand, we can now proceed to better understand why concepts, on Adorno’s view, stand between the world and us, and distort and obfuscate the truth. We will then have further finessed our model of what experience is, for Adorno, and why the structure of that experience prevents us from easily accessing truth. What we will find is that the tendency of concepts to obscure the world—to cause us to make epistemic and ethical errors in dealing with the world and indeed ourselves—will be importantly bound up with the way our society is. Indeed, we will find that the specific errors concepts exhibit are at the same time caused by and evidence of social problems, in Adorno’s view. It is absolutely crucial that we make sense of this. Art’s and philosophy’s being true is internally related, for Adorno, to their taking up a critical stance toward society. And this critical stance, as we will see, is often (in the case of art, is always) indirect, achieved through manipulation and criticism of concepts, experience, and forms of thought. So we must move to clarify and understand the interrelation between conceptual and social content, if we are to understand not only how art and philosophy can be true at all—we need a theory of concepts to have a theory of truth—but

28

the interpenetration of concepts and so ciet y

also how this truth can be somehow bound up with society as we find it. With these clarifications in hand, we can then turn to consider just what truth might be for Adorno, and more importantly how philosophy and art might hope to attain it. As we have seen, Adorno believed that the conceptual mediation of experience was pragmatically necessary, rather than unqualifiedly necessary. Concepts were held to be working in service of heteronomous, pragmatic projects (self-preservation and its derivative projects), rather than in service of an autonomous drive toward truth. Given that, for Adorno, concepts mediate experience with a view to addressing the demands of self-preservation with which the subject is faced, this does open the possibility that the concept might mediate the object incompletely or in a distorted form. All that is required is the possibility that the object might have certain properties or potentials that are not germane or are harmful to the subject’s project of selfpreservation. In such a case, the object would be communicated to the experience of the consciousness only insofar as it was pragmatically necessary; the other properties of the object would not be picked up or made manifest in experience. Adorno takes it that this possibility does in fact exist, and that it is realized in the present day. Concepts remain driven by self-preservation, and their self-preserving activities obscure the genuine constitution of objects. This is Adorno’s position, and there is no shortage of problems with it. Not least of these is Adorno’s confidence that a historical account of the origin of basic conceptual distinctions (appearance and essence, cause and effect, and so on) gives us warrant for making claims about the contemporary use of complex concepts. Even if it were true that concepts were originally formed out of self-preserving projects, why should we think that this says anything informative about concepts today, especially given that many concepts appear to have little to no relationship to our self-preservation? These problems are important, and considering them allows us to see that Adorno’s account has enough flexibility to account for them (though we will have to do some reconstructive work on his behalf). All this, however, presupposes that the fundamental move of the Dialectic—positing concepts as offshoots of pragmatic requirements—is cogent. But there is good reason to think that the account we delivered

the interpenetration of concepts and so ciet y

29

in chapter 1 is not cogent, due to its apparent clash with one other core commitment to be found in both Adorno’s aesthetics and his philosophy more generally. This other “core commitment” that causes such trouble is a presupposition that stands at the base of the entirety of Adorno’s work. Adorno relies on the idea that his analyses of phenomena belonging to various domains—including the philosophical, sociological, and aesthetic—draw out problems and criticisms that have universal validity. By this I mean he takes it for granted that they come out as true and binding on all members of society, regardless of their position, culture, or class. (This universal validity is relative to our sociohistorical location—Adorno accepts that conceptual problems change over time, as we will see. This universal validity obtains until sufficient changes in society or history occur that generate new conceptual problematics.) Examples of this are not hard to find. For example, in Minima Moralia, we have the bullish assertion that a capacity for readily taking aesthetic enjoyment in one’s environment shows “resignation [of the] critical faculties and of the interpreting imagination inseparable from them.”1 This putative quirk of the aesthetic faculty is not held to be a local feature of aesthetic experience specific to Adorno’s milieu, or even his country; it is rather asserted as a fact that obtains for all subjects. While Minima Moralia is often written with an eye to psychoanalytic issues, and so could be said to draw its confidence in the universality of its assertions from some fundamental psychoanalytic set of facts, the same cannot be said of, for example, Negative Dialectics. In Negative Dialectics, Adorno frequently analyses problems in the application of concepts. These problems are not merely specific to the philosophy in which they are found, but rather flag up problems that he thinks holds externally to the concept, universally, for all subjects in our time who wish to use this concept. As an example of this, we can look to Adorno’s analysis of Kant’s conception of freedom. Adorno picks out a familiar difficulty with Kant’s conception of freedom, namely, that this freedom is incompatible with the phenomenal realm (as Kant himself concedes), and yet freedom cannot be allotted to the noumenal realm simpliciter without that conception of freedom losing its relevance to the subject: “To warrant freedom to empirical human beings as if their will were demonstrably free even in theoretical philosophy, in the philosophy of

30

the interpenetration of concepts and so ciet y

nature—this takes an immense effort on Kant’s part; for if the moral law were downright incommensurable to those people, there would be no point to the moral philosophy.”2 This antinomy represents, in Adorno’s view, a suppressed strain in Kant’s philosophy. If freedom, the basis of autonomy and Kant’s moral law, is placed entirely in the noumenal realm only, then it ceases to have clear application to the phenomenal realm and becomes “incommensurable.” The moral law ceases to be practical reason, in Kant’s sense, as it cannot govern and intercede into the phenomenal realm, where moral law must be exercised. Kant, of course, is aware of this problem, and seeks to solve it by reintroducing freedom as a kind of compulsion. We are compelled to act “under the idea of freedom,”3 this compulsion, in Kant’s view, nonetheless amounting to genuine freedom. It amounts to freedom, in Kant’s view, as the laws that this compulsion effects are in parallel with those that a will “declared free also in itself ” would set for itself.4 In Adorno’s view this “turns [freedom] into a paradox; it comes to be incorporated in the causality of the phenomenal world that is incompatible with the Kantian idea of freedom.”5 The concept of autonomy becomes internally contradictory. We are compelled to assert the existence of autonomy in order to hold on to moral law and moral accountability. However, examination of the phenomenal realm (governed as it is, for Kant, by causal chains) demonstrates that this autonomy is an unsustainable ideal; there are strong determining factors that prevent the exercise of true autonomy. Yet again, we cannot simply comply with a deterministic model of agency—that which is best about human life (justice, morality) demands that we resist the reduction of agency to the determining relations of the phenomenal realm. As a result, Kant’s conception of autonomy is at an impasse, and his proposed solution is not internally coherent, but rather paradoxical. This analysis of Kant, however, is not intended by Adorno to simply model some problems in Kant’s philosophy that happen to hold. On the contrary, he understands this incoherence to testify to the strength of Kant’s philosophy, and its capacity to model philosophical problems that hold with universal validity: [His] magnificent innocence  .  .  . makes even his para-logisms superior to all sophistication.  .  .  . The paradoxical character of

the interpenetration of concepts and so ciet y

31

Kant’s doctrine of freedom strictly corresponds to its location in reality.  .  .  . By way of identification, philosophy and society are interrelated in philosophy’s inmost core. . . . The antithesis of freedom and thought is no more removable by thinking than it is removable for thinking.6 The paralogism that Kant’s theory of freedom entails is not merely, on Adorno’s view, a problem internal to Kant’s specific conception of freedom. The problem that Kant identifies corresponds, Adorno asserts, to “reality.” (This is the “metalogical” aspect of this philosophical problem.)7 And, correlatively, Kant’s problems with the proper conception and understanding of freedom and autonomy are not specific to him, but are rather an intrinsic feature of our thought about these issues now. The “antithesis” Kant identifies, then, is not “removable for thinking.” This analysis of Kant raises some concerns that will become germane. (What precisely does Adorno mean when he says “philosophy and society are interrelated” in philosophy’s “core”? How can he justify this?) For now, the important aspect of Adorno’s treatment of Kant is that specific philosophies are being mined in order to deliver analyses of concepts that hold universally, for all thinkers. By the conclusion of Adorno’s treatment of Kant, we are left in no doubt that the identified difficulty in reconciling freedom with the apparent determinations that the subject undergoes is meant to be an objective problem in the application of the concept. As such, Adorno is relying on the idea that concepts have, objectively, internal problems that now show up in the course of their application, regardless of who is putting the concept to use.8 Accordingly, Adorno is here giving an analysis of a conceptual problematic that has universal scope; it is not limited to Kant himself, or to Kant’s contemporaries, but rather is held to be a feature of the application of this concept, for all users of this concept. It is this kind of analysis, which terminates in universal-scope assertions about the employment and status of concepts, that stands in tension with the account of conceptuality given in Dialectic of Enlightenment. The account given in the Dialectic grounds the concepts applied, and the manner in which those concepts are applied, in the demands of self-preservation germane to the individual. We do not as yet have any reason to think that these self-preserving demands will be qualitatively

32

the interpenetration of concepts and so ciet y

identical across all individuals—what I must do to survive at this moment is plausibly different from that which an Alaskan survivalist must do. Accordingly, Adorno’s confidence both that all subjects will be equipped with the same concepts and that these concepts will be related in the same fashion is puzzling. There seems to be the clear possibility either that different subjects will acquire different concepts (since, unlike Kant, Adorno does not have a Metaphysical Deduction that can serve to limit the possible forms of judgment that can serve as concepts to mediate experience, and since there is also reason to think that Adorno has a more promiscuous account of what can serve as a category in the Kantian sense, as I will show), or that a subject may be in possession of the same set of concepts, but with the relations between these concepts generating alternative problematics to those traced in Adorno’s analyses. In short, then, there seems to be a justificatory shortfall. Adorno is confident that concepts, and the problematics internal to those concepts, obtain universally at given times.9 Adorno’s theory of the concept (as elaborated in the last chapter) seems to stand in tension with this assumption; indeed, given the account in Dialectic, we should expect divergences in the concepts generated, just due to the divergences in the pragmatic structures in which individuals have to exercise their self-preserving drives. Here is the central issue: Adorno’s account of concepts formed from and in the requirements of self-preservation implies a kind of conceptual relativism; it implies that concepts might differ in structure and relationships if the pragmatic structures in play differ across individuals. (If, counterfactually, a pragmatic environment required radically different concepts to be understood and manipulated—suppose it exhibited radically different causal and temporal ordering—then per Adorno’s account we would expect radically different concepts to be formed in response.) Why should we not think that more fine-grained differences than this could also be possible in response to more fine-grained differences in pragmatic context? However, this relativism about concept formation does not seem to cohere with the universal validity Adorno presupposes his analyses have—that they hold as true without qualification, for all reasoners within the same sociohistorical context. Addressing this issue will be a surprisingly complex task—Adorno relies on a number of kinds of universal validity in his work that I

the interpenetration of concepts and so ciet y

33

should like to keep separate, as each requires a different kind of justification. The first of these kinds is his reliance on the idea that all subjects will be possessed of an identical set of concepts. For convenience, I will term this a conceptual set. There is the further oddity that, while Adorno seems to think that conceptual sets are fairly robust and persist for long periods of intellectual history, the problems internal to that set are generated by metalogical influences and often change, without there being any change in the set itself. That being the case, conceptual set a at time t1 may have a flawless, internally consistent account of the relation between freedom and causality, whereas conceptual set a at time t2 may have acquired internal inconsistencies in the relation between those concepts.10 The relationships between concepts, and the mutually antagonistic, contradictory character these relationships can take on, are understood by Adorno to be distinct from the concepts themselves, and to be sociohistorically determined. The existence of a conceptual set, together with its specific internal conceptual problematic, I will call a conceptual array.

The Universality of Conceptual Employment The more fundamental kind of universality that Adorno makes use of, which I will address first, is the universality of conceptual employment. Subtending Adorno’s use of universal conceptual sets and conceptual arrays is his presumption that concept use and, correlatively, all concepts themselves are determined by the desire for self-preservation. The account given in support of this in Dialectic of Enlightenment was certainly cogent, if unusual, but nonetheless appears to be linked to a historically specific event—namely, some original “cry of terror” undergone in the distant past. It is not clear why this historical event should have any explanatory value when describing contemporary concept use. It does not help matters that Adorno and Horkheimer phrase their account as applying to “primitive man,”11 but then nonetheless extend this account across all conceptual thought up to the present day. The manner in which they extend this account is quite troubling. For example, “The primitive experiences [the] supernatural.  .  .  . The cry of terror called forth by the unfamiliar becomes its name. It fixes the

34

the interpenetration of concepts and so ciet y

transcendence of the unknown in relation to the known, permanently linking horror to holiness. The doubling of nature into appearance and essence  .  .  . springs from human fear.”12 In referring to the relationship between horror and holiness, the authors are here referring to their thesis of the continuity of contemporary thought and science with primitive religion. In either case, they claim, the incomprehensible features of experience that cannot be captured and synthesized by concepts are rejected in favor of a rational consistency that excludes these experiential features.13 Science shares with primitive religion a horrified rejection of those features of experience that cannot be captured by the consistent application of universals. In the quotation above, Adorno explains this link between primitive religious behavior and modern thought by claiming that the historical event that occasioned primitive religious behavior “permanently” linked reason to this intolerance of unsystematizable phenomena. This seems to be a genetic fallacy. The phylogenetic register of Adorno’s account makes it very difficult to take seriously and, notwithstanding the force of several of the historical analyses made elsewhere in Dialectic of Enlightenment and other works, casts considerable doubt on the sustainability of Adorno’s approach. However, it is possible to rework this aspect of Adorno’s account into a more plausible ontogenetic, sociologically grounded position by means of following some of the implications of Adorno’s various commitments. Although the Dialectic presents its argument in such a way that historical events appear to be phylogenetically fixing features of rationality, there is in fact much more support for understanding Adorno’s account in another way. Instead of seeing features of modern thought as caused by long-past historical events, we can see them as drawn from present-day features of consciousness that importantly re-create certain features, processes, and problems that also arose in primitive consciousness. In other words, we can understand the argument as ontogenetic, tracing intrinsic patterns of rational development and formation in consciousness. (Correlatively, we will therefore also see the Dialectic as substantially proposing an ideal rather than a real history of the generation of thought.) The support for such a reading can be found in thinking again about what the account in the Dialectic purports to show. The Dialectic bases

the interpenetration of concepts and so ciet y

35

its account on the thought that the primitive consciousness was devoid of “dialectical” concepts (that is, devoid of universals capable of judgmentally unifying discrete experiences of the same object). As such, conceptuality (in the conventional sense) is clearly not innate, as far as Adorno is concerned. If this is the case, then clearly no putative historical event is capable of making such concepts innate. As such, the initial problem that Dialectic of Enlightenment picks out (the terrifying discontinuity of experience that occasions the generation of universals) should be a fixed feature in the beginning of each subject’s life. The “primitive consciousness” ceases to refer to a historically fixed human being and instead refers to an early, undifferentiated form of consciousness present in the personal history of each human life. In common with a fairly widespread fault with Dialectic of Enlightenment, the occasional crudity in argumentative elaboration presses the reader into speculatively attempting to go beyond the text and restructure the assertions made. This property of Adorno’s work in general, that it demands genuine philosophical work from its reader, has often (rightly) been understood an essential feature of Adorno’s philosophical practice. However, in the case of the Dialectic we often encounter not the kind of unity of rhetoric and argument (of the kind found in Negative Dialectics, and which I shall further explain in chapter 3), but rather a breakdown in the transmission of philosophical content to the rhetorical aspect of the work. (This kind of breakdown is again found in the “Paralipomena” section, which possesses neither the epigrammatic strength of Minima Moralia’s fragments, nor the deceptively meandering long-form arguments of Negative Dialectics or Aesthetic Theory.) This general thought, that the Dialectic is rhetorically imperfect at points, is reinforced by the fact that my reading of the Dialectic’s account as ontogenetic rather than phylogenetic is directly supported by the text itself in apparent contradiction with the phylogenetic claims it advances elsewhere. In favor of my claim that the initial encounter of primitive consciousness with transcendent, nonconceptual nature is repeated for every individual, rather than only occurring once in some distant historical past, we find the following claim: “Humanity had to inflict terrible injuries on itself before the self—the identical, purpose-directed, masculine character of human beings—was created, and something of this process is repeated in every childhood.”14 “The

36

the interpenetration of concepts and so ciet y

identical, purpose-directed” form of consciousness is made possible only by the introduction of universalizable concepts. It is intriguing that at this point we are informed that the generation of these concepts is not merely epistemologically harmful (insofar as objects are concealed, even as these universals begin to mediate them), but in fact causes “terrible injuries.” In an example of the good use of rhetoric in the Dialectic, this glancing reference informs the reader of a number of things, namely, that the generation of conceptuality is understood to be not only the opening of an epistemological problem (in the simultaneous disclosure and concealment of objects) but also the beginning of a moral degeneration. Adorno is tightly linking together the employment of universals and moral forms of injury. This is a fixed feature of Adorno’s work (Minima Moralia is almost nothing but the elaboration of this theme) and by far the most problematic.15 For the present, it suffices to note that this epistemological-cum-moral injury is seen both as present at the beginning of “humanity” (phylogenetic) and as “repeated in every childhood” (ontogenetic). This means that the “primitive consciousness” does not describe a distant historical period, but rather the initial stage that all consciousness goes through. If this is true, then we can say that some basic set of concepts obtains universally, for every consciousness. Each primitive consciousness will be in an identical epistemological position, undergoing discontinuous experience, and we can take it that there is a determinate, limited set of concepts that must be applied in order to lend continuity to experience (as the “cry of terror” demands). This basic set of concepts (which probably maps onto the set of forms of judgment given by Kant in the Metaphysical Deduction) will therefore be generated by all consciousnesses universally, due to the universal drive for self-preservation, and the necessary role of these basic concepts in making continuous experience possible. This serves to start to do away with the genetic fallacy in Dialectic of Enlightenment. We can say that each consciousness will share a basic conceptual set, and that this basic conceptual set is related to and constituted by self-preservation, just due to the common features all consciousness initially shares. However, this does not stave off the genetic fallacy for long. Even with our ontogenetic account in tow, we can still have worries about how to explain Adorno’s conviction that higher-level concepts (like

the interpenetration of concepts and so ciet y

37

cultural concepts, for example) continue to be determined by and responsive to self-preservation. How do we explain this? Regardless of whether we appeal to the phylogenetic (historical) or ontogenetic (developmental) pictures, a genetic fallacy would occur. If Adorno intended to deliver a reductive account of conceptuality, in which concepts were entirely determined by and reflective of the needs of self-preservation, this problem would disappear. Taking a psychological tack (perhaps in line with his frequent recourse to Freud), Adorno could posit concepts as essentially heteronomous, having no determining autonomy of their own. Concepts would then become mere epiphenomena, being entirely formed—in both their constitution and their employment—by the demands of self-preservation. Although such an account would be cogent, Adorno refuses it. Rather than seeing concepts as purely autonomous, or purely heteronomously determined, Adorno opts for an intermediate, “dialectical” position. While concepts assuredly spring from and are partly determined by self-preservation (and so do not have the absolute autonomy they pretend to), they nonetheless have some autonomy. This autonomy is found in the concept’s intrinsic abstraction. By virtue of being abstract, abstracting from both their objects and the drives that created them, concepts are capable of outstripping both those drives and objects, and thereby set in place modes of thought that are not merely instinctive, but rather rational. Concepts disclose the possibility of freedom just because they are not reducible to the impulses that constitute them.16 To clarify: concepts originate in a self-preserving act of abstraction, in which abstract concepts are created and applied to discontinuous experience in order to lend it continuity. Although abstraction originates in self-preservation, in its application it increasingly leads cognition into practices governed by their own abstract logic, rather than governed by the self-preserving impulses that originally occasioned abstraction. As Adorno sees concepts as determined both by their autonomy and by the heteronomous determinations that help bring about that autonomy, a reductive reading of concepts is not available. So, given that concepts have at least some autonomy, we are entitled to inquire into why self-preservation persists in determining the concept: What prevents the partial autonomy of the concept becoming absolute? To

38

th e in te rpe n et rat i o n o f c o n c e p t s a n d so ciet y

solve this problem, we need to return again to the Kantian distinction between transcendental and empirical concepts. It is perfectly possible to lend continuity to one’s experience solely through the application of basic dichotomies (cause/effect, appearance/ essence, and so on). Typing concepts—like those that pick out natural kinds—would then come later, and would serve to further finesse our comprehension of our environment. Just this, roughly, would be a distinction between transcendental and empirical concepts, between concepts that serve as the foundation of continuous experience, and those subsequent concepts that add further epistemic detail to that experience. Transcendental concepts would be primary, and typing concepts tertiary. Adorno, however, reverses this order, and also refuses to put in place a limited, basic set of Kantian transcendental categories that would be capable of lending continuity to experience. Adorno locates the generation of the kind of fundamental distinctions Kant would understand as involving transcendental concepts (distinctions between “appearance and essence,” “effect and force”)17 as following from, and driven by, the generation of a language equipped with typing concepts capable of articulating the commonality of types of objects. For Adorno, typing concepts are primary, both in mediating experience and in making knowledge possible. It is the fear of the specific object, and the drive to comprehend it, that motivates the formation of categorial distinctions for Adorno. As such, for Adorno typing concepts are primary, in facilitating experience of particulars—the more abstract conceptual categories appear to be built on the epistemic practices that typing concepts make possible. This difference between Kant and Adorno—the former’s separating the transcendental from the empirical concepts, and the latter’s apparent collapse of the distinction between the two—can be understood by returning to the difference in transcendental motivation in each case. A Kantian cognizer’s motivation is to create an optimally structured epistemological viewpoint that is capable of providing phenomenal knowledge. This being the case, the formation of the categories is the chief transcendental task, upon which can be based the lesser project of forming epistemological concepts of natural kinds. By contrast, the motivation of the Adornian consciousness is, above all, terror of the particular. The chief project of the Adornian consciousness is the rapid

the interpenetration of concepts and so ciet y

39

reduction of the radical particularity of objects to recognizable regularities. The mediation of experience is therefore produced by all the concepts that are germane to the experienced particular at any given instant; while this will of course include the familiar conceptual distinctions from Kant, the chief role is allotted to the typing concepts that are capable of mediating the experience of particulars such that they are reduced to tokens of types. An object that is not “predigested” by the universal—mediated so as to appear identical to its governing concept—appears as the terrifying alterity against which concepts were generated as a bulwark: “The individual has no experience, nor any socalled empirical material, that the universal has not pre-digested and supplied.”18 The “so-called” is perhaps suggestive. For Adorno, there is no true empirical material, as there is, by contrast, for Kant. Phenomenal experience for Kant receives its preliminary manipulation by the categorial manifold; this prevents the noumena from being knowable, but nonetheless does not beyond this distort the nature of empirical experience. The phenomenal existents, such as they are, are directly knowable. For Adorno, by contrast, there is no such transparently available empirical experience—the phenomena are distorted by their “cover concepts,” which serve to prevent full empirical knowledge of their genuine phenomenal constitution.19 As Adorno does not have a fixed, basic set of concepts that are responsible for the passive mediation of experience, but rather allots the mediation of experience to all concepts equally, this raises the question of what determining influence ensures that the higher-level concepts, generated not by a “cry of terror” but rather in more relaxed circumstances by the mature consciousness, are employed in line with the demands of self-preservation. It is at this reasonably critical juncture that, perhaps surprisingly, Adorno’s metaphilosophical position on the nature of concepts gets bolstered by his empirical work. As is perhaps recognized more readily by the sociological establishment than the philosophical, Adorno’s engagement with empirical sociology was sophisticated and redounded to the strength of his philosophical account. While not as extensive as, say, his writings on music, Adorno nonetheless wrote reasonably prolifically on sociological themes. The fundamental principle of Adorno’s sociology, which he sought to confirm and elaborate in all of his

40

the interpenetration of concepts and so ciet y

sociological work, concerned social structure. Adorno understood societies to be wholes; these wholes were not constituted by liberal consensus, or by negotiating the demands of various specific groups and subcultures. On the contrary, the social whole (along with its attendant structures, relations of production, and so on) is held by Adorno to be explanatorily prior to the individual constituents of that society. The social whole is integrated sufficiently that Adorno often refers to it as a “totality,” having a univocal, uniform character that is imposed, from the top down, onto its constituents. Drawing on an extended tradition of the use of the concept of totality (which is drawn out by Jay in Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept, and in Adorno’s case most likely derives from Lukács in the first instance), Adorno understands the individual to have little to no content that is not determined by this social totality.20 While I think we should indeed be skeptical of the extent to which Adorno derived this position from empirical investigation, as opposed to bringing it to the data in order to find it confirmed, nonetheless this sociological account of social influence was empirically put to work by Adorno, with qualified success.21 This core commitment, to society’s absolute capability to coerce the thought, behavior, and mental content of its constituents, is a fixed feature of Adorno’s work.22 In Dialectic of Enlightenment, written in close temporal proximity to Adorno’s most thorough engagement with empirically informed sociology, Adorno provides the foundation of an account of how this social totality is capable of enforcing universally identical concept use. This account posits self-preserving conceptual employment as necessary (at all times) as the social totality manipulates the pragmatic context of all individuals such that self-preservation is an ever-present concern. While Adorno appears to concede that, outside of the initial formation of concepts by primitive consciousness, there is no intrinsic necessity that forces the self-preserving use of concepts, Adorno is able to find a universally obtaining extrinsic necessity. This is the social totality continuously pressing self-preservation as a germane concern, through manipulating and constituting the social structures within which the individual lives. The social totality “subordinat[es] life in its entirety to the requirements of its preservation.”23 Evidently, this self-preservation is different in form from that which motivated the primitive consciousness. The

the interpenetration of concepts and so ciet y

41

primitive consciousness was confronted by a superlative complexity that it was unable to manipulate in order to secure its own pragmatic needs. Given that the nonprimitive consciousness is equipped with dialectical concepts that are able to make the subject’s experience amenable to conceptual subsumption, that kind of self-preserving impetus (the need to fix a discontinuous experiential field) is no longer in play. And this raises the question of how the social whole is capable of impressing a continual need for self-preservation onto these nonprimitive consciousnesses. While I do not think Adorno (or Horkheimer) addresses this issue directly, it is nonetheless central to the very thesis of the existence of a “dialectic of enlightenment,” of there being a structural similarity across thought in both primitive and modern forms of life. The Dialectic provides a hint toward the correct understanding of this problem: “The countless agencies of mass production and its culture impress standardized behaviour on the individual as the only natural, decent and rational one. . . . [The individual’s] criterion is self-preservation, successful or unsuccessful adaptation to the objectivity of their function and the schemata assigned to it.”24 It is the very proliferation of social structures, the opacity of their relationship to the individual, and that individual’s reliance on those social structures for the provision of their livelihood that imposes a continual concern with self-preservation. We are confronted by a complex of social structures and processes, whose determining interrelations are beyond our understanding. We, qua members of a capitalist society, must continually appeal to and employ these extant social structures in order to earn money, and thereby provide for our self-preservation. While the primitive consciousness sets up dialectical concepts and social structures in order to clarify and make concrete methods of controlling one’s environment, these same concepts and social structures have become overdetermined and overcomplex, such that they are now set up over against the individual and compel self-preserving behavior at every juncture in order to remain safely in conformity with those structures. Adorno is confident that self-preserving behavior is compelled in every instance by the social totality, which stands over and against its constitutive individuals. However, it is logically possible to be continually pressed into self-preserving behavior, and yet have the operation

42

the interpenetration of concepts and so ciet y

of one’s concepts (the internal function of those concepts) unaffected by that fact. In truth, this is an explanatory gap that Adorno never, to my knowledge, satisfactorily fills by argument. He is happy to cross the gap between compelled behavior and compelled conceptual use by assertion. A particularly egregious example of this is found, again, in Dialectic of Enlightenment: “The exclusivity of logical laws stems from . . . obdurate adherence to function, and ultimately to the compulsive character of self-preservation. The latter is constantly magnified into the choice between survival and doom, a choice which is reflected even in the principle that, of two contradictory positions, only one can be true and the other false.”25 The point being made here is, presumably by design, outwardly outrageous. With no argumentative support, Adorno claims that the law of noncontradiction is contingent on selfpreservation. This is outrageous just because it is very tempting to see the logical law of noncontradiction as deriving from ahistorical facts about what it is possible to think or simultaneously imagine; and this in turn seems amply explained by both the fabric of experience and the limits of cognition. If we hold to this intuition, Adorno’s assertion that the logical rule derives its force from extraconceptual behaviors or phenomena appears deeply unsatisfactory. And at this point Adorno’s account of the interrelation between conceptual content and selfpreservation looks unsupported, and so perhaps unappealing. This criticism should be accepted in spirit, as Adorno is often prone to make justificatory slides between apparently discrete domains of inquiry, and Adorno should not be exempt from providing explanations and justifications for these slides.26 While explanatory gaps of this kind should be addressed, here one should pause and reconsider what an explanation or justification of this particular move by Adorno would look like. Adorno is taking it as explanatorily basic that concepts are emergent epistemological entities, both continuous with and capable of critical reflection on the pragmatic contexts and forms of life from which they emerged. Adorno is capable of pointing to supporting evidence that shores up this account of the concept. For example, the sociohistorical contingency of cultural, aesthetic, and philosophical life is held to be explained by the nature of the concepts that make possible those domains. Similarly, the internal contradictions that Adorno traces in those concepts are themselves held to originate not merely in

the interpenetration of concepts and so ciet y

43

the concepts themselves, but in the objective social contradictions that gave rise to those concepts. These phenomena fit Adorno’s theory of the concept; but they are multiply construable. Other accounts of the concept are also able to accommodate these features, with varying degrees of fit (internal contradictions are contingent failures on the part of the philosophers in question, sociohistorical development in culture merely is a product of the constant thirst for novelty, and so on). The conventional theory of concepts (that they are autonomous and immune to mediation in Adorno’s sense) is similarly placed beyond argumentation. Phenomena can be appealed to in favor of the conventional account (the apparent immutability of logic, the continuity of philosophical inquiry), but Adorno is capable of accommodating these also (logic is seen as contingently necessary,27 the continuity of philosophical concerns is explained by the continuity of the subtending structure expressed by the dialectic of enlightenment). In either case, the fundamental claim about the nature of the concept serves as the beginning of philosophical inquiry and debate, and is not itself derivable from that debate. It rather serves as an enabling condition of it. Adorno is able to provide an argument of reasonable strength concerning the universal incidence of self-preserving behavior, deriving from his theory of society as a totality. The transition from the universal incidence of self-preserving behavior to the claim that, accordingly, concepts will universally be employed in a self-preserving fashion cannot be argued for in the same way. It relies on a metaepistemic claim about concepts being porous to their pragmatic context—and it is just these kinds of claims that cannot be conclusively proved, as the evidence in play is multiply construable.28 With this in mind, Adorno is able to simply build in the transition from self-preserving practices to self-preserving concepts by fiat, thanks to his chosen account of what concepts are. He holds concepts to be intrinsically emergent from, contingent on, and determined by self-preserving practices. No further explanation of this is possible; only further argument over whether we should want to choose this account of conceptuality. It is Adorno’s sociological work, then, that can answer the question of why concepts continue to be used in a self-preserving manner. The

44

the interpenetration of concepts and so ciet y

social totality compels self-preserving behavior, in Adorno’s view, at every level of society. Once we add to this Adorno’s understanding of concepts—as emergent from and determined by pragmatic features of experience—this entails that concepts will, throughout society, continuously be entangled with and determined by the requirements of self-preservation.

Basic Concepts and Universal Validity What we have just seen is that we can allow Adorno the claim that the way in which concepts are used is universally the same for all members of a society—namely, concepts are always employed in service of selfpreservation. But we are hoping to build to a justification of Adorno’s more ambitious claim not only that concepts are employed universally in the same way, but that everyone will share the same set of concepts, and moreover that the relationships between these concepts (the conceptual array) will be universally the same in all cases. As we have already seen, the universal validity that Adorno implicitly gives to his analyses can only carry if conceptual sets and conceptual arrays are also universally identical across all reasoners. We can be confident that concepts are both formed and used in the same way for all reasoners, on Adorno’s account—namely, in service of self-preservation. We found that this was true both at the beginning of the ontogenetic process—when a primitive consciousness first forms its concepts—and for mature, fully formed consciousnesses. But this tells us nothing about which concepts consciousness might form in reaction to the demands of self-preservation. Adorno gives us no intrinsic constraint on which concepts will be formed in response to the drive for self-preservation. This introduces contingency into concept formation—unlike for Kant, there is no finite collection of forms of judgment that the agent can make use of. The only constraint is that the chosen forms of judgment, the selected concepts, serve self-preservation. And we might intuitively think (and I will go on to firm up this intuition) that there are a plurality of ways in which concepts could be formed in order to structure experience, not all of which will match up to how we, as a matter of fact, conceptually structure experience. In other words, then, Adorno’s account of

the interpenetration of concepts and so ciet y

45

concept formation leaves a lot of room for contingency—for the possibility of there being a multiplicity of ways in which primitive consciousness could construct concepts. However, Adorno’s account requires this contingency to be resolved in an identical form for each individual within any specific sociohistorical period, for the universal validity of his claims to carry. The worry at present is that Adorno has no way of ensuring this. This problem appears at two stages, the ontogenetic (at which the primitive consciousness “fixes the transcendence” of his environment by forming dialectical concepts) and the sociohistoric (at which the mature consciousness comes into inheritance of specific conceptual problematics that Adorno holds are specific to sociohistorical periods and obtain universally in those periods). At the ontogenetic stage, the primitive consciousness (as has been established) is confronted by a discontinuous experiential field and, according to the account I derived from Dialectic of Enlightenment, forms dialectical concepts. These concepts abstract away from the concrete objects they apply to. This process of abstraction is only operating in order to allow for control of those objects, and the resulting concepts only have to be formulated so as to be able to cover those specific particulars the individual is confronted with. The sole goal of the initial formation of these basic concepts is the imposition of order onto a discontinuous experiential field. This goal would appear in principle to be satisfiable by many different sets of concepts. At present, we are confronting the worry that the formation of basic concepts—by which I mean those concepts that are initially formed by a primitive consciousness and that serve as enabling conditions for the formation of more recondite universals such as cultural concepts—might be too loose to ensure that it will have the same results for every consciousness. Since concepts simply need to preserve the self, and there are conceivably multiple ways of doing so, there seems to be no reason to expect that conceptual structures would be the same for everyone. To respond to this worry, then, we need to find some kind of constraint—some reason why concepts must be formed in an identical fashion for all consciousnesses. One promising avenue for finding such a constraint would be through looking for commonalities in self-preservation itself. Self-preservation

46

the interpenetration of concepts and so ciet y

is always expressed through the physical complement of the consciousness, namely, the human body, and it seems plausible to derive a set of necessary basic concepts from the influence of the human body on the exercise of self-preservation. This would roughly complement the results of Kant’s Metaphysical Deduction—we might find that concepts of extension, relation, duration, and the like are inescapably required for beings of our corporeal organization. We can return to Adorno’s account of the emergence of conceptual dichotomies in the Dialectic as suggestive on this score: “The cry of terror called forth by the unfamiliar becomes its name. . . . The doubling of nature into appearance and essence, effect and force . . . springs from human fear.”29 Adorno posits the emergence of these conceptual dichotomies—“appearance and essence” and “effect and force,” which can, with some justification, be mapped onto the categories of substance and accident, and causality, respectively—as deriving straightforwardly from the introduction of dialectical conceptuality. As soon as consciousness grapples with “human fear,” and seeks to make use of dialectical concepts, Adorno suggests that these dichotomies immediately “spring from” this project. Although this evidence is not conclusive, it is at least plausible that Adorno saw these conceptual distinctions as significantly more basic, and inescapable, than other eligible universals. And, accordingly, that there was some form of constraint that entailed their being inescapable in this way. We could understand this constraint to be the nature of the human body itself. If this were so, the confrontation of the primitive consciousness with its discontinuous environment would acquire a constraint that determines which concepts the primitive consciousness must initially form. The material constitution of the body necessitates the formation of a limited set of concepts, a basic conceptual set that forms the functional preconditions for the acquisition and formation of more developed, nonbasic concepts. Due to simple features of being embodied, we might think that certain concepts—like extension, cause and effect, appearance and essence—are ineliminable features of a conceptually articulated understanding of both one’s own body and one’s immediate environment. A pragmatic constraint like this—by virtue of appealing to universal features of embodiment—could allow us to see some basic conceptual

the interpenetration of concepts and so ciet y

47

set as socially universal. It is the pragmatic structure of the situation of the embodied primitive consciousness that lends itself to the universality of basic concepts. Perhaps this outline—as brisk as it is—shows an appreciable way in which Adorno could be entitled to see some basic conceptual set as holding universally.

Universality and Basic Conceptual Arrays Even if the preceding argument holds, we nonetheless find a distinction in Adorno’s work between conceptual sets (the possession of an enumerated collection of concepts) and conceptual arrays (a conceptual set together with its internal relations and determining conditions that hold between these concepts). Sociohistorical influences are able to heteronomously determine the richer determining relations that hold between concepts. Concepts themselves are not held by Adorno to change, but the problematics internal to these concepts are. This is implicit in the very conception of Critical Theory; philosophical problematics are found in concepts that are—de dicto—identical to those that have been fixtures of philosophical inquiry for most of the history of philosophy itself. However, these problems are held to be historically produced, and thus vulnerable to appearing and disappearing due to the alteration in the determining sociohistorical relations that brought them about. While the employed concepts continually remain, the problematics that are presented in the course of the application of those concepts change across time. Given that this distinction is to be found in Adorno’s work, there must be a means of fixing not only the conceptual set as obtaining with universal validity, but the conceptual array, too. If Adorno’s theory that the social totality is able to enforce a “monadological character”30 on its members is to have any traction, there must be an available means of ensuring the social universality of the conceptual arrays in play. (Correlatively, Adorno understands given sociohistorical periods to exhibit philosophical antinomies universally, across the thought of all the intellectuals working at the given time.31 This is a point of view that equally requires a guarantee of the social universality of conceptual arrays.) This is a problem that must be considered at both the basic and the nonbasic level. It is important that every primitive consciousness

48

th e in te rpe n et rat i o n o f c o n c e p t s a nd so ciet y

forms an identical conceptual array, given that these basic arrays will have an influence on what higher-level concepts are available, and in what way. We then need to find a guarantee that nonbasic conceptual arrays (those conceptual arrays held by mature consciousnesses) are also socially universal, given that Adorno’s analyses require this in order to hold with universal validity. I will consider these two problems in turn, beginning with the basic conceptual arrays formed by primitive consciousnesses. Above, we built in the idea that the primitive consciousness was constrained in forming its basic conceptual set thanks to certain features of embodiment. We might think that if we can grant Adorno that all primitive consciousnesses will come into the same dichotomies and concepts (for example, of cause and effect, space and time, and so on), then we can be assured that likewise all primitive consciousnesses will exhibit identical determining relations between these concepts. (In other words, will all exhibit the same conceptual array.) If this was so, it might seem that Adorno’s account would need no further constraint to ensure that the fundamental conceptual structures of consciousnesses were the same in all cases. However, I do not think that this is in fact true. To show this, I will now briefly work through an example of a possible consciousness that shares our conceptual set, but exhibits a different conceptual array—I find this example in P. F. Strawson’s account of the “sound-world.” In the chapter “Sounds” of his book Individuals, Strawson attempts to consider whether the fact that we take material objects as primary in the identification of particulars in our “conceptual scheme as it is”32 could not be usurped in some other possible conceptual scheme, wherein the identification of particulars does not proceed by taking material bodies as primary. In other words, Strawson tries to show that the epistemological viewpoint that takes “material particulars”33 as primary for comprehending “objective particulars”34 (that is, objects that are identified via one’s experience, which however exist outside of that experience)35 is contingent. Strawson outlines a different epistemological process (and hence a differing conceptual array), which is able to satisfy the requirement of identifying objective particulars, without needing to posit materiality as primary. What makes this attempt of Strawson’s, which I shall detail below, so interesting and dangerous for

the interpenetration of concepts and so ciet y

49

Adorno is precisely that Strawson does not achieve his goal of a radically different epistemological setup by means of introducing new concepts. Rather, Strawson retains the standard concepts and retools the relationships between them. Strawson posits a new conceptual array (by reordering the primacy allotted to material particulars in achieving an understanding of objective particulars), which satisfies the requirement of providing continuous experience just as well as the standard array (which continues to take material particularity as primary). To compress his account considerably, Strawson maintains the concept of objective particulars while jettisoning extension, by, as he puts it, creating an “analogy” of material space within which to house these objective particulars. What Strawson is concerned with is that the comprehension of objects as objective (that is, as not being exhausted by one’s perceiving them, but being capable of existing without being perceived) necessarily entails a given “housing”36 in which they can be seen to be sustained, regardless of our perception of them. Having jettisoned material space—within which we usually understand objects as being housed—Strawson creates an analogy of space with what he calls a “master sound,”37 with different pitches of which audible particulars are correlated.38 This, Strawson argues, delivers a sufficient housing to allow for the agent to take themself to be reidentifying particulars (the same particular sounds). Just as one may walk into a room that contains a sound, leave momentarily, and return, and thereby take oneself to have two experiences of one sound particular, so one might experience a sound particular at master-sound pitch a, move to master-sound pitch b where it is not, and then return to pitch a and take oneself, due to the housing of the master-sound pitches, to be reidentifying the same sound particular. This master sound, then, provides us with the concept of particulars having “absence and presence” at a given location.39 With this account in tow, Strawson is able to reposition a basic feature of continuous experience (the identification of objective particulars across time) out of the conventional conceptual array, and into a radically different conceptual array while retaining the same conceptual set.40 This loosens the necessity of the basic conceptual array initially formed by the primitive consciousness. While we can continue to grant to Adorno that a single conceptual set is pragmatically necessary,

50

the interpenetration of concepts and so ciet y

it would appear, from Strawson’s example, that the conjunction of that basic conceptual set and the pragmatic goal of self-preservation could nonetheless result in any number of radically differing conceptual arrays. We need an explanation, then, as to why there are no soundworld infants—how do we explain the universality of the basic conceptual array?41 I believe we can answer this question by reconsidering the context in which basic conceptual sets and basic conceptual arrays are formed. Prior to the formation of the basic conceptual set, the primitive consciousness was incapable of communication with other consciousnesses; the absence of mediating concepts prevented continuous experience, and derivatively prevented the experience of other consciousnesses as other consciousnesses. It would seem the initial conceptual set is formed more or less solipsistically, in this sense. However, once this initial conceptual set is formed, and primitive consciousness is capable of recognizing and interacting with particulars over time, consciousness is then opened up to intersubjective interaction (in this case, as the primitive consciousness will belong to a child, to interaction with its parents). This gives us a means of finding some external constraint that could govern and influence how the relations between the basic concepts are formed. We can appeal to developmental psychology as a means of explaining the way a child’s consciousness is molded into a given method of pragmatically interacting with and, by extension, conceptualizing his or her environment. We would need an account of intersubjective interaction and development that would explain how the structure of an early consciousness’ thought could become synchronized to that of its parents or careers. The desired intersubjective account would have much in common with the object-relations theory of Donald Winnicott, Melanie Klein, et al. It would allow for the collaborative formation of cognitive content, conceptualization, and self-image in the infant. Now, when Adorno himself tried to develop his psychological account of intersubjectivity, he characteristically did so in terms of Freud’s libidinal economy. Freud’s account of the neonate’s formation of his or her psychological and epistemic structure is, as has been repeatedly pointed out, solipsistic, in that the parents and interaction partners merely provide occasions for the working out of the internal

the interpenetration of concepts and so ciet y

51

logic of the neonate’s libidinal economy.42 In this sense, the Freudian account is only minimally intersubjective, and is certainly not a collaborative picture of the formation of the structure of thought and experience. For this reason, I do not wish to suggest that Adorno (with his heavily Freudian approach) had a Winnicott-style object-relations account explicitly in mind. But there are significant benefits to positing an intersubjective process of determination like this. Not least of these is that it provides an additional justification for Adorno’s claim that social wholes are internally homogenous. Once we expand out our account of the maturation of consciousness to include the determining power of the texture of the relationship between the infant and its parents and the cultural norms that are invariably embedded in that texture, we find an additional means of understanding how a society could maintain the level of internal cultural and epistemic homogeneity Adorno’s account requires. On top of this appeal, there is also a distantly related interpretive move presently popular in Adorno scholarship, namely, the attempt to understand Adorno’s work as continuous with Axel Honneth’s recognitive philosophy. Honneth himself in his work on reification has attempted to see Adorno as centrally invested in the project of expanding and enriching recognitive relations,43 as against the “forgetting” of those relations that Honneth takes reification to represent.44 Axel Honneth, drawing on Hegel, Winnicott, and Mead (in the main, although Mead has latterly been replaced with more emphasis on the work of Hobson and Tomasello), understands all self-knowledge as achieved through recognitive relations. The core thought is that in order to understand myself as having a given status, I require my communication partners to recognize this status through their modifying their behavior visibly to reflect my having that status. (For example, if I am to be conscious of myself as a Kantian autonomous self-legislator, I require having this status recognized, in the other’s refraining from interfering with the exercise of my autonomy.) Honneth attempts to read recognition as a fundamental tenet of Adorno’s work, and thereby problematically attempts to circumvent Adorno’s negativistic, apophatic ethics.45 All the same, Honneth’s attempt nonetheless has qualified success in picking out Adorno’s reliance on the notion of intersubjective determination of epistemological processes.46

52

the interpenetration of concepts and so ciet y

Reliance on intersubjective determination to ensure the social universality of nonbasic concepts is unworkable (as I will go on to show) not least due to the proliferation of pragmatically and culturally diverse groups in social wholes. However, employing intersubjective determination at the level of basic conceptual arrays does not run into this problem of differentiation. Object-relations understands the determination of the conceptual capacities of the infant to be parasitic on reasonably thin forms of interaction, in which the mother attends to the needs of the child in a “holding phase,” which makes possible the development of a body schema, together with a delusion on the part of the child that it has omnipotent control over the satisfaction of its needs.47 As the child cognitively develops and is capable of differentiating between itself and its environment, so too does the mother begin to withdraw her care to a degree, no longer instantaneously satisfying the child’s needs. This “graduated de-adaptation,” negotiated through the infant’s attempt to destroy its mother through aggressive behavior, eventually discloses to the child both the objectivity of its mother and its own self-confidence in its own integrity and the loving care which that mother provides. 48 While this process entails some reasonably fine-grained distinctions being formed for the child, the relationship that furnishes the child with these distinctions is minimally structured. The mere presence and interaction (“holding”) of the parent serve to inculcate the infant into certain conceptual practices. The interactions that facilitate these conceptual practices are thin, in that they serve to acclimatize the infant to employing its concepts in particular ways just by virtue of familiarizing the infant with the pragmatic structure of intersubjective interaction as it develops into a properly dialogical, rather than symbiotic, form. There is no way to distort or incorrectly perform the mother/ child interactions that Winnicott picks out, short of not performing them at all. Once again, intrinsic pragmatic structures (shored up in somatic structures) take the place of theoretic transcendental structures. The interaction between the parent and the child inculcates the child in specific forms of self-conception, affective understanding, and, correlatively, epistemic behavior. This dialogical interaction provides a means for the transmission of the parent’s form of life to the child, in the synchronization of the child’s consciousness to the parent’s.

the interpenetration of concepts and so ciet y

53

This account serves to fix the basic conceptual array for infants. While the infant forms its conceptual set in isolation, the dialogical relationship with the parent provides a mediating influence that determines the manner in which that conceptual set is put to work. As an obvious example, the interaction between parent and child discloses that cognition of the world should be primarily conducted along visual lines—in terms of negotiating and comprehending the objective environment and the visual cues that the parent’s face provides the child in terms of affection and reassurance—due to the parent’s practices, into which the child is invited, being so constituted. The array relations between concepts are fixed in this manner. The question of how this basic conceptual array is sustained, once this early determining relation is concluded, is answerable through appeal to the behaviors that such inculcated conceptual relations would bring about. Adorno understands concepts to be formed in reaction to self-preservation, and molded to the pragmatic structures in which this drive is expressed.49 The conceptual arrays fixed after birth (for example, the modalities of the senses settling in a conventional rather than “sound-world” fashion) are self-sustaining, in that the behavior and social structures they recommend in turn bolster the resilience of these arrays as the individual matures. Plugging in a broadly object-relations picture of the parental determination of basic conceptual arrays is sufficiently in line with the psychoanalytic approach that Adorno repeatedly makes use of that one can regard this as an addition significantly in the spirit of Adorno’s work, which serves to close off a significant difficulty. It also has the core benefit that understanding basic conceptual arrays as fixed by familial intersubjective influence makes the basic conceptual set fall out as necessary but the conceptual array fall out as contingently necessary. The necessity of the basic conceptual array is contingent on the pragmatic sociological structures that enduringly compel self-preserving behavior and more importantly the pragmatic structures that channel and mold the epistemological upshot of this self-preserving behavior. This contingent necessity is deeply important. Adorno posits the conceptual mediation of perception as pragmatically necessary, and seems to also concede that certain conceptual sets are necessary for continuous experience to take place at all. It is the obtaining employment

54

the interpenetration of concepts and so ciet y

and determining relations that obtain between these concepts that Adorno’s philosophy explicitly sets out to critique. It is only if the necessity of the universally obtaining conceptual array of these determining relations and employments—these conceptual arrays—is defeasible that critique has a normative impetus, or indeed a point. Adorno requires the social universality of conceptual arrays to be contingently necessary, with there being some method in which dialectical philosophy and authentic art can intervene in that determining contingency and break the necessity it generates. The present account of the social universality of basic conceptual arrays provides this contingency, by denying that those array relations are intrinsically necessary. They are rather generated through familial interaction, and then go on to be sustained by cultural modes of behavior and the social totality’s imposition of self-preserving behavior. Intervention in these sociocultural relations (or in the concepts themselves) is therefore possible, in order to overcome this necessity and bend concepts into new employments and new forms. This will go on to be centrally important to our account of the truth of art and philosophy—in either case, we will find that the truth is accomplished by loosening these contingent necessities and allowing for concepts (and experience) to be briefly forced into new structures and forms.

Self-Preservation and the Universality of Nonbasic Conceptual Arrays We now need to turn to the question of what I have called “nonbasic” concepts: those concepts that can only be acquired once the basic concepts are in place. We might consider the majority of Adorno’s philosophy as aimed toward the analysis and critique of these nonbasic concepts, as they are found in philosophy, aesthetic theory, sociology, and so on. As Adorno makes clear in Negative Dialectics, experiences of individual objects, analyzed properly, are revelatory of their social whole and the conceptual problematics that are extant in that social whole. What makes this claim philosophically interesting is that Adorno holds that these experiences, and attendant analyses, are not merely true for the relevant individual, but are rather instructive for all members of

the interpenetration of concepts and so ciet y

55

that individual’s sociohistorical context.50 While Adorno’s reliance on this universality is most often cashed like this—in presenting analyses of experiences of objective particulars—Adorno also makes use of it in analyses of purely subjective phenomena. For example, Adorno feels entitled to claim that apparently subjective phenomena, such as one’s feelings about one’s gender,51 are reflective of a social whole. Adorno, then, sees nonbasic conceptual arrays as holding with universal validity, and also as determining even the most apparently private and subjective parts of our experience. Quite aside from our intuitive resistance to this kind of idea, we can see that it also runs into trouble thanks to Adorno’s sociology. Thanks to a uniformity in the pragmatic structures and material needs bound up with embodiment, we were able to build in a social universality for basic conceptual sets (and developmental psychology took care of the universality of basic conceptual arrays). The uniformity of the pragmatic structures gave us a uniformity of conceptual structure. However, the pragmatic structures at work in a structurally differentiated society don’t look like they underwrite a universality in the set or array of the nonbasic concepts formed in response to them. Rather—on Adorno’s own account—they seem to necessitate divergence, or even contradiction, between conceptual structures. For example, Adorno sees social wholes as functionally divergent at class levels. Philosophers, for example, bear the guilt that they only have sufficient exemption from manual labor to think due to their “class relationship.”52 Relatedly, Adorno understands the division of labor as setting up importantly different modes of life (part of the “guilt” of this division being the decreased potential for autonomy under certain elements of this division). If Adorno understands concepts to emerge in response to pragmatic demands, and to be importantly “molded” to the pragmatic contexts in which these demands can be exercised, it is reasonable to expect that, for example, the class-derived divergences in pragmatic contexts will entail divergences in conceptual arrays. Indeed one might expect that such a thought would be appealing to Adorno, representing as it does a variant of the idea of class-consciousness. Lukács’s Reification and Class-Consciousness, the influence of which on Adorno’s thought cannot be underestimated, in fact makes a very similar move, deriving important epistemological differences from the material divergences

56

the interpenetration of concepts and so ciet y

represented by the differences in the constitution of each class’s “class situation.”53 Further reason to think that such a line of thought might have appeared appealing to Adorno comes from Adorno’s close association with, and approval of, the work of Sohn-Rethel. Sohn-Rethl sought to understand conceptual abstraction as deriving from exchange relations, going so far as to derive the abstract categories of space and time from the conditions of long-distance exchange of money for goods.54 Sohn-Rethel himself notes in his introduction the alacrity with which Adorno defended his work, also noting that Adorno himself “in his own manner was on the same track.”55 Adorno’s correspondence finds Adorno confirming Sohn-Rethel’s self-proclaimed philosophical proximity to Adorno.56 Given both Adorno’s own presuppositions and his explicit philosophical associations, this represents a serious problem for Adorno’s account. His commitment to interweaving philosophical and materialist/pragmatic problematics seems to entail a conceptual pluralism once we reach the level of nonbasic concepts. The upshot of this pluralism would be nothing less than a full-blooded relativism about conceptual problematics and, most likely, a reinvigoration of class-consciousness rhetoric. Adorno treats each of these with suspicion: More fruitful might be the recognition of relativism as a limited form of consciousness. It began as that of bourgeois individualism, in which the individual consciousness is taken for the ultimate and all individual opinions are accorded equal rights, as if there were no criterion of their truth. Proponents of the abstract thesis that every man’s thought is conditioned should be most concretely reminded that so is their own, that it is blind to the supra-individual element which alone turns individual consciousness into thought.57 To insist on the profession of a standpoint is to extend the coercion of conscience to the realm of theory. With this coercion goes a coarsening process in which not even the great theorems retain their truth content after the adjuncts have been eliminated.58 Despite all of the strong structural tendencies toward a kind of conceptual pluralism in his work, then, Adorno holds fast to the principle

the interpenetration of concepts and so ciet y

57

that analysis of an isolated particular, properly carried out, will be universally revelatory and critical of its social context. Given the problems we have just explored, Adorno cannot base the social universality of nonbasic concepts on sociological or straightforwardly pragmatic grounds. Working with the understanding of determination that has been employed so far (in which determination applies to the individual by virtue of their specific properties), Adorno has no way of explaining how a determining influence could create social universality at the nonbasic conceptual level (in either sets or arrays). However, this is not the only model of determination that is available.

Rich and Thin Determination Theories of determination in the Marxist tradition (broadly construed) operate with what I will call a model of “rich determination.” Rich determination exercises its influence on the individual by virtue of the specific structural properties of the activities or relations that he or she engages in. A modern example of the application of this kind of model of determination can be found in Honneth’s attempt to revitalize the term “reification.” Honneth understands reification to be a determining influence, which prevents the agent from cognizing certain phenomena. Reification, for Honneth, is a feature of the structure of certain specific activities the agent engages in: In the course of our practices we might pursue a goal so energetically and one-dimensionally we stop paying attention to other, possibly more original and important motives and aims.  .  .  . [Alternatively] a series of thought schemata . . . [can] influence our practices by leading to a selective interpretation of social facts . . . [thereby reducing] our attentiveness for meaningful circumstances in a given situation.59 Reification for Honneth applies its determination to the individual via the individual’s specificity. It is the individual’s specific engagement with his or her various practices that creates the structural conditions that amount to reification. The essential structure of this account of determination does not differ from, say, that of Georg Lukács. Honneth:

58

the interpenetration of concepts and so ciet y

Now there are at least two exemplary cases of this form of reduced attentiveness that are quite helpful for the task of distinguishing between different types of reification. To start with the first case, in the course of our practices we might pursue a goal so energetically and one-dimensionally that we stop paying attention to other, possibly more original and important motives and aims. . . . The second kind of reduced attentiveness that provides a model for explaining how reification is possible derives not from internal but from external factors influencing our actions: a series of thought schemata that influence our practices by leading to a selective interpretation of social facts can significantly reduce our attentiveness for meaningful circumstances in a given situation.60 Lukács: The individual can never become the measure of all things. For when the individual confronts objective reality he is faced by a complex of ready-made and unalterable objects which allow him only the subjective responses of recognition or rejection. . . . For the individual, reification and hence determinism . . . are irremovable.61 Lukács, too, sees the specific features of the individual and his or her situation as bringing about the reification (and hence misconstrual) of his or her experienced environment. Both Lukács’s and Honneth’s employment of the term “reification,” although importantly different from each other, testify to the persistence with which broadly Marxist social philosophies make use of rich determination—which is to say, determination that applies itself through the affective, relational, and pragmatic specificity of individuals. Both Honneth and Lukács understand this determination to be effected through the structure of the individual’s environment, which compels the individual to certain kinds of cognitive behavior, or to relating to that environment in a certain way. Apart from the intuitive appeal of this notion, the other main source of this enduring conception of determination is probably Marx himself. Marx’s analysis of the commodity form in chapter 1 of Capital has a plausible claim to form the foundation of the Marxist tradition,

the interpenetration of concepts and so ciet y

59

both orthodox and heterodox, by providing a theoretical platform for analysis of concealed relations of determination and an explanation of the ability of these relations to occlude social facts. It is no coincidence that the structure of Marx’s analysis of the commodity form, in line with the determination relations that later Marxists formulated, is predicated on a form of rich determination. Commodities, for Marx, are objects that have come to be seen not primarily as bearers of “usevalue” but “exchange-value.” Use-values are relative to specific projects (things we intend to do) and the specific features of objects (how well they serve to realize these projects).62 “Exchange-value,” by contrast, is entirely abstract and relational. A commodity’s exchange-value is not determined in a qualitative relation to the concrete demands of human life, but rather in a quantitative relation to the exchange relations that obtain between commodities. A diamond has (high) exchange-value as it can be exchanged for a great quantity of goods, for example. Objects become commodities once they are invested with this exchange-value; and this investiture causes us to perceive them primarily in abstract, nonsensuous terms.63 Crucially, it is participation in exchange that brings about this change in the experienced object. It is only when an agent comes to be directly engaged in commodity exchange that this conversion of the object into commodity takes place; the determination is rich, as it takes place through the specificity of the agent’s behavior and situation. It is the specific structure of the exchange relations with which the agent is engaged that serves to determine the contents of his or her consciousness and the phenomenal aspect of the commodity. It is only through explanation of the specific features of the exchange relationship in which the individual is engaged, and the determining influence these specific features have on the consciousness of the participants, that Marx can construct his theory of the generation of commodity fetishism.64 And it is on the basis of this rich determination— conducted through the texture of social economic interaction—that Marx explains the determination of other spheres of social life.65 Rich determination has been an enduring feature of critical Marxist social philosophy. This endurance is in no small part attributable to its intuitive clarity. If we consider, prereflectively, when and how people can be induced to do and think things—to have their autonomy

60

the interpenetration of concepts and so ciet y

compromised—we might naturally consider the role of enticements, threats, and situational impediments. Accordingly, Marxists have conventionally understood class consciousness, ideology, and reification as deriving from social structures that limit the possibilities for agents to exercise their autonomy, or alternatively as deriving from the ability of inducements or threats to channel people’s activity and thought. This model of determination undoubtedly has appeal and applies to certain forms of social pathology (as in the pathologies that Honneth chose to term “reification” above). However, through its history it became increasingly apparent that this model is incapable of underwriting analyses of the influence of social structure on “high-level” concepts, which are used and formed at a far remove from any obvious social or psychological compulsion. We might understand the methodological gregariousness of Walter Benjamin’s work as a response to this problem. Whatever his other failings, Benjamin was able to trace social influences in cultural phenomena as abstruse as architecture and fine art, and as prosaic as mannequins and furniture. These objects were seen to be physiognomies, which had social facts sedimented and embedded in their apparent properties. Cashing out this idea of the physiognomic aspect of objects—and the attendant idea that social structures found expression in such objects—was plainly problematic for Benjamin. The bullish orthodox Marxist assertions one repeatedly finds in his work are syncopated with a variety of exogenous incunabula, intended to provide the medium able to conduct the influence of social structures into apparently autonomous domains, such that the objects in these domains could become physiognomic models of those social structures. This reaches its apotheosis in the Arcades Project, where Benjamin appeals to the existence of a collective unconsciousness, itself a manifestation of the latent “collective revolutionary subject” that is present in each historical epoch. Buck-Morss understands the introduction of this notion to be primarily motivated by Benjamin’s political concerns66—as it provides a clear way of introducing a positive method of describing revolutionary praxis by aligning it to the demands of this collective subject—and this is surely correct, as far as it goes. However, this move—which Adorno was so concerned by—can also be understood as a response to an anxiety concerning the justificatory grounds

the interpenetration of concepts and so ciet y

61

for the kinds of micro- and macroanalyses that the Arcades Project would comprise. The quasi-Jungian notion of a collective subject is intended to provide an explanation of how Parisian architectural and cultural artifacts, which were created in an apparently autonomous fashion, came to reflect philosophically (and politically) germane historical developments in society at large. This move by Benjamin is significant simply because it represents an awareness of the limit of conventional psychological models of determination. Conventional psychological models are for the most part rich determinations, which explain the endurance of social structures through their manipulation of the psychological and affective specificity of individuals. Benjamin, by contrast, moves tentatively to a model of what I will call “thin” determination: the collective unconsciousness applies itself to the behavior of the various constituent members of the social whole without regard for their specific commitments and affective properties. Its application is indiscriminate and equally effective for every individual. This makes it a variant of thin determination. Unlike rich determination, thin determination allows for the determination of the individual by the social whole without that determination being mediated through the individual’s specificity. I will cash this out in some more detail as we go. Adorno was certainly unwilling to put in place an extravagant psychological mechanism like a collective unconsciousness. Nonetheless, it is clear that Adorno was, if anything, more aware than Benjamin of the problems of a rich determination model. Like Benjamin, Adorno relies on the existence of thin determination; unlike Benjamin, this thin determination is not cashed out in psychological terms. One clear example of Adorno’s reliance on the existence of thin determination comes from his Nachlass, specifically his work on Beethoven, which took place late in his life. Adorno asserts, working from a number of specific features of Beethoven’s compositional practices, that Beethoven’s music is Hegelian in substance.67 It is, of course, precisely these kinds of claims (concerning concealed determinations that create commonality in various cultural domains due to sociohistorical determination) that rich determination is unable to cogently explain. Adorno recognizes this weakness and understands social determination to conduct itself not through influence or any relationship immediately apparent to the

62

the interpenetration of concepts and so ciet y

consciousness, but rather by a determination that is “behind the back” of consciousness. Writing in the context of an analysis of Beethoven’s music (an analysis I will return to at the close of this book), Adorno says: “The history of ideas, and thus the history of music, is an autarchic motivational context insofar as the social law, on the one hand, produces the formation of spheres screened off against each other, and on the other hand, as the law of totality, still comes to light in each sphere as the same law.”68 This “social law” is posited as at work in a multiplicity of social spheres, and as expressing itself with equal determining strength in each. As the dispassionate, abstract language indicates, the operation of what Adorno here calls a “social law” (and elsewhere will simply refer to as “mediation”) is a nonpersonal, universally effective determining process. This is a relation of thin determination. We can see further evidence of Adorno breaking with rich determination accounts in his account of reification. As we saw, for Lukács and Honneth reification is understood to be a kind of rich determination. Adorno does not understand reification to operate in this way. He rather understands reification to be an epistemological tendency of the agent. Reification, for Adorno, is the propensity of the individual to accept concepts as exhaustively modeling their object. In other words, reification is for Adorno equivalent to what he calls “identity thinking”—the exclusion and forgetting of that which does not correspond to the concept.69 Jarvis characterizes reification for Adorno as “the conversion of a process into a thing; particularly the presentation of social process as the property of a thing.”70 What Jarvis does not note is that this misidentification, the occlusion of the mediating process in the object, can only be a product of the agents taking the concept to exhaust its object. A founding principle of Adorno’s analyses of social phenomena is that objects, if attended to with full attention, reveal the full complex of the social relations they are imbricated with.71 As such, the conventional model of reification, in which social processes congeal into natural properties and are thereby concealed, cannot directly apply to Adorno’s work, simply because full experience of the object would undo this congelation. There needs to be an additional constraint, then, that prevents the agent’s undergoing this “full, unreduced experience.”72 Marx attempts to understand reification (though he does not use this term) as the consequence of a material process, which results in

the interpenetration of concepts and so ciet y

63

processes becoming “stamped upon” objects, reified into apparent properties of objects.73 For Marx, the experience of objects is mystified and obscured just due to this material process. However, as we have said, Adorno cannot understand reification in this way. The object, for Adorno, is an antireifying force (if experienced fully). This means that reification cannot be identified with some property of material processes (or properties of objects, resulting from these processes). It rather needs to be some kind of epistemological error that blinds us to the true nature of those material processes and the physiognomic objects that testify to them. For Adorno, then, the translation of mediacy into immediacy that reification refers to is not the consequence of some material process in Marx’s sense, but is more generally an epistemological flaw in the concept that entails a neglect of the true nature of the object. If reification is for Adorno an epistemological tendency (to identify objects with their concepts), then reification is not the upshot of social structures interacting with the practical commitments or psychological states of the agent. Rather, reification is identified by Adorno with an epistemological tendency of the agent that subtends the affective and pragmatic specificity of that agent. This subtending epistemological tendency is just the agent’s propensity to identify concepts and particulars (that is, identity thinking). This project of identifying concepts with particulars is the upshot of the ongoing self-preserving comportment of the agent (which, as Adorno’s sociology purports to show, is enforced as an ever-present concern by social structures). Reification acquires its force—society and the form of thought in society has become predominantly reified—just because reification is the immediate upshot of self-preservation. Reification identifies an object with its concept—it is a vouchsafe of control over that object; it assuages the anxiety that the environment creates in the self-preserver. As the social totality has increasingly compelled self-preservation as a pressing task, and in an increasingly intense way, reification is a sociohistorical phenomenon, which accordingly obtains with increasingly universal scope. My interpretation of Adorno’s use of the term “reification,” although heterodox, is also found in Gillian Rose’s The Melancholy Science. Rose understands reification to take place by means of the identification of the concept with its object:

64

the interpenetration of concepts and so ciet y

Identity thinking is reified thinking. . . . Identity thinking makes unlike things alike. To believe that a concept really covers its object, when it does not, is to believe falsely that the object is the equal of its concept. . . . It is the way unlike things appear to be identical or equal, and the mode of thinking which can only consider them as equal, which is reification as a social phenomenon and as a process of thinking for Adorno.74 [Adorno sometimes posits] “complete reification”: the concept’s apparent identity with its object has become unbreakable.75 Rose ties in reification with the agent’s propensity to take the concept to exhaust the object. Rose correctly identifies Adorno’s heterodox understanding of reification as a form of thin determination, which subtends the specificity of the individual. As Rose brings out, reification for Adorno is not contingent, but is rather an inherent property of selfhood. Adorno himself gestures toward this conception of reification in Aesthetic Theory: “The correlative of intention is reification.”76 This tight relation between reification and intention is explicable in terms of the pragmatic context in which concepts are put to use. Concepts are bulwarks against the threatening discontinuity of experience not mediated by universals. Concepts are generated by the primitive consciousness to provide understanding and control of the environment, with a view to satisfying the drive to self-preservation. In order to be assured that one’s actions will provide control, there must in turn be an assurance that one’s manipulation of the phenomena is a manipulation of those factors that are genuinely germane to one’s survival. In other words, one must take these conceptual mediations to be a genuine reflection of the structure of the world, rather than a mere delusion; one must identify the concept and the particular. Accordingly, intention and reification become correlates, as the latter is the precondition for the exercise of the former. Reification is not a form of social influence or determination intrinsically, but is rather a necessary correlate with the individual’s attempt to employ concepts in order to cognize the world. Adorno’s treatment of reification represents a further recognition on his part that rich determination models are unable to provide the universality that his account will require. The deeper problem that

the interpenetration of concepts and so ciet y

65

Benjamin recognized and that thin determination models are intended to address is the difficulty of understanding recondite cultural domains (which are internally differentiated) as being universally determined by some subtending determining process. We have already seen—in the context of his remarks on Beethoven—that Adorno points toward the existence of thin determination, which mediates social “spheres” without conducting this determination through the specificity of the members of these social spheres.77 We need now to expand on this idea of thin determination, in order to make clear how Adorno is able to confidently assert the social universality of nonbasic conceptual arrays. Adorno is scarcely forthcoming at all on this issue, most often simply attempting to close this explanatory gap through exhortation and analogy. Adorno’s understanding of reification will be important in developing the thin determination relation that Adorno relies on. But it is clear that the explanatory force of reification in isolation is relatively meager. Reification for Adorno is only a resilient propensity to identify concepts with the particulars that fall under them, and so it has no determining influence on which concepts the agent forms; it can only determine how these concepts are understood and employed by the subject. What we need is an account of how the social whole is capable of influencing which concepts the subject comes to form; these concepts will then, via reification, go on to be mistakenly identified with their objects. This will give us an explanation of how people can universally bear concepts with identical array relations.

“Idea-Tools” and Regularity In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer understood the concept to be an “idea-tool,” the function of which was to seek and impose manipulable regularity onto the subject’s experiential field. The process of concept formation was claimed to be a constant process of meeting the subject’s self-preserving needs, and synchronizing the subject’s conceptual layout to the pragmatic structures within which these self-preserving needs were exercised. While concepts substantially occlude their objects, they are nonetheless formed in dialogue with those objects. It is the regularities exhibited by objects, and groups

66

the interpenetration of concepts and so ciet y

of objects, that allow the consciousness to generate universals capable of ranging over these exhibited regularities and unifying them in judgments. (As universals operate through the application of criteria, they would be incapable of unifying phenomena with no exhibited likeness or regularity whatsoever.) These concepts are reified, just because the subject takes these exhibited regularities to exhaust the nature of the object entirely. This process of concept formation is pliable in the sense that concepts gain their normative force from the self-preserving subsumption of regularities; should the exhibited regularities change in an important fashion, the concept’s constitutive criteria would be required to be modified in order to accommodate these alterations. Concept formation, then, is responsive to the exhibited regularities found in experience of objects. Concepts are determined by these regularities; and this determination does not work through the subject’s affective or pragmatic properties. The way in which concepts are formed and employed is jointly determined by sociological structures (enforcing self-preservation as an ever-present concern) and reification (this self-preserving impetus translating into the identification of objects with concepts). If that from which concepts are formed can be similarly determined universally—if the social totality can be seen as having the ability to determine the exhibited regularities from which concepts are continually drawn and confirmed—then we can have an account of thin determination that can ensure the social universality of nonbasic conceptual arrays. A picture like this would side step the problem of differentiated pragmatic contexts in social wholes generating differentiated kinds of conceptual array (the problem of “class consciousness” we looked at above). It would also dovetail nicely with Adorno’s account of the role and generation of concepts, and keep his strong emphasis on the importance of self-preservation. The clearest problem with this account is that it relies on a wholly mysterious notion, namely, the idea that society is somehow capable of determining the nature of the phenomenal experience in response to which concepts are formed. By placing social determination beneath the level of individual specificity—in applying to the regularities that objects exhibit—I have also made this thin determination very difficult to explain or comprehend. The question is: How can social structures, or social processes of determination, come

the interpenetration of concepts and so ciet y

67

into contact with and thereby determine the “exhibited regularities” from which concepts are continually being generated, and to which concepts are continually being calibrated? I freely concede that this represents a hard philosophical problem, which has force. I do not think that Adorno has a developed response to this problem, nor does he have any philosophical arguments that could represent nascent responses to this problem. I suspect that the problem, construed in a conventional fashion, is not amenable to a response free of mystical or queer social ontological entities. It may be amenable to being dissolved, however. The problem, as posed, concerns the relationship between an isolated consciousness and social processes, and the method in which these social processes are capable of determining the immediate experience of that isolated consciousness. A number of Adorno’s assertions, which might seem hyperbolic or analogical, should perhaps instead be read as recommending a revision of this manner of conceiving of consciousness: Nevertheless, in an individualistic society, the general not only realizes itself through the interplay of particulars, but society is essentially the substance of the individual.  .  .  . For this reason, social analysis can learn incomparably more from individual experience than Hegel conceded.78 Stubbornly the monads balk at their real dependence as a species as well as at the collective aspect of all forms and contents of their consciousness—of the forms, although they are that universal which nominalism denies, and of the contents, though the individual has no experience, nor any so-called empirical material, that the universal has not pre-digested and supplied.79 In the course of his materialist revision of theories of consciousness, Adorno posits the consciousness as neither material nor immaterial.80 Analogously, Adorno is here collapsing the oppositions between the individual and the social in his account of the generation of consciousness. There is a collective substrate that provides the precondition for even the most basic operations of the individual consciousness, it is claimed. One would struggle to call this more than a sketch of a revised

68

the interpenetration of concepts and so ciet y

conception of consciousness, in moving social structures from being opposed to the isolated consciousness to instead being continuous and imbricated with individual consciousnesses at the most fundamental level. While not being without difficulties of its own, this sketch of a revised conception of the grounds for consciousness has the virtue that the explanatory gap between social structures and the phenomenal texture of immediate experience ceases to be a gap; the phenomenal texture of immediate experience is claimed to be intrinsically predicated on, and hence open to determination by, supraindividual structures. This can only be offered as a peremptory overview of a possible method of further developing Adorno’s conception of consciousness. Regardless of whether this particular method of covering the explanatory gap works, it is nonetheless clear that Adorno relies on a thin determination model. In particular, Adorno in fact explicitly relies on the notion that social structures are capable of determining the phenomenal character of immediate experience. Brian O’Connor, in his monograph Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, provides an alternative method of getting at this aspect of Adorno’s account. O’Connor notes that Adorno holds the social totality to have “a determinative influence on objects.”81 Prior to the application of this determinative influence, objects are bereft of “inherent conceptuality.”82 Working with the reading of Dialectic of Enlightenment adumbrated in the previous chapter, we can understand the object’s lack of inherent conceptuality to consist in the object’s radical particularity: its inability to present properties that are not entirely specific to it. The object, then, is incapable of providing any phenomenal aspects that recommend one universal rather than another.83 As has been seen, at the outset this lack of phenomenal features that could guide concept formation is overcome by simple fiat. The urgency of the terror of self-preservation for the primitive consciousness impels the subject to impose concepts onto its experience. However, concept formation is an ongoing process, which continues throughout the life of the consciousness. Concepts are continually abstracted from and confirmed in immediate experience. While the complete absence of guiding phenomenal features in the primitive consciousness stage is not now a problem—we are now in possession of at least the basic set of concepts formed by the primitive consciousness and usually a far larger set than this—there is

the interpenetration of concepts and so ciet y

69

nonetheless potentially an open-ended, multiply realizable set of phenomenal features (made possible by the basic concepts) that could compel various conceptual arrays. In other words, once equipped with a set of basic concepts, we enter an experiential world populated by objects that could be conceptualized in a multiplicity of ways. It is at this stage that O’Connor claims social determination is applied. As O’Connor puts it, society forms the “theater” in which objects are invested with determinate concepts, the social totality having the capacity to enforce the formation of concepts of objects.84 As O’Connor brings out, the application of social determination at this stage (to the object itself, prior to the concepts being derived from or checked against the object) allows for conceptuality at all levels (whether basic or nonbasic) to be identically compelled by the social whole. O’Connor does not put it in these terms, but the determination that he identifies as structurally central for Adorno’s negative dialectics is thin determination. Outside of this issue of whether Adorno does make use of thin determination, there are compelling reasons why Adorno should make use of thin, rather than rich, determination. Adorno himself claims: “The whole which theory expresses is contained in the individual object to be analysed. What links the two is a matter of substance: the social totality.”85 The use of the term “substance” is intentionally provocative. The phenomenal object’s substance (essence) is the social totality, just because the social totality constitutes the phenomenal object’s phenomenal character. This intercession of the social into the phenomenal shows that the structure of Adorno’s account features the kind of thin determination O’Connor and I identified as necessary.86 Putting this thin determination into place shores up Adorno’s commitment to the social universality of nonbasic conceptual arrays. Concept formation at every level (both basic and nonbasic) has its mechanisms determined by self-preservation, with social structures enforcing self-preservation as an ever-present concern. For basic conceptual sets and arrays, social universality is enforced in the first place by the universally obtaining pragmatic structures disclosed by the structure of the human body, and in the second place by the universal intersubjective mechanisms disclosed by object-relations theory. For nonbasic conceptual sets and arrays, the mechanism of concept formation is fixed by self-preservation. In addition, the phenomenal materials worked by

70

the interpenetration of concepts and so ciet y

this mechanism are also fixed to be the same for all individuals, by the thin determination that is applied by the social totality to objects. As a result, we can be confident that conceptual arrays will be formed in the same way, with the same structure, for everyone. Both the process and that which is subjected to the process are forced by society to be the same in every case. We saw above that it was crucial that Adorno made conceptual arrays come out as contingently necessary at every level. If they were merely contingent, we could not expect them to be the same for every person, and so the universal validity of his criticisms of concepts would be lost. If they were merely necessary, criticism would lose any point, as there would be no way to alter or change these concepts and the behaviors and claims they lead us to make. What is needed, then, is contingent necessity, where concepts have to be employed by everyone in the same way due to some contingent influence. Criticism then becomes possible through interceding in and undermining this contingent influence. For nonbasic conceptual arrays, we have now found an account that delivers this. The contingent influence is the activity of thin determination. This contingent necessity will be modulated across time, as the sociohistorical structures that thinly determine phenomenal objects undergo change, and thus the “substance” of those phenomenal objects will in turn alter. This will bring new conceptual arrays into being; this underwrites Adorno’s claim that concepts and conceptual problems are sociohistorically relative. The relation between sociohistorical content and conceptuality, which Adorno makes frequent use of but rarely seeks to justify, can be understood now as a tight determining relation. This tight determining relation also intrinsically leads to a dialectical theory of history. The social totality determines objects and, by extension, concepts. However, as Adorno notes, concepts have a normative surplus.87 This normative surplus is entailed by concepts being abstract—as they are not reducible to the impulses and influences that create them, they retain the ability to abstract away from them. This lends concepts a semantic and critical content all of their own, which gives concepts the ability to develop this content, and critically posit new normative conceptions that outstrip the states of affairs that these concepts apply to. Social totalities determine concepts but do not thereby wholly

the interpenetration of concepts and so ciet y

71

nullify their critical moment. The full exercise of the normative surplus contained in concepts is capable of interceding in the social totality that created them and bringing about change in it. Such a change in the social structure will in turn lead to a change in the determination of the phenomenal object and (by extension) the concept, bringing into existence new normative surpluses that are capable of criticizing and interceding in the social structures that brought those new concepts into existence. While the social totality determines concepts, then, concepts nonetheless themselves in turn determine and constrain the social totality; each is capable of compelling alteration in the other. With this account of thin determination, we have given a solution to the problem of the universal validity that Adorno grants to his conceptual analyses. Even though concepts are based on mere selfpreservation, there are determining constraints at every social level that make conceptual arrays fall out as the same in each case, with contingent necessity. This has allowed us to clarify Adorno’s theory of the concept and of society and his theory of the way in which these two spheres interrelate and alter each other. And we have seen, on this account, that criticism looks to be possible with universal scope, and that criticism has the capacity to create change in both concepts and society. We have also seen that conceptual problems are intrinsically interwoven with social structures—as we will see, this will allow us to transfer descriptions in either of these domains (the conceptual, the social) into the other. This will have significant consequences when we turn, in the next chapter, to the question of truth. It will also have significant consequences when we turn to Adorno’s philosophy of art and aesthetic experience. For Adorno, authentic artworks are entirely autonomous and hermetically sealed off against heteronomous states of affairs in the societies external to them. However, it is, Adorno claims, through this very hermeticity— this very refusal of any attempt to know or reflect society—that artworks reflect and criticize the rationality and social structure outside of them. The notion of thin determination we have developed in this chapter will be invaluable in making clear how this is possible; and our account of the universality of conceptual arrays will, in addition, be vital in understanding how artworks, for Adorno, can be true. Before we turn to the next chapter, in which we begin to address Adorno’s theory of truth, at the close of this chapter we finally need to

72

the interpenetration of concepts and so ciet y

clarify an important point of detail in this idea of “thin determination” that I have been developing.

Revelatory and Delusive Determination With this account of thin determination, in which the experienced object serves as a kind of physiognomic reflection of the social totality that determines it, we have gone a long way to grounding the kind of analysis that Adorno likes to apply to objects and cultural phenomena (like artworks). For Adorno, the individual object contains in some sense the social totality, and analysis of it yields up knowledge of this totality: “The whole which theory expresses is contained in the individual object to be analyzed. What links the two is a matter of substance: the social totality.”88 On the other hand, while the object is able to yield up this kind of information, it does not always yield it up without effort. The determining relations that are applied to the object are not always transparent. Adorno understands thin determination to be equally capable of concealing the social totality, and thereby providing an occlusion of the genuine state of the social totality that constitutes the object: “[Ideology is] the surreptitious acquisition by indirect things of a directness vested with the authority of absolute, unimpeachable, subjectively evident being-in-itself.”89 There is, therefore, an ambiguity in Adorno’s conception of determination; it appears to have two contradictory effects, being capable of either making apparent the whole in the part or investing the part with an ideological phenomenal character that obscures the true constitution of the social totality that gave rise to it. Thin determination is understood by Adorno, then, as having two distinct characters—there is delusive determination, which serves to occlude the true nature of objects and the determining processes that determine those objects, and revelatory determination, in which the determining relations are transparently visible in the object and thereby allow the object to metonymically display features of the social totality. We saw that Adorno straightforwardly posits all immediate experience to be determined by the social totality that serves as the “substance” of the phenomenal object: “Things of the mind are not constituted by the cognitive intentionality of consciousness, but are based

the interpenetration of concepts and so ciet y

73

objectively, far beyond the individual author, on the collective life of the mind, in accordance with its imminent laws.”90 Given that the social totality determines the phenomenal character of the object, delusive determination appears to be a pressing difficulty. Adorno requires an account of how the determining relations that, in some circumstances, transparently testify to the true nature of the object and determining social totality can, in other circumstances, serve to occlude the true nature of the object and social totality. Fittingly, given Adorno’s emphasis on both terms throughout his work, one can provide an explanation of this aspect of Adorno’s account by virtue of appealing to Adorno’s theory of reification and selfpreservation. Reification prompts the subject to take the concept’s application to be an exhaustive modeling of its object, rather than merely a pragmatic construct. The application of a concept is determined both by the pragmatic structures within which the agent is embedded and by the thin determination of the object’s immediate phenomenal character. If for any object its relevance to the subject’s self-preservation has no reference to, or diverges from, its true constitution, the resultant concept (modeling the exhibited regularities only with relevance to self-preservation) will be delusive, as it will not take in the object’s broader constitution, which is not immediately relevant to self-preservation. One can see an example of this in Marx’s analysis of “free” labor. For the subject, the absence of obvious coercion and the reciprocal signing of a contract upon starting work appear to constitute a free exchange of labor.91 Most importantly, in the context of Adorno’s philosophy, it is imperative to the agent’s survival (as well as that of society) that they behave as if their labor truly were free.92 Society compels the formation of a concept of labor that is arrayed with the idea of its being free. But this is wrong; the “free exchange” of labor is asymmetrical—the purchaser of labor needs to make their purchase only in order to enlarge their capital,93 whereas the laborer must sell their labor in order to provide for their own subsistence.94 The genuine legal freedom that both laborer and employer enjoy (which is reflected in the contract each signs of their own volition) conceals the compulsion under which the laborer makes this contract and the social organization that enforces this compulsion. With this test case from Marx, one can see that if an

74

the interpenetration of concepts and so ciet y

object is, in its immediacy, determined by the social whole, then the concept of the object becomes delusive just because the individual’s processing of that immediacy only has relevance to their immediate self-interest (selling their labor), which ignores the larger social whole in which they and the object are imbricated (the social organization that makes the workers’ selling their labor linked to their survival). This is in line with the founding thesis of Dialectic of Enlightenment (which is carried throughout Adorno’s oeuvre) that the form of dialectical conceptuality that has served to secure the self-preservation of the individual is in fact increasingly undermining the prospects for selfpreservation and of proper comprehension of one’s environment. The dialectical irony is that fixation on self-preservation forces the subject to be incapable of properly comprehending the constitution of its cultural environment. As the complexity of social structure develops—in line with but in advance of the development of our rational faculties—increasingly we fail to be able to understand and keep in view the full structural context in which we live and work. The very drive for self-preservation that generated conceptuality serves as a constraint that frustrates the true goal of conceptuality—to model its object without remainder. So, delusive determination results from the diremption between the full complexity of the object’s constitution and the object’s constitution as captured by the concept. This diremption is caused by the selfpreserving impetus that determines the concept’s operation and causes it to only model those aspects of the object that are immediately salient for the self-preservation of the subject. Given Adorno’s claim that selfpreservation is continually pressed as a going concern by the social totality, it is clear that delusive determination is the standard epistemological relation the subject stands in to the object. The object, however, immediately testifies to the true constitution of both itself and the social totality that produces it, bearing this content “on its face” as it were. Betraying the strong influence Benjamin had on Adorno’s terminology (if not the use to which this terminology was put), Adorno often terms this the object’s “physiognomic” character.95 The object has a physiognomic character, just because its phenomenal character is determined by the sociohistorical whole in which the object is encountered, and the object accordingly bears the traces of these social processes in the texture of experience of that object.

the interpenetration of concepts and so ciet y

75

This gives the object the capacity to disclose information not merely about its own constitution, but about the structure of the social whole that constituted it. This is the object’s revelatory determination. It is the conjunction of this revelatory determination with the constraints of reification and self-preservation that generates delusive determination. While the phenomenal object physiognomically testifies to the society that determined it, the concept is forced to only partially model it. The revelation of the object’s true ground amounts to undoing the effects of the conjunction of reification and self-preservation, and rediscovering the true immediacy of the object. This true immediacy— this phenomenal character—is created by the thin determination of the social totality. This means that a full investigation of the object in its full immediacy in fact leads us to see it as mediated, and leads us to try to comprehend the mediating relations that created the phenomenal object. As Adorno puts it: “To dialectics, immediacy does not maintain its immediate pose. Instead of becoming the ground it becomes a moment.”96 Thin determination has emerged as the grounds for Adorno’s confidence in the social universality of his analyses. Thin determination also serves to provide a warrant for Adorno’s assertion that objects serve as physiognomies of their social context and, thereby, are capable of disclosing conceptual critiques through “full, unreduced experience” of those objects. The core problem that we have now found is the antagonism between delusive and revelatory determination. It is now an important question as to how delusive determination can be overcome. The putative “overcoming” of delusive determination is clearly understood by Adorno to be multiply realizable. There is, of course, a strong line of thought in Adorno’s philosophy that the unorthodox employment of concepts in philosophy can be sufficient to undo the delusive nature of these concepts, and to lead the reader into comprehension of truths and also (to anticipate) into experience of the nonidentical. On the other hand, there is the more elusive claim in Adorno’s aesthetic writings (but paradigmatically in Aesthetic Theory) that “authentic” art is likewise capable of breaking through delusive determination and yielding up truths. The production of truth—the undoing of delusive determination—is very different in the case of art, as art is incapable of directly employing concepts and conceptual materials in the same way as philosophy.

76

the interpenetration of concepts and so ciet y

By the close of this chapter, then, we can see that art and philosophy share an identical, and demanding, task, namely, to undo the effects of delusive determination—to break through the selfpreserving and reifying concept in order to make a form of experience possible in which the phenomenal object and its true mediation are made manifest. Both art and philosophy are obliged to take very different approaches to realizing this. Art is not philosophy—it is not a discursive medium that advances arguments in the same way, nor (as we will see) does art comprise the same materials as philosophy. (This will be true for Adorno even in the case of literature, where we might think that concepts can be directly used in the text.) Given these differences, we cannot consider art’s and philosophy’s treatment of this problem at the same time or run them in parallel as we go. This would conflate what are significantly different approaches to a shared problem. We will find that, added to this, Adorno often makes bold claims about art’s being a genuine form of knowledge, its making (heterodox) use of concepts, and its having a rational character. For these reasons, we need to select a starting point. And, again for these reasons, philosophy seems to be the place to begin. In looking at the case of philosophy, we will see how concepts could be manipulated so as to undo delusive determination and make comprehension of the nonidentical possible. We will then, having established this, be in a position to see how art approaches this problem—and how Adorno’s allusions to philosophical problems in art might make sense, and what he might be asking us to understand by them. In the following two chapters, then, I will give an account of how Adorno understands truth to be instantiated in philosophy. Chapter 3 will cover Adorno’s unusual idea of “texture” in philosophy and rhetorical form (which will have very significant consequences for our understanding of how aesthetic structures can be conceptual and sociohistorically critical). In chapter 4, we will then move to Adorno’s claim that this texture must be conjoined to a “performance” in the consciousness—a cognitive complement and manipulation of this texture. Again, this will have significant consequences for our understanding of Adorno’s theory of the “shudder” in aesthetic experience and its linkage with the nonidentical.

3 Negativism and Truth

At the outset of this book, I claimed that for Adorno both art and philosophy were able to become true only by interceding in the structures of our experience. In order to begin making sense of this, we first had to clarify just what Adorno understood the structures of experience to be. What the last two chapters have shown us is that Adorno understands the structures of both experience and reason to be underwritten by a great many epistemological processes. Summarizing the work of the previous two chapters, we can give the following as a broad map of the processes that serve to lend experience and reason their form, on Adorno’s account: Self-Preservation: Initially compelled through the pragmatic demands of the embodied individual; latterly compelled by the structure of the Social Totality. Self-preservation in turn compels Reification, which determines the nature of Dialectical Concepts, which are compelled by self-preservation, and intrinsically intertwined with reification as a result; dialectical concepts abstract away from the perceivable regularities in objects and identifies the objects with these abstractions (a propensity termed Identity Thinking by Adorno). Dialectical concepts are themselves determined by

78

n e g ativ ism a n d t ru t h

Thin Determination applied to the object by the social totality, and breaking down into Delusive Determination, consisting in the conjunction of thin determination with self-preservation and reification. Revelatory Determination: An ideal relationship of the consciousness to the object, which circumvents the effects of reification and self-preservation on the concept, achievable by Dialectical Philosophy and Authentic Art. Of course, a list like this will inevitably exclude some important points of detail, and may make Adorno’s methodology appear more programmatic than it is in fact.1 But this is an accurate thumbnail sketch of those epistemological factors that Adorno understands to be in play whenever consciousness tries to grasp its object. This structured collection of processes is responsible for the problematic that consciousness must circumvent; and the final two members of the list (Dialectical Philosophy, Authentic Art) represent what Adorno takes to be the best ways of successfully navigating this problematic. I said that the above was a list of “epistemological processes”—why, then, have I included Dialectical Philosophy and Authentic Art on this list? I have done so because it is my view that both philosophy and art are for Adorno not external to the processes that determine experience and reason, but are rather interventions in those processes, which steer and determine the fabric of experience itself. Art and philosophy are themselves epistemological processes and, crucially, the truths of each will also have a temporally extended, processual nature. Looking again at the thumbnail sketch above, intended to give the rough structure of the way in which epistemological processes interact, we can perhaps see just how contentious Adorno’s position truly is. Adorno’s account of concepts quite intentionally sails near the limits of cogency. Adorno refuses to allow concepts absolute autonomy, asking us to understand them as thoroughly determined by impulses and sociohistorical context. On the other hand, Adorno refuses to reduce the concept to these heteronomous determinants. Adorno wants to understand concepts (and thought, by extension) as simultaneously autonomous and heteronomous, as explicable both in terms of the demands

n e g at ivism a nd t ru t h

79

of reason in itself and in terms of extrarational influences. This has the great hermeneutic virtue that thoughts and arguments become navigable in a multiplicity of registers—arguments can be tackled both in terms of their rational consistency and in terms of their sociohistorical context. (This is a familiar feature of Adorno’s criticism of other philosophers.) This gives the critical philosopher a greater number of avenues to explore in order to locate internal contradictions. On the other hand, it is less than clear how this position can remain internally coherent once cashed out. The epistemological structure given above is an admixture of deductive and empirical content; it combines claims that are supported by means of pure reasoning and claims that are grounded thoroughly in empirical work. At several important points Adorno slides in a less than obvious fashion between these two methods of justification in order to motivate his account. (The account of dialectical conceptuality in the previous chapter is an obvious example of this, running together both sociological and transcendental argument.) This admixture intensifies the vulnerability of Adorno’s account to dismissal or objection. Purely autonomous, deductive derivations of epistemological capacities cannot be expected to terminate in the kind of structure given above (indeed, a purely deductive account that shared Adorno’s concerns would likely terminate in something very similar to a Kantian or, at best, Hegelian theory of experience). Contrastingly, investigations of epistemological faculties that are conducted in a purely empirical register, and purely according to empirical structures of investigation, tend to terminate in reductive accounts that suborn cognition under heteronomous processes. Adorno’s metamethodological decision to intermix these methodologies therefore itself stands in need of some justification. The standpoint of neither empiricist nor deductive philosophy will internally lead us to adopt the other. Adorno’s philosophy syncopates between these standpoints. For this syncopation to be more than merely arbitrary, we need some means of justifying it; and, accordingly, this form of justification must be external to both empiricist and deductive forms of explanation. Intriguingly, Adorno’s response to this issue is phenomenological. The epistemological structures enumerated above are neither deductively nor inductively acquired, but rather are derivative on experiences of objects. Adorno develops his general

80

n e g ativ i sm a n d t ru t h

account of epistemic structure by focusing on particular experiences of epistemic relationships between consciousness and object.

Adorno and Husserl While Adorno’s philosophical method is in an important sense phenomenological, Adorno cannot be unproblematically grouped with conventional phenomenologists like Husserl or Heidegger. (Notoriously so in the latter case; but Adorno’s criticisms of Heidegger are embedded in a much larger context than those he levies against Husserl.)2 Adorno’s criticisms of Husserl3 show both how Adorno’s response to the problem of justifying philosophical claims is importantly continuous with Husserl and how Adorno nonetheless importantly diverges from the phenomenological project in general. For this reason, it is worth exploring Adorno’s relationship to Husserl in some detail. Demonstrating Adorno’s great facility for compressing a great deal of philosophical content into epigrammatic form, the beginning of Against Epistemology describes Adorno’s “contact with the subject matter” (Husserl’s phenomenology) as entailing “the obligation to argue effectively against a method designed to forego the need for argument.”4 Adorno will frequently argue against Husserl in the name of Husserl’s program— namely, Husserl’s attempt to properly model the presented phenomena without making any philosophical decisions that could raise the need for argument.5 Adorno shares with Husserl the core intuition that the separation of the structures of thought and object is, in principle, impossible. However, Adorno feels that Husserl’s approach to this issue contains unacceptably idealistic, and dogmatic, residues. In his paper “Husserl and the Problem of Idealism” from 1940, Adorno argues: It appears to me that the sphere of the factual and the sphere of thought are involved in such a way that any attempt to separate them altogether and to reduce the world to either of those principles is necessarily doomed to failure. It is most likely that the very abstraction which the contrast of the real and ideal implies, is derivative to such a degree that we are not entitled to regard this abstraction as a basic principle which could be attributed to nature of being itself.6

n e gat ivism a nd t ru t h

81

This provides the fulcrum for Adorno’s attack on Husserl and, in turn, for clarifying the degree to which Adorno can be understood as having a phenomenologically informed method. Phenomenological method, as practiced by Husserl, is understood by Adorno to comprise mutually contradictory impulses—namely, the impulse to model one’s philosophical categories on the phenomena themselves, and the impulse to have this modeling terminate in abstraction. It is this that Adorno is attacking above—in reducing talk of phenomena to talk of the ideal or eidetic structures underpinning those phenomena, one forfeits the original goal of immersing oneself in, and exhaustively comprehending, those phenomena. Adorno’s complaint, especially as it goes on to be developed in Against Epistemology, is that phenomenology, to be true to its own concept, must immerse itself in the phenomena without prejudgment—and this also means without the prejudgment that the phenomena will be knowable. It is, I think, only partially misleading to say that phenomenological method, divested of these preconceptions, will approximate in large part to Adorno’s philosophical approach. The deepest preconception that Adorno identifies as at work in Husserl concerns the epistemic availability of the phenomena: The doctrine that everything is mediated, even supporting immediacy, is irreconcilable with the urge to “reduction” and is stigmatized as logical nonsense. . . . [Husserl] seems to pander to the fruitless transcendent critique which repays the empty claim to an overarching “standpoint” with being non-binding and with the fact that it never did enter into the controversy, but prejudged it “from above,” as Husserl would have said.7 This “controversy” just concerns the makeup of phenomenal experience. If it is subtended by a complex structure of mediating processes, the phenomenological desire to know the phenomena will entail a rejection of the Husserlian abstraction of eidetic structures from those phenomena. It will instead entail dialectical critique, which will seek to uncover these mediating structures. Adorno’s complaint is that Husserl never “enters into this controversy”—in other words, never considers these competing metaepistemic positions, and instead plumps for one without argument. For Adorno, this can only be construable as a

82

n e g ativ ism a n d t ru t h

dogmatic foundational decision to treat the phenomena as immediate. And so phenomenology, in Adorno’s view, betrays itself at the very beginning—in making a tacit, dogmatic decision about the constitution of phenomena. Adorno consistently locates Husserl’s problems as both decision problems (where Husserl is making dogmatic, foundational choices that he cannot provide ultimate justification for) and description problems (where these same foundational choices cannot after all be descriptively supported, as a clear-eyed description of the phenomena rules against Husserl). These problems are strictly speaking separate— decision problems concern problems of justification for epistemic claims, and have no impact on whether one’s description of phenomena deriving from these epistemic claims is accurate or not. (Indeed, descriptions of phenomena should be sustainable across a number of epistemic accounts.) Nonetheless, Adorno consistently runs these together—repeatedly, Husserl makes an epistemically unjustifiable foundational decision, which in turns obfuscates the correct comprehension of the phenomena. Adorno works with the fundamental idea that philosophy free of foundational claims—a “net of ungarbled cognition”8—delivers the correct conception of the epistemic and ontological status of objects of knowledge. Adorno “pushes the phenomenological model [where it] . . . cannot afford to go”9 just because he dismantles it as a model, leaving only a phenomenological comportment toward the object, without any abstract or dogmatic features that could make it insensitive to the object. Phenomenology fails because it is not phenomenological enough. Phenomenal objects (“noema,” for Husserl) are in constant flux, and this level of particularity is not capturable by eidetic abstractions: “Though the noema is not just supposed to bear the entire determination of the unreduced thing, yet, as always petrified and fixed, it is also more reified than things (which do change).”10 If we are to return to the things themselves—those things that we truly desire to know— there must be no foundational philosophical claims standing between us and those phenomena. I said above that Adorno “ran together” Husserl’s decision and description problems. We can now see that this is justified, given Adorno’s belief that the content of experience is in a constant state of flux (or potential flux not yet realized). Any abstract,

n e g at ivism a nd t ru t h

83

atemporal eidetic structures or dogmatic philosophical decisions will only stand between us and the phenomena we wish to know, and prevent a successful epistemological relationship to them. Accordingly, cutting ourselves off from the phenomena in this way will also remove the very source of justification that such eidetic structures and essences would need to appeal to: Husserl hopes to crystallize out of factical givens results, freed from facticity, by means of “exemplary analysis.” . . . One cannot see beforehand what would change in the ostensible states of the essence with variation, and indeed variation “quite as we please.” The illusion of the indifference of the essence to variation can be protected only because in the refuge of the realm of fantasy, essence is spared the test of its invariance. Only experience can be enlightening as to whether such modifications touch upon essence or not. . . . At the decisive moment Husserl capitulates before traditional theory of abstraction, for his own initiation never escaped it.11 Adorno’s complaint is that Husserl’s eidetic structures are not being compared to experience itself, which is the only legitimate grounds for maintaining these essences. Indeed, for Husserl eidetic structures are justified through imaginative variation of the possible appearances and structures of phenomena. Adorno takes this to be exemplary of Husserl’s carefully avoiding comparing his conceptual structures with the texture of experience. Adorno’s method, by contrast, will be the complete overthrow of all production of abstract structures beyond those that are recommended by the texture of experience itself. Adorno will not claim against Husserl that there are no structures or enduring determinacies in experience. He freely concedes: “Opposing the solid to the chaotic and mastering nature would never succeed without a moment of solidity in the subjugated. Or else it would constantly expose the subject as a lie. . . . Sheer chaos, from which reflective spirit disqualifies the world for the sake of its own total power, is just as much spirit’s product as the cosmos which it establishes to revere.”12 Thought will have fixed points; but these fixed points must ever and again be referred against experience itself, in order to continually

84

n e g ativ ism a n d t ru t h

draw their justification from it. His refusal to stipulatively define his concepts emerges as not a mere quirk of his work, but directly recommended by the criticisms he has made in Against Epistemology. Intriguingly, in a remark that will become more resonant in light of chapter 4, Adorno points out that the absolute incidence of social mediation makes genuine openness to the texture of experience very difficult to achieve. However, once we do achieve a genuinely open relationship to phenomenal objects, the resulting experience is disruptive: The suddenness of intuition competes in its resistance to social control, which wants to scare thoughts out of their hiding place. So-called inspirations are neither as irrational, nor as rhapsodical, as both Bergson and scientism claim. Unconscious knowledge not entirely subject to mechanisms of control explodes in inspiration and bursts through the wall of conventionalized judgements “fitting reality.”  .  .  . Discontinuity in intuition does honour to continuity falsified by organization.13 We will need to find a way of seeing Adorno’s phenomenological approach as being capable of producing an experience of “bursting through the wall” of those delusive concepts that stand between us and objects. We will see that both art and philosophy achieve this through guiding and manipulating the structures of our experience.

Overcoming Delusive Determination Taking this phenomenological approach to at least hold off the question of justifying Adorno’s account of the structures that govern consciousness, we can now consider a pressing problem with Adorno’s account. Adorno takes delusive determination to apply to all members of the social totality and at virtually all times. As a result, Adorno claims that objects cannot be captured by the straightforward application of concepts. The concept, for Adorno, is an obstacle to a proper and full understanding of the object, and we have seen that he has a reasonably complex and thorough account of why this is. But he does not give an account of any great detail of how this delusive determination, and the obstacle of the concept, can be overcome. Adorno is reasonably clear

n e gat ivism a n d t ru t h

85

that he does think such an overcoming is possible, and indeed he identifies it with the central aim of philosophy itself: The matters of true philosophical interest at this point in history are those in which Hegel, agreeing with tradition, expressed his disinterest. They are nonconceptuality, individuality and particularity. . . . A matter of urgency to the concept would be what it fails to cover, what its abstractionist mechanism eliminates, what is not already a case of the concept. . . . The work of philosophical self-reflection consists in unravelling that paradox.14 Although Adorno makes bullish claims like this, he never unpacks in any detail how such an overcoming might be possible, how the consciousness might enter into a truthful relation to its objects. At best, Adorno mentions such a possibility in passing, or explains it through analogy or allusion. In order to fully articulate a suitable theory of philosophical truth for Adorno—to explain how art and philosophy can attain both truth and knowledge of the “nonidentical”—we will be forced to extrapolate from and develop these scattered, often gnomic remarks. Our interpretation of them will be guided by the preceding two chapters, which have helped make clear just what delusive determination and the falsity of concepts consist in, and which, accordingly, have given us a broad idea of what a solution to these problems must be like. We saw that dialectical conceptuality is a condition of the possibility of continuous experience, for Adorno. This means that conceptuality, which abstracts away from particularity, is a necessary feature of experience. The array relations between these concepts cannot be changed by the individual. Rather, conceptual arrays are imposed by society—through thin determination—at the preintentional level. This means that the way in which these abstract concepts are used and the way in which they determine the objects of our experience are socially imposed and cannot be altered simply by an act of individual will. The conceptual problematic that obtains at any historical point does so at an epistemological level below, and therefore not removable by, the operation of intentionally employed concepts. As these concepts, with their internal problematics and obfuscation of the concept,

86

negativism and tru th

cannot be “thrown away” by the subject, we must achieve both truth and improved relationship between concept and object through these concepts: “Dialectics is the self-consciousness of the objective context of delusion; it does not mean to have escaped from that context. Its objective goal is to break out of the context from within.”15 This apparent contradiction is the governing problem of Adorno’s work (as Adorno himself perceives).16 Concepts—which according to Adorno’s own epistemology are constitutively delusive and prevent a fully adequate relationship between subject and object—must be employed in order to render up knowledge of the nonconceptual—namely, that which the concept itself excludes. Adorno never responded to this problem directly. In the course of this chapter and the next, I will work with both what Adorno did say and what potential problems show he must say to give an account of the way that concepts can be manipulated in order to yield up an experience of that which the concept excludes, namely, the nonidentical. In order to properly comprehend Adorno’s solution to the problem, we need to come to comprehension of the three key features of his philosophy, which jointly reinforce and explain one another. These are negativism, texture, and performance. We have already broached negativism in this book. Negativism is just the thought that the truth cannot be positively expressed—rather, we can only outline and describe falsehoods. Adorno’s negativism derives directly from his account of concepts and conceptual thought. As concepts ineluctably falsify their objects, and this falsehood is communicated to the thoughts and arguments that concepts make possible, it stands to reason in Adorno’s view that no direct expression of the truth is possible. (I will expand on this below.) In Negative Dialectics Adorno often links truth with Gewebe, a German term literally translated as “texture.”17 Characteristically, where Adorno employs the term Gewebe, the term “performance” (or oblique reference to it) is not far behind: “The open thought has no protection against the risk of decline into randomness; nothing assures it of a saturation with the matter that will suffice to surmount that risk. But the consistency of its performance, the density of its texture [Gewebes], helps the thought to hit the mark.”18 This combination of texture with performance (elsewhere referred to as “what happens in [thought]”19

n e gat ivism a nd t ru t h

87

or “cogitative productivity”20) is posited by Adorno as the philosophical method. This ideal philosophical method stands outside of the traditional orders of justification represented by standard models of deduction and induction:21 “The crux is what happens in [thought], not a thesis or position—the texture [das Gewebe], not the deductive or inductive course of one-track minds.”22 Adorno’s linkage of texture with performance is obscure, as is the precise way in which it will serve to circumvent the necessarily delusive nature of concepts. As so often in Adorno’s work, these two terms (“performance” and “texture”) are mutually determining, and an explanation of either will to an extent include consideration of the other. A full explanation of texture and performance, however, can be delayed somewhat, for reasons I will explain below. However, we can take the following as a helpful thumbnail sketch. “Texture”—Gewebe—is a property of philosophical texts. It is the reproduction—in both argumentative and rhetorical ordering—of the movement and (crucially) the failure of concepts in the course of their being applied to an object. For Adorno, a philosophical text enacts the movement of concepts (we see a concept being applied, its generating contradictions or antinomies in the course of its execution, and how it then in turn generates a demand to employ a further concept, or alternatively brings the dialectical movement to a standstill). Just this is “texture”—a negative textual enactment of conceptual failure. “Performance,” on the other hand, will be the additional content that consciousness brings to this philosophical text. To anticipate the next chapter, we will find that the text’s enactment of conceptual movements and failures will be joined by the reader’s enactment in their consciousness of these conceptual movements. This performative engagement will result in the breakdown of the concepts that mediate their experience; and this breakdown in turn will have a radical effect on the makeup of their experience, and will vouchsafe knowledge of nonidentity. Negativism, texture, and performance are all somewhat exotic notions that stand in need of explanation. I believe we can see that there is a kind of ordering required here in explaining them. It is negativism that underwrites and necessitates the use of texture—only if it really is the case that concepts ineluctably fail to subsume their objects is it the

88

n e g ativ ism a n d t ru t h

case that the use of “texture” (a reproduction of the continual failure of concepts) is a demand that we can place on philosophy. And, correlatively, only if texture is a necessary feature of genuine philosophical work will—as we shall see—a performative engagement with that work be possible. This being the case, we must begin in considering Adorno’s conceptual negativism. Just why is it the case that concepts necessarily fail to model their objects? The preceding two chapters, of course, have done much to clarify this issue. We have seen that thin determination and self-preservation mean that concepts might misconstrue objects where the demands of self-preservation and the demands of truth come apart. But Adorno has an unqualifiedly negativist position—concepts always misconstrue their objects. It would not be unreasonable for an antagonist to ask, “If all concepts misconstrue their objects, what about assertions like ‘this grass is green’? What could possibly be wrong with this; and why would self-preservation introduce any falsity into the concepts involved?” I think this is a problem worth considering. We can also use consideration of this problem as a test case to clarify just what Adorno’s negativism consists in. This will put us in a better position to enter into the question of his use of “texture” and “performance” in the next chapter.

The Impossibility of Positive Expressions of the True For Adorno, concepts are incapable of truthfully grasping their objects due to the nature of the mediation applied to them. Concepts are mediated by the social totality, and this social totality is internally agonic— in tension and contradiction with itself. This social totality is responsible for the nature and structure of the concept, as we have seen. The agon of the social totality is communicated to the concept and its relationship to its object—concept and object enter into an antagonistic relationship, in which each is in tension with the other. This agon of the social totality—and, by extension, of the concept and object—has three elements. The first element of the agonism of the social totality concerns the totality’s self-concealment. The social totality generates a complex social ontology, and simultaneously forces the use of epistemological

n e g at ivism a n d t ru t h

89

practices that are incapable of comprehending this social ontology. We developed this line of thought at length in the previous chapter. The combination of thin determination, reification, and self-preservation (all three of which are social entities or, in the case of reification, socially reinforced) deforms concepts so that they are incapable of modeling the mediated nature of objects in full. The social totality creates an overdetermined, complex state of affairs—it generates institutions, social influences, patterns of consciousness, and so on. But it also forces us to live and think in such a way that these states of affairs cannot be fully communicated to consciousness. As a consequence, the social totality creates a complex social ontology that is knowable in principle, while ensuring consciousness takes on such a form that it is incapable of coming to knowledge of that complexity. For this reason the social totality can be termed epistemologically agonic—both generating and concealing knowable states of affairs. Secondly, this epistemological agonism is also expressed in the concept itself. Concepts understand themselves to be autonomous— created and governed by their own internal principles. They are forced by the combination of thin determination, reification, and selfpreservation into screening themselves off against genuine comprehension of the mediation that produces them. The social totality comprises mediating relations, which generate epistemological faculties, which are in turn incapable of comprehending those mediating relations. Third, a further consequence of the concept’s being prevented from cognizing its being constituted by mediation is that concepts mistakenly take themselves to have atemporal validity. The mediating processes that constitute and determine concepts are grounded in sociohistorical processes and, thus, change over time. This being the case, conceptual discourse often takes itself to grasp some atemporal truth, when in fact it only synchronically models a present state of affairs.23 The reified concept both fails to grasp the complete mediating context of its object (due to the influence of self-preservation) and is also falsified over time, as the concept is unable to respond to the alterations in the totality that produced it. These three agonisms of the social whole and the concepts it produces entail not only that concepts are incapable of fully comprehending the objects they apply to but also that they are incapable of

90

n e g ativ i sm a n d t ru t h

complete self-reflective knowledge of their own constitution. Concepts fail to perceive that their autonomy is contingent on and undermined by heteronomous processes of mediation. As concepts are not fully responsive to the genuine status of objects, or to the nature of concepts themselves, or to the historically malleable processes that constitute both objects and concepts, concepts find that they cannot subsume objects without remainder. And this, in turn, generates antinomies and contradictions in the course of the application of these concepts. Further, as these antimonies and contradictions are socially caused—by the communication of the agonism of the social totality to the agonism of the concept—these conceptual problems are also reflective of problems extant in the social structures that influence them.24

Negativism and Simple Predication So, we have seen that mediation applies throughout the social totality, to both concepts and objects, and places them into an agonic relationship, with each being in tension with the other. This agonism produces a diremption between how concepts take objects to be and how they in fact are; accordingly, concepts are unable to seamlessly express the way in which objects stand. This generates Adorno’s negativism. But we might now consider whether this account—being based as heavily on “mediation” and “self-preservation” as it is—can really get us Adorno’s desired conclusion. He wants to show that concepts ineluctably falsify their objects—but does this really follow? An antagonist might object that even if mediation applies universally, across all objects and domains of thought, mediacy and immediacy might match up sufficiently in some contexts as to allow for truths to be positively expressed. For example, take the case of simple predication—the assertion that “this grass is green,” say. Is this sentence false? It does not appear to evince any internal contradiction, antimony, or failure of responsiveness to its object. If it is false, it had better not turn out to be false for these sorts of reasons—the characteristic reasons for falsity that Adorno usually identifies in philosophical claims—as this would simply stretch credulity. Adorno himself apparently recognizes this, and in Negative Dialectics gives us an alternative method for making simple predicative

n e g at ivism a n d t ru t h

91

sentences fall out as false. Adorno takes the predicative statement “x is y” to reveal that accurate modeling of an object by a concept “without remainder” is impossible.25 The argument goes that, strictly speaking, x and y do not meet the “is” of identity (that is, grass is not green, strictly speaking; greenness does not exhaust the properties grass has). As such, it is implicit in the grammar of predication that objects and their descriptions are not identical; and so there is always a suppressed “nonidentity” implicit in all acts of concept use. While this is an argument, it is not much of an argument. Adorno’s object here is to show an intrinsic divergence between the application of concepts and the composition of objects. While this arguably succeeds for one-place predicate application (“dogs are four-legged”), one can easily find examples where this argument fails. To take two examples. If one were a Platonist about the existence of geometric points, a description “x is a point, at coordinates a,b,c” would serve as an exhaustive definition of x. Points, by definition, have no properties over and above their being a point (indeed, one could remove the coordinates from the description, as their only role is in aiding one to identify the point, not in describing the point’s constitution). On the other hand, if one believes that objects (of any complexity) have a determinate composition—comprising tropes, relations, or whatever—then from the argument Adorno just offered there is no reason in principle to think that sufficiently long predicative descriptions would be incapable of producing an “x is y” statement (where y comprises an exhaustive chain of predicates, indexicals, and so on), where x and y satisfy the “is” of identity. This being the case, Adorno’s argument in Negative Dialectics does not provide a satisfying account of the falsity of simple predictive claims. To get at how Adorno could term simple predication meaningfully false, one has to reexamine the scope of the agonic mediation that is applied to the objects of experience. As was shown in chapter 1, the concepts employed, together with the manner in which they are employed, are determined in full by the social totality. The social totality imposes a unified form of thought (which Adorno often refers to as “identity thinking”) that determines how concepts can be used and formed, and that affects all experience and thought. No single operation of the consciousness can be held in isolation from the totality. By virtue of being a totality, and of mediating and

92

n e g ativ ism a n d t ru t h

influencing all of its constituent parts, the social totality ensures that every form of thought is entangled with every other.26 The concepts that facilitate the experience and cognition that result in the assertion “this grass is green” are part of a holistically mediated epistemological whole. The social processes that constitute this epistemological whole will have many effects. While they may make possible some set of virtually autonomous cognitive processes (like logic) and unproblematic assertions (like “this grass is green”) they will simultaneously be closing off comprehension of other phenomena, or elsewhere generating internal contradictions, antinomies, and falsity. Let’s concede that many statements—simple predicative statements certainly among them—cannot be seen as false in the usual sense. They will not make demonstrably false claims about their objects, nor will their concepts be misapplied in these cases. Nonetheless, these statements can still come out as false for Adorno. Adorno has expanded the hermeneutic content of these statements—his epistemological holism entails that claims, and the concepts involved in these claims, must be seen in the full context of the totality that made them possible. And the mediating context that made possible simple predicative statements simultaneously causes delusive experiences and delusive concept use elsewhere. The socially universal array is riddled with both agonistic obfuscations (as the above paragraphs have shown, the totality generates a form of thought incapable of comprehending itself or, in most cases, its object) and faulty concepts. Simple predicative statements are elements of this holistic whole. The mediating context within which a simple predicative proposition is nested is part of a wider context that has socially and epistemically disastrous consequences. The truth of an isolated proposition may be made possible by a mediating holistic whole that, taken as a whole, is completely untrue. Member propositions of a holistic epistemic whole should be termed false just in case they derive their content in some nontrivial fashion from their membership in that whole. By analogy, while we might acknowledge the prowess with which shamans could predict the oncoming of the seasons, we might nonetheless be hard pressed to call their account of this change “true,” being embedded as it is in a theory of the seasons being caused by various supernatural phenomena. There is an important way in which the predictions generated by

n e g at ivism a nd t ru t h

93

their incorrect worldview match up with the behavior of the world— they may be able to regularly predict the onset of winter, for example. But all the same, these statements are made possible by a coherent set of views that are substantially false; and we would thereby term their claims both true at one level of description (the seasons will genuinely arrive when they claim they will) but ultimately false at another (in their dependence on an inaccurate picture of the world). This idea, of immediate truthhood and ultimate falsehood, can allow Adorno to understand simple acts of predication as true in one important sense. If we take the claim “this grass is green” at an immediate level of description, we can see this claim as being true just in case the grass referred to is in fact green. Taken in isolation, this claim is true.27 But, of course, for Adorno no claim ever is in fact in isolation. Rather, all epistemic faculties and events are bound up with the social totality, and with the form of thought that made those faculties and events possible. These underlying conceptual structures that successfully mapped onto the world in this particular instance will entail any number of other falsehoods and obfuscations in the subject’s experience and thought. This underlying system of thought, taken as a whole, is false—it is both internally contradictory (for the agonic reasons we explored) and responsible for the occlusion of features of the world. The claim “this grass is green,” considered as an element in the totality that made it possible, is ultimately false. In essence, then, we can see Adorno as having what one might term a “holistic theory of falsity.” Adorno can allow that some simple propositions on the model of “this grass is green” do in fact truthfully refer to objects in the outside world. This can be cashed out in one of two ways, dependent on the object. In the example of “this grass is green” we can, I think, allow that this statement is true in an uncomplicated, conventional way. Its truth-maker is the fact that the grass in fact bears the property of greenness. Alternatively, simple propositions like “gold is valuable” can also be held to be made true in a conventional manner (as gold actually does bear a property of being valuable), with the qualification that this property of the object is contingent on the form of life within which the object is being encountered. (“Value” is empirically discoverable, but nonetheless culturally relative.) In either case, then, Adorno can allow the usual, conventional theories and manners

94

negativism and tru th

of discussing truth. However, these assertions are embedded in a larger epistemic context that serves to occlude and obfuscate truth. Even if the proposition in question is not problematized by its epistemic context (that is, there is no meaningful way to see “this grass is green” as false when taking this proposition in isolation), this proposition was made possible by and perpetuates a socioepistemic totality that causes falsehoods in any number of any other epistemic areas. Adorno has a holistic theory of falsity, then, just insofar as individually true propositions are ultimately false due to their imbrication with and maintenance of a generally delusive epistemic whole. We have now worked through the essential grounds for Adorno’s negativism. Concepts are forced into a delusive relationship to the world due to the conjunction of the influence of self-preservation, reification, and thin determination. As these influences have universal scope, no concepts can be formed that are free from them. Accordingly, all claims are made false either by their immediate misconstrual of their object or by their ultimate membership in a holistically false epistemological whole. Adorno’s claim that conceptual discourse cannot unqualifiedly express the true has now fallen out as cogent. If we grant Adorno’s account of the mediating structures in play (as detailed in the previous chapters), his negativism seems to follow necessarily.

Negativity and Constellations Having established Adorno’s philosophy as negativist—and moreover as being necessarily negativist, given that the epistemological structures Adorno puts in place close off any other possible account of the relationship between conceptual discourse and truth—we might expect that philosophy, on Adorno’s account, should become an entirely skeptical enterprise. Given that all philosophical accounts will inherit internal antinomies and contradictions that will make them incapable of seamlessly expressing truth, it would seem that the dialectical philosopher’s task is to observe the work of other philosophers with an eye to merely tracking these internal contradictions and making them apparent. Philosophy would be a destructive endeavor, having given up (due to negativism) any idea of tracking or expressing truth itself. It can’t

n e g at ivism a n d t ru t h

95

be denied that Adorno’s work often does give this impression. Anyone laboring through the relentless onslaught against Heidegger’s philosophy, for example, peppered throughout Negative Dialectics (though most concentrated in Part One) will have the distinct impression that Adorno’s philosophy seems to terminate in naked aggression toward other philosophies. And his treatment of Bergson and Kant in the same book can be similarly bloodthirsty, on first inspection. This would be to ignore, however, Adorno’s frequent programmatic assertion that the aim of his “negative dialectics” is not merely to adumbrate a fresh version of skepticism; rather, it is intended to indict the falsity of conceptual discourse in order to “break out”28 of that discourse and “identify the nonidentical.” This represents Adorno at his most gnomic; we are told that concepts are not merely to be critiqued, but are to be pressed into an unorthodox function that will allow for the expression of the nonidentical, of that which the conventional use of concepts obscures. And concepts, we are told, are pressed into this unorthodox function by both philosophy and art; we will here focus on the philosophical case, before turning to the aesthetic. Given the strength and necessity of Adorno’s negativism, this unorthodox employment of concepts cannot be expected to be some manner of directly instantiating the truth. Rather, Adorno identifies the required method of heterodox concept use to be the generation of “constellations.” While conventional concept use seeks to subsume the object under a “cover concept”29 (a concept that presents itself as providing exhaustive comprehension of its object), Adorno works to show the object as in fact standing in the center of a constellation of concepts, each of which is required in order to provide explanation and comprehension of some limited aspect of that object’s constitution. Constellations are generated in the course of applying concepts to objects, discovered rather than created. In Adorno’s view, a constellation emerges due to the insufficiency of some single concept (or limited set of concepts) that ostensibly provides seamless and total explanation of the object it is applied to. As he puts it: “The determinable flaw in every concept makes it necessary to cite others; this is the font of the only constellations which inherited some of the hope of the name.”30 The “hope of the name” seems a little gnomic here. For Adorno—and this is likely ultimately traceable back to the influence of Gershom

96

n e g ativ i sm a n d t ru t h

Scholem—the “name” stands for a relation of complete epistemic adequacy between concept and object. It is constellations, then, that best respond to the actual contours of the object.31 They do this negatively, however, by showing precisely how the object resists the application of concepts to it. In the course of applying a single concept—which I take to exhaustively subsume the object—I find it is in fact insufficient, and requires the application of some further concept. And this process continues, until a “constellation” of concepts—all responding to some limited feature of the object, none successfully grasping it entirely—is created. In the first place, this serves to undermine the concept’s selfunderstanding as being capable of immediately subsuming its object. In the second place, the completed constellation—comprising concepts all of which will be incapable of singly modeling their object—will serve to exhibit the full complexity of the object’s evasion of conceptual subsumption. The use of constellations does not account by itself for the production of that “break out” of concepts that Adorno identified as the goal of dialectical philosophy. (I will return to this issue below.) All the same, it is clear that Adorno’s negativism as we presently understand it allows for no positive expression of truths, and should conduct itself via critique (with the question of how this critique allows for a “break out” of that conceptual discourse being bracketed for the moment) and the generation of constellations.

Rich Analysis This construal of Adorno’s philosophy, as being conducted along exclusively negativist lines, starts to look less sustainable once we pay attention to what actually happens in Adorno’s work. While Negative Dialectics or Aesthetic Theory can in large part be profitably understood in line with this negativist model, other equally important works by Adorno cannot. Instead of neatly drawing limits to what can be expressed, and subjecting those philosophies that overstep these limits to immanent critique, one will often find in reading Adorno that he will offer complex sets of positive assertions in service of his analyses. For example, in Minima Moralia Adorno gives an analysis of the increased influence of individualism in modern working life. This

n e gat ivism a n d t ru t h

97

analysis ends in the way one would expect, presenting an internal contradiction: “Their belated individualism poisons what little is left of the individual.”32 This contradictory conclusion is in line with what our account of the agonic totality would lead us to suspect, namely, that the social totality generates internal contradictions within itself. On top of this, Adorno shows that in tracing this social contradiction we find it simultaneously expressed in a conceptual contradiction. In the full development of what we understand to be individualism, we entail a destruction of that individual, which individualism is intended to preserve. And no single concept is sufficient to comprehend this state of affairs; rather, we discover that a constellation of concepts is required to limn the complexity of this contradiction. So, we find Adorno tracing socioepistemic contradictions and generating constellations, which is entirely in line with what our account has suggested. However, while this analysis ends in presenting an internal contradiction, the analysis itself gives an extended, positively expressed account of the social composition of the individual: As the professions of the middle-man lose their economic basis, the private lives of countless people are becoming those of agents and go-betweens; indeed the entire private domain is being engulfed by a mysterious activity that bears all the features of commercial life without there being actually any business to transact. All these nervous people . . . believe that only by . . . tradesman’s qualities . . . can they ingratiate themselves . . . and soon there is no relationship that is not seen as a “connection,” no impulse not first censored as to whether it deviates from the acceptable.33 These points are of course being made in service of the concluding contradiction. Considered in isolation, however, it is difficult to reconcile these assertions with Adorno’s putative universal negativism. In chapter 2, I showed that Adorno was committed to the existence of revelatory determination; the propensity of phenomena to physiognomically display the socioepistemic structures in which they were embedded. Adorno’s negativism would lead one to believe that this revelatory determination showed up only obliquely, in determining the shape of the internal contradictions in concepts, and thereby determining the

98

n e g ativ ism a n d t ru t h

makeup of the constellations that objects generated. In this example from the Minima, by contrast, Adorno is making assertions concerning the constitution of the social whole that appear like nothing other than the direct unfolding of this revelatory determination. In other words, we find Adorno making direct, positive claims about the constitution of the social whole and the mediating relations that have generated the problem of individualism in modern society. Let us call these positive accounts “rich analysis.” On the one hand, rich analysis contradicts Adorno’s programmatic negativism. On the other, it threatens to minimize the difference between Adorno’s work and the kinds of empirical and sociological positivism that Adorno abhors.34 The account Adorno offers above appears to merely replace one empirical account for another, with the only difference being that Adorno applies an unconventionally complicated social ontology. Were Adorno’s philosophy to amount to merely an argument for added complexity in conventional empiricist treatments of objects, Adorno’s own negativist assertions become puzzling, and the strong necessity that this chapter found applied to Adorno’s negativism would be doubly confusing. The core problem is that Adorno’s own metaphilosophical claims about the epistemological relationship between subjects and objects— about the inevitable falsification that results from this relationship— would not appear to always be evidenced in his own analyses of social phenomena. Rather, Adorno makes positive statements of fact, without the use of constellations or concern over failure of fit between concept and object. And this in turn implies that Adorno contradicts himself. Reading Adorno as flatly internally contradictory in this fashion depends on the (presently reasonable) idea that Adorno thinks that truth is discursively expressible, and that Adorno is in fact attempting to discursively express truth positively in these examples. (This will become very important.) The second, more serious worry here is that Adorno is tacitly making use of a two-tier account of truth. Adorno makes it clear that dialectical philosophy and its attendant use of metacritique, constellations, and the like are intended to ultimately provide some sort of “breakout” from conventional conceptual discourse. Adorno first adumbrated this thought in his inaugural lecture at the Frankfurt

n e gat ivism a nd t ru t h

99

Institut für Sozialforschung: “The function of riddle-solving [that is, dialectical philosophy] is to light up the riddle-Gestalt like lightning and to negate it (aufzuheben), not to persist behind the riddle and imitate it. Authentic philosophic interpretation does not meet up with a fixed meaning which already lies behind the question, but lights up suddenly and momentarily, and consumes it at the same time.”35 The end goal of philosophy is the production of a momentary revelation of the true, this revelation causing the disappearance of the discursive problem that occasioned the revelation itself (the discursive “question” “disappear[s]”).36 This line of thought reappears over thirty years later in Negative Dialectics, where Adorno again claims that comprehension of the true is a momentary, nondiscursive experience: In philosophy the authentic question will somehow almost always include its answer. Unlike science, philosophy knows no fixed sequence of question and answer. . . . This distinguishes the relation of understanding and judgment from the usual order of time.  .  .  . What is transmitted here is the fiber of the so-called philosophical demonstration, a mode of proof that contrasts with the mathematical model. And yet that model does not simply disappear, for the stringency of a philosophical thought requires its mode of proceeding to be measured by the forms of inference. Philosophical proof is the effort to give statements a binding quality by making them commensurable with the means of discursive thinking. But it does not purely follow from that thinking: the critical reflection of such cogitative productivity is itself a philosophical content.37 Adorno identifies comprehension of the truth with a flash of comprehension, this flash of comprehension being identified with some epistemological event not in conformity with conventional modes of conceptual cognition. This notion of some kind of experience that vouchsafes knowledge of the true and is in some fashion bound up with or produced by Adorno’s negativism presents a fresh set of philosophical difficulties, which the next chapter will be dedicated to unraveling. It is also, as we shall see, entirely central to Adorno’s aesthetics and philosophy of art.

10 0

n e g ativ i sm a n d t ru t h

The two difficulties here identified—the contradiction between Adorno’s negativism and his positive analyses, and Adorno’s apparent two-tier account of truth—can be jointly dismissed if one can relate the expression of the true (in its positive, discursive form) to the true itself (a flash of nondiscursive cognition) in such a way that the former is not identified with the latter. If we achieve this, Adorno’s positive discursive claims would not be intended to be true in themselves, but rather intended to work in service of eliciting some radically distinct, nondiscursive truth. Remarkably, Adorno achieves just this, in a compressed and allusive way, in the excerpt from Negative Dialectics just given. Adorno begins by claiming that philosophical comprehension is distinguished from the “usual order of time.” This is because philosophical comprehension knows “no fixed sequence of question and answer. . . . Its answers are given, not made, not generated: they are the recoil of the unfolded, transparent question.”38 Philosophical comprehension does not constitute a line of reasoning that is produced in response to a question, and goes on to generate an answer. Rather, “in philosophy the authentic question will somehow almost always include its answer.”39 What Adorno is here clearly asserting is that philosophy gives access to truth not through discursive, inferential, or deductive lines of reasoning. The philosophical true for Adorno is experienced directly, rather than being revealed through discursive lines of argumentation. Again, Adorno gives this thought direct expression: “Paradoxically, the more a philosophical thought yields to its experience, the closer its approach to an analytical judgment.”40 The true, then, is constituted by the experience of a philosophical thought that, in being experienced, becomes akin to an analytic judgment. Adorno is here presumably intending to create an analogy with the manner in which analytic truths are capable of certifying themselves as true without further argument. So, this experience in itself is the affirmation and the presentation of the true. The philosophical experience serves as the answer to the question posed by that experience. Further sense will be given to the precise way in which we can comprehend the unification of the true and a specific experience in a “flash” of comprehension below. What is important here is that Adorno provides an account of the relationship that obtains between this self-certifying flash of experience and Adorno’s other way of getting at the truth, in which he appears to lay out discursively true assertions, as we saw.

negativism and tru th

101

Adorno contrasts the flash of truth in the “analytic” experience with the “mathematical model.”41 By “mathematical model,” Adorno is referring to the discursive presentation of truth in which a problem is posited separately from its answer, and an answer is then sought,42 using forms of inference and the like.43 Adorno is drawing a contrast between the flash of comprehension we find in his theory of truth (the “analytical judgment”) and the discursive account of truth given in inductive/ deductive chains of reasons that we often find in Adorno’s own practice (the “mathematical model”). After contrasting the philosophical mode of immediate comprehension of truth to the “mathematical model,” Adorno asserts: “And yet that [mathematical] model does not simply disappear, for the stringency of a philosophical thought requires its mode of proceeding to be measured by the forms of inference. Philosophical proof is the effort to give statements a binding quality by making them commensurable with the means of discursive thinking.”44 Adorno relates the initial, nondiscursive experience of truth to its discursive manifestation. While the experience of the true excludes discursive modes of thought, such as inference and the like, nonetheless “the stringency of philosophical thought requires its mode of proceeding to be measured by the forms of inference.”45 Adorno is claiming here that although the initial presentation of truth is made possible by a philosophical judgment or cognition that is not discursively expressible, this truth in itself requires, just by its own stringency, expression in discursive terms. This discursive expression is understood by Adorno to be a “philosophical proof ” that makes this initial, nondiscursive truth “commensurable with the means of discursive thinking.” Adorno seeks to solve the relation between the negative, nondiscursive form of truth and positive, discursive form of truth by saying that the latter is simply an expression of the former. The former is posited as primary, with the latter, discursive expression coming afterward, serving as a recapitulation in communicable, discursive terms of what the agent originally perceives immediately and nondiscursively. Adorno denies, however, that the two forms of truth are equivalent: “Philosophical proof is the effort to give statements a binding quality by making them commensurable with the means of discursive thinking. But it does not purely follow from that thinking: the critical reflection of such cogitative productivity is itself a philosophical content.”46 We have here the

102

n e g ativ i sm a n d t ru t h

direct statement that “discursive thinking”—which is a translation of the “flash” of comprehension into chains of inferences and assertions after the fact—is in itself insufficient. This is a flat denial that the two forms of truth are equivalent. The discursive outlay of what the flash of truth has revealed is insufficient. To it must be added, Adorno claims, “the critical reflection of such cogitative productivity” that is in itself a “philosophical content.” This is of course very far from clear—indeed, it is Adorno at his most obscure, and we will have to work hard to clarify what Adorno means. Nonetheless, we have here a denial of the thought that those positive claims that can be discursively expressed on the “mathematical model” (like the rich analyses we found in Minima Moralia) are true in themselves. The discursive outlay of the truth stands in need of an extra “philosophical content” to make it truly adequate to the “flash” form of truth, according to Adorno. The discursive and flash forms of truth, then, are not necessarily estranged or incapable of being put into a relation of equivalence or adequacy—rather, the discursive outlay of the truth is, on its own, missing a single philosophical content that will render it an adequate translation of the flash form of truth. Adorno identifies this necessary extra philosophical content with “thinking . . . the critical reflection of such cogitative productivity.” As is apparent from the original German, here Adorno is referring to that “thinking” not in the static, depersonalized sense in which we might refer to the laws of geometry as a body of thought, but rather to “cogitative productivity” as an ongoing activity, as the cogitative engagement of a given, actual agent that is being undergone at a specific time.47 This is reinforced by Adorno’s identification of this process with “critical reflection,” which, again, is apparently a reference to an activity. The access to the true as nonidentical in a “flash” and the discursive attempt to capture this access to the nonidentical are estranged. The latter cannot, in itself, be sufficient to the former. They are only brought into a relationship of equivalence by the agent’s engaged activity of critical reflection. It is important to note, here, that this activity is not limited to merely registering what is written. Rather, Adorno asserts that this engagement of the agent’s is a “philosophical content”—it is equipollent with the discursively written itself, and plays an equal determining role in the truth or falsity of that discursively written material.

n e g at ivism a n d t ru t h

103

In other words, the activity of consciousness is not merely recognizing, affirming, or bringing to notice something already present. Rather, the activity of “critical reflection” is itself a philosophical element, which has a role over and above mere recognition of what is already discursively expressed. It is the agent’s active involvement with this discursive outlay of the true that adds a further “philosophical content” and causes this discursive thinking to become sufficient and sufficiently true. This idea, that the agent’s cognitive engagement is an element in the truth-conditionality of the assertions with which the agent is engaged, is highly unusual. I will term this position of Adorno’s “performativity.”48 Above, we were worried that Adorno identified the truth as negative, and yet appeared to discursively outlay positive statements of fact. This kind of “rich analysis” that we found in Minima Moralia seemed to contradict Adorno’s account of truth, because we took it that Adorno identified these discursive statements with the truth. However, our thumbnail sketch of “performativity” has served to close off this problem. The truth of the nonidentical is no longer identified with its textual expression. Rather, discursive expression (be it positive or negative) is necessary but not sufficient—it is only the material grounds for the agent’s performance. This performative engagement will produce the negative, nonconceptual true. Adorno is not, then, drawing an equivalence between the true as negative and his positive, discursive analyses. Rather, he holds that it is the combination of these discursive analyses with the agent’s own performance that will result in an instantiation of the negatively true. This is of course a highly odd position for Adorno to take, and as yet I have not given very much detail to precisely what Adorno means by this “performance” of the agent. However, we have now, in the course of our investigation, come onto the second element of Adorno’s theory of truth, namely, its performativity. Of course, although this idea of performativity means that philosophical texts cannot truthfully grasp the nonidentical in and of themselves, this does not mean that the makeup of the philosophical text becomes irrelevant. On the contrary, this means that rhetorical form and organization become more important than ever. For Adorno, it will have to be the case that the text reenacts—in its texture—those movements in the concepts that can produce the kind of experience that

104

n e g ativ i sm a n d t ru t h

allows for a flash comprehension of the nonidentical. This means that rhetorical reenactment of conceptual movements is absolutely crucial. This idea, of texture as a kind of reenactment of conceptual movement, will also find equal application in the case of art. Adorno will claim that the formal structure of artworks has “texture” in just the same way as philosophical texts. It will be the artwork’s formal composition that instantiates and enacts conceptual movements, antimonies, and conceptual breakdowns. In chapter 5 we will make sense of this, through revisiting and expanding our account of thin determination. Performativity itself will also have significant consequences for our understanding of art. It will turn out that philosophical truth is, for Adorno, produced by a kind of process. Authentic philosophy will be processual, a kind of manipulation of the structure of our experience, which will be able to produce a radically unusual form of experience, in which truth is divulged. This model, as we will see in chapter 5, applies also to the case of art. Art will turn out to be a process, an epistemic process, that acquires its truth from its ability to precipitate radically distinct and discontinuous forms of experience, which vouchsafe experiences of truth and of nonidentity. It is perhaps most of all in art that Adorno’s idea of performativity matches up with our common experience of truth. The truth of art has always been an elusive yet completely ineradicable feature of aesthetic experience. We are familiar with the experience of an urgently pressing yet utterly inexpressible demand made by the artwork on us, a radically distinct experience of being confronted with something both deeply significant and utterly other. Adorno, as we will see, terms this the “shudder” and ties it in with both nonidentity and the account of the genesis of conceptual experience that we explored in chapter 1. In finally completing our account of Adorno’s epistemology, we will be in a position to give this feature of aesthetic experience a full foundation and to see how art for Adorno can be said to be true.

4 Texture, Performativity, and Truth

At the close of the last chapter, we found what appeared to be a contradiction between Adorno’s negativism—the position that the truth cannot be positively expressed—and the positive claims that he often advanced in his work. Even though these positive claims were usually advanced in service of eliciting or exhibiting contradictions, they nonetheless looked as if they were intended to be direct statements of fact. It was not clear how to reconcile these kinds of positive interpretative claims with Adorno’s official negativist position. I claimed that this only appeared to be a problem so long as we understood these kinds of claims as being advanced as truthful, as being identified with the truth of Adorno’s philosophy. And I gave some reason to think that this might not be so, that Adorno in fact might understand the role of these claims to be instrumental, as in some way eliciting, while not being identical with, some distinct, negative form of knowledge. Looking at some important extracts from Adorno’s work, I suggested that Adorno identifies truth with some kind of “breaking out” of concepts, and that all of Adorno’s work—including these troublesome positive claims—might be ultimately in service of producing such a breakout, which alone would attain the status of unqualified truth. This reading needs more development—the elusive ideas of “texture” (Gewebe) and “performance” appeared to be really quite central, but have not as yet been clarified properly. This chapter will be dedicated to

106

texture, performativit y, and tru th

unpacking and reconstructing what Adorno meant by these concepts, and how a conceptual “breakout” could be made possible by them. Before doing this, we can roll our immediate problem—of how to deal with Adorno’s positive claims—into this broader issue of how to understand Adorno’s claim that truth should be identified with the production of a “breakout,” an experience of the nonidentical that outstrips and stands outside of conventional concept use. This idea of a “breakout” can only look puzzling, given that Adorno’s philosophy—in both its positive and its negative aspects—makes use of conventional concepts and standards. Indeed, Adorno explicitly claims that he will make use of these concepts—which are, remember, constitutively false and hostile to “nonidentity”—to produce this breakout, this knowledge of the nonidentical.1 If we are to understand this, we need to understand how Adorno’s conceptual analyses and critiques can give rise to some momentary nonidentical experience that he identifies, as we will see, with knowledge of the true. In other words, Adorno needs to give some explanation of a bridging maneuver, which can convert the claims of philosophy—which are inevitably falsified by concepts, due to Adorno’s holistic theory of falsity, as developed in the previous chapter—into some form of truth not governed by concepts. What this chapter will show is that it is the text, organized in such a way that it performs conceptual movements in its “texture,” and a consciousness that engages with this “texture” in the correct way—performatively— that effect this bridging move and produce an experience of truth that is not falsified by the concept. To begin making this clear, we will need to look at Adorno’s idea of a conceptual “breakout” in more detail.

Conceptual Breakouts Adorno’s most focused and sustained work on philosophical methodology came in Negative Dialectics, and it is here that we find Adorno’s best-developed work on the idea of a breakout of delusive conceptuality. Adorno is concerned—as well he might be—to show that this breakout is not merely irrational, that it is not merely an undisciplined exit from conceptual reason. Rather, it should be something that is produced through rational and sustained engagement with the conceptual structures that we find ourselves compelled to employ. Similarly, Adorno is

texture, performativit y, and tru th

107

also concerned to avoid mere skepticism—while he certainly heaps up a significant number of reasons to doubt that concepts and conceptual thought do a good job of mapping the way the world actually is, he is anxious that this thought should not collapse into an unreconstructed skepticism, which merely forfeits any struggle toward a proper relation between the mind and the world. Adorno’s route between this Scylla of irrationalism and Charybdis of skepticism is to hit upon the idea of the conceptual breakout: “Yet the appearance of identity is inherent in thought itself, in its pure form. To think is to identify. Conceptual order is content to screen what thinking seeks to comprehend. . . . Aware that the conceptual totality is mere appearance, I have no way but to break immanently, in its own measure, through the appearance of total identity.”2 In line with the explanation given in the previous chapter, Adorno understands “the appearance of identity” between the concept and object as an intrinsic feature of thought. Further, he notes that this “screens” off the object that thought is committed to modeling. To throw over this commitment, to rest content with the fact that concepts are incapable of properly modeling their objects, would entail a wholesale collapse of Adorno’s thought into mere skepticism. Similarly, if one were to break from concepts and their intrinsic commitment to identity—bracketing for the moment the question of whether such a thing would be possible—this would forfeit the structures of conceptual justification required to comprehend the object in full, and lapse into mere irrationalism. As these options are equally self-defeating, Adorno correctly notes that thought is compelled to “break immanently, in its own measure, through the appearance of total identity.” The crucial qualification here is “in its own measure”; if delusive concepts can be induced to induce a break out of their problematic according to their own standards, then such a breakout can still make use of the standards of justification internal to rational thought and be justified by them. A breakout produced in this way would be justified by the very concepts it critiques, and so would not be irrational. It would also serve to demonstrate to us the falsity of our concepts and hold open the promise of their improvement, and so would not be mere skepticism. Adorno returns to this thought often: “Objectively, dialectics means to break the compulsion to achieve identity, and to break it by means of the energy stored up in that compulsion and congealed in its objectifications. . . . As a

108

texture, performativit y, and tru th

sense of non-identity through identity, dialectics is not only an advancing process but a retrograde one at the same time.”3 This is substantially a restatement of the argument above—Adorno emphasizes the need to make use of the tendencies implicit in concepts in order to break the compulsion to identity that we find in concepts themselves. However, it is notable here that Adorno identifies this conceptual breakout with an instantiation of “nonidentity through identity.” The ultimate goal, then, is to allow for experience of the nonidentical (that which concepts occlude) via concepts themselves (which constitutively screen off the nonidentical). This sharpens the problem; Adorno hopes to use philosophical analyses conducted using inherently falsifying tools (that is, concepts) in order to produce some form of epistemological experience of the truth that those tools cannot help but obscure. To this extent, Adorno is acknowledging that some form of bridging move, which will put the conceptual work in touch with the nonconceptual truth, is required. However, Adorno consistently evades a detailed answer about what this bridging step might be: Dialectics is the self-consciousness of the objective context of delusion; it does not mean to have escaped from that context. Its objective goal is to break out of the context from within. The strength required from the break grows in dialectics from the context of immanence; what would apply to it once more is Hegel’s dictum that in dialectics an opponent’s strength is absorbed and turned against him, not just in the dialectical particular, but eventually in the whole. By means of logic, dialectics grasps the coercive character of logic.4 Adorno again here hints toward the need for a bridging step—an immanent breakout of conceptual discourse—but he also again offers very little by way of a description of how this could be achieved. The concluding sentence restates the claim that dialectical philosophy will bring about this bridging by means of employing its own standards of justification against itself, but the exact upshot of this is not clear. This closing sentence could be understood as picking out immanent critique, but immanent critique could not fulfill the bridging function that Adorno is after. Immanent critique displays the insufficiency, or

texture, performativit y, and tru th

109

internally contradictory nature, of a given philosophical approach; while this can serve as motivation for revising our concepts, it cannot satisfy Adorno’s stated goal of producing a complete break with conceptual discourse.

Performativity and Breakouts The desired “bridging move,” then, must make use of concepts in order to produce a breakout of conceptuality. At the close of the previous chapter, I gave an outline of what I take Adorno’s answer to this question to be. I claimed that Adorno hit upon the idea of “performativity”—that the engagement of consciousness with philosophical critiques in the appropriate way could give rise to an experience of truth that was not conceptually governed. I am now going to develop this account further, and show how it suffices to deliver the bridging move that Adorno needs—to convert conceptual criticism and the use of concepts into the production of some truth that “breaks out,” which stands outside, of concepts altogether. In the previous chapter, I already supplied some evidence from Adorno’s inaugural address The Actuality of Philosophy, through to Negative Dialectics, that this idea of performativity was a persistent and significant one for Adorno. But we will work through this notion exegetically a little more before turning to reconstructively cashing out what Adorno precisely meant by it and how it may serve to answer the question of what Adorno took the true to be and how it could be instantiated. In Negative Dialectics, Adorno claims: On its subjective side, dialectics amounts to thinking so that the thought form will no longer turn its objects into immutable ones, into objects that remain the same. Experience shows that they do not remain the same. The unstable character of traditional philosophy’s solid identity can be learned from its guarantor, the individual human consciousness. . . . [When dialectically treating problems of identity,] technical terminology stands ready with the customary formula.  .  .  . [But, a] purely formal [dialectical] reversal would leave room for the subreption that dialectics is prima philosophia after all, as “prima dialectica.” The test of the

110

texture, performativit y, and tru th

turn to non-identity is its performance; if it remained declarative, it would be revoking itself.5 Adorno gives the texture of experience a key role in generating the critical force of dialectical philosophy. It is experience that demonstrates that conceptual “identity”—the identification of objects with the concepts that apply to them—fails. But, more than this, the ultimate “guarantor” of criticism of concepts on these grounds is “the individual human consciousness” (and, by extension, experience). We might consider for a moment what this could mean. If some experience serves as a “guarantor” for criticism of the relationship between concepts and objects, it cannot be ordinary experience. We saw in chapter 1 that ordinary experience is mediated by concepts—and that this mediation completely occludes nonidentity; it conceals the failure of fit between concepts and objects. The object is subsumed under its mediating concept and prevents any experience of the object’s outstripping the concepts applied to it. If Adorno is identifying the guarantor for criticism of concepts with experience, then it must be some unusual sort of experience, which is capable of directly apprehending the “unstable character” of “solid identity.” This thought is strengthened by Adorno’s closing claim that the “turn to non-identity”—the attempt to show that concepts fail to subsume objects completely—is ratified only in its “performance.” I take this to imply—in line with the evidence that we saw in the previous chapter—that this experience is performative, and that this performativity allows it to serve as the experience that is a guarantor for criticism of concepts. It could certainly be objected here, against my reading, that the “performance” which Adorno is talking about here is the proper “performance” of dialectical philosophy in a text. The “test” of dialectical philosophy that Adorno refers to would then be the strength of the given dialectical analysis in each specific instance, and the performance referred to would be in the execution of each of these analyses. Adorno would then be opposing “prima dialectica” (the dialectics of preset formulae that can be found in straw-man interpretations of Hegel or in Soviet dialectical materialism) to an antifoundational dialectics, which only finds its justification on a case-by-case basis, rather than through

texture, performativit y, and tru th

111

appeal to foundational standards. This is clearly a viable way of reading what happens in this passage. But it does not capture Adorno’s odd closing claim that this performance is in some way opposed to the “declarative.” I interpret this to be an opposition between the performative engagement with the text by the attending consciousness and the text’s own role as merely declarative. In this way, I understand Adorno’s work here to join up with his claims about the crucial role of “cogitative productivity,” detailed in the previous chapter. Adorno claimed a hard distinction between his rich, rhetorical texts and the “critical reflection of cogitative productivity”6 that was conjoined to them and that was an equally significant “philosophical content” in and of itself. There, the discursive layout of Adorno’s analyses was posited by Adorno as insufficient; rather, it had to be accompanied by the agent’s own conceptual performance of that written material. We seem to find an echo of this here in Adorno’s opposition of the declarative and performative. The unproblematically negative features of Adorno’s philosophical method—the use of immanent critique, the generation of conceptual constellations—find themselves outside of the “performance” that Adorno identifies as the sole means of access to philosophical truth. Adorno’s negative philosophy conducts itself by means of engaging with and employing the standards of truth embedded in discursive philosophy; it is precisely by confining himself to the conventional standards of deductive and inductive truth that Adorno is able to demonstrate (without making use of any foundational norms or deductive principles) that these standards are internally problematic. While Adorno’s use of constellations and claims concerning the metalogical imbrication of conceptual problematics is unorthodox, it is nonetheless still recognizably in conformity with what Adorno calls the “mathematical model” (in contradistinction to the “performance”). Likewise, the problematically positive features of Adorno’s philosophy are thoroughly situated within the conventional standards of truth. Unlike Adorno’s dialectical method, Adorno’s rich analysis does not subvert standards of truth by inducing them to fail, but rather offers accounts with an expanded evidential base. This expanded evidential base usually includes claims about the constitution or operation of the social totality, or alternatively concerning the influence of subterranean psychological processes on certain social or philosophical developments.7

112

texture, performativit y, and tru th

In the case of these rich analyses, beyond this expansion of admissible phenomena, the break with the standards of philosophical discourse that Adorno identifies as necessary does not appear. On the one hand, then, Adorno’s negativistic, metacritical analyses are in line with what he castigates as being said “methodologically, in the form of general reflection”; on the other, Adorno’s expanded rich analyses are themselves merely “declarative.” In either case, Adorno opposes these forms to the performance; and it is the performance that Adorno identifies as the method of breaking out of these forms of philosophical practice. These forms of philosophical practice must be broken out of as, in either case, they are not capable of fulfilling Adorno’s ultimate desideratum—knowledge of the particular. Both metacritique and rich analysis make use of concepts, in the one case to demonstrate their internally contradictory nature, in the other to enrich conceptual discourse. In neither case is complete comprehension of the particular possible, since by virtue of making use of concepts, even in service of providing a critique of those concepts, these forms of philosophical practice are entangled with the delusive occlusion of the object by the concept. Adorno posits a “break” with conceptuality as a solution to this problem8 and repeatedly emphasizes the role of the performance in making this break possible. This “performance”—which is constituted by a “cogitative” engagement by the agent—is positioned by Adorno as capable of instituting this break, and thereby escaping the holistic theory of falsity that afflicts all conceptual discourse. Following up on this, three questions arise. (1) How does this performance effect the “break” that Adorno identifies as the desideratum of a dialectical instantiation of the true?9 (2) How does this performative creation of a “break” with conceptuality amount to truth? And finally, (3) what is there to be said for this performative account of truth? While I do think there is strong evidence that Adorno should be read as holding this performative account, it is not clear whether this redounds to the benefit or detriment of his philosophy as a whole. Why should we want to interpret Adorno in this way? By answering these questions in turn, I will demonstrate that this performative account of Adorno’s philosophy of truth is a strong candidate reading, and also in turn has significant benefits for one’s comprehension of the overall structure of his thought and its sustainability.

texture, performativit y, and tru th

113

In order to begin answering these questions, we will need to get more detail on what, exactly, this performance consists in. We will find that the enabling condition for this “performance” of the consciousness is a specific kind of formal and rhetorical organization in the philosophical text with which consciousness is confronted. This will be the text’s having the appropriate kind of “texture,” which textually enacts (or, if you like, textually performs) conceptual movements. This model—of a formal organization of content that in some way enacts conceptual movement, conjoined to a consciousness that cognitively enacts these conceptual movements—not only will prove to be Adorno’s account of philosophical truth, but will in fact be the same model that he applies in the case of the truth of art. What we are doing in this chapter, then, is elucidating a model of truth that is applied by Adorno across both philosophy and art, and it is hence of core significance for our attempt (in the following chapter) to finally elucidate and unpack exactly what Adorno means when he says artworks have truth content and can achieve an “identification of the non-identical.”

What Is the Performance, and How Does It Produce a Conceptual “Breakout”? As Adorno’s scattered references to both the break with conceptuality and the use of the performance make clear, the “philosophical content” that the subject’s performance contributes is created in dialogue with an established philosophical text. Adorno, of course, is tacitly linking the existence of this performative breakout with philosophical texts of a certain kind. It is only a dialectical philosophy of his stripe that serves to make possible the required break with concepts; it is not the case that any philosophy, properly engaged with, could generate the desired performative break. As such, considering the specific features of Adorno’s philosophical practice promises to make clearer how the performance itself is brought about. I have already elaborated the central features of Adorno’s philosophical methodology (the use of critique, the generation of constellations) in previous chapters. He rejects linear argumentation that confines itself to deductively guided inferences and conclusions. Rather, Adorno characteristically fixates his analysis on a single phenomenon

11 4

texture, performativit y, and tru th

and then, in service of attempting to comprehend that phenomenon, progressively works through the available philosophical categories and methodologies that purport to be capable of delivering an exhaustive comprehension of it. Beginning at what is often an arbitrary point, Adorno will cycle through a great variety of perspectives and methodologies in dealing with the phenomenon in question, with each of these epistemological perspectives being induced into failures of a sort that immanently produces a transition to a further philosophical perspective that will, in turn, yield up another. This approach is applied at varying lengths, being compressed into relatively tight confines in Minima Moralia (or, for instance, Adorno’s essays on literature), while becoming dauntingly extensive in Adorno’s later works (each chapter of Aesthetic Theory, for example, often serves as a sustained analysis of a category or problem in aesthetics). In every case, the core similarity is both philosophical and rhetorical; a given philosophical issue is approached from a given perspective; this perspective is put to work immanently (Adorno attempts to employ the criteria internal to the philosophical approach), and this perspective immanently gives rise to a transition to an alternative approach. This series of immanent transitions is mirrored in Adorno’s rhetorical organization of his text. At no point are rhetorical directions or comments offered that interfere with, or stand external to, the immanent flow of the application of the starting philosophical perspective. The entirety of the analysis (in its flow across a given number of philosophical positions) is directed by the internal problematic contained in each of the considered perspectives, and follows them through their entailments.10 The perspectival shifts that continually occur in Adorno’s work, as he shifts conceptual and disciplinary approaches, are presented as necessary and generated immanently by the failures in the preceding concept or approach that Adorno has brought out. As the transition from one philosophical set of criteria to another cannot be dictated by any orienting foundational set of philosophical claims,11 and so must be produced immanently, Adorno is likewise rhetorically compelled to present these transitions, and the resultant dialectical constellations, as emerging immanently. Philosophical argument is obliged to present its dialectical transitions in their immanency; it is only in the rhetorical presentation of these transitions in

texture, performativit y, and tru th

115

their immanent movement that dialectical philosophy is capable of gaining legitimacy—as proving that these transitions arose out of the use of these concepts, rather than being forced upon them. Rhetorical form becomes a feature of philosophical legitimacy. Prima facie, this is a relatively uninteresting fact about Adorno’s philosophy. Dialectical philosophers reliably make use of unorthodox rhetorical forms, in order to better support their claim that the various dialectical transitions they identify are not the product of arbitrary choices, but rather immanently created by dialectical analysis. Hegel’s philosophy was possessed of a similar interleaving of rhetorical and epistemological standards. We find this most consistently in his Phenomenology of Spirit, although it reappears in an increasingly strained form in the transitions in Hegel’s mature work. This being said, Adorno’s endorsement of rhetorical method is distinct from that found in the work of Hegel and other dialecticians. In the first place, Adorno does not understand rhetorical organization to be merely a manner of making his philosophical approach transparent (as it was for Hegel et al.), but rather sees rhetoric as an irremovable feature of that philosophical approach itself: “Dialectics—literally: language as the organon of thought—would mean to attempt a critical rescue of the rhetorical element, a mutual approximation of thing and expression, to the point where the difference fades. . . . In dialectics, contrary to popular opinion, the rhetorical element is on the side of content.”12 Here we see that the “rhetorical element” of Adorno’s practice is implicated in the content of Adorno’s philosophical argumentation itself. The argument of Hegel’s Phenomenology scarcely seems irremovably intertwined with its rhetorical presentation. Indeed, Hegel’s frequent rhetorical shifts in the Phenomenology between the immanent generation of problematics in natural consciousness and the commentary provided by the philosophical consciousness that has already completed the path traversed by the Phenomenology demonstrate that Hegel does not understand any one rhetorical approach as essential to his presentation of his philosophical position. Adorno, on the other hand, draws a tight relation between rhetorical form and philosophical content. In “The Essay as Form,” Adorno states: The how of expression should rescue, in precision, what the refusal to outline sacrifices, without, however, betraying the

116

texture, performativit y, and tru th

intended matter to the arbitrariness of previously decreed significations. . . . In the essay, concepts do not build a continuum of operations, thought does not advance in a single direction, rather the aspects of the argument interweave as in a carpet. The fruitfulness of the thoughts depends on the density of this texture.13 Adorno terms the required rhetorical form “texture.” The German term here translated as “texture” is Gewebe, which is associated with textiles, and is also capable of being translated as “tissue” or “weave.” As these connotations make clear, the philosophical “texture” that Adorno is here identifying as desirable is a multithreaded, multidirectional account in which various strands “interweave,” as he puts it. Dialectical philosophy, for Adorno, can only terminate in this “texture,” in which diverse epistemological categories and perspectives are exhaustively interrelated and interwoven, in order to demonstrate the incapability of any single form of conceptual discourse exhaustively describing its object. Crucially, this rhetorical texture is a condition of the “fruitfulness of the thoughts” that it expresses. Comprehension of the object is not merely a “deductive or inductive course,”14 but is rather achieved in the “density of [the] texture.”15 Following from this claim about the optimal form of a philosophical argument, Adorno is here signifying his rejection of deductive and inductive standards of truth, and his belief in the fusion of standards of truth with standards of rhetorical achievement. Later in the same piece, Adorno cements this idea that philosophical content and rhetorical form have become intermixed in his work: The essay, however, has to do with that which is blind in its objects. Conceptually it wants to blow open what cannot be absorbed by concepts, or what, through contradictions in which concepts entangle themselves, betrays the fact that the network of their objectivity is a purely subjective rigging. . . . It constructs the interwovenness of concepts in such a way that they can be imagined as themselves interwoven in the object.16 Once more, he claims that rhetorically enacting a series of philosophical transitions caused by conceptual insufficiencies is the means

t e xt u re , pe rfo rm at ivit y, a n d t ru t h

117

of “blow[ing] open” that which “cannot be absorbed by concepts.” This means of “blowing open” the object concealed by conceptuality is associated with dialectical philosophy’s propensity to create a texture, an “interwovenness” of concepts that arises out of the internal insufficiencies of those concepts. And, once more, there is the corollary that the rhetorical expression of this texture ceases to be mere rhetoric for Adorno, and becomes a philosophical content in parity with the arguments that it conveys. The rhetorical texture of Adorno’s work, then, is constituted by a kind of destructive phenomenology. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit generated the breakdown of forms of consciousness (each of which was an attempt to know the world), simply by watching these attempts to know break down in the course of their application to the world. Crucially, for Hegel, “truth is attainable by surveying the breakdown of each appearance into its successor . . . until we reach absolute [knowledge].”17 For Hegel, while his phenomenology is a passive enterprise, it is also a positive one—each observed breakdown gives rise to a new, superior form of consciousness and continues the advance toward absolute knowledge, in which concept and object are in perfect conformity. For Adorno, by contrast, the phenomenological method does not generate new, improved concepts out of the observed breakdown of the old. Each candidate epistemological practice or perspective in the topic object’s “constellation” is engaged and employed immanently in the text. However, in the course of this displayed engagement of the given practice, a difficulty arises that is only soluble by the transition from that practice (which understands itself as exhaustive) to another. This process is repeated until each of the candidate practices has revealed itself to be, in itself, insufficient (or, as Adorno puts it, “purely subjective rigging”).18 Adorno’s phenomenology is destructive, then, as it terminates in a display of falsity, rather than an improvement in the conformity between concept and object. The performativity that Adorno makes use of, and I am currently trying to explicate, is quite clearly subject-side (it is the subject’s “cogitative productivity” that constitutes the performance in question). However, this is clear reason to term Adorno’s rhetorical method (the objective structure of philosophical argumentation) as textually performative. In a fashion distantly related to Hegel’s Phenomenology, Adorno textually

118

texture, performativit y, and tru th

instantiates what Hegel called in the Logic the “movement of the concept itself.”19 The text dynamically performs (and allows its form to be shaped by) the movement internal to those philosophical accounts Adorno subjects to scrutiny. Just as Adorno claims that artworks must be “organized from below,”20 it seems that Adorno’s essayistic style is entirely determined by the movement of its epistemic materials. (The similarity is more than coincidental, as I will try to make plausible in the following chapter.) The performativity of the text derives from its performing, in its rhetorical “texture,” the conceptual insufficiencies (antinomies, contradictions, and the like) that it refers to. The text does not merely refer to these conceptual difficulties, but in fact instantiates them by virtue of its phenomenological procedure. The conceptual difficulties are not discursively stated, but are rather enacted in the text itself. This is the rhetorical “texture” that Adorno identifies as an essential enabling condition for the production of a breakout or “blowing open” of delusive conceptuality, in order to make possible knowledge of the nonidentical.

Rhetorical Texture and Performance Going beyond the kind of rhetorical form that was associated with the dialectical philosophy of Hegel, Adorno has made the bold claim that rhetoric is now to be counted as a philosophical content in and of itself. Examining the use to which this notion was put in Adorno’s work, one discovers that rhetoric ascends to the status of philosophical content by virtue of providing a direct acquaintance with the movement of the concept. Philosophical rhetoric is used to show what cannot be said; and as it takes up this vital role, rhetoric becomes an intrinsic part of all genuine philosophical practice. It is just this “texture,” this rhetorical organization, that Adorno has posited as the arbiter of philosophical accuracy.21 Evidence of philosophical comprehension of a given phenomenon just is, for Adorno, the creation of such a rhetorical form, which flows spontaneously through the problematics contained in each of the concepts and conceptual practices used to try to subsume that phenomenon. This perhaps gives us sufficient reason to think that Adorno’s distinctive rhetorical method is not a contingent choice, but is rather intimately

texture, performativit y, and tru th

119

related to and derived from his position on both concept use and truth. However, the question remains of how this rhetorical method is meant to elicit the breakout of conceptuality that Adorno identifies as the ultimate desideratum of his philosophical method. The subject’s breakout of conceptuality, manifested as a “momentary flash,” must take place by means of this text; the text must in an important fashion provide the enabling conditions for this epistemological event. From Adorno’s work, we also have the assertion that this breakout must likewise be produced by the cognitive engagement and “performance” of the consciousness. What is required is a means of cogently uniting these two features—the rhetorical texture, the consciousness of the reader—in such a fashion that such a conceptual breakout will be brought about.22 Adorno characteristically relies on the existence of socially universal conceptual arrays. This universality is vouchsafed by thin determination, a process of mediation which ensures that the concepts formed and the manner in which those concepts are put to work hold identically for all members of a given society across a given time period. It is this thin determination and the conceptual problematics that it constitutes and enforces that Adorno’s philosophy details. The role of rhetorical texture is to textually enact these conceptual problematics; the concepts in question are visibly put to work in the text, until they are induced to generate their own internal failure. These conceptual problematics are latent in the concepts themselves; as per Adorno’s endorsement of phenomenological method, concepts are not directed into failure, but merely applied with an eye to the finegrained problematics that those concepts generate in the course of their own application. Due to the existence of thin determination, the reader who encounters the dialectical philosophical text will be in possession of the same conceptual array, together with the same latent problematics, as the concepts put to work in the text itself.23 The consciousness and the philosophical text are conceptually isomorphic, each having the same resources available to attempt the comprehension of a given phenomenon, and each bearing the same latent problematics that will emerge in the attempt to apply these concepts to the phenomena in question. If one combines this isomorphism with the performativity of the text and the performativity of the reader, it becomes clear how

120

texture, performativit y, and tru th

a conceptual break can cogently result from the interaction of the philosophical text and the reader. In the first place, the text produced by Adorno’s dialectical philosophy is processual—it guides the reader through the enacted application of a concept or set of concepts. From Adorno’s own assertions, the agent’s performance is constituted by the comprehension and performance of this processual text. The subject internally enacts what is enacted in the text—the employment of concepts such that they produce in the course of their own employment contradictions or problematics that make manifest their incapability of subsuming their object. Each of his or her concepts, via performatively engaging with the text, mirrors the employment of those concepts applied in the text. As the text enacts a cognitive attempt to exhaustively comprehend a given phenomenon, the same concept, directed by the rhetorical texture of the work, is performatively put to work in the consciousness of the reader. The conceptual breakdown that is brought about in the text is reinstantiated in the course of the concept’s application in the consciousness of the reader. The text serves as an enacted structure, then, that guides the mimetic engagement of the reader’s own concepts. In the course of the employment of each concept in the text, this concept is brought to failure by virtue of the latent problematics that are exposed in the course of this application. This exhaustively enacts all of the eligible or germane concepts relative to this phenomena, with each having their self-conception (as of being capable of subsuming their object) defeated in turn by virtue of the difficulties that arise in the course of their application. The same concepts that are applied in the text are brought into use in the reading of this text, and the rhetorical texture leads the agent’s application of these concepts. A dialectic between the performativity of the text and the performativity of the subject is created. This dialectic in itself accounts for some of Adorno’s claims concerning the philosophical text’s capability to outstrip conventional standards of justification. Adorno’s philosophy is negativistic and antifoundational, and yet nonetheless purports to express accurately given facts and states of affairs. Ex hypothesi, any positive statement of fact (or value) requires a justificatory standard by which it can be cognized as correct. It is just Adorno’s rejection of positive standards of

texture, performativit y, and tru th

12 1

evaluation, or axiomatic philosophical principles, that entails his negativist metacritical philosophy. Adorno claims that out of this negativist practice, however, positive comprehension of the nonconceptual “nonidentical” results. As all standards of evaluation have been discounted from the first (and, moreover, the nonidentical qua nonconceptual stands outside of concepts that could provide such norms), it appears that any putative nonidentical truths that emerge from this antifoundationalist approach could not be cognized or recognized as true, as they would be without standards of truth that could allow one to recognize them as such. However, by combining the performativity of the text and subject, Adorno is able to sidestep this problem. The justification for the truth delivered by the text is not derived from the standards criticized (as it would be if Adorno’s work were merely skeptical), nor is it imported from an extraconceptual source (as it would be if Adorno’s work were merely irrational). The justification for the nonidentical truth that is provided by the combination of the text and performance of the subject is provided experientially, disclosed through the employment of concepts in a dialectical fashion. Adorno gestured at this unorthodox form of justification before: In philosophy the authentic question will somehow almost always include its answer. Unlike science, philosophy knows no fixed sequence of question and answer. . . . This distinguishes the relation of understanding and judgment from the usual order of time.  .  .  . What is transmitted here is the fiber of the so-called philosophical demonstration, a mode of proof that contrasts with the mathematical model. And yet that model does not simply disappear, for the stringency of a philosophical thought requires its mode of proceeding to be measured by the forms of inference. Philosophical proof is the effort to give statements a binding quality by making them commensurable with the means of discursive thinking. But it does not purely follow from that thinking: the critical reflection of such cogitative productivity is itself a philosophical content.24 The dialectic between the performativity of the text and subject is intended by Adorno to terminate in a radically different form of

122

texture, performativit y, and tru th

justification, which stands outside of the deductive, inductive, and inferential standards internal to conceptual discourse. In clarifying this ostensibly novel form of justification, one can finally get a grasp on how the text and agent can jointly bring about the “break” with conceptuality that Adorno repeatedly outlines as the desideratum of dialectical method. To recap the argument given in chapter 2, for Adorno there is no apparent distinction, as there is for Kant, between transcendental and empirical concepts. All concepts play a dual role, as being put to work in the mediation of experience, and as being available for theoretical use in thought. The concepts that the agent employs, in the course of attempting to cognize an object, serve both as a means of acquiring knowledge and as that which mediates experience and makes continuous experience possible; and the problematics internal to those concepts are manifested both theoretically and experientially (most obviously as internal contradictions and as an occlusion of the full constitution of the object, respectively). It is this dual role, the linkage of the theoretical and the experiential, that provides Adorno with his new form of justification and the breakout of conceptuality. When the agent performatively interrogates the philosophical text, the conceptual failures present in the text are isomorphic to conceptual failures latent in the agent’s own conceptual array. The agent’s performance of the text internally leads to these conceptual failures that are displayed on the page being effected internally, in the agent’s conceptual array. The theoretical problems, which cause the application of these concepts to grind to a halt, are not merely theoretical; they are problems latent in both the theoretical and experiential modes of the concept. Due to this duality, the complete theoretical failures of the performative application of the concepts of the subject are simultaneously a failure in those concepts which mediate that experience. Which is to say, the mediating concepts fail to subsume their object, and the conceptual mediation of continuous experience is accordingly disrupted. As such, the theoretical conceptual failure that is instantiated in the philosophical text is, by virtue of the performative role of the agent, reinstantiated in experience. Chapter 1’s exploration of Dialectic of Enlightenment showed that Adorno took experience without conceptual mediation to be possible, albeit pragmatically unsustainable due to

texture, performativit y, and tru th

123

its discontinuity. This discontinuity in turn generated the “cry of terror,” which inaugurated the formation and employment of concepts. The dialectic between the performativity of the text and the reader, then, should be expected to generate a similarly disruptive, discontinuous experience, and I will show below that Adorno indicates that this is so. First, it can be noted that this conception of dialectical philosophy as effecting a change in the texture of experience, by virtue of disrupting the conceptual mediation of experience, furnishes us with an explanation of Adorno’s desired new form of justification for philosophical truth. The ultimate aim of philosophy is to “unseal the nonconceptual with concepts,”25 namely, the comprehension of the nonconceptual by means of concepts. This “by means of,” Adorno claimed, could not be via the application of concepts according to their own standards of application (even dialectical philosophy metacritically employs standards of justification internal to concepts), which Adorno termed the “mathematical model.” Rather, a flash of comprehension, achieved through the twinning of that mathematical model and the “cogitative productivity”26 of a consciousness, was identified as the new form of justification required. On the reading I am advancing presently, this extraconceptual justification is provided by direct experience of the insufficiency of concepts and of the existence of an object that outstrips subsumption by our concepts as they are presently articulated. As all eligible mediating concepts fail in their application to a given phenomenon, the consciousness is acquainted with the nonidenticality of its object (rather than being told that there is this nonidenticality, as on the mathematical model). The agent experiences an object that cannot be exhausted by his or her concepts. This constitutes the desired breakout of the false epistemological whole just because the constitutive element of the false epistemology—the identification of the concept with the object—is made impossible. The agent is confronted with an object completely resistant to conceptual subsumption. As such, the agent will experience the complete insufficiency of his or her concepts, with regard to the considered object. All of the concepts in the agent’s conceptual array relevant to the object under consideration are engaged and induced to fail. This does not entail a display of the falsity of the entirety of the conceptual array;

12 4

texture, performativit y, and tru th

there will remain any number of concepts possessed by the agent that will not have been engaged by the dialectical critique in question. (Dialectical constellations are finite—they only include those concepts related to comprehension of the topic in question.) However, it will serve to acquaint the agent with the insufficiency of an area of his or her conceptual array. All of the candidate concepts for comprehension of a given object will prove unable to subsume that object. This serves as a hammer blow to the constitutive idea of identity thinking—that concepts can exhaust their objects without remainder. The experience of a breakdown in the mediation of experience is localized to a specific conceptual problematic, and does not force a one-place inference to the falsity of all concepts. The experience serves to momentarily loosen the grip of identity thinking, disclosing the existence of objects beyond the consciousness’s conceptual grasp. This in itself discloses a widened range of possibilities; the consciousness’s concepts (and the behaviors induced by these concepts) are now visibly contingent, as their claim to be necessitated and justified by correspondence to the object is now undermined. It is, I think, for this reason that Adorno ties the nonidentical in very tightly with the political, seeing the nonidentical as a momentary disclosure of the possibility of utopia.27 All discourse internal to the established conceptual order is ultimately bound by the justificatory and semantic constraints of that order. It is only the fleeting experience of the nonidentical that is capable of disclosing a truly utopian moment, a moment in which all claims, structures, and entailments are revealed as revisable. To recap, the combination of the performativity of the text (its textural display of the inherent insufficiency of concepts) and the performativity of the agent (the agent’s mirroring the text in the actual employment of his or her own conceptual faculties) results in a break. The conceptual contradictions in the text are by themselves insufficient for a break—this is due to the holistic theory of falsity outlined above. If the agent were merely to read and register a set of assertions concerning the fallibility of concepts, the experience of these assertions (qua mediated by concepts) would entail the ultimate falsification of these assertions. The agent’s performance, however, dodges the problem of the holistic theory of falsity by taking place not by virtue of assertions or explicit theoretical programs (which are vulnerable to the delusive

texture, performativit y, and tru th

125

influence of the concept, reification, and the like) but instead by virtue of effecting a break in the concept itself, and thereby not being subject to its delusive influence. Performativity, then, satisfies Adorno’s desideratum that dialectics result in a break with the false epistemological practice by virtue of the strength of that false epistemological practice, as well as providing a form of justification that outstrips the holistic theory of falsity without becoming mere skepticism or irrationalism. I will now turn to see if and how this experiential break can be meaningfully termed true.

The Truth of the “Break” with Concepts: Truth by Demonstration and Acquaintance The performative break with concepts is true in two ways, mirroring the dual theoretical and experiential function of concepts on Adorno’s account. It is true by demonstration, and it is true by acquaintance. It is demonstrated to the agent, through its performative engagement with the text, that any presently possible conceptual practice is incapable of exhaustively subsuming the currently considered object. This demonstration is true because it demonstrates to the agent that the socially universal conceptual array is in fact inherently incapable of grasping the considered object—the conceptual array presents itself to the agent as exhaustively subsuming that object, but is in fact completely unable to do so. As we saw earlier, any positive assertion (including “the epistemological whole is false”) is ultimately falsified by Adorno’s holistic theory of falsity, due to the delusive influence of the governing concepts, reification, and the like. As such, any assertion of the falsity of the socially universal conceptual array would itself be falsified by virtue of the conceptual mediation which allowed that assertion to be comprehended. The performative demonstration of this falsity, however, escapes this difficulty and allows for the diremption between all presently available concepts in the socially universal conceptual array and the candidate object to be comprehended without thereby being falsified by the concept. This break, then, is true since it allows for the genuine comprehension of the falsity of the part of the epistemological whole relevant to the considered object. The performative break is the only medium for an escape from the falsifying influence of the

126

texture, performativit y, and tru th

epistemological whole, and the only medium for the perception of its falsity, its insufficiency in relation to the object in question. It is true, then, by virtue of demonstrating (and being the only way of demonstrating) the falsity of all other, presently available, nondialectical forms of knowledge with reference to the considered object. Second, there is knowledge by acquaintance, which is entailed by the concept’s experiential role. As has already been explained, the continual breakdown of each concept applied to the object not only prevents the application of the concept in a theoretic sense, but also prevents that concept from successfully mediating the agent’s experience of that object. As such, the agent’s experience of that object is not wholly conceptually mediated. The agent, then, is experientially acquainted with something that cannot be subsumed or experientially mediated by the concept. The agent has an experience of something nonconceptual—namely, the nonidentical. The performative break, then, serves to acquaint the agent with the nonidentical. The effect of this acquaintance assuredly reinforces the demonstrative effect of the performative break—namely, informing the agent that his or her concepts are not in fact in this case sufficient—by virtue of acquainting the agent with something that is not capturable by the concept. As such, this acquaintance with the nonidentical also stands as true in the same sense as the demonstrative element of the performative break. It displays the falsity of the governing conceptual array without this display being subject to the delusive influence of that governing array. The foregoing has shown us that this is a cogent means of understanding Adorno’s theory of truth as “performative.” Let us now see what benefits there might be in taking Adorno to hold this position. This will force us to return to the issue of the dilemma of skepticism and irrationalism.

The Benefits of Reading Adorno in This Way The strength of the falsifying forces that Adorno has associated with concepts, and the attendant impossibility of the positive expression of the true, would appear to leave us with two choices. First, one could jettison conceptuality altogether and posit the true as accessible through some unorthodox, privileged medium that, being nonrational and

texture, performativit y, and tru th

127

nonconceptual, would be free of the baleful effects of the delusive concepts. This would amount to irrationalism. This is not a viable reading of Adorno; Adorno vituperatively rejects irrationalism.28 Second, one could abandon any theory of the truth as expressible in itself and instead confine oneself wholly to the negative philosophical project of demolishing all positive philosophical projects. This would result in Adorno’s philosophy being arrested in a state of skepticism, with its role being only the identification of internal inconsistencies, antinomies, and so on. This latter reading of Adorno is also unworkable; while Adorno’s philosophical project is assuredly negative, and does conduct itself as a search for inconsistencies, antinomies, and so on, it does in fact also exceed this merely skeptical project (as shown in looking at Adorno’s use of “rich analysis”). Adorno explicitly rejected mere skepticism: In principle, philosophy can always go astray, which is the sole reason why it can go forward. This has been recognized in skepticism and in pragmatism, most recently in Dewey’s wholly humane version of the latter; but we ought to add it as a ferment to an emphatic philosophy instead of renouncing philosophy, from the outset, in favor of the test it has to stand.29 Bourgeois scepticism, which relativism as a doctrine embodies, is perverse.30 Adorno did not construe his critical project as merely an ongoing project of the demolition of other philosophical positions. Rather, he held his philosophy to be an attempt to construe and comprehend the nonidentical. He posits this expression of the nonidentical as exceeding the mere negative criticism of other philosophical positions: “Just as riddlesolving is constituted, in that the singular and dispersed elements of the question are brought into various groupings long enough for them to close together in a figure out of which the solution springs forth . . . so philosophy has to bring its elements . . . into changing constellations . . . until they fall into a figure which can be read as an answer.31 Adorno is alleging that the negative philosophical project does not arrest itself merely with the negative criticism of the inconsistencies in other

12 8

texture, performativit y, and tru th

positions, but in fact serves as a method of instantiating and comprehending the nonidentical, of delivering “an answer.” Without a performative account of the generation of a conceptual break, we would be without any method of making sense of Adorno’s belief in this flash of comprehension. Either, it would seem, this flash is comprehended by means of the concept, in which case it is false by virtue of the holistic theory of falsity, or it takes place entirely outside of the concept, in which case it is irrational and hence, for Adorno, false also. We appear, then, to be caught in a dilemma. This dilemma is recognized obliquely by Adorno in Lectures on Negative Dialectics: If we have no confidence in the feasibility of such a break-out from the sphere of the manufactured concept into the nonconceptual realm essentially belonging to that concept, this would rule out philosophizing of any kind. . . . We would achieve the utopia of cognition [that is, circumvent this problem] not by means of some allegedly superior non-conceptual methods, but by unlocking the non-conceptual by means of the concept, and the self-criticism of concepts—without reducing what has been comprehended, the non-conceptual, to concepts by main force.32 Adorno himself, then, recognizes this fundamental dilemma that is produced by his unequivocal positing of concepts as falsifying. It leaves two apparent possibilities, the skeptical (ruling “out philosophizing of any kind”) or the irrational (positing “some allegedly superior nonconceptual methods”). Adorno posits the escape from this dilemma as “unlocking the non-conceptual by means of the concept.” I suggest that the account of the performativity I have just given matches Adorno’s proposed method of escaping this dilemma. By identifying access to the true with the performance, Adorno allows us to employ the delusive conceptual makeup of experience not merely in order to construct negative critiques of other positions, but in fact in order to allow for an access to the true, namely, the nonidentical. In short, the picture of Adorno’s philosophy I have built in the previous three chapters forces a dilemma between skepticism and irrationalism. Adorno acknowledges this dilemma and posits a determinate breakout of conceptuality in order to circumvent it. The account of the

texture, performativit y, and tru th

129

dialectic between the performativity of the text and consciousness that I have offered provides an explanation of this escape from the dilemma. This provides some of the motivation for acceding to this account of Adorno’s theory of truth. It both alleviates a central dilemma recognized by Adorno himself and does so in a fashion congruent with the suggestive remarks Adorno makes concerning the shape such a solution should take.

Performativity and Scope Mentioned above, but not explored in full detail, was the fact that the performative break with conceptuality does not entail an experience of the falsity of all concepts, but merely those relevant to the object under consideration. Put differently, this performative break does not acquaint one with the falsity of all conceptuality and identity thinking simpliciter: rather, it serves to demonstrate the unworkability of the available and relevant concepts, employed in accordance with identity thinking, insofar as they attempt to subsume without remainder the subject of the considered philosophical critique. This might seem somewhat unambitious. Adorno held out the promise of breaking with identity thinking “in its own measure.”33 The unrestricted scope of this assertion might lead one to expect that identity thinking as a whole will be in some fashion broken, or broken with, by Adorno’s dialectical philosophy. However, the picture I have given is somewhat more partial. The delusive conceptual array is not as a whole critiqued; rather, its specific insufficiency in one area (be that philosophy of mind, freedom, and so on) is experienced. As such, the end result of Adorno’s theory of performative truth (on my reading) is not a complete critique of identity thinking as it obtains in its entirety, but rather the display of the unworkability of a given section of the conceptual array created by identity thinking. While the experience of the nonidentical could not facilitate a oneplace inference to the intrinsic insufficiency of all identity thinking and conceptuality, it does serve to weaken the claim of identity thinking. It displays that concepts are in fact unable to subsume given phenomena and therefore begins to build a case against the presumption of the adequacy between concept and object. As a result, this theory of the

130

texture, performativit y, and tru th

performatively true entails an ongoing project of dialectical critique and performative engagement, which continually engages differing areas of knowledge and displays the failure of the available concepts. This partiality—the inability of the performatively true to indict the whole of the conceptual array, to indict identity thinking in toto— entails the practice of continually undermining identity thinking by repeatedly performatively demonstrating the breakdown of concepts. The philosophical critique of identity thinking hence can at no point be considered a settled matter, but must ever and again be reapplied to each emergent philosophical account or fresh domain of inquiry. While this is perhaps more modest than Adorno’s occasionally brash assertions imply, it nonetheless matches Adorno’s philosophical practice as we find it in his works. Adorno’s work is quite intentionally multifarious and interdisciplinary; and Adorno explicitly endorses an essayistic philosophical style, in which particulars and particular problematics are substituted for grandiose generalizations. Following from my characterization of the mechanics of the performative “hammer blow” to identity thinking, this great diversity can be understood not merely as a contingent quirk of Adorno’s work, but rather as directly necessitated by his methodology. The relentless application of his method to various domains of inquiry is in aid of a project of continually aiming blows at the fallacious appearance of adequacy in the relation between concept and object, in order to loosen the grip of this delusion.

Nonidentity In keeping with Adorno’s reluctance to stipulatively define his terms, we do find that Adorno makes frequent reference to nonidentity without giving us a full description of what nonidentity is or its ontological and epistemic status. We are reliably informed that the nonidentical is the prime desideratum of philosophical method, and moreover has a central role in motivating the critique and breakout of conventional conceptuality. Since nonidentity is the goal of Adorno’s philosophical praxis, our interpretation of Adorno’s praxis has a strong determining role in what we are able to take nonidentity to be. I have, in these four chapters, been engaged in the project of investigating how we should understand this praxis. I hope that I have given a clear account;

texture, performativit y, and tru th

131

building from it, I would like now to draw the consequences it has for our understanding of nonidentity. It has become clear that I cannot posit the nonidentical as being identified with some ahistorical set of intrinsic properties that the object possesses but the concept fails to model. The conception of concept application and self-preservation I have found in Adorno’s work shows us that, ex hypothesi, the kind of epistemic warrant we would require in order to be able to pick out some specific feature/s of object/s as nonidentical is unavailable. (This is not to say we cannot make the claim that objects have some indeterminate set of properties not captured by concepts; I will return to this thought.) To give nonidentity an ontological dimension, and to lend specificity to the ontological constitution of that nonidentity, would ask us to make use of an immediate epistemic access to the world that Adorno’s account of cognition posits as impossible. Conceptual mediation stands between us and the world; and we are without guarantee that this mediation gives us direct access to the world as it is in itself. Mediation is not only subtractive—in occluding given properties—but also additive, capable of forcing us to view objects as having properties they do not in fact have. Given these issues, we might consider mediated experience as unreliable in terms of deciding which properties objects have simpliciter, let alone which properties they might have that concepts do not capture. Nonidentity is, on my view, an itinerant feature of epistemic systems. It is the point at which concepts are confronted with objects that they cannot systematize. This failure of systematicity reveals the contingent necessity of the extant concepts. Concepts now appear contingently necessary as the claims to unconditional necessity and complete accuracy, which Adorno sees as embedded in concepts, are now not jointly sustainable. In the disruptive experience of our mediating concepts coming to fail in the course of attempting to mediate and cognize an object, we are forcibly acquainted with the object’s rejection of our presently available conceptual array. This informs us that our implicit view of concepts—that they unproblematically capture objects in the world—is defeasible and, in this case, defeated. These concepts can no longer be seen to draw their justification from the object—as the object has visibly failed to fit into these concepts, and hence the employment

132

texture, performativit y, and tru th

of these specific concepts is not demanded by the constitution of the object itself, and becomes visibly contingent thereby. This in turn entails that nonidentity is not an ahistorical feature of objects of inquiry. An object may present itself as nonidentical, in the failure of our concepts to be capable of seamlessly modeling it, but this is a function of the problematics internal to the conceptual array at that time. At some other historical point, concepts may become modified such that the object can be seamlessly mediated.34 The socioepistemic whole, as Adorno understands it, continually presses for completely seamless subsumption and control of both its social constituents and its epistemic materials. We should expect that problematics which are generated by the sociohistorically specific failure of fit between conceptual arrays and objects may close over time as new means of employing concepts or conceiving of objects succeed in genuinely solving, or completely concealing, the failure of fit that occasions nonidentity. Adorno’s genealogical account of the emergence of reason, as examined in chapter 1, saw nonidentity being produced by the ordinary objects that featured in man’s environment. The production of conceptuality and derivative practices like magic were a means of removing this nonidentity, by making the object commensurable with cognition. This was qualifiedly successful. As was made clear in examining the practice of “simple predication,” for basic objects there is no longer for us any immediate nonidentity, or failure of fit, between concepts and their objects in these cases. As Adorno’s own philosophical practice makes clear, nonidentity is no longer a property of any object whatsoever; it is only present at the most developed instances of the socioconceptual complex, as in philosophical problems or authentic art. Although it is the holistic conceptual system that is false, this falsity progressively moves outward, into higher levels of abstraction. The social totality and form of thought it compels continually move to smooth over evidence of its own contingency and inaccuracy; as conceptual antinomies are registered and addressed, the fundamental falsity of instrumentalized reason is increasingly only evident at the highest levels of abstraction and complexity. In a helical progression, humanity continually intensifies and wrestles with the problematic intrinsic to its form of cognition—the self-preserving subsumption of particulars under concepts—and presses the visible nonidentity

texture, performativit y, and tru th

133

between reason and features of the world into increasingly more complex spheres of human reason. The account of nonidentity that I see as demanded by Adorno’s work, then, is one that grants no positive specificity to nonidentity whatsoever. Nonidentity is rather produced wherever conceptual systems betray a want of pliability, and thereby create a failure of fit between themselves and the world. The socioepistemic whole continually seeks to close the gap between conceptual systematicity and fidelity to the world; it is the role of nonidentity (and the philosopher who seeks to trace it) to pursue those sticking points at which the world testifies to the impossibility of closing this gap, so long as reason persists in its enlightened form. And in this continual process, of making manifest over and again reason’s tendency to generate a failure of fit between itself and its objects, we increasingly make plausible the idea that thought in general is failing to capture the full specificity of the world. Although we cannot enumerate the concealed properties in that “full specificity,” the continual encounter of nonidentity through Adornian critique nonetheless motivates the view that a continual failure of fit obtains and is a general feature of the way we presently reason.

Toward Aesthetic Truth The first two chapters set out the complex conceptual mediation that Adorno held to be a necessary feature of experience, as well as the falsification that Adorno held to ineluctably follow from the employment of those concepts. This situated the unique problem of Adorno’s theory of the true—namely, that the true appears to preclude its own expression, on pain of the true’s becoming false. The present chapter has been a consideration of how Adorno is able, despite these difficulties, to prevent his theory of truth from being merely an account of truth’s impossibility. As I hope has been shown, the reading of Adorno expounded in this chapter is consistent with the exegetical evidence. Moreover, it also appears to be a unique theory of truth, hitherto unencountered. However, the discussion of Adorno’s theory of truth is not yet complete, as one of its most unique features has yet to be examined. The theory of truth treated in this chapter has been related entirely to an explicitly theoretical form of discourse, namely, philosophy.

13 4

texture, performativit y, and tru th

However, I hold that the theory of truth here outlined also applies outside of the explicitly discursive attempts to instantiate truth. In short, I hold that the textural theory of truth here outlined also provides a theory of aesthetic truth. By applying the structure of this account of Adorno’s theory of truth to his theory of art and aesthetic truth, a number of obscurities in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory can be clarified. Adorno’s criterion of aesthetic truth—the “shudder”—and its relation to the nonidentical can be elucidated by using this account. This has the immediate consequence that artistic method is an aesthetic instantiation of the philosophical mode of instantiating the nonidentical. Running together art and philosophy in this way will also shed light on Adorno’s implicit reliance on the congruity between aesthetic and philosophical categories, and will provide justification for this distinctive characteristic of his aesthetic philosophy. This will also have the corollary that the two accounts, the philosophical and the aesthetic, that Adorno gives of truth will be brought into a mutually supporting relationship as two instantiations of the same theory of truth.35 As such, each account will support the other.

5 Aesthetic Truth Content and Oblique Second Reflection

As perhaps suits its intentionally ambiguous title, Aesthetic Theory is more rhetorically rebarbative than any other of Adorno’s works. Adorno consistently argued against providing definitions of his terms, hoping to maintain a labile set of philosophical concepts. Rather than being set by some stipulative definition, they were intended to take their structure and form from the demands generated by the phenomena they were applied to in each instance. Aesthetic Theory is by far the most successful realization of this principle. Adorno assembles a number of key terms and continually applies and reapplies them throughout the text. The most central of these terms—“expression,” “semblance,” “mimesis,” “construction”—demands sustained exegetical work to winnow out the full variety of uses to which they are put. Much valuable work has been done on this score, and I cannot hope to contribute to it here. In this chapter I hope to work at a lower level— as I did on Adorno’s dialectical philosophy—in order to interrogate those structures that must be in place in order to make Adorno’s conceptually labile method possible. I am going to confine my attention to Adorno’s notion of aesthetic truth content, and the often suggestive linkages he makes between this notion and the nonidentical. I cannot hope to give a full account of Adorno’s aesthetics, then, but I will try to explicate a central feature of that aesthetic, namely, Adorno’s reliance on the notion that art can be true.

136

aesthetic tru th content and oblique second reflection

While Adorno’s claims about the fundamental features of art were nearly always carefully qualified, or couched in refusals of the very idea of the existence of such fundamentals, he was nonetheless entirely strident when it came to the question of art’s relation to truth. For example: “Art is nevertheless the truth of society insofar as in its most authentic products the irrationality of the rational world order is expressed.”1 Most obviously striking about this sentence is Adorno’s blunt statement that art is true. But, in a characteristically compressed fashion, Adorno also makes here a number of claims that serve to deepen and problematize the claim that art is in some sense true. The first of these concerns Adorno’s use of the term “expressed”; art is identified with an expression of the “irrationality of the world order.” This seems the more troubling when we bear in mind that the highest, most authentic form of art for Adorno is identified by its formal rigor and technical innovation, rather than any explicit attempt to fold in political or social themes. Indeed, the controversy that Adorno generated between himself, Lukács, and Brecht revolved around his vituperative rejection of the latter two’s attempt to subjugate the formal demands of art to the political.2 As the scorn that Adorno pours on in “Commitment”3 makes plain, he has in mind as the “most authentic products” of art those that refuse to intentionally open themselves up to social content, refuse to intentionally provide critiques of that which is external to art itself. It is at least partially due to this view that he terms the authentic artwork a “windowless monad,” a Leibnizian metaphor I shall return to below. Contemporary authentic artworks are for Adorno formally modernist. As ever, music furnishes Adorno with his clearest examples, and he singles out for praise Berg, Schoenberg, Webern, and the late Beethoven as examples of authentic art. These works are distinguished by their intense formal experimentation and—with the exception of Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw—their eschewing any overt political content. Accordingly, when Adorno says that artworks “express” the state of the “world order” we are not here dealing with a kind of direct expression. Virtually all of the artworks that meet Adorno’s standard of “authenticity” refuse to express anything concrete about the world at all, much less the “world order.” This is all the more so in the case of the musical examples Adorno has frequent recourse to, which are difficult

aesthetic tru th content and oblique second reflection

137

to understand as expressing (in the presently relevant sense) anything at all. Artworks, for Adorno, are importantly and centrally formally constructed objects, which respond to formal problematics (as we will see). This being so, if Adorno wants to see the artwork as expressive, he stands in need of an account whereby these formal properties take on expanded hermeneutic scope in the artwork and in some fashion provide a critique of the society external to them. Adorno understands the artwork to be critical and (following from this) in some sense cognitive. Just as the artwork’s ability to instantiate the “irrationality of the social order” is difficult to grasp due to the artwork’s refusal to incorporate social content, it is similarly difficult to understand how the artwork is capable of possessing an epistemological viewpoint at all, let alone one that is capable of judging the social order to be irrational. Adorno understands the creation of art to be conducted entirely through the artist’s fidelity to the formal demands of his aesthetic material: “The real source of the risk taken by all artworks, however, is not located in their level of contingency but rather in the fact that each one must follow the whippoorwill of objectivity immanent to it, without any guarantee that the productive forces—the spirit of the artist and his procedures—will be equal to that objectivity.”4 Given that the construction of the artwork is an entirely formal procedure, which has no reference to the intentions of the artist5 beyond the notation and resolution of formal problems, it is entirely unclear how this procedure of formal construction can result in rational criticism of the social order. We have the assertion that the artwork is in contact with realms of phenomena (the social order, standards of rationality) and has capacities (to make rational criticisms) based on that contact, yet Adorno’s account of the constitution and creation of the artwork would appear to entirely close off the possibility of such contact and hence the exercise of such capacities. Adorno’s claim that the artwork is true is intrinsically problematic on these grounds, and much of this chapter will be dedicated to attempting to unravel this problem. This difficulty is compounded when one considers that the artwork for Adorno is not merely an expression of problems in the social order but is also, like dialectical philosophy, capable of providing rationally complex critiques of the structures of understanding itself: “Art is rationality that criticizes rationality without withdrawing from it; art

13 8

aesthetic tru th content and oblique second reflection

is not something prerational or irrational, which would peremptorily condemn it as untruth in the face of the entanglement of all human activity in the social totality. Rational and irrational theories of art are therefore equally faulty.”6 So for Adorno, the purely formal process of artistic creation—and the created artwork that results—not only is able to exhibit and criticize social content, but is also capable of interceding in complex, highlevel problems internal to rationality itself. As Adorno puts it, “Art is rationality that criticizes rationality without withdrawing from it.” This phrase brings to mind Adorno’s characterization of dialectical philosophy as the unlocking of the “non-conceptual by means of the concept, and the self-criticism of concepts,”7 and opens the suspicion that art and philosophy will share a great number of conceptual structures. This suspicion is only intensified by Adorno’s repeated claim that the truth content of the artwork is in some fashion related to the non-identical: “Truth content presents itself in art as a multiplicity, not as the concept that abstractly subordinates artworks. The bond of the truth content of art to its works and the multiplicity of what surpasses identification accord.”8 The artwork is not merely cognitively rich, and possessed of a critique of the rationality of the world order; this rational critique is also claimed in some fashion to accord with the nonidentical (“that which surpasses identification”). Adorno firms up this notion and strengthens the claim: “The new wants nonidentity, yet intention reduces it to identity; modern art constantly works at the Münchausen trick of carrying out the identification of the non-identical.”9 The truth content of the artwork does not merely accord with the nonidentical, then; it is the very work of authentic art to instantiate and to identify the nonidentical. This tight relation between art and the nonidentical presents a further difficulty similar in structure to those already elaborated above. To “identify” is to subsume something under a concept or type; artworks however seem importantly noncognitive and incapable of providing “identification” in this way. Moreover, as Adorno notes, conceptual “identity” is an ineluctable feature of continuous experience.10 As a consequence of this, we saw that Adorno’s philosophy had to follow a complex dialectical procedure in order to undo identity thinking, through manipulating the latent

aesthetic tru th content and oblique second reflection

139

conceptual problematics in the socially universal conceptual array. It is as yet unclear how artworks, which are constructed through following entirely formal, nonconceptual aesthetic problematics, would be capable of circumventing the delusive influence of concepts in a similar way. Nonetheless, Adorno’s use of the phrase “the identification of the non-identical” clearly implies that artworks, like philosophical texts, are capable of dialectically manipulating concepts so as to induce an experience of the nonidentical. This can be seen in the closeness of Adorno’s articulation of the role of art concerning the true to his articulation of the role of philosophy in Negative Dialectics: “To change [the] direction of conceptuality, to give it a turn toward non-identity, is the hinge of negative dialectics.”11 Here, as in the case of art, we have the assertion that dialectical philosophy attempts to grasp the nonidentical via the process of identification. We have seen that Adorno posits art as not only a mode of knowledge, but, as in dialectical philosophy, a mode of knowledge of the nonidentical. Second, we have seen that the problematic of this knowledge of the nonidentical in the aesthetic context is, just as in the philosophical context, governed by the antagonism between conceptual identification and the nonidentical object of comprehension. In both philosophy and art, Adorno alleges that the solution to this antagonism lies in the “identification of the non-identical.” It is apparent that art is confronted with a problematic closely parallel to the problematic that confronts dialectical philosophy. This provides a basis upon which to begin arguing that the truth of philosophy and art can be seen as commensurate. In order to begin building on this basis, I should first like to demonstrate that, as in the case of philosophy, the truth of art is wholly negative and critical. This is best established by reexamining the problematic of delusive mediation, in the context of art.

Artistic Knowledge and Mediation As Adorno’s paradoxical formulation of art’s function—to “identify the nonidentical”—makes clear, art’s status as knowledge is intrinsically problematic. Both art as experienced and art as created constitutively take place in experience. Conceptual mediation is a condition of all continuous experience, and the concepts that compose the array of

1 40

aesthetic tru th content and oblique second reflection

concepts that mediate experience are themselves determined by reification, self-preservation, and thin determination. The relationship between the artwork and the consciousness is, of course, constitutively experiential. This experiential nature of the relation to the artwork situates the artwork in the same problematic as the philosophical text. The consciousness is unable to experience the artwork in a truly immediate fashion; rather, the appreciator’s experience of the artwork is always already mediated by the socially determined concepts that he or she brings to bear. If the artwork is to have any cognitive value (any truth content), it must do so by presenting a phenomenon that is conceptually germane, capable of satisfying the conceptual criteria that make phenomena intelligible to the consciousness. This requirement on the artwork—that it be germane to the concept and capable of manipulating the concept in such a fashion as to disclose truth content—will go on to be important in this chapter. Given what we know about the conceptual mediation of experience—namely, that it is intrinsically falsifying—it follows that if the artwork is to escape Adorno’s holistic theory of falsity it must bear its truth content in a negative fashion. It is not immediately clear how philosophical positivity and negativity translate into aesthetic positivity and negativity. While the concept of aesthetic negativity will become clearer in the course of this chapter, as I demonstrate the formal and dialectical nature of the artwork, one can stipulatively define an aesthetically positive form of knowledge as any attempt by the artwork to transparently display the true, in such a way that the agent could take themselves to have unproblematic, direct access to it by virtue of the conventional employment of their concepts. If the artwork is capable of presenting truth at all, it must, like philosophy, attempt to present the truth by means of the falsifying mediators of experience. Only the negative critique of the falsifying mediators of experience is capable of imparting knowledge that is not falsified by those mediators. Adorno endorses this view: The survival of mimesis, the nonconceptual affinity of the subjectively produced with its unposited other, defines art as a form of knowledge and to that extent as “rational.” . . . The aporia of art, pulled between regression to literal magic or surrender of

aesthetic tru th content and oblique second reflection

141

the mimetic impulse to thinglike rationality, dictates its law of motion; the aporia cannot be eliminated.  .  .  . Art is rationality that criticizes rationality without withdrawing from it; art is not something prerational or irrational.12 Here, Adorno not only explicitly endorses the negativity of art (“art . . . criticizes rationality”) but also, importantly, locates this negativity in the same epistemological context as the negativity of philosophy. As we saw in the previous chapter, philosophy is caught in a dilemma. It cannot employ the “discursive,” merely rational standards of justification and inference presented by conventional conceptuality. Those standards introduce obstacles to the genuine comprehension of the object, and hence falsify assertions made by means of them. However, an irrational escape from this problematic is equally impossible, as it precludes any meaningful relationship between the subject and object whatsoever. Only concepts and the rationality made possible by those concepts allow for an epistemic relation between the subject and object to be created. As a consequence, philosophy became dialectical: neither merely rational nor irrational, but rather a rational critique of rationality itself. Adorno now locates art in an identical situation. Art, like philosophy, is caught between two equally unsustainable epistemological modes. On the one hand, art is pulled toward regression to “literal magic.” Adorno is here drawing on the account of magic adumbrated with Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment, which we developed in chapter 1. Magic stands for an early stage of the development of rationality, at which the distinction between the concept and object is not yet fully fleshed out, and comprehension of the environment is sought through the mimetic project of making oneself like the nature one is trying to control. Art is “pulled” in this direction just because the propensity of concepts to obscure objects generates the temptation to arbitrarily attempt to unite concepts and things, as magic sought to do. In this way, art would exit the problematic of modern rationality, but thereby increase its own irrationality and—in seeking to unite the concept and the particular— forfeit the capability of communicating the truth. The other direction in which art is “pulled” is “thinglike rationality.” In attempting to disclose the nonidentical, art needs to make use of the rational standards of communication and justification embedded

142

aesthetic tru th content and oblique second reflection

in concepts. Art’s inability to escape these standards generates the temptation to simply “surrender” to conventional conceptual discourse and to attempt to positively express the true. However, this would also defeat the goal of the exercise, as such a surrender would surrender the object to the distorting and delusive influence of the concept. Philosophy solves this dilemma by creating a metacritique of the rational standards embedded in conventional conceptuality. Art likewise navigates this dilemma by becoming a rational critique of rationality. This similarity in the negativity of art and philosophy could merely, of course, be skin deep. There is nothing to say that the negativity of philosophy and art relates to the same, identical problematic. Adorno, however, asserts that they do relate to the same problematic: “Art requires philosophy, which interprets it in order to say what it is unable to say, whereas art is only able to say it by not saying it.”13 Art’s requirement of philosophy, whose role it is to “interpret” and “say” that which art cannot say, entails that art and philosophy must share a common content that is, as it were, expressible across the two kinds of practice (the philosophical and the aesthetic). Given that philosophy’s content is necessarily truth-apt, the content embedded in art, which philosophy itself is capable of receiving, would seem itself to be truth-apt (or, at least, to be such that expression in truth-apt terms does not seriously distort it). Both art and philosophy, then, are forms of knowledge; moreover, they each provide differing ways of knowing the same thing: “Philosophy and art converge in their truth content: The progressive self-unfolding truth of the artwork is none other than the truth of the philosophical concept.”14 Not only are philosophy and art identically situated in terms of the web of mediation that constitutes them; they also “converge in their truth content.” The only unqualified truth content of philosophy was the nonidentical; and accordingly, Adorno identifies the ultimate aim of art as the “identification of the nonidentical.”15 There seems to be little doubt that Adorno sees his theory of aesthetic and philosophical truth as substantially unified. Given this gloss on Adorno’s aesthetics, one might have the impression that Adorno has simply reduced art to a clumsily articulated form of philosophy. My claim that art and philosophy have a “unified” theory of truth raises the danger that Adorno is making art and philosophy homogenous. To clear up this possible misconstrual of Adorno, and of

aesthetic tru th content and oblique second reflection

1 43

my reading of him, I would like to develop the differentiations that he folds into his unified theory of truth, and explore how art and philosophy are capable of sharing an identical truth content, while having entirely domain-specific, autonomous methods of instantiating that truth content. The central point around which these differentiations converge is that of the circumvention of delusive mediation. Both philosophy and art are identically positioned in terms of having both their construction (by the philosopher/artist) and reception (by the reader/ art appreciator) problematized by the delusive mediation of concepts. Both art and philosophy are obliged to engage these delusive mediation relations in order to manipulate concepts into revealing their own insufficiency. Both art and philosophy, however, are obliged to engage in this conceptual manipulation in radically different ways.

Differentiating Philosophy and Art The previous two chapters, of course, have been an account of the method by which philosophy achieves its manipulation of concepts. A general point worth noting is that a precondition of dialectical philosophical practice is that the concepts which implicitly mediate and problematize experience reappear in philosophy as explicit, theoretically employable concepts. Which is to say, the concepts that mediate and make possible philosophical experience are also transparently available for employment in the course of that philosophical experience. Philosophy is therefore constitutively the site of conceptual self-reflexivity, in which concepts can be taken up and metacritically employed against themselves. The delusive mediators of experience are ready at hand to be employed in the course of the text, and thereby an explicit critique of the mediation of experience and the delusive nature of conceptuality is possible. In addition to this, philosophy is itself intrinsically oriented toward knowledge and conducts itself in order to attain knowledge. Adorno also construes art as a critique of the delusive nature of conceptuality and the conceptual mediation of experience. However, art cannot be understood as achieving this end goal (and its further production of an experience of the nonidentical) in a functionally identical fashion. The two constitutive features of philosophy—its conceptual self-reflexivity and its orientation toward knowledge—on

144

aesthetic tru th content and oblique second reflection

which its mechanics depend are entirely absent from art. Art is, Adorno claims, constitutively incapable of employing nonaesthetic material; it is, moreover, entirely unconcerned with claims to knowledge or epistemological norms. Art constructs itself solely in accord with its domainspecific aesthetic norms. Adorno understands art as above all autonomous, and entirely rebarbative to any attempt to import heteronomous, nonaesthetic problematics into itself. Art refuses, constitutively, any attempt to know, judge, or cognize: “The affinity of [aesthetic] construction with cognitive processes, or perhaps rather with their interpretation by the theory of knowledge, is no less evident than is their difference, which is that art does not make judgements and when it does, it shatters its own concept.”16 Adorno yet again opens an apparent contradiction. It is essential to the success and “authenticity” of an artwork that it, in some undisclosed fashion, discloses a critique of that which is heteronomous to the artwork. It provides no less than a criticism of the rational structure of society. At the same time as it is critically intervening in the organization of the heteronomous, it is also radically autonomous, refraining not only from making judgments on that which is external to the artwork, but also from any contact with the heteronomous whatsoever. The artwork, in importing its content, reduces the heteronomous to the artwork’s own categories: “Object in art and object in empirical reality are entirely distinct. In art the object is the work produced by art, as much containing elements of empirical reality as displacing, dissolving, and reconstructing them according to the work’s own law. Only through such transformation . . . does art give empirical reality its due.”17 The heteronomous cannot enter into the constitution of the artwork, then, and even if it could, the artwork is constitutively incapable of judgmentally engaging such heteronomous content. It can scarcely be anything other than a mystery, then, how such a radically autonomous artwork could amount to a critique of its sociohistorical context. Adorno is fully aware of this difficulty, and it is this difficulty that undoubtedly stands behind his repeated reference to the artwork as a “windowless monad.” While this glancing reference to Leibniz’s monadology has some interpretive value—as I will go on to show below—it cannot serve to close this difficulty, only rather to highlight it.

aesthetic tru th content and oblique second reflection

1 45

The key difficulty—intimated by the phrase “windowless monad”— revolves around the interaction between heteronomy and autonomy. How can that which is entirely autonomous (artworks that “hermetically seal themselves off ” as Adorno puts it)18 criticize the heteronomous? Moreover, how can that which refuses to enact deliberative judgment produce criticism? Resolving this issue requires a detour through Adorno’s conception of aesthetic autonomy.

Art and Autonomy: Two Problems Given Adorno’s commitment to terminological lability, I cannot provide an exhaustive definition of what Adorno understands by the term “autonomy.” For the moment, one can understand the autonomy of the artwork to consist in the artwork’s constituting itself solely by means of aesthetic processes and its applying these aesthetic processes solely to what Adorno calls “aesthetic material.”19 It is not important at this moment to elucidate the precise meaning of “aesthetic materials” and “aesthetic processes.” Let’s gloss aesthetic materials to be the subject of the processes of artistic creation. The artwork rejects any heteronomous content drawn from the world external to the artwork as an aesthetic material. All imported aesthetic contents are, on Adorno’s view, converted into purely autonomous, purely aesthetic material (I will expand on this shortly). We can gloss aesthetic processes as purely autonomous processes of artistic creation that are in no way determined by extra-aesthetic practices. The artwork confines itself entirely to materials, norms, and practices internal to its own domain, with no intentional dealings with that which is external to the particular artwork itself. Adorno emphasizes this: The mimesis of artworks is their resemblance to themselves. Whether univocally or ambiguously, this law is posited by the initial act of each artwork; by virtue of its constitution each work is bound by it. . . . By the autonomy of their form, artworks forbid the incorporation of the absolute as if they were symbols. . . . Hermetic works do not assert what transcends them as though they were Being occupying an ultimate realm.20

1 46

aesthetic tru th content and oblique second reflection

We are told that the artwork’s self-mimesis prevents it from being akin to a “symbol.” This is because the symbol and the symbolized characteristically share formal characteristics (consider the relationship between the holy trinity and the fleurs-de-lis). The form of an artwork, by contrast, is constructed entirely according to the formal demands of the artwork itself, and has no intentional congruency with that which is external to the artwork. Adorno thematizes this autonomous exclusivity of the artwork, variously terming the artwork “hermetic” or “blind.”21 This serves to throw into relief the impossibility of collapsing the boundary between the categories of art and philosophy. Art, for itself, has no relevance to philosophical problems, and no capacity for mimetically mirroring philosophical method. This introduces our first problem. The very severity of this divorce between the nature of philosophy and the nature of the artwork threatens to stall Adorno’s project of positing the artwork as a form of rational access to the nonidentical. While he intends the artwork to be a form of knowledge, which breaks the falsifying compulsion of the concept in order to reach the nonidentical,22 it would seem that his uncompromising insistence on the artwork’s being autonomously constituted serves merely to rule this out. Art’s autonomy entails that it excludes, as content, the epistemological processes that falsify it. As it cannot address them (having excluded them), then, it would appear impossible that it could successfully critique them and escape being falsified by them. If the artwork takes place in experience, and is thus falsified by the mediators of experience, and moreover is constitutively incapable of directly addressing and critiquing these mediators, the artwork would seem to be incapable of avoiding being falsified itself. Adorno’s laudable refusal to homogenize art and philosophy seems to have undermined any possibility of seeing art as rational knowledge of the true and, by extension, my claim that artistic and philosophical truth is commensurable. However, Adorno flatly denies that the artwork’s hermetic status precludes its being true. Rather, he claims that art—just by virtue of concentrating solely on its aesthetic properties—is able to effect the kind of critique and demolition of its falsifying mediators that is necessary: “That artworks as windowless monads “represent” what they themselves are not can scarcely be understood except in that their own dynamic, their immanent historicity as a dialectic of

aesthetic tru th content and oblique second reflection

147

nature and its domination, not only is of the same essence as the dialectic external to them but resembles it without imitating it.”23 Adorno’s move here is bold. While the artwork is entirely self-mimetic, and hence eschews any attempt to model or criticize the world external to it, Adorno nonetheless confidently asserts that the artwork “resembles [the world] without imitating it.” Taking this assertion at face value, Adorno is claiming that the artwork, though causally and normatively cut off from heteronomy, is capable—through its autonomy—of reflecting that heteronomy. It is Adorno’s use of the Leibnizian phrase “windowless monad” which confirms that we should take Adorno’s claim at face value. Adorno’s reference to Leibniz is calculated and—characteristically of Adorno at the most strained and problematic points of his philosophy—achieves much by implication and allusion that demands to be made explicit. Leibniz understands the universe to comprise ontological units known as “monads,” each of which reflects every other without causal interaction.24 This acausal reflection is brought about by the individual monad developing its own inner principle. Due to the established harmony that underpins Leibniz’s metaphysics, the execution of a monad’s inner principle excludes all interaction with other monads, and yet thereby achieves harmonious reflection of those other monads. It is this acausal, noninteractive reflection that Adorno is claiming stands as the grounds of the artwork’s capacity to remain autonomously exclusive of, and yet critically reflective of, its heteronomous context. Without directly dealing with that which is external to the aesthetic (in fact, precluding the extra-aesthetic by virtue of its autonomy), the artwork nonetheless, Adorno claims, “resembles . . . without imitating” the state of the extra-aesthetic. This is the analogy Adorno intends to draw in using the phrase “windowless monad”; without interaction, the artwork nonetheless expresses the reality of that which is external to it: Artworks are closed to one another, blind, and yet in their hermeticism they represent what is external. Thus it is, in any case, that they present themselves to tradition as that living autarchy that Goethe was fond of calling entelechy, the synonym for monad. . . . As an element of an over-arching context of the

148

aesthetic tru th content and oblique second reflection

spirit of an epoch, entwined with history and society, artworks go beyond their monadic limit even though they lack windows.25 One functional upshot of the artwork’s autonomy, then, will be the capacity to instantiate in some fashion a critique of the heteronomy that obtains outside of it. While Adorno’s use of Leibnizian metaphor is circumspect, it nonetheless leaves importantly open the question of how this synchronicity (between the operation of autonomy and the state of the heteronomous) is guaranteed. To return to Leibniz, the capacity of the monad to reflect its fellow monads without interaction is explained by the intercession of God, who presets the internal principles of each monad such that they, in the course of executing those principles, acausally reflect one another. Adorno’s account stands in need of a similar intercession, which is capable of synchronizing the windowless autonomy of the artwork with the heteronomous. I believe Adorno is capable of providing this interceding principle, and of providing a full explanation of the synchronicity that obtains between the autonomy of the artwork and the heteronomous. Before doing so, I want to first briefly outline a second feature of the autonomy of the artwork that stands in need of explanation. Adorno believes that the successful construction of an autonomous artwork results not only in critique of the world external to the artwork, but also in what he calls a “shudder”: Artworks are images as apparition, as appearance, and not as a copy. If through the demythologization of the world consciousness freed itself from the ancient shudder, that shudder is permanently reproduced in the historical antagonism of subject and object. The object became as incommensurable to experience, as foreign and frightening, as mana once was. This permeates the image character [of art].26 The artwork’s enigmaticalness is the shudder, not however in its living presence but as a recollection.27 In the first extract,28 Adorno asserts that this shudder which results from a successfully executed artwork recapitulates an experience

aesthetic tru th content and oblique second reflection

149

which began the history of mankind, against which the history of mankind was opposed. This cannot but bring to mind the account in Dialectic of Enlightenment of the genesis of conceptuality (outlined in chapter 1). It was the original experience of nonconceptual terror that gave rise to conceptuality (and, correlatively, human history); and it is this nonconceptual experience to which Adorno understands conventional conceptual discourse to be opposed. This original experience, as we saw in chapter 1, was the nonidentical, the experience of an object that refuses conceptual subsumption and threateningly presents a phenomenon that the consciousness is incapable of subsuming and controlling. Adorno claims that the artwork recapitulates an experience of the failure of conceptual subsumption, that is, the nonidentical. Moreover, just as in the case of philosophy, Adorno links this comprehension of the nonidentical with a form of experience. Adorno linked the comprehension of the nonidentical through philosophy with a “momentary” conceptual breakout; Adorno’s theory of art links it with an experienced “shudder.” Once more, then, despite the vast differences between philosophy and art, Adorno is claiming that there is a unified end point for each, namely, a true experience of the nonidentical. This assertion is not without problems. Adorno is claiming that, despite the artwork’s complete hermeticity and autonomy, the artwork’s hermetic process of constitution nonetheless results in a negating of the delusive mediation with which aesthetic experience is imbricated, and as a consequence serves as an instantiation of the nonidentical. This amounts to our second problem—how can we take this autonomously aesthetic process to result in a critical break with delusive conceptual mediation, resulting in access to the nonidentical? Both of the problems I have raised (of art’s autonomous reflection of the heteronomous, of art’s autonomy terminating in an experience of the nonidentical) revolve around the relation of autonomy and heteronomy. Presently, there seems little alternative to understanding autonomy and heteronomy in art as diametrically opposed. There is an explanatory gap in understanding the relationship between autonomy and heteronomy. If there is some account available that is able to put the hermetic constitution of the artwork in touch with that which is aesthetically heteronomous (epistemology, philosophical and social

150

aesthetic tru th content and oblique second reflection

problematics, and the like), by virtue of the operation of autonomy alone, then Adorno’s account will become plausible, and the explanatory gap will be closed. Mediation will serve to smooth over this problem. So long as we understand autonomy and heteronomy as autarchic, opposed spheres in art, then the problematic explanatory gap concerning their interrelation will never be able to be closed. Adorno however argues quite forcefully that heteronomy in fact constitutes the autonomy of the artwork: “Art and artworks are perishable, not simply because by their heteronomy they are dependent, but because right into the smallest detail of their autonomy . . . they are not only art but something foreign and opposed to it.”29 Adorno is not here giving a reductive account— the autonomy of art is not simply an epiphenomenon of heteronomy. The artwork retains genuine autonomous control over its content and structure. Adorno will make the argument that the execution by art of its autonomous decisions will, due to the influence of mediation, be predetermined so as to reflect and critique the heteronomous without interaction with the heteronomous. In this sense, mediation will serve as the functional analogue for Leibniz’s God. The autonomy of the artwork, on Adorno’s account, can be broken down into two main constituents. Adorno conceives the autonomous artwork to comprise an autonomous aesthetic process of formation that in turn concerns itself with wholly autonomous aesthetic materials. I will elaborate Adorno’s solution to the explanatory gap between heteronomy and autonomy by dealing with each of these in turn.

The Autonomous Aesthetic Process of Formation On Adorno’s understanding, the processes at work in constructing an artwork are entirely autonomous. The artist’s role is substantially passive,30 and their intentions have little to no determining influence on the substantial content of the artwork.31 Of course an artist likely engages in aesthetic praxis in order to satisfy some intention (if only to satisfy an urge to create, or, less flatteringly, to acquire prestige). Adorno does not believe or demand that artists are selfless and intentionless. But he understands the mechanics of artistic production to be such

aesthetic tru th content and oblique second reflection

15 1

that any intentions the artist has are functionally precluded from having any influence on the resulting artwork.32 The artwork is produced without the imposition of predetermined aesthetic ideas or structures. Rather, the artwork is “organized from below.”33 Adorno claims that the aesthetic materials which are employed by the artwork have intrinsic formal demands.34 It is the role of the artist to follow and reconcile these formal demands: “The real source of risk taken by all artworks, however, is not located in their level of contingency but rather in the fact that each one must follow the whippoorwill of objectivity immanent to it, without any guarantee that the productive forces—the spirit of the artist and his procedures—will be equal to that objectivity.”35 Artistic production is a form of sensitivity to purely immanent formal demands. These formal demands can be presented within certain wider formal contexts—as, for example, a composer in the premodernist period might be constrained by certain preset demands of the sonata form. Nonetheless, the artist’s only intercession is in the resolution of these formal demands, and aesthetic materials confront the artist as a complex of formal problematics. Adorno often likens this process of artistic formation to the construction of a riddle or Vexierbild.36 The Vexierbild, or “picture puzzle,” is an illustration that plays on the formal characteristics of its visual components in order to introduce a visually complex image, which can be visually interpreted into a number of different images, often satirical in intent. Examples of these abound—they were a reasonably popular fixture in the German newspapers of Adorno’s time—but the most familiar to us are perhaps Wittgenstein’s duck-rabbit or Salvador Dali’s The Great Paranoiac. Adorno’s analogy with riddles and Vexierbilder is informative. A riddle or Vexierbild cannot be constructed according to a predetermined structure or form; rather, the content of each can only be produced through the manipulation of the formal properties of its materials and the structural specificity of its medium (for example, tricks of perspective in the Vexierbild, linguistic ambiguity in the riddle). The finished product is the outcome of a dialectic between the formal properties of all of the constituents, and could not have been imposed onto those constituents without navigating this dialectic. Taking the Vexierbild as an example—the concealed image cannot be imposed onto the

152

aesthetic tru th content and oblique second reflection

apparent image, but rather must be composed from the formal properties of the constituents of the apparent image. Failing to do so will cause the concealed image to no longer be concealed, and the constitutive ambiguity of the Vexierbild will be lost. The nature and formal content of the materials of the riddle and Vexierbild have a strong determining role in establishing the constitution of the completed artifact and what it turns out to “mean.” It is this that Adorno is gesturing toward in using his analogy. This, then, is how we should understand the process of aesthetic creation—it does not concern itself with propounding an ideology, or with attempting to instantiate an “aesthetic idea,” but is instead a formal process of investigating aesthetic materials and then resolving the various aesthetic and formal properties of these aesthetic materials such that an aesthetic whole results.37 This clarifies why Adorno terms the artwork “hermetic.” The artwork’s constitutive principle is nothing other than the treatment of aesthetic materials without reference to anything but their formal properties. As such, the artwork is entirely autonomous considered from the perspective of its constitutive processes. And this leaves us with the problem of comprehending how such a radically autonomous procedure could entail critique of that which is external to the artwork. Adorno frequently asserts in Aesthetic Theory that this hermetic process of artistic creation is constituted by heteronomy. This constitution of the autonomous by heteronomy is often referred to by Adorno as the “guilt” of the artwork: “The monadological character of artworks would not have formed without the guilt of the monstrous monodalogical character of society, but only by its means do artworks achieve that objectivity that transcends solipsism.”38 Adorno’s use of term “monad” is somewhat confusing here—it does not seem that Adorno means to signify the acausal reflective properties of Leibniz’s monads. Rather, here the “monadological character” shared by the artwork and society would appear to refer to the self-contained nature of Leibniz’s monads. Leibniz’s monads have no parts, and each is a complete unity (that is, it is not internally differentiated, but bears its properties uniformly throughout itself).39 Calling society “monstrously monadological” maps onto Adorno’s critique of society as a “total society, which encompasses all relationships and impulses.”40 Society’s monadological

aesthetic tru th content and oblique second reflection

153

character is just its suppression of internal differentiation in favor of total unity, reducing all of its constituents to its own internal standard. The artwork, likewise, has a monodalogical character by virtue of manipulating and harmonizing the alterity of its constituents until they form a unified whole. The aesthetic materials that constitute an artwork each have competing individual formal demands, which are only harmonized into a unity through the oppressive imposition of form created by the artist’s decisions at such points of tension.41 The “guilt” that Adorno refers to here is not incurred by the mere fact of having a monadological character, but rather in the functional dependence that this monadological character of the artwork has on society itself. The artwork in some fashion uses the “means” of the social whole in order to constitute its critique of that society. The way in which Adorno wants to see the autonomy of the artwork as intertwined with the heteronomy of society is best understood sociologically. Adorno often notes the practical requirements for cultural work (freedom from immediate want, unusually large amounts of leisure time), and claims not unreasonably that cultural work thereby is only possible through a negotiation, and hence compromise, with the existing structures of capitalist society. Since Adorno views the extant social structure as “hell,”42 any such compromise incurs a “guilt” for the artwork and artist.43 This first form of “guilt,” that of the artwork’s imbrication in a falsely constituted social whole, is relatively simple. Adorno claims that, although the artwork constitutes itself as autonomous, this “autonomous” activity is predicated on a heteronomous state of affairs. This heteronomous state of affairs is nothing other than the unequal social distribution of funds that makes possible the artist’s hermetic, blind activity. To sharpen the issue, the “hermetic” nature of the artwork entails that the artist must construct the artwork without reference to immediate interest, ideology, or instrumental goal. This, however, is only possible if the artist’s situation is such that he or she is able to withdraw him- or herself from these concerns; and this possibility itself is determined either directly by the social structure (in the case of state funding) or indirectly (in the case of patronage or personal wealth, either of which are only possible in a society that unevenly distributes its funds).

15 4

aesthetic tru th content and oblique second reflection

There is an inescapable air of the mundane about this line of thought. And it certainly does not aid us at all in trying to understand how autonomously executed artworks can mirror and critique their heteronomous context. All the same, there is something to be said for it. Namely, that this shows Adorno trying to demonstrate that even at the most basic aesthetic level (the existence of the artist and the artist’s engaging in the activity of creating art) autonomy presupposes heteronomy and requires it in order to exist. Adorno’s understanding is that the nature of autonomous aesthetic production (the hermetic working of aesthetic material) is itself only possible if certain heteronomous conditions obtain (the artist’s social standing, level of funds, and so on). Even if successful, however, this account is far too thin to explain how the artwork possesses the ability to criticize that which is outside of it. Adorno goes on to deepen this account of the artwork’s “guilt,” turning away from its more practical aspects to the deeper interrelation between the hermetic artwork and its social context: “Art becomes entangled in the guilt context of the living, not only because its distance allows the guilt context to prevail but even more importantly because it makes incisions in the living in order to help it to language and thus mutilates it.”44 While the guilt of the artwork’s “distance” from the “guilt context” of society is undeniably a gesture toward the first kind of guilt I outlined above, the “even more important” form of guilt Adorno picks out here is quite different. This “guilt” is identified with an epistemological trait that the artwork shares in common with its “guilt context.” The artwork’s expressivity, achieved through the manipulation of its aesthetic materials, is a “mutilation” of those aesthetic materials. The “living”— the world as it appears in the artwork—is culpably mutilated by the artwork, and this mutilation derives from the artwork’s lifting the living into “language.” This falsification of the living—which is importantly similar to the falsification caused by the social “guilt context”—comes about through the introduction of language. Just like philosophy, art makes use of language (linguistic art) and conceptual structures (linguistic and nonlinguistic art) that are embedded in “identity thinking” and thereby false. In the very attempt to make something manifest, the artwork obscures the phenomena through subjecting it to concepts. Adorno understands the autonomous artwork as taking part in identity thinking (and, correlatively, as being determined in the

aesthetic tru th content and oblique second reflection

155

structure of its operation by heteronomy) by virtue of the artwork’s “domination”45 of its aesthetic materials. The artwork is intrinsically a form of domination because it is an offshoot of the heteronomous process of identity thinking, from which it inherits this dominating character. As such, Adorno wants to see the autonomous sphere of artistic production as structurally dependent on, and constituted by, a heteronomous process that occurs external to it, and that gave rise to it. This dependence of art on identity thinking—if that is what Adorno is gesturing toward here—is difficult to comprehend outside of those forms of art that, like literature, have a clear connection to concepts. How do sculpture and music, for instance, take part in identity thinking? This difficulty is especially pressing given that Adorno has already claimed that artistic composition purely follows formal demands. It is difficult to see how the conceptual problems represented by identity thinking are germane, in the case of the formal problems thrown up by music, for instance. Concepts, under “identity thinking,” “dominate” their objects by mangling their phenomenal and cognitive character until any extraconceptual residue is concealed and treated as nonexistent. Artworks are constitutively incapable of employing concepts,46 and Adorno accordingly requires an account of how artworks can be meaningfully seen as dominating in the same way. It is tempting to read the artwork’s domination as the artwork’s attempt to force its aesthetic materials into an established aesthetic form that rides roughshod over the formal demands of the materials themselves. On this reading, then, domination would arise whenever the formal properties of the aesthetic materials were ignored in order to subordinate them to some imposed formal project. (We might imagine, for instance, a set of poetic ideas being forced into a preset rhyme scheme, rather than being given the kind of full expression that free verse might afford them.) However, this reading is untenable, just because Adorno also identifies this domination of the artwork as being present in ideal, “authentic” artworks too.47 Adorno identifies the authenticity of an artwork with its refusal to impose preestablished forms, and so the domination referred to cannot be of this type.48 The “domination” of the artwork is its subjugation of its component materials to the overarching unity of that artwork. In order to

156

aesthetic tru th content and oblique second reflection

exist as an artwork, the artwork cannot be a mere aggregate of its components, but must formally bend those components into a unified whole. In order to exist as a singular and unified artwork, an artwork must prevent its aesthetic materials from being apprehended in their full specificity as wholes, and must instead subjugate these materials as parts: “What art in the broadest sense works with, it oppresses: This is the ritual of the domination of nature that lives on in play.”49 The sacrifice of the immanent demands of each of the aesthetic materials to the demands of unification of those materials in a whole unavoidably transforms, mutilates, and reduces the aesthetic materials employed. If the artwork is to cogently reject the world external to it and appear as a hermetically sealed, autonomous whole, it must make manifest and apparent its status as not merely an object native to the heteronomous world, but rather something that is at work in refusing to conform to the structure of the heteronomous. And this is, on the one hand, bound up with the demands of aesthetic unity; as we have seen, in order to exist as a singular aesthetic object, and not a mere collection of discrete material, the artwork must mold, combine, and harmonize its various parts. This is ineluctable, I think, on almost any understanding of artworks as compositional objects; on Adorno’s view, it is also reflective of the artwork’s being entwined with a broader epistemic trend toward “identity,” control, and abstraction. The artwork, then, to exist as an artwork, must change its materials, must “dominate” them and subjugate them to an overarching project of unification. This, in part, grants the artwork its autonomy; a sculpture, for instance, appears as a distinct source of value by virtue of not merely collecting various pieces of marble together (which might exhibit heteronomous kinds of value, suitability as building material, say), but through forcibly unifying and molding them into an object that visibly rejects these heteronomous forms of value in favor of autonomously exhibiting aesthetic structure and value. It is just the artwork’s autonomy—its ability to unify itself and differentiate itself from nonaesthetic objects—that Adorno takes to be centrally responsible for the artwork’s imbrication with and criticism of the heteronomy external to it. Horowitz gives a very useful account that clarifies why this is:

aesthetic tru th content and oblique second reflection

15 7

If autonomy in art is the work’s refusal to let anything outside itself determine its form, then the autonomous work is just the appearance of that refusal. . . . But this of course entails that the work is bound irredeemably to what does not determine it; it is constrained to show what does not constrain it. . . . It must visibly negate something and can only appear as the negation of that thing.50 The autonomy of the artwork reveals itself through the negation of the heteronomous. Art is constitutively appearance; for autonomy to be discerned in an artwork—and hence for it to be relevant to the artwork’s aesthetic value—this autonomy must also display itself. However, as autonomy is in an important sense a lack, an absence of subjection to external determination, this autonomy can only manifest itself through the exhibition of this freedom. As Horowitz notes, this exhibition must be accomplished through the negation of the heteronomous. Moreover, this negation must also be made apparent. The autonomy of art, then, is dependent on a visible negation of extra-aesthetic, heteronomous material. By analyzing the conditions for the autonomy of art, and discerning its dependence on the visible negation of heteronomy, Horowitz elucidates the internal relation between the visible autonomy of the artwork and criticism of the heteronomous, which is external to the artwork. Adorno expands on this: “The opposition of artworks to domination is mimesis of domination. They must assimilate themselves to the comportment of domination in order to produce something qualitatively distinct from the world of domination. . . . Aesthetic rationality wants to make good on the damage done by naturedominating rationality.”51 The artwork, then, is unavoidably implicated in, and constituted by, the heteronomous dialectic external to it. In order to manifest its own autonomy, and constitute itself as a unity, the artwork must formally manipulate its constituent parts. This formal manipulation, in Adorno’s view, is nothing but domination: “Undoubtedly, the historical [aesthetic] materials and their domination—technique—advance; discoveries such as those of perspective in painting and polyphony in music are the most obvious examples.”52 The artwork constitutively recapitulates

15 8

aesthetic tru th content and oblique second reflection

the characteristic error and “guilt” of identity thinking, which does violence to the topic of its thought in order to attain the pragmatic goal of that thought. Just as the consciousness is pressed into knowledge of the world by self-preservation, but thereby generates concepts that preclude full knowledge of the world, so too is the artwork pressed into being a formal unity in order to display its autonomy and differentiation from the world, but thereby recapitulates the internal structure of the world it attempts to differentiate itself from, in making use of the dominating manipulation of its aesthetic materials. Working with Horowitz, one can see that the autonomy of the artwork is functionally dependent on its heteronomous context, and is forced to engage it in order to constitute its own autonomy. While this serves as a forceful theoretical account of the constitution of autonomy by heteronomy, Adorno also provides a sociohistorical account of the emergence of art out of identity thinking, which is also intended to provide an account of the similarity in structure between art and identity thinking. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno provided an account of the characteristic structures of both rational thought and human society that derived its justification both from conceptual analysis and from historical speculation. History is seen at least in part by Adorno as a working through of a particular conceptual problematic—namely, identity thinking—and the various disintegrations and forms of life that this governing problematic generates. Adorno quite clearly understands art itself to feature in this historico-conceptual narrative, and to derive its dominating character from its status as an epiphenomenal production of identity thinking: “Art holds true to the shudder, but not by regression to it. Rather, art is its legacy. The spirit of the artworks produces the shudder by externalizing it in objects. Thus art participates in the actual movement of history in accord with the law of enlightenment.”53 Adorno understands autonomous art to be functionally dependent upon the “movement of history” represented by the “law of enlightenment.” The constitution of the artwork—its dominating of its aesthetic materials—is not merely the result of the autonomous function of the artwork, but rather a sociohistorically specific offshoot of heteronomous conditions (that is, the prevalence of identity thinking). Accordingly, art is not merely critical of identity thinking; it is a form

aesthetic tru th content and oblique second reflection

159

of identity thinking itself. Art is immanently constituted by identity thinking and derives its structure and function from it. As art is itself a species of identity thinking, it constitutively comports itself in the same manner as other forms of identity thinking (artworks “dominating” their material,54 just as concepts dominate their objects). As such, there is a preestablished harmony between the way in which aesthetic processes and conceptual processes operate. Both conduct themselves according to the constitutive tendencies of “enlightenment” thinking. As such, we have the first example of the artwork’s autonomy (following the immanent demands of its own constitutive processes) being reflective of (without causal interaction with) the extra-aesthetic. Art’s fundamental structures and modes of comportment are constituted by the heteronomous processes external to them. However, these heteronomous processes do not intercede into the internal workings of art itself. It is in the autonomous execution of its internal principle (which was determined by heteronomy) that the artwork mirrors, without interaction with, the structure of the heteronomous. In sum, aesthetic processes, while behaving wholly autonomously, are nonetheless only possible should given heteronomous conditions obtain. Moreover, these autonomous aesthetic processes are predetermined to be congruous with nonaesthetic cognitive processes, such as those that obtain in philosophy and conceptual thought. Our examination of the relationship between aesthetic processes and identity thinking begins to make apparent the continuity between the hermetic status of the artwork and the obtaining socioepistemological whole. While for Leibniz God preset the internal principles of the monads, such that their autonomous exclusion would nonetheless entail reflection of their fellow monads, it is mediation that for Adorno synchronizes the internal structure of the artwork and the heteronomous world external to it. The mediating processes that give rise to “identity thinking” also determine and constitute art, which itself recapitulates the characteristic structures and domination of identity thinking even as it attempts to distinguish itself against it. This determination of the autonomous by the heteronomous serves to begin making clear how the hermetic, “blind” working of the artwork, and the resultant autonomous aesthetic truth, can amount to a philosophically critical, negative instantiation of the nonidentical. While these aesthetic processes

16 0

aesthetic tru th content and oblique second reflection

do not intentionally form a critique of the obtaining epistemology of identity thinking, and do not in fact concern themselves with that epistemology, we can see that in fact the aesthetic process is constituted and determined by that epistemic whole. As such, the artwork’s aesthetic processes recapitulate the nature of the processes of the epistemological whole. Both the epistemological and aesthetic processes are identical in terms of their constitutive treatment of the material they work—they are both species of identity thinking. This lays the foundation for understanding the relationship between the artwork’s hermetic status and that artwork’s being (despite its hermetic status) an epistemological critique, a form of knowledge, and an instantiation of the nonidentical. We should understand the aesthetic processes as an oblique reflection of the epistemological whole. This reflection is oblique just because the epistemological totality asserts itself in the aesthetic, but does so without being itself instantiated in those processes (the artwork does not explicitly reflect the epistemological whole in its expressed themes). The aesthetic processes remain autonomous (that is, they do not for themselves consider anything extra-aesthetic) but, due to their autonomy’s being constituted by heteronomy, come through autonomous activity to reflect the heteronomous epistemological totality. This reconfirms once again the usefulness of Adorno’s analogy of the “windowless monad”; like Leibniz’s monad, the artwork reflects what is outside itself, without bearing any explicit relationship to that outside. This examination, then, of the relationship between autonomy and heteronomy in the context of the constitutive processes of the artwork has already begun to make clear how we can close the gap between the autonomy of the artwork, the artwork’s truth, and that truth’s sociocritical, nonidentical instantiating nature. Looking at the relationship between autonomy and heteronomy in the context of aesthetic materials will serve to finally close this gap.

Aesthetic Materials and the Autonomy of Selection The autonomy of aesthetic materials splits into two distinct parts: the autonomy of selection and autonomy of function. The autonomy of selection for aesthetic materials consists in the artwork’s progressively

aesthetic tru th content and oblique second reflection

161

gaining control over the selection of materials it chooses to employ. This autonomy develops over time, a development often referred to by Adorno as “spiritualization”: “Spiritualization . . . the continuous expansion of the mimetic taboo on art. . . . The sensuously pleasing has come under . . . attack. On the one hand, through the artwork’s spiritualization the external must pass by way of spirit and has increasingly become the appearance of the inward.”55 As Horowitz outlined, the display of autonomy requires a visible rejection of the heteronomous. Accordingly, as art’s autonomy has intensified across time the “mimetic taboo” has intensified also. The artwork progressively rejects any resemblance between itself and the heteronomous order external to it, and hence it takes on the “appearance of the inward”; artworks increasingly seek to be sui generis fields of experience, and hence reject those “sensuously pleasing” aesthetic materials that would incorporate artworks into the heteronomous order of objects employed for mere pleasure. This intensifying self-determination comes along with an increase in the control that the artwork has over those aesthetic materials it chooses to incorporate. This increased autonomy of selection expresses itself first as the throwing off of preset formal kinds. Adorno traces this process in the premodernist period in, for example, Beethoven’s astringent relationship to the strictures of sonata form (explored further in the next chapter), and in the modernist period in the rejection of formal constraints altogether. This autonomous freedom of selection is also accompanied by an expansion of the content that can be autonomously selected by the artwork. As the artwork increasingly becomes “inward” and refuses any semblance of continuity with the heteronomous, what were previously formal features of artworks become reincorporated as content. This process reaches its apotheosis in modernism, in which previously binding features of genres and compositional norms become reinternalized as content that can be manipulated, parodied, and recontextualized. The autonomy of selection, then, consists in the artwork’s progressive capacity to freely determine its makeup, both formally and in terms of the content available to it. As this autonomy intensifies, so too does the artwork’s rejection of any content that has not been manipulated so as to forfeit any heteronomous aspect it might have. Artworks are progressively “spiritualized” in that every aspect of their constitution increasingly comes under control by the artwork,

162

aesthetic tru th content and oblique second reflection

and the very content of the artwork itself increasingly refuses any semblance of continuity with the world external to the artwork, instead insisting on being directly determined by the autonomous decisions of the artwork. This very process of spiritualization—of intensification of the autonomy of art—is constituted by the heteronomous intensification of rationalization that is occurring outside of art: “Thus, as Hegel was the first to perceive, the spirit of artworks is integrated into an overarching process of spiritualization: that of the progress of consciousness.”56 Just as Hegel folds the developments and innovations of art into an overarching narrative of the progress of Geist, which determines and makes possible those developments in art, so too does Adorno view the developing character of art as intimately bound up with the “progress of consciousness.” For Adorno, of course, whose view of progress was notoriously grim,57 this “progress of consciousness” is not driven by a benign Zeitgeist, but rather the ongoing intensification of identity thinking. Just as the dialectic of enlightenment served as the heteronomous basis for the development of the autonomy of aesthetic processes, the autonomous spiritualization of artworks is embedded in, constituted by, and made possible by a heteronomous process. The intolerance of the artwork for anything not already reduced to the artwork’s own categories and ratified by the artwork’s own decisions is expressed in its restless rejection of predetermined forms and of heteronomous aesthetic materials. This intolerance mirrors the intensification of the intolerance displayed by identity thinking toward those phenomena (and forms of life, derivatively) that cannot be readily conceptually subsumed and rationally ratified. Adorno posits this parallelism not as mere coincidence, but rather as deriving from art’s status as a production of identity thinking itself (as I explored in the previous section). The autonomy of aesthetic material selection bears the same “guilt” as the aesthetic processes, and similarly reinforces the deep tie between the autonomous aesthetic processes and the contingent epistemological whole that makes them possible. As such, the artwork’s spiritualization is also itself an oblique reflection of the epistemological whole, serving as a reflection and embodiment of the socioepistemic problematic external to it. This examination of aesthetic processes, and the artwork’s autonomy of selection of aesthetic materials, lays the foundation for an account

aesthetic tru th content and oblique second reflection

163

that can close the explanatory gap between the autonomy of art and that autonomy’s critique of the heteronomous. The artwork’s autonomous processes of self-construction are constituted by the heteronomous social totality; as such, the execution of these processes entails a parallel between the artwork’s domination of its materials and conceptual discourse’s domination of its objects. Similarly, the artwork’s internal constitution recapitulates the insularity of our thought; just as the artwork increasingly rejects all materials and forms not reducible to its own control, so too does conceptual thought increasingly reject as false all phenomena that cannot be conceptually subsumed in full. So far, we have established that the interior of the artwork is methodologically reflective of that which is external to the artwork. For this methodological parity to make critique of that external to the artwork by that which is internal to the artwork possible, some further parity or relationship must be struck up between the material of the artwork and that which the manipulation of that material ostensibly critiques. If we are to see art as bearing an epistemologically significant truth (access to the nonidentical, sociohistorical critique), we still require an explanation of how the blind, hermetic nature of the artwork and its aesthetic material are capable of referring to that outside of itself. There needs to be a cogent method of seeing the aesthetic properties of the artwork as having expanded hermeneutic scope, such that aesthetic creations can present philosophically germane content and sociohistorical criticism. This brings us to the aesthetic material’s autonomy of function.

Aesthetic Materials and Autonomy of Function The artwork is, for Adorno, created by a formal process, in which the aesthetic processes are guided by the selected aesthetic materials. For Adorno, the way in which these aesthetic materials figure and have weight in the creative process is not explicable in terms of their sensuous or emotive properties.58 They are not used because of a contingent liking for their sensuous properties (that is, timbre, hue, or assonance). Nor, on the other hand, are aesthetic materials simply forced into conformity with some project or desire external to them. (Authentic artworks are not didactic or “opinionated” artworks.) Rather, aesthetic

164

aesthetic tru th content and oblique second reflection

materials present a set of demands to the artist. Aesthetic materials fall into a kind of aesthetic logic, imposing their own formal demands, and having their own set of aesthetico-logical possibilities (that is, that which they can and cannot be combined with and so on). An example of the aesthetico-logical property of an aesthetic material x would be its employment entailing the impossibility of the employment of y, or, more plausibly, its employment opening up a large set of possibilities and simultaneously closing off some other set. An informative analogy might be harmonic relations in music. If one is committed to avoiding dissonance, the employment of a given note immediately excludes a large set of notes from being employed after it, as it stands in a relation of dissonance with these notes. This is an aesthetico-logical relation. However, harmonic relationships are largely “natural” and ahistorical— aesthetico-logical properties for Adorno are neither natural nor ahistorical properties, as we will see. As aesthetic materials are possessed of their own aesthetic logic, it is the artist’s role to follow and reconcile these formal demands: “Opinion generally produces opinionated artworks that are, in a certain sense, rationalistic. Rather, the lyric poet’s desinvolture, his dispensation from the strictures of logic—which enter his sphere only as shadows—grants him the possibility of following the immanent lawfulness of his works.”59 The first “logic” referred to in this extract refers not to aestheticologic, but rather to formal logic. It is the “immanent lawfulness” of the work that represents what I call aesthetico-logical properties. “Opinionated” artworks are not successful precisely because they lack the passivity or desinvolture that allows the artist to follow the “immanent lawfulness” of the aesthetic material. It is the “consistency of . . . [the artwork’s] elaboration”60 of these aesthetic materials and their demands, and nothing else, that entails the truth of the artwork: “Aesthetic form is the objective organization within each artwork of what appears as bindingly eloquent. It is the nonviolent synthesis of the diffuse that nevertheless preserves it as what it is in its divergences and contradictions, and for this reason form is actually an unfolding of truth.”61 To further this picture, Adorno claims (as we have seen) that aesthetic materials do not present themselves to the aesthetic processes as nonaesthetic or heteronomous content to be subordinated to the formal demands of aesthetic processes.62 Rather, aesthetic materials are

aesthetic tru th content and oblique second reflection

165

always already sets of aesthetico-logical demands, which it is the artist’s role to formally reconcile and reconfigure, in order to construct a true artwork. It is difficult to comprehend what these purely aestheticological properties of aesthetic materials could amount to for Adorno. Once introduced into the nexus of the artwork under construction, the aesthetic materials appear to be translated out of their sensuous and affective properties, and to become instead purely formal, in this aesthetico-logical sense.63 It is just the aesthetic material’s possession of a kind of property of aesthetic logic, completely divorced from the material’s apparent properties outside of the logic of aesthetic formation, that constitutes its autonomy. The aesthetic materials are blind and ensure the blindness of the aesthetic processes, in that they present themselves to the aesthetic processes without any reference to or relevance to anything outside of the aesthetic nexus. Rather, they are present solely as complexes of aesthetico-logical properties that must be dominated by the aesthetic processes, such that they can be forced into a collectively constituting a unified artwork.64 This is the autonomy of function of aesthetic materials—their function in the process of aesthetic construction is explicable purely in terms of aesthetic logic, with no reference to or immediate determination by extra-aesthetic processes or criteria.

Autonomy and Criticism While Adorno’s account has thus far successfully provided an account that explains how the artwork’s constitutive structures can be understood as in parallel with—and hence illustrative of—the socioepistemic problematic external to the artwork, this has not sufficed to legitimate Adorno’s claim that the artwork is critical of those structures. This is precisely because, as Adorno often emphasizes, the artwork is semblance. In order to provide a semblance of such a critique, the artwork’s material would have to present content that could be understood as relating to and criticizing the artwork’s heteronomous context. The autonomy that Adorno allots to aesthetic material is sufficiently radical as to make this appear impossible. Aesthetic materials appear—to the processes of aesthetic construction—as nothing but autonomous logical problematics, with no social content.

16 6

aesthetic tru th content and oblique second reflection

This introduces one of the central problems of this chapter, and indeed of Adorno’s aesthetics in general. Only if the aesthetico-logical properties can be shown to, in some fashion, mirror the socioepistemic problematics external to the artwork and only if the completed artwork can be understood to make these aesthetico-logical properties disclose these socioepistemic contents through the artwork’s semblance will Adorno’s claim that artworks can be a form of socioepistemic critique be cogent.65 This looks like a steep task; the artwork’s complete autonomy, its hermetic exclusion of the extra-aesthetic, and its incapability to directly express critique—as it is obliged to make use of mere semblance—seem to combine to make the idea of a true, socially critical artwork impossible. Part of what is needed is to put the autonomy of the artwork into contact with the heteronomy of that external to the artwork. We achieved this for the autonomy of the processes of aesthetic formation by understanding their autonomy as being an offshoot from (and contingent on) extra-aesthetic, heteronomous epistemological processes. This relation allowed us to explain how autonomy came to reflect the heteronomy external to it. What is now required is a method of seeing the aesthetico-logical properties of the aesthetic materials as determined by the extra-aesthetic totality. Adorno repeatedly gestures toward an account of this sort: The artwork is mediated to real history by its monadological nucleus. History is the content of artworks. To analyze artworks means no less than to become conscious of the history immanently sedimented in them.66 [Aesthetic m]aterials and objects are as historically and socially preformed as are their methods; they are definitively transformed by what transpires in the works.67 While this shows that Adorno understands that which takes place in the interior of the artwork to be determined by that which is exterior to it, Adorno does not directly provide an explanation of how these aesthetic materials are themselves able to reinstate, and thus be reflective of, obtaining sociohistorical-epistemological contradictions. This leads

aesthetic tru th content and oblique second reflection

167

to the problem that Dahlhaus identifies with Adorno’s aesthetic theory. As the autonomy of the artwork is apparently absolute, there would appear to be no way to relate what takes place in the artwork to what inheres outside of the artwork. Adorno not infrequently displays a penchant for aphoristic allusions to socio-musical parallels and analogies, allusions which are by no means intended to be taken playfully, but the logical status of which is difficult to perceive or even questionable.68 The contrast between . . . the formal-analytically individualizing and the sociological generalizing procedure . . . returns as a flaw in the individual analyses, though Adorno was able at times, by dint of great effort, to reconcile the opposing views by force. And the verbal analogies perform the function of hiding a gap which the arguments could not close.69 In identifying this problem, Dahlhaus is treating the same problem that has been exercising us in the present chapter, namely, the problem of relating the autonomous formation and analysis of the autonomous artwork to that which is extra-aesthetic. As Paddison notes in the paper in which Dahlhaus’s challenge is cited, this problem can only be closed by consideration of the dialectical nature of aesthetic material: Adorno argues that while aesthetics must immerse itself in the particularity of individual works through analysis . . . it is nevertheless a different kind of activity to analysis. . . . [The] aim of such an analysis is to establish the technical consistency (Stimmigkeit) of a work. . . . [Access to the truth content of the artwork requires not only analysis, but second reflection] in terms of the relations between the work and its social and historical context—a context which also constitutes, if I understand Adorno correctly, the work’s structure, as socially and historically mediated content (Gehalt). . . . It is the “correspondence” between the inner structural relations of the work and the outer social relations within which it functions which is the focus of Adorno’s interpretative method, and which is, of course, the bone of contention [for writers like Dahlhaus].70

16 8

aesthetic tru th content and oblique second reflection

In his monograph Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music, Paddison enters into this problem at length, giving an extended treatment of Adorno’s theory of mediation and its operation in the aesthetic context. Paddison notes that the structural properties and contradictions of aesthetic materials are themselves the products of social antagonisms: At the level of the aesthetic, sublimated/repressed social antagonisms and internalized socio-cultural norms (including the process of rationalization itself) are displaced into the arena of the artistic material. The stage on which the conflict now plays itself out is the structure of the work of art, in the tension between mimesis and rationality, expression and construction, as the immanent dialectic of the material.71 Paddison is alleging that the aesthetic function of aesthetic materials is constituted by the extra-aesthetic, that the autonomy of function is in fact determined by heteronomy. This reflection that obtains between the aesthetic materials and the extra-aesthetic is, Paddison alleges, constituted by “mimesis.”72 “Mimesis,” in the context of Adorno’s broader philosophical writings, denotes the propensity of thought to try to intentionally assimilate itself to the world outside of it in order to comprehend it.73 It is clear that we cannot interpret aesthetic mimesis along these lines, just because of the hermeticity of the artwork already outlined.74 It is also clear that Paddison himself does not understand the operation of aesthetic mimesis in this way. He asserts that, for example, “Social antagonisms exist within the art work only in ‘cipher’ form, as deviations from the handed-down formal norms, as genres, formal types and schemata.”75 Paddison is arguing that the artwork’s mimesis does not take place at the level of the artwork’s content, but is rather a formal occurrence taking place at the level of the artwork’s structure.76 As such, it would appear that the “mimesis” that Paddison refers to is equivalent to what I have referred to as “oblique reflection.” Put into the idiom employed in this chapter, Paddison holds that the aesthetico-logical properties of the aesthetic materials reflect extraaesthetic contradictions. As such, the “mimesis” of the artwork is an oblique reflection, obtaining between the autonomously blind and the heteronomous. Adorno himself endorses this reading of mimesis: “The

aesthetic tru th content and oblique second reflection

169

survival of mimesis, the nonconceptual affinity of the subjectively produced with its unposited other, defines art as a form of knowledge and to that extent as ‘rational.’ ”77 Mimesis is not constituted by an intentional attempt by artists to make themselves, or their artworks, like the world. Rather, mimesis describes an unintentional “affinity” between an entity and “its unposited other.” Art’s mimesis entails nothing other than its oblique reflection of its other; the artwork, without positing or intending any reference to the extra-aesthetic, nonetheless reflects it. But how do we understand this oblique reflection? Paddison puts us on the right track by pointing toward the operation of mediation: “It means that the second reflection of sociological critique and philosophical interpretation, which Adorno argues is both separate from and, at the same time, dependent upon the first reflection of immanent analysis, has its model within the process of mediation which constitutes the technical structure of the work itself.”78 Paddison is undoubtedly correct on this score. Mediation is the only remaining available method of understanding the autonomous aesthetic function of aesthetic materials as heteronomously constituted. One of the unique properties of mediation is that it influences that which is mediated without showing up in that which is mediated. As such, it provides a method of seeing the autonomy of aesthetic materials as determined, without thereby compromising the autonomous nature of their operation in the artwork. Mediation allows us to see them as determined, without this extra-aesthetic determination showing up in the course of the employment of the aesthetic processes and hence compromising the hermeticity of the artwork. If we are able to reapply our analysis of the mediation of experience to aesthetic materials, I believe we will be able to put the autonomy of aesthetic function in touch with the heteronomy external to it.

Mediation and the Function of Aesthetic Materials We know from chapter 2 that any experience, with the exception of the experience of the nonidentical, is determined by the following three mediating influences: reification, thin determination, and selfpreservation. These three mediating influences that make experience

1 70

aesthetic tru th content and oblique second reflection

possible appear our best hope of achieving a coherent theory of the mediation of autonomous aesthetic material function. The combination of reification and self-preservation, in enforcing the tendency of identity thinking to take its concepts of things to exhaust those things, is clearly at issue in the aesthetic. This has already emerged in our examination of the heteronomy of the aesthetic processes. While reification and self-preservation are germane to aesthetic processes, however, they do not appear to be relevant when considering aesthetic materials. Reification and self-preservation serve to determine the character and employment of epistemological structures. They do not determine the nature of the material that is manipulated by those structures. Aesthetic materials, analogously, are the subject of the aesthetic processes, and so are fully beneath the purview of reification and self-preservation. These forms of mediation are unable to effect an oblique reflection between aesthetic materials and the extra-aesthetic. It is thin determination, then, that makes possible the oblique reflection between aesthetic materials and the extra-aesthetic. We have already seen in chapters 2 and 3 that thin determination entails that the apparent properties of any subject of experience are in fact determined by the social totality. Moreover, because of reification this thin determination is not transparent to immediate experience. As such, the presented properties of objects in experience are in fact mediated productions of thin determination. As thin determination is a property of all experience simpliciter, it is in fact a short step to comprehending how it could be that the autonomy of the function of aesthetic materials is obliquely reflective of the social totality. As thin determination is the social constitution of all experience, this must of course extend to the experience of the artist, in constructing the artwork and aesthetic materials. Aesthetic materials (and their perceived formal properties and problematics) are present to artists and their creative processes as objects of experience. This being the case, the autonomous aesthetico-logical properties that the aesthetic materials present are thinly determined, and hence reflect the source of that determination (the social totality). As such, the formal problematic of aesthetic materials and the resultant form of the completed artwork are obliquely reflective of the extra-aesthetic. The aesthetic contradictions, tensions, and incompatibilities that the

aesthetic tru th content and oblique second reflection

171

aesthetic materials present to the aesthetic processes in the course of the autonomic process of constructing the artwork are in fact determined by and reflective of the totality, which mediates and makes possible these aesthetic materials and processes. Adorno himself confirms this: The question posed by artworks is how the truth of reality can become their own truth. . . . Their pure existence criticizes the existence of a spirit that exclusively manipulates its other. What is socially untrue, flawed, and ideological is communicated to the structure of artworks as flawed, indeterminate and inadequate. For the manner in which artworks react, their objective “attitude toward objectivity,” remains an attitude toward reality.79 The formal problematics presented by the aesthetic materials when they are taken up into the processes of aesthetic formation are therefore mimetic reflections of the problematics that obtain in the social totality, which determines them through thin determination. Just as the phenomena of experience bear conceptual analogues of the socioepistemic totality that determine them through thin determination, and thereby give rise to latent contradictions in the concepts that are applied to them, so too do aesthetic materials present to aesthetic processes formal problematics that recapitulate the problematics extant in the socioepistemic totality. The core difference, of course, is that the phenomena that give rise to the conceptual problematics of philosophy disclose these problematics in an explicitly epistemological register. The problematic of aesthetic materials, by contrast, will be obliquely reflective of the structural problematics in the socioepistemic totality. We still stand in need of an account of how these obliquely reflective formal problematics can be induced to yield up the semblance of a critique of these problematics, and how this semblance of critique can in turn yield an experience of the true (that is, the nonidentical). I will now turn to this problem.

The Dialectical Artwork and Its Truth The remainder of this chapter will deal with the precise way in which the artwork comes to instantiate truth. However, at this point it is important

1 72

aesthetic tru th content and oblique second reflection

to note that the explanatory gap between the autonomous, hermetic aesthetic and the heteronomous extra-aesthetic has been filled. Our investigation of the mutual constitution of autonomy and heteronomy in both aesthetic processes and aesthetic materials has resulted in a theory of oblique reflection. While the artwork undeniably operates autonomously, and its processes have no intentional reference to the extra-aesthetic whatsoever, the mediation of this autonomy by heteronomy entails that the artwork’s processes always already involve not only a working of aesthetic materials, but also an oblique working and critique of the mediating processes that gave rise to the aestheticological properties of those aesthetic materials. We have yet to receive an explanation of how the artwork will employ this oblique reflection in such a way as to create truth; however, it is important to recognize that the very category of oblique reflection has served to close off the most serious difficulty facing Adorno’s theory of art as bearing truth content. In the remainder of this chapter, I will give an account of how the artwork employs its oblique reflection in such a way as to instantiate truth. As a corollary, I will also be demonstrating the profound affinity of aesthetic and philosophical method and the entailed affinity of their forms of truth. The remaining desiderata of this chapter are to establish the artwork as a form of knowledge and to establish that the artwork’s form of knowledge and resultant truth are isomorphic to philosophy’s. I will take it that a demonstration of the latter, the affinity of the artwork’s and philosophy’s processes in attaining knowledge, will entail a demonstration of art as a form of knowledge. So I will move directly to demonstrating the parallelism between philosophy and art as forms of knowledge. Aesthetic processes are determined by identity thinking and “dominate” their aesthetic materials in accordance with identity thinking. In this respect, this is identical to the epistemological faculties and processes operative in philosophical thought, which are also constitutively in accord with the form of identity thinking. Moreover, aesthetic materials are determined by the same social totality that is operative in the mediation of the epistemological materials (concepts, objects, and so on) that philosophy makes use of because of the incidence of the same process of thin determination in both aesthetic and nonaesthetic

aesthetic tru th content and oblique second reflection

173

contexts. The parallel between philosophy and art is clearly quite strong at this point. However, what is distinctive about philosophy, as we saw in chapter 3 and 4, is that it employs the delusive epistemological processes available to it in such a way as to break with those processes. It does so by forming a dialectical texture in the philosophical text, which enacts the failure of all candidate concepts. This textual demonstration is then inwardly performed by the agent, which causes the concepts that mediate their experience to fail, thereby acquainting the agent with the nonidentical. It is this specific philosophical dialectical method that results in the knowledge of the nonidentical, and thereby the knowledge that there are existents which are not capturable by one’s present conceptual array. While the artwork may share the same nature of its processes with philosophy, and its materials may be identically mediated, this does not entail that the truth of the artwork should be the same as the philosophical standard of truth. For this to be so, it would have to recapitulate the philosophical method summarized above, in order to similarly achieve a critique of the delusive mediators of experience and entail the agent’s acquaintance with the nonidentical. I will suggest in what follows that this is in fact the case. There is textual evidence in Aesthetic Theory that Adorno understands the artwork to recapitulate the philosophical text’s approach to truth. This can best be shown by breaking down the philosophical method into three core areas—the destructively phenomenological employment of false epistemological materials in order to create a break with those materials, the employment of the dialectical constellation in order to effect this break, and the performative role of the agent as ultimately responsible for this break’s taking place—and finding analogues for them in the artwork. The unique feature of Adorno’s theory of truth is its circumventing the falsifying mediators of experience by virtue of engaging these false mediators, and creating a break in them through this engagement. Adorno phrases this, in the philosophical context, as the attempt to instantiate truth by virtue of breaking with concepts “in [their] own measure.”80 In Adorno’s aesthetic philosophy this feature, of creating an immanent break, is also present: “It is by way of concepts, however, that art sets free its mimetic, nonconceptual layer. . . . Art militates against

1 74

aesthetic tru th content and oblique second reflection

the concept as much as it does against domination, but for this opposition it, like philosophy, requires concepts.”81 Adorno claims that art has a “nonconceptual” layer, and “militates against the concept.” This serves to closely tie together art and philosophy in their role as not only providing a critique of conventional conceptual thought, but also providing a grasp on the nonconceptual (nonidentical) through this critique. Second and more importantly, Adorno states that the artwork constitutively sets free the artwork’s “nonconceptual layer” not by attempting to work outside of concepts, but in fact by way of concepts. Adorno confirms that art, like philosophy, “requires concepts,” and yet these concepts must be employed such that they give rise to access to the nonconceptual: “The truth of artworks depends on whether they succeed at absorbing into their immanent necessity what is not identical with the concept, what is according to that concept accidental.”82 As was shown above,83 Adorno has asserted that art “requires concepts.” Bearing this in mind, in the extract just cited84 Adorno is saying that the artwork effects a break in these concepts by virtue of forcing the concepts employed in the artwork in the course of their own employment to, by virtue of their own “immanent necessity,” incorporate content that the concept took itself to exclude. This was, of course, how philosophy goes about creating a breakout from conceptual thought. Concepts take themselves to have a seamless identity with their objects. If concepts can be pushed into summoning other concepts in the course of their application to a given object, this generates Adorno’s desired “constellations,” while also destroying the idea of the concepts ability to flawlessly subsume the object. The artwork, like the philosophical text, also seeks to force the concept to work against itself in the same way. The way in which the artwork effects this break in conceptuality might be identical in form to the philosophical employment of constellations; the artwork might force the concept to call up other concepts and content in order to mitigate the concept’s own insufficiency. If this is indeed the case, and the artwork effects a break in conceptuality in the same way as the philosophical text, this would take us further in trying to establish the uniformity of Adorno’s theories of philosophical and aesthetic truth. There is in fact exegetical evidence that Adorno takes the artwork to constitute itself in the same way, by making use of dialectical constellations. Adorno makes it clear that the truth

aesthetic tru th content and oblique second reflection

175

content of the artwork, its epistemological and sociohistorical critique, is constituted not through the addition of any new content, but rather through the dialectical employment of preexisting content. This dialectical employment constitutes the artwork’s truth content and “break” with the falsifying mediators of experience: Unconsciously every artwork must ask itself if and how it can exist as utopia: always only through the constellation of its elements. The artwork transcends not by the bare and abstract difference from the unvarying but rather by taking the unvarying into itself, taking it apart, and putting it back together again; such composition is what is usually called aesthetic creativity. Accordingly, the truth content of artworks is to be judged in terms of the extent to which they are unable to reconfigure the other out of the unvarying.85 Here, then, we have Adorno’s claim that the artwork’s instantiation of “utopia” and the “other” (both of which function as shorthands for the nonidentical) is achieved through the “[reconfiguration of] the other out of the unvarying.” The “aesthetic creativity” that brings about this appearance of the nonidentical through the artwork is identified with nothing other than the constellation of the artwork’s “elements.” As in philosophy, then, there is the clear thought that the instantiation of the nonidentical is achieved via the dialectical employment of constellations. Adorno reiterates this thought: “In artworks the name is, however, strictly negative. Artworks say what is more than the existing, and they do this exclusively by making a constellation of how it is, ‘Comment c’est.’ ”86 Here, Adorno uses the “name” as shorthand for the identification of the nonidentical, this idiosyncratic connotation being inherited, via Benjamin, from Gershom Scholem’s work on the Kabbalah.87 Again, as in philosophy, art says more than what is the case, but does so negatively. As we saw above, art (as constitutively experiential) is subject to the delusive mediators of experience. Art is subject to the same problematic as philosophy; the positive statement of the true is impossible, as it would be falsified by the mediators of experience. As such, as Adorno says, the “name” of the artwork is “strictly negative.” This

176

aesthetic tru th content and oblique second reflection

negative grasp of the truth is achieved through what Adorno calls a “constellation of how it is.” This reinforces the similarity of the situation of art and philosophy—both are necessarily negative, and both transcend this negativity through the employment of dialectical constellations. Finally, Adorno gives a direct statement of the artwork’s mimicking of philosophy’s dialectical employment of concepts: That universal elements are irrevocably part of art at the same time that art opposes them, is to be understood in terms of art’s likeness to language. For language is hostile to the particular and nevertheless seeks its rescue. Language mediates the particular through universality and in the constellation of the universal, but it does justice to its own universals only when they are not used rigidly in accord with the semblance of their autonomy but are rather concentrated to the extreme on what is specifically to be expressed.88 Adorno draws a direct parallel between art and language, the constitutive medium of philosophy. Language, Adorno asserts, is problematized by its innate “[hostility] to the particular” (this hostility deriving from the conceptual mediation of experience) and yet “nevertheless seeks its rescue” through “universality and the constellation of the universal.” This suffices as a summary of the philosophical method that we examined in chapters 3 and 4, and posited as the constitutive element in the philosophical text that allows for an instantiation of the nonidentical. Adorno then asserts that art’s own relationship to concepts (“universal elements”) is likewise to be construed in this manner. As such, art, like philosophy, is problematized by the falsifying role of universals and also resolves this problematic through the dialectical employment of constellations. However, of course, art, unlike philosophy, does not construct these constellations explicitly with reference to concepts, but instead conducts itself autonomously, through working the formal properties of its aesthetic materials. So, we have seen that for Adorno the artwork is constructed by dialectical procedures that, like philosophy, result in what Adorno terms “constellations.” These constellations are constructed (in the artwork) by interrogating and attempting to reconcile the aesthetico-logical

aesthetic tru th content and oblique second reflection

177

properties of aesthetic materials. The key consequence to be drawn from this is that the artwork bears the same textural performativity as the philosophical text. Just as in the case of the philosophical text, the artwork employs problematic concepts and, in the course of their employment, causes the concept to display its insufficiency. As in the context of philosophy, the displayed insufficiency of the concept thereby calls up other concepts and causes a dialectical constellation. We need to briefly add our account of oblique reflection to this account of the affinity of the artwork and the philosophical text. We are presently asserting that the artwork and philosophical text both instantiate a textually performative critique of concepts. However, I need to outline how art’s hermetic procedure amounts to this conceptual critique. First, we must note that both the artwork and the philosophical text present, in their respective media, the same dialectical complex of concepts. Which is to say, that which is present in each is determined by the same conceptual totality, with the same obtaining conceptual aporias.89 This is so just due to the influence of a single process, thin determination, on both philosophical and aesthetic materials. The aesthetic materials, and their aesthetico-logical properties, are obliquely determined by both concepts and the social totality. As such, the artwork’s dialectical working of those aesthetico-logical properties serves as an oblique mirror of the philosophical dialectical method. The hermetic procedure of following the aesthetico-logical demands of aesthetic materials amounts to a conceptual constellation, just because these aestheticological properties are nothing other than the oblique reflection of the conceptual mediation that governs them. As such, the dialectical working and development of these aesthetico-logical properties will result in the artwork presenting, in the completed artwork, a formal whole that will engage the agent’s concepts and induce them to fail. The contradictions latent in concepts are translated into aesthetic logic—the working of the aesthetic processes on this aesthetic logic results in a completed artwork. As has been said, the aesthetico-logical properties of the aesthetic contents are not merely passively received, but are in fact worked on by the artist. This working takes these aesthetico-logical demands and tendencies and extrapolates and develops them. As a consequence,

178

aesthetic tru th content and oblique second reflection

these aesthetico-logical tendencies often result in the aesthetic equivalent of philosophical contradiction. Authentic artworks encounter aporias and irresolvable formal problematics, just as authentic philosophy terminates in the display of contradictions, aporias, and the like. It is in the frank display of these aesthetic aporias, contradictions, and internal inconsistencies that artworks increasingly became incapable of successfully forming flawless wholes. Accordingly, Adorno lays great weight on dissonance and ugliness in his account of authentic art. These irruptions of disharmony are not, on Adorno’s account, attributable to a contingent dislike of tonality or seamlessness on the part of the artist. They are rather the unconcealed limits of the artwork’s attempt to seamlessly dominate and unify its materials. And, thanks to thin determination’s communicating sociohistorical content to the aesthetico-logical nature of aesthetic materials, this ugliness and dissonance are reflective also of genuine contradictions and problems in the unity of the socioepistemic whole external to the artwork.

Aesthetic Form and Conceptual Criticism Purely aesthetic formal developments become conceptually critical just because of the conceptual mediation of perception. For the artappreciator perceiving the completed artwork, the concepts that obliquely determined the formal demands of the aesthetic content reappear and are reengaged by the agent viewing the completed artwork. While aesthetic materials are for the artistic processes of formation reduced to mere collections of formal aesthetico-logical demands, this reduction does not take place for the art-appreciator (that is, the individual who perceives and comprehends the completed artwork). The artwork’s manipulation of formal problematics is, at the same time, manipulation of material that has intrinsic socioepistemic content and structure for the art-appreciator. As such, the blind artistic processes of formation inadvertently constitute social critiques, just because the formal constitution of an aesthetic contradiction will, at the same time, bear socially germane meaning in the completed artwork for the recipient of the artwork. Having been worked by the processes of artistic formation, the aesthetic materials are now configured so as to display the socioepistemic contradictions embedded in them that were present

aesthetic tru th content and oblique second reflection

1 79

to the processes of artistic formation as merely formal contradictions. While the processes of artistic formation do not, from their perspective, interact with the heteronomous, they nonetheless visibly display autonomy through negation of the heteronomous (as we saw from Horowitz’s argument). This visibility is achieved through the dual hermeneutic status of aesthetic materials. What appears to the processes of construction as formal units appears to us also as colors, tones, themes, and so on. What is merely formal and aesthetico-logical to the processes of artistic formation is both socioepistemically germane and formal to the art-appreciator. If the completed artwork engages our concepts and leads them, during the agent’s performative engagement with the artwork, into contradiction, then the conceptual mediation of experience will be led to break down just as in the case of philosophical performativity. The conceptual structure of experience has certain latent contradictions. This same conceptual structure lends aesthetico-logical form to the contents worked by the artwork. The logical demands of these aesthetic contents are determined by and reflective of these contradictions. However, these contradictions have been translated out of a conceptual medium and into the medium of aesthetic form. In constructing the artwork, the aesthetic processes work these formal demands and develop them. Just as in the philosophical case, development of these formal tendencies reveals their latent contradictions. Once completed, the artwork displays these contradictions, translated back into a conceptual medium (namely, experience). As such, the artwork presents to the agent a dialectically constructed “text” wherein the aesthetic contents, and their attendant conceptual mediation, are isomorphic with the agent’s own conceptual array. As such, the artwork’s autonomous, dialectical form is also always already a latent critique of the conceptual array that determined it. It only stands in need of the agent’s own performative engagement to vitalize this conceptual critique and create the desired conceptual break, as in philosophy. This will be demonstrated in the following section. To conclude this section, then, the artwork’s dialectical treatment of its aesthetic materials, because these materials are constituted by conceptual and sociohistorical mediation, amounts to the same as the philosophical text’s dialectical treatment of its explicitly conceptual

180

aesthetic tru th content and oblique second reflection

material. By “the same” I mean that, in either case, the finished product (the artwork or philosophical text) bears in itself a dialectical construct that engages the concepts of the agent’s conceptual array and induces them to fail. The philosophical text does so explicitly; the artwork does so obliquely, by virtue of the thin determination of the aesthetic materials and the conceptual mediation of experience. This amounts to their textual performativity—their bearing a texture that is conceptually germane. The artwork, like the philosophical text, bears on its face a destructively phenomenological treatment of concepts. Adorno makes this textual performativity explicit: “The truth content of artworks, as the negation of their existence, is mediated by them though they do not in any way communicate it. That by which truth content is more than what is posited by artworks is their methexis in history and the determinate critique that they exercise through their form.”90 Adorno identifies the critique in the artwork with the artwork’s form. It is through its formal properties that the artwork exercises its critique. Once one recognizes that formal problematics are translations of conceptual problematics, this becomes cogent. What remains to be seen is how the artwork’s capability to visibly instantiate conceptual critiques, through the dual hermeneutic status of its materials as both formal and socioepistemically germane, will amount to the creation of a “truth content . . . more than what is posited by artworks.” This truth content that emerges in the artwork but exceeds the artwork’s constitution is the nonidentical. The artwork is textually performative in the same fashion as the philosophical text, organizing its materials such that concepts are engaged and induced to fail. What is now required is an account of how this semblance of conceptual critique can result in knowledge of the nonidentical.

The Performative Role of the Agent Like philosophy, the artwork generates an enacted critique of conceptuality. Unlike philosophy, the artwork achieves this obliquely, with the conceptual critique being formed through the navigation of formal aesthetic problematics, which are retranslated into a conceptual register when experienced by the art-appreciator. In philosophy this critique was only capable of delivering knowledge of the nonidentical

aesthetic tru th content and oblique second reflection

181

with the addition of the performative engagement of the subject’s consciousness. Adorno claims that, just as for philosophy, the truth of art is constituted by both the artwork’s and the agent’s performative engagement with the artwork in equal measure. For example: That artworks say something and in the same breath conceal it expresses this enigmaticalness from the perspective of language. This characteristic cavorts clownishly; if one is within the artwork, if one participates in its immanent completion, this enigmaticalness makes itself invisible; if one steps outside the work, breaking the contract with its immanent context, this enigmaticalness returns like a spirit. . . . Whoever refuses to reenact the work under the discipline it imposes falls under the empty gaze [of the artwork, which reveals nothing].91 What is most important in the above is that the artwork’s “enigmaticalness”—its failure to disclose a determinate, subsumable content—is only overcome by an active participation in the artwork. This participation is termed by Adorno a reenactment of the work “under the discipline it imposes.” Adorno posits this role of the agent as necessary in order to avoid falling under the “empty gaze” of the artwork (that is, to not become like those Adorno terms the “art-alien,”92 who are incapable of a genuine relationship to and interpretation of the artwork). Just as in the case of philosophy, art is held to have a content that is not reducible merely to its apparent phenomena, but in fact also requires the agent’s own engagement. This strongly suggests that art, like philosophy, is held by Adorno to require a performative engagement from the agent in order to fully disclose its content. Adorno explicitly draws this comparison: By reading the spirit of artworks out of their configurations and confronting the elements with each other and with the spirit that appears in them, critique passes over into the truth of the spirit, which is located beyond the aesthetic configuration. This is why critique is necessary to the works. In the spirit of the works critique recognizes their truth content or distinguishes truth content from spirit. Only in this act, and not through any philosophy

182

aesthetic tru th content and oblique second reflection

of art that would dictate to art what its spirit must be, do art and philosophy converge.93 What is most striking about this, of course, is that Adorno is here asserting that “art and philosophy converge.” However, what is most important is Adorno’s assertion that the “truth of the spirit” (the intellectual component of the artwork) is “located beyond the aesthetic configuration” (that is, it is not merely equivalent to the presented properties of the artwork). He simultaneously asserts that in “the act” of critique the truth is revealed—and this act is constituted by “reading the spirit of artworks out of their configurations and confronting the elements with each other.” The artwork, then, holds a truth of spirit that is “beyond the aesthetic configuration”—that is, not equivalent to the immediate properties of the artwork. But this truth is only revealed through the addition of an activity in the consciousness—the “reading of the spirit of artworks out of their configurations.” Adorno denies that this truth could be extracted from the artwork. While Adorno holds the truth to be “beyond the aesthetic configuration,” it nonetheless can only be comprehended through this configuration. In the act of critique enacted by the agent, the truth is “read out” of the aesthetic configuration, and bound up with it. This sounds identical in nature to the problematic encountered in chapters 3 and 4, namely, that the philosophical content was located beyond the conceptual content of the philosophical text, and yet was nonetheless posited as only being accessed by the agent’s interaction with that philosophical text. As in the case of philosophy, then, the truth content of the artwork is incompatible with the nature of the medium in question (as the truth content is nonidentical and the medium is in accord with identity thinking), and yet nonetheless must be “read out” of that medium, by virtue of the agent’s own performative engagement. As such, Adorno is claiming that the artwork sets up a truth that is not identical to the artwork’s actual constitution. In the philosophical context, this opposition of the truth to the discursive makeup of the philosophical text was solved by the performative engagement of the agent. From the evidence already adduced, and Adorno’s statement that the aesthetic problematic “converges” with the philosophical, we may take this as

aesthetic tru th content and oblique second reflection

183

legitimation for reading art as demanding the same kind of performative engagement of the agent as philosophy. Adorno states this directly: Pure immediacy does not suffice for aesthetic experience. Along with the involuntary it requires volition, concentrating consciousness; the contradiction is ineluctable. All beauty reveals itself to persistent analysis, which in turn enriches the element of involuntariness; indeed, analysis would be in vain if the involuntary did not reside hidden within it. In the face of beauty, analytical reflection reconstitutes the temps durée through its antithesis. Analysis terminates in beauty just as it ought to appear to complete and self-forgetting unconscious perception. Thus analysis subjectively redescribes the course that the artwork objectively describes within itself: Adequate knowledge of the aesthetic is the spontaneous completion of the objective processes that, by virtue of the tensions of this completion, transpire within it.94 Adorno is tracing a relationship between analysis and the artwork itself that is identical to the problematic of the relationship between the “philosophical demonstration” and “discursively true” that Adorno discovered, which was discussed in chapter 3. The artwork in aesthetic experience constitutes itself through the “involuntariness” of “pure immediacy.” However, this “involuntary,” immediate experience is necessarily accompanied by “volition, concentrating consciousness.” “Aesthetic experience” is constituted by a dialectic between an immediate truth of the work and the conceptually mediated element (analysis enacted by a “concentrating consciousness”) that makes this immediate truth viable. As Adorno puts it, analysis “enriches the element of involuntariness.” A complicated dialectical relation is being drawn between the immediate truth of aesthetic experience and the intellectually mediated grounds of that experience. Adorno also subtly transitions from consideration of the constitution of optimal aesthetic experience to the related issue of the optimal relationship between aesthetic analysis and aesthetic experience. Adorno asserts that the “pure immediacy” of aesthetic experience must be accompanied by, and translated into, “analysis,” which “reconstitutes” this experience “through its antithesis.” As such, Adorno is introducing

184

aesthetic tru th content and oblique second reflection

a dialectical opposition between an immediate, nondiscursive truth content of the artwork and “its antithesis”—that is, a conceptually mediated, complex analysis by which this immediate truth content demands to be reconstituted. This analysis, Adorno claims, “redescribes the course that the artwork objectively describes within itself.” As such, then, the truth of the artwork is the “antithesis” of the language of analysis (that is, conceptual discourse), but nonetheless must be retranslated into this language of analysis. Compare this to Adorno’s analysis of the relationship between philosophical demonstration and discursive knowledge: In philosophy the authentic question will somehow almost always include its answer. Unlike science, philosophy knows no fixed sequence of question and answer. . . . This distinguishes the relation of understanding and judgment from the usual order of time.  .  .  . What is transmitted here is the fiber of the so-called philosophical demonstration, a mode of proof that contrasts with the mathematical model. And yet that model does not simply disappear, for the stringency of a philosophical thought requires its mode of proceeding to be measured by the forms of inference. Philosophical proof is the effort to give statements a binding quality by making them commensurable with the means of discursive thinking. But it does not purely follow from that thinking: the critical reflection of such cogitative productivity is itself a philosophical content.95 Adorno claims that philosophy is caught between the immediacy of “philosophical demonstration” and the “mathematical model.” The former is nondiscursive but, because of the “stringency” of thought, “requires” a retranslation into the rational discourse of the mathematical model. As in the aesthetic case, then, the immediate content, the access to the nonidentical, entails and requires a discursive, rational instantiation. Just as art has the opposition between “immediacy” and “analysis,” philosophy has the opposition between “philosophical demonstration” and “discursive thinking.” Adorno is drawing a strikingly direct correspondence between the aesthetic and philosophical modes of comprehension. In both cases the

aesthetic tru th content and oblique second reflection

185

medium of expression (the philosophical text, the artwork) is by itself insufficient. The conventional mode of understanding the medium (conventional philosophical discourse, aesthetic analysis) is also found to be insufficient. True comprehension is achieved in an immediate experience of truth, which is derived from the agent’s internalized performance of that which is contained in the medium of expression. This immediate experience is opposed to the conventional, discursive mode of comprehension, but nonetheless entails and requires it. As Adorno puts it in the aesthetic context, the “pure immediacy” of the artwork must be reexpressed “through its antithesis,” namely, conceptual analysis. As such, the “spontaneous completion” of the artwork’s “objective processes” that takes place in the observer’s experience is necessary for “adequate knowledge of the aesthetic.” However, this “pure immediacy,” Adorno asserts, is insufficient, and must be accompanied by discursive analysis. Adorno, then, is reinstating here the dichotomy that was characteristic of philosophical truth, namely, that there is a complex relationship between a discursive expression of the truth—which accords with preestablished conditions of validity—and a form of experiential, immediate truth that is opposed to the former but must be retranslated into it. The solution to this problem, in the case of philosophy, was the addition of the performative engagement of the agent. This performative engagement of the agent vitalized, as it were, the concrete truth of the philosophical text through performatively internalizing it. This performative internalization established a breakdown in the mediators of experience, and hence an experiential acquaintance with the nonidentical. It is my claim that Adorno also extends this solution to the aesthetic problematic. Art and philosophy are united in their solution to their shared problematic. In each case, the discursive standard of understanding (philosophical discursive thinking, standards of aesthetic analysis) is insufficient and falsifying by virtue of its employment of conceptual discourse, and in each case the proposed answer is the agent’s own immediate cognitive performance of the philosophical text or artwork. Adorno makes this clear in the aesthetic context: “Adequate knowledge of the aesthetic is the spontaneous completion of the objective processes that, by virtue of the tensions of this completion, transpire within it.”96

186

aesthetic tru th content and oblique second reflection

This serves as a very concise assertion by Adorno that the correct comprehension of the aesthetic entails a performative element. In the philosophical case, the role of performativity was to liberate the philosophical content, by means of the concept, from conceptuality itself. Intriguingly, Adorno here asserts the same, obliquely, for art. Adequate knowledge of the aesthetic requires the agent to performatively engage with the constitutive processes within the artwork and to complete them. In other words, Adorno notes that the processes transpiring in the artwork are presently incomplete—it falls to the agent to add their performative element and complete the artwork, and thereby attain adequate knowledge of the artwork. Performativity for the aesthetic, as for philosophy, is a condition on the true completion of the artwork as a mode of knowledge: “Understanding specific artworks . . . requires an objective experiential reenactment from within in the same sense in which the interpretation of a musical work means its faithful performance.”97 As in philosophy, then, performativity is required to solve the dilemma of the rational/nonrational modes of knowledge in art, and to finally attain the nonidentical.

Performative Engagement and Access to the Nonidentical If aesthetics, like philosophy, requires the performative engagement of the agent, we need to make clear how this performative engagement gives rise to access to the nonidentical. In the case of philosophy this was reasonably clear. The philosophical text with which the agent performatively engages employs the self-same concepts that mediate experience—as such, understanding how an engagement with a discursive critique of theoretical concepts could result in the breakdown of the concept’s mediating function was quite transparent. The artwork does not take concepts as its aesthetic materials, nor does it transparently employ concepts in the process of aesthetic formation. This being so, we are presently without an understanding of how the subject’s performative engagement with the artwork is intended to give rise to the required break in the conceptual mediation of the subject’s experience. As it happens, this is in fact reasonably easy to explain, as soon as we make use of the idea of oblique reflection. The aesthetic materials that

aesthetic tru th content and oblique second reflection

187

are worked on by the aesthetic processes are obliquely determined by the conceptual array. As such, their behavior when being worked by the aesthetic processes (which are themselves determined by and a form of conceptual practice) and the artwork that results from their being worked are reflective of the conceptual array. This means that the problematic of the artwork (its dilemmas, its formal development, and so on) is in fact an instantiation of the problematics native to the conceptual array that determines it. The conceptual structure of the agent’s experience is identical to that conceptual array that determines the aesthetic problematic.98 Concepts are obliquely at work in the artwork, rather than directly, as in the case of philosophy. This obliquity, however, does not change the fact that the artwork is conceptually constituted and, when encountered by the agent, engages the agent’s conceptual array: “Although artworks are neither conceptual nor judgmental, they are logical. In them nothing would be enigmatic if their immanent logicality did not accommodate discursive thought, whose criteria they nevertheless regularly disappoint. . . . The unity that artworks . . . achieve makes them analogous to the logic of experience.”99 Adorno correctly maintains that the artwork cannot be consistently seen as either conceptual or judgmental. Our examination of the artwork’s autonomy served to demonstrate why this is; the artwork constitutes itself wholly with reference to aesthetic properties and in no way attempts to capture, describe, or conceptually subsume anything extraaesthetic. However, and this returns to the artwork’s status as dialectical critique, the artwork nonetheless “accommodate[s] discursive thought” while “disappoint[ing]” its “criteria.” While the artwork may be formed aconceptually, it nonetheless (once completed) presents a conceptually germane unity that engages and is “analogous” to the “logic of experience.”100 The artwork accommodates and engages, then, the conceptual faculties of the agent as they performatively engage with the artwork, while simultaneously frustrating these concepts. This combination of the engagement of concepts and frustration of the self-same concepts according to their criteria that Adorno here describes is nothing other than dialectical method, and does not differ from the manner in which philosophy performatively effects its critique. The agent’s performative engagement with the artwork engages their concepts just as a philosophical text does, the only difference

188

aesthetic tru th content and oblique second reflection

being that it is not immediately apparent to the agent that the artwork is conceptually constituted. As the artwork engages and enacts a dialectical critique of concepts just as philosophy does, the art-appreciator’s performative engagement with this enactment likewise results in a break being effected in their conceptual structure of experience, and results in an experience of the nonidentical: a “shudder.” The aesthetic not only shares in the problematic of philosophy, but also breaks out of this problematic, like philosophy, in order to access the nonidentical in the same manner. Moreover, this entails a unification of the theory of truth for each; both dialectically work their respective materials, which bear the determination of the social totality. The dialectical working of these materials results in the display of the contradictory and insufficient nature of the epistemological whole that determined these materials. This static critique, however, then has added to it the agent’s own performative engagement, which, by virtue of the direct use of concepts in the case of philosophy and by virtue of the oblique determination of aesthetic materials by concepts in the case of aesthetics, results in the breaking of the conceptual mediation of experience. This breaking of the conceptual mediation of experience results in the acquaintance of the agent with the nonidentical. The theory of truth content that Adorno holds for philosophy and aesthetics is unified. Although there is a degree of differentiation in the philosophical and aesthetic modes (due to aesthetics making use of oblique, as opposed to direct, second reflection), nonetheless both take place in an identically constituted problematic and employ an identical solution to this solution, namely, the combination of conceptual texture with the performative engagement of the agent.

6 Beethoven, Proust, and Applying Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory

When we read Adorno’s own writings on artworks—rather than his writings on aesthetic theory—we do not find Adorno simply putting his aesthetic theory to work. Adorno does not expend all of his time in tracing conceptual problematics in formal characteristics, nor does he exclusively occupy himself only with an attempt to show how and in what way artworks are true. Adorno’s approach is far more diverse in approach and tone than this, and he shows himself very willing to pursue both tangents and matters of important detail. In this respect, Adorno’s work on specific artworks appears to diverge from, or at least run in parallel to, the account of aesthetic truth (complete with its account of aesthetico-logical properties and so on) that we worked through in the previous chapter. To understand why this is, in the first place we need to pay attention to Adorno’s own remarks in Aesthetic Theory on what aesthetic analysis (as opposed to aesthetic theory) is and is meant to achieve. As Adorno put it, the goal of analysis of an artwork is not to pretend to “discover” support for an overarching theory, but rather to “contemplatively immerse” oneself in the artwork’s specificity.1 This is not to say that aesthetic theory and aesthetic analysis can allowably contradict each other, but rather that they have different aims and different subject matter. Aesthetic theory is a study and critique of allowably general features of art, and forms its interpretations with a view to maximizing

19 0

beethoven, proust, and applying adorno’s aesthetic theory

their universality. By contrast, aesthetic analysis begins with specific features of specific artworks, and does not allow the conclusions of aesthetic theory to determine how the analysis will run.2 In other words, in his analyses of artworks, Adorno is not in the business of shoring up his theoretical position; he is rather seeking to analyze and unfold the full specificity of the artwork as far as possible. It may be the case that specific artworks can tell us informative things about our general theory of art; and it may be that our general theory can be in part disconfirmed or amended by what we discover in particular pieces of art. But we cannot decide in advance if and how this will take place.3 Aesthetic analysis and aesthetic theory, then, are divergent kinds of interpretation, which may or may not overlap. However, at important points these different kinds of interpretation do overlap. In this chapter, I would like to examine two examples of the interpretation of specific artworks that shows how the general theory of aesthetic truth content I have reconstructed in Adorno’s work is capable of meaningfully and helpfully supporting and interweaving with Adorno’s interpretative engagement with artworks. Aesthetic theory ultimately holds worth only to the degree to which it can inform and undergird our appreciation of artworks and our comprehension of those unusual and beguiling features they exhibit. Just as Adorno takes artworks to be organized “from below,” and yet to also exhibit a critical responsivity to general developments in art theory, so too must Adorno’s account of the truth of art not only be found to be consistent in general terms, but also match up importantly with his work on particular works of art.

Adorno on Beethoven Adorno’s Nachlass contains a great deal of preparatory work for an uncompleted monograph on Beethoven. In it, Adorno insists without analogy or intended hyperbole that the composer’s work is Hegelian in substance.4 Adorno grounds and explains the successes and failures of Beethoven’s work in the argot of Hegelianism: The special relationship between the systems of Beethoven and Hegel lies in the fact that the unity of the whole is to be understood

beethoven, proust, and applying adorno’s aesthetic theory

19 1

merely as something mediated. Not only is the individual element insignificant, but the individual moments are estranged from each other.  .  .  . Beethoven’s music is Hegelian philosophy: but at the same time it is truer than that philosophy. . . . Logical identity as immanent to form—as an entity at the same time fabricated and aesthetic—is both constituted and criticized by Beethoven.5 As Adorno points out, Beethoven was not plausibly influenced by Hegel’s philosophy.6 The parallel between Hegel and Beethoven is created not by the intention of the composer but by the same social whole expressing itself through the two men: The history of ideas, and thus the history of music, is an autarchic motivational context insofar as the social law, on the one hand, produces the formation of spheres screened off against each other, and on the other hand, as the law of totality, still comes to light in each sphere as the same law. . . . It is in fitting together under their own law, as becoming, negating, confirming themselves and the whole without looking outward, that [Beethoven’s] movements come to resemble the world whose forces move them; they do not do it by imitating that world. In this respect Beethoven’s attitude on social objectivity is more that of philosophy—the Kantian, in some points, and the Hegelian in the decisive ones.7 This is all perfectly in keeping with the account I have argued for; the problematics we find in both aesthetic and philosophical material are constituted by the social totality: “Social law” produces the “spheres” of philosophy and music (among others) and expresses itself (“comes to light”) in each, despite their being “screened off against each other.” As Adorno’s frequent reliance on Leibnizian metaphor makes clear, the social totality generates genuinely autonomous spheres of human endeavor that, through their autonomy, come to harmonize with and recapitulate the structural problematics in these other spheres to which they are not connected. Philosophy and music are united, despite their separation, as the same mediation (“social law”) transpires in each. Adorno claims that it is Beethoven’s use and organization of movements that serve to crystallize socioepistemic problems and to critique them:

192

beethoven, proust, and applying adorno’s aesthetic theory

At this point a precise analysis of the D major passage from the slow movement of the great String Quartet in F major [op. 59, no. 1, third movement, bars 70ff.] must be given. In the formal sense this passage appears superfluous, since it comes after a quasi-retransition, after which the recapitulation is expected to follow immediately. But when the recapitulation fails to appear it is made clear that formal identity is insufficient, manifesting itself as true only at the moment when it, as the real, is opposed by the possible which lies outside identity. The D͖ major theme is new: it is not reducible to the economy of motivic unity.8 Here Adorno begins to trace a critique of the “self-reproduction of society as a self-identical entity” by frustrating the principle of “logical identity.”9 This critique of logical identity is found in the frustration of the relationship between the “retransition” and “recapitulation.” A sonata has a fixed, triadic form. The opening section—the “exposition”—states a set of themes and figures. These are developed in the middle section, the “development.” The development is brought to close by the “retransition,” which serves to effect the movement into the “recapitulation,” the closing triadic section, which restates the thematic content of the exposition. The specific interest of the “D major passage” that Adorno points to, then, is that it inserts into the interstices between the completion of the retransition and the beginning of the recapitulation a new theme that was not found in the exposition or derived from the development of those exposited themes in the middle section (as he puts it, it is not “reducible to the economy of motivic unity”). This represents a break, however slight, with established sonata form. Beethoven’s insertion of an unanticipated, novel theme frustrates the immediate and established relationship between the development and recapitulation. The abstract structures of the sonata form are, in Adorno’s view, being broken—it is being shown that these abstractions are incapable of truly constraining and explaining the possible thematic development that could take place in a piece of this type. The introduced theme is, in a literal sense, not identical to the structures of the sonata. In Adorno’s view, this thematic development demonstrates the truth content of Beethoven’s composition, which is both akin to and “truer than”10 Hegel’s philosophy. As Adorno puts it: “The

beethoven, proust, and applying adorno’s aesthetic theory

193

developmental tendency in those works of Beethoven which precede the late style itself is opposed to the principle of transition. The transition is felt to be banal, ‘inessential’; that is, the relation of disparate moments to a whole which holds them together is seen as no more than a prescribed convention, no longer tenable.”11 Beethoven refuses to make unqualified use of the overarching structures of the sonata form—rather than lending his sonata a seamless unity, he violates the transition from development to recapitulation by introducing a novel theme. In Adorno’s view, this is simultaneously a refusal of the epistemic pretense of a seamless unity of concept and object. (As we saw in the last chapter, formal aesthetic structures and problems are sedimented socioepistemic content, in Adorno’s view.) Beethoven dissolves the apparently necessary formal relationships between abstractions (such as the transition between development and recapitulation) and the particulars that they apply to (the musical themes themselves). In doing so, Beethoven reveals them as not in fact necessary, but rather “prescribed convention” that is “no longer tenable.”12 This claim might seem a little strange—supposing we accept that what Beethoven has done is reveal the traditional sonata form as not in fact necessarily binding, but purely conventional. We might wonder (1) who ever doubted this in any event and (2) why such a “revelation” would make sonata form “untenable.” Musical composers are presented with a large range of musical forms—and presumably they have always been aware that they are free to pick up or put down these forms as they please. (One might abandon a sonata to write a canon instead.) In this sense, music forms have always been selected rather than imposed and, in this sense, conventional. Adorno’s point, however, is that in the act of composition, certain formal structures present themselves to the compositional eye as rigidly necessary. As one begins to work with the aesthetic material, they appear to demand the use of rigid and ostensibly necessary structures. And—just as in the case of identity thinking in general, of which this is for Adorno an example—these apparently necessary abstractions obscure the genuine formal/structural demands of their contents. Beethoven’s break with sonata form renders it “untenable,” as it breaks the fiction of the absolute necessity of the use of that form—it becomes clear that the aesthetic materials outstrip the structures of the abstract

194

beethoven, proust, and applying adorno’s aesthetic theory

sonata form. The sonata form is now untenable in the sense that it can never again present itself as a necessary formal constraint. Indeed— and here Beethoven’s anticipation in his late work of certain features of modernism can be seen—the sonata form now in fact becomes content rather than form. The artwork can choose to incorporate the sonata form, but now always on the understanding that such a form is contingent and revisable and only employed to the extent that the artwork consents to make use of it. Sonata form ceases to have a role as a necessary formal constraint and instead becomes contingently employed—a content that the artwork is free to pick up or put down as it pleases—to bend, deform, and revise. This is, for Adorno, also an instance of a critique of the general principle of identity thinking—of the identification of particulars with the abstractions applied to them. Adorno finds this kind of critique of identity thinking also in some other of Beethoven’s work—for example, Beethoven’s Piano Sonata no. 29.13 While Beethoven’s organization of his movements exhibits criticism of the application of abstract structures to particulars, Adorno also finds social criticism to be crystallized in Beethoven’s use of motives. Motivic composition conducts itself by means of short note patterns that are repeatedly subjected to variation and, less commonly, wholesale repetition. These motive patterns can be constituted by patterns in melody, rhythmic cadence, or harmonic relationships. In Beethoven’s employment of these motives, Adorno again finds Beethoven’s astringent relationship to logical identity and the totality: The motive kernels, the particulars to which each movement is tied, are themselves identical with the universal; they are formulas of tonality, reduced to nothingness as things of their own and preshaped by the totality as much as the individual is in individualistic society. The developing variation, an image of social labour, is definite negation: from what has once been posited it ceaselessly brings forth the new and enhanced by destroying it in its immediacy, its quasi-natural form.14 The motives, then, are taken by Adorno to be immediate elements of a formal totality. When they are worked over by Beethoven’s compositional practice, however, they begin to bring “forth the new” and destroy

beethoven, proust, and applying adorno’s aesthetic theory

19 5

their immediate, apparent identity with the totality (that “quasi-natural form”). Developing variation serves as a paradigmatic example of dialectical practice (which is hostile to logical identity) as it does not make use of inflexible formal structures. Adorno’s point is that an inflexible use of motives—which assumed that the role and effect of these motives could be abstractly anticipated in advance—would result in the repetition rather than development of motives. (We might understand Adorno’s criticism of Wagner’s use of leitmotifs in this way15—the leitmotif is given a fixed function and trotted out only with a view to satisfying this function.) By contrast, Beethoven suspends judgment about the compositional demands a motive might exhibit at each point—and accordingly, we find that motives are developed and varied continually, in response to the specific formal situation in which they are found. Beethoven forfeits, then, any preset overarching formal scheme, in favor of developing his aesthetic materials—his motives—in response to the particular situations they are found in. Just as in the case of sonata form, then, we see that Beethoven’s compositional form causes a deterioration in the apparent seamless identity of the aesthetic materials and pregiven forms. The structural similarity to Adorno’s account of ideal cognition—in which concepts are dialectically labile and maximally open to the particular features of their objects—is apparent. Just as Adorno traces the contradictions in the elements of the socioepistemic totality, Beethoven displays this totality in the formal qualities of his music: “All these implications of Beethoven result from musical analysis without any daring analogies, but to social knowledge they prove as true as the inferences about society itself. Society recurs in great music: transfigured, criticized and reconciled.”16 Formal problems are, thanks to thin determination, sedimented socioepistemic problems. This allows Adorno to claim that Beethoven’s response to the problems thrown up in the course of composition are at the same time indirect responses to the problems latent in the social totality. And so in Beethoven we find a preoccupation with the inability of the abstract— the compositional form—to properly subsume and govern, to respond to and develop, the particular aesthetic materials it applies to. This is an expression of the general “social law” of the diremption between abstract structures—in both epistemological and social structures—and the particulars to which they are applied. This allows Adorno to see Beethoven

19 6

beethoven, proust, and applying adorno’s aesthetic theory

as truthfully capturing—to an extent greater than Hegel!—the genuine features of the social totality. Even conceding all this, it is not clear why Adorno claims that above society is “reconciled” in great music. What we have seen implies that Beethoven’s work is relentlessly—if indirectly—critical of society. However, in Adorno’s view, this thoroughly critical work is undermined by Beethoven’s use of the reprise, which imports an ideological and “affirmative” moment into his work. The reprise, the return in composition to the opening themes of the piece, represents to Adorno “the force of crushing repression, of an authoritarian ‘That’s how it is.’  .  .  . The self-exaggerating assurance that the return of the first is the meaning, the self-revelation of immanence as transcendence—this is the cryptogram for the senselessness of a merely self-reproducing reality that has been welded together into a system.”17 The reprise becomes ideological by means of its apparent privileging of some original content that stands over and above the dialectical elaboration of the aesthetic material. To Adorno, this represents a “formalistic residue.”18 It represents a failure by Beethoven to completely integrate the formal and content-led demands of his art. Beethoven forgoes total compositional spontaneity in favor of a final repetition of some foundational preset musical material in the reprise. This failure, however, is not contingent but sociohistorically enforced. The reprise is the tribute Beethoven was forced to pay to the ideological character whose spell extends even to the most sublime music ever to aim at freedom under continued unfreedom. . . . A composer is always a zoon politikon as well, the more so the more emphatic his purely musical claim. . . . The fact that Beethoven’s music is structured like the society to which . . . we give the name of “rising bourgeoisie,” or at least like its self-consciousness and its conflicts, is premised on another fact: that the primary-musical form of his own views was inherently mediated by the spirit of his social class in the period around 1800. He was not the spokesman or advocate of this class . . . he was its inborn son.19 Once again, then, the formal nature of Beethoven’s music is determined by the sociohistorical complex external to his “purely musical”

beethoven, proust, and applying adorno’s aesthetic theory

197

activity. The appearance of the reprise in Beethoven’s work, then, is not simply a contingent choice made by Beethoven alone. It in fact represents the limit of Beethoven’s dialectical musical activity, this limit being imposed by the same sociohistorical determination that also lends the successful elements of Beethoven’s work its socially critical dimension and truth. Both the truthfulness of Beethoven’s work and the limit we find drawn to its truthfulness are produced by the same thing—the complete mediation of the artwork by the sociohistorical whole external to it.

Proust: A Literary Case Study At the close of our examination of Adorno’s account of Beethoven, we were given some insight into how Adorno is able to find artworks as bearing truth. In looking over Adorno’s account of Beethoven, I confined myself entirely to Adorno’s account of the truth of that artwork, and this of necessity creates some dissatisfaction. Artworks are experientially rich and qualitatively unique, and any theory of art or aesthetic experience that limits the value of art (or aesthetic experience) simply to being vouchsafed an experience of truth does a disservice to that aspect of art that draws us to it. This is in part a regrettable, and inevitable, side effect of the tack I have taken in this book, in focusing on Adorno’s account of the truth of art. Adorno’s work on art manifests itself in incredibly dense analyses that move between a number of different registers and approaches. These analyses, like Adorno’s metacritical work on philosophy, are importantly unparaphrasable, working as they do on the fruitful interplay of rhetoric and content. I have hoped to work at a level below this, attempting to explicate one central element of Adorno’s aesthetic thought—namely, that art is true—and the structures and premises that would have to be in place in order to provide the logical space in which that assertion stands. This being done, however, I should like in closing to visit Adorno’s aesthetic work once again. Adorno’s work on Beethoven represents a particularly stark example of Adorno’s finding truth in an artwork. There is also the suspicion that Adorno’s aesthetics as a whole is predicated far more closely on the structure of musical experience and problematics than, say, the literary. Music—or at least the classical or art

19 8

beethoven, proust, and applying adorno’s aesthetic theory

music with which Adorno deals—is constitutively formal, with only the libretto (if there is one) giving the chance for the presentation of meanings that are not generated solely by form. It is little surprise that highly developed modernist music—which constitutes itself solely through the investigation and navigation of formal problematics— might hew close to Adorno’s aesthetics, with its account of the interrelation of purely formal experimentation and aesthetic experience. But this should not imply that Adorno’s engagement with nonmusical art was lacking. Or, at least, not completely lacking. Adorno was at no great pains to engage with the specificity of the visual arts, although he did make some enlightening remarks on that subject. Nonetheless, an engagement with visual art of the quality and speculative daring of, say, Althusser’s work on Cremonini is altogether missing. It is literature, in any case, rather than painting or sculpture, that presents the most difficult case study for Adorno’s aesthetics. Both painting and sculpture are closer than music to our everyday structures and conventions of meaning—but nonetheless, they have clearly demarcated borders of formal control, within which our preestablished forms of meaning are converted into fresh forms. (One only needs to consider the case of the use of ready-mades here.) On top of this, the skein of preestablished meanings (visual, spatial) is free to be defied or exited by the artist in each of these disciplines, through the formal innovations and stresses that are introduced in the artwork. Henry Moore’s Two Piece Reclining Figure No. 5 clearly draws its impetus, and a great deal of its effect, from familiarity with the horizon of possibilities disclosed by the human form; but it is in the careful violation and skewing of that horizon that the sculpture demonstrates its autonomous, formal content. Similarly, Kandinsky’s Bustling Aquarelle quite intentionally appeals to the familiar cluster of impressions associated with the viewing of planes from given perspectives; but the painting’s exhibition of the physically impossible synchronicity and contiguity of divergent perspectives breaks decisively from the familiar form of visual experience. Literature, which per Adorno’s account of “authentic” art musters a complete lability of form, is in a far more straitened context, in which formal innovation is submerged in the skein of socially constructed meanings intrinsic to language and largely finds itself incapable of exiting from that skein. The artwork, we are told, engages concepts and

beethoven, proust, and applying adorno’s aesthetic theory

19 9

leads them into failure; and yet novelistic language must do so while at the same time (through the meaning intrinsic to its materials) appealing to our concepts in a different, undialectical way. If a work of literature were to display its conceptual engagement on its face, as it were, it would be a work of philosophy, which employed philosophical terms. It must indirectly engage the concepts that mediate experience—and thereby acquire philosophical content—while nonetheless simultaneously employing the conceptual medium of language in the elaboration of its content. In conducting itself, the novel passes through a series of assertions, descriptions, and claims, all of which employ concepts; if the artwork is to have a philosophical content, this content must be elaborated indirectly. And it is not clear how we can understand this as occurring. These problems strike me as deep, but I cannot engage with them programmatically here. What I can do is turn to one of Adorno’s engagements with literature and attempt to show how Adorno is capable, using the architectonic elaborated in the preceding five chapters, of delivering an analysis that can unravel the truth performatively enacted in the work, together with some of the wider value that we should hope to find in art. Adorno’s work on literature, of course, is largely associated with Beckett and Kafka. I would like to tackle the harder case of Adorno’s engagement with Proust. Beckett and Kafka, complex figures though they are, are of course thematically far closer to Adorno’s preoccupations, and fit more neatly into the modernist approach of Adorno than Proust. Adorno’s engagement with Proust is (in my view) flawed and incomplete, and has received little attention. This, on top of my great affection for Proust’s work, recommends engagement with Proust as a means of elaborating Adorno’s aesthetic a little further. While Adorno drops a number of glancing references to Proust’s work in Aesthetic Theory and Negative Dialectics,20 Adorno engaged in a sustained way with Proust in only two essays.21 The first—“Valery Proust Museum”—turns on a dispute between Paul Valery and Marcel Proust on the ultimate worth of the museum; the second, “Short Commentaries on Proust,” is, as the title implies, a rather fragmentary treatment of isolated passages from across À La Recherche du Temps Perdu. Adorno begins the latter with an insightful account of the

200

beethoven, proust, and applying adorno’s aesthetic theory

relation between whole and part in Proust: “In Proust, however, the relationship of the whole to the detail is not that of an overall architectonic plan to the specifics that fill it in.  .  .  . Proust’s great theme, the rescue of the transient, is fulfilled through its own transience, time. The duree the work investigates is concentrated in countless moments, often isolated from one another.”22 Bracketing Adorno’s uncharacteristically reductive attempt to find a unifying theme for Proust’s work in the “the rescue of the transient,” we do find here a good rule of thumb. Proust’s work composes itself in the flow of its enthusiasms, in the crystallization and reliquefaction of experiences in language, from which the characteristic curlicues of the Proustian sentence derive. As Adorno rightly divines, Proust’s À La Recherche du Temps Perdu is a work whose energies are continually being expended in all directions, rather than in service of an overarching architectonic. This demands and legitimates Adorno’s treatment of Proust in his selecting, apparently at random, isolated passages from his work. What Adorno does with these passages is a different matter. For instance, Adorno informs us that: The episode about Marcel’s disagreement with his revered uncle Adolf, the demimondaine who occasions the disaster through no fault of her own is not lost to the novel. As Odette Swann, she . . . manages to achieve the highest social honours. . . . Proust’s work captures one of the strangest experiences;  .  .  . that the people who are decisive in our lives appear in them as though appointed and dispensed by an unknown author, as though we had awaited them in this place and no other. [It is in fact Uncle Adolphe. The “disagreement” concerns the narrator’s failure to salute his uncle in the street, after having told his parents he found his uncle entertaining a courtesan, leading the Uncle to erroneously believe the narrator’s family had forbidden him from acknowledging him, this belief in turn leading to Adolphe’s estrangement from the family.]23 This does not find Adorno at his most insightful. What I hope to do here is to revisit Proust’s work with a view to putting to work the fruitful early remarks that Adorno has made, about the physiognomic

beethoven, proust, and applying adorno’s aesthetic theory

2 01

status of detail in Proust’s work and the intrinsic worth of abiding with fragmentary excerpts from Proust: an application of the Adornian form of analysis, then, not an exegesis of Adorno’s own engagement with Proust. I will focus on one passage from late in Swann’s Way. It comes from the section “Swann in Love,” in which Swann, in an anticipation of the narrator’s later torrid relationship with Albertine, is suffering from his love for Odette de Crecy, a courtesan whose infidelities and growing disinterest in him have driven Swann to devote the greater part of his time and energy in tracking, thinking about, and obsessing over her. This has been to the detriment of his standing in the high society of the Fauborg Saint-Germain, and the excerpt below finds Swann, by this point quite exhausted in his pursuit of Odette, reentering for one night the society he has spurned for so long: He [Swann] speedily recovered his sense of the general ugliness of the human male when, on the other side of the tapestry curtain, the spectacle of the servants gave way to that of the guests. But even this ugliness of faces, which of course were mostly familiar to him, seemed something new and uncanny, now that their features—instead of being to him symbols of practical utility in the identification of this or that man, who until then had represented merely so many pleasures to be sought-after, boredoms to be avoided, or courtesies to be acknowledged—were at rest, measurable by aesthetic co-ordinates alone, in the autonomy of their curves and angles. And in these men, in the thick of whom Swann now found himself packed, there was nothing (even to the monocle which many of them wore, and which, previously, would, at the most, have enabled Swann to say that so-and-so wore a monocle) which, no longer restricted to the general connotation of a habit, the same in all of them, did not now strike him with a sense of individuality in each. Perhaps because he did not regard General de Froberville and the Marquis de Bréauté, who were talking together just inside the door, as anything more than two figures in a picture, whereas they were the old and useful friends who had put him up for the Jockey Club and had supported him in duels, the General’s monocle, stuck like a

2 02

beethoven, proust, and applying adorno’s aesthetic theory

shell-splinter in his common, scarred, victorious, over-bearing face, in the middle of a forehead which it left half-blinded, like the single-eyed flashing front of the Cyclops, appeared to Swann as a monstrous wound which it might have been glorious to receive but which it was certainly not decent to expose, while that which M. de Bréauté wore, as a festive badge, with his pearl-grey gloves, his crush hat and white tie, substituting it for the familiar pair of glasses (as Swann himself did) when he went out to places, bore, glued to its other side, like a specimen prepared on a slide for the microscope, an infinitesmal gaze that swarmed with friendly feeling and never ceased to twinkle at the loftiness of ceilings, the delightfulness of parties, the interestingness of programmes, and the excellence of refreshments.  .  .  . The Marquis de Forestelle’s monocle was minute and rimless, and, by enforcing an incessant and painful contraction of the eye over which it was incrusted like a superfluous cartilage, the presence of which there was inexplicable and its substance unimaginable. . . . M. de Palancy, who with his huge carp’s head and goggling eyes moved slowly up and down the stream of festive gatherings, unlocking his great mandibles at every moment as though in search of his orientation, had the air of carrying about his person only an accidental and perhaps symbolical fragment of the glass wall of his aquarium24 This passage, embedded as it is in a broader account of Swann’s entering the house of the Marquise de Saint-Euverte, which is intentionally rendered by Proust as a bewildering cyclopean structure, is one of the most striking of all the six volumes that compose À la Recherche du Temps Perdu; it is one of the rare points at which a character is driven by the force of his emotional life to stand outside the society in which the majority of the novel takes place. (Indeed, the trajectory followed by the majority of the characters—insofar as they move at all in relation to the question of making an impression “in society”—is in entirely the converse direction, the narrator’s bathetic encounter with Legrandin in The Guermantes Way25 being most emblematic of this.) The oddity of the customs of French high society is registered elsewhere—as in the beguiling experience of seeing a theatre box and its inhabitants as beautiful marine life forms, which Adorno also refers

beethoven, proust, and applying adorno’s aesthetic theory

2 03

to himself26—but is therein seen as invitingly unusual. It is only with Swann’s desperate attendance above, which Proust raises to such a pitch as to almost invite the impression that Swann is temporarily taking leave of his sanity, that we see a character who is forced into taking an objective perspective on the mores by which he has lived. The effect of this bleeds into the tenor of the prose itself, and by implication the mental state of Swann himself, taking on a monstrous quality, in which the characteristics of his fellows are disintegrated, lose their uniqueness, and then are recombined into unfamiliar and allegorical figures. It is of course grist to the Adornian mill that this process is occasioned by the withdrawal of Swann’s self-interest. His love for Odette has created a set of projects (spying, winning the confidence of Odette’s friends) that has wholly supplanted his desire to appear “smart” in society. Accordingly, we see Proust inform us that the differentiation of these characters—according to their worth as “symbols of practical utility”—vanishes altogether, leaving only their constitution by the external markers of their social standing and wealth, namely, their clothes and accessories. It is this that occasions Proust’s excursus on monocles, the power and oddity of which bring to mind Benjamin’s work on Grandville, the French illustrator. One of Grandville’s illustrations in Un Autre Monde sees human beings replaced by their accessories, who are now dancing together, organized into a parody of the human form.27 Buck-Morss summarizes Benjamin’s use of Grandville well: “The earliest Passagen-Werk notes state that the work of Grandville is to be ‘compared with the phenomenology of Hegel.’ . . . Grandville ‘brings well to expression what Marx calls the “theological capers” of commodities.’ ”28 This link with Marx is suggestive. In Swann’s encounter, for a brief moment, his own milieu is presented to him as it truly is; the uniqueness of the men vanishes, preserved only in the mass-produced articles they drape on themselves: their monocles. In this moment, which comes close to what Adorno sees as most characteristic of Proust (the experience of everything being “completely different”29 from our conventional view), we have a classic picture of reification and the effects of the commodity form. The self-externalization and alienation that Swann suffers from here are the inversion familiar from analysis of the commodity form: the inversion of the relationship between people and things. Swann

2 04

beethoven, proust, and applying adorno’s aesthetic theory

now sees his fellows as mechanistically following rote formulae of social success, while it is their inanimate accessories that have the only remaining element of life. The bewilderment of this new perspective is communicated by Proust in the formal construction of the sentences that bear it: the lengthy, loping sentences that Moncrieff preserves in his translation move in a steady descent from focusing on faces and names (Marquis de Bréauté, Monsieur de Palancy) to a confrontation with the collocations of individual articles to which these men are reduced. By the time we reach the grotesque of Monsieur de Palancy’s fish head, we find Swann attempting to reunify the bewildering discontinuity of his experience of these individuals, and finding himself unable to re-create them as they once were. This section is the more remarkable for the brusqueness with which it emerges from the common texture of the novel, and the marmoreal tone in which the location for this event is drenched.30 This moment in Recherche is unique in the life of the character who experiences it also, being the pinnacle of Swann’s alienation from both himself and his desire; shortly afterward, his marriage to Odette brings access to domestic happiness, of a sort, but more importantly the socialite fatuity that Swann finds himself unable to comprehend here. Proust, as ever, does not name the central facet of the impression he is hoping to bring into prose, but he, as it were, suffuses it formally into the construction of the sentences. We find washed through the sentences various adjectives that convey the underlying distaste Swann is going through: the general’s face bears a “shell-splinter” and is “common,” “monstrous,” and “not decent”; M. De Bréauté has a monocle that contains his gaze like “a specimen prepared on a slide for a microscope”; M. De Palancy is altogether repellent with his “mandibles” and “goggling eyes.” Social eminence in Proust invariably, even when under criticism, ultimately confers a complimentary aura that, as the narrator mercilessly outlines at several points, suffuses the often disappointing features of its bearers.31 Swann’s epiphany represents one of the rare travels in the converse direction in Proust: the complete unraveling of the effects of social mediation, and the perception of social practices and values from an exterior perspective. It is, characteristically for Proust, love that has unseated Swann’s system of values. Swann’s

beethoven, proust, and applying adorno’s aesthetic theory

2 05

suffering continues, as he is forced to remain at a small concert that has been laid on. But it is at this concert that a musical figure by Vinteuil, the “little phrase” with which Swann had associated his love for Odette, is played: He suffered greatly from being shut up among all these people whose stupidity and absurdities wounded him all the more clearly since, being ignorant of love, incapable, had they known of it, of taking any interest, or of doing more than smile at it as some kind of childish joke, or deplore it as an act of insanity, they made it appear to him in the aspect of a subjective state which existed for him alone, whose reality there was nothing external to confirm; he suffered overwhelmingly, to the point at which even the sound of the instruments made him want to cry, from having to prolong his exile in this place where Odette would never come, in which no one, nothing was aware of her existence, from which she was entirely absent. But suddenly it was as though she had entered, and this apparition tore him with such anguish that his hand rose impulsively to his heart. . . . And before Swann had had time to understand what was happening, to think: “It is the little phrase from Vinteuil’s sonata. I musn’t listen!,” all his memories of the days when Odette had been in love with him [returned]. . . . When it was the little phrase that spoke to him of the vanity of his sufferings, Swann found a wisdom in that very wisdom which, but a little while back, had seemed to him intolerable when he thought he could read it on the faces of indifferent strangers, who would regard his love as a digression that was without importance. ’Twas because the little phrase, unlike them, whatever opinion it might hold on the short duration of these states of the soul, saw in them something not, as everyone else saw, less serious than the events of everyday life, but, on the contrary, so far superior to everyday life as to be alone worthy of the trouble of expressing it. Those graces of an intimate sorrow, ’twas them that the phrase endeavoured to intimate, to create anew; and even their essence, for all that it consists in being incommunicable and in appearing trivial to everyone save him who has experience of them, the little phrase had captured, had rendered visible.32

206

beethoven, proust, and applying adorno’s aesthetic theory

No small amount of interest can be derived from Proust’s description of the “little phrase” above. We are elsewhere informed that the little phrase consists of only five notes. Despite the scant formal composition of this phrase, we are shown the immense significative power it bears and, moreover, the violent self-alienating effect it has on Swann, one of the sole characters in the novel to appreciate its power.33 It is due to the phrase that Swann does “not at first recognize . . . himself,”34 such is its power to absorb Swann into it. Also suggestive, in light of Adorno’s account, is Proust’s juxtaposition of the expressive power of this music with the “essence” of its content, which is its “being incommunicable.” Vintueil’s sonata, with its little phrase, combines the ability to reflect extramusical content (in its sorrowfulness and air of resignation), truth, and the ability to intervene in the continuous experience and self-conception of those who attend carefully to it. I am not trying here to find, in Proust, support for Adorno’s conception of art. Rather, what is significant about Proust’s development of Swann’s alienation from his environment, through the ability of art to alienate Swann from himself, is that we here find that Proust’s novel is engaging in a complex self-reflexive discourse about art, and the value of art, itself. Proust’s novel contains a myriad of artworks—music by Vintueil, novels by Bergotte, paintings by Elstir, and pseudepigraphical excerpts from fictive works by the real Goncourt Brothers—but it is most characteristically in writing on Vintueil that Proust intensifies the formally intricate self-reflection on the status of the artwork and the worth of aesthetic pleasure. If nothing else, this shows us that Adorno’s association of formal complexity and formal “risk”35 with authentic art is at least intuitively plausible; and, moreover, the link of formal innovation with aesthetic value likewise models the peculiar pleasure that can be taken in Proust’s work. The almost entirely liquid formal composition of both the Proustian sentence and, within its titled sections, the Proustian novel as a whole shows us why Adorno places such a high value on Proust. It is in Proust that experiences of objects are taken as primary and allowed to dictate the composition of the novel. In his experience of the sonata, then, Swann has a double role; we see Proust elaborating the inner life of Swann the character, but also, through the description of that inner life, simultaneously elaborating and instantiating the nature of aesthetic pleasure that both Swann is

beethoven, proust, and applying adorno’s aesthetic theory

2 07

taking and we ourselves are taking in reading Proust’s description of Swann. This deeply knotted passage attests to Adorno’s claim that social content—in the unraveling of mediation and the display of social relations as not natural but in fact revisable—is embedded in art, alongside and through its formal complexity. In these complex passages from Swann’s Way, we can perhaps find an exemplar of Adorno’s account of aesthetic truth, betraying as they do exacting formal control of their materials, deeply intricate self-reflexivity about their status as art, and the surreptitious social content that escapes from these formal traits.

NOTES

Abbreviations AT DE

MM ND

Theodor Adorno. Aesthetic Theory. Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. London: Continuum, 2004. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. Theodor Adorno. Minima Moralia. Translated by E. F. N. Jephcott. London: Verso, 2005. Theodor Adorno. Negative Dialectics. Translated by E. B. Ashton. Abingdon: Routledge, 2006. Negative Dialektik: Jargon der Eigentlichkeit. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1997. All quotations from ND will provide two page references—for the relevant pages in the Ashton translation and the original German text, respectively.

Introduction 1. 2. 3.

AT 370, emphasis mine. ND 182/183. ND 56/66, emphasis mine.

1. Models of Experience 1. 2.

ND 12/24; AT 29, 173. Peter Dews, Logics of Disintegration: Post-Structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory (London: Verso, 1998), 225–227.

2 10 3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

1. models of experience ND 63–64/71–72, 71–72/78–79; Theodor Adorno, “The Essay as Form,” trans. Bob Hullot-Kentor, in The Adorno Reader, ed. Brian O’Connor (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 101, 110. AT 172. AT 29. Deborah Cook, Adorno on Nature (Durham: Acumen, 2011), 66–68. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996), 168, 181. Ibid., 196. For finite beings like us. “We then say that the conditions for the possibility of experience are such as simultaneously conditions for the possibility of objects of experience.” Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 228. ND 46/56. “Thoughts without content are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind.” Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 107. DE 11. DE 22. Theodor Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, trans. Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster (London: Continuum, 2007), xxiv, 5. “To the savage the world in general is animate, and trees and plants are no exception to the rule. He thinks that they have souls like his own, and he treats them accordingly.” James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (London: MacMillan, 1963), 111. “For the same principles which the magician applies in the practice of his art are implicitly believed by him to regulate the operations of inanimate nature; in other words, he tacitly assumes that the Laws of Similarity and Contact are of universal application and are not limited to human actions. In short, magic is a spurious system of natural law as well as a fallacious guide of conduct; it is a false science as well as an abortive art.” Ibid., 11. Cf. DE 3–4. DE 10. DE 31. Adorno understands the operation of concepts to necessarily entail a reciprocal relation between the subject and object. This is, for Adorno, a transcendental fact about the functional prerequisites for the operation of concepts. O’Connor gives a nicely concise account of this: Brian O’Connor, Adorno’s Negative Dialectic: Philosophy and the Possibility of Critical Rationality (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004), 54–59. As such, concepts can only ever be “loosely” arbitrary, in the sense that the objects to which concepts apply at least minimally determine the nature and scope of those concepts. DE 11.

1. models of experience

2 11

23. Theodor Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung: Gesammelte Schriften 3, ed. Rolf Tiedemann with Gretel Adorno, Susan Buck-Morss, and Klaus Schultz (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997), 32. 24. DE 11. 25. DE 11. 26. DE 11. 27. DE 11. 28. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller with analysis of the text and foreword by J. N. Findlay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 58. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid., 66. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid. 33. DE 11. 34. It is notable that Adorno makes the link between conceptual employment and self-preservation fully explicit repeatedly throughout his work. For example, ND 277/273, 389/382, and AT 14, 184, 320. 35. Adorno, of course, worked on Husserl’s work at Oxford, prior to joining Horkheimer in the United States and beginning to write the Dialectic. This work constituted an abortive attempt at a manuscript on Husserl’s epistemology, which was later revised and published as Against Epistemology: Studies in Husserl and the Phenomenological Antinomies. Against Epistemology largely draws its references from the Cartesian Meditations and the Logical Investigations. Adorno also studied Husserl under Hans Cornelius, in his first attempt to complete his Habilitation. For a very lucid look at Adorno’s persistent interest in Husserl across his career, see Ernst Wolff, “From Phenomenology to Critical Theory: The Genesis of Adorno’s Critical Theory from His Reading of Husserl,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 32, no. 5 (2006): 555–572. Miller also gives a good account of some of Adorno’s more specific criticisms of Husserl’s work: Jared Miller, “Phenomenology’s Negative Dialectic: Adorno’s Critique of Husserl’s Epistemological Foundationalism,” Philosophical Forum 40, no. 1 (2009): 99–125. 36. Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969), 40. 37. Ibid., 44. 38. DE 10. 39. It would be an interesting project, which I cannot pursue here, to examine if this genealogy of reason is not intended at least in part to function as a rebuff to the ahistorical eidetic structures Husserl enumerates. Husserl’s model of the primitive structures of intention posits the fundamental structures of intention as importantly continuous with the more sophisticated and complex intentional structures that are placed upon them. Cf. Husserl’s logical ordering of the pre-predicative and predicative forms of experience and the relation between

2 12

1. models of experience

their associated eidetic structures in Experience and Judgement. Edmund Husserl, Experience and Judgement: Investigations in a Genealogy of Logic, rev. and ed. Ludwig Landgrebe, trans. James S. Churchill and Karl Ameriks (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973). Interestingly, Adorno rejects this in favor of an agonic, Hegelian model in which the primitive layer of intention, as well as its associated sense, is canceled and preserved, in bringing forth an opposed model of intention, namely, the dialectical concepts with which we are familiar. Adorno’s model quite directly rejects Husserl’s more “generative” conception of the increasing complexity of continuous intentional structures, in favor of a discontinuous model in which conceptual cognition proper is created in spite of primitive forms of intentional experience and breaks with those structures. There is also the deeper problem that Adorno identifies with Husserl’s attempt to discover the basic structures of intention, namely, that this presumes that eidetic structures can be reliably extracted from their phenomena while retaining the capacity to seamlessly describe the features of those phenomena. Adorno, by contrast, claims that the phenomenal and the eidetic are contradictory: the former is irreducibly particular, the latter irredeemably abstract. Theodor Adorno, Against Epistemology: A Metacritique: Studies in Husserl and the Phenomenological Antinomies, trans. Willis Domingo (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), 86, 105–106. As such, phenomena can only be known through structures in a problematic fashion, as all structures (whether eidetic in the Husserlian sense or conceptual in the Adornian sense) abstract away from and distort the particulars (and experiences) that come under them. 40. There are clear resonances here between Adorno’s attempt to ground conceptual structures in deeper structures of pragmatic desire and impulse and Fichte’s own account of the emergence of reason. For a broad account of some of these similarities, see James Clarke and Owen Hulatt, “Critical Theory as a Legacy of Post-Kantianism,” British Journal of the History of Philosophy 22, no. 6 (2014): 1047–1068. 41. ND 11/23. 42. Cf. DE 11.

2. The Interpenetration of Concepts and Society 1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6.

MM 76. ND 231/230. ND 232/231. Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Lewis W. Beck (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1959), 448. English translation of Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten. ND 231/230. ND 232–233/230–231.

2. the interpenetration of concepts and so ciet y 7.

8.

9.

10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

17. 18.

2 13

Adorno takes concepts to have innate reference to extraconceptual, sociohistorical conditions. This reference he terms “metalogical.” Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity, 1998), 153. Assuming that they employ the concept consistently. Adorno is not claiming that anyone who makes use of the concept of freedom will run into Kant’s difficulty—less talented philosophers will obscure the difficulty, or fail to follow through the logic of the concept until they encounter the problem in question. It must not, of course, be forgotten that Adorno understands conceptual problematics as sociohistorically sensitive. As such, the “universality” he seems to appeal to is not atemporal, but indexically linked to a given period. This is intimated in Adorno’s analysis of Kant on freedom. The incoherence that arose in the relation between freedom and causality is attributed to the irruption of bourgeois problematics into those concepts, rather than a dialectically inevitable contradiction internal to those concepts. Adorno does not have a Hegelian position in which philosophy is driven entirely by the ongoing elaboration of the autonomous problematic internal to concepts. DE 27; see also 7, 10, 11. DE 10, emphasis mine. DE 7. DE 26. The problematic nature of this account lies in Adorno’s rather free use of “nonidentity.” While his epistemological account of nonidentity is well grounded and cashed out extensively in both Hegelian and Kantian terms (among others), Adorno intends to transfer rationality’s intolerance of the nonidentical (that which “does not fit” under concepts) to social intolerance of human difference. While intriguing, this link is never expounded by more than allusive terms, and remains, in my view, one of the more intractable features of his work. Cashing out some of the detail of how we can meaningfully term the epistemological employment of concepts as morally harmful is more or less beyond the purview of this book, but I will provide some foundations to what Adorno may have had in mind in chapter 3. Rolf Tiedemann brings this out: “Abstraction is untruth that is nevertheless true. Untrue, it deceives about the very things it depends on; full concretion. True, it is the precise expression of the fact that the concrete humans of commodity society are being swindled.” Rolf Tiedemann, “Concept, Image, Name: On Adorno’s Utopia of Knowledge,” in The Semblance of Subjectivity, ed. Tom Huhn and Lambert Zuidervaart (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), 123–146, at 131. Concepts, while being delusive abstractions caused by social processes, nonetheless have a normative surplus that is capable of reflecting upon their grounds. DE 10. ND 312–313/307.

214

2. the interpenetration of concepts and so ciet y

19. Further evidence of Adorno’s elision of the distinction between transcendental and empirical concepts will be provided in chapters 4 and 5. We will see that the isomorphism between the agent’s mediating conceptual array and the concepts theoretically employed in the philosophical text or authentic artwork entails the breakdown in the conceptual mediation of the subject’s experience. This demonstrates, again, that the subject’s mediating and theoretically available concepts are continuous. 20. Cf. “In an individualistic society, the general not only realizes itself through the interplay of particulars, but society is essentially the substance of the individual.” MM 17. 21. Benzer summarizes this aspect of Adorno’s thought and his occasional failures in effecting it very well. See particularly Matthias Benzer, The Sociology of Theodor Adorno (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 86–125. 22. In Adorno’s later work (Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory, most notably) this commitment reappears in a more theoretical register, with less emphasis on concrete social relations, and more emphasis on mediating relations that obtain between concepts and their social context. Adorno’s later works are almost wholly metatheoretical, and as such this is not surprising. The metatheoretical and sociological lines of thought are continuous, however, as concepts for Adorno are importantly constituted by their sociohistorical context. 23. DE 24, emphasis mine. 24. DE 21–22. 25. DE 23. 26. A particularly serious example is Adorno’s claim that the autonomous, formal properties of authentic artworks mimic and criticize social content. Dahlhaus brings out this problem very clearly, and I turn to his articulation of it in chapter 5. 27. ND 40/50. 28. For a longer look at this problem, and some suggestions on how to solve it in an ethical context, see my paper “Interpretation and Circularity” (forthcoming in Constellations). 29. DE 10. 30. AT 389. 31. ND 6/18. 32. P. F. Strawson, Individuals (London: Routledge, 1990), 59. 33. Ibid., 62. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid., 69. 36. Ibid., 74. 37. Ibid., 76. 38. “One may imagine, finally, that variations in the pitch of the master-sound are correlated with variations in other sounds that are heard, in a way very similar to that in which variations in the position of the tuning-knob of a wireless set are correlated with variations in the sounds that one hears on the wireless.” Ibid.

2. the interpenetration of concepts and so ciet y

2 15

39. Ibid., 75. 40. While Strawson takes himself to have replaced space with “an analogy of space” (ibid., 75), and hence not the category of space itself, this is not particularly compelling. What Strawson presents us with is the category of space repositioned without reference to visuality or extension. He takes such an alteration to be a forfeiture of the concept—equipped with the distinction between arrays and sets, however, one can rather take it to be the same set, merely with radically altered determining relations holding in that set. 41. While Strawson’s example operates without the sense of vision, there is no reason why the presence of the sense of sight should prevent the formation of a sound-world consciousness. The privileging of vision in our epistemological schema is contingent—it is perfectly conceivable that the sense of sight could be entertained but marginalized, and seen as largely a source of pleasure rather than information (analogously to our present employment of our sense of smell or taste). 42. Honneth brings this out nicely: Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts (Cambridge: Polity, 2005), 96. 43. Axel Honneth, Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea, with Judith Butler, Raymond Geuss, Jonathan Lear, and Martin Jay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 57. 44. Honneth draws extensively on the assertion that “All reification is a forgetting” (DE 191) to try to motivate this reading. 45. This clash, of Honneth’s placid assurance that a positive recognitive picture can be extracted from Adorno’s work with the rebarbative apophatic ethics of Adorno’s work itself, is nicely brought out in Bert van den Brink, “Damaged Life: Power and Recognition in Adorno’s Ethics,” in Recognition and Power, ed. Bert van den Brink and David Owen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 79–99. Van den Brink is perhaps more optimistic than I concerning the usefulness of seeking recognitive structures in Adorno’s work at all, but convincingly finds a method of marrying recognition to Adorno’s overall normative negativism by redescribing recognition as a “moment of responsiveness to otherness” (ibid., 80), which makes momentarily clear the disconnection between extant social structures and true human flourishing. 46. Honneth, Struggle for Recognition, 62–63. 47. Ibid., 99–100. 48. Ibid., 101–102. 49. “In the bourgeois economy the social work of each individual is mediated by the principle of the self. . . . But the more heavily the process of self-preservation is based on the bourgeois division of labour, the more it enforces the self-alienation of individuals, who must mold themselves to the technical apparatus body and soul.” DE 23. 50. ND 25/35–36. 51. DE 95.

2 16

2. the interpenetration of concepts and so ciet y

52. ND 42/52. 53. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Merlin Press, 1971), 54. 54. Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology, trans. Martin Sohn-Rethel (London: MacMillan, 1978), 48–49. 55. Ibid., xiii. 56. Adorno, in writing to Benjamin, notes that he has received an “extremely stimulating letter” from Sohn-Rethel who “has arrived at certain conclusions which are remarkably similar to my own current efforts.” Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence, 1928–1940 (Cambridge: Polity, 1999), 162. 57. ND 36/46. 58. ND 32/42. 59. Honneth, Reification, 58–60. 60. Ibid. 61. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 193. 62. “It is the utility of a thing for human life that turns it into a use-value.” Karl Marx, Value: Studies, trans. and ed. Albert Dragstedt (London: New Park, 1976), 7. 63. “The fact that the substance of the exchange-value is something utterly different from and independent of the physical-sensual existence of the commodity or its reality as a use-value is revealed immediately by its exchange relationship. For this is characterized precisely by the abstraction from the use-value. As far as the exchange-value is concerned, one commodity is, after all, quite as good as every other, provided it is present in the correct proportion. Hence, commodities are first of all simply to be considered as values, independent of their exchangerelationship or from the form, in which they appear as exchange-values.” Marx, Value: Studies, 8–9. 64. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (Bloomsbury: Swan Sonnenschein, 1908), 42. 65. “The social relationships of their labours are and appear consequently not as immediately social relationships of persons in their labours, but as objectified relationships of persons, or social relationships of objects. The first and most universal manifestation of the object as a social thing, however, is the metamorphosis of the product of labour into a commodity. The mysticism of the commodity arises, therefore, from the fact that the social determinations of the private labours of the private producers appear to them as social natural determinations of products of labour; from the fact, that is, that the social relationships of production of persons appear as social relationships of objects to one another and to the persons involved. The relationships of the private workers to the totality of social labour objectify themselves over against them and exist, consequently, for them in the forms of objects. To a society of commodity producers whose universally social relationship of production consists in their behaving toward their products as commodities (hence as values) and their relating their

2. the interpenetration of concepts and so ciet y

66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80.

81. 82. 83.

217

private labours to one another in this objective form as equal human labour, it is Christianity that is the most appropriate form of religion, with its cult of the abstract man—especially in its bourgeois development, Protestantism, Deism, etc.” Marx, Value: Studies, 37–38. Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics (New York: Free Press, 1977), 144–145. Theodor Adorno, Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge: Polity, 1998), 11. Ibid., 43. Hence “all reification is a forgetting.” DE 191. Jarvis, Adorno, 191. “The whole which theory expresses is contained in the individual object to be analyzed. What links the two is a matter of substance: the social totality.” ND 47/57. ND 13/25. Marx, Capital, 42–43. Gillian Rose, The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno (London: MacMillan, 1978), 46. Rose, The Melancholy Science, 48. AT 354. Adorno, Beethoven, 43. MM 17. ND 312–313/307. “We can no more save the absolute segregation of body and mind (which is tantamount to a secret supremacy of the mind) than we can save the idealistic hierarchy of data. Historically, in the evolutionary course of rationality and ego principle, the two have come into opposition to each other; yet neither is without the other. The logic of noncontradictoriness may fault this, but that logic is brought to a halt by the state of facts.” ND 196–197/197. O’Connor, Adorno’s Negative Dialectic, 59. Ibid. This will seem immediately fallacious. Intuitively, concrete particulars have determinate constitutions, the structures of which are closer in kind to some universals than others. However, one must bear in mind that primitive consciousness applies universals with a view to the complete subsumption of the object under the concept, the complete identity of the object with its concept. For universals of this kind, a particular can exhibit no aspect that recommends any universal other than the universal united to its whole particularity. The experience that these “absolute” universals make possible exhibits no finegrained properties that could recommend the application of dialectical concepts. The transition to dialectical concepts (and its associated experience being furnished with conceptual distinctions, properties, and the like) is enforced by the consciousness.

2 18

2. the interpenetration of concepts and so ciet y

84. O’Connor, Adorno’s Negative Dialectic, 59–60. 85. ND 47/57. 86. For further clear examples of Adorno’s making use of thin determination, see ND 163/165, 82/89. 87. ND 106/112. 88. ND 47/57. 89. ND 82/89. 90. ND 82/89. 91. Marx, Capital, 147. 92. Ibid.,147, 152. 93. Ibid., 147. 94. Ibid., 152. 95. The correspondence between Adorno and Benjamin shows both Adorno’s (Adorno and Benjamin, Complete Correspondence, 302) and Benjamin’s (Adorno and Benjamin, Complete Correspondence, 293) use of this term in discussion with each other, as well as Benjamin’s approving compliment that Adorno’s work on Wagner has a “pregnant physiognomy” (Adorno and Benjamin, Complete Correspondence, 257). 96. ND 40/50.

3. Negativism and Truth 1.

2.

Adorno quite rightly denies that dialectical philosophy, for example, has a method (ND 144–145/148). This might lead one to suspect that Adorno’s philosophy cannot be articulated in a settled fashion, and therefore any conspectus of the sort I offered is culpably programmatic. As I will go on to show in this chapter, Adorno’s epistemological position entails that its application to any given object cannot be anticipated in advance. But this is consistent with, and internal to, an articulable position on the nature of experience and the determinants of that experience. Adorno takes Husserl to clearly instantiate problems intrinsic to all epistemologies and, accordingly, his critique of Husserl is in an epistemological register and couched in respectful terms. Heidegger, by contrast, is not merely held to have epistemological shortcomings; Adorno’s criticism of Heidegger is drenched in a tone of moral repulsion. One needs only to read three pages into the introduction to Jargon of Authenticity before the following declamation is made: “Fascism was not simply a conspiracy”—although it was that—but it was something that came to life in the course of a powerful social development. Language [the language of authenticity that Heidegger epitomizes] provides it with a refuge. Within this refuge a smoldering evil expresses itself as though it were salvation.” Theodor Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. Knut Tarnowki and Frederic Will (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), 5.

3 . n e g at ivism a nd t ru t h 3.

4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

2 19

Largely found, of course, in Theodor Adorno, Against Epistemology: A Metacritique: Studies in Husserl and the Phenomenological Antinomies, trans. Willis Domingo (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), but also found continuously throughout Adorno’s work, for example, ND 69–70/77–78, 78/85–86, and Theodor Adorno, “Husserl and the Problem of Idealism,” Journal of Philosophy 37, no. 1 (1940): 5–18. Adorno, Against Epistemology, 1. Adorno here, perhaps, sees in Husserl a continuation of that which he found valuable in the work of Hans Cornelius, his doctoral supervisor. Buck-Morss describes the core of Hans Cornelius’s work in this way: “To him the philosophical ‘subject’ was not a uniform, transcendental universal, but a unique living individual.  .  .  . All knowledge was based on prior experience, hence it was never complete; philosophy was no closed system, and there were no ontological absolutes. . . . This amounted to the abrogation of a philosophical first principle (prima philosophia) and it was one of the earliest and most constant tenets of Adorno and Horkheimer as well.” Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics (New York: Free Press, 1977), 8. That there were limits to Cornelius’s “abrogation of a philosophical first principle” Adorno learned swiftly enough when his doctoral dissertation on the transcendental unconscious was quietly encouraged to be abandoned. Husserl’s method can be understood as compelling to Adorno just because it (until Husserl’s later work, at least) provides an avenue for philosophy free of rigorous transcendental method, in a fashion that Cornelius’s neo-Kantianism would not quite permit. Adorno, “Husserl and the Problem of Idealism,” 11. Adorno, Against Epistemology, 4–5. Ibid., 45. Ibid., 5. Ibid., 114. Ibid., 119–120. Ibid., 19–20. Ibid., 46. ND 8–9/20–21. ND 406/398, emphasis mine. ND 5/17. This term also has connotations of the weave and weft of fabrics; Adorno’s employment of this term is presumably intended to connote the overdetermination of phenomena by the conceptual “constellation” that constitutes them. ND 35/45. ND 33/44. ND 64/72. This rejection of both deduction and induction models the earlier rejection by Adorno of both philosophical autonomy (the a priori deduction) and empirical

220

22. 23.

24.

25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30.

3 . n e g at i vi sm a n d t ru t h method (the a posteriori inducted). Once more, Adorno is not rejecting both tout court, but rather moving to a dialectical position that syncopates both forms of justification according to the emergent demands of the analyzed phenomena. ND 33/44. Paddison develops this aspect of Adorno’ s account in an intriguing fashion in relation to Hindemith. Hindemith provided a systematic account of musical composition that picked out “natural” tonality. Max Paddison, Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 67. While this provided an appreciable statement of the mores of traditional composition at that time, musical developments quickly demonstrated that musical tonal relations were in fact temporally determined and in flux (ibid., 93). Intriguingly, Adorno also extends this sociohistorically defeasible nature to analytic truths (ND 40/50). Adorno understands analytic truths not to derive their normative force from their autonomous nature simpliciter, but rather to be “peeled out of their variables.” This amounts to the claim that analytic truths are produced by their sociohistorical context; however, this context fails to change in the relevant fashion, and so analytic truths have (and will remain for the conceivable future) true. (This fixity is presumably bound up with the fixed features of all sociohistorical contexts—that is, the fixed corporeal and cognitive makeup of human beings.) Even the analytic remains temporally defeasible, then, for Adorno. “Dialectics is the consistent sense of nonidentity. . . . What we differentiate will appear divergent, dissonant, negative for just as long as the structure of our consciousness obliges it to strive for unity: as long as its demand for totality will be its measure for whatever is not identical with it. This is what dialectics holds up to our consciousness as a contradiction. . . . Contradiction is nonidentity under the rule of a law that affects the nonidentical as well. This law is not a cogitative law, however. It is real. . . . Its agony is the world’s agony raised to a concept.” ND 5–6/17–18. Contradiction is constituted by the law of the external world, which also compels thought to “strive for unity,” that is, a seamless, wholly conceptual control of the world. ND 5/17. We saw this in Adorno’s account of Beethoven. This sentence’s being true is compatible with the self-preserving nature of concepts. We might explain the agreement of simple claims like this with the way the world is in terms of self-preservation. Assertions concerning color, mass, and so on are sufficiently basic that the interest of self-preservation, as relevant to concept formation, does not introduce any delusive relationship to the object—it instead provides a satisfactory window onto how the object in fact is. ND 406/398. ND 152/155. ND 53/62.

4. texture, performativit y, and tru th 31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48.

22 1

“As a constellation, the essay is not arbitrary. . . . [It] is determined by the unity of its object, together with that of theory and experience which have migrated into the object.” Theodor Adorno, “The Essay as Form,” trans. Bob HullotKentor, in The Adorno Reader, ed. Brian O’Connor (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 165. MM 24. MM 23. For example, ND 86–87/92–93. Theodor Adorno, “The Actuality of Philosophy,” trans. Benjamin Snow, in O’Connor, The Adorno Reader, 31–32. Ibid., 32. ND 63–64/71–72. ND 63/71. ND 63/71. ND 64/72. ND 64/72. ND 63/71. ND 64/72. ND 64/72. ND 64/72, emphasis mine. ND 64/72. “Es folgt aber nicht rein aus diesem: die kritische Reflexion solcher Produktivität des Denkens ist selbst ein Inhalt der Philosophie.” ND 64/72. The “Produktiviät des Denkens”—translated by Ashton as “cogitative productivity,” literally “productivity of thought”—refers to the thought of agents, rather than impersonal bodies of thought, due to the reference of the term “Denkens” to thought in the process of being executed. The far more natural term for impersonal thought would be Gedanke. To reiterate what I pointed out in the introduction, the term “performativity” is not intended to have any linkage or resonance with Austin’s or Butler’s use of the term. Nor is it intended to be assonant with the idea of performativity in Theatre Studies.

4. Texture, Performativity, and Truth 1.

2. 3. 4. 5.

“Aware that the conceptual totality is mere appearance, I have no way but to break immanently, in its own measure, through the appearance of total identity.” ND 5/17. ND 5/17, emphasis mine. ND 157/159–160, emphasis mine. ND 406/398, emphasis mine. ND 154–155/157, emphasis mine.

222 6. 7.

8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22.

23.

4. texture, performativit y, and tru th ND 64/72. An example of this is Adorno’s attempt to view mass culture “not merely as a result of the encompassment of life in its totality” (MM 214) but rather as following directly from the development of artistic technique and expression at its highest levels. Wagner’s very movement into pure expression at the same time, due to a “historical tendency,” furthers the process of subjugating artworks to structures of mass culture. “The more masterfully an artist expresses himself, the less he has to ‘be’ what he expresses, and the more what he expresses, indeed the content of subjectivity itself, becomes a mere function of the production process” (MM 214). The artwork’s dominance over its materials, as necessitated by the submission to the demands of expression, in turn begins the processes of subjugating the particularity of aesthetic materials to processes, which Adorno sees as culminating in the production of mass culture. This problem of aesthetic form—its oppression of its materials—will go on to be important in chapter 5. ND 5/17. Correlatively, of course, one will require further elucidation on what precisely constitutes this performance, and how it relates to Adorno’s dialectical method. This, of course, is an assertion concerning Adorno’s paradigmatic method. While Adorno, especially in his mature work, was capable of carrying this approach off, Adorno’s execution of this method did not always live up to this standard. Cf. ND 4–5/16–17. ND 56/66, emphasis mine. Theodor Adorno, “The Essay as Form,” trans. Bob Hullot-Kentor, in The Adorno Reader, ed. Brian O’Connor (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 101. ND 33/44. ND 35/45. Adorno, “The Essay as Form,” 110. Michael Inwood, A Hegel Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 216. Adorno, “The Essay as Form,” 110. G. W. F. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik II (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986), 551. I here use Angelica Nuzzo’s translation: Angelica Nuzzo, “Thinking Being: Method in Hegel’s Logic of Being,” in A Companion to Hegel, ed. Stephen Houlgate Michael Baur (Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 132. AT 142. ND 33/44, 35/45. It is already clear that they cannot be united merely by the consciousness noting what happens to occur in the text—just as the rhetorical form is itself a philosophical content over and above the content of which it is composed (ND 56/66), so too is the cognitive performance itself termed a philosophical content over and above the philosophical argumentation it is engaging (ND 64/72). The following presumes that the reader and text are existing (in the former case) and were created (in the latter case) in sufficient temporal proximity to ensure

5. aesthetic truth content and oblique second reflection

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35.

223

that any alterations in conceptual array relations that sociohistorical change could go on to cause have not yet come about. ND 63–64/71–72. ND 10/21. ND 64/72. ND 150/153. See particularly DE 71–72. ND 14/25. ND 37/47, translation modified. Theodor Adorno, “The Actuality of Philosophy,” trans. Benjamin Snow, in O’Connor, The Adorno Reader, 32, emphasis mine. Theodor W. Adorno, Lectures on Negative Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Cambridge: Polity, 2008), 73–74. ND 5/17. I am not here dealing with Adorno’s “logical” argument for nonidentity, namely, his claim that predication displays the inevitable nonidentity of any conceptual relation to the world, given the nonidentity between object and predicate. I have given cause, in chapter 3, to distrust this argument. Although there will be important points of differentiation, as the following chapter will make clear, I am not advocating the reduction of aesthetics and art to philosophy.

5. Aesthetic Truth Content and Oblique Second Reflection 1. 2.

AT 111. Adorno complains of Lukács, “What looks like formalism to him, really means the structuring of the elements of a work in accordance with laws appropriate to them, and is relevant to that ‘immanent meaning’ for which Lukács yearns, as opposed to a meaning arbitrarily superimposed from outside, something he objectively defends while asserting its impossibility.” Theodor Adorno, “Reconciliation Under Duress,” in Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso, 2007), 153. Lukács’s refusal to properly follow the formal properties of artworks entails the misconstrual of what political power and meaning the art has in its formal composition. Somewhat intriguingly, Adorno develops his criticism of the formal qualities of Brecht’s work in the opposite direction. He does not castigate Brecht’s attempt to interpolate political content, but rather claims that the falsity and crudity of Brecht’s politics negatively impact on the formal qualities of his work: “His work, with its often patent weaknesses, would not have had such power, if it were not saturated with politics.  .  .  . The task of immanent criticism, which alone is dialectical, is rather to synthesize assessment of the validity of his forms with that of his politics.  .  .  . Where Brecht distorts the

22 4

3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

5. aesthetic truth content and oblique second reflection real social problems discussed in his epic drama in order to prove a thesis, the whole structure and foundation of the play itself crumbles.” Theodor Adorno, “Commitment,” in Aesthetics and Politics, 186. Although he approaches Brecht’s failings in a different fashion, his criticism nonetheless in the end turns about a question of the formal failings of Brecht’s work. Brecht subjects the content of his art to arbitrarily overarching formal structures (the need to visibly “prove” a thesis); and this form is imposed without due care, as the facts that Brecht musters in order to satisfy this goal are in fact resistant to being employed in this fashion. Adorno, “Reconciliation Under Duress.” AT 48. “Among the sources of error in the contemporary interpretation and critique of artworks the most disastrous is the confusion of the intention, what the artist supposedly wants to say, with the content [Gehalt] of the work.” AT 197. AT 71. Adorno, Lectures on Negative Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008), 74. AT 173. AT 29. Hence the claim that “intention reduces it to identity.” Continuous experience, the precondition of the exercise of determinate intentions, presupposes the mediation of concepts in order to make experience continuous. Adorno returns to this thought elsewhere in claiming that “The correlative of intention is reification.” AT 354. ND 12/24. AT 70–71. AT 94. AT 172. AT 29. AT 74. AT 335. AT 169. AT 201. AT 137. Cf. AT 96, 135, 137, 162; AT 237, 251, respectively. AT 29. AT 6. Nicholas Jolley, Leibniz (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005), 68–69. AT 237. AT 110–111. AT 367. AT 110–111. AT 5.

5. aesthetic truth content and oblique second reflection

225

30. Although the artist is called upon to intercede at the points of tension presented in the process of artistic creation wherever the formal demands of their aesthetic materials are multiply satisfiable, or apparently terminating in mutually contradictory demands. 31. Adorno often takes pleasure in locating the value of art in its complete refusal or betrayal of its author’s intentions. For example, on the poetry of Stefan George, it is the very failures of the artwork to realize its object that disclose the truth of that artwork: “George’s self-staged aristocratic posturings contradict the selfevident superiority that they postulate and thereby fail artistically; the verse ‘And—that we lack not a bouquet of myrrh’ is laughable, as is the verse on the Roman emperor who, after having his brother murdered, gently gathers up the purple train of his toga. The brutality of George’s social attitude, the result of failed identification, appears in his poetry in the violent acts of language that mar the purity of the self-sufficient work after which George aspired. In programmatic aestheticism, false social consciousness becomes the shrill tone that gives it the lie.” AT 323. 32. This of course carries the caveat that Adorno is referring to authentic or successful art (these categories being coextensive, for Adorno). It is possible for artworks to incorporate heteronomous content intentionally, directly realize the intentions of the artist, and so on. But such events can only, in Adorno’s view, be to the detriment of the artwork’s status as art at all. There is the justified suspicion that Adorno is simply stipulating art of the kind he enjoys as “authentic,” and his accompanying definitions therefore fall prey to the “no true Scotsman” fallacy. However, as this chapter will show, this is uncharitable. Adorno is forced to posit a very specific kind of aesthetic organization and production as capable of producing artworks that evade the delusive influence of conceptuality, and artworks that fall below the level of formal rigor required will thereby forfeit any chance of producing an experience of the nonidentical. (This does, however, leave open for now the question of why the truth of artworks should be imbricated with their aesthetic quality.) 33. AT 142. 34. “Aesthetic materials” comprise both formal and nonformal items, for example, the use of a given note in musical composition is an aesthetic material. Formal features can also become aesthetic materials, as in the modernist reappropriation of compositional norms for use in parody, recontextualization, and so on. These formal structures (which once served as external compositional norms) now reappear in the artwork themselves as content. 35. AT 48. 36. Most often translated by Hullot-Kentor as “enigma”: “All artworks—and art altogether—are enigmas; since antiquity this has been an irritation to the theory of art.” AT 160. 37. As ever, there is disconnection between the analogy and analogue. Riddles and Vexierbilde have a stronger relationship to an originating intention than

226

38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44.

5. aesthetic truth content and oblique second reflection artworks do. It is not plausible to think that Dali, in painting The Great Paranoiac, saw the picture puzzle simply emerge from the formal problematic of his materials. Rather, the originating idea was put to work to bend the aesthetic materials to making it possible. On the other hand, the fact remains that both riddles and picture puzzles are incapable of realizing themselves if their aesthetic materials do not have the requisite formal properties. While a painting that depicts a house, or a dolorous feeling, can be realized in many ways, a duckrabbit is only constructable if there is some way in which the depiction of rabbits and ducks formally allows for the requisite ambiguity. If, counterfactually, ducks and rabbits had figures that were not amenable to the construction of a picture puzzle, no picture puzzle could be produced. This tight relationship between the existence of a riddle or picture puzzle and the intrinsic formal qualities of its materials does neatly illustrate Adorno’s theory of artistic creation. Of course, this process of attempting to form a unified aesthetic whole is not necessarily completable. In fact, Adorno holds that the seamless aesthetic whole has been rendered impossible by sociohistorical developments. Therefore, any “authentic” attempt at aesthetic unity will necessarily fail, and display its failure in its incapability to form a seamless whole: “As little as art is to be defined by any other element, it is simply identical with form. Every other element can be negated in the concept of form, even aesthetic unity, the idea of form that first made the wholeness and autonomy of the artwork possible. In highly developed modern works, form tends to dissociate unity, either in the interest of expression or to criticize art’s affirmative character.” AT 186. AT 389. Jolley, Leibniz, 66–67. DE 29. AT 369. MM 28. It is a very similar line of thought that leads Adorno to denounce the capacity of artworks to give pleasure and relief. This further form of “guilt,” which I will not go into in detail, concerns the artwork’s “feign[ing] the factual existence of reconciliation.” AT 177. The experience of the nonidentical afforded by philosophy was a “utopian” moment of cognition for Adorno. Similarly, the authentic artwork affords a vision of a utopian state of things, but is thereby culpable. Art— constitutively semblance, unlike philosophy—resembles utopian organization of life, and thereby redounds to the good reputation of the false world that made this artwork’s utopian vision possible: “That is the melancholy of art. It achieves unreal reconciliation at the price of real reconciliation.” AT 68. (Philosophy, by contrast, reveals utopian potential in cognition; and this comprehension of the revisability of all normative and conceptual structures is critical, insofar as society is revealed as revisable, and hence disposable in the name of a more rational social organization.) AT 190.

5. aesthetic truth content and oblique second reflection

227

45. AT 370. 46. AT 74. 47. “The opposition of artworks to domination is mimesis of domination. They must assimilate themselves to the comportment of domination in order to produce something qualitatively distinct from the world of domination.” AT 370. 48. “The work is no longer to be the result of any pregiven form; flourishes, ornament, and all residual elements of an overarching formal character are to be renounced: The artwork is to be organized from below.” AT 142. 49. AT 65. 50. Gregg M. Horowitz, “Art History and Autonomy,” in The Semblance of Subjectivity, ed. Tom Huhn and Lambert Zuidervaart, 259–287 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), 274, emphasis mine. 51. AT 370. 52. AT 276. 53. AT 157. 54. AT 65. 55. AT 120–121. 56. AT 120. 57. “No universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leading from the slingshot to the megaton bomb. It ends in the total menace which organized mankind poses to organized men, in the epitome of discontinuity. It is the horror that verifies Hegel and stands him on his head.” ND 320/314. 58. AT 120–121. 59. AT 72. 60. AT 170. 61. AT 189. 62. AT 335. 63. I do not have time to enter into this, but I should like to note that this explains Adorno’s assertion that form and content are not separable or unified, but rather dialectically interrelated (AT 194). The formal properties of aesthetic materials, and hence the resultant artwork, are nothing but the content of the aesthetic materials, appearing as form in the aesthetic nexus. 64. AT 189. 65. I have presupposed throughout that Adorno understands artworks to provide specific criticism. There is another reading, which contends that Adorno conceives of the artwork as socially critical merely by virtue of visibly rejecting, or standing apart from, its social context. For example, Horowitz claims, “Autonomous art criticizes society just by being there because the ‘there’ where it is is no ‘proper’ place.” Horowitz, “Art History and Autonomy,” 264. The lack of propriety that art’s existence manifests is its failure to provide anything of use (for supporting evidence for this reading, see AT 321). The existence of an artifact or field of human endeavor that visibly fails to have instrumental worth amounts,

22 8

66. 67. 68.

69. 70. 71. 72.

5. aesthetic truth content and oblique second reflection it is claimed, to a criticism of a society organized according to the demands of instrumental reason. Skees also takes up this theme, terming the autonomy of the artwork an “image of freedom.” Murray W. Skees, “Kant, Adorno, and the Work of Art,” Philosophy and Social Criticism (October 2011): 17. This “image” is achieved through the artwork’s providing an “example of freedom from external determination.” Skees, “Kant, Adorno, and the Work of Art,” 17. The line of thought exemplified by Skees and Horowitz is deeply problematic. As the artwork’s status as critique amounts to its failure to successfully provide anything germane to instrumental reason and social organization, two questions arise. The first of these is a worry over what serves to differentiate art from trash; all manner of phenomena fail to be useful—like cigarette butts, for example—but it would seem odd to thereby term them “critical.” Critique has an object and has a content or argument. Failure to provide use seems too thin to fulfill this minimal condition. The second, related problem is that this theory of art’s critical status does not seem to encompass the specificity of art’s status as critical. Which is to say, Adorno’s analyses disclose a belief that the artwork is critical in a way specific to it (cf. AT 122). The theory of criticism through disutility seems too generic, as it can be satisfied by any number of objects or cultural practices. AT 112. AT 117. Carl Dahlhaus, “The Musical Work of Art as a Subject of Sociology,” in Schoenberg and the New Music, trans. Derrick Puffett and Alfred Clayton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 243. Cited in Max Paddison, “Immanent Critique or Musical Stocktaking? Adorno and the Problem of Musical Analysis,” in Adorno: A Critical Reader, ed. Nigel Gibson and Andrew Rubin (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 209–233, at 210. Dahlhaus, “The Musical Work of Art as a Subject of Sociology,” 244. Cited in Paddison, “Immanent Critique,” 223. Paddison, “Immanent Critique,” 222–223, emphasis mine. Paddison, Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 147, emphasis mine. To be exact, it is the conflict between mimesis and rationality that Paddison introduces. However, as demonstrated by their respective association with expression and construction, it is mimesis that serves to open the artwork to the extra-aesthetic, whereas rationality (as expressed in construction and aesthetic technology) serves to motor the ongoing, autonomous development of aesthetic processes. There is a deeper sense in which the two poles mediate each other (that the processes of rationality are crystallized productions of mimesis, and that mimesis is only possible by means of these rational crystallizations). Cf. Paddison, Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music, 146. However, for the purposes of this analysis, I will treat mimesis and rationality as separable, with the implicit caveat that, despite being distinct, they are ultimately moments in a dialectical whole.

5. aesthetic truth content and oblique second reflection

229

73. “The cave drawings are stages of a process and in no way an early one. The first images must have been preceded by a mimetic comportment—the assimilation of the self to its other.” AT 416. For a more detailed investigation of Adorno’s account of mimesis, and how it relates to both Adorno’s genealogy of reason in Dialectic of Enlightenment and his account of art in Aesthetic Theory, see Hulatt, “Reason, Mimesis, and Self-Preservation in Adorno,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 54, no. 1 (January 2016). 74. There is also a more developed defense of this position on aesthetic mimesis, which I cannot give here for reasons of space. In short, it would appear that interpreting mimesis as being the artwork’s intentional, as it were, attempt to make itself like the world would result in a violation of the artwork’s autonomy, as well as the impossibility of aesthetic construction. The artwork would become a mélange of mimetically imported social content and autonomous aesthetic content—this would be in clear violation of Adorno’s claim that nothing can appear in the artwork without first being reduced to the artwork’s own categories: “Object in art and object in empirical reality are entirely distinct. In art the object is the work produced by art, as much containing elements of empirical reality as displacing, dissolving, and reconstructing them according to the work’s own law. Only through such transformation . . . does art give empirical reality its due.” AT 335. This self-same reduction to the artwork’s own autonomous categories prevents the appearance in the artwork of any mimetically imported content. One cannot read mimesis in this way, then, as it does not cohere with Adorno’s theory of the artwork. 75. Paddison, Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music, 147. 76. “It is the sociohistorical content of the work mediated through its form which Adorno identifies, as far as one can understand him here, as the truth content of the work, and which is thus the telos of his hermeneutics.” Paddison, “Immanent Critique,” 223. 77. AT 70. 78. Paddison, “Immanent Critique,” 224. 79. AT 363, emphasis mine. 80. ND 5/17. 81. AT 126. 82. AT 134. 83. AT 126. 84. AT 134. 85. AT 394, emphases mine. 86. AT 175. 87. In the Kabbalah the name of God is understood to not be expressible positively, but only to show up negatively in the failure of predicates to describe God. The analogy Adorno has in mind (and this is taken over from Benjamin directly) is that the object refuses all conceptual description and can be only approached

230

88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98.

99. 100.

5. aesthetic truth content and oblique second reflection negatively. See Buck-Morss, Origin of “Negative Dialectics” (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), 4–5. AT 268. Presuming the artwork and philosophical text are contemporaneous. AT 175, emphases mine. AT 160. AT 160. AT 116. AT 91. ND 63–64/71–72. AT 91. AT 161. This equivalence, between the determining structures of experience and a given medium, was demonstrated at length in the case of philosophy (see chapters 3 and 4). As both philosophy and art are subject to the same determining influences, there is no need to fashion a new argument for the case of art; the argument concerning philosophy can be taken as applying in this case also. AT 180. AT 180.

6. Beethoven, Proust, and Applying Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

AT 232. AT 232. AT 237–238. Adorno, Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), 11. Ibid., 13–14. Ibid., 44. Ibid., 43. Ibid., 14. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 19–20. Ibid., 43–44. Theodor Adorno, In Search of Wagner, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Verso, 2005), 21. Adorno, Beethoven, 44. Ibid.

6. beethoven, proust, and applying adorno’s aesthetic theory 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27.

28. 29. 30.

31.

231

Ibid. Ibid., 44–45. Most significantly, AT 83, 135, 175, 196; ND 55/64, 373/366, 374/367, 378/371. Adorno also very briefly touches on Proust in Meine stärkste Eindrücke 1953. Theodor Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 20, bk. 2, Vermischte Schriften, vol. 2, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, with the cooperaation of Gretel Adorno, Susan BuckMorss and Klaus Schultz (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997), 734. This finds Adorno reconfirming Proust’s “central role” in his intellectual life, but however largely replicating the observations on Proust found in the two main essays. Theodor Adorno, Notes to Literature, vol. 1, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 174–175. Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way, book 1, Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff (London: Penguin, 2000), 176. Ibid., 382–383. Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, vol. 3, In Search of Lost Time, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, rev. D. J. Enright (London: Vintage, 2000), 226–231. Adorno, Notes to Literature, 1:178–179. This illustration can be seen in Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), 100, titled “Fashionable People Represented in Public by Their Accroutements.” Ibid., 149–154. Adorno, Notes to Literature, 1:176. The scene opens with Swann climbing what is, from the point of view of the description, an inhumanly colossal staircase, at the portals of which on each floor the day-to-day inhabitants stand at attention: “On the despicable, enormous staircase which Swann was at the moment climbing, on either side of him, at different levels, before each anfractuosity made in its walls by the window of the porter’s lodge or the entrance to a set of rooms, representing the departments of indoor service which they controlled, and doing homage for them to the guests, a gate-keeper, a major-domo, a steward (worthy men who spent the rest of the week in semi-independence in their own domains, dined there by themselves like small shop-keepers, and might to-morrow lapse to the plebian service of some successful doctor or industrial magnate), scrupulous in carrying out to the letter all the instructions that had been heaped upon them, [stood].” Proust, Swann’s Way, 380–381. It is here that the great concentration of social power and capital that underwrites the lives of Proust’s characters is made unmistakably manifest; it is this power that invests the building with its colossal dimensions and contributes to the headiness and oddity of the experience that Swann undergoes. Adorno alludes to one such passage, in which the Princesse des Laumes (later the Duchesse de Guermantes) is seen at communion: Adorno, Notes to Literature, 1:178. The narrator is disappointed to see a Guermantes—a family he

232

32. 33. 34. 35.

6. beethoven, proust, and applying adorno’s aesthetic theory associates with the mythical figure of medieval legend, Genevieve de Brabante—in the flesh, bearing imperfections and flaws (her “red face” and “prominent nose,” and more fundamentally her appearing as a normal person). In his meditating on the nobility of her name, however, these imperfections eventually become virtues: “Whenever I brought my mind to bear on that face—and especially, perhaps, in my determination, that form of the instinct for self-preservation with which we guard everything best in ourselves, not to admit I had been in any way deceived—I found only beauty there . . . apart from and above that common run of humanity with which the sight, pure and simple, of her in the flesh had made me for a moment confound her.” Proust, Swann’s Way, 208. Proust, Swann’s Way, 403–407. Proust’s correspondence informs us that this “little phrase” has its roots in SaintSaen’s Violin Sonata no. 1 in D Minor, op. 75. Proust, Swann’s Way, 405. AT 44.

BIBLIO GRAPHY

Adorno, Theodor. “The Actuality of Philosophy.” Translated by Benjamin Snow. In O’Connor The Adorno Reader, 24–39. ——. Aesthetic Theory. Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. London: Continuum, 2004. ——. Against Epistemology: A Metacritique: Studies in Husserl and the Phenomenological Antinomies. Translated by Willis Domingo. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985. ——. Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Cambridge: Polity, 1998. ——. “Commitment.” In Adorno, Benjamin, et al., Aesthetics and Politics, 177–195. London: Verso, 2007. ——. The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture. Edited and introduced by J. M. Bernstein. London: Routledge, 1991. ——. Dialektik der Aufklärung: Gesammelte Schriften 3. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann with Gretel Adorno, Susan Buck-Morss, and Klaus Schultz. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997. ——. “The Essay as Form.” Translated by Bob Hullot-Kentor and Frederic Will. In O’Connor, The Adorno Reader, 92–111. ——. Essays on Music. Selected, with introduction, commentary, and notes by Richard Leppert. Translated by Susan H. Gillespie. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. ——. Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. 2, bk. 2, Vermischte Schriften, vol. 2. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann, with the cooperation of Gretel Adorno, Susan Buck-Morss, and Klaus Schultz. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997. ——. History and Freedom. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann. Cambridge: Polity, 2006.

234

bibl io g ra ph y

——. “Husserl and The Problem of Idealism.” Journal of Philosophy 37, no. 1 (1940): 5–18. ——. In Search of Wagner. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. London: Verso, 2005. ——. Introduction to Sociology. Edited by Christoph Gödde. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2000. ——. The Jargon of Authenticity. Translated by Knut Tarnowki and Frederic Will. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973. ——. Lectures on Negative Dialectics. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann. Cambridge: Polity, 2008. ——. Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life. Translated by E. F. N. Jephcott. London: Verso, 2005. ——. Negative Dialectics. Translated by E. B. Ashton. Abingdon: Routledge, 2006. ——. Negative Dialektik; Jargon der Eigentlichkeit. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997. ——. Notes to Literature. Volume 1. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann. Translated by Shierry Weber Nicholson. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. ——. Philosophy of Modern Music. Translated by Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster. London: Continuum, 2007. ——. “Reconciliation Under Duress.” In Adorno, Benjamin, et al., Aesthetics and Politics, 151–176. London: Verso, 2007. ——. The Stars Down to Earth: Essays on the Irrational in Culture. Edited and introduction by Stephen Crook. London: Routledge, 2002. Adorno, Theodor, and Walter Benjamin. The Complete Correspondence, 1928–1940. Cambridge: Polity, 1999. Adorno, Theodor, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, and Georg Lukács. Aesthetics and Politics. Afterword by Fredric Jameson. London: Verso, 2007. Adorno, Theodor, and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. Benzer, Matthias. The Sociology of Theodor Adorno. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Bottomore, Tom, Laurence Harris, V. G. Kiernan, and Ralph Miliband. A Dictionary of Marxist Thought. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. Bowie, Andrew. Schelling and Modern European Philosophy: An Introduction. London: Routledge, 1993. van den Brink, Bert. “Damaged Life: Power and Recognition in Adorno’s Ethics.” In van den Brink and Owen, Recognition and Power, 79–99. van den Brink, Bert, and David Owen, eds. Recognition and Power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Buck-Morss, Susan. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990. ——. The Origin of Negative Dialectics. New York: Free Press, 1977.

b ib l io g ra phy

235

Clarke, James, and Owen Hulatt. “Critical Theory as a Legacy of Post-Kantianism.” British Journal of the History of Philosophy 22, no. 6 (2014): 1047–1068. Cook, Deborah. Adorno on Nature. Durham: Acumen, 2011. ——. Theodor Adorno: Key Concepts. Stocksfield: Acumen, 2008. Dahlhaus, Carl. “The Musical Work of Art as a Subject of Sociology.” In Schoenberg and the New Music, 234–248. Translated by Derrick Puffett and Alfred Clayton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Dews, Peter. Logics of Disintegration: Post-Structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory. London: Verso, 1998. Düttman, Alexander García. Philosophy of Exaggeration. Translated by James Phillips. London: Continuum, 2007. Finlayson, James Gordon. “Morality and Critical Theory: On the Normative Problem of Frankfurt School Social Criticism.” Telos 146 (2009): 7–42. Frazer, James George. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. London: MacMillan, 1963. Gibson, Nigel, and Andrew Rubin, eds. Adorno: A Critical Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. Hegel, G. W. F. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. V. Miller with analysis of the text and foreword by J. N. Findlay. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. ——. Wissenschaft der Logik II. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1986. Honneth, Axel. Reification: A New Look at An Old Idea. With Judith Butler, Raymond Geuss, Jonathan Lear, and Martin Jay. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. ——. The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts. Cambridge: Polity, 2005. Horowitz, Gregg M. “Art History and Autonomy.” In Huhn and Zuidervaart, The Semblance of Subjectivity, 259–287. Houlgate, Stephen, and Michael Baur, eds. A Companion to Hegel. Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. Huhn, Tom, and Lambert Zuidervaart, eds. The Semblance of Subjectivity. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997. Hulatt, Owen. “Reason, Mimesis, and Self-Preservation in Adorno.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 54, no. 1 (January 2016). Husserl, Edmund. Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology. Translated by Dorion Cairns. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969. ——. Experience and Judgement: Investigations in a Genealogy of Logic. Revised and edited by Ludwig Landgrebe. Translated by James S. Churchill and Karl Ameriks. Introduction by James S. Churchill. Afterword by Lothar Eley. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973. Inwood, Michael. A Hegel Dictionary. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. Jarvis, Simon. Adorno: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Polity, 1998. Jay, Martin. Adorno. London: Fontana, 1984. ——. Marxism and Totality: Adventures of a Concept. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.

236

biblio graphy

Jolley, Nicholas. Leibniz. Abingdon: Routledge, 2005. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996. ——. Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals. Translated by Lewis W. Beck. New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1959. Translation of Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten. Kohlmann, Ulrich. “Selbstreflexion der Ethik.” Zeitschrift für kritische Theorie 2 (1996): 87–110. Leppert, Richard. “Introduction.” In Adorno, Essays on New Music, 1–82. Lukács, Georg. History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. London: Merlin Press, 1971. Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production. Translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling. Bloomsbury: Swan Sonnenschein, 1908. ——. Value: Studies. Translated and edited by Albert Dragstedt. London: New Park, 1976. Miller, Jared. “Phenomenology’s Negative Dialectic: Adorno’s Critique of Husserl’s Epistemological Foundationalism.” Philosophical Forum 40, no. 1 (2009): 99– 125. Müller-Doohm, Stefan. Adorno: A Biography. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. Malden, Mass.: Polity, 2005. Nuzzo, Angelica. “Thinking Being: Method in Hegel’s Logic of Being.” In Houlgate and Baur, A Companion to Hegel, 111–139. O’Connor, Brian, ed. The Adorno Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. ——. Adorno’s Negative Dialectic: Philosophy and the Possibility of Critical Rationality. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004. ——. “Philosophy of History.” In Cook, Theodor Adorno: Key Concepts, 179–197. Paddison, Max. Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. ——. “Immanent Critique or Musical Stocktaking? Adorno and the Problem of Musical Analysis.” In Gibson and Rubin, Adorno: A Critical Reader, 209–233. ——. “Review: Adorno’s “Aesthetic Theory.” Music Analysis 6, no. 3 (October 1987): 355–377. Proust, Marcel. The Guermantes Way. Vol. 3, In Search of Lost Time. Translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin. Revised by D. J. Enright. London: Vintage, 2000. ——. Swann’s Way. Vol. 1, Remembrance of Things Past. Translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff. London: Penguin, 2000. Rose, Gillian. The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno. London: MacMillan, 1978. Sherman, David. Sartre and Adorno: The Dialectics of Subjectivity. New York: State University of New York Press, 2007. Skees, Murray W. “Kant, Adorno, and the Work of Art.” Philosophy and Social Criticism (October 2011): 915–933.

b ib l io g ra phy

237

Sohn-Rethel, Alfred. Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology. Translated by Martin Sohn-Rethel. London: MacMillan, 1978. Stewart, Jon. The Phenomenology of Spirit Reader: Critical and Interpretive Essays. New York: State University of New York Press, 1998. Strawson, P. F. Individuals. London: Routledge, 1990. Tiedemann, Rolf. “Concept, Image, Name: On Adorno’s Utopia of Knowledge.” In Huhn and Zuidervaart, The Semblance of Subjectivity, 123–146. Westphal, Kenneth R. “Hegel’s Solution to the Dilemma of the Criterion.” History of Philosophy Quarterly 5 (1988): 173–188. Reprinted in Stewart, The Phenomenology of Spirit Reader, 76–101. Wolff, Ernst. “From Phenomenology to Critical Theory: The Genesis of Adorno’s Critical Theory from His Reading of Husserl.” Philosophy and Social Criticism 32, no. 5 (2006): 555–572.

index

Adorno, Theodor: “The Actuality of Philosophy,” 109, 221n35, 221n36, 223n31; Aesthetic Theory, 35, 64, 75, 96, 114, 134, 135, 152, 173, 189, 199, 211n34, 214n22, 224n5, 224n10, 225n31, 225n36, 226n37, 226n43, 227n47, 227n48, 227n63, 227n65, 228n65, 229n73, 229n74; Against Epistemology, 80–81, 84, 211n35, 212n39, 219n3; Dialectic of Enlightenment, x, xii, 4–7, 10, 21, 22, 31, 33–36, 40, 42, 45, 65, 68, 74, 122, 141, 149, 158, 215n49, 217n69, 229n73; “Husserl and the Problem of Idealism,” 80, 219n3; Lectures on Negative Dialectics, 128; Minima Moralia, 2, 29, 35, 36, 96, 102, 103, 114, 214n20, 222n7; Negative Dialectics, 6, 24, 29, 35, 54, 68, 86, 90, 91, 95, 96, 99, 100, 106, 109, 128, 139, 199, 211n34, 214n22, 217n71, 217n80, 218n1, 219n3, 220n23, 220n24, 221n47, 221n1, 222n22, 227n57; and sociology, 39–40 aesthetic analysis, xx, 183, 185, 189–190

aesthetic experience, 29, 71, 76, 104, 149, 183, 197, 198 aesthetic form, 135–138, 145–146, 151–153, 155, 157, 161–165, 168, 170, 174, 176–180, 187, 190–196, 198, 204, 206–207, 214n26, 222n7, 223–224n2, 225n32, 225n34, 227n47, 227n63, 229n76; formal demands, 136, 137, 146, 151, 153, 155, 164, 178, 179, 193, 225n30; formal unity, 158, 177, 194, 226n37; sonata form, 151, 161, 192–195 aesthetic material, xix, 137, 144–145, 154, 157, 166, 186, 188, 195–196, 226n37; autonomy of, 160–165; as dominated by the artwork, 154–156, 158, 159, 178, 222n7; as formal, 151–153, 164–165, 176, 178, 193; as reflecting socio-historical content, 165–172, 177, 177–178 aesthetico-logical properties, xv, 164–166, 168, 170, 176–179, 189 Althusser, Louis, 198 antinomy, 1, 30, 47, 87, 90, 92, 94, 118, 127, 132

2 40

index

apperception, 4–5 aporia, 1, 140–141, 177–178 art: and authentic art, x, xii, 1, 54, 71, 75, 78, 132, 136, 138, 155, 163, 178, 198, 206, 214n19, 214n26, 226n43; enigmaticalness of, 148, 181; and philosophy as sharing a unified truth content, xvi, xx, 142–143, 149, 188; and the “shudder,” 76, 104, 134, 148–149, 158, 188; spiritualization of, 161–162 art-appreciator, the, xiii, xx, 140, 143, 178–180, 188 artistic creation: as following formal demands, 151–153; and “immanent lawfulness,” 164; as organized from below, 118, 151, 190, 227n48 artworks: as “blind,” xv, 56, 146, 147, 153, 159, 163, 165, 168, 178; as culpably “reconciled” to society, 195–196; as dominating their materials, xii–xiii, 147, 155–159, 163, 165, 172, 178, 222n7, 227n47; as expressions of social order, xii, xx, 62, 136–138, 147–148, 160, 165–169, 191–192, 222n7; as hermetically sealed, xix, 71, 145–147, 149, 152–154, 156, 159–160, 163, 166, 168–169, 172, 177; as mimetic, xii–xiii, 140–141, 145–146, 157, 168–169, 171, 173, 214n26, 227n47, 228n72, 229n73, 229n74; as rational, x, xii–xiii, xv, 71, 76, 136–138, 141–142, 144, 146, 157, 162, 164, 168–169, 186, 228n72; and self-mimesis, 146–147; and social content, 27, 136–138, 165, 207, 214n26, 229n74; as a “windowless monad,” 136, 144–147, 160 Austin, J. L., xvi, 221n48 autonomy, 24, 30, 31, 37, 51, 55, 59, 60, 78, 90, 191, 201, 219n21; of aesthetic processes of formation, 150–160, 178; of art, 145–150, 153–154,

156–163, 165–170, 172, 176, 179, 187, 226n37, 227n50, 227–228n65, 229n74; of function, 160, 163– 165, 168–170; the guilt of art’s autonomy, 152–154, 158, 162, 226n43; of selection, 160–162 Beckett, Samuel, 199 van Beethoven, Ludwig, 136, 161, 190– 197; use of motives, 192, 194–195; use of reprise, 196–197 Benjamin, Walter, 60–61, 65, 74, 175, 203, 216n56, 218n95, 229n87, Berg, Alban, 136, Bergson, Henri, 84, 95 Brecht, Bertolt, 136, 223–224n2, Brooks, Cleanth, xiv Buck-Morss, Susan, 60, 203, 219n5 Butler, Judith, xvi, 221n48 capitalism, 41, 153, class consciousness, 55–56, 60, 66 collective unconsciousness, Benjamin’s theory of, 60–61 commodity exchange, 58–59, 216n63, 216n65 commodity fetishism, 59 commodity form, 58–59 concepts: basic concepts, 23, 28, 36, 44–50, 53, 55, 69; conceptual arrays, 33, 44, 47–50, 52–55, 57, 65–66, 69–71, 73, 85, 92, 119, 122–126, 129–132, 139, 173, 179–180, 187, 214n19, 215n40, 223n23; conceptual breakouts, 98, 105–109, 113, 118, 119, 122, 123, 128, 130, 149, 174; conceptual schemes, 48; conceptual sets, 33, 36, 44, 46–50, 53, 55, 69; as delusive, 19, 73–75, 84, 86, 87, 92, 94, 106–107, 112, 118, 125, 127–129, 139, 142, 143, 213n16, 225n32; and embodiment, 46, 48, 55; empirical concepts, 10, 38,

index 122, 214n19; as “idea-tools,” 8, 27, 65; and impulses/drives, xi, 9, 25, 28, 32, 37, 38, 44, 53, 64, 70, 74, 78, 212n40; as loosely arbitrary, 9, 210n21; the “movement of the concept,” 87, 104, 106, 113, 118; non-basic concepts, 46–48, 52, 54–57, 65–66, 69–70; as selfpreserving, x–xi, 6, 8–10, 19–20, 24–25, 27, 28, 31–33, 36, 37, 39–46, 50, 53–54, 63–66, 68–69, 73–75, 77–78, 88–91, 94, 131–132, 140, 158, 211n34, 220n27; separation of concept and thing, 11–15, 17, 20–23; transcendental concepts, 10, 38; as universally valid, 29, 30, 32, 44–48, 55, 70–71 conceptual self-reflexivity, 143, 206, 207 constellations, 94–98, 111, 113, 124, 127, 219n17, 221n31; in art, 173–177; as generated immanently through concept use, 114, 117 construction, xv, xix, xx, 135, 143–144, 151, 168, 204, 228n72, 229n74; as formal, 137, 165, 179, 226n37; as problematized by mediation, 143, 163; as resulting in critique, 148 contradiction, xv, 5, 11, 13, 14, 33, 42, 55, 72, 81, 86–88, 92, 94, 100, 105, 116, 118, 120, 124, 164, 188, 212n39, 220n24; aesthetic contradictions, 168, 170, 171, 177–179, 183, 195, 225n30; apparent contradiction, 26, 35, 86, 144; latent contradictions, 171, 179; law of non-contradiction, 42; social contradictions, 43, 88, 90, 97, 166 Cook, Deborah, 3 consciousness, xi, 16, 17, 34, 36, 45, 46, 48, 56, 59, 72, 103, 124, 149, 162, 215, 220n24, 225n31; and the artwork, xvi, 140, 148; and concepts, 66, 124,

241

158; as determined, 62, 67–68, 84, 89, 91; forms of in Phenomenology of Spirit, 115, 117, 162; maturation of, 50–52; and the object, 28, 78, 80, 85; and the performance, xvi, xix, xx, 76, 87, 106, 109–110, 111, 113, 119, 120, 123, 129, 181–183, 222n22; and the philosophical text, xvi, 76, 87, 106, 109, 111, 113, 119, 120; primitive consciousness, 7–9, 18–19, 22–24, 35, 36, 40–41, 44–50, 64, 68, 217n83, 220n24; self-consciousness, 86, 108, 196; and self-preservation, 38–39, 41, 44, 46, 67–68. 158 Cornelius, Hans, 211n35, 219n5 Cremonini, Leonardo, 198 critique,75, 113, 128, 129, 133, 189, 218, 224n5; of concepts, ix, xiii, 54, 95, 96, 106, 107, 109, 112, 129, 130, 143, 177–182, 186, 188; dialectical critique, 81, 124, 130; of identity thinking, 129, 130, 194; of mediation of experience, 143; through art, 136–138, 140–142, 144, 146, 148, 150, 152–154, 160, 163, 165–166, 169, 171–175, 177–182, 187– 188, 191, 192, 228n65; transcendent critique, 81 “cry of terror,” 6, 11, 15, 20, 22–23, 33, 36, 39, 46, 123 Dahlhaus, Carl, 167, 214n26 deduction, 79, 87, 100–101, 111, 113, 116, 122, 219n21 determination: delusive, 72–76, 78, 84–85; revelatory, 72, 75, 78, 97–98; rich, 57–59, 61–62, 64, 69; thin determination, 57, 61–62, 64–66, 68–73, 75, 78, 85, 88–89, 94, 104, 119, 140, 169–172, 177–178, 180, 195, 218n86; dialectics, xiv, 69, 75, 86, 95, 107–110, 115, 125, 139, 220n24

242

index

dialectical concepts, 15, 23, 35, 41, 45–46, 77, 79, 85, 212n39, 217n83 discontinuous experience, 84, 204, 212n39; as causing the “cry of terror,” 20, 123; as occasioning concepts, 22–23, 35–37. 45–46, 64, 123; as pragmatically unsustainable, 24, 41; produced by art, 104 drives, 9, 25, 28, 32, 36–38, 44, 53, 64, 74 enlightenment, the, 41, 43, 158–159, 162 epistemology, ix–x, xii–xiii, xvii, 1, 80–81, 84, 86, 104, 123, 149, 160, 211n35, 211–212n39 epistemic negativism, 2, 86–88, 90, 94–100, 105, 215n45, experience, xi–xii, xv, xvii, 21–23, 26, 27, 33–34, 42, 44, 48, 51, 53, 55, 58, 59, 63, 66–68, 72, 74, 76, 77, 79–84, 91, 109–110, 128, 131, 169, 170, 171, 175, 200, 204, 206, 210n10, 211–212n39, 217n83, 218n1, 219n5, 221n31, 230n98; experience and concepts, 2–6, 8–10, 14–15, 17–21, 24, 25, 28, 32, 34 -39, 41, 44, 49–50, 53, 64, 66, 68, 85, 91–93, 104, 110, 122–123, 133, 138–140, 143, 173, 176, 179, 180, 186–188, 199, 214n19, 224n10; experience of art, x, xx, 29, 71, 76, 78, 84, 104, 139–140, 146, 148–149, 161, 170, 175, 179, 180, 183, 185, 187, 197–198, 203, 206; experience of the limits of rationality, xvi, 7, 110, 122–124, 129, 149, 173, 179; experience of the non-identical, xiv, xix, 2, 7, 75, 76, 86, 87, 99, 103– 104, 106, 108, 124, 126, 129, 139, 149, 188, 225n32, 226n43; experience of truth, xvi, xvii, 99–101, 104, 106, 108, 109, 171, 185, 197; experiential justification, xiv; “full, unreduced, experience,” 62, 75; nonconceptual experience, 5–6, 20, 149

Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 212n40 freedom, 33, 37, 129, 153; and art, 157, 161, 196, 228n65; Kant’s conception of, 29–31, 213n8, 213n10; legal freedom, 73 formal problematics, 137, 151, 170, 198, 226n37; and socio-conceptual problematics, 155, 170–171, 178, 180, 195 Frazer, James George, 7, 210n16 Freud, Sigmund, 37, 50; solipsistic developmental psychology of, 51 Geist, 162 genetic fallacy, 25, 34, 36–37 geometric points, 91 Grandville, J. J., 203 Hegel, G. W. F., 16–17, 51, 67, 85, 110, 115, 117–118, 162, 190–191, 196, 203, 227n57; Phenomenology of Spirit, 16, 115, 117 hegelian, xx, 61, 79, 190, 191, 212n39, 213n10, 213n15 Heidegger, Martin, 80, 95, 218n2 heteronomy, 145, 147–150, 152–160, 166, 168–170, 172 history, 26, 29, 70, 148, 149, 158, 166, 180, 227n57; and art, 62, 166, 180, 191; of reason, 6, 33–35, 47, 62 Hobson, R. Peter, 51 holistic theory of falsity, 92–94, 106, 112, 124–125, 128, 132, 140 Holocaust, the, xv Honneth, Axel, 51, 57–58, 60, 62, 215n44, 215n45 Horkheimer, Max, x, 4, 7, 11, 24–25, 33, 41, 65, 141, 211n35, 219n5 Horowitz, Gregg M., viii, 156–158, 161, 179, 227–228n65 Husserl, Edmund, viii, 21–22, 80–83, 211n35, 211–212n39, 218n2, 219n5

index identity thinking, 62–64, 77, 91, 124, 129–130, 138, 154–155, 158–160, 162, 170, 172, 182, 193, 194; hammer blow to, 124, 130 ideology, 60, 72, 152, 153, 171, 196 immanent critique, 96, 108, 111, 223n2 immediacy, 94; and aesthetic experience, 182–185, 194; of experience, 67–68, 72, 131, 140; of phenomena, 9, 16–17, 68, 73–75, 82; as produced by mediacy, 63, 81, 90, 170; as socially determined, 61; of truth, 93, 101, 182–185 impulse, xi, 37, 70, 78, 81, 97, 141, 152, 212n40 induction, 8, 16, 79, 87, 101, 111, 116, 122, 219n21, instrumental reason, 8–10, 105, 132, 153, 227–228n65 internal contradiction, 30, 79, 90, 94, 98, 109, 112, 122; as caused by a holistic epistemic whole, 92–93; as socially caused, 42–43, 97 irrationalism, 107, 125–128 Jarvis, Simon, 62, 213n7 Jay, Martin, 40 Kafka, Franz, 199 Kandinsky, Wassily, 198 Kant, Immanuel, 4–6, 8–10, 19, 20, 29–32, 36, 38–39, 44, 46, 51, 79, 95, 122, 191, 210n10, 210n12, 213n8, 213n10, 213n15; Metaphysical Deduction, 4, 32, 36, 46; Transcendental Deduction, 4 Klein, Melanie, 50 knowledge, x–xiv, xvii–ix, 8, 14, 16, 21, 84, 89, 99, 122, 126, 130, 143, 158, 183–186, 195, 219n5; absolute knowledge, 117; by acquaintance, 126; art as a kind of, xiii, xvii, xix, 76, 139, 140, 142, 144, 146, 160,

243

169, 172; conceptual knowledge, 8, 38–39; negative form of, 105; of nonidentity, xii, 85–87, 106, 118, 139, 173, 180; of particulars, 16–18, 82, 112; self-knowledge, 51; self-reflexive knowledge, 90; of the totality, 72 language, ix, xiv, 38, 115, 154, 176, 181, 184, 198–200, 218n2, 225n31; emergence of, 10–16 logic, 42–43, 92, 108, 164, 187, 191–192, 194–195, 217n80 Lukacs, Georg, 40, 55, 57- 58, 62, 136, 223n2 magic, 12, 132, 140–141, 210n16, 210n17 Marx, Karl, 58–63, 73, 203, 216n62, 216n63, 216–217n65 materialism, 56, 67, 110 Mead, G. H., 51 mediation, xvii, xx, 61, 62, 119, 176, 191, 207; agonic mediation, 88–91, 93, 97, 212n39; and art, 142, 150, 159, 166–172, 177, 180, 197; breakdown in mediation, 87, 120, 124, 126, 131, 173, 175, 185, 186, 188; as causing conceptual error, 88–91, 110, 124, 125, 131, 146, 173; concepts as immune to, 43; delusive mediation, 139, 143, 149, 173, 175; of experience, 4–6, 15, 18, 20, 24, 28, 32, 38, 39, 53, 81, 110, 122, 133, 139–140, 143, 176, 179, 180, 186, 199, 214n19, 224n10; of the object, 28, 36, 75, 76, 110, 131, 132; via parents, 53; of perception, 19, 178; and reification, 62, 64; via the social totality, 84, 88–91, 98, 179, 196, 197, 204; transcendental account of, 20; unmediated experience, 19–20, 50, 64, 120 metacritique, 98, 112, 142 metalogical, 31, 33, 111, 213n7 Miller, Jared, 211n35

244

index

mimesis, 135; and art, xx, 140, 141, 145–147, 161, 171, 173, 228n72, 229n73, 229n74; of domination, xii–xiii, 157, 168–169, 227n47; mimetic engagement, 120; self-mimesis, 146, 147 modernism, 161, 194 Moore, Henry, 198 Name, the, 95, 175, 229n87 necessity: contingent,43, 53–54, 70, 71, 131; pragmatic, 20–26, 28, 49, 53 nonidentity, xi–xix, 2–3, 87, 91, 104, 106, 108, 110, 130–133, 138, 213n15, 220n24, 223n34; as itinerant feature of conceptual schemes, 131; “logical” argument for, 90–91, 223n34 noumena, 29–30, 39 object-relations theory, 50–53, 69 oblique reflection, 160, 162, 168–170, 172, 177, 186 O’Connor, Brian, vii, 68–69, 210n21 ontogenetic, 6, 34–37, 44–45, Paddison, Max, 167–169, 220n23, 228n72, 229n76 performance, xvi, xix, 76, 86–88, 103, 105, 110–113, 117–122, 124, 128, 185–186, 222n9, 222n22; and cogitative productivity, 87, 99, 101–102, 111, 117, 121, 123, 184, 221n47; Durchfuhrung, xix performativity, xvi, 87, 103, 109–110, 112, 125, 221n48; of the artwork, 177–180, 187, 199; in the experience of the art-appreciator, xvi, xx, 103–104, 173, 179; in the experience of the reader of the philosophical text, xvi, xix, 88, 103–104, 106, 109– 111, 113, 119–120, 124; performative engagement of the agent, 180–188;

scope of the truth of, 129–130; of the text, 117–124, 187; truth of, 125–129 phenomenology, 80–82, 203, 211n35; destructive phenomenology, 117 phenomenal ontology, 5 phylogenetic, 6, 24–25, 34–37 pragmatic contexts, 32, 40, 42–43, 55, 64, 66, pragmatic structures: and concepts, 3, 9, 10, 16, 17, 24–25, 27, 28, 32, 42–44, 50, 55, 65–66, 73, 212n40; and infant development, 52–53; and self-preservation, 20, 24, 25, 27, 50, 53, 77; and the social totality, 40–41; and universality, 46–47, 53, 55–57, 65–66, 69 predication, 90–93, 132, 211n39; simple predication, 90–91, 132 progress, 162 protention, 22 Proust, Marcel, xx, 197–207 radical particularity, 39, 68 rationality, x, xii, xiv, 4, 7, 11, 23, 25, 34, 37, 41, 74, 137, 213, 217n80; of artworks, xii–xiii, xv, 71, 76, 137, 138, 140–142, 144, 146, 157, 168, 169, 228n72; limits of, xvi recognition (Anerkennung), 51, 215n45 reification, 51, 55, 57–66, 73, 75, 77, 78, 89, 94, 125, 140, 169, 170, 203, 215n44, 217n69, 224n10 relativism, 32, 56, 127 retention, 22 revolutionary praxis, 60 rhetoric, xvii, xix, 1, 12, 20, 35–36, 56, 76, 87, 111, 114, 135; as philosophical content, xiv, xix, 2–3, 103–104, 113–120, 197, 222n22 rich analysis, 96, 98, 103, 111–112, 127 riddles, 99, 127, 151–152, 225–226n37 Rose, Gillian, 63–64

index Schoenberg, Arnold, 136 Scholem, Gershom, 96, 175 self-preservation, 77–78, 229n73, 231–232n31; and the body, 45–46; as causing error in the concept, 19, 28, 63, 73–75, 88–90, 94, 158, 170, 215n49, 220n27; and conceptual universality, 31–33, 36, 40–44, 54, 64–66; as determining concepts, 6, 8–10, 19–20, 24–25, 27–28, 37, 39, 43, 50, 53, 68–69, 131–132, 146, 211n34; and reason, x, xi, 6 semblance, 135, 145, 161–162, 165–166, 171, 176, 180, 226n43, skepticism, 94–95, 107, 121, 125–128 “social law,” 62, 191, 195 social totality, 47, 72, 77, 78, 84, 111, 132, 138, 188, 217n71; agon of, 88–93, 97; and art, 163, 170–172, 177, 188, 191, 195–196; as compelling self-preservation, 40–41, 44, 54, 63, 74, 77; as determining concept formation, 69–70; as determining experienced regularities, 66, 70; as determining objects of experience, 68–70, 72–75, 170; as reciprocally determined by concepts, 71 Sohn-Rethel, Alfred, 56, 216n56 Strawson, P. F., 48–50, 215n40, 215n41 syllogism, 13–14 tautology, 11–16 texture, xv, xix, xx, 51, 59, 68, 74, 76, 83, 84, 86–88, 103–106, 110, 113, 116–120, 123, 173, 180, 188; Gewebe, xv, xix, 86–87, 105, 116; textural display of conceptual movement, xix, 87, 113, 119, 124, 177, 180; textural theory of truth, 134 Tiedemann, Rolf, 213n16 Tomasello, Michael, 51 truth: by acquaintance, 16, 118, 125–126, 173, 185, 188; analytic truths,

245

100, 220n23; atemporal truth, 3, 83, 89, 213n9; and deduction, 79, 87, 100–101, 111, 113, 116, 122, 219n21; by demonstration, xv, 2, 99, 107, 110–112, 116, 121, 125–126, 129, 130, 173, 183–184, 192, 198; discursive truth, 100–103, 111, 118, 134, 141, 182–187; and the flash of experience, 99–102, 104, 119, 123, 128; and inference, 99, 101–102, 113, 121, 124, 129, 141, 184, 195; and the “mathematical model,” 99, 101, 102, 111, 121, 123, 184; nondiscursive truth, 100–101, 184; and “philosophical proof,” 99, 101, 121, 184; sociohistorical truth, 29, 32, 33, 42, 45, 47, 55, 61, 76, 144, 158, 163, 166, 175, 178, 196–197, 213n7, 213n9, 220n23, 229n76; truth-makers, 93 truth content, 56; of artworks, 113, 135, 138, 140, 167, 172, 175, 180, 182, 184, 190, 192, 229n76; philosophy and art as converging in, 142–143, 181–182, 188, typing concepts, 10; priority of, 38–39 universality: of basic conceptual sets and arrays, 44–54; conceptual arrays, 44–71, 85, 92, 119, 122–125, 131–132, 139, 187; conceptual employment, 4, 25, 31, 33–44, 53–54, 131–132, 170, 211n34, 213n15; of nonbasic conceptual sets and arrays, 54–72; social universality, 47, 48, 52, 54–55, 57, 65–66, 69, 75, 92, 119, 125, 139; utopia, 17, 124, 128, 175, 213n16, 226n43 Vexierbild, 151–152, 225–226n37 Webern, Anton, 136 Winnicott, Donald, 50–52

columbia themes in philosophy, social criticism, and the arts Lydia Goehr and Daniel Herwitz, eds., The Don Giovanni Moment: Essays on the Legacy of an Opera Robert Hullot-Kentor, Things Beyond Resemblance: Collected Essays on Theodor W. Adorno Gianni Vattimo, Art’s Claim to Truth, edited by Santiago Zabala, translated by Luca D’Isanto John T. Hamilton, Music, Madness, and the Unworking of Language Stefan Jonsson, A Brief History of the Masses: Three Revolutions Richard Eldridge, Life, Literature, and Modernity Janet Wolff, The Aesthetics of Uncertainty Lydia Goehr, Elective Affinities: Musical Essays on the History of Aesthetic Theory Christoph Menke, Tragic Play: Irony and Theater from Sophocles to Beckett, translated by James Phillips György Lukács, Soul and Form, translated by Anna Bostock and edited by John T. Sanders and Katie Terezakis with an introduction by Judith Butler Joseph Margolis, The Cultural Space of the Arts and the Infelicities of Reductionism Herbert Molderings, Art as Experiment: Duchamp and the Aesthetics of Chance, Creativity, and Convention Whitney Davis, Queer Beauty: Sexuality and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Freud and Beyond Gail Day, Dialectical Passions: Negation in Postwar Art Theory Ewa Płonowska Ziarek, Feminist Aesthetics and the Politics of Modernism Gerhard Richter, Afterness: Figures of Following in Modern Thought and Aesthetics Boris Groys, Under Suspicion: A Phenomenology of the Media, translated by Carsten Strathausen Michael Kelly, A Hunger for Aesthetics: Enacting the Demands of Art Stefan Jonsson, Crowds and Democracy: The Idea and Image of the Masses from Revolution to Fascism Elaine P. Miller, Head Cases: Julia Kristeva on Philosophy and Art in Depressed Times Lutz Koepnick, On Slowness: Toward an Aesthetic of Radical Contemporaneity John Roberts, Photography and Its Violations Hermann Kappelhoff, The Politics and Poetics of Cinematic Realism Cecilia Sjöholm, Doing Aesthetics with Arendt: How to See Things