jarvis, simon (ed) - theodor w. adorno -- critical evaluations in cultural theory, vol. 1

THEODOR W. ADORNO

Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory

Edited by Simon Jarvis

Volume I

I~ ~?io~1!;n~~;up LONDON AND NEW YORK

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Publisher's Note

References within each chapter are as they appear in the original complete work

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements Chronological table of reprinted articles and chapters

General introduction

VOLUME I

1 Can theory become aesthetic? On a principal theme of Adorno's philosophy RUDIGER BUBNER

2 Adorno's concept of musical material CARL DAHLHAUS

3 Adorno and Hegel: a misunderstanding on the question of language FELICITAS ENGLISCH

4 Natural beauty and the 'representative' character of the work of art GUNTER FIGAL

5 Hegel's untruth: some remarks on Adorno's critique of Hegel UTE GUZZONI

6 Truth and power HERMANN MORCHEN

v

XI

xiii

1

14

40

48

65

84

90

CONTENTS

7 The metaphysics of critique: on the relationship between metaphysics and experience in Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno BIRGIT RECKI

8 The contemporary relevance of the Dialectic of Enlightenment HERBERT SCHNlDELBACH

9 The dialectical critique of reason: Adorno's construction of rationality HERBERT SCHNlDELBACH

10 Negativity in Adorno MICHAEL THEUNISSEN

11 Dimensions of the non-identical ANKE THYEN

12 The anticipation of the true concept of the universal in art and experience MATTHIAS TICHY

VOLUME II

Acknowledgements

13 Adorno: love and cognition ANON

14 Critical theory as a critique of society: Theodor W. Adorno's

106

137

155

178

199

221

VII

1

significance for a feminist sociology 11 REGINA BECKER-SCHMIDT

15 Autonomy as mimetic reconciliation SEYLA BENHABIB

16 The end of internalization: Adorno's social psychology JESSICA BENJAMIN

17 Speculation, art and politics JAY BERNSTEIN

18 Ethical modernism JAY BERNSTEIN

VI

26

61

85

100

CONTENTS

19 Against negation, for a politics of cultural production:

20

21

22

23

24

25

Adorno, aesthetics, the social GEORGINA BORN

The culture of truth: Adorno ANDREW BOWIE

Adorno's anthropology STEFAN BREUER

Adorno, Heidegger and postmodernity HAUKE BRUNKHORST

Adorno's anti-avant-gardism PETER BURGER

The consequences of enlightenment ANTHONY CASCARDI

Adorno, ideology and ideology critique DEBORAH COOK

26 Reassessing the culture industry DEBORAH COOK

27 Subversive mimesis: Theodor W. Adorno and the modern impasse of critique MICHAEL CAHN

28 The ethical message of negative dialectics DRUCILLA CORNELL

29 Adorno, poststructuralism and the critique of identity PETER DEWS

30 The cunning of Odysseus: a theme in Hegel, Lukacs and Adorno MARTIN DONOUGHO

VOLUME III

Acknowledgements

31 Adorno on the ethical and the ineffable JAMES GORDON FINLAYSON

141

163

212

231

243

254

294

312

342

371

401

422

Vll

1

CONTENTS

32 The theory of natural beauty and its evil star: Kant, Hegel, Adorno 28 RODOLPHE GASCHE

33 The entwinement of myth and enlightenment: Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno 46 JURGEN HABERMAS

34 Interpretation as critique: the path to literature 67 PETER UWE HOHENDAHL

35 Foucault and Adorno: two forms of the critique of modernity 90 AXEL HONNETH

36 The movement of mimesis: Heidegger's 'Origin of the Work of Art' in relation to Adorno and Lyotard 101 TOM HUHN \

37 The need in thinking: materiality in Theodor W. Adorno and Judith Butler 123 CARRIE L. HULL

38 Back to Adorno 147 ROBERT HULLOT-KENTOR

39 Adorno in reverse: from Hollywood to Richard Wagner 170 ANDREAS HUYSSEN

40 Recollections of Theodor W. Adorno 199 LEO LOWENTHAL

41 T. W. Adorno; or historical tropes 209 FREDRIC JAMESON

42 The coastline of experience: materialism and metaphysics in Adorno 246 SIMON JARVIS

43 What is speculative thinking? 267 SIMON JARVIS

44 The concept of totality in Lukacs and Adorno 282 MARTIN JAY

45 Adorno in America 304 MARTIN JAY

46 Red Kant, or the persistence of the Third Critique in Adorno and Jameson 328 ROBERT KAUFMAN

.,.,,

CONTENTS

47 The aesthetics of negativity and hermeneutics CHRISTOPH MENKE

48 The scene of the other: Theodor W. Adorno's negative dialectic in the context of poststructuralism RAINER NAGELE

VOLUME IV

Acknowledgements

49 Language: its murmurings, its darkness, and its silver rib SHIERR Y WEBER NICHOLSEN

50 Adorno and the problem of givenness BRIAN O'CONNOR

51 Adorno and the metaphysics of modernism: the problem of a 'postmodern' art PETER OSBORNE

52 The critique criticised: Adorno and popular music MAX PADDISON

53 Adorno's notion of natural beauty: a reconsideration HEINZ PAETZOLD

54 Under the sign of Adorno HENRY PICKFORD

55 Nietzsche and critical theory PETER PUTZ

56 From speculative to dialectical thinking -Hegel and Adorno GILLIAN ROSE

57 The lament over reification GILLIAN ROSE

58 Concept, image, name: on Adorno's utopia of knowledge ROLF TIEDEMANN

373

405

VII

34

48

70

88

106

124

137

147

178

CONTENTS

59 Truth, semblance, reconciliation: Adorno's aesthetic redemption of modernity 197 ALBRECHT WELLMER

60 Metaphysics at the moment of its fall 226 ALBRECHT WELLMER

61 Synthesis as violence: Lacan and Adorno on the ego 241 JOEL WHITEBOOK

62 Hibernation: on the tenth anniversary of Adorno's death 290 IRVING WOHLFARTH

63 Utopia, mimesis, and reconciliation: a redemptive critique of Adorno's Aesthetic Theory 320 RICHARD WOLIN

64 History, art, and truth 338 LAMBERT ZUIDERVAART

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The publishers would like to thank the following for permission to reprint their material:

Suhrkamp Verlag for permission to reprint Rudiger Bubner, 'Kann Theorie iisthetisch werden? Zurn Hauptmotiv der Philosophie Adornos', in Burkhardt Lindner and W. Martin Ludke (eds), Materialien zur asthetischen Theorie Theodor W Adornos (FfM: Suhrkamp, 1985), pp. 108-37. © Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main 1985.

Zu Kampen Verlag and Felicitas Englisch for permission to reprint Felicitas Englisch, 'Adorno und Hegel. Ein Mil3verstiindnis uber die Sprache', in Hager, Frithjof and Hermann Pfiitzer (eds), Das unerhOrt Moderne. Berliner Adorno-Tagung (Luneburg: zu Klampen, 1990), pp. 28-47.

Birgit Recki for permission to reprint Birgit Recki, 'Die Metaphysik der Kritik: zum Verhiiltnis von Metaphysik und Erfahrung bei Max Horkheimer und Theodor Adorno' Neue Heftefiir Philosophic 30-1 (1991), pp. 139-71.

Suhrkamp Verlag for permission to translate and reprint Herbert Schniidelbach, 'Die Aktualitat der Dialektik der Aufkliirung', in Vernunjt und Geschichte: Vortrage und Abhandlungen (FfM: Suhrkamp, 1987), pp. 179-206. © Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main 1987.

Campus Verlag for permission to translate and reprint Herbert Schniidelbach, 'Dialektik als Vernunftkritik. Zur Konstruktion des Rationalen bei Adorno', in Harry Kunnemann and Hent de Vries (eds), Die Aktualitat der Dialektik der Aujklarung (FfM: Campus Verlag, 1989), pp. 15-35.

Suhrkamp Verlag for permission to reprint Michael Theunissen, 'Negativitiit bei Adorno', in Ludwig von Friedeburg and Jiirgen Habermas (eds), AdornoKonferenz 1983 (FfM: Suhrkamp, 1983), pp. 41-65. © Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main 1983.

Suhrkamp Verlag for permission to reprint Anke Thyen, 'Dimensionen des Nichtidentischen', in Negative Dialektik und Erfahrung. Zur Rationalitat

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

des Nichtidentischen bei Adorno (FfM: Suhrkamp, 1989), pp. 198-221. © Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main 1989.

Disclaimer

The publishers have made every effort to contact authors/copyright holders of works reprinted in Theodor W. Adorno: Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory. This has not been possible in every case, however, and we would welcome correspondence from those individuals/companies whom we have been unable to trace.

Chronological table of reprinted articles and chapters

Date Author Title Source Vol. Chap.

1971 Fredric Jameson T. W. Adorno; or historical tropes Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form: Ill 41 Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 3-59.

1973 Anon Adorno: love and cognition Times Literary Supplement, 9 March: 253-5. II 13 1974 Carl Dahlhaus Adorno's concept of musical material Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht (ed.), Zur I 2 (")

::i:: Terminologie der Musik des 20. Jahrhunderts, ~ Stuttgart: Musikwissenschaftliche Verlags- 0 Gesellschaft, pp. 9-21.* z

1975 Ute Guzzoni Hegel's untruth: some remarks on Hegel-Jahrbuch, pp. 242-6. * I 5 0 r

Adorno's critique of Hegel 0 :. 1977 Jessica Benjamin The end of internalization: Adorno's Telos 32: 42-64. II 16 a .....

social psychology (")

1977 Gunter Figal Natural beauty and the Gunter Figal, Theodor W. Adorno. Das I 4 > r

'representative' character of Naturschone als spekulative Gedankenfigur, ..., the work of art Bonn: Bouvier Verlag Herbert Grundmann, >

pp. 83-107.* ~

1977 Martin Jay The concept of totality in Lukacs Telos 32: 117-37. III 44 r m

and Adorno 1977 Matthias Tichy The anticipation of the true concept Matthias Tichy, Theodor W. Adorno. Das I 12

of the universal in art and experience Verhiiltnis von Allgemeinem und Besonderem in seiner Philosophie, Bonn: Bouvier, pp. 106-43.*

1978 Gillian Rose The lament over reification Gillian Rose, The Melancholy Science: An IV 57 Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno, London: Macmillan, pp. 27-51.

1979 Irving Wohlfarth Hibernation: on the tenth Modern Language Notes 94: 956-87. IV 62 anniversary of Adorno's death

Chronological Table continued


1980 Hermann Morchen Truth and power Hermann Morchen, Macht und Herrschaft im I 6 Denken von Heidegger und Adorno, Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, pp. 171-86. *

1981 Martin Donougho The cunning of Odysseus: a theme Philosophy and Social Criticism 8: 11-43. II 30 in Hegel, Lukacs and Adorno

1981-82 Peter Piltz Nietzsche and critical theory Telos 50: 103-14. IV 55 1982 Max Paddison The critique criticised: Adorno and Popular Music 2: 201-18. IV 52 ()

::i: popular music ::i::i 1983 Andreas Huyssen Adorno in reverse: from Hollywood New German Critique 29: 8-38. III 39 0

to Richard Wagner z 1983 Michael Theunissen Negativity in Adorno Ludwig von Friedeburg and Jurgen Habermas I 10 0

t"" (eds), Adarno-Konferenz 1983, Frankfurt am 0

~- Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 41-65.* 0 ...... 1984 Michael Cahn Subversive mimesis: Theodor Mihai Spariosu (ed.), Mimesis in II 27 ()

W. Adorno and the modem Contemporary Theory, Philadelphia: John > impasse of critique Benjamin's Publishing Company, pp. 27-64.

t""

.....j 1984 Martin Jay Adorno in America New German Critique 31: 157-82. III 45 > 1985 Rudiger Bubner Can theory become aesthetic? Burkhardt Lindner and W. Martin Ludke I 1 t:C

on a principal theme of Adomo's (eds), Materialien zur iisthetischen Theorie t"" ttl

philosophy Theodor W Adornos, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 108-37.*

1985 Albrecht Wellmer Truth, semblance, reconciliation: Telos 62: 89-115. IV 59 Adomo's aesthetic redemption of modernity

1985-86 Stefan Breuer Adomo's anthropology Telos 64: 15-31. II 21 1986 Seyla Benhabib Autonomy as mimetic reconciliation Seyla Benhabib, Critique, Norm and Utopia: II 15

A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 186-223.

1986 Axel Honneth Foucault and Adorno: two forms Thesis Eleven 15: 48-59. III 35 of the critique of modernity

1986 Rainer Nagele The scene of the other: Theodor Jonathan Arac (ed.), Postmodernism and III 48 W. Adorno's negative dialectic Politics, Minneapolis, MN: University of in the context of poststructuralism Minnesota Press, pp. 91-111.

1987 Jilrgen Habermas The entwinement of myth and Jurgen Habermas, The Philosophical III 33 enlightenment: Max Horkheimer Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, and Theodor Adorno Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 106-30.

Translator Frederick Lawrence. 1987 Leo Lowenthal Recollections of Theodor W. Adorno Leo Lowenthal, An Unmastered Past: III 40

(j The Autobiographical Reflections of Leo ::i: Lowenthal, Berkeley, CA: University of ~

California Press, pp. 201-15. 0

1987 Herbert Schnadelbach The contemporary relevance of Herbert Schnadelbach, Vernunft und Geschichte: I 8 z 0

the Dialectic of Enlightenment Vortriige und Ahbandlungen, Frankfurt am r Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 179-206.* 0

Cl 1988 Hauke Brunkhorst Adorno, Heidegger and Philosophy and Social Criticism 14: 411-24. II 22 ..... postmodernity (j

> 1989 Robert Hullot-Kentor Back to Adorno Telos 81: 5-29. III 38 r 1989 Peter Osborne Adorno and the metaphysics of Andrew Benjamin (ed.), The Problems of IV 51 ....,

modernism: the problem of a Modernity: Adorno and Benjamin, London: > 'postmodern' art Routledge, pp. 23-48. t;d

r 1989 Herbert Schnadelbach The dialectical critique of reason: Harry Kunnemann and Hent de Vries (eds), I 9 tt1

Adorno's construction of rationality Die Aktualitiit der Dialektik der Aujkliirung, Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, pp. 15-35.*

1989 Anke Thyen Dimensions of the non-identical Anke Thyen, Negative Dialektik und I 11 Erfahrung. Zur Rationalitiit des Nichtidentischen hei Adorno, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 198-221.*

1990 Felicitas Englisch Adorno and Hegel: a Frithjof Hager and Hermann Pfiitzer (eds), I 3 misunderstanding on the question of Das unerhort Moderne. Berliner Adorno-language Tagung, Liineburg: zu Klampen, pp. 28-47.*



1990 Albrecht Wellmer Metaphysics at the moment of its fall Peter Collier and Helga Geyer-Ryan (eds), IV 60 Literary Theory Today, Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 35-50. Translated by Shaun Whiteside.

1990 Richard Wolin Utopia, mimesis, and reconciliation: Representations 32: 33-49. IV 63 a redemptive critique of Adorno's Aesthetic Theory

1990-91 Peter Burger Adorno's anti-avant-gardism Telos 86: 49-60. II 23 ("")

1991 Birgit Recki The metaphysics of critique: on the Neue Hefte fiir Philosophie 30/31: 139-7 l. * I 7 ::i:: ~

relationship between metaphysics 0 and experience in Max Horkheimer z and Theodor W. Adorno 0

t'"' 1991 Lambert Zuidervaart History, art and truth Lambert Zuidervaart, Adorno's Aesthetic IV 64 0

>< Theory! The Redemption of Illusion, 0 :::. -Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 275-307. ("")

1992 Jay Bernstein Speculation, art and politics Jay Bernstein, The Fate of Art: Aesthetic II 17 > Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno,

t'"'

University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State ..., > University Press, pp. 261-74. txi

1992 Drucilla Cornell The ethical message of negative Drucilla Cornell, The Philosophy of the Limit, II 28 t'"'

dialectics London: Routledge, pp. 13-38. tT1

1993 Georgina Born Against negation, for a politics of Screen 34, pp. 223-42. II 19 cultural production: Adorno, aesthetics, the social

1993 Henry Pickford Under the sign of Adorno Modern Language Notes 108: 564-83. IV 54 1993 Gillian Rose From speculative to dialectical Gillian Rose, Judaism and Modernity, Oxford: IV 56

thinking - Hegel and Adorno Blackwell, pp. 53-63. 1995 Peter Uwe Hohendahl Interpretation as critique: the path Peter Uwe Hohendahl, Prismatic Thought: III 34

to literature Theodor W Adorno, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, pp. 75-104.

1995 Joel Whitebook Synthesis as violence: Lacan and Joel Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia, IV 61 Adorno on the ego Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 119-64.

1996 Deborah Cook Reassessing the culture industry Deborah Cook, The Culture Industry II 26 Revisited: Theodor W Adorno on Mass Culture, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 103-29.

1996 Peter Dews Adorno, poststructuralism and the Peter Dews, The Limits of Disenchantment, II 29 critique of identity London: Verso: pp. 19-38.

1996 Tom Huhn The movement of mimesis: Philosophy and Social Criticism 22(4): 45-69. III 36 Heidegger's 'Origin of the Work of

(") Art' in relation to Adorno and ::c: Lyotard ::ti

1996 Christoph Menke The aesthetics of negativity and Christoph Menke, The Sovereignty of Art, III 47 0

hermeneutics Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 71-105. z 0

Translated by Neil Solomon. t"" 1997 Andrew Bowie The culture of truth: Adorno Andrew Bowie, From Romanticism to Critical II 20 0

5. a Theory: The Philosophy of German Literary ..... Theory, London and New York: Routledge, (")

> pp. 238-80. t"" 1997 Carrie L. Hull The need in thinking: materiality in Radical Philosophy 84: 22-35. III 37 --l

Theodor W. Adorno and Judith > Butler ~

1997 Simon Jarvis The coastline of experience: Radical Philosophy 85: 7-19. III 42 t"" tI1

materialism and metaphysics in Adorno

1997 Shierry Weber Language: its murmurings, its Shierry Weber Nicholsen, Exact Imagination, IV 49 Nicholsen darkness, and its silver rib Late Work, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,

pp. 59-102. 1997 Heinz Paetzold Adorno's notion of natural beauty: a Tom Huhn and Lambert Zuidervaart (eds), IV 53

reconsideration The Semblance of Subjectivity: Essays in Adorno's Aesthetic Theory, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 123-45.



1997 Rolf Tiedemann Concept, image, name: on Adorno's Tom Huhn and Lambert Zuidervaart (eds), IV 58 utopia of knowledge The Semblance of Subjectivity: Essays in

Adorno's Aesthetic Theory, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 123-45. Translated by Ellen Anderson and Tom Huhn.

1999 Regina Becker- Critical theory as a critique of Maggie O'Neill (ed.), Adorno, Culture and II 14 (')

Schmidt society: Theodor W. Adorno's Feminism, London: Sage, pp. 104-18. :i:: significance for a feminist sociology :ii:i

1999 Anthony Cascardi The consequences of enlightenment Anthony Cascardi, Consequences of II 24 0 Enlightenment, Cambridge: Cambridge z

0 University Press, pp. 1-48. t""

>< 2000 Robert Kaufman Red Kant, or the persistence of the Critical Inquiry 26(4): 682-724. III 46 0 s. Third Critique in Adorno and Cl -Jameson (')

2001 Jay Bernstein Ethical modernism Jay Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and II 18 > t""

Ethics, Cambridge: Cambridge University --l

Press, pp. 415-56. > 2001 Deborah Cook Adorno, ideology and ideology - Philosophy and Social Criticism 27(1): 1-20. II 25 t:cl

critique t"" tr1

2002 James Gordon Adorno on the ethical and the European Journal of Philosophy 10(1): 1-25. III 31 Finlayson ineffable

2002 Rodolphe Gasche The theory of natural beauty and its Research in Phenomenology 32: 103-22. III 32 evil star: Kant, Hegel, Adorno

2004 Simon Jarvis What is speculative thinking? Revue Internationale de Philosophie 63(227): III 43 69-83.

2004 Brian O'Connor Adorno and the problem of Revue Internationale de Philosophie 63(227): IV 50 givenness 85-99.

* Translated by Nicholas Walker, 2006.

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

Collections of scholarly articles on this or that important thinker have a melancholy resemblance to funerary monuments, and not only because their sheer bulk tends to remind readers rather of tombstones than of living thinking. The fact of gathering such a collection implies that it is time for an autopsy, perhaps of the kind which might discover 'what is living or what is dead', as Croce put it, in the body of thought in question. Enough time has passed since the author's death for fleeting polemic and mere discipleship to be distinguished from those elements of the reception that themselves constitute a further important contribution to the intellectual landscape. In certain cases, the provision of such collections can be considered as an essential act of cultural prudence. It will offer a prophylactic against the perpetual reinvention of the wheel. To collect the reception history of a really major figure, a Kant or a Hegel, can be not only to provide a significant map of large areas of the intellectual history which has developed since their deaths, but also to remind us how dependent our thinking still often remains upon sources which we might have thought, if not drained, then long familiar; to remind us how far any achievement of the really new - should such even be available or desirable - will depend upon a return to those authorships which have determined us, made us, and within whose thoughts, languages, idioms, and systems so much of our intellectual activity is still, consciously or unconsciously, conducted.

The same cannot really be said of Theodor W. Adorno. Although it seems likely that his thought will continue to have influence for some time to come, it remains unclear whether his will in retrospect be this kind of stature - the stature of a figure unavoidable in the intellectual history of his time, and without a consideration of whose work no account of intellectual life in the period would be, not simply incomplete, but, rather, unintelligible - or whether he will, instead, appear as an interesting and important, but not aboriginal, source. This is, I think, only partly because the relevant reception-history is still relatively young. Others, after all, more recently dead, have indeed become figures clearly indispensable to any understanding of the period. The mind turns immediately to Adorno's intimate antagonist, Martin Heidegger (the antagonism was intimate for Adorno, at least; although Adorno was so preoccupied with him, Heidegger famously never did manage to find time to read Adorno). It is


not simply that Heidegger, although postdeceasing Adorno by a few years, has already emerged as a figure of greater influence, but rather that what comes from Heidegger, despite his being a thinker so deeply rooted in a series of traditions of thinking, seems more clearly and unambiguously to come in some sense from him: Heidegger seems a much clearer point of origin for a whole series of intellectual practices and habits which would be impossible to explain without him than does Adorno.

This need not be chalked up to Adorno's discredit. The reasons for it probably need not be sought in any lack of intellectual originality on Adorno's part, although it is hardly the case that Adorno was indifferent to such questions. They are, perhaps, instead connected to the kind of writer Adorno was. Most of Heidegger's work was mapped on this side of what he himself called the 'gulf' between thinking and knowing. On this map, Heidegger himself was a thinker, and, while he might occasionally also know this or that, what he might know about this or that could never make any essential difference to his activity as a thinker. Adorno's self-definitions were much more ambiguous. This was not simply a matter of his extraordinary intellectual range - reason, in some views, for suspicion in an epoch of intense intellectual specialization - but also of his failure or refusal to settle upon any clear vocational description for himself. His work would clearly have been unthinkable without its core engagements with questions which would ordinarily be understood as philosophical questions, and his preoccupation with which culrrfinated in his two late major works, Negative Dialectics and the unfini~hed but substantially complete Aesthetic Theory. Yet at the same time he was also a musicologist, a literary critic, a social theorist, a cultural commentator and, even, at briefer moments, a composer, a broadcaster, and a designer of questionnaires for projects in empirical sociology.

Although Adorno became in the course of time a strong champion of the intellectual autonomy of the individual writer, he was never in any simple way a 'one-man philosopher'. In the first place, his commitment to the notion of 'immanent critique', of thinking through a tradition, meant that, although he certainly did develop his own style, one which barely admitted of imitation, he was never the inventor of a philosophical idiolect. When hostile critics speak of 'Adorno-ese', they cannot primarily be referring to a peculiarly Adornian lexicon, because that lexicon emerges primarily out of the writings and traditions with which Adorno engages, but rather to a peculiarly Adornian set of propositions, or mode of argument. In the second place, and still more importantly, Adorno's project would have been inconceivable without the institutional context of the Institute for Social Research, under the direction of Max Horkheimer. Much of his most important early work was undertaken in direct fulfilment of some task or other envisaged by the collaborative programme of the Institute, a programme which, however, Adorno certainly attempted to shape in ways


which would allow him to develop interests such as aesthetics which might otherwise have found no place there. Even when, in the late 1930s, Adorno's work began to voice deeper reservations about the very possibility of interdisciplinary collaboration in prevailing social and intellectual circumstances, it still remained informed by a keen sense of its own fragmentariness, its need to be open not only to change in historical circumstances, but also its need to remain open to developments in those special disciplines of which it was to be, not the 'queen' (in Kant's phrase), but rather the interpreter. For this reason, Adorno's trajectory was from the start not simply that of the thinker voyaging through strange seas of thought alone - for all that Negative Dialectics in the event struck land at some places never before visited - but rather of one who understood his own work as standing in continual relation to that of his friends, collaborators, and rivals.

All this has mattered not simply because of the twentieth-century feeling that one who is jack of so many trades can hardly be master of any, but, still more, because it has meant that Adorno's reception has been fractured in a way, and to an extent, different from that of, to return to the same example, Heidegger. Heidegger, of course, has also been influential in many fields and has also been interpreted in many different ways; but there has generally been, among those interested in his work, some rough sense of its intellectual geography and of its outlines as a complete project, or series of connected projects. In the case of Adorno, however -and this applies especially to the Anglophone reception - his operation in what are, for us, simply quite discrete and not necessarily connected fields of inquiry has meant that his work has been received in a much more uneven way.

What this means, then, is in the end something which must matter quite a lot if Adorno matters quite a lot. His work still remains to be properly read and received. One indication of that state of affairs, perhaps, is this: while Adorno has lately received most currency as a star in the small constellation of intellectuals who will appear on almost every introductory reading list dedicated to Theory in the humanities, and while most members of that set spend or spent a good deal of time reading and reflecting upon the work of its other members in public, surprisingly few of his fellows have devoted anything like sustained or committed commentary to his work. The situation testifies to the fact that Adorno remains uncomfortable reading, not merely in that banal sense in which we all like to have so-called uncomfortable reading to read, viz. that it will 'subvert our expectations' and perform other such routine ablutions for contemporary subjectivity, but in the sense that other star theorists (if we must now think of Adorno in such terms) do not quite know how to place him. To make the point once more by a further contrast with Heidegger, one might ask where readings of Adorno can be found which would have the same


stature - the same sense of defining encounter for a major body of philosophically important work which then becomes important in its own right - as Levinas's or Derrida's or Rorty's encounters with Heidegger. While there is so much brilliant writing about and inspired by Adorno, perhaps only Michael Theunissen's 'Negativity in Adorno', in the view of this editor one of the finest single essays ever devoted to his work, comes to mind as an example of a reading which is in this way in deadly earnest, where its subject is read to the letter because the reader understands his or her own intellectual fate to be at stake in the outcome of the reading.

This difficulty with placing Adorno - a factor which, I am suggesting, has made his assimilation so much more haphazard a matter even than that of superficially much more difficult writers - has many sources in addition to those mentioned above. Perhaps the most important have been some of Adorno's deeply unfashionable philosophical commitments - to a 'negative' dialectic in an epoch when it has become an intellectual reflex to understand dialectic, however qualified, as implying by its nature some form of panlogism; to aesthetics in an epoch when that discipline has tended to be understood as necessarily connected to certain kinds of metaphysics; to metaphysics at what Adorno himself declares on the final page of Negative Dialectics to be 'the hour of its demise'; to the non-identity of language with experience in the era of the 'linguistic turn'.

An hour or two with the relevant citation indices at hand is, while not necessarily pleasant, nevertheless illuminating. Adorno ~erves entirely discontinuous and incompatible purposes in different corners of the republic of letters. In some fields, he plays the part of founding villain, deplored in social psychology as the developer of that notorious 'F-scale' upon which the authoritarianism of a given personality was to be calibrated, or (in cultural studies) as the 'mandarin' elitist who got it so wrong about jazz. Even in such cases, however, it is not so much that Adorno is seen only as insignificant or as outmoded. On the contrary, he remains indispensable even here, if only because without him there can be a terrible shortage of appropriate targets. One valuable current of the later reception has been to develop less schematic accounts of these sides of Adorno's works. At the intersection of social theory and psychoanalysis one thinks of Joel Whitebook's subtle interpretations; in theory of culture, of Deborah Cook's recent work, or of J.M. Bernstein's careful exposition of the distinction between 'mass culture' and 'popular culture', a distinction which, however, continues to be missed whenever (as often) we are assured that Adorno was a firm enemy of the latter. But, with some exceptions, the current reception in these fields continues to say more about the fields themselves than to illuminate Adorno's thought.

The aim of this introduction, therefore, is not to give an exhaustive account of the afterlife of Adorno's thinking. Such a task would demand many more pages than are at my disposal and, after all, even if they were

..


at my disposal, it is not clear that the reader's time would be well spent in consulting such a document. It does attempt to give a map of some of the most important features of the terrain; with the primary end, however, less of providing a balance sheet than of indicating where we now stand in the history of understanding a body of work which has to date, for good or ill, been only very partially and imperfectly assimilated. One material factor here is that much of it still remains to appear. The gradual posthumous publication of unfinished drafts, lecture courses and philosophical journals which is underway in Germany is making clearer than ever the inner coherence of a body of thought whose apparent lack of it was always more the result of the contingencies of publishing and of translation than of any real eclecticism. Especially in the lecture courses, Adorno is emerging as a thinker and expositor of perhaps surprising lucidity, one whose own work is based on an intimate grasp of the traditions from which it emerges.

Undoubtedly the most important reception of Adorno has been in Germany. Cost meant that only a few of the most important instances of as yet untranslated German work could be newly translated for these volumes; had I been permitted to disregard such factors, and to choose on merit alone, more than half the space would have been taken up by German contributions. As often, however, the most faithful continuations of Adorno's work did not turn out to be the most significant ones. Those pupils who attempted to continue his manner, as well as his matter of thinking, had the clear and evident justification that it was hardly possible to separate without damage style from content in their master's work. Yet creative succession, in such circumstances, would demand an agon, a co-operative antagonism, in style and substance at once; whereas, in general, this procedure tended instead to yield pale imitation. Of much more import was the work of Adorno's former pupil Jiirgen Habermas. This developed into what was later to become 'second-generation' critical theory and, in its fullest stage, into Habermas's theory of communicative action: developments which, of course, are in many quarters considered as more significant even than Adorno's own thinking. Retained from firstgeneration critical theory was the idea of the entanglement of communication with domination. All forms of action, not excluding war, could be understood as incipiently communicative. It was natural, if not necessarily just, given this kind of view, that much of Adorno's extremely unhappy view of late capitalism would be discarded. But many other emphases of Adorno's thought now seemed dispensable: of much less interest to the second generation were, in particular, his peculiar kind of materialism - a materialism issuing only from a continous re-engagement with classical German idealism - and his emphasis on art and aesthetics. All this went along with a revived interest in the earlier programme of the Institute for Social Research - with an interest in its collaborative and interdisciplinary


nature and in its emphasis on empirical as well as theoretical work. In Habermas's view, this earlier programme was lost partly as a result of Adorno's turn towards elaborately shaped philosophical compositions. The new theory of communicative action, by contrast, would be less pessimistic than Adorno about the possibility of constructing an adequate critical theory out of the contributions of a divided intellectual labour. Now information and ideas of all kinds could be added on to the more eclectic edifices (more rigorous or more ramshackle, according to taste and conviction) of second-generation critical theory.

The work of that generation has provided by far the most populous field in Germany since Adorno's death for the reception of his work. As well as turning critical theory towards new currents of its own, it has also conditioned many of the ways in which Adorno is read. As well as trenchant criticisms of Adorno's work, it has also prompted a variety of rational reconstructions of his thinking. These have taken numerous forms. In the central line, there has been an attempt, as it were, to recuperate central features of Adorno's work for second-generation critical theory, while discarding those that are thought no longer to wash. An outstanding figure here, among much important work, has been Schnadelbach. The aim there is not only to patch up Adorno by bringing him into line with current standards, but also to deepen current standards by confronting them with one of their most important sources. Another very important figure has been Wellmer. Wellmer wishes to recuperate aspects of Adorno's critique of instrumental reason as a corrective tCY a tendency which he discerns in some second-generation critical theory to become uncritical in the face of 'modern' norms and values. His, then, is an Adorno positioned 'between' modernity and post-modernity. Yet, at the same time, his is also an Adorno, many of whose key claims need rationalizing. Thus, for Wellmer, Adorno's idea that works of art possess a 'truth-content' cannot be taken literally. It has to be re-imagined as a metaphor in order to become useful. Such a retranscription may no doubt make the idea more palatable to many. Yet it also loses most of the force which this idea has in Adorno, where it is not an add-on to the investigations carried out in Negative Dialectics, but part of a complex refiguration of what the idea of truth might mean. Adorno's account of works of art as cognitive artefacts is a central feature of his theory of truth in general. The case indicates something of the difficulty faced by all rational reconstructions, updatings, or refits of Adorno as such. Although his is not an authorship like, say, Hegel's, in which the insistence on systematic totality places exceptional difficulties in the way of reconstructive surgery, there is nevertheless an interrelatedness among Adorno's various leading motifs so intimate as to make it difficult to operate without killing the patient.

Considerations like these have prompted some German scholars to want to insist on those aspects of Adorno's thinking which cannot be assimilated

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by second-generation critical theory. In some cases (Rademacher, for example) this has taken the form of imagining, as it were, what 'Adorno's critique of Habermas' might look like. Such a critique was perhaps already being articulated in the remarks on the limitations of 'communication' as an ideal in Adorno's late essay on subject and object. These are motifs which have also recently been developed in the Anglophone reception. Meanwhile, other scholars, both in Germany and elsewhere, have concentrated on elaborating the close rootedness of Adorno's thinking in classical German philosophy. A further important current has been governed by the wish to make sense of Adorno's work in the context of the new landscape apparently provided by post-structuralist and so-called post-modern thought. Whereas Habermas tended to prefer to deploy Adornian motifs, and especially to adapt Adorno's critique of Heidegger, against post-modernism and post-structuralism (a tendency which perhaps at one time contributed to a lack of interest in Adorno's thinking on the part of these movements), Honneth, Menke and others have been interested in bringing Adorno into a negotiation with certain kinds of poststructuralist thinking (above all, with Foucault and Derrida).

It would be wrong to suggest that the German-speaking and Anglophone receptions have proceeded in total disregard of each other. At the present time the English-speaking reception has begun to take more notice of the German scholarship, although with certain exceptions German scholars have not been much interested in Anglophone Adornocommentary. Yet it is remarkable how often commentary in Britain and North America has proceeded with little regard to the existing scholarship on Adorno in his own language. (It was not practicable within the scope of these volumes to pay close attention to scholarship in other European languages: the resources available for translation from languages other than English were thought best deployed on translations from the German.)

The Anglophone reception in general, in fact, has been much more markedly uneven than that in the German-speaking world. This has largely been conditioned by one simple fact. While some excellent translations of important work by Adorno have been available for some time, many of the early versions of Adorno's work appearing in English were at best clumsy and at worst incompetent. The damage which this has done to Adorno's reception in English is sometimes underestimated. For example, Adorno is perhaps still best known in musicological circles for his Philosophy of New Music, translated under the title Philosophy of Modern Music. But English-speaking musicologists very often refer to this work in the existing translation, from which very little idea of Adorno's book can be gleaned. Yet this has not prevented many dismissive or patronizing judgements of Adorno from being formulated on the basis of an acquaintance with translations only. Many critics appear to show little

'7


awareness that a faulty translation is capable, not merely of getting in the way of appreciation, but of decisively distorting the work of a particular thinker. This editor is no doubt not the only reader of Adorno who has had the experience of being told that Adorno is a 'terrible writer', only to discover upon inquiry that the opinionator has read him only in translation. Such judgements are often followed by an exception in favour of Minima Moralia - a work which happens to have been brilliantly translated, by Edmund Jephcott. The translations by Jephcott and Livingstone show how high Adorno sets the bar for translators of Adorno into English: such a translator must not only be familiar with a wide range of subjectfields and their relevant lexicons, comfortable with the most virtuosically compressed feats of syntactical organization, but also be an English stylist. Only such a translator can have a chance of giving some idea of the texture of Adorno's writing, which (to give a thumbnail sketch) brings together the wealth and depth of classical German philosophy with the lightness and point of a Francophile. Complaints about Adorno's ability as a writer sometimes derive from the feeling that complaints about bad writing constitute the sort of thing that one ought to say about a difficult German philosopher, rather than from close acquaintance and mature judgement.

Although it was not part of the scope of this series of volumes to deal with translations, translations form incomparably the most important aspect of the Anglophone reception of Adorno, its determining framework. For so long as an inadequate version of Aesthetic Theory was the only one available in English, interest in the book, and in Adorno's wider contributions to philosophical aesthetics, languished. At the same time, reception of his contributions to music criticism remained partial, lacking the deepening and clarification of the underlying presuppositions provided by the later work. Now that a much better version by Robert HullotKentor exists, Adorno is coming to take a much more central place in arguments about the aesthetic - a development which has also coincided with a revival of interest in the possibility of aesthetic judgement, a topic which remained largely unfashionable in many academic circles in the 1980s. It is hard to estimate the effect on reception of Adorno's contributions to epistemology and metaphysics of the fact that the current commercially available translation of Negative Dialectics is, while certainly much better than the decommissioned translation of Aesthetic Theory, nevertheless from time to time inaccurate and clumsily written throughout. Despite the great progress made in the English-speaking philosophical reception of Adorno in the past twenty years - and despite the very valuable start which has been made on translating Adorno's lecture courses such as those on Metaphysics and on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason - it seems unlikely that Adorno will break through to capture the full attention of those philosophers who are not themselves Adorno exegetes until an adequate translation of Negative Dialectics is available.


The uneven quality of translations of Adorno's work, as well as the lopsided history of their appearance, has (together with shifts in the intellectual weather) determined the shifting focus of interest in his work in the Anglophone world. The earliest attention was devoted to Adorno's work in social psychology, work which is perhaps among his least characteristic and which is strongly determined by the circumstances of his exile in the United States. Later, Adorno came to be understood largely within a narrative of 'western Marxism', of which he is still sometimes understood as an adherent. This, while not wholly without foundation, was a potentially misleading label. Although Adorno devoted little sustained commentary to Marx in his published work, his surviving lecture courses indicate how important was Marx to his thinking. But they also indicate that Adorno understood his work not as a contribution to anything which might be called western Marxism but as a refusal of both Soviet-style dialectical materialism and of the strong elements of cultural idealism in its western counterparts. Adorno's own re-reading of Marx, of immense value and still especially fragmentarily received, involves understanding Marx not as a social scientist but as a critic of social illusion. Marx's literary talent, his wit and irony, elements which have tended to be downgraded whenever the intention is to construct the imaginary science of Marxism out of his work, become in Adorno's reading central features. Marx's work is characterized by a vital tension between system and fragment, and it is precisely this tension which makes possible his materialism. In such an understanding Marx is not the key figure from whom everyone else must be read, but rather one important predecessor among others, whose truth is no less liable to historical decay than that of any other thinker. It would be wrong to imply that the early reception universally overlooked this; but Adorno's incorporation into a narrative of western Marxism, as well as the very incomplete understanding of Negative Dialectics, meant that the connections between his interpretation of Marx and his wider positions were not elaborated.

After Martin Jay's pioneering work on the Frankfurt School as a whole, two very different interpretations in English prepared the way for a detailed account of Adorno's singularity: Susan Buck-Morss's The Origin of Negative Dialectics, and Gillian Rose's The Melancholy Science. The two studies could hardly be more different: Buck-Morss's elaborate, detailed, and rich; and Rose's concise, pointed, and trenchant. But both made it possible to imagine a new kind of approach to Adorno. The philosophical accounts of Adorno since then have owed much to these earlier attempts; but they, like some of the German scholarship, have also set more store by what could be called 'rational reconstruction'. This has taken many different forms. Perhaps the central English-speaking contribution to the interpretation of Adorno has been made by J. M. Bernstein, concentrating to begin with and throughout on Adorno's

9


aesthetics, but culminating in his recent lengthy study with its focus on Adorno's ethical thought and its deep attention to Negative Dialectics. Bernstein's approach has centred from the start on Adorno's unique kind of Hegelianism and on Adorno's interest in classical German philosophy; at the same time, he has also been a pioneer in reconstruing arguments in Adorno through those developed in contemporary Anglo-American thought, especially by John McDowell. Important recent work by, among others, Andrew Bowie, Raymond Geuss, Brian O'Connor and Lambert Zuidervaart has also been interested in opening Adorno to a dialogue with other philosophical traditions. Bowie's work, inspired in part by that of the German philosopher Manfred Frank, has in particular emphasized Adorno's affinity with German Romanticism, his connections, whether declared or not, to lines of thought initiated by the work of Schelling, Friedrich Schlegel and others.

It is too soon to judge the effect of all this work, and to chronicle it in more detail would be to begin writing the history of last week. I should like to devote the remainder of the space available to me, instead, to a consideration of where research and inquiry might usefully be concentrated in future, of those aspects of Adorno's thinking which remain poorly understood or which seem of particular importance at this moment.

One obvious fact here is that Adorno's work is still continuing to be published: philosophical notebooks, drafts, lecture courses continue to appear, and offer by no means minor adjustments to our understanding of Adorno's thinking. One important instance is the extremely rich draft material for a theory of musical performance, work which may have the potential not only to change what has become a rather over-rigid characterization of Adorno's thinking about music among musicologists, but also to contribute powerfully to reflection on performance in connection with other art forms (poetry, for example). Equally important are the lecture courses which are gradually appearing, and which richly demonstrate the inner integrity, lucidity and coherence of what was for too long assumed to be a hermetic authorship.

Central to Adorno's contemporary relevance is his aesthetic theory. It is now beginning to be much more widely understood that this constitutes a major monument of philosophical aesthetics in the German tradition, rather than, say, an 'application' of Marxist social theory to theory of art. Above all, Adorno offers the possibility, one which might just be crucial to the humanities or human sciences at their current juncture, that materialism and aesthetics need not be thought of as opposites. This is because Adorno offers a powerful continuation and revision of the notion that works of art might be cognitive artefacts. Works of art are attempts to know the world, but attempts which, rather than trying to offer either a copy of the world, or an exhaustive description of it or of some invariant laws of its course, instead proceed by obsessive immersion

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in their own relatively autonomous traditions of making. This idea brings with it a reconfiguration of the notion of technique in art. Technique would now be central to whatever the work of art knows about the world. It is an aspect of making, material through and through; yet it is the same time where the thinking in the work of art also happens. This has consequences both for a non-relativistic aesthetics and for an account of the role played by works of art and by talk about art in social life (Adorno is committed to providing both kinds of account). Any account of art's 'ideological' role can no longer afford to proceed simply by paraphrasing the supposed referential content of a work of art and then linking this paraphrase to a narrative of political struggle contemporaneous with the work of art's production. It cannot do this for a materialist reason: what is being given in such cases overlooks not simply the 'form' of works of art but their very substance, what makes them able to play a role of any kind whatsoever, whether this is thought to be ideological or revelatory. And at the same time, it becomes impossible to give an account of the supposedly ideological effects of works of art without also at the same time giving an account of their possible truth-content. It cannot be open to works of art to occlude, mystify, or conceal social process unless it is in principle also open to them to illuminate, clarify and reveal it.

In the further development of this aesthetic theory several tasks (among many) spring to mind as unfinished business. First, Adorno's speculative re-opening of the question of the aesthetics of natural beauty. A substantial section of Aesthetic Theory offers some possible explanations for the relative downgrading of this area of aesthetics since Kant's third critique, to which it is central, and also begins to open the area up again. This aspect of Adorno's argument has been well commented on in a fine paper by Rodolphe Gasche, and Martin Seel has produced an aesthetics of natural beauty (which, however, is not centrally concerned with Adorno). But the questions posed here by Adorno remain to be answered, or even properly taken up, by philosophical aesthetics. Second, the relation between Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory. The relation between the 'ontology of the wrong state of things' given in the former and the residual ontological commitments unavoidable in the latter remains to be fully clarified. Third, and connectedly, the question of 'form' itself - and, with it, the question of whether 'aesthetics' itself is any longer the right term. Adorno insists (against, for example, Heidegger) on the retention of this word. This is one of many terms which Adorno thinks can neither be defined nor deleted from the lexicon of aesthetics. But the inability to say what 'form' means is more disabling than most. Contemporary understandings have been so shaped by the idea that form starts where cognitive content stops that one wonders whether this word is really susceptible of being reconfigured in the way that Adorno's aesthetic theory would demand. The word itself

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sometimes seems to stand in the way of the kind of account of thinkingthrough-making that Adorno wants to offer.

This brings further to the fore another key question which remains to be properly developed - the relation between Adorno's work, on the one hand, and phenomenological and then fundamental-ontological projects, especially Heidegger's, on the other. There is important work here, notably Morchen's vast attempt to overcome the (rather one-sided) 'refusal to communicate' between the two - an attempt which, while indispensable, renders the material down into so many bits that it is hard to see a path forward - and Diittmann's extremely difficult study, a study which, however, has to be seen first and foremost as a monument of Diittmann's own thinking, and which is relatively uninterested in what I take to be a central task for any attempt to think Adorno with Heidegger - a thorough engagement with the explicit critique of Heidegger mounted in the long section of Negative Dialectics devoted to him. Meanwhile, the question of Adorno's relations to phenomenology remains to be further developed. There was always a strong strain in Adorno's commentary on phenomenology which, as well as voicing suspicion of false immediacy, saw a utopian element in it: a wish for philosophy to open up an access to concrete experience. Although Adorno would certainly have been unable to endorse in its entirety a project such as the late Michel Henry's 'phenomenologie materielle', Adorno's own account in Negative Dialectics, with its attention to a somatic aspect of subjectivity, nevertheless raises problems of a phenomenological nature, problems which remain unresolved in that work.

The central question there, of course, remains that of whether a 'negative' dialectic is at all possible. Time has dulled the fully intended shock contained in this oxymoron, without the question of the possibility of this kind of dialectic ever having been properly resolved. The extradialectical moves necessary to the idea of a 'negative' dialectic cannot, of course, find a dialectical justification. They therefore necessitate the re-introduction of epistemological and metaphysical problems which had earlier been given a 'dialectical' treatment. What has become clearer, perhaps, is the failure of the various attempts rationally to reconstruct Adorno so that he forms less of an embarrassment to second-generation critical theory. As it becomes more and more evident that style is substance in Adorno's thinking, so it becomes clearer that interpretation, if it is to achieve, not merely philological but philosophical results of substance, must pay close attention to chapter and verse in the mode for which Theunissen's and Gasche's readings are models.

Although these look like the currently most vital strains of Adorno's thinking, his social thought also offers resources which might be considered to have been insufficiently exploited. Especially important here is the Dialectic of Enlightenment, an astonishing book which remains fully to

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be assimilated. It is still too often received as though it were a work of speculative universal history, rather than (what it at first was explicitly entitled) a careful constellation of Philosophical Fragments. The more crudely debates about the status and meaning of secularization become polarized between eager secularizers and staunch mythologues, the more important Adorno and Horkheimer's attention to the mutual entanglement of myth and enlightenment becomes.

The criteria governing the selection of writing for these volumes have been various. It will be understood that the editor cannot be assumed likely to agree with, nor certain to admire, everything that appears within these pages. On the other hand, the editor must emphatically not be assumed not to admire whatever might be omitted here. Many fine studies could not find a place because of the constraints upon space. More have no doubt been missed simply because of the editor's ignorance. But merit alone - even were it a simple matter comparatively to quantify the several merits of work in all the widely differing fields in which Adorno worked - could not in fact be the only criterion of selection. One of the aims of the selection was to give some idea of the range of responses to Adorno's thinking. Some work, therefore, is included primarily to serve this subsidiary, representative purpose.

I have throught it best to arrange the essays in alphabetical order of author, with new translations from the German first, followed by essays written originally in, or previously translated into, English. To arrange them thematically or chronologically would, in my view, confer only spurious and misleading kinds of ordering or coherence on a literature which has not yet become settled enough to display those attributes.

This introduction has tried to give reasons for thinking that it might be too early for any definitive assessment of Adorno's importance, and hence for any definitive account of the main lines of interpretation of his work, to be given. The incompleteness of the textual record, the fragmentary and unsatisfactory state of available translations, and the widespread inability to match and rival, rather than to absorb or disconnect, Adorno's thinking, all mean that these possibilities lie, if anywhere, in the future. In the meantime these volumes offer a record of some of the work that has been done so far.

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Simon Jarvis University of Cambridge

1

CAN THEORY BECOME AESTHETIC?

On a principal theme of Adorno's philosophy

Rudiger Rubner

Source: Burkhardt Lindner and W. Martin Liidke (eds), Materia/ien zur iisthetischen Theorie Theodor W. Adornos, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985, pp. 108-37. Translated by Nicholas Walker.

The unspoken foundations

'I make no attempt to decide whether my theory rests upon a certain conception of man and being, but I do deny the necessity of appealing to this conception.' These remarks can be found at the end of the programmatic lecture on 'The Actuality of Philosophy' of 1931 which not only marked the beginning of Adorno's academic career but also announced certain essential themes that would be central to his later philosophy.' And his words already reveal a theoretical self-understanding to which the author would basically remain faithful over the succeeding decades.

The principal theses of Adorno's philosophy arise, like all meaningful claims and especially all theoretical insights, from certain fundamental assumptions. But the form of their theoretical presentation is specifically determined by his deliberate refusal to appeal in an explicit way to these premisses. Most of the fundamental assumptions that we make in our everyday speech or thought appear so self-evident that we pay absolutely no attention to them. The specific task and function of theoretical reflection, on the other hand, is to elucidate and justify these primary assumptions as thoroughly and fundamentally as possible. Philosophical theory was inspired from its very beginning with the ethos of rational justification. And 'rational' here implies a transparent and compelling account of the relationship between our assertions and that which underlies and grounds

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those assertions. Adorno's astonishing formulation, and many other similar ones that could easily be cited here, does not actually repudiate this approach to theory, but uses the traditional conception precisely to challenge its typical claims. Adorno is not interested, therefore, in offering a different type of theory, let alone with rejecting all theoretical reflection in favour of novel and irrational forms of expression. For in fact his thought remains emphatically oriented towards a specifically philosophical conception of theory. And it is only in this context that his refusal to provide rational justifications in the usual sense acquires significance in the first place. But we can certainly say that nothing is more characteristic of Adorno's philosophy than its consistent refusal to fulfil the traditional expectations of philosophical theory.

In the passage we have cited, Adorno's challenge to the necessity of appealing to independently identifiable fundamental assumptions leads him to a defence of the essay form as the appropriate medium of philosophical expression.2 The attitude that typically characterised the early formulation of Adorno's theory returns again and again in different ways later on. He describes his entire enterprise as 'critical theory'. The expression 'negative dialectic' is intended to contrast his own principal intentions polemically with Hegel. And the 'dialectic of enlightenment' is a characteristic watchword of Adorno's thought. But his philosophy only acquires its ultimate and definitive form under the aegis of Aesthetic Theory. And this posthumously published work represents Adorno's real philosophical legacy. The allusive title of this 'aesthetic theory', as is widely recognised, is not meant to refer to a theory of aesthetics that would merely constitute a subordinate part within a greater all-embracing theoretical construction. It is supposed, rather, to indicate that theory itself here becomes aesthetic, that the convergence between art and cognition is now the principal theme of reflection. 'Aesthetics is, however, not applied philosophy, but rather in itself philosophical.'3 But what, precisely, does this ultimately mean?

Genuine respect for significant thinkers demands that we take them seriously in a philosophical sense. And this also implies that we trust in their capacity to furnish serious answers to problems that are either already evident in some way or which they first properly raise and identify as such. This trust allows us in turn to ask questions. One who simply asserts a given doctrine, on the other hand, needs no further questions. And those who routinely invoke the words of the master in scholastically hermetic form surely only reveal a secret contempt by replacing the service of philosophy with the cult of authority. But the phase is clearly past when Adorno's thought threatened to expire in the face of mute veneration or the jargon of epigones. We can now take Adorno seriously in a freer and more independent manner precisely by asking questions of our own.

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THEODOR W. ADORNO

A historical diagnosis

The question that principally interests us here is concerned with the reasons which led Adorno to the ultimate transformation of 'theory' into 'aesthetics'. To raise this question is to refuse Adorno's refusal to give his reasons and to court the possible charge that our own reasoning is inappropriate in the context. The purely stylistic objection which would forbid us even to touch the delicate and self-sufficient web of the original text is generally nothing but an expression of intellectual sophistry and has little to do with genuine philosophical substance. Thus the complaint that Adorno himself would simply have repudiated questions like this, that they can find no possible point of support in Adorno's own work, must surely be resisted. And silence regarding the reasons which brought Adorno to develop the kind of theory that he did itself does nothing to make that theory appear more plausible. There is no compulsion of nature that somehow magically forbids us to speak of these things and no table of prohibitions should prevent the supposed sacrilege of thinking further in our own right.

And in fact Adorno goes some way himself to explain the reasons for his silence in this respect. His argument here is essentially historical. The demand to identify and present the presupposed foundations of our theoretical activity belongs, for Adorno, to an obsolete and idealist exaggeration of the nature and possibilities of philosophy itself and reflects the illusory idea that we could ever provide an absolute beginning for thought. 'However, philosophy which no longer makes the assumption of autonomy, which no longer believes reality to be grounded in ratio, but instead always acknowledges that the sphere of autonomous-rational legislation is broken in upon by a kind of being that is incommensurable with it, being that cannot be rationally construed as a totality. Philosophy will not therefore pursue to its very end a path that leads to rational presuppositions, but will remain there where irreducible reality breaks in. [ ... ] But the irruption of the irreducible transpires in a concretely historical fashion and hence it is history that halts the movement of thought towards such presuppositions.'4

In the first place we should recognise that it is quite insufficient to brand every theoretical quest for fundamental grounding simply as another echo of exaggerated idealist ambition. Ever since Socrates demanded that we give a proper reason (logon didonai) for our claims, the readiness to justify why we speak as we do constitutes an elementary duty of philosophy. Rationalistic systems of thought went further and attempted to demonstrate the absolute and unrevisable character of their own first principles. This was true of Spinoza, and particularly true of Fichte and Schelling, both of whom also naturally appealed to his example in this respect. Hegel, on the other hand, whom Adorno is always willing to cite as a paradigm case of idealist hybris, was actually much more reflective concerning the philosophical

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systems of his contemporaries with their own rapidly overtaken claims for definitive status. The 'absolute' claim which indeed Hegel's philosophy also raised did not spring from historical blindness about its own context or from the merely arbitrary positing of an abstract principle. On the contrary, it was consistently developed on the basis of a conscious philosophical engagement with the experience of the historically conditioned character of philosophy itself. But that is not the question for us here,5

where we are effectively attempting a fundamental clarification of the rational presuppositions of Adorno's claims.

Adorno's reference to the historical irruption of irreducible being either implies some hidden justification of its own or it amounts to nothing more than an incantatory formula. If the former is the case, there are certainly serious difficulties with it as we shall presently see. If the latter is the case, there is no real point to the constant polemic directed against Heidegger. The surprising parallels between Adorno's early philosophical contributions and Heidegger's philosophy of being is certainly something that would merit much closer investigation. From the beginning of his philosophical career Adorno never tired of pillorying the 'new ontology' as a form of ahistorical hypostasis.6 He must have been acutely aware of the disturbing proximity with Heidegger whose influence had already begun to spread with the publication of Being and Time in 1927. The way in which Heidegger expressed his hope for an encounter with being that would immediately reveal itself, after the long degenerative history of official metaphysics, in the dimension of concrete existence and beyond the philosophical sphere sometimes sounds very similar to Adorno's claims. But Adorno also goes out of his way to counter this external appearance and emphasise the difference between their respective positions.

Thus in his post-doctoral dissertation Adorno attempts throughout to challenge the way in which existentialism appealed to Kierkegaard as the Church Father of protest against academic idealist philosophy.7 And Adorno also harshly criticised Heidegger's questionable, and arguably tasteless, attempt to seek refuge in poetic metaphorics once the traditional philosophical language has lost its former power.8 But Adorno's decisive contribution to the marginalisation of Heidegger with respect to his general public influence only appeared rather later. When Heidegger's fame was beginning to fade towards the end of the post-war phase of restoration, Adorno's deliberately polemical pamphlet on The Jargon of Authenticity thus came out at just the right moment. From this time onwards the laconic formula 'being' was increasingly replaced by the more complex formula of 'the non-identical'. In both cases, the expression was intended to capture a reality which eludes the purely sovereign philosophical concept and without which the latter could never arise in the first place. Only the recognition of reality in this sense first genuinely opens up the dimension of truth to the concept.

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If we are not satisfied simply with emphatic assurances, we can interpret this reference to a historical experience which forbids recourse to explicitly thematised intellectual presuppositions as an unacknowledged justification of the kind of theory in question. This brings us to the second possible way of understanding the remarks of Adorno which we cited at the beginning. The justification would have to recognise that specifically today, under contemporary conditions and in the current state of society, it has now become impossible to continue the practice of philosophy in the older naive manner. Adorno's writings are, of course, full of just such observations and formulations. But in what sense does the description of the particular historical present suffice to justify us in decisively relinquishing 'traditional theory' in favour of 'critical theory' alone? The readiest answer to this question refers us to what Adorno calls the seamless context of delusion.

According to this view of the matter, ideology has now become so total that there is no possibility of evading it ~ and even the attempt to do so would betray the true cause of spirit. The simple expression of how things are would fall victim to this delusion insofar as it fails to add that what is the case 'ought' not be what it fundamentally and in its entirety is. Every utterance that serves the truth would simultaneously have to revoke its own content. But this kind of paradoxical expression would already leave the restricted possibilities of theory far behind. We can therefore only place our hopes in a different form of expression, namely in art. The truth of discursive knowledge is unshrouded, but that is why such knowledge lacks truth. The knowledge that is art has truth, but as something incommensurable with art. '9

The compulsion to totality

Before art can function as a replacement for theory in the way which we have suggested, it is clearly necessary to discuss the difficulties involved in the implied historical diagnosis. The argument at issue is not a question of the realistic evaluation of the political situation or of the possibility of introducing specific corrections and improvements here or there. Nor is it a question of strategic moralising that is all too easily calculated to silenc~ innocent doubts about the analysis by invoking actual historical catastrophies. What is problematic here is rather the ossified form which the historical diagnosis itself threatens to assume by insisting that everything is, in every respect, exactly as the diagnosis claims it is. To introduce the idea of a wholly universal context of delusion radically deprives theoretical reflection of its own freedom. For in this context every content appears, without exception and at a stroke, simply as another instance of reification. Theory thus falls victim entirely to the compulsion which it was itself intended to describe.

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The processes of hypothetical reasoning, of argumentative debate, of evaluation, examination and rejection, of reciprocal and self-critical questioning - all this tends to fall away once the historical diagnosis has named the spell that universally governs the current world. Under these conditions it would be simple self-deception for theory to proceed as if nothing fundamental had occurred. The moment when historical truth is revealed is also the moment when, in a kind of negative kairos, it also decisively vanishes from sight. For a theory which suspects the ineluctable falsehood of all claims to knowledge it is now clear that truth is no longer possible in the domain of theory, and this subjects its own concepts to an entirely external, heteronomous, form of determinism.

But the ossification of theory, a process reflected back upon it by the character of its own object, fundamentally contradicts the express intentions of Adorno's critique and dialectic. The totality which theory ascribes to ideology now entirely consequently binds the hands of critique itself. Given the superior power of current reality, the only possible reaction to it is strict negativity. The all-embracing character which, according to the theory itself, typifies the actual ideological state of things can only drive theory to the undifferentiated denunciation of the ideology implied in anything and everything. The false ideal of totality which an expressly critical theory ascribes to the traditional systems of philosophy thus returns to haunt the theory itself and threatens to destroy its own critical capacities.

For this theory already knows what it must do irrespective of its object in any particular case. Theory must treat its object critically lest the concrete form of the latter might seduce the former to approach it without preconceptions. Theory must preserve its distance to the changing phenomena it encounters, indeed must constantly reassert that distance. It must define itself again and again, through an endless sequence of reflective acts, precisely in opposition to the given. Theory thus obeys an inner impulse to self-activation that simply looks like the counterpart to the formerly derided self-certainty of the idealist philosophical concept.1° Critical theory persists in maintaining an entirely unclarified front against idealism insofar as it fails to recognise that it generates the compulsion to totality to which it finds itself subjected.

Critical theory is therefore not nearly as concrete or historical as it interprets itself to be. In fact it is based upon comprehensive and a priori assumptions of its own. The leading conceptual motifs that defined its beginnings also remained binding for the later development of the theory. Adorno later encapsulated them in a single remark: 'There is in fact an ontology that has persisted throughout history, that of despair. If that ontology, however, is what endures, then thought experiences every age, and especially its own, of which it has direct knowledge, as the worst.' 11 The prior certainty that everything is always entirely bad allows the present

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to appear in the worst possible light. The historical diagnosis is governed by previously assumed knowledge that escapes serious discussion.

The type of theory which refuses to appeal explicitly to the foundations that actually support it - because this would only falsely repeat a historically obsolete model of argument - thus rests upon an inflated theory of history of ontological dimensions. Without this theoretical foundation the postulate that traditional conceptions of theory must be renounced entirely in favour of the critique of ideology could never be demanded in such an emphatic way. The genuinely underlying theory itself can only be discussed, of course, at the cost of directly infringing the postulate in question. The validity of the theoretical foundations could only be determined by entering into just such a discussion in the first place. This alone would facilitate the kind of undogmatic assessment that all of Adorno's remarks deliberately appear to rule out. One can only follow the traces which the process of silently ignoring the foundations of the theory has left behind. These traces lead us into the realm of aesthetics.

For the refusal to discuss the theoretical foundations certainly does not reflect a purely petty obsession with mystification. On the contrary, this silence acquires a new function in the architectonic framework of Adorno's complex and involved ideas and arguments. The fact that the theory itself is no longer thematised here must be interpreted in a manner that properly explains the transition from philosophy to aesthetics. For Adorno finds a particular way of precisely expressing the repudiation of theoretical grounding as such. Instead of adopting Wittgenstein's maxim, which enjoins silence concerning that of which we cannot speak, Adorno transforms aesthetics into the only legitimate way of speaking about the refusal to speak of theory.

The Dialectic of Enlightenment

It has long been recognised that Dialectic of Enlightenment provides the proper key for understanding the central problems of Adorno's aesthetic theory. 12 The studies which comprise this book, written in collaboration by Horkheimer and Adorno under the impact of political exile, exhibit features of a shared self-analysis which has effectively been translated into general philosophical terms. The work assumes a central place in the work of both authors insofar as it exercises critical reflection upon itself rather than upon something else. 13 In view of the historical experience of Fascism, and equally of the Stalinist perversion of Marx's thought, it had become necessary to acknowledge a task that had been outstanding ever since Marx had founded the idea of a materialist critique of ideology.

What is the precise standpoint of the critique which thoroughly penetrates the ideological illusion by explicating 'consciousness' in relation to the 'being' that determines it? Critical consciousness must also be rooted in the same being about which it would critically enlighten our ideological

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or everyday consciousness. If we are not simply to appeal to the kind of 'free-floating intelligentsia' envisaged by the 'sociology of knowledge', 14

what is this being in which the critic too is rooted, albeit in such a way that he escapes the danger of ideology? Or could the critique of ideology, unknown to itself, be as exposed to the power of ideology as the other theoretical perspectives that it would criticise? Lukacs was one of the first to address the problem of the petrified enlightenment of Marxist orthodoxy, and he attempted to remedy the situation by introducing a Hegelian concept of reflection into the concept of class. The productive influence of Lukacs's major study on History and Class Consciousness on the early Frankfurt School should not be underestimated. Nonetheless, the supposed commitment of the proletariat, as the only potentially revolutionary class, to the historically appropriate consciousness could not prevent the actual political collapse of the hopes originally maintained by the theory. Regression thus comes to take the place of expected progress. ls there a convincing explanation for this enigmatic development?

The idea of a dialectic of enlightenment suggests a possible answer to this question. For this dialectic is one that inwardly afflicts the enlightenment itself rather than simply and unambiguously serving its ends and interests. Whereas Marx had essentially identified the dialectical method and the general intentions of enlightenment, here the process of enlightenment itself falls victim to a dialectical reversal that effectively transpires behind its own back. 15 The critique which the young Hegel had already directed against the one-sided enlightenment mentality of the mere 'understanding' in the name of a higher and more concrete 'reason' can be seen as an anticipation of this line of thought. But whereas Hegel's critique of the enlightenment implied the overcoming or 'sublation' of abstract and onesided thought and thus inaugurated the development of a speculative dialectic, the dialectic of enlightenment envisaged by Horkheimer and Adorno hardly terminates in this kind of perfect conceptual comprehension. On the contrary, the consummation of absolute idealism functions precisely as a permanent warning. How can we employ the instrument of dialectic and simultaneously protect ourselves against its consequences?

It is necessary to resist the automatic extension of the dialectical critique of abstract enlightenment thought that leads to the edifice of autonomous theory as embodied in the Hegelian system. We must acknowledge a certain indissoluble and original right to the dimension from which enlightenment thought promised to deliver us. The priority of this obscure, already given, pre-worldly dimension is revealed by the fact that enlightenment reason fails, for all its efforts, to penetrate it thoroughly and transparently. The confident struggle to elevate substance, which initially appeared so alien to reason, to the level of the concept ultimately destroys itself. For the more reason is convinced of itself, and of the correctness of its procedures, the more it comes to resemble the principle it

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attempts to overcome. The omnipotence of reason eventually becomes as irrational as the elemental despotism of nature from which the evolution of human culture had originally begun to deliver us. The dialectic of enlightenment thus expiates an original fall which immemorially drove human beings from a state of paradise into the world of history.

The authors attempt to convey this obscure nexus, difficult as it is to grasp at a stroke, by introducing the concept of myth. They may have been inspired by the Judaic tradition here, but their own use of the term is, at any rate, quite different from the usual one. One may well think of Rousseau's ambivalent narrative in trying to understand a state of nature that is only retrospectively identified from the subsequent standpoint of total enlightenment, a state of nature in which the hopes of enlightenment are distantly reflected and the entire guilt of culture appears to have been cleansed. 'Myth' here is not a word that stands for a primordial beginning from which human reason has slowly and successfully emerged. Rather reason is already implicit in the oldest myths and the mythical retains a presence throughout the entire process of historical enlightenment. The culmination of knowledge is a regression to the earliest state of things, and this itself confounds the expectations of enlightened thinkers by showing that nothing has essentially changed at all.

The word 'myth', more closely considered, names a dimension that is actually withdrawn from the historical dialectic precisely because it grounds the latter. 16 The movement of enlightenment and its reversal stand in relation to a stratum which appears to regulate real historical processes according to the principle of attraction and repulsion. The failures and the limitations of all historical advance are thus clearly revealed. For whatever direction history may take, it never escapes its original condition. 17 Over against this predicament, we find the corresponding, albeit only vaguely described, ideal of an eschatological reconciliation where all tensions would be resolved, all error eliminated, all historical change brought to a standstill. In life as it still is we know of this condition, which lies beyond our rational capacities but is therefore also safe from any danger of ideological contamination, only through the pseudo-reality of art. 18

This conception undeniably implies a philosophical claim that cannot itself be rationally redeemed because it is intended to expose the original limitation of all ratio. It is thus impossible to compare and assess one-sided perspectives in relation to one another, according to a formal schema of relativity, in order to establish a rational and mediating position on a higher level of thought. If this step were permissible, we could readily acknowledge both the justified position of myth against reason and that of reason against myth. The equally justified mediation of myth and reason, of immediacy and mediation itself, to express this in Hegelian terms, would bring theory, interpreted as speculative dialectics, to its final adequate form. For it would still be reason which here celebrates victory over its own self-motivated


trial and challenge. In accordance with idealist doctrine, the limitation of reason can be overcome by nothing but reason itself.

If the internal movement towards an idealist form of system is to be resisted, we must identify a hindrance, and that a not merely empirical one, that counters this development. It must in principle be recognisable as a hindrance without this knowledge simply becoming a defeat for reason. The 'dialectic of enlightenment' is the conceptual expression of this situation. This dialectic must be conceptually illuminating and must not simply dissolve its object precisely through its own conceptual form. In other words: the description of the situation cannot possibly distance itself from the inner reversal which it describes. Every purely external theoretical position is thus excluded in principle. Tua res agitur ~ this is the moral which theory itself must draw from the dialectic of enlightenment. But how precisely is this to be accomplished? What possible site still remains for a theory which affirms the hopeless invalidity of all theory?

Philosophy does possess a concept which, as itself a rational creation of extreme subtlety, can conceptually indicate the limit of the conceptual itself: the concept of semblance. Semblance is precisely what the concept is not, insofar as the concept can ever know what it is not. From the very beginning philosophy has attempted to capture the essence of art with reference to this concept. 19 'Semblance' is one of the terms which articulates the problem of the dialectic of enlightenment. A philosophical approach which properly addresses this problem must cross the dividing line between art and thought.20

The dogma of opposition

For a philosophy which feels obliged to translate its own deepest intentions into the medium of art it would seem that Schelling's philosophy of art represents the most relevant point of comparison. 21 Schelling wished to present the absolute indifference of subject and object, which philosophy is not capable of expressing without already conceptually destroying it in the process, in the intuitive mode of being proper to art. The climax of conceptual reflective achievement, the self-abandonment of thought to an ultimate unbroken unity, simultaneously marks the limit of the discursive philosophy of the concept. In art, on the other hand, that unity appears, effortlessly and undistortedly, to become a reality. If the enterprise of letting art speak for philosophy in this way is to be successfully realised at all, it is clearly necessary to clarify and specify the relationship between art and philosophy.

Schelling appealed to the concept of an organon 22 in order to express the relationship which philosophy assumes towards the neighbouring domain of art precisely in order to remedy its own weakness without thereby violating the integrity of art itself. This means, on the one hand, that art must be conceded complete autonomy in its own right, that it cannot be replaced by some construct that simply answers to the apodictic interests

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and claims of philosophy. Art must not be conceived as an ancilla phi/osophiae if it is to perform the service which philosophy expects precisely from its autonomous character. But on the other hand, it must be possible to describe and characterise the function which art assumes in the name of philosophy. Nothing would be gained here either by invoking extravagant feelings of simple identification, where one domain is simply fused with another, or postulating some state of neutral coexistence where neither side had anything to say to the other. In view of this dilemma, the Aristotelian model of an organon is obviously a kind of emergency measure. For art cannot be instrumentalised in relation to philosophy in the way in which a tool or other instrument is properly subordinated to its relevant purpose. For it is precisely the irreplaceable parity of art with philosophy that permits it to give voice to the ultimate enigmas of the latter. That is why Schelling subsequently abandoned the model of the organon and attempted to grasp the difficult relationship between art and philosophy in a more indirect way. 23

The general programme of critical theory occupies a fraught position in between the extremes of Kant's doctrine of the thing in itself and Hegel's absolute concept, a field that had already been prepared through the labours of Marx and the Young Hegelians. Under these particular conditions philosophical aesthetics would most naturally be expected to turn to Schelling, although this is something that has hitherto remained largely unexplored by historical commentators and interpreters. If we pursue this suggestion more closely, we may be able to clarify the question concerning the relationship between art and philosophy more explicitly than Adorno was willing to do. It is true that Adorno always emphasised the convergence between art and philosophy with regard to knowledge, but it is much more difficult to understand precisely how this convergence itself should be conceptualised.

In the first place, not all art necessarily involves knowledge. In opposition to idealist naivety in such matters, the critic of ideology strictly distinguishes between authentically enlightening works of art and those which simply belong to the 'culture industry' and therefore merely help to perpetuate the general bewitchment of consciousness. This distinction does not simply coincide with a qualitative assessment of art according to purely aesthetic criteria, but rather presupposes a sensitive and acutely developed awareness of the relevant historical situation. The responsiveness of the critic of art is itself developed by an extra-aesthetic, that is to say, by a philosophical and sociological knowledge with respect to the factors which determine the shape of the present and to the potential for a different kind of future. Now Adorno constantly emphasises that the most aesthetically significant works are also those which are most progressively minded. Artistic and political evaluation come together here. And this rather echoes Benjamin's exaggerated attempt to grasp 'the author as producer' in such a radical


manner that mastery of the artistic material in the productive process essentially coincides with a progressive political outlook.24 Consummate technique and endorsement of the proper course of history both point in the same direction: advanced works of art. 25

This notion effectively combines genuine knowledge of and insight concerning art with an evaluation of its progressive content in accordance with the true interests of human beings. And the resulting way of talking about the reconciliation of the universal and particular reminds us of the classical poetics of German literature, of Goethe's concept of the symbol, for example.26 But the critic also takes over the poetologist's words in order to prevent the deception that could easily arise if we forget the unreality of this reconciliation, its persisting absence, its utopian remoteness. The work of art must therefore represent two different things at once: the concrete and the particular as something that refuses to be stifled by the abstract universal, but asserts its own fights in accordance with an authentic universal, and the current irreality of such reconciliation. 27 The contradiction between harmony and its non-fulfilment takes shape as form in the genuine work, this is what determines the authentic status of significant works of art. And their historical meaning must find expression precisely in their artistically fashioned structure and composition.

This requires that the supposedly external evaluative categories of the interpreter are actually embodied in the work. The work itself expresses or articulates something that only the interpreter of the historical process can properly know about. And indeed a specific form of art with this kind of internalised consciousness of its own historical position has actually appeared: the art of modernism. The consistent and explicit distantiation from the traditional aesthetic canons which we characteristically associate with modern art would seem to furnish the paradigm for Adorno's general conception. For the contradiction between the immanent closed structure of the work and the immediate disruption of its harmonious character has clearly become an emphatic reality here. The critic finds his own demands entirely embedded in the artistic form and assumes the subordinate role of a mere recipient whom art spontaneously presents with whatever he may require. Of course, the role of the critic would simply become superfluous if the relation were not also rather more complicated than this. For certainly not every artistic product of the last hundred years or so can be regarded as progressive, however 'modern' it may otherwise appear to be. It is still necessary, in this new musee imaginaire, to separate the sheep from the goats. Thus the function of the critic, which initially seemed to have been fused together with the work, is renewed after all. The required distinction between good and bad works is that between progressive and reactionary ones.

This reaffirmation of the critic's task within the context of modern art shows that the formal law of the modern production of art is in truth merely introduced to support a postulate that the critical theorist of art

THEODOR W. ADORNO

has already laid down. For uninstructed perception alone cannot possibly reveal the meaning of art. We must possess proper historical and philosophical categories in order to be able to penetrate the structure of works of art in the first place. 'Of course, an immanent method of this kind always presupposes, as its counter-pole, a philosophical knowledge that transcends the object. It cannot rely, as Hegel suggests, upon a posture of merely "looking on".' 28 This is precisely demonstrated by the distinction between advanced art and all other art which simply seems to resemble it. Without such categories, for example, the controversy between Schoenberg and Stravinsky, which Adorno himself actively develops, would amount to nothing but an entirely academic dispute between two schools of composition.29 Philosophy itself introduces something that is not actually contained in the innocent works of art themselves, and could never be contained there: namely the negation of existing reality.

It is this thought that thereby furnishes the keystone of aesthetic reflection. Now it becomes clear why an external comparison between the work of art itself and social reality is required in order to discover in certain works at least - if not in all art - the moment of contradiction. If art simply stood opposed in general to reality, then the distinction between progressive and ideologically tainted works of art would lose all sense. If art simply repeated in perfected form the repudiation of reality which is embodied in the closed and completed work, it would forfeit its specific point over against the world external outside it, it would ossify its protest in the image itself and fall victim once again to a harmonising ideology on a higher level. Adorno was therefore quite consistent in vigorously rejecting the notion of explicitly 'engaged' art. 30 Only art that remains entirely itself, which refuses to generate a specific effect beyond itself, resists the prevailing form of reality with sufficient independence to permit us to glimpse the relevant opposition between art and reality. The total autonomy of art itself thus stands in radical opposition to the universal context of social illusion. But it is only from a third position, beyond the reification of everyday life and artistic production alike, that this context is effectively revealed in its own right. It is this position which the critical thinker claims to occupy.

The analysis must be pursued up to this point if we are to begin to find some response to the question we originally posed above. With regard to the attempted articulation of philosophy in terms of aesthetics, it was clear that we must clarify the character of the reciprocal relationship involved here. A mere melange of works of art and general ideas can hardly yield the kind of knowledge for the sake of which the issue of art was explicitly raised in the first place. It is clear that it is basically two corresponding and interacting assumptions that facilitate the claim that art and philosophy both effectively strive toward a single cognitive goal. On the one hand, we find Adorno's conviction concerning the all-encompassing


ideological character of reality, and on the other, his insistence upon the complete autonomy of artistic technique. Taken in their extreme form, these two claims urgently provoke the emphatic demand for truth. The doubling of art and reality, which both equally follow their own laws and thus inevitably persist in unmediated opposition to one another, must be originally posited as dogma if the ensuing conclusions are really to appear valid.

It is this unchallenged dogma which allows us to establish the specific relationship between art and philosophy with regard to knowledge. The negation which art performs in accordance with its essential character as the counterpart of a fetishised reality tends at least to break the ideological spell. Art therefore, as if by a fortunate dispensation, already finds itself in close proximity to a philosophy which seeks to wrest itself free of the dialectic of enlightenment. The negation which art already embodies is concretely grasped as such when the critical thinker explicitly brings the work of interpretation into play. Critical theory, which attempts to expose the false appearance of reality through an endless series of negating reflections, finds itself confirmed from another quite different quarter insofar as art, in its very work character, objectively presents the problem which philosophical thought was unable to resolve. In other words: the cognitive potential harboured in art requires expression in relation to the immanent structures of the artistic product and the process of enlightenment that constantly threatens to revert to its own opposite is unburdened by intuitively glimpsing the authentic liberation from heteronomous compulsion. But this correlation itself must be assumed a priori. Pure theory actually prevails here, even though it cannot acknowledge the fact.

Mimesis and work

The matter appears even more complex when we turn to consider the experience of art itself. Simply on its own, intuitive perception of the work, whether apprehended through vision or hearing, is insufficient to disclose the truth content of works of art. The kind of aesthetics which seeks support for its critique of ideology specifically from modern art is already compelled to abandon the classical aesthetic faith that beauty intrinsically dispenses its own light without need of further mediation. For Adorno the original and authentic experience of art already requires theory itself. 'The demand of works of art that they be understood, that their content be grasped, is bound to the specific experience of the works; but it can only be fulfilled by way of the theory that reflects this experience.' 31 If it is theory which first fulfils what is harboured in experience, then the critical and enlightening function of art in turn depends upon the undiminished autonomy of the aesthetic form of the work which must not be distorted by reference to the extra-aesthetic requirements of conceptual demonstration. What the works themselves, in their own right, have to say to us, is only disclosed in

THEODOR W. ADORNO

the context of philosophical knowledge if, in a sense, the latter learns to ignore its specific contribution. Philosophy must deliberately forget what it brings to the interpretation of the work of art. Otherwise we would clearly pervert art by turning it into an object of conceptual demonstration that merely serves the dominating impulse of purely sovereign thought, instead of permitting it to announce an unsubsumable right of its own.

Adorno's aesthetics seeks to avoid this self-generated dilemma by appealing to the oldest term familiar to us in the philosophy of art, although its specific role is also subjected to a remarkable transformation in this new context. In the philosophical tradition the term mimesis signified a kind of representation that 'imitates' an independently given and already existing reality. Such mimesis was regarded as remote from the conceptual realm on account of its derived or secondary status32 and was thereby relegated to a much lower anthropological level of experience. 33 For Adorno, on the other hand, the non-conceptual character of mimesis, its participation in an original stratum of experience, actually becomes a virtue, while the secondary and dependent status of all mimesis also appears to acquire a higher value here. The recourse to a mimetic perspective is intended philosophically to repair the damage that has been wrought by the sovereign domination of the concept. 'To defend the cause of the mimesis it has suppressed, the concept has no other way than to incorporate something mimetic into its own approach, without simply abandoning itself to mimesis. The aesthetic moment is thus not accidental to philosophy, though on grounds quite different from those of Schelling.'34

Through mimesis the human mind restores an almost pre-historical attitude to things. We thus make intimate and unforced contact with things other than ourselves and relinquish our demand for control for the sake of concrete experience. And blind imitation, which philosophy has always regarded as beneath itself through its own pursuit of perfect conceptual precision, furnishes a required corrective to the deployment of an automatically functioning categorial apparatus now devoid of genuine substantive content. To the degree that the theoretical sovereignty of thought is curbed, philosophy comes ever closer to the domain of art which the concept itself had once slighted. Artistic mimesis thus acquires an entirely new significance once the monopolistic claims of theory over the true content of experience have been challenged.

This re-evaluation of the concept of mimesis, as a corrective to a purely theoretical approach, inevitably brings Adorno into a certain vicinity with the established aesthetic doctrine of imitation as a reflection of reality. The further extension of the traditional principles of mimetic aesthetics in the Marxist theory of 'reflection' in particular could not fail to provoke a critical response from Adorno. The later Lukacs had defended, on Marxist premisses, an entirely orthodox theory of art as the reflection of an independently given reality that was to be correctly described and depicted


as such. It is no surprise that Adorno emphatically repudiated this conception of mimesis, which replaces knowledge with images and effectively encourages the mystification rather than the exposure of the true state of things. 'The most fundamental weakness of Lukacs's position may be that [ ... ] he applies categories that refer to the relationship between consciousness and reality to art as though they simply meant the same thing here. Art exists within reality, has its function in it, and is also inherently mediated with reality in many ways. But nevertheless, as art, by its very concept it stands in an antithetical relationship to the status quo.'35

But Adorno's newly elaborated concept of mimesis can be defended against the dominant power of the more traditional notions of imitation only by recourse to rather ingenious reasoning. Mimesis as a kind of elementary solidarity with things that transcends the petrified structures of conceptuality is not available to us as an inviolable residuum to which the exhausted concept can always appeal. It would be a deception for philosophy to believe, as if by uttering its own 'Open Sesame!', that it could reactivate archaic strata of anthropological experience. Without further argument and clarification the concept of mimesis tells us nothing. This is clear from the fact that the conflict between Lukacs and Adorno involves little more than one assertion being bandied with another, and the readily cited witnesses for the defence, whether Samuel Beckett or Thomas Mann, only get to speak when they are simply invoked for the purpose from one position or the other. 36 From this point of view, Adorno's recourse to mimesis as a kind of 'mimicry' of the spirit remains unconvincing.

There is another final conclusion that should also be considered here. Adorno's aesthetics cannot avoid restoring the category of the work in undiminished form even while it constantly documents its emphatic decline. Where should that reconciliation of the concrete and the universal, elevated beyond all conceptual schematisation, transpire if not in some intrinsically independent sphere of its own? And what can hold up a revealing mirror to a wretched reality if not some truly objective court of judgement? To what else can reflection cling, threatening to founder in the wake of the dialectic of enlightenment, if not to the sensuous products of mimetic behaviour? There can be no doubt whatsoever about the fundamental importance of the category of the 'work' for Adorno's entire enterprise. His general theoretical reflections, as well as his specific critical and material analyses, testify on every page to his methodical insistence and reliance upon the concrete givenness of works.

But there is equally no doubt that the phenomenon of modem art itself, upon which Aesthetic Theory is clearly based, represents a single consistent process of dissolution as far as the category of 'the work' is concerned. 37

If this variety of artistic contributions, which is crudely enough described as 'modern' art, can be brought under a common denominator that justifies this unified epochal characterisation, it is surely the fundamental tendency

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to destroy the traditional category of the work. In this respect the spectrum of possibilities ranges from playful scepticism through ironic distantiation and surrealist provocation to a wholesale rejection of unity, a radical reduction of any explicit formative contribution, and a constitutive acknowledgement of chance and contingency. Modern works deny the ontological status of art as a kind of second reality that, despite its intrinsically produced character, was still regarded as equal in significance to originally given reality. The ergon, understood as an autarchic bearer of meaning, effectively disappears here. Even when the artistic products are not expressly calculated to disappoint the processes of cultural reception which complete and self-contained works typically expect, they still tend to present themselves as an occasion for engaging the imagination and encouraging the active contribution of the viewer or listener. Art that once presented itself in terms of independent works now finds itself abandoned to a process that unpredictably unfold beyond the parameters of any stable and finished form.

This insight is not new, and nor does it need to be discussed exclusively in relation to Adorno, although he certainly described this modern process of the dissolution of the work with great perceptiveness and sensitivity. There are two arguments which are frequently raised against this thesis. It is often claimed that the dissolution of traditional forms of works of art simply gives rise to new works. If this is correct, the modern movement in art is not nearly as intrinsically revolutionary as its self-understanding suggests. For modern art would simply represent a further phase in the long history of stylistic transformation and epochal cultural change which the discipline of art history can calmly continue to classify and categorise as before. But in this case the analyses which are so crucial to Adamo's Aesthetic Theory would immediately appear irrelevant and invalid. For he explicitly attempts to interpret the emphatically innovative and 'protesting' character of modern art as a kind of 'enlightenment.'38 If we wish to defend a critical aesthetics like Adamo's, we obviously cannot seriously entertain the comforting argument that there is nothing really new about the new.39

The other argument we often hear claims that modern art merely resolutely exposes what has always essentially been peculiar to art.40 A certain fragility and contingency would thus constitute the original character of art as such and the idea of substantial content in art would simply be a deceptive appearance. There are two possibilities here. Either this view of the matter merely retrojects a contemporary perspective upon the entire history of art. Modern art would thus no longer be modern, but simply a new way of illuminating what has long since been familiar to us. But this way of immediately applying the present to the past and effacing all historical differences surely simply produces inappropriate and misleading simplifications. Or, on the other hand, we can appeal to the Marxian


dictum that the anatomy of man provides the key to that of the ape, and follow a teleological model which interprets the contemporary stage of development as the culmination of the whole previous history of art. We can then effectively survey the unfolding of all earlier stages from the perspective of the end of the process. Apart from the methodologically questionable historical teleology implied here, whose idealist ancestry is also quite evident in Marx despite all his materialist applications, this faith in historical progress effectively robs aesthetics of its critical force once the actual genesis of the process of enlightenment has been properly grasped. Our rational capacities are not remotely approaching their genuine fulfilment at all - or so Adorno claims. On the contrary, art now counters the process of rationalisation and attempts, like Faust returning to the realm of the mothers, to revive the original mimetic strata of human experience. Art becomes the final refuge from which we may glimpse the ever growing deception at the heart of history.

There is no avoiding this intrinsically unstable synthesis: modern art dissolves the traditional attitude and orientation to the 'work' and this accounts specifically for its critical character - but modern art can only articulate itself in individual works because critical consciousness no longer finds a place outside or beyond the immanent structures of artistic fabrication. Adorno quite consciously embraces this paradoxical situation. There is no purely theoretical solution to the paradox. It can only be further explored with a certain tendency to casuistry, although Adorno's analyses of texts or scores sometimes effectively reveal the tense relationship between communicative and fragmented unity that is played out in particular cases. It is this which generally explains the often acknowledged strength of Adorno's aesthetic theory with regard to its individual interpretations of art. In this connection the priority ascribed to 'works' does not merely reflect the particular talents and preferences of the writer, but rests upon an eminently systematic foundation. But it nonetheless remains the case that the examples offered for a theory cannot replace the discursive grounds of the theory in question. However plausibly Adorno can illustrate his general insights in relation to particular literary or musical cases, there is little demonstrative force in the application of the theory. For every interpretation of Adorno's depends far too strongly on his hermeneutical starting point and indeed on his own rhetorical skill. If we read or listen to the same works from a different perspective or with a different intention, they can always to some extent also be understood differently. The emphatic gesture with which Adorno's interpretations typically make their effect, where alternative approaches tend to be excluded in advance as vulgar or ideological, only conceals the ambiguity and uncertainty involved here. The way in which Adorno deliberately transposes questions of principle to the interpretations of specific works illegitimately effaces the difference between aesthetic theory and aesthetic experience itself.

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THEODOR W. ADORNO

Aesthetic experience

The role of aesthetic experience in the context of Adorno's aesthetic theory actually remains particularly enigmatic. Strictly speaking, it is impossible to analyse how works of art exercise the effect they do once we assume a specific effect from the start insofar as the theory bases its own observations and conclusions entirely on this effect. The possibility of further analysis disappears because the theoretical means available for analysing the aesthetic effect are already defined in terms of the aesthetic paradigm in question. How would we even begin such an investigation? Since the works of art ultimately stand in the service of theory in order to produce the knowledge that theory demands of them, the final result is already decided before the encounter with the particular concrete work. The theory knows that works of art make a critical intervention because it knows that only the autonomy of works can defy the blind and deluded course of the world. The theory therefore also knows what is genuinely progressive or avant-garde and what, for all its apparent modernity, has merely taken a regressive path.

Since art, in the full range of its varied forms, repeatedly serves to document the underlying structural claim, it would appear, to put it bluntly, that the individual experience of the particular work were no longer required. For everything now echoes back the sound of one's own voice. The appeal which is undeniably exerted by the concrete interpretations lies more in the intellectual versatility and fascination with detail which unlocks the expected echo in each case than in the freedom and breadth of understanding that marks an interpreter prepared to encounter the unexpected.

This prior conviction concerning the knowledge harboured in the work of art, which makes actual experience superfluous, to my mind reveals the inner limit of this kind of critical aesthetics. For the theoretically over-determined character of the governing aesthetic conception clearly shows its problematic consequences here. All interpretations, of course, are invariably developed in the light of a more or less explicit theoretical framework. But if we locate the entire theoretical potential of our approach in the works themselves, it is hardly surprising if they ultimately reveal precisely what we have invested in them. In this way aesthetic theory itself becomes entirely self-sufficient41 and narcissistically protects itself from external doubt or radical challenge. Nothing unfamiliar can ever be encountered in principle. Nothing new can be experienced because the theory has already defined all the relevant possibilities. Genuine experience, on the other hand, involves a readiness for the unforeseen that no theory itself can replace.

The true contrast with any purely theoretical certitude, a contrast which Adorno's aesthetics is essentially concerned to express, only appears when


we acknowledge a readiness to encounter something that is not already shaped and predefined by theory. Aesthetic experience itself must become the basis of reflection. And a theory, above all, which is intrinsically conceived in terms of critique would have to take aesthetic experience particularly seriously. The critical suspicion concerning the supposed authenticity of reality as it is must be aroused in the first place precisely because the enormous psychological power of omnipresent ideology intrinsically tends to repress every possibility for doubt. But this petrified appearance of rightness and inevitability can be dissolved if there is freedom to confront the official view of reality with alternative visions and perspectives. This freedom can only be developed in the first instance through an unrestricted play of reflection. This play of reflection unfolds in an original manner in every aesthetic experience.

And in fact the encounter with aesthetic phenomena, in contrast with everyday experience, does not necessarily activate the particular ordering functions of the cognitive understanding or impose them upon the object of experience. While the activity of consciousness is awakened by aesthetic experience, it is not functionally directed or restricted in the process. On the contrary, this rare kind of experience discloses new and hitherto unrealised possibilities for consciousness. The manner in which we are actually affected by art reveals previously unsuspected ways of liberating us from rigid and already established forms of perception. And the extreme manifestations of modern art in particular require a greater openness to the full range of such experience.

Our description of aesthetic experience here obviously recalls Kant. And it is time we rediscovered the significance of his analysis of the way in which aesthetic phenomena affect our consciousness, and challenged the idea that it has really been overtaken by the approaches of Schelling or Hegel.42 Critical exposure to modern art should specifically free us from reliance upon a rigidly established canon of works and reaffirm a play of reflection which, provoked though not prejudged by art, liberates new possibilities for consciousness. Art shows itself for what it is by activating thought unbound by external constraints and by encouraging an independent play of reflection that no longer depends on conceptual principles. Only art that releases the free play of our cognitive powers, by loosening any fixed connection to some perfectly defined an determined task or function, resists the possibility of re-appropriation by conceptual thought.

Those works, on the other hand, whose innermost character according to Adorno amount to nothing but critique, fail to foster criticism. They fetter rather than liberate our cognitive powers. Works that are utterly constituted through radical opposition to reality are simply the reverse side of those images that content themselves with a harmless reproduction of the existing world. In both cases the receptive consciousness is condemned to an essentially predetermined, almost mechanical, kind of

THEODOR W. ADORNO

reaction. Whichever concept of the work of art is involved, this approach effectively underestimates the dimension of aesthetic experience which is only revealed where such positive or negative demands are relinquished.

The dialectic of the limit or philosophy and art

We can elucidate this undervaluation of aesthetic experience by considering the dialectical method of Hegel to which Adorno likes to appeal at strategically decisive points of his argument. Hegel's fundamental objection to the Kantian idea of the 'thing in itself', which in a sense is resurrected in Adorno's conception of the non-identical, appeals to a dialectic of the limit. According to Hegel's analysis, something can only be known to be limited from a perspective which already transcends it. Limits can never be drawn solely from one side of an alleged divide. The recognition of a limit thus implies its potential overcoming. In its argument with Hegel Adorno's own Negative Dialectics cannot simply evade the necessary implications of this argument. Adorno first expressly acknowledges the dialectic of the limit and then proceeds to challenge it.43 And this particular step is precisely revealed by the way in which theory passes over into aesthetics in Adorno.

To know the limitations of theoretical knowledge should not involve an illegitimate transgression of limits in the direction of the ultimate completion of theory itself. For this knowledge is already embodied in the work of art in accordance with Adorno's fundamental claim concerning the immanent convergence of the cognitive intentions of both art and philosophy. This convergence permits a process of mediation in the classical dialectical manner. But the fact that the convergence in question transpires on the aesthetic level also interrupts the movement of mediation and prevents its consummation in an absolute philosophical system where theory could still finally secure itself precisely through acknowledging and overcoming its original limitations. But the identification of this level of mediation precisely as an aesthetic one is certainly no a priori truth. For it derives from a theoretical act which actually denies its authentic competence here. Aesthetics as the alternative of theory can therefore only be defined by theory. But this simply renews the dialectic of the limit. The wholly other is the wholly other in relation to theory, and thus not so other to theory after all.

One can interpret this as an inversion of the relationship between art and philosophy in Hegel. The immediate presence of absolute spirit, through which Hegel's philosophy conceptualises the art which historically precedes and is nonetheless subordinate to it, produces a mediation without which spirit could not be fully realised as spirit. But to elicit the properly spiritual dimension is necessarily to destroy the artistic medium itself and the essentially spiritual substance of art requires the ultimate sublation of its external form of appearance as beauty. The sublation of its immediacy takes place


through the conceptual articulation of art by philosophy. But this elevation of art to the level of the concept eliminates the once unbroken effect of aesthetic semblance which depends precisely upon sensuous immediacy. The semblance which is explicitly recognised as semblance now therefore loses its power and forfeits its mystery. That is why the emergence of the philosophy of art simultaneously designates the end of the epoch of art itself. As Hegel himself writes: 'With respect to its form and its content, art is no longer the highest or absolute manner in which spirit brings its true interests to consciousness. The specific character which belongs to the production of art and its works no longer fulfils our highest need.' Or again: The scientific knowledge of art is therefore a much more important condition in our time than it was in the times when art already offered complete satisfaction in its own right. Art now invites us to thoughtful contemplation, and that not for the purpose of producing art itself, but in order for philosophical science to grasp what art is. '44

In a certain sense Adorno's aesthetics reverses this conceptual overcoming of the independent status of artistic creation and production. It is true that philosophy here rediscovers its own most fundamental intentions in art, but it refuses to subject the forms of artistic expression to an intrinsically philosophical concept of truth precisely because this would inevitably deprive all specifically artistic expression of its force. In order to save art from falling back into an ultimately irrelevant, and purely preparatory, stage of spirit, philosophy should rather renounce the reflection that would show art is a form of knowledge only for the abstract philosophical gaze. But philosophy here conceals that it was precisely the interpretive achievement of philosophy which first elevated art to the same status as itself. And it is the fact that philosophy does not confess its own constitutive contribution in this respect which lends art the appearance of independence. Considered more closely, this amounts to a regal dubbing of art for which no one wishes to take responsibility. Perhaps, despite the apparent gesture of theoretical modesty, it is really a case of extreme condescension - an anonymous act of beneficence on the part of philosophy.

Basically all these complications could be avoided if philosophy could only forfeit the dream of being both itself and yet something other than itself. The aestheticisation of theory overburdens a proper theory of the aesthetic. For although the autonomy of art is officially proclaimed in this connection, what we see at work here in the final analysis are the specific interests of theory which effectively subordinate aesthetics to a profoundly heteronomous perspective. This line of argument, which starts with the 'universal context of delusion' and ends up with the dogma of the fundamental opposition between art and reality, ultimately turns art into a handmaiden for fulfilling the critical intentions of theory. Since these intentions avowedly cannot be articulated in conceptual terms, they are incorporated in works of art in such a way that our relevant reactions to the latter can be determined

THEODOR W. ADORNO

in advance. Theory thus prevails even in the act of its own aesthetic repudiation. It imagines it can assimilate itself to the immediate experience of art by willingly curtailing the traditional conception of what theory is. But it thereby entangles itself in a semblance which is other than that of which it speaks. The attempt to render theory aesthetic in character ends by conflating a semblance of theory with a work of art.

Literary postscript

Thomas Mann correctly sensed, to express this in the language of his own Doctor Faustus, that we must enter into a pact with the devil if art is really to become a kind of knowledge and the ultimate work of art is to be born from the destruction of all actual works. The musical-theoretical passages of Mann's novel, which were of course derived from his collaboration with Adorno and in part paraphrase his Philosophy of Modern Music, 45

are deliberately ascribed to the originally unnamed opponent and inspirer of the protagonist. It is supposed to sound duly Mephistophelian and redolent of sophistical deception when 'He' laughingly speaks as follows: 'My dear fellow, the situation is too critical to be dealt with without critique. [ ... ] What I do not deny is a certain satisfaction which the state of the "work" generally vouchsafes me. I am against "works", by and large. Why should I not find some pleasure in the sickness which has befallen the idea of the musical work? [ ... ] Critique no longer tolerates pretence and play, the fiction, the self-glorification of form, which censors the passions and human suffering, divides out the parts, translates into images. Only the non-fictional is still permissible, the unplayed, the undisguised and untransfigured expression of suffering in its actual moment. .. .' To which the artist responds significantly: 'Touching, touching! The devil waxes pathetic. The poor devil moralises. Human suffering goes to his heart. How high-mindedly he shits on art!'46 The irony of the novelist instinctively identifies the weakest point of a theory of art which pursues its own quite different purposes through its apocalyptic diagnosis of the problem of the 'work' and which obscures the real significance of the latter by moralising considerations. Philosophy pays court to art for the sake of its own difficulties and invokes human suffering with undiminished pathos for the same purpose.

Notes and references

'The Actuality of Philosophy' was Adorno's inaugural lecture as a Privatdozent at the University of Frankfurt. Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1 (Frankfurt am Main 1973), p. 343. English translation: 'The Actuality of Philosophy', in: Telos 31, 1977, pp. 120-133, and specifically p. 132. Cf. also the Preface to Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt am Main 1966), p. 9; English translation: Negative Dialectics, tr. by E. B. Ashton, London 1973, pp. xix-xxi.


2 Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, 'Der Essay als Form', Noten zur Literatur I (1958), p. 2lf.; English translation: 'The Essay as Form', in: Notes to Literature, vol. I, tr. by Shierry Weber Nicholsen, New York 1991-92.

3 Theodor W. Adorno, Asthetische Theorie, Frankfurt am Main 1970, p. 140; English translation: Aesthetic Theory, tr. by Robert Hullot-Kentor, London 2004, p. 119.

4 Theodor W. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. I, p. 343; The Actuality of Philosophy', p. 132.

5 For further discussion of this question cf. my article 'Problemgeschichte und systematischer Sinn der "Phlinomenologie" Hegels', in: R. Bubner, Dialektik und Wissenschaft, Frankfurt am Main 1973.

6 Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, 'Die Idee der Naturgeschichte', in: Gesammelte Schriften, vol. I, pp. 345-365; English translation: The Idea of Natural History', in: Telos 60, 1984, pp. 111-124.

7 T. W. Adorno, Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des ,.fsthetischen, Frankfurt am Main 1962, p. 124 ff.; English translation: Kierkegaard. Construction of the Aesthetic, tr. by R. Hullot-Kentor, Minneapolis 1989, p. 68ff.

8 Cf. T. W. Adorno, 'Parataxis. Zur spaten Lyric Holderlins', in: Noten zu Literatur III (Gesammelte Schrijien 11: 452ff.); Notes to Literature, vol. 2, pp. 108-149, specifically pp. l l 4ff.

9 T. W. Adorno, Asthetische Theorie, p. 191; Aesthetic Theory, p. 167. 10 For a fuller defence and development of this argument cf. R. Bubner, 'Was

ist kritische Theorie?', in: K-0 Apel et al., Hermeneutik und ldeologiekritik, Frankfurt am Main 1971.

11 Noten zu Literatur IV, p. 246; Notes to Literature, vol. 2, p. 9f. English translation in two vols, Columbia 1992, Nicholsen translation cited in all the translations.

12 Cf., for example, Th. Baumeister and J. Kulenkampff, 'Geschichtsphilosophie und philosophische Asthetik ', in: Neue Hefte fur Philosophie 5, 1973.

13 Dialektik der Aujkliirung, Amsterdam 1947, p. 9.; English translation: Dialectic of Enlightenment, tr. by J. Cumming, New York 1972, pp. xiv-xv.

14 Cf. M. Horkheimer, 'Ein neuer Ideologiebegriff?', in: Kritische Theorie, ed. Alfred Schmidt, Frankfurt am Main 1968; and in a similar vein, T. W. Adorno, 'Das Bewusstsein in der Wissenssoziologie', in: Prismen, Frankfurt am Main 1955; English translation: Prisms, tr. by Samuel and Shierry Weber, London 1967, pp. 35-49.

15 In his essay on Samuel Beckett's Endgame he writes: The irrationality of bourgeois society in its late phase rebels at letting itself be understood; those were the good old days, when a critique of the political economy of this society could be written that judged it in terms of its own ratio.' (Noten zu Literatur II, p. 192; Notes to Literature, vol. 1, p. 244.)

16 Cf. Adorno's late essay 'Zurn Klassizismus von Goethes lphigenie', Noten zu Literatur IV, pp. 30ff.; Notes to Literature, vol. I, pp. 168ff.

17 Cf. T. W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik, Frankfurt am Main 1975, p. 124; English translation: Negative Dialectics, tr. by E. B. Ashton, London 1973, p. 118: 'As far back as we can trace it, the history of thought has been a dialectic of enlightenment.'

18 Cf. ,.fsthetische Theorie, pp. 16, 67, 114 and many other places; Aesthetic Theory, pp. 7, 51, 94-5.

19 As in Plato's analysis in Book X of The Republic. 20 Dialektik der Aujkliirung, p. 31; ET: 19. Cf. also Philosophie der neuen

Musik, Berlin 1972, p. 20f. and p. 189; English translation: Philosophy of Modern Music, tr. by A. G. Mitchell and W. V. Blomster, New York 2003, p. 13f. and pp. 205-6.

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THEODOR W. ADORNO

21 Dialektik der Aujkliirung, loc. cit.; Asthetische Theorie, pp. 120, 197, 511; Aesthetic Theory, pp. 99-100, 172, 436.

22 In the System of Transcendental Idealism of 1800. 23 F. W. Schelling, Philosophie der Kunst [1802/4], Darmstadt 1959, p. 8ff; cf.

lecture XIV of Schelling's Vorlesungen iiber die Methode des akademischen Studiums [1803].

24 Walter Benjamin, Versuch iiber Brecht, Frankfurt am Main 1966, pp. 96ff. 25 For example, T. W. Adorno, Ohne Leitbild, Frankfurt am Main 1967, p. 16ff. 26 Loe. cit. Cf. 'Zurn Klassizismus von Goethes Iphigenie', Noten zu Literatur IV,

p. 16f.; Notes to Literature, vol. 2, p. 159f. Cf. also Goethe, Maximen und Refiexionen, Nr. 751. For some perceptive remarks on this question cf. G. Kaiser, 'Adornos Asthetische Theorie', in: Antithesen, Frankfurt am Main 1973, pp. 309ff.

27 Adorno appeals to Beckett as a favourite witness with respect to his historicophilosophical conclusions concerning 'a change in the a priori of drama: the fact that there is no longer any substantive, affirmative metaphysical meaning that could provide dramatic form with its law and its epiphany. That, however, disrupts the dramatic form down to its linguistic infrastructure. Drama cannot simply take the negative meaning, or the absence of meaning, as its content without everything peculiar to it being affected to the point of turning into its opposite'. (Noten zu Literatur II, p. 189; Notes to Literature, vol. 1, p. 242.)

28 T. W. Adorno, Philosophie der neuen Musik, p. 31; ET: 26f. The reference to Hegel is entirely misleading since the 'looking on' which Hegel recommends for the method of his Phenomenology of Spirit does not characterise his philosophy as a whole and his phenomenological approach certainly does not imply the absence of systematic presuppositions. Cf. the aforementioned essay in my collection, Dialektik und Wissenschafi.

29 In this connection Busoni's innocuous observations in his Outline of a New Aesthetics of Musical Composition in 1916 completely fail to appreciate the real problem: 'It is the ephemeral features which constitute the "modern" character of a work. It is the unchanging ones that prevent the work from becoming "old-fashioned". In the "modern" and the "old" there is good and bad, authentic and inauthentic. There is nothing that is absolutely modern - merely things that have arisen earlier or later, have flourished longer or have faded sooner. The modern has always existed, and so has the old.' Cf. F. Busoni, Entwurf einer neuen A·sthetik der Tonkunst, Frankfurt 1974, p. 8.

30 For one example amongst many cf. .11."sthetische Theorie, p. 134; Aesthetic Theory, p. 114. Cf. also Adorno's essay on 'Commitment', in: Noten zu Literatur III; Notes on Literature, vol. 2, pp. 76-94.

31 A°.~thetische Theorie, p. 185; also pp. 189, 193f., 391; Aesthetic Theory, pp. 162, and pp. 165, 168f., 341.

32 Cf. Plato, The Republic 595 c ff. 33 Cf. Aristotle, Poetics 1448b 2 ff. 34 Negative Dialektik, p. 26; Negative Dialectics, pp. 14-15; cf. Asthetische Theorie,

p. 86f., 180f.; Aesthetic Theory, p. 69f. and 157f. 35 'Erprel3te Versohnung', in: Noten zu Literatur II, p. 163; Notes to Literature,

vol. 1, p. 224. 36 For more on the earlier history of the debate concerning materialist aesthetics

cf. R. Bubner, 'Uber einige Bedingungen gegenwartiger Asthetik', in: Neue Hefte fiir Philosophie 5, 1973, 50ff.

37 Loe. cit., p. 60ff.


38 For one example amongst many cf. Philosophie der neuen Musik, p. l 12f.; ET: l 16f.

39 This counts against the argument in Peter Biirger, Theorie der Avantgarde, Frankurt am Main 1974, pp. 74ff.

40 Cf. F. Grenz, 'Zur architektonischen Stellung der Asthetik in der Philosophie Adornos', in: Text und Kritik, special volume dedicated to the work of Adorno, ed. by H. L. Arnold, Munich 1977, p. 123.

41 External observers have been particularly sensitive to this point, as we can see, for example, from the generally perceptive discussion in M. Jimenez, Adorno. Art, ideologie et theorie de !'art, Paris 1973, pp. 270ff.

42 Cf. my essay 'Uber einige Bedingungen gegenwartiger Asthetik', in: Neue Hefte fur Philosophie 5, 1973.

43 Cf. Negative Dialektik, p. 9f., 396ff.; Negative Dialectics, pp. xix f., 404ff.; Philosophie der neuen Musik, p. 20f., 189; ET: I 3f.

44 G. W. F. Hegel, /4."sthetik, Werke X 1, 1842, p. 13f. and 16. 45 Cf. especially chapters XXI and XXV of Mann's Doktor Faustus (Frankfurt

am Main 1947, pp. 287f., 378ff; English translation: Doctor Faustus, tr. by H. Lowe-Porter, Harmondsworth 1968, pp. 167ff. and 214ff.) Cf. Thomas Mann's letter to Adorno of 30.12.1945; English translation: The Correspondence of Thomas Mann and Theodor W. Adorno, tr. by N. Walker, Cambridge 2006; Cf. also Die Entstehung des Doktor Faustus, Frankfurt am Main, 1966, pp. 35ff. and 109ff.; English translation: The Story (~f a Novel: The Genesis of Doctor Faustus, tr. by Richard and Sarah Winston, New York 1961.

46 Doktor Faustus, p. 38lf.; Doctor Faustus, p. 234.

2

ADORNO'S CONCEPT OF MUSICAL MATERIAL

Carl Dahlhaus

Source: Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht (ed.), Zur Termino/ogie der Musik des 20. Jahrhunderts, Stuttgart. Musikwissenschaftliche Verlags-Gesellschaft, 1974, pp. 9-21. Translated by Nicholas Walker.

It is a commonplace to observe that dialectical concepts are essentially 'fluid' in character, that they intrinsically elude rigidly framed definitions. It is an observation that has also justified 'dialectical' thinkers in rejecting the unreasonable demand that they defend their case on the same ground as that occupied by their positivist opponents. In claiming that the material truth content of a specific category can only be grasped within a broader systematic context, the dialectical philosopher already eschews arguments and considerations which appeal to isolated terms that are artificially detached from a body of theory. It is only as a moment of the whole that the individual concept, unintelligible on its own, properly acquires meaning in the first place.

Nonetheless, the careful terminological investigation of a dialectical concept or category, like that of 'musical material' in Adorno's aesthetic theory, is not necessarily a futile and inadequate exercise. It is undeniable that the concept of musical material cannot be made intelligible independently of its connection with other relevant categories. But that does not itself present an insuperable obstacle since the kind of terminological investigation I am suggesting here does not have to proceed by appealing to definitions or artificially isolated concepts. On the other hand, it is certainly an exaggeration to claim that one must first present an entire systematic body of related concepts in order to do justice to an individual concept with all its aspects, nuances, contradictions and transformations. To determine the significance of a dialectical category, it is almost always sufficient to describe its fixed or variable relations to a relatively small number of other concepts.

Ai\


I

When Adorno speaks of musical material, he is certainly referring to what we also spontaneously think of when we use the term 'material' in this context: the sounds with which a composer works. But he also combines this idea of 'material', a term he adopts from everyday language, with another much less familiar concept. From the Philosophy of Modern Music onwards - though not yet in the essay On the Fetish Character of Music and the Regression of Listening from 1938 - Adorno consistently deployed the expression 'musical material' in a quite specific philosophical and musicological sense.

We can approach this idea in an initial, general and entirely provisional way - one that should not be misinterpreted as an attempt to provide a rigid definition - as follows: musical material in Adorno's sense is the sum of the historically generated properties and characteristics of sounds and the relationships between sounds. It is essential to understand that Adorno, in contrast with the everyday use of the term 'material', excludes the natural properties of sounds from his own concept of musical material. According to Adorno, sound as a natural given, the physically determined substrate of music, is itself 'pre-musical'. The musical properties of sounds, and the relationships between them, are produced by human beings and are thus intrinsically historical in character. 'Thus material is not natural material even if it appears so to artists; rather, it is thoroughly historical' (AT: 223; ET: 195). 1 But this restriction of naturally given sound to the 'pre-musical' physical substrate of music appears extremely forced. Adorno mistrusts the 'psychology of music' as a discipline and avoids it altogether: 'music recognises no natural law; therefore all psychology of music is questionable' (PMM: 37; ET: 32). But quite apart from the purely physical aspects of sound, there also appear to be certain psychological aspects of sound which are difficult to dismiss as merely 'pre-musical', but which are nonetheless rooted in the nature of music or of musical hearing itself (like internal octave relationship between fifths and fourths and thirds and seconds). The difference, or antithesis, between consonance and dissonance, on the other hand, can certainly be described as something specifically 'posited', and thus as a historical phenomenon: a matter of compositional technique and active thought. And this interaction between natural and historical features and properties generates a dialectic of material that Adorno denies or fails to grasp when he restricts the concept of material to that which has effectively been produced historically.

Adorno's indifference to the natural properties of sounds and their relationships derives from the fact that the function which he ascribes to musical 'material' is nothing less than that fulfilled by 'objective spirit' in Hegel's system. The musical material, which gives rise to a certain 'tendency' (PMM 36; ET: 32) or even 'constraint' (AT: 222; ET: 194),

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appears as an active moving principle of historical development. And this means that the idea of some inert, or merely natural, material must be excluded from the start.

Adorno's claim that musical material is 'sedimented spirit' (PMM: 38; ET: 33) initially sounds rather conventional - it even recalls Hanslick's description of composing as 'spirit working upon material that is capable of becoming spiritual' - but it differs from the traditional maxims of Geistesgeschichte because it strongly emphasises the musical means rather than the results. It is the material from which the works are formed, the technique through which they are realised, rather than the works themselves, which effectively appear as the bearer of 'objective' or 'objectified' spirit.

It is impossible to deny the trivial claim that there is a interaction between musical material in Adorno's sense and the accomplished works, that the material itself is the result of earlier works and constitutes the starting point for later ones. But very significant consequences flow from apparently very slight differences in the way in which we emphasise one moment or the other. Adorno's remark concerning the 'tendency' or 'constraint' arising from the musical material implies that the tradition on which composers depend, and which they in turn transform, is contained in the material, in the substance, in the techniques, with which they work. On this perspective, the usability of the triad or the exhaustion of the diminished seventh is something that can be read off immediately from the chords themselves. Authentic insight into compositional achievement or failure, into what is 'right' or what is 'false', as Adorno says, arises principally from our experience with the material, and only secondarily from our knowledge of the work.

But this one-sided emphasis is highly questionable. The 'current state of the material', the aesthetic and compositional criterion to which Adorno constantly appeals, is nothing but the sum total of traces which earlier works have left upon the musical organisation of sound. It is undeniable that nothing of any significance can be read off from the 'material' without an adequate knowledge of the works themselves. But it is equally selfevident that one does not need to be acquainted with its prehistory in order to clarify its 'current state of the material'.

In Adorno's aesthetic theory musical material appears as an anonymous authority which prescribes certain steps and prohibits others. And the composer can refuse to accept this only at the cost of aesthetic failure. But if we go to the other extreme, in opposition to Adorno, and emphasise the individual works, rather than the materials and technique, of the musical tradition which itself furnishes both support and resistance to the composer, we cannot properly speak of anonymity at all.

It is our experience with works that determines the character of the material, not the other way around. The way in which a composer perceives


specific musical sounds and their relationship with one another, what the composer rejects as a false and exhausted path, the principles on which the composer relies and exploits for compositional reasons, all this depends upon the actual works which, positively and negatively, form the basis of the composer's musical experience in general. And it seems legitimate to emphasise works rather than 'material' here insofar as since the 19th century, in contrast to earlier periods, musical tradition has been embodied in the individual works that constitute the concert or operatic repertory, rather than in normative conceptions of genre or traditional bodies of compositional rules. The anonymous compulsion of the tradition, of which Adorno speaks, is far more characteristic of the 17th and early 18th centuries than it is for the I 9th century.

One certainly cannot deny that in more recent times the concept of the 'work' has lost its once clearly defined contours. But this serves to explain rather than justify Adorno's theoretical position. The dissolution of the concept of the work is not so much a consequence of a tendency on the part of the material as the presupposition which first allows us to speak of a 'tendency of the material' at all. But concepts that are effectively based upon the experience of a particular development of the 'new music' provide an inadequate foundation for a universal theory intended to encompass the history of music as a whole.

Yet the one-sided emphasis of particular and individual 'works' would be just as problematic as Adorno's philosophical and historical defence of the priority of the 'material'. We cannot possibly decide on dogmatic grounds whether, or when, to ascribe priority to one or other of these moments. This can only be accomplished by the kind of empirical and historical investigation which traces and explores the transformations of meaning and the shifts of emphasis which have marked the categories of 'material', 'work' or 'norm'. Adorno's concept of material, which undertook to historicise an older and rather naive conception of the natural substance and basis of music, must be historicised in turn.

II

The concept of musical material is a technical and compositional category that must also be considered from an aesthetic, sociological and historicophilosophical perspective. And it would be no exaggeration to speak of an essentially 'interdisciplinary' term in this connection (though Adorno only suspiciously refuses the possible contributions of physics and psychology here, the very disciplines which one would immediately and ordinarily consider whenever the material of music is under discussion).

The different aspects which are involved in the concept of musical material are impossible to distinguish rigidly from one another. In Adorno's theory, which explicitly works against any professional separation of

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different spheres of competence, technical and compositional arguments invariably pass over into sociological and historico-philosophical ones without any clearly demarcated boundaries between them.

In a crucial passage of the Philosophy of Modern Music Adorno writes that 'all the specific characteristics of musical material are marks left by the process of history. But the more they bear this historical necessity within them, the less directly legible they are in this respect' (PMM: 37; ET: 32). 'As an earlier form of subjectivity - now forgetful of itself - this objective spirit sedimented in the material has its own principles of movement' (PMM: 38; ET: 33). These observations describe the transformation of musical works, which formerly expressed subjective spirit, into an anonymous material that eventually confronts later composers as a shape of objective spirit. Conceptual schemata that are drawn from quite different disciplines are all closely interwoven with another in this approach. A particular historico-philosophical category - like the extremely questionable one of 'historical necessity' - is buttressed with psychoanalytic considerations: the idea of 'necessity' is grounded in a certain 'forgetting' of its own origins, in the emergence of objective spirit from an 'earlier' expression of subjective spirit (as if the musical works of the 19th century, which represent the prehistory of t~e material that constituted the 'new music' of the modern age, were not still immediately accessible to us in the concert and operatic repertoire of today).

The compulsive character that Adorno ascribes to the 'tendency of the material' arises therefore from a certain 'forgetting' of its own historical presuppositions. The transition from subjective spirit to objective spirit inevitably appears as a process of alienation or estrangement, and this quite irrespective of whether we interpret Adorno's claims in a Marxist, Hegelian or psychoanalytic sense. We might therefore expect some attempt at overcoming this 'forgetting', this alienation, through a process of critical reflection. But in fact Adorno's analysis leads him to defend the objective - or 'covertly social' - spirit of the musical material against the subjective spirit of particular and individual works. What Adorno himself so anxiously shunned, the transformation of critique into affirmation, is itself the presupposition of the very category of 'material' that constitutes the basic foundation of Adorno's purportedly 'materialist' aesthetics.

The thesis that musical material is a form of objective spirit to whose demands and prohibitions composers have to subject themselves if they are to accomplish anything artistically significant would seem to epitomise an intricate and barely decipherable complex of aesthetic, technicalcompositional and historico-philosophical judgements. A serious analysis of the concept of material must attempt to reconstruct, in its broad outlines, the implicit assumptions underlying the claim that the system of tonality has long been obsolete, exhausted and pointless, and that by virtue of an inner 'tendency' of the musical material (in this connection substantive


claims like this reveal the full meaning and implications of the concept of material far more clearly than any abstract theoretical discussions).

The claim that tonality - and not merely 'classical' tonality but modem 'expanded' tonality as well - stands in fundamental contradiction with the objective spirit sedimented in the history of music is principally a historicophilosophical thesis that recalls the essentially commonplace observation that for art not everything is possible at just any time. The later works of Bartok and Hindemith, which can hardly be dismissed out of hand as irrelevant or unsuccessful compositions despite their meaningful use of tonality, effectively compel us to supplement the original historicophilosophical claim with a further aesthetic one: that compositions which attempt, in explicit opposition to the 'tendency of the material', to preserve or to restore the role of tonality are inevitably fragile or problematic achievements (which does not imply that such music is poor, meaningless, or indifferent).

It is a methodological postulate of Adorno himself that aesthetic judgements must be supported by the relevant analysis of compositional techniques and procedures if they are to amount to more than empty speculation. And it might in principle be possible to demonstrate that the later tonal works of Bartok and Hindemith are internally contradictory from the technical and compositional point of view, though Adorno disdains to provide a detailed analysis in this connection. But in Adomo's view several of Schon berg's dodecaphonic works (like the third and fourth string quartet for example) are no less technically inconsistent, albeit for rather different reasons. Thus the verdict passed on Bartok and Hindemith can only be upheld if we also oppose fruitful or dialectical contradictions that produce further developments (like the serial technique that arose from the alleged inconsistencies of Schonberg's dodecaphonic method) to the moribund and unproductive contradictions that supposedly represent a dead end in the history of music. It is this distinction between dialectical and moribund contradictions which brings the analysis of compositional technique back into the historico-philosophical analysis. In this way Adomo's argument comes full circle. But the historico-philosophical thesis that the value of a musical work is ultimately decided by whether or not it produces significant consequences is a profoundly questionable one. For in contrast to political history, where an event without consequences is effectively a nonevent, even a work from which nothing follows can also be significant as far as the history of music. The criteria which govern poiesis, the production of works, are different from those which govern praxis as the realm of human action. But a thinker like Adorno, who underemphasises the importance of the 'work' in music, may well be tempted to overemphasise the aspect of the 'effect' of art, and thus to confuse the categories of poiesis and praxis.

Like the concept of musical material, and indeed in intimate connection with it, the concept of internal 'consistency' is also an essentially

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'interdisciplinary' category which simultaneously involves technicalcompositional, aesthetic and historico-philosophical elements. To simplify the matter considerably: 'inconsistency' signifies the self-contradictory character of a musical work from the perspective of compositional technique, although we do not have to interpret such a work either as a total artistic failure or as an aesthetically 'significant' failure. Deciding in such a matter depends on whether the work expresses, as it were grasps in sound, the historico-philosophical situation in which it is produced, or whether it essentially avoids and evades the specific challenge of the hour. But if it is not to remain purely empty and speculative, the historicophilosophical judgement here must justify itself through careful examination of the compositional technique of the work in question, thus ensuring that the chain of argument properly returns to its original point of departure.

III

Dialectical concepts are thus historical categories. They are tools which we employ in the context of historiography, although of course it is far from clear whether the latter must be regarded as a 'science' or an 'art'. (That is precisely why Johann Gustav Droysen deliberately excluded the 'poetics' of historiography from the 'methodology' of history.) Dialectical categories, whose internal complexity tends to confuse our habitual and direct approach to things, are justified to the degree that they are capable of presenting or interpreting historical processes and developments in a more precise and more differentiated fashion than classificatory concepts typically do. In order to capture the changing character of the objects and states of affairs which they describe, dialectical concepts also change their meaning, sometimes in striking and sometimes in barely perceptible ways, and these shifts in meaning can be detected through the different configurations which they come to form with other related concepts.

As we saw at the beginning, Adorno does not interpret musical material as an unchanging material substrate of music. On the contrary, the concept exclusively designates the historical properties of sounds and the relations between them as properties shaped and produced through human activity. The relationship between the material through which Schonberg and Webern compose their works and the material of John Cage - a relationship which first makes it possible to speak of material in reference to Schonberg and Cage at all - cannot therefore be specified by enumerating a range of shared features, which hardly indeed exist, but only by elucidating or reconstructing an essentially historical development.

But is not simply the material which is different in the cases of Schonberg, Webern or Cage, but even the very concept of material itself: the category of 'the material' in relation to other concepts like technique, language and


structure. The specific divergence between musical language and dodecaphonic structure in Schonberg generates a different concept of material from that which arises from Webern's attempt to bring about a convergence between pre-formed dodecaphonic structure and composed form itself, not to mention the nature-mysticism of Cage's desire to present sounds which have been 'emancipated' or deliberately detached from any traditionally musical context. On Adorno's interpretation, musical 'language', in both the semantic and expressive sense of the word, which Schonberg opposes to the material, comes to be identified with the material in Webern, and is finally extinguished in Cage: music is no longer expected to speak, but merely to exist.

The terminological investigation of the concept of material thus passes over into a historical one: every attempt to provide a definition is dissolved in the historical narrative. But this does not itself necessarily exclude lexicographical considerations. For it is not the substance of history, but the central categories, which must constantly remain oriented to that substance, which constitute the object of terminological reflection: categories whose meaning is as mutable as the configurations in which they appear.

Note and references

Th. W. Adorno, /i'sthetische Theorie, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 7, Frankfurt 1970, abbreviated as AT; English translation: Aesthetic Theory, tr. by Robert HullotKentor, London: Continuum 2004; Philosophie der neuen Musik 2

, Frankfurt 1958; English translation: The Philosophy of Modern Music, tr. by A. G. Mitchell and W. V. Blomster, New York: Seabury Press 1973.

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ADORNO AND HEGEL

A misunderstanding on the question of language

Felicitas Englisch

Source: Frithjof Hager and Hermann Pfiitzer (eds), Das unerhOrt Moderne. Berliner AdornoTagung, Liineburg: zu Klampen, 1990, pp. 28-47. Translated by Nicholas Walker.

Introduction

The following reflections were prompted by a remark of Adorno's which struck me as astonishing. In Negative Dialectics, in the discussion of the concept of 'constellation', he writes that 'Hegel's dialectic was a dialectic without language'. And the following clause develops the observation as an explicit reproach: 'a dialectic without language, even though the simplest meaning of the word "dialectic" postulates language'. I felt a specific irritation beyond the initial intuition that the remark in question could not really be true. It was originally quite obscure to me what Adorno's remark was intended to mean. And it is precisely this question that I should like to explore here - and especially Adorno's apparently absurd claim that in this respect Hegel effectively 'remained the adept of the current conception of science'. 1

Given my own understanding of Hegel, shaped as it was by interpreters like Michael Theunissen, Bruno Liebrucks and Josef Simon, these remarks, to put it bluntly, clearly failed to grasp the essential and fundamental 'language-character' of Hegelian thought - one which regarded language as the only exemplary place where 'spirit', the instinctive form of the absolute, becomes an experience available to consciousness itself. I believe that Adorno's misunderstanding of Hegel in this respect arises from his unwitting commitment to a 'natural ontology'. And I should like to show that Adorno's appeal to conceptual mimesis in terms of constellations and Hegel's attempt to articulate speculative reflection as a system derive from a different understanding of language that is grounded in each case in a different way of conceptualising the 'realm of necessity'.

ADORNO AND HEGEL

The fundamental features of Adorno's critique of Hegel's dialectic

The two thinkers already conceive the source of dialectic in a quite different way. Adorno claims that 'dialectic [ ... ] signifies nothing more, in the first instance, than that objects are not exhausted in their concept, that they come into contradiction with the traditional norm of adequatio', that is to say, that of the 'correspondence' of concept and object. For Adorno therefore it is a tension within the relationship between concept and object which prompts the dialectical movement in the first place. Whereas Adorno passes critical judgement on contradiction, and although he frequently deploys the concept of contradiction himself, the genesis of contradiction for Adorno remains an ambivalent question. His attempts to elucidate it move back and forth between conceptual, theological, 'materialist' and sociological approaches. From the theological perspective, Adorno says that thought is impelled in the direction of the dialectic by a certain 'guilt' or 'debt' [Schuld]: 'It is the ineluctable inadequacy of thought, its guilty debt to what it thinks, that drives thought toward dialectics'.2 Thought here necessarily means 'identificatory' thought. In other contexts, however, this suspicion is displaced by an essentially sociological explanation. For Adorno says that 'contradiction' is not an 'essential Heraclitean feature', 3

as Hegel is alleged to have claimed, but merely something that belongs to the 'administered world' of society. Again, on another occasion, the moment of contradiction is entirely eliminated from the realm of being and reduced to a problem of specific conceptual perspective. In this sense 'contradictions' would only exist for the ideologically suspect gaze of identificatory logic. Contradiction is simply the non-identical interpreted from within the straight-jacket of identity. Contradiction represents the appearing untruth of identity because, in a logically defined and constructed totality, everything that cannot be accommodated, everything qualitatively different, will take on the features of a contradiction. Dialectic thus belongs with identificatory thought. For although it is the 'consistent consciousness of non-identity',4 dialectic too always measures the heterogeneous by the standard of identitarian thought. 'Contradiction' is governed by this law and inflicts it in turn upon the non-identical. But the determining ground of this law is also subject to change. In a sociological context this means that this law is 'not a law of thought, but something real'. 5 The materialist perspective is happy to interpret this as signifying merely real now, merely historically real, and thus open up the highly problematic hope that this law might one day be suspended. But this same hope is counterbalanced throughout Adorno's texts by the frequently expressed suspicion that thinking itself ultimately is identifying thought, that the logic of identification is not simply a perspective that could be historically overcome.

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The constant burden of Adorno's critique of dialectic, Hegel's included, is the violence inflicted upon the non-identical when it is mastered by identificatory conceptual consciousness. Adorno's critique of dialectic basically involves all the classical topoi of the theological critique of Hegelian idealism: that it lacks any 'real and comprehensive acknowledgement of finitude, of contingency (of the non-identical and the non-conceptual), of difference, of the immediacy which ultimately eludes all mediation'.6

Adorno shares Kant's view, in direct opposition to Hegel, that the particular, the manifold, exists as something in its own right. All 'synthesis' is accomplished by an obviously a priori faculty of concepts. In attempting to grasp the particular the concept over-reaches itself and necessarily violates the former. The non-identical, the opaque, that which lacks or precedes language, must be protected from the oppressive grasp of the concept. Any prior relationship amongst particulars would already imply a kind of domination. For Adorno, therefore, every form of society implies a negation of freedom, every form of cultural socialisation signifies a distortion of instinctual impulse. The dialectical movement he invokes is always a movement between concept and object, and this basic ontological perspective is never abandoned. It is also retained in the concept of 'constellation' where Adorno is principally concerned with the relationship of several different concepts to the - still ontologically conceived - individual or particular that they surround and configure.

Some remarks on Hegel's dialectic

The Hegelian dialectic, on the other hand, begins strictly and exclusively from concepts as the absolutely only thing that is accessible to consciousness. For Hegel we are so fundamentally immersed in language that our every thought process transpires precisely in and through language. By virtue of language we necessarily and constantly move within the context of the universal, even when we believe we are most intimately engaged with the immediate. The intrinsic point of reference for the Hegelian dialectic is therefore speech within society and the domain of 'appearing knowledge'. The sensuous particular can never be the primary dimension of knowledge because such particularity, on account of the spatio-temporal variety of different perspectives it involves, is entirely incommunicable. Hegel rightly argues that we can 'never say what we mean', but can only comprehend what we 'say'.

For Hegel, there is only 'contradiction' where what is spoken claims some validity or truth. There can be no contradiction between concept and object, as for Adorno; there can only be contradiction between the abstractions of the understanding which manifest themselves in language, and the distinctions between 'concept' and 'object', or 'truth' and 'certainty', also belong amongst these abstractions. For Hegel contradiction can therefore only be

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'sublated' within and by means of language. This claim, of course, would prompt someone like Jacobi to accuse Hegel of transforming the essential being of things into mere words. We shall have to clarify later what Hegel actually understands by 'language'. Hegel himself certainly also regards the determining structure of self and object that characterises consciousness as unavoidable, as constitutive of our relationship to the world, but he does not thereby 'ontologise' it, i.e. regard it as something independent in its own right. It has its actual existence only in language. In this sense 'being' -including the being of the particular and the non-identical - is dependent upon language. For Hegel language possesses the power of bringing concepts into the world only by virtue of the absolute. But consciousness in its form as 'the understanding' can only realise this power through the process of 'identifying' thought. It is the fundamentally tragic character of the reflective understanding that it can only move within a structure of conceptual 'oppositions', and that although it strives for unity through identity, it necessarily generates difference.

In Hegel dialectic arises from this: the oppositions which the understanding reveals in the form of language misunderstand their own origin in the absolute, posit themselves as absolute, and thus repress and conceal the absolute from which they spring. This tendency on the part of abstract thought to present itself as independent, to posit itself as absolute, is what Hegel means by 'positivity'. Hegel first experienced such 'positivity' in the forms of a dogmatic Christian theology that had long since lost their meaning. The dominating form of identifying thought in Adorno corresponds to Hegel's confrontation with a spiritually ossified age entangled in the abstract oppositions of its own conceptual forms. Like Adorno before the objectifying processes of identification, Hegel recoils before the uncanny power of the abstract understanding. He recognises that there is something deadening and destructive about the 'understanding' in this form, that life itself flees from its fatal grasp. The absolute can no longer properly appear when our concepts begin to petrify, when language as it were is mortified.

This is the situation in which the need of philosophy first arises for Hegel. In his remark that 'diremption is the source of the need of philosophy' we must recognise the significance of the double genitive. In the first place, it is the experience of diremption which awakens the need for philosophy. This need arises when 'the might of union vanishes from human life and the oppositions have lost their living connection and reciprocity and have gained independence from one another'.7 But we must also say that thought develops a need for diremption, for the deliberate conceptual recollection of the living contradictory moment that belongs to all opposition. For Hegel, therefore, in contrast to Adorno, 'contradiction' is a bearer of hope. For it is the first thing that is eliminated once abstract opposites are fixed in an ossified relationship to one another. If we claim that only A=A or A=B can, by definition, be true, then we remove the contradictory relationship that

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binds both propositions together. Hegel struggles to conceptualise precisely this contra-diction, this living relationship which a binary logic cannot acknowledge. He attempts to bring it explicitly to light there where ossified conceptual separations present themselves as a form of reciprocal tolerance. The need of philosophy for diremption also bears on the silent pain that is itself more fatal than the burning pain that expresses life. Hegel counters the abstract understanding in order to arouse this living pain. That is why he needs 'contradiction': not for the purpose of conferring independence upon the individual moments of contradiction, or of condemning a logic which treats these moments as mutually exclusive, but to relate the individual moments back to 'the absolute' where they ultimately subsist. The 'oppositions' which present themselves as 'independent' (in Hegel's time pre-eminently those of 'subjectivity' and 'objectivity') must be brought once more to acknowledge their own lack of independence. This is accomplished by relating the relevant oppositions back to the absolute which can thus come to reveal itself once again precisely through this movement. That is what Hegel means by 'dialectic'. But the process of dissolving oppositions that have become fixed in this way is not pursued for its own sake here. It is undertaken in order that the absolute can in principle reveal itself to us. Hegel does not need the absolute for his dialectic, he needs the dialectic for the absolute. For the philosophical task he has set himself is precisely to expound the absolute in the element of thought, that is, to bring it to expression through language. The absolute is not therefore a supplement that one could ignore or delete. Adorno's attempt to inherit the power of dialectic without its theological presuppositions inevitably incurs fundamental problems. And Horkheimer himself once drew attention to them in a rather drastic fashion in the course of a discussion concerning knowledge and language: 'We can either say that this thought corresponds to the present situation, or we can concede that it applies to everything, and that is negation in the bad sense. [ ... ] Unless one specifies a particular direction here, there is no escaping either difficulty.'8

To summarise the preceding observations: if we ontologise dialectic as the tension between concept and object, any attempt to thematise the entire relationship through one term, namely the concept, will inevitably appear as an illegitimate assault on the other, even if the relationship is grasped as a substantive contradiction. This attempt to relate the terms merely reveals the process of 'identification' at work here. But if we start from the burden of positivity that afflicts our concepts, then deliverance lies in revealing and reviving obscured or forgotten relations. The power of contradiction, which lies in grasping difference in identity, is the path that leads back to the presupposed identity. And without the absolute this identity is as impossible as it is meaningless. The relation to the absolute must therefore be regarded as the true criterium separationis as far as the respective forms of dialectic in Hegel and Adorno are concerned. And here

ADORNO AND HEGEL

I should like to return to Adorno's remark that 'Hegel's dialectic was a dialectic without language'. Now that we have discussed the first aspect here, that of dialectic, I should like, firstly, clarify the aforementioned differences between Adorno and Hegel with specific reference to language and, secondly, elucidate the way in which Hegel appeals to the idea of 'system' and Adorno appeals to that of 'constellation'.

Adorno's conception of language

I believe we can distinguish four dimensions of language in Adorno's thought: 1. mimesis, the expressive language of art; 2. the original power of naming, the language of creation; 3. specifically conceptual, signifying or communicative language; 4. conceptual mimesis as a kind of artistic production wrested from language.

In mimesis (as 'imitation'), the ideal of art, language is not yet properly language. 9 Adorno tells us that the 'true language of art is mute'. Expression is this languageless moment which enjoys 'priority over poetry's significative element'. Expression in art proclaims: 'Thus it is.' And again: 'Art is expressive when what is objective, subjectively mediated, speaks, whether this be sadness, energy, longing.' 10 But this subjectivity does not directly communicate itself as such.

Expression, as the 'language-character' of art, is fundamentally different from language considered as the medium of expression. One might well speculate, as Adorno points out, whether the expressive language-character of art is actually 'incompatible' with the latter. 11 Alluding to the Etruscan vases of the Villa Giulia, Adorno writes that the 'aspect of the vases that lies closest to language probably depends upon their own Here I am or This is what I am, upon a selfhood which is not first carved out from the context of interdependent things solely by identificatory thought' .12 Every form of conceptual definition or determination would inevitably destroy the purity and intensity of 'expression'. Absolute expression would remain in intimate proximity with the thing, it would be the thing itself, the very matter in question.

In the second place, the language of creation, the process of 'naming', lies somewhere in between the mimetic language of expression and 'significative' language in general. It is already manifest in the 'word', and to that extent is itself language, but it is not yet identical with a 'concept'. As with Husserl, the deictic act of naming, which would in a certain sense be the only ultimately authentic revelation of language as language, presents the basic framework for understanding the deployment of all other linguistic expressions. In comparison with the emphatic character of naming, these other forms of language remain secondary and derivative.

The proper name alone, as a purely singular term, would be entirely blameless here. But does not the proper name already represent an

THEODOR W. ADORNO

enormous 'reduction' in which all the manifold differences and variety of something have effectively vanished? This is the question, as Adorno is well aware, which Hegel would naturally. Any word that can intrinsically function as a generic term - like 'tree', 'dog' or 'man' - is already essentially caught up in the dialectic of the Fall. Before the fall into original sin it was Adam who bestowed names upon the plants and animals of the earth. In the emphatic act of this initial naming the 'classificatory' moment, which is nonetheless already present in nuce, withdraws entirely behind the creative imperative. The interpretive exclamation 'dog' amounts to saying: 'henceforth you shall be a dog'. In the act of naming, the human being repeats the original creative act in accordance with his own capacities. But this hope for truly creative naming is only fulfilled in paradise. After the fatal irruption of sin and history, after the Fall, the process of naming is revealed in its nakedness. It shows itself as the starting point for all subsumption. After the Fall, Adorno no longer knows how or why 'the act of subsumption could be opposed to the act of naming itself'. This is what he says in his discussion with Horkheimer on the question of language and knowledge. 13

In the third place, therefore, conceptual language as such falls victim to the 'identificatory' process. The 'concept' is an instance of domination insofar as it is a universal term which grasps what is singular or individual. It is here that the difference between Adorno and Hegel is most clearly revealed, and again I shall discuss Hegel's position before returning to the fourth point concerning 'conceptual mimesis'.

The place of language in Hegel

Whereas Adorno regards a specific concept as claiming - and inevitably failing to capture - an immediate truth, an undifferentiated identity with the intended referent, Hegel interprets language as the site where difference, and therefore freedom, can first be experienced. In order to clarify the distinction between their respective positions, it is necessary to consider the question in a rather broader context. For this purpose I shall examine Hegel's discussion of the intrinsic relationship between consciousness, imagination and language as presented in his Jena Rea/philosophie. Hegel begins with the idea of a 'pure self' permeated by and submerged in manifold images - and, once again, this must be interpreted in terms of consciousness itself, rather than in essentially 'ontological' terms. For Hegel this idea of the pure self (one not yet corrupted by subjectivity in the narrower sense) has nothing to do with the sort of utopian hopes that are so popular in various regressive and meditative forms of fantasy today. On the contrary: Hegel regards this pure self as a kind of preserving night or darkness. 'We glimpse this night when we look into the eyes of another human being -into a night that appears terrifying; here we are confronted by the night of the world.' 14 The 'imagination' represents the first awakening form of

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activity within consciousness. The imagination possesses the power of drawing images out of this 'night', or letting them fall back into darkness. Hegel describes this act of inner consciousness as a kind of self-positing, and therefore as an initial form of diremption or dichotomy [Entzweiung]. And this involves a twofold process. The object thereby first assumes the form or determination of becoming 'mine' in a certain sense. And once the object is perceived again its being no longer possesses the pure significance of being, but exhibits the significance of being 'mine'. The activity of calling forth and letting fall takes time and involves repetition. That is why the very consciousness of an object is already an internal re-calling or re-membrance [Erinnerung]: the object is already familiar to me, or I recall the object, or I am immediately aware of myself in being aware of the object. But insofar as the object is recalled, I also so to speak recall myself, I withdraw myself from the mere image and posit myself within myself. I posit myself as separated in relation to the object.

But the being-for-myself that I have acquired in this way, the fact that 1 posit myself in relation to the object, is nothing but the initial 'night', or self, in which the object was originally submerged. But that self has now been called forth in its own right, is itself an object to me, and what presents itself to me now is the synthesis of both, is both content and the ego. Ontological thought effectively 'naturalises' this synthesis, that is, takes it as something that is simply and originally given.

Hegel locates, more radically than many other thinkers, the dominating aspect that belongs to the loss of self-possession on the part of the object at this point: 'But the external object itself is sublated precisely in this process, has become something other than it is. It has come under the power of the self; it has forfeited the significance of being something immediate and independent. It is not only a synthesis that has transpired here, but rather the being of the object has been sublated.' And, as Hegel himself emphasises, 'the object is not what it is' .15 And 'being' here means self-conscious being rather than independent being in itself. Once again: the thing is not what it is. And that indicates the ruling power of subjectivity. In Hegel it is precisely through language that the return to being is accomplished. For language once again lets the difference reveal itself insofar as the thing is now explicitly posited as the thing. It is not where the imagination feigns a immediate relationship to the 'mineness' of the intended object, but only where language holds open the necessary difference that the tree can be a 'tree', the dog can be a 'dog', the human being can be a 'human being'. That is to say: whereas imagination posits form only as something inner, language is the power that posits what was previously merely inner as an existing being. Language makes the experience of difference possible: when I reply to the question 'what is that?' by saying 'a dog', the answer is unambiguously perceived as a name and as the sound of my voice, that is: as something entirely different from the sensibly intuited object. It is only

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language, therefore, that tears things from the lack of distance that belongs to the world of immediate images and releases those things into the freedom of their own being. The monadological power of the imagination over its images is broken once the 'name' is brought into the world. Language bestows upon the ego the redeeming certitude that there are beings outside and beyond itself, that it is not alone in the world which would then be no world. We are bound up with the world through language. The difference between the naming and the named is irrevocably represented by language itself. Language is not an identificatory grasp upon things, but the guarantee of non-identity.

But language only allows us to experience this difference because it embraces the unity of the relation in question. And language can only do this in turn, according to Hegel, because its site lies within the absolute. As Hegel sees it, language possesses the power of positing inner form as something external, or as an existing being, through the creative power of spirit rather than through consciousness itself. Language is the subject that speaks: it does not belong to us, but merely claims consciousness in order to realise itself. In Hegel's thought, therefore, language assumes a certain priority or antecedent significance. Language is the actual being [Dasein] of spirit, that is, the form of existence in which spirit becomes accessible to the human being. Since spirit also needs language in order to manifest itself, Hegel's concern for language reveals itself in turn as nothing else than a fidelity to the absolute.

To recapitulate: for Hegel, language, also and especially conceptual language, is the manifestation of the absolute through which the manifold character of beings, including that of our own selves, is given to us in the first place. Adorno draws qualitative distinctions between forms of language in order to preserve the greatest possible distance between conceptual and all other kinds of language. The different obligations which each thinker recognises, whether it be to the non-identical or to the absolute, incur different decisions concerning the character of language in each case.

The idea of constellation: conceptual mimesis

I now come to the principal question of 'conceptual mimesis' as something which is allegedly secured by recourse to the idea of a 'constellation' of relevant concepts. Against a certain misconception that is frequently encountered in the secondary literature on Adorno, it should be observed that Adorno is not prepared either simply to renounce 'knowledge' or merely to replace philosophy with 'the aesthetic'. His intention, rather, is to articulate a theoretical form of aesthetics that can broach the problem of understanding, that is, of 'knowing', the non-identical in a new way.

But Adorno insists that knowledge here must abide within the dimension of creative naming. Authentic cognition, Adorno tells us, consists precisely

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in that illuminating act where the concept 'tree' and the beholding of the individual tree coincide. It is then that the tree is there: 'tree!' But he also suggests that the emphatic power of creative naming is bound to the particular moment. Anything that would go beyond the creative moment - to say 'a tree', or 'this is a tree' - degenerates into a form of magical invocation. Only a moment after the astonished exclamation, after the shock of spontaneous cognition, and time already exacts its tribute. One might ask whether a concept can ever be used over and beyond this moment of illumination, and if not whether it is still a concept at all. Yet Adorno will not consider renouncing the language of concepts. He realises that individual experience can only be maintained through concepts, that only concepts can accomplish what the concept itself obstructs. He insists, moreover, that 'the individual concept cannot ground speech that is capable of truth. Such a concept certainly possesses the advantage of not cacooning its object within a categorial framework, but it also thereby forfeits its own cognitive function' .16

Adorno attempts to solve the problem by gathering together different terms, which must also include universal generic as well as singular ones, into a specific constellation. But even here concepts should only be introduced in a 'naming' fashion. For 'cognition lies precisely in the act of illumination'. 17 The concepts should not be defined or determined, but deployed and composed paratactically in the manner of Schonberg's dodecaphonic music. That means: there should be no hierarchical distinctions between either notes or concepts, and the connection between them should emerge spontaneously, refracting and reflecting their different aspects in turn. Every precise or determinate sense of direction must be avoided. The emergence of some all-determining context through processes of reflection or necessary implication should also be prevented - and that by recourse to elaborate linguistic skill and all the art required. We should only countenance propositions which cluster, as it were, around the focal thing or point at issue. Adorno tells us that in a constellation of this kind 'all things are equally close to one another'. He places all his original hope for 'naming' in this idea of conceptual 'constellation' - as if the individual and non-identical could almost 'properly' be named in its spatiotemporal historical givenness from the constellation that surrounds it. 'Only concepts can accomplish what the concept obstructs.' The idea of constellation thus bears his hope for the illuminating disclosure of an unbidden 'thereness'. And that is what Adorno means by 'conceptual mimesis'. This term too must be read as a double genitive: the mimesis of concepts and by concepts. This utopia of knowing is aptly expressed in a formula that reveals the doubt of its possibility in the very moment of its utterance: 'The utopia of knowing would be this: to touch the non-conceptual through our concepts without simply rendering it identical with them.' 18

But Adorno relies here upon a kind of context which really only Hegel can articulate: the objective significance upon which Adorno insists must

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ultimately be established through the power of language itself. What is disclosed in and through constellation thereby comes to take on the structure of a text: 'The language-character of such constellations lies in this: what has been subjectively thought and brought together suddenly reveals itself as objectivity by virtue of language.' 19 At this point, of course, one might critically enquire how language itself can establish or found 'objectivity'. It could only accomplish this if it is already conceived as 'spirit', that is, something that is actually connected with what it has brought forth, namely subject and object, through the concept itself. And here Adorno himself explicitly refers us to 'the self-movement of concepts' as Hegel described it.

But in order to capture the experience that is harboured by the selfmovement of concepts Adorno is compelled to eliminate subjectivity. The priority which he ascribes to the object suddenly reveals its origin in Adamo's hatred of a subjectivity that has been perverted by society itself. One is forced to ask who then is expected to taste the experience harboured in this self-movement of concepts. If one takes the elimination of subjectivity seriously, there is nothing that could be described as a subject any longer anyway, or perhaps one should treat the self-elimination involved as merely feigned, as a kind of Husserlian epoche. That would simply leave the kind of existentialist concept of the self secretly inherited from Kierkegaard, but never overtly expressed because Adorno was fully aware of its theoretical indefensibility.

The source of this asymmetry between a hated and repudiated subjectivity and the priority of the object appears to me to be obscure. The object as object is incapable of yielding redemptive insight here since it is as unredeemed as the subject itself. In his Early Theological Writings Hegel had already critically questioned, with explicit allusion to Fichte, the idea of a philosophy either of absolute subjectivity or of absolute objectivity. He understands the temptation, when 'union with the age were base or dishonourable', to flee towards the perspective of 'absolute opposition' that now appears as 'the noblest and most worthy' course of action. But Hegel also knows that whatever side of the opposition we emphasise, whether that of the ego or that of the alien, distant and unattainable object, this only seals the fate of those 'unhappy peoples' who cling to such a separation. 20

As long as we cling to a 'natural ontology', as long as we attempt to salvage the 'positive', whether we call it the object or the non-identical - itself a concept entirely contaminated by identity - or the novel or the singular, Hegel would rightly describe this approach, as he did the critical philosophy of Kant, as an imperfect and unfulfilled form of scepticism.

The concept of negativity in Hegel's system

At this point I should also like to clarify a related misunderstanding of Hegel's philosophy. Insofar as he remains indebted to the 'ontological'

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approach we have already outlined, Adorno misunderstands Hegel's dialectic of destruction and presentation in a positivistic manner. Horkheimer also misinterprets this aspect of Hegel's thought, as the following remark from the aforementioned discussion concerning language, knowledge and dialectic surely reveal: 'We actually employ the Hegelian method in order to claim that his abstractions are themselves untenable.' 21 But what Hegel presents are not his own abstractions, ones he would gladly preserve, but the petrified abstractions of his age, the fixed power and force of abstraction under which the age suffers, abstractions which Hegel would 'render fluid' and thereby set in motion. To treat them as if they were Hegel's own is fundamentally to misunderstand the radical negativity of Hegelian thought. For this philosophy is a kind of destructive hermeneutics. This brings us directly to Hegel's systematic exposition of 'appearing knowledge'. On the one hand, this represents a radically completed scepticism insofar as all concepts in Hegel must undergo the catharsis of the absolute, and this also includes the concept of the absolute itself. On the other hand, and I should like to lay particular emphasis upon this point, Hegel's system of philosophy is explicitly conceived as a labour of liberation.

Since all concepts derive from the absolute and stand in an internal relationship to 'reason' or to 'the understanding' for Hegel, he cannot assign their actual existence or the effects they exercise, or indeed their interpretation in terms of 'positivity', to a single site or source like 'society' or 'capitalism'. Nor does he attempt, for example, to detach and isolate certain unfortunate concepts or to denounce their deployment. And in the final analysis language has nothing to work on but its own concepts. His task rather is to 'render fluid' the positivity of each and every concept - hence the tendency to completeness of exposition - by referring them back to the absolute. The twofold intention here, once again, is to save the true sense of our concepts, but equally to reveal the presence of the absolute within each and all of them. The concepts in question would otherwise remain nothing but so many petrified remains of the absolute and the latter would be unable to unfold itself unhindered. For us today this all smacks inevitably of the problematic rhetoric of redemption. For the possibility of this opposition to the age, which once possessed a certain political significance, depended for Hegel on the still perceptible presence of the absolute. The elaborate overall context of this philosophy disappears once the relationship to the absolute has to be abandoned. It is not possible to explore this in more detail here.

The difference between system and constellation

The decisive difference between the respective ideas of system and constellation lies in the way in which the concepts are internally connected in the textual exposition of philosophical thought. The exposition of Hegel's

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system proceeds with an advancing and self-directed movement since the evolving significance of its concepts and categories must constitute an intelligible experience for consciousness. If subjectivity is to be articulated and developed, it cannot be eliminated in advance. Hegel's concept of 'experience' does not simply imply a cathartic 'shock' in which a particular shape of consciousness is destroyed, but involves the moment of reflection which reconstructively establishes a certain continuity and also inevitably prepares the next catharsis. Hegel realises that the freeing up of the abstractions produced by 'the understanding' can only succeed by bringing the latter, in accordance with its own structures and demands, to a kind of 'despair', and thus to 'reason' itself. This can only be accomplished through the process of 'determinate negation' that reveals itself at work in experience and which the understanding cannot simply ignore as 'too easily contrived' (too arbitrary or illogical in character). The concept of constellation relies upon a certain phenomenological kind of 'evidence' in the specific configuration and is oriented towards an intellectually formed capacity for intuition. But Hegel's system is also directly concerned with helping 'the understanding' to participate in the transitions within experience. What Adorno critically describes as force or violence on the part the system is actually a kind of counter-force. It is a counter-force directed against the fatal and petrifying consequences of reflection, against the 'positivity' of the power of the understanding which Hegel fearfully recognises. And there are many passages in Hegel's texts which reveal a kind of shocked horror in this regard.

I come now to my concluding reflections on the relationship between the two thinkers. They essentially concern the repudiation of 'determinacy' that is implicit in Adorno's idea of conceptual mimesis. When Adorno categorically declares that language, in its most authentic sense, does not define its concepts, it finally becomes clear what he really means by saying that the Hegelian dialectic is 'one without language'. If definitions, if determinacy and determination per se, are an essential distortion, are a negation of language, then Hegel's dialectic would indeed be a dialectic without language, or at least afflicted by the distorting character of merely determinate and discursive language, precisely because it does not eliminate definition, determination or, in short, the realm of necessity. Instead of being excluded from dialectic, the process of definition is awakened in Hegel's 'speculative proposition' to a new and dynamic vitality. But it nonetheless remains quite true to say that the system, in contrast to the idea of constellation, is ultimately governed by certain 'necessary' relations.

But I fear, and this is my concluding thesis, that conceptual mimesis fails precisely because it excludes the realm of necessity, and this in two respects. For it cannot properly respond to the power and the content of metaphysics. Adorno's conceptually mimetic form of speech only succeeds

'"

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(in appearance at least: through its immediate effect) in those areas which are not governed by any necessity: in speech about art where there is an undeniable experience of the beautiful, in the encounter with the 'unconditional', with authentic language, with 'expression', as in the case of Kafka for example. 'You are only loved there where you may show yourself to be weak without provoking a display of strength' - remarks like these seem to speak for themselves in the very moment of utterance. Their phenomenological 'evidence' suffices momentarily to banish the need for any interpretation. Adorno's Minima Moralia contains observations without which, as in the case of art, the world would be the poorer. And if they did not exist, we should somehow feel their absence.

But conceptual mimesis in Adorno's sense cannot adequately capture the experiential content of Hegelian philosophy. One could even go so far as to claim that Adorno once again closes himself off to a semantic space that was first opened up by Hegel himself. The signs of Adorno's evident helplessness here have frequently been documented in the literature from Theunissen to Muller: the almost stereotypical application of the concepts of 'subject' and 'object' themselves, the schematic reduction of different connotations of terms, the unintentional trivialisation of historical phenomena as an alleged consequence of an undifferentiated logic of subsumption. Individual and particular events are subordinated to the abstract explanatory principle of a globally deployed concept of identity so that their own value and importance is misinterpreted as a result. 22 Horkheimer himself accused Adorno of employing concepts uncritically by simply presupposing a conception of subject and object that could only emerge from the resolution of the genuine philosophical problems. In spite of all the elaborate recommendations about 'how one is to read' his own texts, Adorno negates the fundamental insight that dialectically developed thought cannot possibly abstract from successive attempts to define and determine its own character. Adorno's critique of 'allegedly undifferentiated identity' itself levels out all the distinctions that govern Hegel's thought as it advances from original identity to the accomplished identity that concludes the exposition. Theunissen speaks of the tactical oscillation in Adorno's reading of Hegel as he moves from genuine understanding on the one hand to a purely partisan and merely apparent interpretation on the other. I believe that these criticisms are quite justified. But I think that the failure of Adorno's conceptual mimesis before the power of metaphysics is even more relevant in this connection insofar as it touches directly on the political dimension.

Adorno's utopian conception of knowledge - that of touching the nonconceptual through concepts without rendering it identical with the latter - presupposes that the non-conceptual is given for us in the first place, and as something that we should approach as a hitherto undisclosed treasure. But in the domain of metaphysics we are not concerned with the

/;I

THEODOR W. ADORNO

non-conceptual, but with concepts that have grown and rigidified over centuries: with positive, existing, and actually suffocating 'real abstractions'. Rigidified concepts, as I suspect that Hegel clearly sees and Adorno does not, are qualitatively different in character from the actuality that it is our task to comprehend. We are no longer concerned with 'expression' here, the time has already passed when we could struggle to find the right word - I allude to Adorno's remark in his essay on Kafka: the reader is guilty as long as the word has not been found. The task is rather to make the dead weight of positivity once again into something fluid. One might well object that the notion of 'constellation' is also a way of rendering concepts 'fluid'. But not every attempt to do so also produces genuine sense.

Adorno attempts to deploy difficult metaphysical concepts, like subject and object, as mimetic metaphors within the context of conceptual constellation, but where is the 'evidential' moment in this approach? When Adorno speaks of subject and object, we miss the joyful recognition, or the consolation that can assuage despair, that is vouchsafed where truth is actually disclosed. These concepts cannot be brought into movement by any process of emphatic, or denunciatory, naming. Subject and object, identity and non-identity, concept and reality - all these concepts are bound up with another according to a certain logic of necessity. Their respective meaning can only properly be determined within such a context. And this context can only be transformed in accordance with the rules of one's own rational faculties. Torn from their context, these concepts become simply meaningless rather than 'fluid'. They cannot be brought to 'move' through a quasi metaphorical negation, through what Jiirgen Naeher has aptly characterised as a 'physiognomic negation', but only through a process of determinate negation. One must play to the relations in question their very own melody, as Marx would say, if they are ever to be made to dance. For they will not respond to a different, though possibly more beautiful, one. In the almost manic compulsion to repeat, to evoke and intone, the same remarks and observations, with slight variations, Adorno himself seems to sense the impotence of his own approach. This repetition compulsion simply reveals the predicament of an attitude that taboos every conceptual determination, that avoids touching what it rejects, that is consumed by the anxiety of incurring injury or guilt if it does come into contact with the latter.

When necessity is pitted against necessity, where logic is pitted against the kairos of authentic experience, it is clear that domination and necessity have already triumphed - and that indeed in an entirely unredeemed and compulsive form. And one cannot help asking whether a philosophy that 'enters into an irreconcileable opposition to the prevailing consciousness'23 has fully measured the political consequences that result from an approach which effectively leaves the dominating power where it is, whether it be on the left or the right.

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Negative dialectic, mass culture and the end of philosophy

What happens when concepts are detached from their necessary context? Necessity continues to exercise its power, but now in an uncomprehended way. Concepts are released from the obligation to justify their own status and character. For necessity also preserves a certain continuity of meaning and prevents the arbitrary use of concepts. We must surely regard 'meaning' as a historical achievement rather than as a gift that is simply dispensed by 'human nature' however conceived. Meaning is a cultural achievement that can in turn be lost or forfeited. Meaning in this sense cannot be preserved over time without reference to something 'absolute'. If we can no longer rely upon the binding power of language, then we cannot rely upon a continuing relation to the world either, and we can no longer grasp or express the compulsive economic context that is now accompanied by an anachronistic illusion of perfect meaning and freedom. To assume that we cannot meaningfully address these things is simply to abandon ourselves.

The predicament of language in this respect is intimately bound up with the end of philosophy (and perhaps even with an imminent end of history). The world of advertising and the mass media have taken it upon themselves to define and interpret our concepts for us, while the 'language wars' of modern politics have clearly revealed that the administration of 'meaning' has become the most effective means of directing the masses and that more material means (military or otherwise) already seems rather anachronistic. The levelling character of mass culture, which earned Adorno's justified if not always properly differentiated contempt, the manner in which mass culture typically abuses the dimension of language itself, merely celebrates the divorce between language and the realm of necessity in its own shameless and scornful way.

We should be grateful to Adorno precisely for speaking out - and speaking out seriously - at the very highest level in a despairing and objectively hopeless situation. At the risk of striking a false note, one could say that Adorno bears within himself the wound that Hegel still represents. And the provocation of Hegel, which Adorno at once opposed and passionately defended, has itself been handed on to us as a consequence. The distance which Adorno so forcefully upholds in relation to Hegel testifies to the intensity of his engagement. The eminently fraught reception of Adorno's work reveals the groundless despair that is generated by an absent absolute, one so groundless that it could ally itself once again with hope. Adorno, whose own historical experience prevented him from responding to Hegel in terms of the absolute itself, is the very thinker who compels us to address Hegel with the seriousness required. Adorno has bequeathed the question of what our own present means in the light of Hegel. He has handed down the problem, rather than its resolution, of how thinking itself is possible when the 'absolute' can no longer be thought as God, or even any longer as itself.

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1 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik, Frankfurt am Main 1970, p. 163. English translation: Negative Dialectics, tr. E. B. Ashton, p. 163.

2 Ibid., p. 15. ET: 5. 3 Ibid. ET: 5. 4 Ibid. ET: 5. 5 Ibid., p. 16. ET: 6. 6 Michael Theunissen, Hegels Lehre vom absoluten Geist als theologisch-po/itischer

Traktat, Berlin 1970, p. 27. 7 G. W. F. Hegel, Differenz des Fichteschen und Schellingschen Systems der

Phi/osophie, in: Hegel, Jenaer kritische Schriften (I), Hamburg 1979, p. 12; English translation: The Difference between Fichte's and Schelling's System of Philosophy, tr. by H. S. Harris and Walter Cerf, Albany 1977, pp. 89 and 91.

8 Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 12, edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, Frankfurt am Main 1989, p. 519.

9 Theodor W. Adorno, A'sthetische Theorie, Frankfurt am Main 1973, p. 171; English translation: Aesthetic Theory, tr. by Robert Hullot-Kenter, Continuum 1997, p. 147.

10 Ibid., p. 170; ET: 146. 11 Ibid., p. 171; ET: 147. 12 Ibid., p. 170; ET: 147. 13 Max Horkheimer, Joe. cit., p. 503. 14 G. W. F. Hegel, Jenaer Rea/philosophie. Vor/esungsmanuskripte zur Phi/osophie

der Natur und des Geistes von 1805-1806, edited by J. Hoffmeister, Hamburg 1969, p. l 80f.

15 Ibid., p. 182; English translation of Hegel's 'Second Philosophy of Spirit' in: Hegel and the Human Spirit, translated by Leo Rauch, Detroit 1983.

16 Ulrich Miiller, Erkenntniskritik und negative Metaphysik bei Adorno. Eine Philosophie der dritten Refiektiertheit, Frankfurt am Main 1988, p. 154.

17 Max Horkheimer, Joe. cit., p. 518. 18 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik, p. 19. ET: 10. 19 Ulrich Miiller, op. cit., p. 150. 20 Hermann Nohl (ed.), Hegels theologische Jugendschriften, Tiibingen 1907, p. 350;

English translation: G. W. F. Hegel, Early Theological Writings, tr. by T. M. Knox, Philadelphia 1971, pp. 318-19 ('Fragment of a System').

21 Max Horkheimer, Joe. cit., p. 519. 22 Ulrich Miiller, op. cit., p. 223. 23 Theodor W. Adorno, Eingriffe. Neun kritische Model/e, Frankfurt am Main 1964,

p. 13.

£A

4

NATURAL BEAUTY AND THE 'REPRESENTATIVE' CHARACTER

OF THE WORK OF ART

Gunter Figal

Source: Gunter Figal, Theodor W. Adorno. Das Naturschiine als spekulative Gedankenjigur, Bonn: Bouvier Verlag Herbert Grundmann, 1977, pp. 83-107. Translated by Nicholas Walker.

'The artwork art, through and through thesei, something human, is the representative of that which is phusei, of what is not merely for the subject, of what, in Kantian terms, would be the thing in itself. The identity of the artwork with the subject is as complete as the identity of nature with itself should some day be' (AT: 99; ET: 82). Works of art, as aesthetic monads, stand in for, or 'represent', what they themselves are not. This 'representation' can only be accomplished through the rationality that is realised in the aesthetic monad. Rationality manifests itself in and through the unity of the monadic work of art. This objectively constitutive aesthetic rationality does not manifest itself in something simply other or foreign to itself: it is only in and through this process of appearing. It is this 'appearing' [Erscheinen] which brings the work of art into a representative relationship to nature. Adorno describes this process by reference to our actual aesthetic experience: 'Just how bound up natural beauty is with beauty in art is confirmed through our experience of the former. For its nature is exclusively appearance, never the stuff of labour and the reproduction of life, let alone the substratum of science. Like the experience of art, our aesthetic experience of nature is that of images' (AT: 103; ET: 86). The concept of 'appearance' here is understood in contrast or opposition to that of 'essence'. It signifies that nature, grasped as appearance, is not understood in relation to 'another', not subsumed under a form of rational unity or universality, alien to itself, one that would primarily attempt to know or evaluate it.

The 'representation' of nature through an aesthetic monad is not merely different from the theoretical knowledge or practical evaluation of nature.

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For it cannot properly be grasped as a presentation or depiction of nature either. Nature is not brought to 'appear' in the work of art, let alone through the work of art, for this would contradict 'the fact natural beauty cannot be copied' (AT: 105; ET: 87). Adorno expressly emphasises that so-called 'naturalistic' art is 'only deceptively close to nature because, analogously to industry, it relegates nature to raw material' (AT: 104; ET: 86). Nature, considered as the raw material for art, could then simply be subsumed under the universality of aesthetic rationality. But the aesthetic monad is characterised as 'self-likeness freed from the compulsion of identity' (AT: 190; ET: 166).

Works of art can 'represent' nature as appearance precisely because they are themselves are appearance. Because their own appearance is the result of objectively constitutive rationality, of a kind of self-possessed rationality, they can represent nature as self-likeness. In this respect nature has an image-character of its own that cannot be copied or reproduced through art. Works of art represent this image-character by appearing themselves: 'Rationality that has become aesthetic, a disposition over materials that fits them together according to their own immanent tendencies, is ultimately similar to the natural element in aesthetic comportment. Quasi-rational tendencies in art - the outcome of subjectivisation - such as the critical rejection of topoi, the complete internal organisation of individual works progressively approximate, though not by imitation, something natural that has been veiled by the mastery of the omnipotent subject ... ' (AT: 104; ET: 86). Adorno thus distinguishes a specific 'aesthetic rationality' from that of the 'all-dominating subject', from that rationality whose conceptually determining and intentional relationship to all things allows them to possess nothing but a purely 'intentional' significance. Aesthetic rationality, on the other hand, self-possessed as it is, lacks the 'intentionality' that is directed toward anything else and thereby also opens up a non-intentional dimension of language: 'The more that art is thoroughly organised as an object by the subject and divested of the subject's intentions, the more articulately does it speak according to the model of a non-conceptual, non-rigidified significative language; this would perhaps be the same language which is inscribed in what the sentimental age gave the beautiful if threadbare name, "The Book of Nature'" (AT: 105; ET: 87). Aesthetic rationality, realised in a specific medium, only appears as the medium itself. In thus presenting itself as an object, for the medium is intrinsically material, the work of art represents the 'priority of the object' that makes a significant appearance in natural beauty (AT: 111; ET: 92). This priority is realised in the nonintentional, image-like language of natural beauty and is therefore perceived as 'something authoritatively binding and as something incomprehensible that questioningly awaits its answer' (AT: 111; ET: 92).

Natural beauty also enjoys a certain priority in relation to art precisely because the priority of the objective is a constitutive moment of natural

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beauty. For the objectivity of art is posited only as the result of a process of rationality itself. The possibility of a non-posited objectivity is the very condition of the objectivity of art. Natural beauty, on account of its own inimitable character, cannot itself be integrated within the aesthetic monad. Yet although the place of natural beauty 'is located beyond the sphere of aesthetic immanence', it is nevertheless the very 'premise' of the latter (AT: 98; ET: 81 ). For Adorno art is therefore 'the imitation of natural beauty, not the imitation of nature' (AT: 111). The represented is what is prior in the representation: the representing activity could not be what it is without the represented.

Imitation of natural beauty is the imitation of the 'appearing' of nature. This appearing is possible as long as nature is not simply determined by a universality external to itself. This appearing is 'discontinuous' in character. But this appearing is only inviolably possible where discontinuity is produced as the result of a continuous process. It is only thoroughly present, free of external determination, where determination is already the constitutive condition of discontinuity. That is why natural beauty depends upon its representation in the aesthetic monad. The language which natural beauty speaks can only begin to be described, for Adorno, through its representation in the work of art. This is what Adorno means when he says that 'whoever declaims on natural beauty verges on poetastery' (AT: 11 O; ET: 91). Works of art produce the language of natural beauty as 'their own transcendence, rather than being its arena, and thereby they once again become separated from transcendence' (AT: 122; ET: 104). Adorno clarifies the place where the work of art reveals transcendence precisely through the nexus of its different elements: 'By straining toward, as well as adapting to, this nexus, they go beyond the appearance that they are, though this transcendence may be unreal. Only in the achievement of this transcendence, not foremost and indeed probably never through meanings, are artworks spiritual. Their transcendence is their eloquence, their script, but it is a script without meaning or, more precisely, a script with broken or veiled meaning. Although this transcendence is subjectively mediated, it is manifested objectively, yet all the more desultorily. Art fails its concept when it does not achieve this transcendence; it loses the quality of being art. Equally, however, art betrays transcendence when it seeks to produce it as an effect' (AT: 122; ET: 104). We shall have to return to the concept of the 'spiritual' that is deployed here. It is the network of different moments which manifests the rationality that appears in the work of art. When Adorno says that this appearance is transcended, he means that the rationally determined aesthetic medium excludes all further rational determination: the transcendence of appearing rationality already lies in the appearing itself. Indeterminability arises precisely as a result of immanent determinacy. The work of art becomes irreal through its own reality and indeterminable through its own determinacy. That is how the work of art represents the

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determinate indeterminacy of natural beauty: 'Works of art become appearances in the pregnant sense of the term - that is, as the appearances of an other, where the accent falls on the unreality of their own reality' (AT: 123; ET: 105).

The transcendence belonging to the work of art, the 'more' of which Adorno also speaks in this regard, is un-real in the sense that it can never be defined or determined in an exhaustive or definitive fashion. This transcendence is therefore essentially 'semblance' [Schein]. If transcendence were positively asserted or affirmed in works of art, then what the latter represent would simply be immanent to them, what they represent would no longer be what they themselves are not. Adorno emphasises how it is precisely modern art which has attempted to renounce this semblance-character: 'Already in Baudelaire the transcendence of the artistic appearance is at once effected and negated' (AT: 123; ET: 105). The work of art runs the danger of claiming a spurious transcendence if it presents itself as the appearance of a deeper essence, if it denies its own unity as one of rationality itself, or again if it remains overly beholden to discursive language. The character of semblance, the transcendence that belongs to the work of art, then threatens to revert to a merely delusory transcendence which is simply immanence. This is what Adorno means when by the concept of phantasmagoria: 'During the nineteenth century aesthetic semblance was heightened to the point of phantasmagoria. Artworks effaced the traces of their production, probably because the victorious positivistic spirit penetrated art to the degree that art aspired to be a fact and was ashamed of whatever revealed its compact immediateness as mediated. Artworks obeyed this tendency well into late modernism. Art's illusoriness progressively became absolute; this is concealed behind Hegel's term "art-religion", which was taken literally by the reuvre of the Schopenhauerian Wagner. Modernism subsequently rebelled against the semblance of a semblance that denies it is such' (AT: 156f.; ET: 135). Works of art which attempt to avoid all transcendence are directed precisely against the tendency to affirm the unity of rationality as the transcendence of the work of art and thereby paradoxically to integrate transcendence entirely within the aesthetic monad: 'In the aftermath of that rebellion, however, artworks are at the point of regressing to the status of a mere thing as if in punishment for the hubris of being more than art' (AT: l 57f.; ET: 136). In Adorno's eyes this tendency culminates in the 'happening', in every artistic product which threatens once again to become another object of instrumental rationality as soon as it eliminates its own 'representative' character. For the representative character of the work of art is the ground of their non-discursive language. This language, and thus the transcendence of the work, can never be defined or demonstrated in purely positive terms. If it could, works of art would no longer represent what they themselves are not: 'Any claim that this is how

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nature speaks cannot be judged with assurance, for its language does not make judgements' (AT: 115; ET: 95).

Aesthetic transcendence is a merely apparent transcendence if regarded from the perspective of rationality, if it is supposed to accommodate itself to the criteria of rationality, or if rationality presents its own unified and unifying character as transcendence. The work of art avoids both these alternatives, and thus transcends itself, when it approaches the limits of silence: 'A language remote from all meaning is not a speaking language and this is its affinity to muteness' (AT: 123; ET: l 05). This affinity is not merely encountered where the work of art actually falls silent, as in music where, as Adorno says, 'nothing is so full of expression as what flickers out - that tone that disengages itself starkly from the dense musical texture - where art by virtue of its own movement converges with its natural element' (TA: 123; ET: l 05). The work is art is close to such falling silence when it transcends itself, when its unity withdraws behind its discontinuous character. When this transpires, the work of art becomes an 'appearing' in the sense of sudden manifestation or 'apparition'. Adorno compares this with the phenomenon of fireworks: 'They are apparition kat'exochen: they appear empirically yet are liberated from the burden of the empirical, which is the obligation of duration; they are a sign from heaven yet artifactual, an ominous warning, a script that flashes up, vanishes, and indeed cannot be read for its meaning' (AT: 125; ET: 107). The firework is prototypical for the work of art because the latter is also 'luminously actualised through its expressive appearing' (AT: 126; ET: 107). Because the appearing of the work of art arises from the thoroughly worked medium itself, and thus remains bound to its objective aesthetic constitution, the 'apparition' is intrinsically bound to the image-character of the work of art: 'If apparition illuminates and touches, the image is the paradoxical effort to transfix this most evanescent instant. In art something momentary transcends; objectivation makes the artwork into an instant' (AT: 130; ET: ll 1 ). Imagecharacter and appearance are terms that parallel those of totality, the rational unity and universality of the work of art, and of discontinuity: 'If, as images, artworks are the persistence of the transient, they are concentrated in appearance as something momentary. To experience art means to become conscious of its immanent process as an instant at a standstill; this may perhaps have nourished the central concept of Lessing's aesthetics, that of the "pregnant moment"' (AT: 131; ET: 111 ). This concept of the 'instant' or 'moment' [Augenblick], the blinking of an eye, as Adorno employs it here, recalls not only Lessing, but also Kierkegaard, in whose work it certainly plays a central role. 1 But Adorno interprets the concept differently from Kierkegaard insofar as he does not try to grasp it as a unity, as a 'synthesis of the temporal and the eternal' within time itself.2 Adorno opposes 'apparition', as the transcendence of the work of art, to the permanence,

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that is, to the rationally constituted identity, of the work. The difference here arises from the fact that Adorno makes no attempt to explicate the relationship between the apparition and the image-character of the work in terms of an absolute movement which ultimately constitutes time itself. He rather interprets this relationship in terms of the process of aesthetic 'representation' as we have described it. The work of art becomes an image through the objectively constitutive power of rationality. The discontinuous appearing of the image, as the transcendence of the work of art, tends to destroy the image-character because the process of appearing represents what the work itself is not. The 'appearing' directs itself, for its own sake, against the immanent structure of the aesthetic monad: what works of art themselves are not, dominates their appearing at the cost of what they are. This radical conceptualisation of appearance involves the negation of Schein as 'merely apparent semblance': 'As a result of its determination as appearance, art bears its own negation embedded in itself as its own telos; the sudden unfolding of appearance disdains aesthetic semblance' (AT: 132; ET: 112). Adorno tries to capture this destruction of the immanent imagecharacter of the work with the concept of 'explosion': 'Artworks not only produce imagines as something that endures. They become artworks just as much through the destruction of their own imagerie; for this reason art is profoundly akin to explosion. [ ... ] The shocks inflicted by the most recent artworks are the explosion of their appearance. [ ... ] Closely observed, even tranquil works discharge not so much the pent-up emotions of their makers as the works' own inwardly antagonistic forces' (AT: 131; ET: 111-112).

Appearance is also therefore directed against semblance because the latter implies the idea of harmony. If what the work of art is were to appear in the work itself, this appearance would be identical with its unity, and appearing unity is harmony. The appearing unity of rationality would in itself already be 'apparition'. But since the work of art represents what it itself is not the 'emancipation of the concept of harmony' reveals itself precisely as 'a revolt against semblance' (AT: 154; ET: 133). And the reverse is also true: the fact that the work of art in its apparition represents what it itself is not violates its own unity. As the moment that contradicts harmonious unity, 'dissonance is effectively expression' (AT: 168; ET: 145; my emphasis). The concept of 'expression' thereby 'approaches the transsubjective; it is the form of knowledge that - having once preceded the polarity of subject and object - does not recognise this polarity as definitive is the shape of cognition' (AT: 170; ET: 146). For it is mimesis, the prehistory of rationality itself, which precedes the polarity of subject and object. Expression realises mimesis as appearance because it arises from the immanent mediating process of aesthetic rationality. Mimesis is distinguished from expression insofar as the former merely underlies rationality itself. Expression, on the other hand, does not merely refer rationality to the


moments which the latter has itself determined, does not merely unfold a correlative relationship between these moments, but also reaches, precisely through traversing the rational polarity of subject and object, a kind of objectivity that is no longer entirely determined rationally. In this context, where the 'dissociation' of purely immanent construction and the idea of 'objectivity' become central concepts for exploring the work of art, we can see precisely why 'fragments' and 'late works' are so important for Adomo's thought. For they reveal most significantly and emphatically how the work of art represents what it is not: they discard their apparent character and disclose the impossibility of attaining objectivity of expression within the immanent unity of rationality. The works which Adorno describes as the 'highest products of art' are 'condemned to a fragmentariness that is their confession that even they do not possess what is claimed by the immanence of their form' (AT: 139; ET: 118). Because only the thoroughly constructed medium acquires self-possession, because what the work of art represents must be represented as self-possession, the 'truth of disintegration' can only be attained precisely 'through the guilty triumph of integration'. As Adorno says: 'The category of the fragmentary ... is not to be confused with the category of contingent particularity: the shard is that part of the totality of the work that opposes totality' (AT: 74; ET: 57). The rational totality of the work is the necessary condition that allows the latter to represent an objective totality, and representation signifies that this totality is not present in the work itself. In this sense, representation is fulfilled in the 'violation' of rational totality accomplished by expression.3

The objectivity of expression, which has no factical status in the work of art, is what Adorno means by 'spirit': 'That through which artworks, by becoming appearance, are more than they are: This is their spirit. The determination of artworks by spirit is akin to their determination as phenomenon, as something that appears, and not as blind appearance. What appears in artworks and is neither to be separated from their appearance nor to be held simply identical with it - the non-factual in their facticity - is their spirit' (AT: 139; ET: 114). Spirit is mimesis, expression, realised in appearance as totality: 'the mimetic impulse captured as totality' (AT: 139; ET: 119). That is why Adorno's concept of spirit is different from 'what idealist aesthetics calls spirit' (AT: 139; ET: 119). The question concerning this difference is as central as it is problematic. It is central because the category of 'representation', and thus the relationship between natural beauty and the work of art, finds its most complete articulation in the concept of spirit. And this concept must form the basis for any adequate clarification of the argument underlying Adorno's Aesthetic Theory. The concept of spirit is well suited to illuminate Adomo's position in relation to Hegel's aesthetics which certainly formed the systematic point of departure for his own analysis. It can help to clarify the systematic character of Aesthetic Theory itself, as well as elucidating the real philosophical problems which Adomo's book

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effectively attempts to address. But the question concerning the difference between Adorno's thought and idealist aesthetics is also problematic because he does not always pursue his argument in the way that the systematic structure of Aesthetic Theory would immediately suggest. Thus, in order to distance himself from Hegel's aesthetics, Adorno seems to sacrifice the conception of spirit as totality when he claims that for Hegel 'spirit is at one with totality, even with the aesthetic totality' (AT: 138; ET: 117) and explicates the concept of spirit as follows: 'Certainly spirit in artworks is not an intentional particular but an element like every particular constitutive of an artwork; true, spirit is that particular that makes an artifact art, though there is no spirit without its antithesis. In actual fact history knows no artworks in which there is a pure identity of the spiritual and the nonspiritual. According to its own concept, spirit in artworks is not pure but rather a function of that out of which it arises. Those works that appear to embody such identity and are content with it are hardly ever the most important ones' (AT: 138; ET: 117). When Adorno describes spirit here as an individual moment and locates it as simply one of the 'factors' of the work of art, this clearly reveals a polemical intent in relation to Hegel. His arguments here derive less from the conceptual structure of Aesthetic Theory than from a defensive strategy against anything that could give the impression that he is himself developing a concept of totality in whatever form. But Adorno does not make it clear why we should reject the conception of spirit as totality, or any of its specific implications. Against the letter of Adorno's remarks, we must insist that spirit should indeed, even in the context of Aesthetic Theory, be determined precisely as totality. For otherwise the rational unity of the work of art, the totality of its construction, would no longer constitute the necessary condition for the representation of what the work itself is not. If spirit is not totality, the representative character of the aesthetic monad, and thus its most important feature, is also forfeited. Spirit cannot be a 'moment' or aspect of the work of art, for then it would tend to become, along with other moments, a part of a more comprehensive unity that would include it. But this unity, the only one realised in the work of art, can for Aesthetic Theory only be the unity of rationality. And if the relationship between the factical and the non-factical were integrated, or capable of being integrated, in this rational unity, spirit would simply be a 'factor', rather than the non-factical itself. That would contradict Adamo's conception of transcendence. The critique of Hegel's concept of spirit as a totality must therefore be formulated in a different way, and grounded explicitly by reference to the underlying argument of Aesthetic Theory if the inner consistency of the work itself is to be maintained. The critique of the concept of spirit as a self-manifesting totality is certainly compatible with the general argument of Aesthetic Theory as we have presented it since it is the unity of rationality that manifests itself in the aesthetic monad. Hegel, on the other hand, proceeds on the assumption


that 'the spiritual individual is a totality within itself' (Hegel, Asthetik 1: 195) and that the work of art is a manifestation of this totality. In this context the Idea is the manifestation of spiritual individuality, that is to say, of an individuality that relates essentially to itself, in the specific form of sensuous appearance. Individuality relates to itself in art because it realises itself in the sensuous 'show' of appearance, because it does not appear 'for another'. The sensuous appearing is the form of immediate spiritual self-knowing.4

What manifests itself in this sensuous appearance is already 'free individuality' itself, not merely a rudimentary or preliminary form of the latter. For Hegel art is the original fashion in which free individuality relates to itself, but the specific form of sensuous appearance is still inadequate with respect to the complete unfolding of this self-relation. For only the 'concept' ultimately relates to itself in such a way that the relevant form of knowledge 'no longer falls apart into a work of external common existence, a subject that produces the work, and a subject which contemplates and worships it' (Hegel, Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, §556). Hegel can still regard art as one of the spheres of absolute spirit, however, because he interprets art as the prehistory of the philosophical concept and defines it explicitly in relation to the latter. It is this teleological feature of art which permits that 'apology for immediacy as something meaningful' which Adorno himself criticises (AT: 139; ET: 118). Adamo's fundamental argument against Hegel is that immediacy only acquires meaning in being specifically related, through the concept, to the concept, and cannot therefore claim meaning in its own right. But the meaning that belongs to the concept already violates, for Adorno, what can properly be called the immediate character of art itself. Hegel's critique of natural beauty therefore simply confirms, in Adamo's eyes, how little Hegel is capable of conceptualising the meaning of an immediacy which could simultaneously present an immediate meaning. In his own meta-critique of Hegel's position Adorno argues that Hegelian aesthetics 'lacks receptivity for that which speaks a non-signifying language' (AT: 116; ET: 97). And 'signifying' language here basically means a unambiguously definable and determinable language. This kind of unambiguously definable and determinable meaning, as communicated through the concept, is not specifically aesthetic at all. For Adorno it is natural beauty which decisively shows that the signifying character of the concept is inadequate to capture beauty as such: 'What Hegel chalks up as the deficiency of natural beauty - the characteristic of escaping the fixed grasp of the concept - is however the substance of beauty itself' (AT: 118; ET: 98). From the systematic perspective of Aesthetic Theory Adorno charges Hegel with taking natural beauty as the starting point of his own aesthetics simply from the perspective of progressive conceptual determination. He is thereby ineluctably forced to interpret natural beauty as the most abstract form of beauty. Hegel therefore offers a rigorously 'consistent' aesthetics (AT: 116; ET: 96) insofar as he regards the most indeterminate form of experience as

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the poorest form of experience, insofar as he interprets it merely as the least determinate, rather than as something indeterminable in principle. For Adorno, on the other hand, 'the fleetingness of natural beauty, and virtually everything non-conceptual' is 'the central moment of art' (AT: 119; ET: 99). The indeterminacy of natural beauty with respect to the concept, its intrinsic indeteminability, is what is richest here. Natural beauty, as the allegedly poorest beginning, inevitably becomes a conceptual beginning 'for us' if the concept must be grasped in terms of rationality alone. But natural beauty as a 'beginning' is also elevated if it is impossible to attain any greater or more concrete determinacy comparable to that which already, in an abstract way, belongs to natural beauty itself. Nothing further, if it is to remain immediate, can emerge from the substantial immediacy of natural beauty. Even if its indeterminacy is not identified with imperfection, as in Hegel, natural beauty still remains proton phusei, still remains 'the first existence of the beautiful' as Hegel himself says (Asthetik I: 190). But it is now 'first' in a prior sense, rather than a sequential or numerical one. For it is a beauty which 'presents itself as independent of the subject, as absolutely something not made' (AT: 116; ET: 97) and therefore as something other than art. For all its wealth, natural beauty is still exposed to the determining grasp of rationality, and its liberated non-rational meaning is still threatened by a rationality that asserts its own significance as the only valid kind there is. As Adorno says: 'natural beauty, the unexpected promise of something that is highest, cannot remain locked in itself but is rescued only through that consciousness that is set in opposition to it' (AT: 117; ET: 97). Natural beauty needs to be represented in the aesthetic monad of the work of art. But the immediacy of natural beauty cannot really be sublated or eliminated. In the worst, and indeed most general, case it can only be concealed by rationality and its signifying procedures, and in the best case, in art, can be brought to a new un-threatened presence through the immanent aesthetic process of rationality. The immediate character of natural beauty, in its un-threatened presence, is precisely 'spirit'. This means that the immanent mediating process of the work of art is merely the condition for the appearing of spirit, but does not presuppose spirit itself. For spirit, as something immediate, has no presupposition.

In interpreting spirit in this way as something that is itself immediate, Adorno institutes a decisive change of conceptual perspective over against Hegel.5 For Hegel the concept of spirit was bound up with his own attempt to develop a conception of subjectivity as autonomous self-relation. Two conditions are minimally required in order to articulate this conception successfully. Firstly, a strictly autonomous self-relation cannot be defined or determined by anything other than itself. Secondly, this self-relation must be separated from anything other than itself, that is to say, it must determine itself over against everything that is not itself. The Hegelian programme requires both these conditions to be fulfilled by a single principle since a


theory of strictly autonomous self-relation cannot appeal to correlative terms. Hegel must therefore develop a concept of negation which allows him to conceptualise the autonomous character of self-relation in a perspicuous fashion. Otherness itself must be grasped as a moment of self-relation and the self-reflexive character of this relation must be elucidated as a movement that passes from itself to its other and from this other, which necessarily appears as a moment of self-relation, back to itself. As autonomous selfrelation spirit can therefore be described as 'the knowledge of oneself in the externalisation of oneself; the being that is the movement of retaining its self-identity in otherness' (Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by A. V. Miller, p. 459). It is of course impossible to examine the problems associated with Hegel's conception of spirit, and the specific role played by the concept of 'negation', in any detail here. 6 The relevant point is simply that Hegel requires this kind of mediating movement because spirit for him is essentially a 'self-relation', and that he can only present spirit in its immediacy by conceptualising the immediate in its 'indissoluble connection' with mediation (Encyclopaedia of' the Philosophical Sciences I: §12). Hegel can only think spirit as 'presuppositionless' if he successfully recuperates all presuppositions within the single conceptual continuum of the speculative movement, and if he successfully conceptualises the negative movement of self-relation as an integral moment of immediacy itself. Hegel himself must also conceptualise an immediacy that is free from all negation or mediation. In the Science of Logic, however, this immediacy is already described explicitly as 'indeterminate', so that a determinate immediacy can then be distinguished from it in turn. The indeterminate immediacy that functions as the beginning of Hegel's Logic cannot be, and is not meant to be, captured and retained as such.7 For a philosophy of spirit the 'essential purpose' of which is to 'reintroduce the concept into the knowledge of what spirit is' (Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences III: §378), immediacy is not something that can remain 'indeterminate'. On the contrary, immediacy must be able to take on conceptual determinations, must be itself in principle determinable, if it is to be articulated as a medium of the concept itself.8 Since spirit has the concept as 'the pure element of its existence' (Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 490), and spirit is conceived essentially as autonomous self-relation, immediacy cannot be something alien to the concept. If it were, the Hegelian theory would forfeit the monistic character it requires to formulate an adequate conception of autonomous self-relation.

The systematic structure of Adorno's Aesthetic Theory presupposes the collapse of this concept of autonomous self-relation. Adorno's interpretation of the Hegelian conception art as the prehistory of the concept liberates art from the status of an empty form awaiting further conceptual determination. This liberation denies the idea that the concept simply relates to itself in the object for it reveals an immanent dynamic in the object itself and thereby also demands a new conceptual approach to the latter. The

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movement of art over and beyond the concept, something paradoxically facilitated by the Hegelian determination of art in the light of the concept, reduces the concept to a rationality which, once it has been deprived of the teleological character of the concept, can indeed 'remain at home within itself' as a moment of the aesthetic monad. And it can do so without turning into the true form of self-relation conceived by Hegel as 'the immediate unity of self-knowledge' (Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 490). For Adorno the self-possessed character of rationality can never transcend its relationship to the object because it acknowledges its determining relation to the object in relation to its own objective character as rationality.

Spirit cannot be 'absolute' for Adorno because it is something immediate which excludes rational mediation, because rationality cannot be related solely to itself, because rationality must always mediate something immediate without becoming immediate itself, because its mediating activity always depends upon something immediate that precedes that activity. Hegel could grasp the absolute as spirit because he believed autonomous self-relation could be conceptualised as something presuppositionless. For Aesthetic Theory the problem of 'self-relation' has therefore not merely forfeited its once central role. It can no longer meaningfully be addressed at all once we have recognised that art transcends a purely conceptual approach of this kind. For the rationality that has emerged from the liberation of art from the concept and revealed itself as the only form of determining thought, Hegel's 'absolute' can only appear as a presuppositionless, that is, as an immediate objective totality. In this form 'spirit' survives the metaphysics of spirit that has now become 'philosophically questionable' (AT: 140; ET: 119). The 'absoluteness' which Hegel once ascribed to spirit has lost its truth now that the teleology of the concept, internally sustained by the idea of autonomous self-relation, has revealed itself as anything but absolute. This is what Adorno means when he says that the work of art still presents itself as something 'essentially spiritual even when spirit for all intents and purposes can no longer be presupposed as the ultimate substance of things' (AT: 140; ET: 119). But if spirit is something immediate, for which all mediation is external, this may also suggest a way of resolving the problem which Hegel's aesthetics, according to Adorno, has left open for us, namely how it is possible 'to speak of spirit as a determination of the artwork without hypostasising its objectivity as absolute identity' (AT: 140; ET: 119). This approach is incompatible with Hegel's own theory since Adorno regards objectivity and identity as two different determinations which can only properly be united in the special case of the aesthetic monad. For here the terms are no longer grasped in terms of an essentially polar relationship. But Adorno can only pursue this line of thought because he has already reduced the Hegelian 'concept' to a different model of 'rationality'. He doubts the capacity of subjective thought to think the subjective and the objective together in a unity which is not merely subjective. Identity is only


conceivable for Adorno as subjective identity, and subjective identity and objectivity can only be thought together within the representative character of the work of art. The work of art enjoys a special status of its own in relation to conceptual thought because it alone brings the subjective and the objective into a relationship that thought, as one moment of this relationship, cannot grasp simply in its own terms.

These reflections bring Adorno's Aesthetic Theory into some proximity with Schelling's philosophy of art. For Adorno, as for Schelling, art has enjoyed certain priority with respect to conceptual thought. Thus in the final section of the System of Transcendental Idealism Schelling defends the idea that 'art alone can succeed in objectifying with universal validity what the philosopher is able to present in a merely subjective fashion'. 9 For art is capable of objectifying 'the harmonious correspondence between the subjective and the objective' (Schelling, System des transzendentalen Jdealismus, p. 279f.). Since this is precisely what Schelling means by 'the absolute', it follows that the absolute itself finds its most adequate realisation in art. However, the particular way in which Schelling defines the specific task of art in this connection also reveals a fundamental difference between the two thinkers, for all the undeniable affinity between Adorno's approach and Schelling's critical analysis of conceptual thought. What they do share is a critical perspective on the subject implicit in the thought that the absolute, the correspondence of the subjective and the objective, cannot be realised from the subjective side alone. For the subjective is itself a moment of the correspondence in question. Since this correspondence cannot be grasped conceptually, and precedes thought as something 'given' that can only be conceptually described, it must be grasped as an object of intuition. Since in its universality this 'object' cannot be sensibly intuited or conceptually subsumed, Schelling appeals to 'intellectual intuition' and claims that the objectivity of such intuition is realised in art: 'This universally acknowledged and altogether incontestable objectivity of intellectual intuition is art itself. For the aesthetic intuition simply is the intellectual intuition become objective. The work of art merely reflects to me what is otherwise not reflected by anything, namely that absolutely identical which has already divided itself even in the self. Hence, that which the philosopher allows to be divided even in the primary act of consciousness, and which would otherwise be inaccessible to any intuition, comes, through the miracle of art, to be radiated back from the products thereof' (System des transzendentalen Jdealismus, 294f.; ET: 229-30). If this presuppositionless unity, one that has not been discovered through conceptual thought, is identical with truth, then the work of art is the site where truth comes to appear, the site where conceptual thought itself must seek the truth. Adorno's line of thought resembles Schelling's insofar as both of them regard the work of art as the site of truth, although they draw conclusions from this conclusion. From Schelling's ultimate perspective, philosophy 'was born and nourished by

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poetry in the infancy of knowledge, and with it all those sciences it has guided toward perfection; we may thus expect them, on completion, to flow back like so many individual streams into the universal ocean of poetry from which they took their source' (System des transzendentalen Idealismus, p. 298; ET: 232). For his part Adorno claims: '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. With good reason, idealism historically - in Schelling - derived its own concept of truth from art. The closed yet internally dynamic totality of the idealist systems was read out of artworks' (AT: 197; ET: 172; my emphasis). For Schelling truth is revealed in art in a way that philosophy can only describe. Philosophy finds its own telos in art by turning into poetry. For Adorno, on the other hand, philosophy retains an independent significance of its own. Art certainly remains prior to philosophy, and the latter must acknowledge the truth of the domain that originally formed the basis and paradigm of its own attempt to construct the absolute in conceptual terms. But the temptation to transfigure art, to which Schelling succumbs according to Adorno, can only serve to destroy its truth character. The truth of the work of art for Adorno lies in the fact that the relationship between subjective, as rationality, and the objective and immediate must be grasped as one of 'representation'. And the attempt to describe art in terms of 'identity' or 'in-difference' appears to violate the 'difference' implicit in the concept of representation as he develops it. In Adorno's eyes, the identity and in-difference of the work of art that is emphasised by Schelling threatens to destroy the very condition of the truth content of art: the representative dependence upon natural beauty that alone confers immediacy and objectivity upon the work of art itself. Schelling explicitly denies, in a way that 'the merely contingent beauty of nature gives the role for art' (System des transzendentalen Idealismus, p. 291). On the contrary, he says that 'what art creates in its perfection is the principle and norm for the judgement of natural beauty' (System, p. 291; ET: 227).

Schelling also tries to clarify and exhibit the 'perfect in-difference' of the work of art by reference to the concept of 'the symbolic' .10 But Adorno regards the 'perfect in-difference' and 'identity' of symbolic art as a pure mystification or phantasmagoria. The unity realised in the work of art can only be conceived as a unity of rationality, and if we are permitted to speak of 'symbols' in this connection, they can only be symbols that have lost their sensuous and intuitive character: 'It remains to be demonstrated that symbols or metaphors in modern art make themselves progressively independent of their symbolic function and thereby contribute to the constitution of a realm that is antithetical to the empirical world and its meanings. Art absorbs symbols in such a fashion that they are no longer symbolic; advanced artists have themselves carded out the critique of the character of the symbol. The ciphers and characters of modern art are signs that have

712


forgotten themselves and become absolute' (AT: 147; ET: 125). The lack of sensuous immediacy in these 'broken symbols' forbids any rational and unambiguous determination of their meaning. Instead they become a moment of expression that discloses the transcendence, the unreal reality of the work of art. Adorno is alluding to this reality and unreality, and to the appropriate perspective of philosophy in this regard, when he describes the work of art as a riddle or enigma: 'They are question marks, not univocal even through synthesis. Nevertheless their figure is so precise that it determines the point where the work of art breaks off. As in enigmas, the answer is both hidden and demanded by the structure' (AT: 188; ET: 165). It is the task of aesthetic reflection to seek out this answer, and thus the truth content of the work of art, for although 'no artwork can be exhaustedly captured through the kind of rationalistic determinations that it condemns, every artwork by virtue of its enigmatic character needs must turn toward the reason that would interpret it' (AT: 193; ET: 169). This reason is directed toward the work of art not merely in a reflective, but in a constantly repeated interpretative fashion. For interpretation itself must be thought as mimesis, as exemplifying the double structure of mimesis and rationality that prevails within the innermost character of the work of art. Interpretative mimesis is also a pre-rational relationship to the object, one that helps to resolve the enigma by tracing the immanent structures of the work of art to the point at which they break down: This is the quintessence of understanding this side of the enigma' (AT: 189; ET: 165). Interpretation is also the appropriate realisation of expression: 'The Aristotelian dictum that only like can know like ... divides the knowledge that is art from conceptual knowledge: What is essentially mimetic awaits mimetic comportment. If artworks do not make themselves like something else but only like themselves, then only those who imitate them understand them' (AT: 190; ET: 166). Adorno can speak of 'the knowledge that is art' because the mimetic principle of interpretation essentially denies the separation between the cognitive subject and the object of cognition. Through its interpretation art itself becomes cognition. This cognition responds so closely to the structure of its object that it effaces the distinction between itself and the object. If works of art are 'objects whose truth cannot be thought except as that of their interior', imitation 'is the path that leads to this interior' (AT: 191; ET: 166-6 7). This metaphor of the 'interior' captures that intrinsic feature of art which means that it can never become an object of conceptualrational cognition without thereby being destroyed as art. If works of art can be understood through interpretation, this is only because interpretative mimesis immerses itself in the immanent structure of the work of art. This does not mean that the truth content of the work of art can ever be rendered accessible independently of the work itself. The process of interpretation cannot resolve the problem of relating properly to the truth content of the work of art and simultaneously certifying the correctness of one's

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interpretation. 11 For there is no 'certainty' in the appropriate relationship to the work of art. Certainty implies a kind of insight to which one can always return, and to return to something one must be able to leave it in the first place. But the possibility of such distance is repudiated by the concept of interpretation since distance to the object of cognition inevitably involves the constitution of subject-object relations. Cognition of the truth content of the work of art is here caught in a dilemma: 'Artworks speak like elves in fairy tales: "If you desire the unconditioned, you shall have it, but you will not recognise it when you see it". The truth of discursive knowledge stands unveiled, and that is why the latter does not possess it. The knowledge that is art possesses truth, but only as something incommensurable with art' (AT: 191; ET: 167). The distance typically required by discursive-rational thought provides an inadequate model for our relationship to the work of art. The 'certainty' it seeks rests solely on the subsumptive and determining procedures of thought. Neither interpretation nor rational thought alone are able to combine adequacy and certainty and permit the truth of the work of art to disclose itself. That would require a form of reason that is exhausted neither in mimesis nor in rationality, and that is precisely what Adorno understands by 'philosophical reflection'. The truth of works of art can 'only be achieved by philosophical reflection. This alone is what justifies aesthetics' (AT: 193; ET: 169). It is the task of philosophical reflection to disclose the truth of art. And if the truth of art concerns the relationship of the subjective to the objective and the immediate, one which must be thought as a representative relationship, this implies two things for philosophical reflection. On the one hand, it must grasp itself, qua subjective thought, as a moment of the relationship and thus avoid deploying the subsumptive procedures of rationality in this connection. On the other, if it is to think an actual totality which embraces the subjective and objective within itself, it must deny the reality of this totality within thought itself. Disclosing the truth of art lies in the interest of a thought which is essentially concerned with truth and does not necessarily regard itself as the whole truth. It must ascribe a truth to works of art which can only be a truth for thought if it is not the truth of thought, a truth which remains undisclosed if it not grasped through the categories of thought itself.

The question concerning the truth content of art, and its disclosure through philosophical reflection, assumes its most acute form when we ask whether meaningfulness as such can be conceptualised at all. For meaningfulness is vouchsafed by the objective totality represented through the work of art, not by the signifying structures and procedures of rationality. As Adorno says: 'The most extreme form in which the question posed by the enigmatic character of art can be formulated is whether or not there is meaning. For no artwork is without its own coherence, however much this coherence may be transformed into its own opposite. But through the objectivity of the work this coherence also posits a claim to an objectivity of intrinsic

Of\


meaning. Not only is this claim unfulfillable, but it is also contradicted by experience. The enigmatic character of art peers out of every work with a different face, but as if the answer that it requires - like that of the sphinx - were always the same, although only by way of the diversity, not the unity that the enigma, though perhaps deceptively, promises. Whether the promise is a deception - that is the enigma' (AT: 193; ET: 168-69). The fact that experience contradicts the objectivity of meaning does not ultimately discredit objectivity, although Adorno's remarks might easily be construed in this way. On the contrary, it discredits the experience which, shaped and stamped as it is by the rational cognition of objects, can generate certainty, but not the certainty of objectivity, that is, of the totality of sense. The certainty of experience that is at issue here always seeks support from the unity of rationality. The unity of rationality is indeed given, but is why it is not identical with the total objective unity in question here. The philosophical reflection which has assumed the task of disclosing the truth of art for the sake of truth as such can only therefore proceed from something other than itself, from those 'other looks' cast by the enigmatic character of art. The unity which philosophical reflection seeks, the objective totality, can only adequately be thought if philosophy grasps the different works of art in their enigmatic character as rational totalities, as monads that represent the rational totality, that is to say, if philosophy begins from the very unity and totality that is given to it, that of rationality, but does not simply remain there.

But this advance from rationality cannot be interpreted theologically since the totality of rationality and the objective totality in question are mutually dependent by virtue of the representative character of the work of art. Aesthetic reflection cannot escape its predicament by turning to 'faith' as a way of bestowing and disclosing the totality of meaning. The totality of meaning that Adorno has in mind is not 'the absolute'. Adorno's thought in this respect is less radical than that of Kierkegaard who had also attempted to understand how we might, through thought, reach out to the unknown that is beyond thought itself. 'Defined as the absolutely different, it seems to be at the point of being disclosed, but not so, because the understanding cannot even think the absolutely different; it cannot absolutely negate itself for that purpose and consequently thinks the difference in itself, which it thinks by itself. It cannot absolutely transcend itself and therefore thinks as above itself only the sublimity that it thinks by itself.' 12

The absolute difference of which Kierkegaard speaks implies a conception of faith which involves the absolute negation of thought. In thinking heterogeneity thought cannot avoid thinking sameness, thereby violating and integrating what it itself is not. Unlike the truth of faith in Kierkegaard, the truth of the work of art in Adorno is dependent on conceptual thought for its own disclosure. And every interpretation which misses or ignores this difference and attempts to ground aesthetic reflection in theology is

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compelled to eliminate aesthetic reflection in its own right. Gunter Rohrmoser, for example, who explicitly tries to provide a theological foundation for Adamo's Aesthetic Theory, is inevitably forced to relativise the significance of central categories of Adamo's thought. 'The emphasis with which Adorno evokes the truth of art does not really spring from art itself, from its questionable immanence or autonomy, but essentially from a renewal of messianic hope.' 13 But the immanence and autonomy of art is the only thing which aesthetic reflection can effectively oppose to the fulfilled 'moment' of faith. It is the only thing which allows the work of art to disclose the totality of meaning. The work of art only accomplishes this as a riddle and philosophical reflection, if it is to contribute anything to 'the objective solution of the enigma posed by each and every work of art' (AT: 193; ET: 169), must begin from the rationality whose cognitive capacities are not in a position to grasp the work of art adequately. In order to disclose the truth of the work of art, philosophy must reflect where the work of art 'represents', must attempt with the means of reflection to reveal the path from the rational totality to the objective totality. In order to present itself as a theory of the work of art, philosophy must regard this reflection as objectified in the work of art. This intellectual operation, which offers a specifically aesthetic modification of the theological problem concerning the ultimate existence or non-existence of meaning, effectively transforms aesthetics into a teleological theory in the sense of Kant's Critique of Judgement. Thus even if Adamo's Aesthetic Theory begins from an engagement with Hegel's aesthetics, the full clarification of the underlying theoretical argument of this work can only successfully be accomplished by investigating its fundamental relation to the third Critique.


1 Cf. M. Theunissen's article, 'Augenblick', in: Historisches Worterbuch der Philosophie, edited by J. Ritter, volume I, pp. 649f.

2 S. Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, tr. by R. Thomte and A. B. Anderson, Princeton University Press 1980, pp. 48-50; 80-81.

3 That is why it is certainly inadequate simply to reduce Adorno's conception to the idea of 'violation' and interpret his aesthetics in a one-sided fashion as a 'logic of disintegration'. Cf., for example, B. Lypp, A.'sthetischer Absolutismus und po/itische Vernunft (Frankfurt am Main 1972), pp. 235ff. This interpretation also generates the same author's equally one-sided claim that 'mimesis' is the fundamental concept of Adorno's thought as a whole.

4 Cf. Hegel, Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, IH, §556; English translation: Hegel's Philosophy of Mind, translated by William Wallace, Oxford 1971, p. 293.

5 For Hegel's concept of mind or spirit, cf. F. Fulda's article 'Geist', in: Historisches Worterbuch der Philosophie, vol. III, pp. l 91f.

6 For detailed analysis of Hegel's concept of negation and self-relation. cf. the relevant studies by Dieter Henrich: 'Anfang und Methode der Logik' and 'Hegels


Logik der Reflexion', in: Hegel in Kontext, Frankfurt 1971; and 'Formen der Negation in Hegels Logik', in: Hegel-Jahrbuch 1975.

7 For further specific discussion of the problem concerning the 'beginning' of Hegel's Logic, cf. F. Fulda, 'Uber den spekulativen Anfang', in: Suhjektivitiit und Metaphysik, Festschrift for W. Cramer, 1966; H-G. Gadamer, 'The Idea of Hegel's Logic', in: Gadamer, Hegel's Dialectic. Five Hermeneutical Studies, tr. by P. C. Smith, Yale University Press 1976; R-E. Schulz, '"Sein" in Hegels Logik: "Einfaches Beziehung auf sich"', in: Wirklichkeit und Reflexion, Festschrift for W. Schulz, 1973; W. Wieland, 'Bemerkungen zum Anfang von Hegels Logik', also in: Wirk/ichkeit und Reflexion; E. Tugendhat, 'Das Sein und das Nichts', in: Durchhlicke, Festschrift for Martin Heidegger, 1970.

8 For the problem of determinate and indeterminate negation in Hegel, cf. D. Henrich, 'Hegels Logik der Reflexion', in: Hegel im Kontext; and Manfred Frank, Der unendliche Mangel an Sein, Frankfurt 1975, pp. 32ff.

9 F. W. J. Schelling, System des transzendentalen Idealismus, Meiner 1957, p. 298; English translation, The System ol Transcendental Idealism, tr. by Peter Heath, University Press of Virginia 1978, p. 232.

10 Cf. F. W. J. Schelling, Philosophie der Kunst, Darmstadt 1976, pp. 51 and 55; English translation: The Philosophy of' Art, tr. by D. W. Stott, Minnesota University Press 1989, pp. 48-50. Cf. also Walter Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, Gesammelte Schrifien I, pp. 336ff.; English translation, The Origin 11/ German Tragic Drama, tr. by John Osborne, London 1977, p 167.

11 Adorno applies the concept of interpretation, as developed here, pre-eminently to the performance and realisation of musical and dramatic works. But the understanding of poetic and literary texts in general can be treated as an 'art of interpretation' if it attends closely to the rhythmic and other features of the work that define its particular style and character. Interpretation in this sense is equally required for the understanding of lyrical or narrative texts. Cf. Emil Staiger, Die Kunst der Interpretation, Zurich, 5th edn, 1967, pp. 9-33.

12 S. Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, tr. by H. V. Hong and E. H. Hong, Princeton University Press 1985, p. 45.

13 G. Rohrmoser, Herrschaji und Versohnung, Freiburg 1972, p. 13.

5

HEGEL'S UNTRUTH

Some remarks on Adorno's critique of Hegel

Ute Guzzoni

Source: Hegel-Jahrbuch (1975): 242 6. Translated by Nicholas Walker.

Adorno argues that Hegel's thought is both true and untrue. But in another sense he describes Hegel's untruth as true, while this truth is characterised in turn as untrue. The following remarks attempt to trace and elucidate the different levels at which Adorno's evaluation of Hegel's thought effectively operates. I am principally concerned here with the question concerning the intrinsic possibility of a philosophical critique that is also accompanied by an insight into the historical truth of the object of critique, in this case, of the Hegelian philosophy itself. The individual steps of the following discussion arise directly from a consideration of the different levels of this conjunction of truth and untruth as Adorno understands it.

I

In the first instance Adorno recognises Hegel's 'truth' to lie in the fact that his philosophical system explicitly undertakes to define and elucidate the concepts of individuality, finitude and difference. In Negative Dialectics Adorno claims that Hegel attempts 'through philosophical concepts to do justice to what is heterogeneous to these concepts' .1 But the way in which Hegel thinks the individual or the particular inevitably 'sublates' within the infinite process through which the conceptual totality finally 'comes to consciousness of itself'. 'Everything that exists ... possesses truth only insofar as it exists within the Idea.'2 Hegel's untruth, for Adorno, lies in the fact that his philosophy, in accordance with its innermost intentions, also tries to negate the very possibility that anything might remain heterogenous to the concept.

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HEGEL'S UNTRUTH

Adorno therefore sees Hegel's philosophy as a simultaneous expression of two ultimately conflicting principles: namely those of identity and non-identity. And it is the interplay between these principles which constitutes the tense and difficult structure of a 'negative dialectics' as he understands it. On the one hand, Hegel's philosophy exemplifies the 'philosophy of identity' in an absolute and essentially unsurpassable sense. For Hegel unites subjectivity and objectivity, freedom and necessity, spirit and nature, within a single total system which allows every opposition and contradiction to emerge from itself in the first place, and which is therefore also ultimately capable of sublating them in turn. Absolute being implies an ultimate, internally dynamic, identity of thought and being precisely because this absolute being is itself absolute thought.

On the other hand, even under the sign of identity, this philosophy also opens up the possibility of thinking the internally contradictory, the different, the non-identical. For the systematic identity in question is presented not as something lying alongside, or over and above, the individual, internally opposed contents of thought, but as intrinsically immanent to those contents. Hegel thought the finite and conflicting elements together within the system by treating them as moments of a universality that is constituted precisely in and through these moments.

We can, of course, always claim that Hegel himself already sees his own thought in terms of the unity of identity and non-identity. Hegel's philosophy is the dialectic. But idealist and negative dialectics are nonetheless opposed to one another precisely because each considers the concepts of identity and non-identity from mutually opposed perspectives. And that is why the truth for the one dialectic inevitably presents itself as untruth for the other. For Hegel the different, the distinct, the dimension of otherness, are sublated in an absolutely independent unity that ultimately constitutes their truth: 'The individual by itself does not correspond to its concept. It is the limitation of its existence which constitutes the finitude and the ruin of the individual.'3 For Hegel the 'truth' of the individual and individual contents consists precisely in the fact that are themselves 'untrue': 'namely individual vanishing moments which whose truth is only the entire movement of thought itself'.4

Insofar as Adorno apostrophises this fundamental, essentially integrating and identificatory, feature of Hegel's thought as its 'untruth', he takes up the cause of the non-conceptual and the non-identical. For Adorno dialectic signifies precisely 'that objects are not exhausted in their concept'. 5 Against the 'priority of the subject' proclaimed by identitarian thought, he insists upon the 'priority of the object'. He argues that the separation of subject and object inevitably implies two objects, two different beings, that come into communication with one another, a communication which can never be described as free as long as one 'partner' of the relationship, the subject, usurps a dominating position over the other. The insistence on non-identity

THEODOR W. ADORNO

ultimately means allowing or giving the object the opportunity of affirming itself in its own right over against thought, the subject, man himself. Measured against this perspective, Hegel's philosophy, considered as a philosophy of identity, is 'untrue'.

II

Hegel's 'untruth' for Adorno would therefore seem simply to consist in the fact that he is ultimately unable to sustain the particular in its own right as something that cannot be dissolved in its concept, although this is an idea that has already begun to suggest itself within the context of Hegelian thought. It seems that Hegel's philosophy is 'untrue if it is judged in accordance with its own concept',6 and that the task is effectively to understand the idea implicit in Hegel better than he himself has succeeded in doing. But for Adorno such an attitude to Hegel would still be an essentially premature and one-sided one. For it would in turn overlook precisely what Adorno calls 'the truth of Hegel's untruth'. 7 Adorno understands the force of the concept that is definitively articulated in the closure of Hegel's absolute system, and thus the priority of the identical and identificatory subject, as the true reflection of the closure of the universal social whole. This social closure exerts the same identitarian compulsion upon its individual members as the absolute concept inflicts upon the individual and the particular which cannot ultimately be dissolved in purely conceptual terms.

Hegel's 'untruth', the priority of the subject over the object, also therefore represents a specific historical truth. The priority of the subject is 'the truth of the priority of society over the individual consciousness'. 8 It expresses a universality which has acquired an alien objectivity that precedes and predetermines individual subjects even though it cannot easily or clearly be perceived as such. From a historical perspective, the principle of identity, through which the subject attempts to master the separated object to which it stands opposed, is the theoretical counterpart of the currently prevailing form of society. In this society the subject's intended mastery over inner and outer nature has assumed the character of a reified and independent objectivity precisely because this society itself embodies the principle of a transcendental subjectivity which is the condition of the possibility for every 'individual', whether it be an individual object or an individual subject.

III

Alongside the speculative identity of truth and untruth which Adorno thought he could discern in the two conflicting tendencies of Hegel's philosophy, we must therefore also recognise the historical truth of Hegel's untruth, the sense in which the latter corresponds to something which has actually come to be in the context of universal world-history. But how then does the

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HEGEL'S UNTRUTH

truth to which we alluded at the beginning, namely Hegel's insight into the antithetical character of things, stand with respect with this historical truth? If the historical reality of the recent present itself fails to correspond to this truth, if on the contrary the individual subject of the present has already submitted to the constitutive universality of the total social subject, then this truth has itself obviously become untrue from the historical perspective. Its own principle of individuality and non-identity remains unrealised in the present state of society.

The truth and untruth of philosophy on the speculative level stands opposed, in a reversed sense, to the untruth and truth on the real historical level. Yet this fundamental opposition cannot remain the last word here. The very discrepancy between the speculative and the historical level is already an index of untruth. Historical truth itself is speculatively untrue. On the level of social reality, a universality which permitted the non-identical to preserve its non-identical character, which acknowledged its capacity to interact and communicate within a dynamic constellation of elements, would correspond to speculative truth. The reified identitarian context of society, on the other hand, is the intrinsically untrue shape of society, a context of alienation which contrasts emphatically with the true, that is, the concrete universality of freely associating individuals. The truth of the social and historical present stands opposed, as untrue, to a truth that must be critically produced as such,9 truth that can, in this sense, be called utopian.

But how can we even approach the idea of a truth that is yet to be produced? How can we even begin to experience such a truth? It is hardly sufficient simply to invoke the speculative truth to which we referred at the start of our discussion. Historical reality may well reveal its untruth in the light of the speculative truth which functions as the standard of critique. But how are we to conceive that historical truth in relation to which present reality reveals itself as untrue? To what experience can our critique of the truth of the existing state of things appeal, if the acknowledgement of an individuality that cannot simply be incorporated into the prevailing order is itself an 'unseasonable thought'?

The alleged untruth of historical truth cannot be measured against an actual or conceptual truth that is itself already given. It cannot be measured either against the truth of an earlier and supposedly original Golden Age, or against that of a still outstanding and merely imagined future ideal, against a telos which human beings are simply called upon to strive. Nor can our critique of untruth appeal to an immediate experience of some essential timeless truth that could provide the clue or criterion for the critical analysis of the present. Nor do I believe - with Habermas - that we can ground the possibility of such critique by appealing to the 'counterfactual anticipation' of a true form of life that is already embedded in our actual linguistic practices. 10

In his essay A Metacritique of Epistemology Adorno writes that 'idealism is not simply untruth. It is the truth in its untruth' .11 Adorno means that

11'7

THEODOR W. ADORNO

truth - and indeed that truth which permits us to perceive present truth as untrue - cannot simply lie somewhere alongside or sometime beyond untruth. It can only arise, and be discovered, within untruth itself. Untruth as such must be able to produce the truth from within itself, must allow itself to be broken open through the truth. To say that untruth belongs to the truth is to say that untruth harbours, in itself, the possibility of becoming true. It implies the promise that untruth could yet become something more than it currently is and appears to be. But according to Adorno this 'more' also belongs to untruth - although we cannot explore this any further here - because the latter has become what it is, because history, that is, real social practice, has been sedimented there. 12 As something historical, something that has become what it is in relation to something else that it excludes, this untruth cannot be reduced to the single and necessarily one-sided moment that constitutes its present.

If we apply what we have said about the truth in its untruth to the philosophy of Hegel, we can see that the closed identity of the Hegelian system is the untrue form of truth that corresponds to the closed identity of our present social and historical reality and simultaneously testifies from within this reality to a possible truth. On the other hand, communicative synthesis, the social labour of freely associating individuals, is the truth that already fleetingly appears within the absolute identity of Hegelian thought, even where this identity is understood as a whole that precedes the members that constitute it as untrue moments, rather than as something that first arises from and has no independent existence beyond their reciprocal communication.

Hegel's truth and Hegel's untruth are not presented here as two separate dimensions of his philosophy. For the former is the - historically true -untruth of the latter, and the latter is the - historically still untrue - truth of the former. The acknowledgement of non-identity is only true as the emerging untruth of identity. 'The true priority of the particular could itself only be attained through a transformation of the universal. ' 13 Hegel's 'untruth' implies, from a speculative perspective, that it must be verified, that its truth be revealed. The philosophy of identity itself, and its concept of spirit, hints at the possibility of understanding this philosophy differently, from the perspective of the potential self-consciousness of genuinely and freely associating individuals. What Adorno calls Hegel's 'untruth' harbours the task - and thus the promise of the possibility - of making the truth of this untruth true in a real historical form.


T. W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik, Frankfurt am Main 1966, p. 14. English translation: Negative Dialectics, tr. by E. B. Ashton, London 1973, p. 4.

HEGEL'S UNTRUTH

2 G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen iiber /t"sthetik, Werke, edited by Hermann Glockner, vol. 12, p. 159; English translation: G. F. Hegel, Aesthetics, tr. by T. M. Knox, Oxford 1975, vol. I, p. 110.

3 G. W. F. Hegel, Enzyklopiidie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse, Meiner, Hamburg 1959, p. 182 (§213); English translation: Hegel's Logic, being Part One of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, translated by William Wallace, Oxford 1971, p. 275.

4 G. W. F. Hegel, Phiinomenologie des Geistes, Meiner, Hamburg, 1948, p. 223. 5 Negative Dialektik, p. 15. ET: 5. 6 T. W. Adorno, Drei Studien zu Hegel, Frankfurt 1969, p. 29. 7 Ibid., p. 104. 8 Negative Dialektik, p. 180. ET: 181. 9 Cf. Negative Dialektik, p. 188. ET: 189.

10 Cf., for example, Jurgen Habermas, Philosophisch-politische Profile, Frankfurt 1971, p. 195.

11 T. W. Adorno, Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie, in: Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5, p. 235.

12 Cf. Negative Dialektik, p. 163. ET: I 62f. 13 Ibid., p. 305. ET: 313.

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6

TRUTH AND POWER

Hermann Morchen

Source: Hermann Morchen, Macht und Herrschaji im Denken von Heidegger und Adorno, Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1980, pp. 171-86. Translated by Nicholas Walker.

In the course of the preceding analysis we have enquired into the truth concerning power as this emerges from Adorno's and Heidegger's critical reflections on the character of domination or dominion [Herrschajt]. The fact that both thinkers, in spite of the different meaning which attaches to their respective critiques of domination (I), refuse to set out unambiguous criteria for judging the character of justified or unjustified dominion (2) suggests that we must revise the way in which the principal question has been posed (3) and that we must broaden the relevant basis for discussion (4).

1. The meaning of the critique of domination

It would appear that essential tendencies of the thought of Adorno and Heidegger can be characterised by reference to the idea of a 'critique of domination', even if they develop a different conception of what this involves. One might attempt to simplify this difference as follows: Adorno envisages a state of things without domination, while Heidegger asks what it means to open up a space for an other kind of power [Macht]. But it is actually difficult to substantiate this particular way of accentuating the difference which would effectively imply the explicit rejection of one thesis in favour of the other. All such reflections can lead us only to the threshold of the decisive question which has still to be posed. Yet it is precisely the unsaid here which provokes the need to clarify the alternatives more precisely. And if the latter turn out to have been over-accentuated, this in turn may prompt us to doubt the genuineness of the opposition as originally stated. It is only through a dialogue, one which never actually took place, that we could explore the idea that the two different critiques of domination nonetheless concern the same matter of thought.

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We could tentatively and provocatively express the unsaid in Adorno this way: dominion - or domination - is itself bad. 1 Hence his utopian vision of a society free of domination. Heidegger, on the other hand, appears to presuppose that the prevailing conditions of today merely distort that which is truly powerful. The task would be to let latter to hold sway insofar as this power is good. If we put the matter as openly and directly as this, then we cannot avoid confronting Heidegger with the question as to where he stands in relation to those unjust conditions which govern society, and with the question whether precisely these conditions are not themselves ideologically distorted if they are implicitly treated as merely secondary or superficial in character. We should have to confront Adorno, on the other hand, with the question whether his own downright denunciation of dominion as domination does not cast doubt upon the thought of power as such, and with it any fundamental trust in the possibilities of human existence itself. In this way perhaps, through question and counter-question, an initial dialogue might be encouraged here.

That such a dialogue is, in reality, more difficult than it appears is actually connected with the considerable proximity of their differing positions, ones which cannot adequately be captured or described in terms of ultimately simplifying formulae. Heidegger's attempt to 'twist free' of the will to domination, which tirelessly seeks to unlock the true essence of the latter, is not as remote as it might initially seem from the remorselessly negative character of Adorno's utterances when he turns repeatedly to lay his finger upon the same wound. To stay with our chosen image: both thinkers are far from desiring simply to bind up this wound - one which thought must rather strive to keep open. In both cases, rather than simply assuming the alleged implications of the different positions, the unsaid must be exposed from the said. The dialogue must begin precisely there where we approach most closely to the 'threshold' of the matter.

With reference, for example, to the 'dialectical observation' with which Adorno concluded one of his research interviews: 'Power is almost identical with the misuse of power' (AC: 353). It would be difficult to express Adamo's position more precisely, or the unsaid that is implicit here: that the appropriate use of power, as a measure of its actual misuse, is not only conceivable in a utopian sense, but is even factically possible, although at present this possibility can hardly be imagined. All this is harboured in the little word 'almost', without which the 'dialectic' here would merely degenerate into simple paradox. The dialectical resistance to power, which is not the expression of some brilliant subjective whim on Adamo's part but is necessarily grounded in the actual historical situation, and which can concede this power 'almost' no right whatsoever, springs from the factical preponderance of a misuse of power which is actually shaping history and from the responsibility of countering this development. 2 But this problem could only be addressed dialogically by confronting it with an alternative perspective which allows

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us, with a comparable sense of responsibility, to perceive the relevant situation differently. But as long as the alternative position is regarded merely as an unacceptable confirmation of the prevailing conception of power, the accent of Adorno's dialectical critique must remain entirely negative in character. If it is true that it never 'occurs' to a thinker like Oswald Spengler that 'power' could ever be wrong (Pr: 70), Adorno inevitably finds himself forced into the opposite one-sidedness. And indeed it is not at easy to see why he would wish to revise this position. 'Domination has always harboured the moment of fearfulness within itself. If we must advance today towards a radical critique of domination, the reason for this lies not in some child's dream of a blissful state of existence under the palm trees, but simply in the fact that domination today, within itself, and in order to maintain itself as domination, hatches the tendency to totality. And we know very well what totalitarian domination means. That is why we should not treat the concept of dominion too gently and insist on bearing in mind the good aspects that it has also certainly sometimes possessed. For these carry no serious weight in relation to the potential for absolute horror which, I am convinced, continues to confront us today as it has before' (Soz. I: 586).

If this is how it stands with the 'good aspects' of dominion, then the idea of doing objective justice to this concept can only be scornfully rejected. 'Your reason is one-sided, so one-sided reason whispers, and you have done wrong to the world of power. You have cried out - pathetically, tearfully, sarcastically, noisily - against the shameful nature of tyranny. But you have forgotten the good things achieved by power. Without the security that power alone establishes, these things could never have existed. Life and love have played beneath the protective wings of power and this has won the happiness that you now enjoy from the hostility of nature.' But the ironic concession that this 'apologetic argument is both true and false' (DdA: 195; ET: 218), along with the repudiation of the charge of 'one-sidedness', surely does not fully exhaust the dialectic that is involved. For the point is, in the first instance, that the decision here is not left open, but clearly falls out against power itself. For the 'lie speaks true. If the Fascist murderers are already waiting, the people must not be encouraged to assault a weak regime. But even the alliance with a less brutal form of power does not mean that infamy should be concealed .... Evil rather than good is the object of theory .... The element of theory is freedom and oppression is its theme ... There is only one expression for the truth: the thought which denies injustice. If insistence upon the good aspects is not placed within the context of the negative totality, then it transfigures its own opposite: violence' (DdA: 195f.; ET: 218-219). Critical theory, of course, cannot escape entanglement in that which it would counter: 'But however true it may be that there are no words which cannot ultimately be used in the service of lies, the goodness of power would manifest itself not in such

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lies, but solely in the obstinacy of the thinking which resists power. Uncompromising hatred for the terror inflicted upon the least of creatures furnishes the basis for the legitimate gratitude felt by those who are spared' (DdA: 196; ET: 219).

Yet precisely in this 'uncompromising' and negative accentuation of the dialectic, perhaps indeed against its conscious intention, its own meaning is most strikingly revealed: that of 'manifesting' the goodness of power. The unexpected and indeed almost marginal character of this remarkable tum of thought, far from speaking against it, encourages us rather to pursue its hidden premises. The negativity that marks the critique of domination seems to assume a different character than the apparent one that is generally ascribed to it. The text itself (although it certainly speaks of a 'legitimate gratitude') does not betray this directly. But it is nonetheless amply confirmed by the image with which this remarkable fragment from the supplementary 'Notes and Drafts' of the Dialectic of Enlightenment concludes: 'The invocation of the sun is idolatry. Only the sight of the tree withered in its blaze inspires a vision of the majesty of the day which lights the world without thereby setting it on fire' (DdA: 196; ET: 219). This partly reflects the zealous heritage of the prophets so eager to denounce the cult of Baal, but it is refracted here in a very distinctive way. 3 Beneath the pitiless skies of the south the sun can certainly become the primordial image of extreme and violent power, and the worship of the sun can easily appear as the sinful glorification of nature. The zealous denouncer of cultic violence has almost forgotten here that the benevolent 'majesty' of daylight is the same as that which belongs to the burning sun. But his own image cannot deny the hidden identity of the two. And this goodness seems, if not as an origin, then as an eschatological 'presentiment', or as an unrenounceable utopia, to penetrate to the heart of our own reality. It is only in this way, only as question and presentiment, that the 'goodness of power' reveals itself, although it must also be considered, and not merely noted in passing as it were, as the unaddressed centre of Adorno's critique of domination.

In contrast with certain other passages from the Dialectic of Enlightenment, the text under discussion may prompt the question4

- if this particular formulation derives from Horkheimer and possibly reveals a rather different conception from that of Adorno - whether the avowed solidary of the two authors of this work also extends entirely to the thought expressed here. If the latter is not the case, the passage could be particularly interesting in indicating possible internal differences within the Frankfurt School with respect to its argument with Heidegger.

But the radically accentuated contrast with Heidegger's position still cannot be maintained in a simply unqualified manner. Instead of merely joining, on the basis of the latter position, the chorus of critics who reproach Adorno for his 'one-sidedness' and 'negativity', we should rather pursue all those traces which suggest related points of contact in the principal themes and

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fundamental experiences of the two thinkers, without of course thereby obscuring the relevant distinctions.

The situation appears rather different with respect to the 'one-sided' aspects of Heidegger's critique of domination. If this critique, understood as an alternative to Adorno's negative dialectic, is charged from the latter perspective with a covert positivism and an 'affirmative' tendency, we should here simply recall, in the first instance, how little these precise accusations do justice to the said and the unsaid of Heidegger's thought here. The fact that Heidegger's questioning after the 'powerful essence of truth' is not simply obstructed by a summary suspicion concerning power, as in Adorno, but rather opens itself up to an insight into the 'silent force of the possible', reflects the fundamental character of attempted overcoming of the metaphysical conception of power that was paradigmatically expressed in the thought of Nietzsche. Nor can it plausibly be regarded as a 'one-sided' perspective for which Adorno could provide the relevant corrective. For Heidegger's recourse to the 'empowering no', to the 'nihilating' character of temporalisation itself, is more radical than Adorno's negation of the inherited structures of domination.

When Adorno criticises Heidegger's exclusion of social structures of domination, one might be more willing to recognise the justice of this charge if Adorno himself were in a position to furnish more convincing criteria of judgement in this regard. But his summary tendency to discredit any and every concept of dominion is precisely what prevents him from doing so. Only if he were able to make relevant distinctions, and thus succeeded in 'grounding positive power in reason', could the comfortable 'principle of sanctioning the existent' be overcome in principle (cf. Soz. I: 465). The comparative examination of Adorno and Heidegger reveals the startling fact that neither thinker seems to show much, if any, interest in explicating the question whether, or where, legitimate power or dominion can be found. 5

Bat what is the ultimate reason for this? And can we perhaps clarify the meaning of their respective critiques of domination more precisely by elucidating this very question.

2. Criteria of justified dominion?

If the question concerning the criteria of justified dominion forms the core of any normative theory of the political or of political ethics in general, then judgement has surely already been passed on any perspective that fundamentally neglects or ignores this problem. If Heidegger and Adorno fail in this respect, we can hardly expect either of them to furnish us with relevant political criteria. And indeed this constitutes Alexander Schwan's principal objection to what he describes as Heidegger's 'political philosophy'. And he complains, in a similar way, that Adorno simply 'levels down' the different tendencies of the historical present and fails to offer us any 'guiding models'

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in this respect, something which indeed Adorno always expressly refused to do (cf. OL: 7ff.).

Friedemann Grenz takes a quite different approach insofar as he argues, without adducing any textual support, that Adorno's critique of domination articulates the opposition between 'necessary and surplus domination' (AP: 57). 'The true state of society would be one in which the full measure of potential freedom from domination were accomplished' (AP: 61 ). He not only fails to identify any concrete steps with regard to such an emancipatory process, let alone any criteria of 'necessary' domination, but emphatically distinguishes between this 'real' concept of socially attainable 'truth', which coincides with the 'disappearance of those parts of surplus domination', and an 'emphatic concept of truth' which insists upon 'the abolition of domination as such' (AP: 62). The latter idea appears to correspond to Adorno's specific conception: he is 'concerned with objective truth, with freedom from reification, with liberation rather than emancipation' (AP: 62f.). Even if we succeed in 'eliminating obsolete forms of domination', this remains inseparably bound up with 'the preservation of ever more fateful domination ... including the possibility of fascism' (AP: 103). Given the dialectical character of this situation, Adorno refuses to develop a casuistical political philosophy but rather attempts, according to Grenz, to 'elucidate the meaning of history from history itself, claiming that the possibility of true being, which has developed along with the self-same persisting domination, has reached the point where its potentiality can suddenly become actuality' (AP: 103). Despite this extreme formulation, which sees Adorno's principal interest as concentrated upon 'the possibility of true being', Grenz does not wish to go so far as to trivialise Adorno's realistic insights in relation to the 'emphatic' tendency of his thought. But he tightly pursues the central impulse of Adorno's philosophy here and refuses the superficial strategy of defending Adorno by reference to the supposed practical validity of his conclusions. If the same freedom were conceded to the interpreter of Heidegger, then we could finally attain a level of discussion where accusations like those of 'abstractness', 'one-sidedness' or interpretive 'violence' can no longer simply function as arguments in their own right and the conflict of thought can properly begin.

This does not imply that we should simply ignore the legitimate demand for practically relevant and applicable criteria. The daily necessity of distinguishing between avoidable and unavoidable forms of force and compulsion, between legitimate and illegitimate claims and demands, between justified and obsolete forms of authority, between different kinds of privilege and entitlement, is so urgent that any philosophy concerned with power and domination that ignored these questions would amount to little but groundless speculation. The search for relevant concepts of practical orientation, for appropriate standards and criteria, is something that cannot be avoided, and the expectation that philosophy can and must assist us in this regard

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cannot simply be repudiated either. Adorno and Heidegger have often been criticised for their apparent unwillingness to meet this expectation, but this itself suggests a certain motivation that should also be weighed and considered in its own right.

In the broader sense what is fundamentally at issue here is the refusal of both thinkers to present a system of ethics which would furnish universally valid rules or guidelines for behaviour.6 In this context we might recall Heidegger's famous and notorious claim: 'Conscience discourses always and only in the mode of keeping silent' (SuZ: 273, emphasis in the original; ET: 318). If I cling to universal rules and criteria, instead of deciding appropriately in accordance with the situation, then I evade the unambiguous demand that is disclosed by the silent call of conscience itself (SuZ: 274; ET: 318-19). It is quite true that we require critical evaluation and substantive orientation in order to interpret what the call in question gives us to understand, but this function is still a secondary one. That is precisely what philosophy shows when, in seeking out 'the possibility of true being', it does not simply confirm but rather questions back behind the currently prevailing rules of practice and conduct. We must therefore insist upon the characteristic indeterminacy of the appelative concepts of 'authentic Dasein' or 'right consciousness'. 7 How they can be given content is something that is decided by reference to the situation. Similarly we cannot conclusively determine, once and for all, when or where dominion or domination is 'necessary' or 'superfluous'. It is true that Adorno can concede in discussion that 'force [Gewalt] cannot simply be condemned as barbarism if it leads, in a transparent context, to the realisation of conditions that are more worthy of human beings even in very restricted situations' (Erz: 130; cf. also p. 136), but he avoids mentioning any concrete and specific cases of the permissible use of force or violence. Nor is it possible unambiguously to separate 'genuine' from 'bad' art, like the sheep from the goats, simply by appealing to the 'criterion' of its ideological appropriation or manipulation.

Does this merely amount to an evasion of clear decision in such questions? Or is it, on the contrary, an indication of a sensitivity towards responsible decision, something that can never be anticipated by the possession of given criteria? Naturally this is not the place to explore in detail the complex problem of an ethics that is intrinsically related to its situation, an ethics that relinquishes any appeal to universally valid values and norms. But the full meaning of a critical reflection on the question of domination is by no means exhausted by setting forth the criteria of legitimate dominion. However necessary this might be, it would be naive to believe that we could thereby acquire control over concrete relations of domination, or even thereby attempt to dismantle their dominating character, something that is itself shaped by the way in which we dispose over set criteria. At least this would no longer have anything to do with philosophical questioning insofar as the latter has become aware of its own entanglement in relations of power in

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which power takes precedence over truth. This is what makes philosophising about power so questionable - and not only when the thinker pursues his own prejudices, or distorts the truth, or falls into actual error, but already insofar as human existence, and thus thought itself, is possible in the first place. Primum vivere, deinde philosophari. Power, understood in an elementary sense as possibility and theactualisationofpossibility(oras self-affirming effect), is always already at work within the practice of philosophising, and emphatically within its attempt to elevate itself above power, and thus also over itself. If this a kind of swamp, philosophy cannot lift itself out by its own hair. There is no knowledge free of control or domination. Knowing, including philosophical knowing, as long as there is such a thing, also is and remains power. The principal task of the philosophical investigation of domination is to recognise the 'context of delusion' in which the selfaffirmation of dominating thought entangles itself (cf. ND: 362; ET: 372; cf. also PT: 201, and many other similar passages). Once we have acknowledged that knowledge and domination, truth and power, are intimately connected with one another, philosophy can no longer imagine that conceptually identified and secured criteria could deliver the responsible engagement with power from its own intrinsic fallibility - a fallibility which also remains inevitably bound up, as condition and motivation, with the urgency and necessity of such engagement.

Insofar as this is acknowledged by both thinkers, neither Heidegger nor Adorno can be expected to endorse the demand to set out ethical and political 'criteria' in the manner described. It is quite true that both Heidegger and Adorno often treat the dimension of domination, and the question whether or in what sense it is recognised or not, as the criterion for the truth of other concepts.8 But the true meaning of the critical diagnosis of domination cannot possibly consist for either thinker in trying to subject power and dominion itself to the dominating conception of knowledge which disposes over the criteria of its truth. This must be acknowledged here as a negative result of our enquiry.

3. The truth of power

It is more difficult to formulate the question which, as we have seen, both Adorno's and Heidegger's reflections on power and domination attempt in their different ways to answer. One would of course imagine that the answers are different precisely because the question was already different too. If we ask after what power in truth is, we no longer dispose over power, but rather allow it room to announce its true essence. Has Adorno's negative view of power already decided against the very possibility of such a questioning? Are the relations of power nothing but that 'swamp' from which it would simply be utopian to imagine any escape? Or would this merely be to succumb to a deceptive metaphor? Does the obstinacy with

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which Adorno clings to the utopia of a world 'free of domination' already reveal a counter-power, and is there any truth to the latter? And have we not already acknowledged Adorno's remarkable admission that the meaning of the uncompromising negation of power lies in the manifestation of its hidden 'goodness'?

Perhaps we could answer these questions immanently in terms of Adorno's thought by recalling the idea of hope which, as he believed, bound him emphatically to Bloch rather than to Heidegger, and to which he always clung as the implicit or acknowledged 'principle' of his own thinking that dialectically protects against any simply optimistic misunderstanding of his position.9 This is overlooked when we fail to appreciate that the meaning of its despair, of its 'unwavering negation' (ND: 160; ET: 159) and its 'speculative force', lies in its capacity to 'break down the gates of the insoluble' (ND: 36; ET: 28). 'Consciousness could never despair over the greyness unless it harboured the concept of a different colour whose scattered traces are still perceptible within the negative whole' (ND: 368; ET: 377-78). For Heidegger too we can say that despair lies precisely in the fact that the despairing one perceives the impossibility of the possible. He bears witness once more to the possible in despairing of the latter (Anf: 248f.). But what kind of hope could be concealed in power? There seems to be no clear indication in this respect.

The word 'hope' is encountered far more frequently in Adorno than it is in Heidegger. 10 I do not presume to decide whether the factical hope, in which the questioning of the one thinker discovers its own motivation, might be much closer to the hope of the other than either of them was aware. But it would be crucially important for an initial dialogue concerning the truth of power to grasp what sustains the thinking of both when that thinking refuses to relinquish hope. The theme of 'power and domination' has revealed itself as so central for the thought of both men that the question concerning the truth of power becomes one fundamental (if not the) question of any attempt to explore the possibility of a dialogue between Adorno and Heidegger. The principal task of such a dialogue must be to readdress Heidegger's ontological thought from precisely this perspective and thereby to examine Adorno's allergic, but nevertheless opaque, relationship to this thought. And this would certainly require more detailed and careful investigations. 11 But from what has already been said we can make some initial observations concerning the programmatic title of 'Being and Time'.

For this could basically be interpreted as the thesis that time assumes the power of being. Or more precisely: of being insofar as being (in the tradition and in the prevailing unquestioned understanding of being) was withdrawn from the power of time and asserted over against time precisely as constant presence. Insofar as this understanding was a kind of self-deception, the thesis in question can also be expressed by saying that time is powerful in being. This would be an entirely trivial observation if we ignored the

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'ontological difference' here and simply heard the implication that all beings are subject to time and must sometime therefore come to an end. But Heidegger means to say that time shows its power in being and as being insofar as time becomes the 'first name' of the truth of being (We: 205). At first Heidegger only explicitly elaborated this with respect to the time of Dasein as a 'running ahead towards possibility' (SuZ: 262; ET: 306), i.e. towards death. From this perspective we can begin to grasp how dominion, insofar as this is the dominion of man himself, i.e. his being as master, is released by an other power which thereby reveals itself as that which determines this Dasein.

This possibility is not some fantastical fabrication, but an intrinsically given one. It is given in the mastering essence of man himself. We have already said, for example, that knowledge is and remains power 'for as long as it is'. And the same thing holds for every other form of human power and dominion. Paradoxical though it may sound, it is upon this 'as Jong' that our hope for delivery from entanglement in self-assertion and will to power is grounded. For this is quite certain: our power has its own time, and the possibility of this power can in turn be exhausted. Our lack of power is always already at work and involved here too. The more powerful this lack of power becomes, the more our entanglement in a will that insists on its power is loosened, and the 'swamp' begins to release us into freedom. Of course this is precisely what we are so reluctant to believe, and we clutch the power that has been vouchsafed to us as if it were a possession. But our language rightly says of the one who is dying: 'he must believe it'. Death is the incontestable truth of power and it is in death that truth assumes its power. And not indeed only at the end of life, but already from birth onwards. As essentially mortal beings we are always already within the possibility of coming into the truth of power, of being able to seize this truth (in 'running ahead'), rather than of being dazzled and blinded by the untruth of power. It is only for this reason that we can seriously doubt that our entanglement in the will to power is inescapable and that the 'legacy of violence' is an everlasting fate. It is not merely because a more original or a utopianly imagined world that is free of domination will one day prevail over everything that we know, practise or lament as domination, but rather because something more powerful now already contests its inescapability, that power and dominion is not simply bad or injurious but ambivalent: a leeway of possibilities that have been opened up and permitted to us. As long as we live, in knowing and acting, out of these possibilities and make use of the latter, then there are also differences in the use of power. We can weigh and deliberate whether, as the case may be, dominion is necessary, good and right, or whether it produces bad and injurious effects.

This is therefore the place to address the question concerning the criteria of justified or unjustified dominion. The condition for discovering such criteria, and also for developing a responsible perspective upon or potentially

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affecting the structures of dominion and domination, is the emergence of an other and more powerful power to which mankind owes the leeway, the open space, of his own possibilities of dominion. The task of philosophical questioning is to recall, to bring this condition to mind, for human beings who are absorbed in mastery and therefore forgetful of this more powerful power. This questioning resists the restriction of truth to that which serves the power of man. And it exposes itself to the movement through which Da-sein advances to the truth of its power and to the powerful seizing of its truth. This is the meaning of the critical function of this conception of dominion. And from this point of view it can certainly also help to ground the discipline of political thought, can and must help to furnish a measure of orientation for human beings who are daily afflicted by various forms of force and compulsion. But it cannot do so as long as, implicitly or explicitly, it merely confirms the image of man, shaped as it is by the idea of dominion, that characterises our humanistic tradition. Heidegger challenges us to engage with this image of man by recalling the interplay between our capacities and that which entirely surpasses those capacities, by recalling the 'hidden temporal character of being' (Ho: 311 ). If we were to assume, rather than to repress, this character as the true possibility of our own individual and shared way of being, this would surely correspond, from a specifically philosophical perspective and in the abstract language of its concepts, to what the New Testament calls 'love', namely the abandonment of the primacy of the will to self-assertion or to its paradoxical self-transformation. 12

4. Expanding the basis for dialogue

The basis for the attempted dialogue with Adorno, as developed through our final reflections upon a fundamental aspect of Heidegger's thought, remains a narrow one. It is unclear whether the suggestion of the 'goodness' of power, which only appears at the very margins of 'Critical Theory', can be brought together with the truth of the 'greatly empowering' to which Heidegger's thought appeals. It is difficult to bring the dialectic of Adorno's concept of domination, his awareness of the powerlessness of power, into relation to the measure-giving and meaning-bestowing significance of death in Heidegger. The suspicion that we might indeed discover an affinity between both thinkers with regard to this and other fundamental experiences of thought is something that would have to be pursued further. Whether this undertaking is worthwhile might well appear doubtful - except that we have already discovered a kind of 'basis' for dialogue in the fact that it was precisely Adorno's polemic which encouraged us to explore more carefully the dimension of power in Heidegger's fundamental conception. And what is more: this polemic compelled us to examine and to clarify our thesis concerning the critical character of this conception in relation to dominion and domination in a twofold manner.

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For in the first place, it must appear daring, if not absurd, in the eyes of the traditional, still largely existentialistic understanding of Heidegger, to try and interpret the project of anticipatory resoluteness, as authentic being towards death, as a contribution to the dismantling of certain interpersonal and social positions of power. For it is precisely here that the utter singularity and non-relationality of the Dasein that is 'in each case mine' is most emphatically accentuated (SuZ: 263f.; ET: 308). But this misinterpretation of 'mineness' (one from which Adorno's polemic draws its substance - cf. JdE: 95f.) must itself be revised once we also recognise in this very context one of Heidegger's most important references to the authentic possibility of being-with-others. The anticipatory running towards death as the possibility of Dasein which is not only 'unrelated' but also can never be 'outstripped' equally gives Dasein the freedom to acknowledge and to understand 'the possibilities of existence of the others' (SuZ: 264; ET: 308). This clearly indicates, at least with respect to the domain of personal relations, the fundamental theme of an unforced abandonment of false claims and positions of power and equally clearly harbours the suggestion for a further extension of this approach to the problem of social domination. From this perspective, for both Heidegger and Adorno, must we not ask the question concerning a kind of dominion over (or amongst?) human beings that does not simply turn them into objects? The idea of justice would appear in a different light where the will to power no longer usurps this concept for itself and would also ground, in accordance with a new 'Gelassenheit' or 'composure towards things' (Gel: 25), a far-reaching transformation in the social dimension of existence. For it from the perspective of death that man first receives the 'measure for the range of his own essential being' (VuA: 194). 13

But it is hardly surprising if this possible approach to the 'social' in Heidegger is generally overlooked. For Heidegger, and this surely appears to be no accident, makes no further use of this approach himself. And the further labours of the school of thought encouraged by Heidegger will certainly have to take this question up once again. And far more is at stake here than simply countering Adorno's polemic against Heidegger. For this polemic could and should provoke further reflection, where Heidegger's approach to authentic existence is at issue, upon the disclosure of being as such, and not merely of human-individual being, that transpires in a transformed manner through the anticipation of death. 14 This reflection alone would first bring out the full implications of the ontological significance of Heidegger's approach. But this in turn is impossible unless we are prepared to address the meaning of social as well as individual 'subjectivity' with respect to its grounding in Dasein. If we take this step, we can remedy the fateful narrowing of perspective which was itself opened up in Heidegger's existential 'Analytic', and thereby at least one of the problematic factors which has obstructed a potential dialogue between Heidegger and the sociologically oriented approach of Adorno. It is then no longer necessary

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to exclude social relations of domination from consideration and we can thus begin to envisage the pre-political and the political implications of the question of being.

The second objection which Adorno might well raise against our attempt to clarify the critical implications of Heidegger's fundamental thought in relation to domination also appears to possess some justification as long as the social aspects of Heidegger's analysis of death remain unaddressed. If this analysis ignores the abuse which the representatives of the prevailing order have frequently encouraged with respect to the self-sacrificial readiness for death on the part of their subjects and citizens, it is not difficult to charge it with a certain 'complicity with death' (JdE: 112 and 130), and thus with an ideological transfiguration of socially produced and conditioned kinds of death (cf. JdE: 74, 84f., 109f., 115). In fact the hermeneutic of Dasein itself must have a direct interest in resisting such misinterpretations and the tragic-heroic misunderstanding, another form of the existentialistic one, that arises from them.

But there is yet another problem here. Quite apart from the specifically social aspects of the question, Adorno's suspicion seems fundamentally motivated by the thought that acknowledging the power of death already effectively legitimates death as such. This would raise once again the question concerning the criterion of 'legitimate power', but now on the higher level of the problem of theodicy. The difference between Adorno and Heidegger would then assume the following form: whereas Adorno appears to contest the rights of death, Heidegger would already reject the question concerning death's 'rights', and thus of theodicy in every sense, as a metaphysical one that is intrinsically inappropriate to the situation of Da-sein. For Heidegger the negative view of death would simply be a denial of the question of theodicy which would accomplish as little as the contrary affirmation of the question. 'The turning towards the Open dispenses with reading that which is in a negative sense' (Ho: 279). 15 If Heidegger's understanding of the anticipation of death is not intended to 'darken' our existence by encouraging a 'blind staring at the end', but rather to help us grasp the thought of 'a good death', to guide mortal beings towards 'the essence of death' in order that they may 'acknowledge the power of death as death' (VuA: 151), then he certainly cannot be said to dispose over any criterion of justification or legitimation. But from Adorno's perspective too, critical thought cannot wish to elevate itself over the 'goodness' of power if the latter is to 'manifest itself' as such. We may surely hope that closer engagement with the texts will be able to lead us further beyond this initial and provisional state of the debate.

In order to expand the basis for dialogue, we should have to develop an overview of the textual material in all its range and variety, to consider the specific historical context of the relevant polemics and the reciprocal failure of communication involved here, to sharpen and clarify the character of

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Adorno's principal objections and to explore their potential truth content. Our own attempt in this direction has been prompted by the unavoidable suspicion that such an impassioned struggle to distinguish one position from the other also betrays an unacknowledged proximity as far as certain central experiences and lines of thought are concerned. If this suspicion could be confirmed with regard to such a difficult example as this one, it might well serve to encourage our weakened faith in the possibility of convergent mutual disputation and enhance our capacity for the dialogical resolution of conflicts.

Abbreviations of cited texts

AC: T. W. Adorno, Studien ::um autoritiiren Charakter [1949/50], Frankfurt am Main 1973.

Anf: M. Heidegger, Metaphysische Anf{mgsgrunde der Logik im Ausgang von Leibniz [1928], Frankfurt am Main 1978.

AP: F. Grenz, Adorno.1· Philosophic in Grundhegriffen. Auftiisung einiger Deutungsprohleme, Frankfurt am Main 1974.

DdA: Max Horkheimer IT. W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufkliirung [1947], Frankfurt am Main 1971; English translation: Dialectic of' Enlightenment, tr. John Cumming, London 1973.

Erz: T. W. Adorno, Er::iehung zur Mundigkeit, Vortriige und Gespriiche mit Hellmut Becker 1959-1969, Frankfurt am Main 1970.

Gel: M. Heidegger, Gelassenheit, Pfullingen 1959. JdE: T. W. Adorno, Jargon der Eigentlichkeit. Zur deutschen ldeo/ogie, Frankfurt

am Main 1964. Ho: M. Heidegger, Ho/::wege [1935-1946], Frankfurt am Main 1950. MM: T. W. Adorno, Minima Moralia. Refiexionen aus dem heschiidigten Leben [1944-

1947], Frankfurt am Main 1970. N: M. Heidegger, Niet::sche [1936-1946], vol. II, Pfullingen 1961. ND: T. W. Adorno, Negative Dia/ektik, Frankfurt am Main 1966; English translation:

Negative Dialectics, tr. E. B. Ashton, London 1973. OL: T. W. Adorno, Ohne Leithild. Parva Aesthetica, Frankfurt am Main 1970. Pos: T. W. Adorno et al., Der Positivismusstreit in der deutschen Soziologie, Neuwied/

Berlin 1972. Pr: T. W. Adorno, Prismen. Kulturkritik und Gesel/schafi, Frankfurt am Main 1969. PT: T. W. Phi/osophische Terminologie, Frankfurt am Main 1973-74. Soz I: T. W. Adorno, Sozio/ogische Schriften I, Frankfurt am Main 1972. SuZ: M. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, Halle 1927; English translation: Being and Time,

tr. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson, Oxford 1967. VuA: M. Heidegger, Vortriige und Auf~iitze [1936-1953], Pfullingen 1954. We: M. Heidegger, Wegmarken [1928-1962], Frankfurt am Main 1967.


Herbert Marcuse, on the other hand, explicitly distinguishes between 'two kinds of dominion: a repressive and emancipatory one'. Cf. H. Marcuse, Der

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eindimensiona/e Mensch. Studien zur Ideo/ogie der fortgeschrittenen Industriegesellschaji, Neuwied/Berlin 1970, p. 247.

2 The concept of 'authority' too is so bound up with 'violence' in Adorno's eyes that he prefers to avoid it altogether or to replace it with that of 'authenticity' in the context of art (cf. T. W. Adorno, Noten zur Literatur, Frankfurt am Main 1969, vol. 2, p. 127f.)

3 The image may well remind the reader of the conclusion to the Book of Jonah (ch. 4, 5-11).

4 For a specific discussion of this passage cf. Ries, "'Die Rettung des Hoffnungslosen". Zur "theologia occulta" in der Spiitphilosophie Horkheimers und Adornos', in: Zeitschrift fur philosophische Forschung, 30, 1976, p. 75f. It has been claimed that the 'latent Messianism' is actually more characteristic of Adorno than of Horkheimer. Cf. H. Gumnior IR. Ringguth, Max Horkheimer in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten, Reinbeck 1973, p. 78f.

5 Cf. Carl Friedrich von Weizsiicker, Der Garten des Menschlichen. Beitriige zur geschichtlichen Anthropologie, Munich/Vienna 1977.

6 The interpretation of Gerold Prauss, who also objects to the absence of any explicit discussion of ethics in Heidegger, suffers from its fundamental reluctance to address the ontological theme of Being and Time. Heidegger does not endorse what Prauss calls 'practicism', or simply assert the priority of action over knowledge, but claims that the being of intra-mundane entities is disclosed to Dasein primarily in terms of 'readiness-to-hand' and only secondarily in terms of 'presence-at-hand'. Heidegger's project of 'fundamental ontology' attempts to question back behind the traditional distinction between 'theory' and 'praxis'. Cf. G. Prauss, Erkennen und Hande/n in Heidegger.1· 'Sein und Zeit', Freiburg/ Munich 1977, p. 109; but cf. SuZ: 57, 300f., 320 note, and We: 145.

7 Ernst Herhaus has claimed that the 'provocation of Adorno's legacy is the complete absence of any presumptuous prescriptions as to how our fatal world might actually be changed.' Cf. Theodor W. Adorno zum Gediichtnis. Eine Sammlung, edited by H. Schweppenhauser, Frankfurt am Main 1971, p. 95.

8 For example: with reference to 'origin' cf. We: 317, ND: 156, 272; with reference to 'the whole' cf. Pos: 49; with reference to 'value' cf. N II: 88f., 273f., Ho: 213, MM: 30, Pos: 94; with reference to 'justice' cf. N II: 198, 323, Ho: 227f.; with reference to 'sacrifice' cf. DdA: 44, 47ff.; with reference to 'dialectic' cf. Ho: 200, Pos: 48, ND: 19, 18lf., 396.

9 Alfred Schmidt, on the other hand, identifies a principal difference between Adorno and Bloch in the fact that the latter still endorses a 'teleological metaphysics of the world process' with an 'all-too direct connection with the early positions adopted by Marx and Engels'. Cf. Theodor Adorno zum Gediichtnis, p. 70, note.

10 For 'hope' might well appear as an expression of 'ressentiment' for an understanding of being that effectively shares Scheler's view that authentic possibility ('love') arises from 'the abundance of our own vital power, of our firmness and steadfastness'. Cf. Max Scheler, Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Mora/en, edited by M. S. Frings, Frankfurt am Main 1978.

11 I here refer the reader to my detailed investigation of the entire question: Hermann Morchen, Adorno und Heidegger. Untersuchung einer phi/osophischen Kommunikationsverweigerung, Stuttgart 1981.

12 Luke 10: 27, 9: 24. From an Adornian perspective Ute Guzzoni can also claim 'that "self-preservation against otherness" must be historically transformed into "self-preservation in and through otherness"'. Cf. U. Guzzoni, 'Selbsterhaltung und Anderssein. Ein Beitrag zur kritischen Theorie', in: Theorie Diskussion. Subjektivitiit und Se/bsterha/tung, edited by H. Ebeling, Frankfurt am Main 1976, p. 316.

TRUTH AND POWER

13 James Demske also rightly indicates 'a social aspect' to the way in which Dasein 'runs forward' towards death. Insofar as death is that which can never be 'outstripped', it also 'counteracts' in a certain way the radical individuation of Dasein. Cf. J. M. Demske, Sein, Mensch und Tod. Das Todesproblem bei Martin Heidegger, Freiburg/Munich 1963.

14 Cf. F. W. von Hermann, Die Selbstinterpretation Martin Heideggers, Meisenheim 1964.

15 Heidegger is alluding to Rilke's letter to Countess Sizzo of 6.1.1923 where he talks of his desire 'to communicate a "key" that would allow us to read the word "death" without negation'. Cf. Rainer Maria Rilke, Briefe, Wiesbaden 1950, vol. II, p. 381.

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THE METAPHYSICS OF CRITIQUE

On the relationship between metaphysics and experience in Max Horkheimer and

Theodor W. Adorno

Birgit Recki

Source: Neue Heftefiir Phi/osophie 30/31(1991):139-71. Translated by Nicholas Walker.

In recent years it is clear that the question of 'metaphysics', formerly considered a rather specialist area of academic research, has returned once again to the centre of more general philosophical discussion.' The fact that the critique of metaphysics is as old as metaphysics itself2 seems hardly relevant to its contemporary critics insofar as they desire to address the subject systematically from the exclusive perspective of their own problems and questions. The dispassionate examination of the recurring features of older historical debates clearly seems to contribute nothing where our own contemporary interests are in question. And the insight that one can only really combat metaphysics by appeal to 'a different metaphysics', 3 does little to settle the relevant conflict since it already presupposes the point at issue. As a general claim it only appears compelling to those who are already convinced of the unavoidability and indispensability of metaphysical thought itself.

It may seem easier to concede that this claim has already frequently revealed its justification - something which will only be further confirmed here - in an engagement with specific historical positions. It is by no means unusual to find that the severest critics of the metaphysical tradition, like Nietzsche or Heidegger for example, have ultimately been least capable of entirely renouncing metaphysical claims or borrowings of one kind or another in the immanent unfolding of their own thought. And we can also find exemplary illustration of this phenomenon if we consider the intellectual development of the Frankfurt School from Max Horkheimer's

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original social-political grounding of theory to the later radical formulation of this approach in the work of Adorno.

In their critical confrontation with tradition, the two founding fathers of Critical Theory are also compelled to raise the question concerning the precise relationship between their own distinctive approach and the history of metaphysics. Although they start from a common position in this respect, the subsequent development of their versions of critical theory reveals that the two thinkers ultimately come to opposite conclusions as far as this question is concerned. Whereas Horkheimer remains exclusively concerned with repudiating metaphysics in the name of a meaningful relationship to experience, Adorno develops a clearly more differentiated approach to the question with which they both originally began. Precisely under the impact of events in recent modern history Adorno comes to recognise more than a mere connection between living experience and metaphysical speculation, and thereby comes to see that the very principle of critique essentially has something to do with metaphysics itself. This tension between Horkheimer's early and Adorno's late position in relation to metaphysics certainly reveals something essential about the changing self-conception of the Frankfurt School over this period. But it also basically exposes, in exemplary fashion, a problem that is revealed in a particularly emphatic way by the necessity of providing a criterion of critique for this theory. This is the problem that any theory of society must acknowledge its own need for justification.

I Horkheimer's critique of metaphysics as ideology

'For this is the remarkable thing about the philosophical chaos in which we live: however much everyone is entrenched against everyone with respect to the answers, everyone has still run to occupy the same trench with respect to the task they agree in addressing'.

Julius Ebbinghaus

In the decade following his appointment as Director of the Institute for Social Research in 1931 Max Horkheimer published a series of articles which addressed a number of fundamental questions concerning the nature of 'theory' and formulated a 'programme for an interdisciplinary materialism'4 that would remain valid for the members of the Institute up until the period of exile in the United States. 5 These programmatic essays express a decisive, indeed often highly polemical, rejection of metaphysics as such. And when Horkheimer abjures metaphysics as an 'intellectual pretence of certainty',6 this is only the least of his accusations.

But it is particularly striking, when we look more closely, that it is very vague and imprecise, and indeed enigmatically fluctuating, concept of metaphysics that furnishes the horizon for this critique. At this time Horkheimer was already vigorously attacking the various forms of what Adorno would

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later summarily dispatch as 'positivism'. 7 But he also frequently deployed the word 'metaphysics' in the undifferentiated and pejorative sense that is typical of everyday judgements on the matter and is also encountered in the 'common sense' philosophers from whom the Frankfurt theorists so emphatically dissociated themselves. Thus 'metaphysics', as Horkheimer claims with remarkable vagueness, attempts 'in some way or other to acquire knowledge of the true essence of things'. 8 But even when he correctly describes, independently of all polemics, the concepts of 'essence, substance, soul, immortality' as the characteristic themes of metaphysics,9 he clearly cannot regard them as genuinely philosophical issues at all. Thus he not only often mentions metaphysics, theology and religion in a single breath, but also seems to treat them as simply identical with one another, as when he summarily speaks of metaphysics as a kind of illusion: 'Death, as the inescapable end, has always been the fundamental basis of religious and metaphysical illusion.' 10 It is then no surprise to find that illusion is itself interpreted as deceptive appearance in the classical sense: it turns our attention away from the real world, and its real problems. Metaphysical thought, which concerns itself 'with the "enigma of existence'', with the "totality" of the world, with "life", with reality "in itself", or however else it defines the thrust of its questions','' merely 'compensates' us, in Horkheimer's view, for real existing misery .12 It fulfils the function of 'appeasement' and is therefore nothing but a 'deception'. 'There is no eternal enigma of the world, no mystery of the world, that thought is called upon to penetrate once and for all.' 13 'The "mystical" does not exist, and nor does "the meaning of life" .' 14 'The meaninglessness of the world refutes all metaphysics, that is, refutes the meaningful interpretation of the world.' 11 And what is worse: such 'metaphysical dreams' suggest a false escape from the experience of our modern commoditybased society .16 In the light of these observations it is only to be expected that metaphysical thought, which is merely a 'tributary of religion' 17 for Horkheimer the Marxist, should also fall victim to the judgement which Marx had already passed upon religion in general. On the one hand metaphysics is regarded as 'synonymous with dogmatic thought', 18 while on the other it is reduced to little more than a belief in ghosts and spirits. In attempting to define its own character in opposition from other approaches, it is clear that critical theory employs the concept of 'metaphysics' as little more than a verbal cudgel for attacking the thinkers of the bourgeois tradition whenever the need arises.

Just as the critical theorist regards Kant's moral philosophy simply as an instructive reflection of the prevailing antagonism of society19 and considers morality in general merely as a characteristic form of behaviour of human beings in the era of bourgeois domination, 20 so too metaphysics as such is only interesting as an 'ideological reflex of bourgeois society'. 21 Since certain problems are thus still 'preserved' in metaphysics22

- 'albeit in a false and inverted form' - the subject continues to possess some cognitive value for

1(\Q


the critic of society. Horkheimer deployed a structural demystifying critique that mobilised the emancipatory elements of politico-economic and psychoanalytic thought in order to analyse the central questions of morality, ethics, anthropology and classical philosophical theory and determine their ideological function in bourgeois society. In these areas he identified many of the symptoms of the same alienated condition that a committed contemporary critique was essentially intended to remedy. Fundamentally, therefore, Horkheimer treated the subject of metaphysics in much the same way that a physician typically examines the symptoms of a disease to be cured.

By the 1930s, of course, there was nothing particularly original about this generalised critique of metaphysics. In the light of the arguments that have been raised by a long-standing tradition of critical reflection upon metaphysics,23 one could even describe the position which Horkheimer and Adorno basically shared up until the 1960s as an almost 'classical' form of critique. The 19th century in particular had already produced a host of explicitly anti-metaphysical theories, though none of them was itself free of metaphysical elements or assumptions: the Left Hegelians, Marx, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, Dilthey and the hermeneutic tradition of the cultural sciences, the various forms of 'Lebensphilosophie', phenomenology, neoKantianism. These traditions, for all their own fundamental differences of approach, shared this fundamental repudiation of metaphysics with the scientistic trends of thought which also emerged during the 19th century. In all these cases we hear the same basic melody whose monotonous refrain is repeated in 'critical theory'. With greater or lesser emphasis, and in a variety of formulations, we always find 'experience' played off against 'metaphysics', as if the latter had never had anything to do with the former. This tendency culminated in 20th century positivist and empiricism, but it was even perpetuated by a self-proclaimed critic of positivism like Horkheimer, as the simple opposition expressed in the title of his essay Materialism and Metaphysics rather suggests. The position which Horkheimer so vigorously defended in the 1930s as if he had just invented this anti-metaphysical gunpowder for himself really belongs seamlessly to the scientistic tradition of the nineteenth century critique of metaphysics.

Marx and Engels significantly strengthened and productively developed this tradition above all in relation to social-critical thought by treating economics as the fundamental discipline for a truly scientific socialism. But they certainly failed to reflect upon the metaphysical implications of their own dialectical materialism or their teleological conception of history. In this connection they effectively radicalised the earlier interpretation of metaphysics as ideology that had already been attempted by the materialist thinkers and enlightenment critics of the 18th century. 24 Given his assumptions concerning the primacy of economic factors, Marx was able to relegate metaphysics, along with all other intellectual and cultural achievements, to the 'superstructure' of society and thus to interpret it as a secondary function

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of the material basis of social life. For the social critic who is primarily interested in developing a scientific analysis and promoting the practical transformation of society it then becomes possible to situate 'metaphysics' as an element of the social context more precisely than earlier comparable critics and theorists were capable of doing. This sort of 'dialectical critique', which is effectively continued in Horkheimer's programme for critical theory,25 typically runs the risk that is connected with all such claims to unmask the truth of reality or society - that of a functionalist reductionism which can no longer grasp the intrinsic significance of the matter in question.26

In effect this reductionist approach simply applies the slogan about 'the opium of the people' to the domain of metaphysics.

When Horkheimer insisted in 1931 that the principal advantage of 'social research' lay in the fact 'that it addresses the social reality of the present', he interprets this openness to experience as a fundamental 'contrast with many currents of contemporary metaphysics'. 27 Since the latter is essentially concerned with attaining 'cognition of the absolute', or 'knowledge of the infinite',28 it cannot, in his view, avoid 'hypostasising' specific general insights as 'suprahistorical moments' in their own right. 29 This inevitably 'absolutises abstract conceptualities'30 and thereby withdraws them from 'further clarification and justified rejection on the basis of empirical research'. 31 Whereas the pursuit of social research - the principal task for a theory of society - is explicitly related to experience and thus acknowledges the possibility of social change, and thereby also its own fallibility, we cannot say the same for metaphysics in Horkheimer's eyes.32 If this deficiency already disqualifies metaphysics from procuring any authentic knowledge of reality, it renders it entirely useless as far as the practical transformation of reality is concerned. And that is precisely why Horkheimer the 'enlightened' critic warns us against all 'metaphysical illusions'33 and appeals instead to 'the testimony [ ... ]of experience as opposed to the deceptive world of metaphysics'. 34

'Materialism concurs with positivist doctrine in recognising only that which authenticates itself within sensible experience as real', as Horkheimer explicitly puts it.35 And indeed the central critical motif of his own summary objections to metaphysical thought cannot really be distinguished from that of the corresponding 'positivistic' positions. It is true that empirically oriented 'social research' in Horkheimer's sense is primarily concerned with certain specific aspects of experience with regard to reality: the critical theorist of society finds it intolerable that 'the metaphysical thinkers have rarely been seriously troubled by the causes of human distress'. 36 This condemnation of metaphysics is motivated by an explicitly historical consciousness of the problems of social experience. But even this more concrete conception of what is really implied in the concept of experience is still by no means sufficient adequately to define the all-encompassing critical claim of the Frankfurt School. And Horkheimer's programmatic essays also clearly betray an awareness that one cannot develop a critical concept of

1 1 {\


experience solely on the basis of experience itself. In distancing himself from logical empiricism, therefore, Horkheimer emphasises that for any true cognition of reality 'the given [ ... ] must be mediated by thought, the relations between things must be exposed, differentiated and transformed'. For Horkheimer, 'experience, or the "given"' is 'mediated [ ... ] through the whole of knowledge'. 37 We must recognise the 'correct relationship'38 of the factors of knowledge which 'attempts precisely as a whole to reflect reality'. 39

In short, we must develop a 'correct social theory'40 and that is ultimately a task for thought. From the first this raises the fundamental problem of articulating a critical theory of society.41 Even under the misleading title of 'social research', the original programme of the Frankfurt Institute involves far more than a pragmatically motivated commitment to interdisciplinary empirical research. The enterprise was aimed 'not simply at remedying particular unfortunate circumstances', but was essentially concerned with 'the whole' of social reality.42 This only becomes fully clear in Horkheimer's essay of 1937 where he emphatically distinguishes 'critical theory' from what he regards as the typical orientation of 'traditional theory'.43

Horkheimer basically understands traditional theory here in terms of the 'dualism of thought and being, of cognitive understanding and sensuous perception',44 and ultimately the dualism of theory and praxis. He interprets this latter dualism as an expression of false consciousness which a genuine theory of society must attempt to overcome. In arguing the necessity for this approach Horkheimer opposes the specific material starting point of critical theory to all those theories which are methodologically oriented to the natural sciences. He makes it quite clear that the possibilities of 'critical theory' can only adequately be clarified through a fundamental examination of its own principles. Neither 'society' nor 'nature'45 can properly be understood as self-evident or immediately given entities. A 'critical theory that is entirely governed by an interest in realising rational conditions' of human life can challenge the 'alienation'46 of bourgeois society and the corresponding dualism of 'traditional theory' only by reference to a 'deeper unity'47

articulated by reason as the animating principle of critical reflection. According to Horkheimer, critical theory certainly receives its fundamental

impulse from the experience of need and distress.48 But it also 'projects' an alternative image of things that cannot simply be derived from the existing state of reality. It must rather be developed counter-factually from the 'idea of a future society constituted as a community of free human beings'.49 This idea is certainly 'immanent in human labour' itself, according to Horkheimer, and we only require a 'specifically oriented interest in order to experience' these social tendencies. 50 But this kind of 'oriented interest' does not simply emerge immediately from experience, as Horkheimer himself clearly recognises. 'That is why the constructive activity of thought that is involved in the totality of such a theory plays a more significant role in relation to empirical experience than it does in our normal and everyday view of things. '51

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Horkheimer obviously believes that has avoided the problem that arises in this connection by emphasising the pragmatic dimension of his conception of theory: 'Critical theory begins, therefore, with an idea of simple commodity exchange as defined through relatively universal concept.'52 But what was already recognised as true for experience, is certainly also true for the concept of commodity exchange. For this concept is already an element in a theory and thus points as such, despite its emphatically concrete content, towards a broader open question. Where, therefore, does critical theory on Horkheimer's view actually begin? One must surely clarify precisely what it means to begin with an 'idea' rather than merely with certain specific phenomena. For this already clearly implies the comprehensive perspective upon the whole which the constructive activity of thought is supposed reliably to procure. 'As we have seen, critical and oppositional theory also derives its claims concerning the real relations of things from fundamental universal concepts and thereby reveals the necessary character of these relations. '53

Once we consider the relationship between 'social research' and all those other 'intellectual approaches that strive for the most universal and comprehensive possible view' of their subject matter, it becomes quite clear that the former thereby also begins to approach the territory of metaphysical reflection. For even the kind of dialectical thought which is fully conscious of its own historicity, and which is required for a materialist theory of society for Horkheimer, cannot avoid an initial 'positing' from which further theses are then 'derived' through a process of 'purely conceptual construction'.54 Such a theory is interested in the 'structure of the social totality'55 and while it refuses to 'hypostasise' some purely 'universal system of categories',56 it is directly concerned with 'the construction of a specific object' in the context of a 'theoretical whole'.57

We might make the same objection to Horkheimer that Kant already raised against the 'alleged indifferentists' who nonetheless 'inevitably fall back upon metaphysical assertions as soon as they start to think at all'. It is quite true that Horkheimer explicitly appeals to the importance of conceptual thought in order to distance himself from the 'positivists'. But he does not make it at all clear what this difference ultimately signifies. The necessity of such thought is essentially implied in Horkheimer's language even though it is obviously never properly grasped here in its own right.

In the last analysis it is only by developing an appropriate concept of experience that the metaphysical requirements and implications of a critical theory of society can properly be clarified. This would also reveal, in an exemplary fashion, the basic reason for the idiosyncratic repudiation of metaphysical reflection on the part of critical theory. And this lies above all in an overly reduced understanding of what metaphysics really is. Although it is indeed quite clear that metaphysical speculation cannot be derived from experience and that the substantive themes of metaphysics cannot themselves be objects of experience,58 it would certainly be premature simply to

1 1,.,


leave the matter at that. For such considerations capture no more than half the truth concerning the authentic relationship between metaphysics and experience. It is quite true that empirical experience has nothing to do with metaphysics insofar as the former simply relates in each case to singular objects in our immediate sensory perception of them. Metaphysics, on the other hand, is always concerned with a totality and its principle,59 and these cannot be derived from the objects of experience, but can only be thematised through a process of conceptual construction. All metaphysics is 'speculative' in the sense that it discovers its own object through the kind of emphatic conceptual reflection for which the term speculatio serves as a metaphor.60

If experience itself can be said, in a philosophically relevant sense, to compete with metaphysics, then we are no longer dealing with particular experiences in their underivable concreteness, but always with a matter of principle. And whenever the essence of experience is explicitly contrasted with metaphysics, we must already possess, in accordance with the demands imposed by the dialectic of the limit, some conception in principle of what transcends experience, some complete concept of what we mean when we speak of experience in this connection. We must already grasp not merely the particular content of experience here and now, but also what can constitute experience in the future, indeed in any possible case, and thus also the principle through which all experience can be grounded. Experience must be grounded in a manner that is not itself a matter of experience. We can therefore understand how Kant, who originally intended to confine his reflections 'solely to what is useful' for us and whose distaste for the empty concepts of traditional metaphysics led him to appeal to 'the fruitful bathos of experience', eventually developed a theory of the conditions of the possibility of experience in general. And Kant interpreted the project of transcendental philosophy as a metaphysical undertaking. 61 Just as in cases of particular experience we 'grasp, indeed must grasp, the wavering content of appearance in constant conceptual terms',62 we cannot avoid reflecting upon the concept of experience which permits us in principle to distinguish experience from its own opposite. And this means that we can only comprehend experience 'metaphysically' insofar as we attempt to understand what essentially belongs to it.

While Horkheimer claims that the difference between critical social research and metaphysical reflection lies specifically in the appeal to experience, he is immediately forced to insist, in contrast to positivism, upon a form of thought that for its part always already transcends mere experience. Since Horkheimer himself is well aware, on the basis of his own critical reflections, that he is speaking of 'experience' at a quite different level of abstraction from that of the ordinary individual who habitually refers to the level of particular experience, the problem with his approach is all the more obvious. For it is clear that the comprehension of the whole to which critical thought is directed, and the concept of the relevant whole which provides the principle of critical

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thought, already stands in need of philosophical justification. Horkheimer certainly realises this and responds to the problem in a number of instructive remarks and observations. But he does not grasp that this question represents the properly metaphysical task of thought itself.

In this connection Horkheimer may well have shared the misleading self-understanding of many self-proclaimed materialists whose emphatic and over-simplified opposition to 'idealism' also tends to create a certain blindness with regard to the many different forms that metaphysical reflection can assume. Horkheimer is clearly aware of the accusation that materialism is also a kind of metaphysics.63 But with respect to this difficult issue he is not prepared to go beyond the admission that 'most philosophical defenders of materialism take up and respond to metaphysical questions'. Without even considering the arguments that have long since been raised in this connection even in Marxist quarters,64 Horkheimer repudiates this accusation by appealing to a particularly vivid and concrete example of the need for pragmatic orientation. According to Horkheimer, it is not merely the facts, but also the characteristic features of thought itself - which prompt other theories to pursue metaphysical reflections - that acquire an entirely different significance in the context of materialism. But in what sense precisely? 'The doctrine that asserts the fundamental historical role of economic relations must be regarded as the defining characteristic of the materialist perspective. And this new theoretical content has also made it impossible to bestow closed and conclusive form upon any highest principle as a principle.'65

Horkheimer's commitment to an open conception of historical development certainly identifies the principle which is supposed to ground an appeal to totality. But this frank confession of his overall perspective surely also reveals why, in addition to the usual ideological objections, he feels compelled to repudiate metaphysics: Horkheimer recognises only one kind of metaphysics. For him all metaphysics represents a 'closed and conclusive dogmatism',66 'completed theory of reality',67 whose static character, with the concomitant danger of 'absolutising' and 'hypostasing' historical conditions, cannot do justice in principle to the demands of dialectical theory. For the 'dynamism of reality' must be reflected, in Horkheimer's view, in 'the fluid character of our concepts'.68 His failure to perceive that the principled conceptual grounding which is equally indispensable for a critical theory is itself metaphysical in character probably derives in the last analysis from his fixation with one specific form of metaphysical thought. And the same holds for the fundamental insight that our attempts at principled grounding can certainly involve reflection upon matters of experience that must be significant for thought and its interest in reality.69

As any consideration of the contemporary discussion of these issues would show, many modern materialist thinkers also regard the simple opposition of metaphysics and materialism as a misleading one. 70 And with specific reference to the tradition of critical theory there is certainly growing recognition that

11 A


this alternative is entirely inadequate.71 And it is indeed impossible to conceptualise critical theory without reference to metaphysical considerations. For all its self-proclaimed distance from 'classical' theory, critical theory too is basically interested in the truth concerning the whole. And it too must first construe the 'whole' with specific conceptual means and indicate the falseness of this whole by recourse to some 'deeper unity' and without the immediate support of experience.72 This only really becomes obvious after the turn in Horkheimer's thought which was effectively occasioned by the catastrophic historical developments in Germany and Europe in general between 1933 and 1945. The argument of Dialectic of Enlightenment betrays a dramatic loss of that hope for a transformed society that had still characterised the tone of the essays written during the 1930s. In this later text the argument has become more radical and fundamental than it was in the earlier programmatic writings, and the metaphysical character of the basic theoretical decisions involved is now all the more evident as well. It is hardly an exaggeration to claim that the thought behind Dialectic of Enlightenment, an attempt to interpret the entire development of western culture and its singular fate in terms of its rationalising tendency to dominate the realm of nature, is fundamentalist in character. However one ultimately judges the rather associative procedure that is adopted by both authors in this work, one cannot fail to recognise a strong metaphysical impulse at work when Odysseus and Auschwitz, Kant and de Sade are interpreted as manifestations of a single essential principle.73 We will inevitably misinterpret everything which they present in a characteristic and influential allegorical manner simply as a result of basic category mistakes or conceptual confusions, if we fail to recognise in advance that they here attempting in detail to ground what is actual by reference to the single principle of domination.

Of course, it was not simply the European 'regression to barbarism' which prompted this decisive radicalisation of the argument in Dialectic of Enlightenment. Confronted by an American culture oriented to mass entertainment, consumer prosperity and competitive advancement, Horkheimer seems to have realised where the danger of a literally interpreted materialism really lies in the profane world of the present.74 From now on, up until his final years, Horkheimer's notes and papers reveal increasingly frequent laments over a cultural condition in which nothing - no image, no hope, no thought - any longer transcends the domain of mere facticity. 'From Plato to Schopenhauer philosophers have claimed again and again that the world of appearance is the world of mere appearance, of illusion. But we need to have felt and witnessed this, rather than merely to know it. m As before, Horkheimer continues to appeal to experience in such contexts - and what is experienced prompts reflection: 'Instead of God, we worship the WC. The most wretched thing about our current predicament is that human beings are neither capable nor willing to imagine that there is anything "other" than this.'76 The thought which had already encouraged Horkheimer's

THEODOR W. ADORNO

investigations in The Eclipse of Reason,77 now drives his thinking towards a certain positive orientation: it is 'the longing within a torn world' 78 which thus initially sharpens his appreciation of the logical demands of his own theory. As before, he still thinks it is 'pointless to deny that all my claims are relative. But if there is something relative, there must be something else, something other, that is not relative'. 79 By the beginning of the 1940s Horkheimer had clearly already realised that there is no critical consciousness without some relation to the 'wholly other', and especially that no genuine intention to transform current reality can be sustained without such a relation. This insight also encapsulates the motif that is emphasised from now on as the constant counterpart to mere pessimism. It is also around this time that the Frankfurt School finally and expressly articulates the fundamental philosophical claim that had always implicitly animated it. The radical critique of existing society, which Horkheimer initially identified as the task for critical 'social research' oriented towards 'the whole', and then as the central problem for a critical theory of society, is now explicitly interpreted as the original function of philosophy itself.80 'The real social function of philosophy lies in its criticism of what is prevalent. '81 Thus Horkheimer here distinguishes false idealism from the 'true' idealism which consists in the conviction that reason can actually be realised in the world and thereby demonstrates its philosophical 'loyalty to the highest ideas'.82 Horkheimer now interprets the task of philosophy as that of 'seeking the truth concerning the proper form of life' and thus encouraging the realisation of this 'other' possibility.83 Henceforth he even identifies this truth with 'the divine'. 84 And subsequently we can see how Horkheimer, whose historicaldialectical approach naturally refuses any 'closed metaphysics', effectively offers a religious rather than a philosophical response to the problem of grounding which Kant attempted to resolve through the radical transcendental critique of reason. It is true that Horkheimer identifies the criterion of the genuine philosopher in the fact that the latter 'articulates the way in which the whole presents itself to him'. And he also claims that philosophy cannot fulfil its task of expressing the other of current reality through recourse to 'a few propositions' precisely because 'the truth is the whole'. Yet he adds that 'the concept of truth has no meaning withoutfaith in God', and the decisive indications for how the task of philosophy should be met are proffered by 'certain words like the absolute, redemption, reconciliation'. 85 Although Horkheimer no longer condemns metaphysics as robustly as he had in his more hopeful earlier years, what he recognises as ultimately 'binding' upon us is not 'some form of metaphysics or other but simply the divine commandment: Love thy neighbour'. 'Religion or affective outlook are what determine the human being - otherwise he is left with nothing but emptiness and desolation.' For he now finds the problem of discovering an ethical orientation without reference to God more pressing than the dilemma involved in the concept of critical theory. Starting from a conception of society

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'as it ought to be', he sets about criticising current reality. For 'the problem lies in the appropriate approach: from what perspective do I know what is right insofar as it is not revealed to me or even demanded of me by God?'86

Once again, it is actual social experience which prompts a more severe judgement upon current reality and encourages a milder attitude to everything which transcends the mere facts: to the religious impulse and the theological approaches which had formerly fallen victim to the critique of ideology. Even the illusions which the young Horkheimer had once ascribed to metaphysics without more ado are rehabilitated here.87 And even 'myth', in terms of which Horkheimer had also ultimately understood metaphysics, now appears in a much milder light.88 Yet what we do not find is precisely what might naturally be expected from this turn in Horkheimer's thought: any revision of the original verdict on metaphysics. Here too it is possibly his own narrow and dogmatic concept of metaphysics which prevents him from revising his earlier standpoint. It is also possible that the original lack of clarity concerning the relationship between metaphysics and theology persists because Horkheimer, for all his awareness of the necessarily counterfactual orientation of thought in relation to 'the whole', remains convinced to the end that he can still pursue his aims without metaphysics, if not without religion. Horkheimer started with a conception of social research that was not simply content to combine empirical investigation with socialpragmatic commitment, but was always explicitly intended as a critical theory of society. But he ends up appealing to a religiously motivated critical philosophy ultimately based upon a mutually reinforcing play of despair and longing that the defective whole can be remedied by 'the wholly other'. In this way he explicitly develops a certain philosophical self-understanding, but one that cannot redeem the claim that is fundamentally implied in it: the persistent refusal of metaphysics takes him beyond the sphere of philosophical thought itself, the sphere in which the rigorous examination and justification of the object of thought is pursued by specifically conceptual means.

II Adorno's solidarity with metaphysics 'in the moment of its downfall'

'Set yourself therefore ... high and noble goals and let them destroy you!' Friedrich Nietzsche

As far as Adorno is concerned, the matter presents a different face. In the course of his development the constantly reformulated or intimated responses which Adorno furnishes to our central question, even if they are no less problematic in detail, appear more differentiated as a whole. 'Our philosophy is one and the same', so Horkheimer claimed in the Foreword to The Eclipse of Reason in 1946, referring explicitly to his intellectual collaboration with Adorno.89 For his own part, Adorno could also emphatically say

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in 1957 that 'the philosophical thought of the author is one with that of Max Horkheimer'.90 But by the time of Negative Dialectics this is certainly no longer the case. This can be clearly grasped if we consider the path of Adorno's development in retrospect. In the early years of the Institute for Social Research Adorno made no specific or independent contribution to the central task of 'critical theory'. This may principally have been because Adorno, whose own links with the Institute in the 1930s were still rather loose, basically shared the general programme which in this early period Horkheimer alone was responsible for formulating. Adorno's 'reflections from damaged life' in Minima Moralia, which were set down shortly after the collaboration with Horkheimer on Dialectic of Enlightenment, certainly suggest broad agreement with the overall perspective of the Institute for Social Research. 'Nietzsche [ ... ] voiced the strongest argument not merely against theology but against metaphysics, that hope is mistaken for truth. '91

This 'argument' is grounded in terms of social conditions and is therefore deployed, as in Horkheimer, as a critique of ideology. Thus, in the year in which Dialectic of Enlightenment appears, we find Adorno unmasking practical autonomy as the sublimated metaphysical expression of a 'peasant greed barely held in check by priestly threats'. And three years later he can claim that metaphysical categories are 'not merely an ideology concealing the social system' but also 'express its essence, the truth about it'.92 There is no doubt that such remarks reveal the same emphatic opposition to metaphysics with which we are already familiar from Horkheimer's programmatic conception of critical theory. It is also true that Adorno here avails himself, without further comment, of certain ideas and concepts drawn from the metaphysical tradition in order to reinforce his critical judgement upon the existing world. Thus in attempting to grasp the social totality Adorno appeals, albeit in a rather simplified and indefinite manner, to Hegel's concept of universal mediation as a means of clarifying the relevant principle of domination.93

There are certainly many passages in Negative Dialectics which suggest that Adorno continued to share Horkheimer's tendency to vulgar reductionism in some respects.94 And he also repeats the problem that we have already encountered in Horkheimer's writings for in some of his discussions at least Adorno identifies metaphysics with theology, if not with religion. In this connection we cannot of course object to the thought that the 'conception of transcendence' also belongs to the domain of metaphysical reflection.95 And we might also wish to give proper consideration to the claim that metaphysics preserves theology 'even as it criticises it by opening up as a possibility for human beings what theology imposes and inflicts upon them'.96 But Adorno goes further than this. He also ascribes everything which the 'Protestant hymn book' presents under the name of 'the last things' to the domain of metaphysics. He counts 'heaven and hell', along with the 'resurrection of the body'97 and the 'hope for a beyond' as the


'core' of 'positive religions', as matters of 'metaphysical speculation'.98 And his remark that 'metaphysical questions have by no means been resolved through their realisation in this world'99 reveals the same pattern of argument. Yet in the face of these and similar observations we must remember that the mere existence of such general conceptions cannot function as a criterion for metaphysics: the question is precisely how conceptual thought relates to and evaluates these conceptions. With regard to claims for 'transcendence' and other associated themes, we should naturally have to examine whether, or to what extent, they simply represent articles of faith or religious promises - or could be regarded as necessary implications of speculative thought itself.

But it is also important to recognise that Adorno does not merely content himself with criticising and analysing these conceptions of 'the last things' as expressions of ideology. Adorno's critique of metaphysics is already essentially contained in his analysis of the conception of philosophy as system. 100

And it is here that the most fundamental of the many aporias of his thought ultimately lies. Adorno rejects 'systematic' philosophical thought as a sublimated intellectual expression of domination in general. At the same time, Adorno never tires of identifying existing society, this 'seamless context of immanence', as a system, indeed as the closed system of a rational domination of nature which is mediated through every domain of the whole and from the dialectic of which there appears to be no escape. The selfcontradiction here lies in the fact that while Adorno's radical critique of the existing order excludes the possibility of systematic philosophy, he simultaneously defends the mimetic - and also always formal - correspondence of thought to its object. The idea that the procedure of negative dialectic can do justice to its object, the social totality, rests upon a mere equivocation. It is true that Adorno describes the latter as a completed or consummate negativity. 101 But unlike its application to Adorno's method of thought, its application to society implies a unified whole about which we can certainly say something positive, even if we cannot say anything good. In this regard systematic thought is actually required. Adorno's aporetic relationship to metaphysics could hardly find clearer expression than in his own 'unparalleled attempt to produce a system that rejects all forms of system' .102

This insight possesses exemplary significance for Adorno's thought. For we find a similar situation when he explicitly addresses the problem of metaphysics directly. But in this connection we should also recognise that Adorno does not simply remain entangled in this aporia. 103 In his mature writings, in contrast with Horkheimer's work and his own earlier collaborative efforts, it becomes much clearer that critical theory at least involves a certain metaphysical claim. And in contrast with Horkheimer, Adorno explicitly acknowledges that this is the case. It is quite true that the 'meditations on metaphysics' with which Adorno concludes Negative Dialectics offers no single definition of metaphysics that would appropriately sum up his own

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thoughts in this regard. But they do reveal a desire not merely to articulate a philosophical concept of metaphysics but even in some sense to justify a metaphysical claim. If we bear Adamo's 'meditations on metaphysics' in mind, we can clarify the concept of the 'metaphysical' in a twofold manner that itself refers us back to the original significance of the term 'metaphysics'. On the one hand, the thinking we call metaphysical is concerned with understanding the whole - or feels at least compelled to acknowledge a certain whole - and thereby already transcends what can be experienced as the measure of the empirical. On the other hand, the 'metaphysical' is that which goes beyond the 'physis' of the existing society in a utopian sense. Both of these ideas are connected to the extent that such a utopian conception can only be derived by contrasting one kind of 'whole' with another, and this is only possible because we can think about both. In Adamo's thought, therefore, metaphysics is the capacity to think the whole in a rational way and to think a truly rational whole. These fundamental arguments are not merely relevant to the 'meditations on metaphysics' alone, but it is certainly here that they first acquire a decisive contour of their own and have their importance expressly confirmed in relation to the relevant problematic. They go to the very heart of critical theory - even when the latter misunderstands itself as intrinsically anti-metaphysical - insofar as they claim to offer an overall perspective and thereby to grasp, albeit negatively, a certain totality. One thing, above all, must be acknowledged with regard to the specific conditions of this theory: we must be able to think coherently about the internal relationship between the existing whole and that idea of something better or wholly other which sustains our critique in the first place, between total negativity and what would specifically represent its negation.

Adamo's conception of the social system as one of completed negativity, the dialectical paradox of 'the untrue' whole, the reference to 'preestablished disharmony', 104 all inevitably involve assertions concerning 'the whole'. The false essence is here declared to be the essence of the whole, something which is already only possible from the perspective of a thinking which discovers within itself the criterion for its critical accusations. Once the critically interrogated whole is related to its own other, the problem of the whole is inevitably raised in an even more comprehensive manner. In Adamo's 'meditations on metaphysics' the ultimately metaphysical character of critical theory itself finally emerges completely from the twofold struggle to grasp society as a whole by reference to its own mediation of everything particular and individual, and to describe this whole from the visionary perspective of something wholly other.

Adamo's reflections upon the relationship between metaphysics and experience in his 'meditations' thus lead him to a highly individual re-formulation of the concept of materialism and to a significant revision of the idea of critique that Horkheimer had formerly defined as central to critical theory. The opposition of materialism and metaphysics, as

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Horkheimer's title once expressed it, proves untenable once the 'course of history' itself 'forces' materialism to join with 'what was traditionally its direct antithesis', namely metaphysics. 105 It is true that Adorno's reflections do not fully clarify what 'materialism', in the sense in which materialist thinkers have understood it, properly signifies here. 106 The insight which materialism had mobilised against idealism of all kinds would ultimately seem to contradict materialist theory itself insofar as it claims, like dialectical materialism, to grasp reality as a whole: 'Total comprehension on the basis of a single principle establishes the total rights of thought.' 107 It is clear to Adorno that the 'priority of the object' which he is principally concerned to emphasise in his critique of the rational domination of nature can only be secured precisely through something 'more in the subject' .108 To this extent his own materialism would naturally pass over into a kind of idealism. The real question is why Adorno, given his own acute awareness of the metaphysical problems involved in all theory of knowledge, still retains the traditional opposition of idealism and materialism even when he clearly recognised the inadequacy of the opposition between materialism and metaphysics. Perhaps it is his desire to provide a proper account of what could be called the 'instinctual-naturalistic components' 109 of his materialism, aspects which he believed were not acknowledged in any previous forms of idealism, that leads him to perpetuate a simplistic opposition that had already long been dismantled in the inner context of his own theoretical reflections. It is striking however, that the concept of materialism in the 'meditations on metaphysics' is no longer simply understood as a standard term for describing the Marxist theory of society, its claims for the primacy of the economy and its associated conception of the dialectic. Adorno's use of the term is clearly designed to draw attention to its literally material significance. Adorno's reflections on the relationship between body and soul, the lived body and the mind, physically conceived immanence and the idea of transcendence, are principally concerned with all the material states and processes of life on the basis of which, from the genetic perspective of materialism, the mind itself first arises. He is concerned here with sexuality and with our instinctual reactions to danger and threat, with ingestion, assimilation and decay. With vivid and striking images Adorno brings out the brutal facts of self-preservation which, like death itself, belong to human life and upon which all culture also ultimately rests: 'A child, fond of an innkeeper called Adam, once saw him club the rats pouring out of holes in the courtyard; it was in his image that the child formed his own image of the first man. That this has been forgotten, that we no longer understand what we once felt before the dog-catcher's carriage, is the triumph of culture and its failure.' 110

In his descriptions of both suffering and pleasure Adorno calls attention to experiences which have an affinity to metaphysical thought. 111 These experiences bring the subject to acknowledge distress, to comprehend the

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relationship between bodily decay and the fragility of happiness, 112 between immanence and transcendence, to question the meaning of life in the aporetic relation between the claims of subjectivity and the demands of objectivity. 'Wretched physical existence ignites a highest interest that is scarcely less repressed, ignites the questions "what is this?", and "where does it lead?".' In 'perennial suffering' ,113 as in moments of happiness, we can experience the finitude of existence, and become aware of the inner relationship between body and soul. These experiences, where the fragile character of our intellectual and spiritual capacities becomes thematic, do not simply encourage a more rational self-understanding on the part of the subject. They drive conceptual thought itself to try and transcend the existing state of things, and thus promote a rational understanding of the world as a whole. In this way the experience of despair and happiness alike give rise to what Adorno calls the 'metaphysical need' - and thus the necessity for a 'transition' to metaphysics for a theory which has acknowledged its experience within 'the objective context of illusion'. 114

Adorno interprets these experiences of 'wretched physical existence' from the perspective of a philosophy of history that culminates in the catastrophes of the recent past: 'The course of history forces materialism upon metaphysics, traditionally the direct antithesis of materialism.' The 'new categorical imperative' that has now been 'imposed upon mankind' by the horrors of the concentration camps demands that 'we pursue our thought and action in such a way [ ... ] that nothing similar will happen again' .115 It obliges us to develop an acute sensitivity for the concept of nature which Adorno had interpreted, ever since Dialectic <Jf Enlightenment, as the 'other' of reason. But this extreme attentiveness to the cruel, destructive and humiliating aspects of life also serves both to curb the exaggerated pretensions of our spiritual self-understanding and to encourage critical thought itself to address the themes and questions that have traditionally belonged to metaphysics.

This sensitivity also captures the leitmotif of critical theory that was expressed in Adorno's dialectical identification of society and cognition: 116

the motif of resistance to the false and dominant state of things in the name of the non-identical. For the experiences which Adorno explicitly reflects upon in his 'mediations on metaphysics' have an exemplary function. In contrast with the case of purely neutral and sober objective knowledge, any thinker who simply recalls such experiences cannot fail to grasp that no concept fully captures or exhausts their significance. These experiences represent the most extreme and concrete form of what Adorno calls the non-identical, and one that necessarily touches every human being. To this extent the conceptual reflection that acknowledges such experiences performs a double role: it methodologically secures the relationship between metaphysics and experience that had long been required to orientate a critical theory of society which claimed to grasp 'the whole', but it also directs our thought to the non-identical which Adorno was centrally


concerned to redeem systematically in Negative Dialectics. The thought of the non-identical had always involved the idea of the condition of its potential redemption. It impels us towards a transcendence that Adorno attempted to think in utopian rather than theological terms - even though the example of theology was constantly before his mind in this connection. He is concerned with the wholly other of the existing indigent state of things, with a historically possible society that would be a quite different whole from that of the present. 117 The wholly other, particularly if it is conceived as a possible configuration of the whole, certainly transcends the current order, but it must also remain subject to the conditions of historical immanence. The possible finds its own meaning in the same conceptual space within which we also have to grasp the actual. Through totalising the current life-context as a whole - albeit a false whole - Adorno's projected utopian alternative acquires the status of an immanent transcendence. This aporetic concept harbours a considerable metaphysical potentia, especially if we take the criterion of a critical metaphysics in Kant's sense as our point of departure.

The motif of critical resistance in Negative Dialectics also plays a fundamental role in Adorno's concept of truth. Adorno interprets the 'ideas' as the true content of metaphysics, and he consequently describes the 'idea of truth' as the 'highest amongst the metaphysical ideas' .118 Of course, Adorno's conception is not merely provocative for a correspondence theory of truth which treats the adequatio rei ad intellectus as an ontological relation between two different kinds of being. 'The claim that Carnap and Mieses are truer than Kant or Hegel could not be the truth even if it were correct.' 119 Here the moment of correspondence between thought and thing is emphatically rejected as a criterion of truth. The lack of ontological determinacy which therefore belongs to truth in no way detracts from the character of truth in Adorno's sense. On the contrary: he explicitly regards irreconcilability with empirical reality as an index veri - precisely because the negativity of the criticised social whole is 'the untrue'. In polemical opposition to every philosophical consensus, Adorno resolutely defends a negative conception of truth. For him truth is no logical or ontological relation, but both an idea and an ideal which performs a critical role precisely through its utopian relationship to a whole that is not just better, but wholly other in character. Negation rather than adequation is the function of this concept of truth for Adorno: 'For only what does not fit into this world is true.' 120 Given its necessary relationship to the utopian moment, this concept of truth as the quintessential negation of the existent cannot be thought without reference to a self-transcending impulse. And this impulse, for its own part, would have no meaning if, in relation both to what it would overcome and what it would accomplish, it were not already oriented to the kind of whole that only metaphysics is equipped to think. One may well experience this whole in an exemplary way, and meaningfully express it, but it can only be properly thought within a context that cannot itself be

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an object of experience. In accordance with both the oldest and the most modern conception of the matter, this context which overreaches and comprehends experience can only be presented with the help of metaphysical concepts. Whether these metaphysical concepts in fact merely disclose this context or whether they themselves first constitute it is a question that cannot be considered further here.

In view of the claim which Adorno connects with the experiences of 'wretched physical existence', it is easier to understand why he says that metaphysics finds its 'refuge from the totality' in the inconspicuous, that it has 'emigrated into micro logy', that it 'survives only in the slightest and meanest of things'. 121 In this respect a theory which had Jong felt obliged to repudiate in metaphysics an abstract, hybristic and ideological construct can finally express its solidarity with metaphysical reflection. In this respect there are basically two conditions which must be grasped together. Metaphysics must renounce its traditional hybristic attitude to supposedly inferior forms of thought and cease to dominate its object through the way in which it deploys its concepts and thus participates in the 'context of guilt' in which reality is entangled. In the 'moment' when it relinquishes its previous domination nothing can any longer hinder metaphysics from realising its 'true core'. This would be the first condition. But in Adorno's negative dialectic this renunciation of domination coincides precisely with the reflection upon the origin and motivation of the metaphysical in the context of 'total negativity'. In this way a negative dialectic, which has transformed the critique of ideology into a social-critical theory of knowledge, can finally reconcile itself with the thought that it is itself metaphysical. For once we realise that the claim to transcendence 'can only be nourished from experiences within immanence', 122 it is also obvious that even our theoretical relationship to this immanence already implied a whole the incompleteness of which appears in retrospect. This is the second condition. In his 'meditations on metaphysics' it finally becomes clear to Adorno that the claim to think the whole rationally can only be fulfilled through the simultaneous attempt to think a rational whole which alone can furnish the Archimedean point for the critique of existing reality. By reflecting upon the question of the 'metaphysical need', by explicitly grasping, in other words, that the 'redemption of the non-identical' presupposes the thought of the 'wholly other', Adorno can finally express his 'solidarity with metaphysics in the moment of its downfall' .123

In order to evaluate this position it is extremely important to take Adorno's specific formulations seriously. The deployment of such a demonstrative ethical category as 'solidarity' is particularly noteworthy here. Adorno does not express any nostalgic regret or grief over a supposed loss here, let alone a purely retrospective conception of metaphysics which can only tragically be articulated at a moment when it is already too late. Adorno speaks of a relationship that one could not possibly have with something that is dead.


Solidarity expresses the subject's obligation to other fellow subjects. Hence we cannot properly speak of the end of metaphysics, of its death or decline, or even of its dissolution. Adorno rather speaks deliberately of its 'downfall'. But when metaphysics falls from heaven or off its plinth, this does not necessarily imply its end. It can also mean that it must be now pursued under different conditions, must therefore be pursued otherwise.

We can develop an idea of what such a micrological metaphysics involves by considering Adamo's speculations on the non-identical in Negative Dialectics - at the 'moment' when he considers all the implications and finally draws the consequences of his own reflections. His own theory is metaphysics in 'the moment of its downfall'. Through his readiness to 'see more in things than what they are' Adorno broaches the 'transition to a metaphysics' which after its downfall survives in the 'slightest and meanest things'. 124

This outlines the programme, as well as the general motivation, of Adamo's later thought. It is of course extremely difficult to pursue and maintain this programme. There are two equally serious problems, one ontological the other methodological, to which critical theory as negative dialectics is exposed. The existing reality is certainly grounded in the principle of domination. But since transcendence can only be 'nourished by experiences within immanence', current reality itself must harbour impulses which anticipate something other than itself, a different whole that is not grounded in domination. 125 This may already raise doubts as to whether this envisaged whole can be understood in non-contradictory manner. 126 The methodological problem, on the other hand, arises when we ask how we can preserve the non-identical - that to which no concept is adequate - in its affinity to another better whole, if the relationship in question clearly requires articulation by reference to the speculative concept. To express the point in another way: can the moment of the downfall of metaphysics be theoretically grasped at all? It looks as though we simply have to come to a decision here: either for metaphysics or for its downfall. But Adorno seeks to avoid this decision, to sublate the moment of its downfall methodologically, and thus to escape the aporia through a further transition. Thus critical theory becomes aesthetic.

Adamo's theory is based from the first, despite his own explicit selfunderstanding, on metaphysical speculations of considerable complexity. And Negative Dialectics must be interpreted, albeit aporetically, as a metaphysical 'coming out' on Adorno's part. But if Adorno had problematised the 'resurrection' of metaphysics 127 under the sign of its 'downfall' in the last chapter of Negative Dialectics, his later opus summum seems to celebrate a speculative Easter: Adorno now understands his aesthetics of art as, amongst other things, a 'metaphysics of art' .128 It might occasion some surprise that this interpretation of art as the exemplary site of subjectivity should also appear to offer a general route of escape from the overall 'context of illusion'. But however things stand in this respect, we clearly could not fail to

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recognise the metaphysical character of aesthetic theory in the light of this conception of art as the last trace of subjectivity under the largely petrified objectivity of the social whole - even if Adorno had not openly confessed as much in advance. 129

Adorno can interpret art as the symbolic trace of the non-identical precisely because art 'renounces judgement', 130 precisely because it avoids conceptualising anything. The autonomy of art thus embodies same 'the utopia of cognition' which the philosophical critic of the dominating universal had already envisaged in Negative Dialectic: 'To unseal the non-conceptual with concepts, without thereby making it identical to them.' 131 Art also stubbornly resists social domination, and indeed does even more than this: it condemns such domination for what it is and brings the possibility of a better order of things to expression in the realm of aesthetic semblance. 'Indelible from the resistance to the fungible world of exchange is that of the eye which would not willingly see the colours of the world fade. Semblance is the promise of what is not semblanced.' 132 What is being promised here? That which is not semblance is that which is not (yet) and which thus cannot (yet) appear. It lies in the very nature of the matter that it cannot (yet) be conceptually determined. But we can still indicate what Adorno is trying to say. It is not something merely objective which underlies this ontology of what transcends mere semblance, but rather wishes, presentments and yearnings: possibility stands higher than reality. Through this fusion of transcendental idea and utopian concept, this affinity of the non-identical and the wholly other, the concept of non-semblance fundamentally expresses everything that Adorno has said about otherness, about the non-identical and about counter-factual truth. As for Ernst Bloch, so too for Adorno the aesthetic semblance of the work of art furnishes an anticipatory manifestation of a better world. 'The redemption of semblance, the object of aesthetics, thus possesses an incomparable metaphysical significance of its own.' 133

Adorno's ambitious contribution to aesthetics brings all the earlier motifs of critical theory together into a single form. But even if they are indeed comprehensively gathered up in Aesthetic Theory, it is only now in retrospect that we can properly recognise the aesthetic character of the fundamental themes and claims of critical theory. When Adorno extended and systematically elaborated the argument of Dialectic of Enlightenment as a radical critique of reason as an expression of domination, his theory finally revealed itself as an aesthetic metaphysics. In this regard the path from Negative Dialectics to Aesthetic Theory simply concretely unfolds the ultimate implications and consequences of this metaphysics. The origin of Adorno's aesthetic approach is already implicit in his concentration upon the singular, the particular, the non-conceptual, a concentration which was essentially motivated by the concerns of social and epistemological critique. 134

The interest in the 'particular', which itself can only be described in aesthetic terms, naturally demands, if pursued consistently, a self-consciously


aesthetic method. 135 His critique of objectifying cognition as an extension of social domination into the relation between subject and object leads Adorno to postulate a non-dominating approach to the 'non-identical' dimension of things through constellations which furnish an alternative to the objectifying character of concepts which place everything at their instrumental disposal. 136 It is in this context that Adorno comes to speak of the mimetic moment of theory, itself a vivid indication of the affinity between the theoretical and the aesthetic upon which the enterprise of any genuinely aesthetic theory essentially depends. 137 No other motif so clearly reveals the union of the aesthetic impulse and the metaphysical character of Adorno's thought than the 'monadological perspective' which he had developed even before the composition of Aesthetic Theory. He had already appealed to the concept of the monad in the context of his critique of society and epistemology in order to stress the exemplary significance of the individual object of knowledge and of a social critique which is properly obliged to penetrate the specific details of our experience.

At an early stage of his thought Adorno had adopted the concept of the 'monad' from Walter Benjamin. The latter had appealed to the old maxim of knowing 'like through like' in order to privilege an attitude of contemplative internalisation over the dominating and controlling posture of conceptual cognition as the only appropriate relationship to truth. He attempted to ground this approach through a conception of 'ideas' as a form of 'intentionless being'. According to Benjamin we can only do justice to truth through the linguistic presentation of the treatise. And he already recognised the affinity of philosophical and aesthetic theory precisely in the emphatically intuitive, mimetic and even ornamental features of this method. In striving to 'save the phenomena' through the 'presentation of ideas', to accomplish the appropriate mediation of the universal and the particular, Benjamin explicitly identifies the idea as a monad. As far as his specific critique of epistemology is concerned, what interests Benjamin about the monad is its inaccessibility to intention (its windowless character), its irreducible unity, its originality beyond all historical genesis, and the representative character through which, as an individual, it nevertheless points towards the whole. 'The idea is a monad - the representation of phenomena, in their objective interpretation, lies pre-established within the former. [ ... ] The idea is a monad - that means, in short: every idea harbours the image of the world.' 138

What is so striking about the attempt to exploit the concept of the monad for the purposes of an aesthetic theory is precisely its combination with a critique of ideology which claims to recognise the universal in the 'pre-established disharmony' 139 of everything particular. The influence of Benjamin's esoteric and programmatic text upon his younger friend was certainly decisive and Adorno specifically developed these insights further in his own dissertation on Kierkegaard. What Adorno himself eventually

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described as a 'monadological procedure' subsequently makes an appearance at all levels of his thought.

But this procedure is exemplified most strikingly in Aesthetic Theory. The significance of an autonomous work of art is not defined or exhausted by the external conditions of its genesis. It follows its own laws and principles, but is nonetheless a fait social - 'the social antithesis of society'. Adorno naturally attempts to grasp this dialectic in terms of the 'monadological character of works of art'. 'That works of art 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 nature and its domination, not only is of the same essence as the dialectic external to them but resembles it without imitating it.' With reference to the concept of the monad, we should notice that, along with its unity of universality and particularity and its original, self-contained and representative wholeness, it also emphatically exhibits an individual and animated character of its own. Thus Adorno ultimately understands the work of art no longer simply as a 'site of experience' but as its 'true subject'. 140

But indeed Adorno had already applied Benjamin's ideas not only to works of art but to objects as well: 'What prompts philosophy to risk the exertions of its own infinity is the unwarranted expectation that any individual and particular that it undertakes to decipher will, like the Leibnizian monad, bear within itself the whole which ever threatens to elude its grasp. ' 141

Here too we must think of an 'individual' that Adorno presents as though it were itself a living thing. Once we recognise the affinity with the wholly other which Adorno ascribes to the non-identical dimension of things, we can no longer be entirely surprised if he describes the singular and the particular in terms of a concept that suggests a 'living and autarchic' self. It was not only in his late Aesthetic Theory, but even in his earlier writings on critical theory, already inspired as they were by a social-critical conception of knowledge, that Adorno defends the idea of the subjectivity of objects. By the time of Negative Dialectics the aesthetic experience which attends to the particular in its individuality and for its own sake, which thereby concurs with metaphysical speculation in seeing 'more in things than they are', has finally become paradigmatic. 142

'It is not in fact true that every product of intellectual or popular culture bears the whole of the present within itself. [ ... ] We are only entitled to believe in this inner consistency of symbolic constellations if we also actually believe that we can look from without into the arrested time of the age.*3

And we could surely develop this line of argument further. For the 'pars pro toto' symbolism of the monadological procedure already involves systematic implications whose problematic character Adorno certainly failed to clarify in an adequate manner. That would constitute an objection. But before exploring it further we should also recognise, given the widespread lack of clarity concerning Adorno's philosophical position, that he does

THE MET A PHYSICS OF CRITIQUE

acknowledge this problem, in spite of all the standard protests to the contrary. For in the dialectical exposition of his critical thought Adorno specifically undertakes, like the Leibnizian God, to look 'from without into the arrested time of the age'. Before all orientation to the idea of something wholly other, which for its part at least requires a speculative element, this is itself the 'transcending impulse'144 which already adequately qualifies a form of thought as metaphysical. And this is even 'metaphysical' in a pre-critical sense insofar as Adorno here attempts to grasp a whole as if it were momentarily given for a single glimpse. The parallel with Leibniz, which Adorno himself suggests, is therefore highly instructive when it comes to judging his own conception of metaphysics.

But quite independently of the question whether Adorno ultimately attempts to keep faith with a critical or a pre-critical form of metaphysics, his though is decisively metaphysical. In this he shares the fate of all those philosophical thinkers who claim to furnish fundamental insight into the whole through the mediated conceptual means of a philosophical theory. That such a claim cannot perhaps, in the final analysis, be fully justified is a reservation that every form of metaphysics, since Kant at least, is compelled to make. Metaphysics recognises, above all, that it cannot offer any answers that cannot be conceptually recuperated. Adorno's problem lies precisely in the fact that he already makes this reservation with respect to conceptual comprehension itself. In the attempt to escape this self-imposed aporia he thus finds himself increasingly forced to make such conceptually unrecuperable claims. Since for his theory the whole of society is 'the untrue', and since Adorno's 'ban on images' effectively imposes a ban on concepts with regard to the wholly other character of a true whole, it is impossible to provide the kind of grounding which both the critical and the speculative aspects of critical theory ultimately require. Adorno's philosophy remains aporetic precisely as metaphysics. For as negative dialectics it is essentially called, like aesthetic experience, to recognise 'more in things than what they are' - although it cannot say what this more is and what it is grounded in. Within the framework of negative dialectics the 'true' can be neither presented nor grounded by conceptual means. Apart from merely invoking or indeterminately presupposing it, all that is left is a hinting and mimetic approach in the medium of aesthetic experience. Adorno's materialist 'metaphysics of art' is therefore condemned to remain a metaphysics not only without closure, but also without grounding.


For recent discussions of this question, cf. J. Habermas, 'Riickkehr zur Metaphysik - eine Tendenz in der deutschen Philosophie?', in: Merkur 4391 440, 39 Jg., September/October 1985, pp. 898-905; Dieter Henrich, 'Was ist Metaphysik? Thesen gegen Jiirgen Habermas', in: Merkur 448, 40 Jg., June

129

THEODOR W. ADORNO

1986, pp. 495-508; Jiirgen Habermas, 'Metaphysik nach Kant', in: Conrad Kramer, ed., Theorie der Subjektivitiit, Frankfurt am Main 1987, pp. 425-443; and particularly, Metaphysik nach Kant?, Stuttgart 1988 (Proceedings of the Stuttgart Hegel Congress of 1987) (= MnK?).

2 Cf. the article by Thomas Rentsch, 'Metaphysikkritik', in: Historisches Worterbuch der Philosophie, Band 5, 1280-1289, and the general remarks by Volker Gerhardt, 'Metaphysik und ihre Kritik. Zur Metaphysikdebatte zwischen Jiirgen Habermas und Dieter Henrich', in: Zeitschrift fur philosophische Forschung, Band 42, Heft I, 1988, pp. 45-70, especially pp. 51 ff.

3 Wolfgang Stegmiiller, Metaphysik. Skepsis. Wissenschaft, Berlin/Heidelberg/New York 1969, p. 452.

4 Jurgen Habermas, 'Drei Thesen zur Wirkungsgeschichte der Frankfurter Schule', in: Axel Honneth and Albrecht Wellmer, eds., Die Frankfurter Schute und die Folgen (= Folgen), Berlin/New York 1986, p. 10.

5 Cf. the following essays by Max Horkheimer: 'Materialismus und Metaphysik' (= MM 1), in: Zeitschrift fur So::ialforschung (= ZfS), Jg. 2, 1933, pp. 1-33; 'Materialismus und Moral'(= MM 2), Joe. cit, pp. 161-197; 'Bemerkungen zur philosophischen Anthropologie' (= Anth.), in: ZfS, Jg 4, 1935, pp. 1-25; 'Zurn Problem der Wahrheit' (=PW), Joe. cit., pp. 321-364; 'Der neueste Angriff auf die Metaphysik (= Angriff), in: ZJS, Jg. 6, 1937, pp. 4-53; 'Traditionelle und kritische Theorie' (= KTh), Joe. cit., pp. 245-294; 'The social function of philosophy', in: ZfS, Jg. 8, 1939-1940; there are also a number of remarks on metaphysics in Horkheimer's essay 'Vorwort und Bemerkungen iiber Wissenschaft und Krise', in: ZJS, Jg. 1, 1932, I-IV; 1-7.

6 Anth., p. 5. 7 As he puts it in Angriff (cf. note 5 above); Theodor W. Adorno, 'Soziologie und

empirische Forschung' and 'Zur Logik der Sozialwissenschaft', in: Adorno et al., Der Positivismusstreit in der deutschen Soziologie, Darmstadt u. Neuwied 1969, pp. 80-101; pp. 125-143.

8 Max Horkheimer, Diimmerung (published under the pseudonym of Heinrich Regius in 1943), p. 85.

9 Angriff, p. 4. Cf. Heinz Heimsoeth, Die sechs groften Themes der abendliindischen Metaphysik und der Ausgang des Mittelalters (1965), Darmstadt 1974.

10 PW, p. 327; cf. Angriff, p. 7. 11 MMJ,p.8. 12 Angriff, p. 8. 13 PW, p. 336. 14 MM 1, p. 29. 15 Diimmerung, p. 232. 16 Angriff, p. 29. 17 Ibid., p. 8. 18 Carl-Friedrich Geyer, Aporien des Metaphysik- und Geschichtsbegriffs der

kritischen Theorie, Darmstadt 1980, p. 87. 19 Cf. MM 2, pp. 165ff. 20 Cf. ibid., p. 169. 21 PW, p. 348. 22 Angriff, p. 50; in the course of his argument with positivism Horkheimer can

even suggest that our task should be the realization of metaphysics. This idea is only rarely repeated however.

23 Cf. Rentsch for example, op. cit., note 2 above. 24 Voltaire had already rejected 'fantomes metaphysiques' as the dreams of a sick

mind. Cf. (Euvres, vol. 23, Paris 1879, p. 494.


25 Cf. KTh, p. 261. 26 It makes no substantive difference even if this approach is described in the

more recent terminology of the last decade as a materialist 'deconstruction [ ... ] by recourse to Marxist political economy'. Cf. Seyla Benhabib, 'Max Horkheimers friihe Moralphilosophie', in: Folgen, pp. 128-138, specifically p. 132.

27 Jg. 1, 1932, III. Horkheimer is thinking of Jaspers, Heidegger and Scheler as the principal 'metaphysicians' of the present.

28 MM/, p. 16. 29 Ibid., p. 15. 30 Ibid., p. 20. 31 Jg., 1932, III. 32 For objections to this view, which Habermas has recently repeated, cf. Henrich,

Joe. cit., and Gerhardt, Joe. cit. 33 Angrij]; p. 7. 34 Angrijf, p. 9; cf. MM I, p. 30. 35 MM/, p. 30. 36 Diimmerung, p. 86; cf. also p. 85. 37 Angriff, p. 38. 38 Ibid., p. 48. 39 Ibid., p. 30. 40 Ibid., p. 28. 41 Cf, Rudiger Bubner, 'Was ist kritische Theorie?', in: Hermeneutik und

Jdeologiekritik, Frankfurt am Main 1971, pp. 160-209, particularly pp. 168 and 178ff.

42 KTh, p. 261; Horkheimer's argument that critical theory 'aims at the transformation of the whole' (p. 263; p. 272; p. 284) encapsulates the claim to unify theory and praxis (p. 264; p. 269f.; p. 282).

43 From the historical perspective Horkheimer's critique of 'traditional theory' is based upon an extremely limited conception of the latter. He only really considers the advanced positions of modem thought on the basis of the programmatic Cartesian conception of method and ignores the claims traditionally connected with the Aristotelian conception of 'theoria'.

44 KTh, p. 253. 45 KTh, p. 253; cf. particularly p. 277. 46 KTh, p. 254, p. 259, p. 263. 47 KTh, p. 258. 48 KTh, p. 265f., p. 267, p. 270, p. 273. 49 KTh, p. 273, p. 270. 50 KTh, p. 267. 51 KTh, p. 273; cf. p. 290. 52 KTh, p. 278. 53 KTh, p. 280. 54 ZJS, Jg. I, III; PW, p. 351. 55 Ibid., p. 361. 56 Ibid., p. 357. 57 Ibid., p. 355f. 58 As Julius Ebbinghaus observed: 'It is obvious that I cannot know the totality

which lies behind something as its ground simply through experience. For this I require possible a priori knowledge.' Cf. Ebbinghaus, Ober die Fortschritte der Metaphysik (1931), in: J. Ebbinghaus, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 3: Interpretation und Kritik, Bonn 1990, pp. 281-294, here p. 288.

1'11

THEODOR W. ADORNO

59 As far as the contemporary debate is concerned, there is widespread consensus about this characteristic aspect of metaphysics. Cf., for example, Jan P. Beckmann, 'Zur Transformation der Metaphysik durch Kritik', in: Philosophisches Jahrbuch 92, 1985, p. 291.; also Beckmann's article, 'Metaphysische Entwiirfe und ontologische Verpflichtungen. Ober Moglichkeiten von Metaphysik im 20. Jahrhundert', in: Information Philosophie, Nr. 4, Oct. 1989, p. 5; Volker Gerhardt, op. cit. (cf. Note 2), p. 51; Lorenz B. Puntel, 'Materialismus und Metaphysik: Begriffliche Kliirungen, Sachprobleme, Aporien', in: MnK (cf. Note I), p. 632f. Dieter Henrich has further differentiated this general approach by distinguishing between a 'metaphysics of closure' and a 'metaphysics of foundations'. Cf. Henrich, Joe. cit. (cf. Note I), p. 495.

60 Cf. Dieter Henrich, 'Grund und Gang spekulativen Denkens', in: MnK?, pp. 87-91; and the relevant remarks by Joachim Ritter in his essay 'Landschaft. Zur Funktion des Asthetichen in der modernen Gesellschaft', in: J. Ritter, Subjektivitiit, Frankfurt am Main 1974, p. 176.

61 Cf. Kant's letter to Marcus Herz (11.5.1781) where he describes the Critique of Pure Reason as 'a metaphysics of metaphysics' (Ak. 10, p. 269). Adorno had already clearly focused on the relationship between metaphysics and experience in his early writings. As he puts it in connection with a discussion of Husserl: 'No future experience could refute a "condition of the possibility of experience".' Cf. Gesammelte Schriften I, Frankfurt am Main 1973, p. 35.

62 Hans Cornelius, Transcendentale Systematik, Munich 1916, p. 198, cited by Adorno, Joe. cit., p. 35.

63 MM I, p. 6f. 64 I am thinking here of writers like Max Adler, Eduard Bernstein and Franz

Staudinger who were already arguing something similar at the turn of the century.

65 MM I, p. 14. 66 M. Horkheimer, 'Geschichte und Psychologie', in: ZjS, Jg. I, 1932, p. 132. 67 PW, p. 334. 68 PW, p. 356. 69 In his discussion of the problem of truth Horkheimer argues that dialectical

materialism is compelled to oppose both metaphysics and relativism. He is thus forced to defend the methodological assumption of a 'conditioned absolute': 'Insofar as the experience drawn from perception and inference, methodical enquiry and historical circumstance, the world of labour and political struggle, can be justified through the cognitive means at our disposal, then they are indeed the truth.' Or again: 'Human truth only appears to possess a lesser quality if is measured from the perspective of some transcendent and changeless existence. But insofar as this truth remains necessarily open, and to that extent remains "relative", it is also absolute since subsequent correction does not mean that an earlier truth was once untrue' (PW, p. 337f.). Whatever we may think of these claims in detail, in the problematic context of the rather clumsy qualifications deployed here ('insofar as ... '), this approach provides a model which could have helped Horkeimer to see that metaphysical thought and a dialectical theory based upon concrete experience and expressly oriented to social reality and historical change are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

70 Hans Heinz Holz, 'Einfiihrungsbemerkungen zum Colloquium "Materialismus und Metaphysik'", in: MnK?, pp. 599-601. Cf. also Lorenz Puntel, op. cit. (cf. Note 59).

71 Werner Post rather skirts around the possible metaphysical implications of Horkheimer's thought in his study, Kritische Theorie und metaphysischer


Pessimismus. Zurn Spiitwerk Max Horkheimers, Munich 1971. In his detailed analysis of these questions, Carl-Friedrich Geyer reveals the problematic and gestural character of the opposition to metaphysics in critical theory given the concept of 'totality' characteristic of the latter. But he also completely endorses the overly dogmatic conception of metaphysics that motivates Horkheimer's own anti-metaphysical posture. That is why Geyer speaks in this connection of 'quasi-metaphysical schemata of argument', of 'remnants of metaphysical thought', of the 'inversion of metaphysics' etc. Cf. Geyer, op. cit. (Note 18), pp. 3, l 85f., l 90f. Alfred Schmidt, on the other hand, clearly recognizes the 'metaphysical-materialist insight' that lies behind Horkheimer's critique. Cf. A. Schmidt, Drei Studien zum Naterialismus, p. 86. More recently Schmidt speaks emphatically, with regard to Horkheimer, of a 'pessimistic metaphysics deeply influenced by Schopenhauer'. Cf. A. Schmidt. 'Die urspriingliche Konzeption der Kritischen Theorie im friien und mittleren Werk Max Horkheimers', in: Folgen, loc. cit. (Note 4), p. 90.

72 Jtirgen Habermas, who regards himself as a materialist thinker in the tradition of Marx and the Frankfurt School and is disturbed by what the calls Adomo's 'startling proximity to Heidegger' (Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, Frankfurt am Main 1981, p. 516), clearly finds Horkheimer's thought directly relevant not only to his attempted rehabilitation of reason in general, but more specifically to his explicitly communicative model of rationality (with regard to the first point, cf. the Afterword to the new edition of Dialektik der Aujkliirung, Frankfurt am Main 1986, pp. 176-294, specifically p. 288f., with regard to the second, cf. Max Horkheimer, 'Dialog iiber den Dialog', Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 7, Frankfurt am Main 1985, particularly p. 302; cf. also vol. 14, p. 15lf.). As far the question of 'metaphysics' is concerned, Habermas also follows Horkheimer's approach rather than Adomo's self-critical revision of the critique of metaphysics and attempts to explain and disqualify the renewed contemporary interest in metaphysical issues in social and political terms.

73 It may appear surprising, but this theory in particular, in which 'associative' speculation is so clearly pursued at the expense of the faculty of judgement, already revealed emphatic tendencies in the direction of a specifically 'aesthetic theory'. Cf. Dialektik der Aujkliirung, Frankfurt am Main 1986, p. 66f.

74 Cf., for example, Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 14, p. 266. In this connection cf. Habermas's remarks (loc. cit. Note 72), pp. 280-282, and Martin Seel, 'Dialektik des Erhabenen. Kommentar zur "asthetischen Barbarei heute" ',in: Willem van Reijen and Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, eds., Vierzig jahre Flaschenpost: Dialektik der Aujkliirung 1947 bis 1987, Frankfurt am Main 1987, p. 14. Cf. also RolfWiggershaus, Die Frankfurter Schule. Geschichte. Theoretische Entwicklung. Politische Bedeutung, Munich 1986, especiall pp. 364-390.

75 Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften vol. 14, p. 231. 76 Ibid., p. 215; cf. also p. 219. 77 For the 'possibility of a self-critique of reason' presupposes precisely that 'even

at this stage of complete alienation the idea of truth is still accessible to us'. 78 Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 14, p. 162. 79 Ibid., p. 370; cf. also p. 495. 80 'The social function of philosophy', in: ZfS, Jg. 8, 1939-1940, p. 328. 81 Ibid., p. 33 l. 82 Ibid., p. 336. 83 Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 14, p. 236. 84 Ibid., p. 125 and 126; cf. also p. 488. 85 Ibid., pp. 270, 215, 369; my emphasis. Cf. p. 97.

THEODOR W. ADORNO

86 Ibid., p. 333. 87 Cf. Ibid., p. 346. 88 Max Horkheimer, Zurn Begriff der Vernunft, Frankfurt am Main 1952, p. 13; in

this connection cf. Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 14, p. 403. 89 Max Horkheimer, The Eclipse of Reason, p. vii. 90 Theodor W. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5, Frankfurt am Main, p. 386. 91 Minima Moralia, aphorism 61; English translation: Minima Moralia. Reflections

from Damaged Life, tr. by E. F. N. Jephcott, London 1974, pp. 97-98. 92 Minima Moralia, aphorisms 54 and 148; ET: 89-90 and 231-233. 93 Minima Moralia, especially aphorisms 19, 49, 72, 102 and 117. The concept of

the monad, which is so important in Adorno's later writings, already makes a striking appearance in Minima Moralia (cf. aphorism 203). And Adorno even finds some plausibility in teleological thought - cf. aphorism 315.

94 For some exemplary remarks in this respect, cf. Negative Dialektik, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 6, Frankfurt am Main 1973, pp. 377-382 (abbreviated as ND). English translation: Negative Dialectics, tr. by E. B. Ashton, London 1973, pp. 384-390.

95 ND: 302; ET: 400. 96 ND: 389; ET: 397. 97 ND: 393; ET: 401. 98 ND: 390, 393; ET: 397-98, 401. 99 ND: 388; ET: 395.

100 ND: 31-37; ET: 20-28. 101 Michael Theunissen, 'Negativitiit bei Adorno', in: Adorno Konferenz 1983, ed.

by Ludwig von Friedeburg and Jilrgen Habermas, Frankfurt am Main 1983, pp. 41-65 (included in the present collection).

102 Rudiger Bubner, 'Adornos negative Dialektik', in: Adorno Konferenz 1983, p. 35. 103 In most respects I find myself in agreement with Albrecht Wellmer's observa

tions on Adorno's 'Meditations on Metaphysics', but it seems to me that the aporetic attitude to metaphysics, which Wellmer's analysis reveals, does not represent Adorno's final word on the matter. The following interpretation is intended to show that Adorno's approach, for all its overtly aporetic appearance, is ultimately rather less ambiguous than Wellmer's account suggests. I would emphasis that, and how, Adorno reflects above all on the indispensability of metaphysics for his own critical thought. Cf. A. Wellmer, 'Metaphysik im Augenblick ihres Sturzes', in: MnK? (cf. Note I), pp. 767-783.

104 Minima Moralia, aphorism 29; ND: 25; ET: 14. Nietzsche had already spoken of 'preestablished disharmony' with regard to the conditions of his own life in Ecce Homo ('Why I am so Wise'; KSA, vol. 6, p. 268).

105 ND: 358; ET: 365. 106 Cf., for example, ND: 193ff.; ET: 192ff. Cf. the instructive contribution by

Alfred Schmidt, 'Begriff des Materialismus bei Adorno', in: Adorno Konferenz 1983, pp. 14-28.

107 Theodor W. Adorno, Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie, p. 193. 108 ND: 185-86, 50; ET: 183f., 40. 109 As Alfred Schmidt puts it, cf. Joe. cit. (Note 106), p. 24. 110 ND: 359; ET: 366. These highly rhetorical passages are certainly intended as

a provocation for the reader and Adorno can draw on exemplary historical precedents in this respect. Thus his remark, following Brecht, that the mansion of culture is 'built on dogshit' (ND: 366; ET: 366) is a radicalised social variant of the humbling cosmological observation of Voltaire who, here following Pascal, had attempted to startle the public by describing the earth as nothing

1 '.lA


but a 'pile of dirt'. Cf. Voltaire's Metaphysical Treatise of 1734 (Frankfurt am Main 1978, p. 34).

111 That Adorno does not regard experience and metaphysics as opposites is also evident from his appeal, in addition to the idea of 'spiritual' and 'philosophical' experience, to the concept of'metaphysical experience' (ND: 364-367; ET: 371-375), even if this idea is explained in more precise terms. He elucidates it by referring to evocative place names like 'Otterbach, Watterbach, Reuenthal, Monbrunn. One cannot but believe that such places would bring fulfilment if we went here' (ND: 366; ET: 373) - for they suggest, aesthetically, the objectivity of meaning. In another context Adorno speaks of the 'experience that a thinking which is not decapitated will open out into transcendence' (ND: 395; ET: 403) and this surely expresses as well as anything what he ultimately understands by 'metaphysical experience'.

112 ND: 366f., 396; ET: 373f., 404. 113 ND: 359, 355; ET: 366, 362. Cf. the concept of metaphysics presented by Josef

Simon, 'Was ist Metaphysik?', in: MnK? (Note I). The metaphorics of 'ignition' in Adorno's words here captures the sudden and explosive, essentially discontinuous, character of the process in question: there is no discursive ascent from experience to the question concerning transcendence. Thought makes something resembling a 'leap' here, although it is not simply arbitrarily motivated. It is prompted rather by a certain immediacy of shock. The 'metaphysical experience' which Adorno elucidates by reference to 'names' is very different - here the objectivity of meaning is presented unproblematically in the aesthetic semblance of meaningful language.

114 Cf. ND: 364, 397, 398; ET: 372, 405-6. 115 ND: 358; ET: 365. 116 Cf. ND: 58; ET: 48. 117 Cf. ND: 391, 395; ET: 398, 403. 118 ND: 384, 394; ET: 391, 401. 119 ND: 377; ET: 385. 120 ;fsthetische Theorie, Gesammelte Schrifien, vol. 7, p. 93; English translation:

Aesthetic Theory, tr. by Robert Hullot-Kentor, London 2004, p. 76. 121 ND: 399; ET: 407. Cf. ND: 394; ET: 402. 122 ND: 390; ET: 398. 123 ND: 400; ET: 408. 124 ND: 397, 394; ET: 405, 402. 125 One has to agree with Theunissen's conclusion that 'negative dialectics cul

minates in a positively sublated dualism'. Cf. M. Theunissen, 'Negativitiit bei Adorno', loc. cit., p. 60. The claim that Adorno clings to 'an absolute without totality', on the other hand, is not convincing because it presupposes that Adorno treats the non-identical itself as the absolute. Theunissen overlooks the fact that Adorno speaks in the conditional tense in this connection (cf. ND: 398; ET: 406).

126 It is quite clear that Adorno is aware of the problem here. Cf. ND: 370, 396; ET: 377, 404.

127 ND: 396; cf. 391; ET: 404, 398. 128 ;1.°sthetische Theorie: 201-202, 506, 198; ET: 176, 432, 173. 129 'The author is well aware of the resistance which Negative Dialectics will

encounter. He feels no rancour and does not begrudge the joy of those, whether on this side or that, who will proclaim that they knew it all the time and that the author has now finally confessed' (ND: 11; ET: xx-xxi).

130 ND: 396; ET: 404.

,..,.,

THEODOR W. ADORNO

131 ND: 21; ET: 10. 132 ND: 396f.; ET: 404f. 133 ND: 386; ET: 393. For further discussion of this question, cf. Birgit Recki, Aura

und Autonomie. Zur Subjektivitiit der Kunst bei Walter Benjamin und Theodor W Adorno, Wi.irzburg 1988, pp. 158 and 180.

134 ND: 38; ET: 28. 135 Cf. ND: 53, 55; ET: 43, 45. Adorno's post-doctoral dissertation on Kiekegaard,

written at the beginning of the 1930s, basically already contains all the essential thematic and methodological approaches that Adorno will subsequently develop. Formulated in the context of an analysis of ideology, conceived as a critique of social domination, the work unfolds an allegorizing form of thought which is expressly dedicated to redeeming the individual dimension of experience and was clearly influenced by essential features of the aesthetic approach which Benjamin had attempted to justify in the 'epistemo-critical' Preface to his book on tragic drama. Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des A."sthetischen, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2, Frankfurt am Main 1979; English translation: Kierkegaard. Construction of the Aesthetic, tr. by Robert HullotKentor, Minneapolis 1989; Walter Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, Gesamme/te Schriften, vol. I.I, 1974, pp. 203-409; English translation: The Origin of German Tragic Drama, tr. by John Osborne, London 1977.

136 ND: 62; ET: 52-53. 137 On the problematic concept of a specifically aesthetic theory, cf. Rudiger Bubner,

'Kann Theorie asthetisch werden? Zurn Hauptmotif der Philosophie Adornos', in: R. Bubner, A."sthetische Erfahrung, Frankfurt am Main 1989, pp. 70-89 (included in the present collection). Cf. also Thomas Baumeister and Jens Kulenkampff, 'Geschichtsphilosophie und philosophische Asthetik. Zu Adornos "Asthetische Theorie"', in: Neue Heftefiir Philosophie, 5, 1973, pp. 74-104.

138 W. Benjamin, Gesamme/te Schriften, vol. I.I., p. 228. 139 ND: 25; ET: 14. 140 A"sthetische Theorie: 445, 15, 385, 133; ET: 389, 6, 336-7, 113-114. 141 ND: 25; cf. 165; ET: 13-14, cf. 163. 142 A."sthetische Theorie: 268, 488; ET: 23 7, 417. 143 This is Martin Seel's skeptical response to Adorno's claims concerning the work

of art. Cf. M. Seel, loc. cit. (Note 74), p. 32. 144 As Abrecht Wellmer put it. Cf. A. Wellmer, loc. cit. (Note 103), p. 770.

8

THE CONTEMPORARY RELEVANCE OF THE DIALECTIC

OF ENLIGHTENMENT

Herbert Schniidelbach

Source: Herbert Schniidelbach, Vernunft und Geschichte: Vortriige und Ahhandlungen, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1987, pp. 179~206. Translated by Nicholas Walker 2006.

It speaks for itself that we are gathered here, forty years after the appearance of a book, for a conference in the city in which it was first published: the Dialectic of Enlightenment still appears relevant, and this conference would not have been convened if this were indeed not the case. The relevance of the book - at least for the participants - can hardly be denied. Nonetheless, it is far more difficult to define the precise nature of this relevance. And indeed the recent reception history of the Dialectic of Enlightenment is largely a story of trenchant critique. The most important arguments behind this critique will naturally be the subject of discussion throughout the conference. Of course, we should never expect to substantiate the relevance of a 'critical theory' in anything but a critical way, and neither a process of affirmative embalming nor an attitude of defensive orthodoxy is compatible with the idea of critical theory itself. But we must be permitted to ask explicitly what ultimately remains of critical theory articulated in the Dialectic of Enlightenment after all the critique to which it has now been subjected. Is it relevant only because it has provoked this critique, only because it has been consumed by the fire it has fed? Is the book simply to be regarded as a historical document that belongs to the unfolding story of critical theory, and one that testifies to an essentially obsolete phase of this development? Are the ideas originally developed in the Dialectic of Enlightenment only relevant in the critically filtered and transmuted form in which the spiritual grandchildren and great grandchildren of critical theory relate to the work of Horkheimer and Adorno?

I shall argue that there are at least two reasons for rereading the Dialectic of Enlightenment as a book that is indeed relevant, albeit in a different way

THEODOR W. ADORNO

than before. Of course, in a number of respects the book has become a kind of 'historical' document, especially when we consider the specific historical conditions and intellectual context in which it was produced. But the fundamental issue which the book addresses - the dialectic of Enlightenment itself - is not merely historical in this sense at all. For this dialectic has continued to propagate itself ever since. The authors of the Dialectic of Enlightenment express the thought in this way: 'Myth is already enlightenment; and enlightenment reverts to mythology.' 'Just as myths already realise enlightenment, so enlightenment with every step becomes more deeply entangled in mythology.'' The current manifestations of postmodernism might seem to provide contemporary confirmation of this second thesis, although others who are better informed in this respect will be able to address this question directly. Here I am principally interested in the idea that the dialectic of enlightenment, as Horkheimer and Adorno describe it, is also accomplished in the text of Dialectic of Enlightenment, that myth and enlightenment effectively 'devour one another' in the work itself, although I understand this in a quite different way from Jiirgen Habermas. 2 I shall address this question in the first part of the following discussion. But there also seems to me to be another inescapable reason why we should be prepared to re-examine the Dialectic of Enlightenment in the contemporary context. For the interpretation of this work is capable of contributing to a structural and dialectical theory of enlightenment which would assist us, in the face of an emphatically increasing anti-enlightenment approach in the present, in explicitly defending the cause of 'enlightenment'. I shall address this question in the second part of my discussion.

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If it were indeed the case that myth and enlightenment are dialectically reduced to one another in Dialectic of Enlightenment itself, the book would produce an entirely ironical confirmation of its own truth: aporia would be complete and reign of myth inescapable. The question is simply be whether we can discover mythical elements in the work that can, on further reflection, be ascribed to the process of enlightenment, just as Horkheimer and Adorno themselves proceeded with traditional and archaic myth. It would, of course, be far more provocative to claim that enlightenment 'reverts to mythology' in the book itself, that it 'becomes with every step more deeply entangled in mythology'. It this were in fact the case, it would explain the striking contemporary relevance which the text has acquired by virtue of has its affinity to Nietzsche and certain fundamental theses of the poststructuralism shaped by the thought of Nietzsche. Twenty years ago, the Dialectic of Enlightenment was naturally read from the perspective of Marx and the early Lukacs, and the covert Nietzscheanism of the text was not

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really noticed at all. Today, on the other hand, we have some difficulty in distinguishing between Horkheimer and Adorno on the one hand, and Foucault on the other, in clearly identifying the points where the former, despite their critique of subjective domination, nonetheless remain committed to the concepts of reason and the subject. What, then, is mythic and mythological about the Dialectic of Enlightenment?

In order to approach this issue more precisely, I shall start with a formal concept of myth without raising the question of its truth content at this point. I understand it as a typological concept that explicitly captures a certain way of interpreting and explaining the world. The Greek word mythos - in the sense of a 'report' or 'account' - indicates the essential aspect here: myth presents an interpretation, a reading, and explanation of the world by narrative means. The Judaic creation myth begins with the words: 'In the beginning God created heaven and earth', and the Olympian myth of creation commences with the words: 'At the beginning of all things Mother Earth emerged from Chaos and bore her son Uranus as she slept. Gazing down fondly at her from the mountains, he showered fertile rain upon her secret clefts, and she bore grass, flowers, and trees, with the beasts and birds proper to each. '3 These examples already reveal something that is beyond dispute: myth is the report of an event through the narrative of an act, a narrative which is intended to render the event intelligible precisely as the transpiring and consequence of an act. These examples concern the beginning or origination of the world: both myths provide an account of the event by narrating the acts of a specific agent or subject, and they attempt an explanatory interpretation of the event in question through the narration itself. The Bible tells us that the world came to be in the beginning because God created it, and indeed as a creation with which he was well pleased. The Olympian myth presents the world as the result of the kind of natural processes with which we are already familiar in the case of human birth and procreation. Eliade and van de Leeuw, in particular, have also emphasised another distinctive feature of mythological narratives: the event narrated is never really datable in character. When precisely was this event 'at the beginning'? It was at the beginning of time itself, and not something that happened in time. The mythical happening is also an eternal happening, as Judaeo-Christian theology clearly expresses in the idea of the unity of the original creator with the constant sustainer of the world. In the ancient Greek world the firm connection between myth and religious ritual preserves the present significance of the events narrated in myth, and of course we ourselves can still join our children in singing the hymn that tells us that 'the Christ child returns to us with every year .. .' The mythical event transpires outside of time because of the specific function which myth discharges: the narrated event cannot lie within time because it is supposed to explain what does lie within time, namely the spatio-temporal world in its actual existence and specific character. The event is also always present in

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this world precisely as its eternal law or structure. This supra-temporal truth which is claimed by myth over and beyond the phenomenal reality of the spatio-temporal world - something which can never strictly be located despite every attempt to set up some temple or other at the alleged sites of the original mythic event - is an anticipation of the truth of the philosophical logos, something of which it is also intrinsically meaningless to ask when or where it is or is not binding upon us. But the most important point for me here, as the Dialectic of Enlightenment points out, is that myth itself is already a 'product' of enlightenment if we understand the latter as the interpretive and explanatory transcendence of what lies simply before us. The mythical and the 'logical' form of enlightenment (logical in the sense of the logos) are distinguished from one another only by virtue of the specific means adopted to interpret and explain the world.

If we reconsider the Dialectic of Enlightenment with this preliminary concept of myth in mind, it can hardly be denied that the work involves mythic elements in its own attempt to 'enlighten' us about enlightenment itself. The book narrates the primal history of the human subject as the story of selfliberation actively accomplished through the domination of nature, and recounts the consequences for the subject that have necessarily arisen in the process. It is not by chance that the Odyssey, itself a mythic tale, provides the guiding thread for the narrative of Dialectic of Enlightenment. What is narrated here is not datable historically precisely because it concerns the constitution of historical time in the first place. Before the events narrated, there are no individual beings that could possess or narrate a history at all. At the same time the content of the tale is always contemporary - for at least as long as history as 'prehistory' actually continues - since it already exemplifies the dialectical mechanism which, according to Horkheimer and Adorno, had governed all previous history: 'Every attempt to break the compulsion exercised by nature by breaking nature itself merely falls more deeply under that same compulsion. Hence the course of European civilisation.'4 But it is important to note that this mechanism is also presented and confirmed in narrative terms. For of course it is supposed to represent not some eternal law in the sense of the laws of nature, but a kind of entanglement in which human beings, who have acted in one way rather than in another, have effectively become involved for certain understandable reasons. And a story like this is something that can only be narrated. On the other hand, the story in question does not really lie at the surface of the kind of history that can be narrated in the usual sense. This narration is intended to capture and explain the deep structure of the historical process - just as Marx and Engels intended to do when they claimed in the Communist Manifesto that the 'history of all previous society is the history of class struggle'.5 For Horkheimer and Adorno do not simply wish to recount the history of human civilization in its own right, but are interested in narrating something that interprets and explains this history itself: namely

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the history of this history, the true history of the historical, the primal history that is still contemporary.

The Dialectic of Enlightenment shares this intention with the entire tradition of modern 'narrative' philosophy of history which understood itself as providing enlightenment about the processes of history. If we apply the formal characteristics of myth, as described above, to this tradition, we cannot deny that these philosophies of history, insofar as they offer specific narratives, are mythical in character. For they do not narrate history itself, but something which is intended to render history intelligible and explain the course it has taken. This usually also involves explicit prognoses which can reveal the true background of the apparent historical process. I should like to describe this history behind history, as understood in the enlightenment tradition, as a social myth. Social myths are myths specifically conceived from the perspective of enlightenment. That is to say: they are distinguished from nature myths insofar as they presuppose the disenchantment of nature and proceed in a purely immanent fashion. The narrative interpretation and explanation of the human world which such myths provide no longer recognise the active intervention of natural powers or forces, but grasp nature itself simply as the sum of the conditions of human life. But at the same time, these social myths are not theories either - even though they are sometimes described as such. From the time of Aristotle until the emergence of the modern social sciences it was universally agreed that we can only frame theories, in the strict sense of the word, concerning things that do not lie within our own power, like the phenomena of nature for example. On the other hand, we can only produce a narrative for our individual and collective actions insofar as these can be considered distinct from the processes of nature. The social myths occupy a space somewhere between history and theory. They attempt literally to penetrate beneath the surface of history without simply establishing a specific theory of history. For a purely 'theoretical' approach would be incompatible with the 'practical' domain we are attempting to interpret and explain. The narrative philosophers of history refuse to frame theories about history in this sense precisely because they fear that a purely theoretical explanation would only transform the human historical world back simply into a process of nature.6

In establishing this double front against the naturalistic character of nature myths and the natural sciences the social myths are intrinsically culturalist. The tradition of the so-called social contract theories provides a particularly prominent example. They narrate how human allegedly beings left the original state of nature and agreed to enter into the state of society. The event itself is not datable, and little interest is shown in this question anyway. If we do enquire about the precise historical character of the event, we are likely to be told that it simply represents a 'model' or an 'idea' for our reflection. At the same time, the 'theorists' of the social contract regard these accounts as still entirely relevant to the present or even as intrinsically

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true. For the central image of the 'contract' was intended to explain not merely the emergence, but also - and far more importantly - the continuation and legitimation of the institution of society and the political form in which it finds expression. In this sense, the narrated doctrine of the social contract is supposed to be 'true for ever', that is, for as long as society itself exists. At the same time, the doctrine in question does not see itself as a theory in the classical sense of the word theoria. For that would suggest that one could explain the emergence of human beings from the state of nature by appeal to certain laws in much the same way as we might explain the rising of the sun. But human beings are not like the planets simply moving in their orbits since, so we are assured, they have actually entered into a 'civil conditon' on the basis of rational deliberation and, therefore, through a kind of free and independent act. That such an account presupposes certain theoretical background assumptions concerning the natural capacities, endowments and interests of human beings is no objection to what we have said. The doctrine of the social contract implies that human beings have acted, and this involves more that the idea of merely causal or teleological determination.

Rousseau's Discourse on the Origin of Inequality amongst Men presents a celebrated model, one which has inspired countless successors, of a social myth that possesses an explicit critical intent. Rousseau recognised that the earlier traditional contract theories had essentially proceeded in a circular fashion insofar as the idea of a contractual agreement already presupposes 'socialised' partners capable of concluding and upholding contracts. Such accounts were therefore incapable of explaining the fact of socialisation itself. But in spite of this, Rousseau refuses to appeal to some alternative naturalistic explanation. The beginning of history and the dynamics of historical development should not be regarded in Rousseau's eyes as if they were laws of nature. For they are the result of an 'accidental interaction of several external causes' which have exercised an influence upon natural human beings and their natural capacities and thereby encouraged them to leave the state of nature. This 'interaction' is something that 'may just as well never have happened, and without which man would have remained for ever in his original state'. 7 The beginning of history, therefore, is not a natural process that could be explained by appeal to laws. But nor is this an act of human beings already capable of acting in society - for such human beings did not exist in the state of nature - but a 'fateful accident', as Rousseau puts it.8 The contingent character of this unique event is the objective counterpart to the subjective moment which the culturalist approach generally regards as essential to the human world: human action that is free in the negative sense that it cannot be reduced to any supernatural or naturalistic form of determination. Contingency and human freedom are therefore necessarily connected in Rousseau's perspective. Contingency itself is the condition of freedom, and culture thus presents itself

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as the necessary content for the realm of freedom which contingency first opened up in the order of nature. But culture itself, compared with this order of nature, is contingent.

This internal connection between contingency and freedom underlies all of the great social myths that have been presented to us after the time of Rousseau - from Hegel's cunning intrigues of the world spirit to the irresistible Marxian march of the successive modes of production, through Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung, Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, Freud's Totem and Taboo, down to the narrative passages in the Dialectic of Enlightenment. It is the true basis of every 'narrative' philosophy of history. For the latter, we cannot explain what human beings have in some sense freely and consciously accomplished in history except by recourse to a narrative. The contingent character of culture, interpreted as the condition of human freedom and as that which eludes strict explanation in terms of laws, provides the negative context in relation to which the historical reveals itself as something which can only be narrated. For it is generally true that we can only provide a narrative explanation for contingent events which transcend our capacity to explain them strictly in terms of laws. On the culturalist approach, 'actions' are precisely of this kind. For the narrative ontology we have sketched the contingent can only be recounted rather than explained. Compared with nature as an object of causal explanation, the human world is contingent and its narratable character belongs intrinsically to it.

This narrative ontology of the modern social myths was powerfully reinforced in the nineteenth century by what we could call methodological narrativism. The latter is based upon the hermeneutic maxim that suggests that we only really understand something when we understand how it has become what it is.9 But this process of becoming cannot be 'explained' in accordance with laws of nature. For historical becoming is conditioned by the interaction of freedom and contingency that first defines the specifically human world as the only thing we can ultimately understand. According to the hermeneutic tradition, such historical becoming is the basic subject matter of 'understanding' and essentially defines its role and function. Causal explanation, on the other hand, merely concerns the external conditioning factors. And how could we ever 'understand' the realm of historical becoming except by narrating it? Methodological narrativism draws the same conclusion from the opposed operations of explanation and understanding as ontological narrativism: the human world intrinsically demands a narrative.

Narrativism is thus the basis of the modern social myths. They do not attempt to identify the general external conditions of the narrated history for that would simply lead to the generation of theories and explanations. They attempt instead, with critical and enlightened intentions, to identify the conditions that are allegedly themselves historical, that is to say, 'understandable'. And these can only therefore be narrated. Nonetheless,

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this conviction alone is insufficient to explain the transition from a narrative philosophy of history to a social myth. One can narrate many histories, including the background histories behind apparent history, without thereby becoming a mythologist as such. For this the pathos of singularity is required: 'O man, of whatever country you are, and whatever your opinions may be, behold your history, such as I have thought to read it, not in books written by your fellow creatures, who are liars, but in nature, which never lies. All that comes from her will be true, nor will you meet with anything false, unless I have involuntarily put in something of my own.' 10 Rousseau claims to narrate the one true, authentic history that is accredited by nature itself. This one history - 'the' history - has a singular object of reference: the human historical world as a whole. Now in one sense histories always have a single object of reference, and if we exchange this for another one, then we narrate a different history. Narrative philosophies of history that are essentially concerned with 'the whole', cannot therefore avoid transforming the historical world through this totalisation into precisely this singular object of reference in order then to be able to narrate the one true, authentic history of this world. Thus the historical is condensed into 'the' history that then appears as the singular object of a greater narrative structure. This is the social myth that would present the history that embraces everything historical and first allows us to understand it properly.

It is this totalisation of the historical into 'history' as singular object of reference which secures the transition from the narrative philosophy of history to the 'social myth'. The totalisation also implies that one must clearly identify the beginning and end of the object in question, for otherwise the totalisation would not be singular and complete. (As far as the end is concerned, the image of 'history as prehistory', or indeed any other utopian perspective, suffices here.) This totalisation is simply obeying the methodological constraints of narrativism itself. We must totalise in this way once we attempt to provide an 'enlightening' narrative of the historical world. Otherwise we can identify no singular object to be narrated in the first place. But this is precisely what leads directly to the mythicisation of history, that is, to the mutual entanglement of myth and enlightenment in the narrative philosophies of history. Mythicisation of history is also the mystification of history, as is already abundantly clear in Rousseau: who can read in nature itself, in the nature 'that never lies'? How could we ever distinguish in Rousseau's history that which derives from nature and that which derives from the author himself? The social mythologist must clearly enjoy, and ascribe to himself, a privileged access to the true history that can only be read in nature itself. And this already involves a fundamental mystification: Richard Wagner produced what is probably the most significant myth of the nineteenth century with the text of the Ring. He elaborates this aesthetic myth, originally developed as a solution to the problem of music drama, by way of a romantic ideology of the artist into a solution for

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every problem of the social world, and treats it as an emphatic source of truth that even leaves the claims of philosophy far behind. This quasiaesthetic posture of the seer who scorns the empirical and historical sciences as merely limited in scope and reaches resolutely for the whole truth is also characteristic of Nietzsche's approach in the Genealogy of Morals. For Nietzsche rejects not merely specific hypotheses concerning the origin of moral beliefs and practices but the entire method of 'English hypothesizing',11 and he claims for his own part to point out 'a better direction for a real history of morality'. We never learn precisely how Nietzsche himself is capable of genuinely disclosing 'what has been documented, what is really ascertainable, what has really existed, in short, the whole long hieroglyphic text, so difficult to decipher, of humanity's moral past'. 12 In this respect Nietzsche follows Rousseau's example, and many other thinkers have followed Nietzsche's. The combination of a sovereign contempt for science with the claim to some immediate access to the real truth about history characterises all such thinkers - to mention only Spengler, Klages and Heidegger in this connection. We also can discover elements of this same approach in the Dialectic of Enlightenment. For the authors themselves lay claim to a reflective and diagnostic competence which they could not possibly possess if their own thesis concerning the total context of illusion were actually correct.

The internal narrative structure of these modern social myths inevitably leads them to a mythicisation of modernity itself. 'Modernity', 'the Enlightenment', 'Reason' - these grand singular objects of the 'grand narratives' (as Lyotard calls them) are themselves a narratively generated illusion that all too easily encourages us to speak of the end of modernity, the end of Enlightenment, the end of reason. Such singular expressions presuppose the speculative totalisation of what is the inevitable theme of a modern knowledge-based culture that clearly thematises its own character: the social and cultural world which is differentiated in a variety of ways and is only intelligible from a multiplicity of perspectives. This world gets 'mystified' once it is stylised as the single great referent of a single grand narrative. Modernity itself is a plural phenomenon. At the same time, we must recognise that specific historical accounts and theories are all we have, that we possess no perspective between or beyond the two that could ever unite them in some higher unity or even totality of the historical. Every historical account is only one amongst other possible histories, even if they claim the same object of reference. Theories, on the other hand, can certainly claim a universal character, but they only ever concern specific 'aspects' which can in principle be identified in relation to infinitely many different singular phenomena. The social myth as the grand background narrative is less a utopian model of knowledge than a self-generated illusion. It is a species of counter-enlightenment, even if it has been conceived with the best of enlightened intentions.

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II

Insofar as the Dialectic of Enlightenment is narratively organised and belongs in this respect to the Rousseauean tradition, it cannot be salvaged. As a social myth that purports to enlighten us about enlightenment it simply confirms a basic aporia: 'Just as myths already realise enlightenment, so enlightenment with every step entangles itself more deeply in mythology.' It is not the act of self-reflection upon enlightenment which makes it impossible to locate the site from which enlightening reason might speak13

- for the concept of enlightenment about enlightenment poses no insuperable logical problem. It is only when the narrative procedure transforms reason 'itself' or enlightenment 'itself' into singular objects of reference within the grand overall narrative structure that the self-application of the theory appears fatal. Independently of this approach, of course, we can associate many different things, in terms of family resemblances, with these expressions. Open-ended concepts do not produce antinomies when they are reflexively applied to themselves. I believe, therefore, that the fascinating, or perhaps horrifying, self-repudiation of rationality revealed in the Dialectic of Enlightenment is a narratively generated illusion. This is a negative dialectic in the Hegelian sense of the term and it arises inevitably from the reflexive self-application of a concept produced by a process of speculative totalisation. We do not have to take this step ourselves. If we understand terms like 'reason' and 'enlightenment' as concepts with an open-ended sphere of application, we can also apply them to themselves without inevitably creating aporetic consequences. But then we should naturally have to ask what a 'dialectic of enlightenment' might mean in such a context.

I have already suggested an answer to this question: the dialectic would have to be presented in theoretical terms rather than narrative ones. This is only possible if we specify the objects concerned through theoretical concepts rather than proper names. There are no such things as 'modernity itself', 'Enlightenment itself', 'reason itself'. There are a number of phenomena that can intelligibly be subsumed, within specific theoretical contexts, under the concepts of 'modernity', 'enlightenment' and 'reason'. The 'aspectual' character that defines every theoretical approach that avoids all-embracing speculative closure excludes the possibility of totalising the object of theory. It also excludes the total identification or coincidence of history and system. Hegel's dialectic could be upheld, within the context of a narrative philosophy of history, because it was presented as the dialectic of the absolute, as an absolute dialectic. System and history necessarily coincide with one another in such a dialectic. For the 'world spirit' whose actions - and cunning intrigues - the philosophy of world history itself narrates is ultimately nothing other than the objectivity of the 'absolute idea' itself, and this latter is the concentrated expression of the true logicalspeculative structures of Hegel's system. The entire tradition of Hegelian


Marxism down to Lukacs and Sartre can be seen as a series of attempts to claim a philosophical comprehension of actual history that accepts the Hegelian identification of history and system while rejecting the premises of absolute idealism. This is an impossible project. On materialist assumptions, the Hegelian identity of history and system must break apart into systematic theory on one side and narrative history on the other.

It follows that any 'dialectic' of enlightenment that would avoid the mythologising temptations of narrativism must assume the form of theory in the non-speculative sense: namely a structural theory of enlightenment. The narratively prepared historical material, which furnishes our information concerning the actual processes of enlightenment, is by no means without significance here, but its function is to provide the quasi-empirical basis for justifying more general dynamic and structural hypotheses and assumptions. There is no question that such material itself is always acquired in the light of specific theoretical or typological concepts. In this sense there is no history available to us independently of theory. But this certainly does not justify us in collapsing theory and history into one on the level of concrete exposition and claiming that the theory itself is identical with the true history of its object. In this sense the concept of 'enlightenment' must de-historicised. It is only through its historical application as a structural concept that it can successfully be deployed in an enlightenment context without generating counter-enlightenment consequences.

In concrete terms this means that the theory of the dialectic of enlightenment must renounce all philosophy of history and turn instead towards social theory. There is a price to be paid here. For we must then be prepared to stop speaking about 'the' enlightenment in the singular and abandon the hope of eliciting its ultimate 'essence'. But there is also something to be gained. By deploying the concept of 'enlightenment' in an open-ended way we can identify the relevant examples, possibilities and demands of enlightenment in a variety of historical and cultural contexts. We can subject the dynamics of enlightenment to comparative examination and perhaps even assess the significant chances and opportunities of realising enlightenment. It is also possible to provide historical re-conceptualisations of the process of enlightenment in this way, i.e. the theoretical concept of enlightenment is also capable of introducing and guiding narrative accounts of such processes. The same is true for the concept of 'modernity'. Indeed, if this had always clearly been borne in mind, we could probably have spared ourselves the larger part of the contemporary debate over 'the post-modem'. For it no longer makes very much sense to speak of the end of 'modernity' or of 'enlightenment' in this context. And how could one even attempt, once and for all, to exclude all future moves in the direction of enlightenment or modernisation?

These are certainly not empty demands in relation to Dialectic of Enlightenment. Indeed they are already implicitly fulfilled by the text itself. Its basic

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concept of enlightenment, derived from Max Weber, belongs in the context of a theoretical, or at least ideal-typical, conception of modernisation as a process of 'rationalisation'. Adorno and Horkheimer see this process unfolding dialectically throughout the history of western civilisation. There is no question that some such process could also have transpired in a similar way elsewhere under similar conditions. Irrespective of whether we understand Weber's notion of 'rationalisation' or 'disenchantment' as theoretical concepts or as ideal types, they are clearly not singular terms in the sense outlined above. We need not therefore understand Adorno's and Horkheimer's concept of 'enlightenment' in this way either, although they often enough suggest such an understanding and fall into a mythologising narrative precisely in those passages where they do. This is also true for the other elements with which they enrich Weber's model of rationalisation, namely the increasing autonomisation which characterises the subject and its domination of nature in their account. I suggest that the systematic misunderstanding of such expressions as if they were singular terms is one of the reasons behind the characteristic neglect of the complexity and the rational content of cultural modernity in Dialectic of Enlightenment, something that Habermas in particular has rightly criticised. 14 This neglect is also a consequence of the conceptual monotony of the book. So much historical specificity is also ignored here: 'Unity remains the watchword from Parmenides to Bertrand Russell. The destruction of gods and qualities alike is insisted upon.' 15 One cannot deny that this observation precisely captures one aspect of rationalisation, but taken as pars pro toto it is simply false. It takes no account of the fact that the 'natural science' of the antiquity which generated no serious technology plays no part in the prehistory of modern positivism that they project back into earlier history from the standpoint of Bacon. It is simply not the case that everything since Parmenides has effectively developed in the direction of Russell (a formula which rather recalls Karl Popper's 'from the amoeba to Einstein'). Nor does it recognise that in modern cultures the experience of 'gods and qualities' is passed on to cultural domains other than those of the sciences: to expect everything from one and the same cultural sector is a precisely pre-modern expectation. One cannot therefore deny that the history of science and technology has unfolded more or less as Adorno and Horkheimer describe it - moving from gods through essences and concepts to the pure configurations of numbers and formulae - but this is not identical with the history of enlightenment as such. For the formalisation and technological specification of the scientific engagement with nature has itself opened up the possibility of other quite different forms of relating to nature as well. The rational core of the formula 'unity remains the watchword from Parmenides to Russell' is simply the authors' anxious animadversion to the actual tendency of one type of rationality, that characteristic of the technical-scientific domain, to dominate all the other domains of culture too. And the power of this


tendency to encroach upon other areas should certainly not be underestimated. Nonetheless, the problem is surely better formulated in terms of social theory - as something like 'the colonisation of the life-world' - than it is in terms of narrative history. The rationalising unification of anything and everything as a process that transpires under identifiable conditions rather than simply as our ineluctable cultural fate.

The word 'dialectic' has a twofold sense. In Kant and Hegel it designates both an 'antithetic' structure, i.e. a self-contradictory process in the object of thought or experience, and the theory of the antitheses in question: one that presents their inner logic or their logical re-conceptualisation. The Dialectic of Enlightenment also uses the term in this way. For it attempts to present the antinomic dynamics of enlightenment itself - in this sense the dialectic of enlightenment is its object - and understands itself at the same time as the theory of enlightenment. Horkheimer and Adorno like to describe and to defend this approach as the unity of method and object. But this unity has Jong since revealed itself after Hegel to be a noble illusion. The idea of 'dialectic' as the 'ontology of the false state of things' 16 either results from ontologising logical forms and structures which can only be justified upon the premises of absolute idealism itself or represents little but a logical metaphor. The 'contradictions' in reality or the object of which Adorno frequently speaks are not strictly speaking logical phenomena at all. They are antagonisms, ambivalences, self-destructive tensions and tendencies, aporias etc. that result from the internal relationship between enlightenment and counter-enlightenment on particular premises and under quite specific conditions. Adorno and Horkheimer always insisted that these premises and conditions are contingent, i.e. that they could in principle be entirely different. That is why the 'contradictions' of enlightenment are not supposed to exemplify some higher or even absolute logic of their own. They are not 'necessary' in any logical or metaphysical sense, but only necessarily arise under precisely identifiable social and historical preconditions. Thus the idea of enlightenment is only dialectical in a metaphorical sense. That is why we should not interpret Dialectic of Enlightenment as if it presents a process that unfolds and develops through logical laws of some kind. It merely presents a dialectical theory that reconstructs the 'contradictory' structure and dynamics of the internal connection between enlightenment and counter-enlightenment in relation to its specific social and historical conditions. We can only diagnose an objective 'dialectic of enlightenment' through such a conceptual reconstruction; it is not something simply lying there in front of us that we could 'narrate' without more ado. Narration already represents reconstruction, as analytical philosophy has demonstrated. If we neglect this epistemological insight, the theory that clothes itself as the Dialectic of Enlightenment would also fall victim to the Rousseauean mythicisation of history - as if we could read the story 'in nature itself' without having inscribed it there already.

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The book Dialectic of Enlightenment contains abundant suggestions for developing a dialectical theory of enlightenment in the sense we have outlined above. This is what lends this text its undiminished relevance, and this in a situation in which enlightenment appears to have celebrated its fatal victory: '[ ... ] the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant'. 17 Thus for many today it seems as if salvation lies in a rejection of the enlightenment paradigm altogether. But a dialectical theory of enlightenment, prompted by the example of Adorno and Horkheimer, refuses to be defined within the limits of this bad alternative. And there is no good reason to adopt it either since the counter-enlightenment of today generally presents itself precisely as an enlightenment of enlightenment: those who insist on clinging stubbornly to the former programme of enlightenment are now regarded as naive and dogmatic, i.e. as unenlightened. Hence a contemporary 'dialectic of enlightenment' would have to explain the phenomenon that 'our' counter-enlightenment now presents itself as the final cry of enlightenment itself. It would have to clarify the conditions in which the self-reflexive process of enlightenment produces counterenlightenment, and those in which it does not. Is this simply a question of the subjective intentions of the theorists involved? It is repeatedly claimed that Adorno and Horkheimer, in contrast to other critics of enlightenment, always continued to maintain the original aims of enlightenment. But is this really sufficient to prevent their own analyses from supplying further power to drive the post-modern mills of counter-enlightenment? We can only answer this question if we examine the individual claims of their own dialectic of enlightenment in careful detail. For the work itself shows that the sudden reversal from enlightenment to counter-enlightenment only transpires under specific conditions. There is nothing total or intrinsic about it. That is also why there is no reason to embrace either fatalism or the dialectical self-sublation of the critique of enlightenment, however pessimistically one may regard the situation. The end of enlightenment through its own self-reflection is not a destiny or fatum. Indeed it is not even a fact that could securely be identified independently of specific assumptions and prognoses. It is merely the object of a fear that nonetheless urgently suggests certain penetrating analyses and diagnoses of the current condition of our culture.

I should like to substantiate this by reference to a central trope of the dialectic of enlightenment as Adorno and Horkheimer present it. This trope connects enlightenment and myth, reason and domination, emancipation and self-subjection, progress and regression in the form of assertions which imply that the one not only provokes or produces the other, but that each is its own other. This coincidentia oppositorum is not some intrinsic feature of the world for Dialectic of Enlightenment makes it abundantly clear that it only occurs under specifiable conditions that are ultimately contingent and in principle allow for other possibilities, even if as a species we have failed to


pursue the latter for particular empirical and historical reasons. It is not reason itself that is the principle of domination, but reason insofar as it functions precisely as an instrument for the domination of nature. No one can claim - and the authors of Dialectic of Enlightenment explicitly refuse to do so 18

- that reason is nothing but such an instrument, that it is not also a form of self-reflexive 'mindfulness' [Eingedenken] that acknowledges its relation to the history of the human species as the history of its own 'metabolism' with nature. If we fail to differentiate and qualify the concept of reason in this way, this self-reflection on the part of instrumental reason becomes a sheer miracle that could never be explained by the logic of the domination of nature itself. And something similar holds for the claim that the constitution of subjectivity through this instrumental process also always results in the self-forfeiture of the self-constituting subject. 19

Here Adorno and Horkheimer are basically following the Hegelian trope of alienation or estrangement. On this perspective, the alienation from the object produced by domination of the latter necessarily passes over into self-alienation because the subject is only capable of dominating nature through dominating itself at the same time. The self-constitution of the subject does not imply self-forfeiture under all conditions, but only when it is governed by a formal or abstract model of self-preservation. It is precisely this, and not self-preservation as such, which leads to the process of self-preservation without the self. Insofar as this abstract model is connected with a concept of freedom predicated upon full sovereignty and nothing else then the transition from emancipation to self-subjugation is indeed unavoidable. But this is precisely not the authentic concept of freedom we need. We can still understand the Hegelian idea of freedom as 'self-possession in otherness', even if our history has actually been governed by an obsession with the ideal of a wholly sovereign will. Once again we must come to see that the antinomian relation of self-liberation and self-enslavement is not already posited with the mere thought of 'freedom', but arises when a particular model of freedom, under specific historical conditions, becomes the characteristic ideal of an entire culture. What might strike the orthodox representatives of the Frankfurt School as a softening, or even accommodating and innocuous, appropriation of Dialectic of Enlightenment is actually an attempt to test out the strong, i.e. narrative, claims that are embedded in the philosophy of history it presents. It is only in this way that we can meaningfully begin to discuss and evaluate these claims in a social-theoretical context. The only alternative to trying out such hypothetical structures (if x then y) is the grand narrative which can only be simply true or simply false, even though we can form no real idea of what effectively makes it true. We must abandon such narratives if we wish to free the concept of a dialectic of enlightenment from the speculative philosophy of history and formulate it in terms of social theory. It is only the social-theoretical elements of the book we know as Dialectic of

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Enlightenment that are still relevant to us, and not the narrative elements which only make it look like a modern example of the transition from enlightenment to mythology.

Horkheimer and Adorno provide further models for such a socialtheoretical formulation of dialectic which could also be mentioned here: the internal relation between individualisation and human loss of identity in the culture of industrial mass society; the self-transformation of enlightenment into a form of mass deception (something which is particularly relevant today); the remythification of social relations in terms of the awesome nature of sheer power; 'the absurdity of a state of affairs in which the power of the system over human beings grows with every step that delivers them from the power of nature' - to cite Adorno and Horkheimer themselves once again.20 The contemporary relevance of these models, to which others could easily be added, can hardly be denied. Though we cannot do so here, it would certainly be a rewarding task to develop them explicitly and furnish them with specific content. I should merely like to conclude, therefore, by emphasising that such a contemporary formulation of the dialectic of enlightenment is only possible precisely as a negative dialectic in Adorno's sense of the term. I have attempted elsewhere to show that Adorno's concept of dialectic differs from that of Hegel, Lukacs or Sartre above all by the way in which it makes an exclusively critical rather than constitutive use of the idea of totality. 21 What is more, compared with the text of Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno's Negative Dialectics represents a new methodological and philosophical beginning and is more than the final culmination of the purely aporetic position to which Horkheimer and Adorno had once rather rigidly reduced the dialectic. 22 The attempt to understand the totality of the context of illusion in a critical rather than ontological manner, as in Heidegger, assumes that we can recognise it as something intrinsically contingent and historical. And this understanding excludes a hermetic kind of systematic dialectic that would also embrace the dialectical thinker within itself. As self-reflective theorists of an enlightenment that has now become self-reflexive we already stand beyond its own structural logic. What Adorno's Negative Dialectics attempts to ground is precisely this irreducible distance in relation to the object which the text of Dialectic of Enlightenment merely claims for itself. Adorno pursues this grounding by reformulating the dialectic as a critical hermeneutic of the particular and individual. The practice of such a hermeneutic must constantly expose and exceed all the totalising impulses of theory itself. The task would be finally to bring just such a critical hermeneutics of the manifestations of enlightenment into intimate relation with the formation of social theory. A philosophically oriented theory of society in this sense could then confirm what could only be presented here as a bare thesis: namely that the idea of a dialectic of enlightenment can only claim contemporary relevance as a negative dialectic.

RELEVANCE OF THE DIALECTIC OF EN LIGHTEN M ENT


Max Horkheimer I Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufkliirung, Amsterdam 1947; now in: T. W. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, Frankfurt am Main 1970-86, vol. 3, p. 16 and 28. All references are to this edition (abbreviated as DA). English translation: Dialectic of Enlightenment, tr. by John Cumming, London 1973 (abbreviated as DE), p. xvi and pp. 11-12.

2 Cf. Jurgen Habermas, Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne, Frankfurt am Main 1985, chapter 5: 'Die Verschlingung von Aufklarung und Moderne: Horkheimer und Moderne', pp. l 30ff. English translation: The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, tr. by F. G. Lawrence, Cambridge 1987, pp. I 06ff.

3 Robert Graves, The Greek Myths, London 1999, p. 39. 4 DA: 29; DE: 13. 5 Karl Marx, Die Friihschr(fien, ed. by S. Landshut, Stuttgart 1953, p. 525. 6 Kant's essay Idea .fi1r a Universal History From a Cosmopolitan Point of View

already explores this problem: cf. I. Kant, Werke, edited by W. Weischedel, vol. 6, p. 33f. English translation: ldea.fi1r a Universal History, tr. by L. W. Beck in Kant Selections, edited by L. W. Beck, Macmillan 1988, pp. 415ff.

7 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Schr(/ien ::ur Kulturkritik, ed. K. Weigand, Hamburg 1971, p. 189.

8 Ibid., p. 209. 9 Cf. my essay 'Etwas Verstehen heisst Verstehen, wie es geworden ist', in: H.

Schnadelbach, Vernun.fi und Geschichte. Vortriige und Ahhandlungen, Frankfurt am Main 1987, p. I 25ff.

I 0 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, A Dissertation on the Origin and Foundation of the Inequality of' Mankind, in: The Social Contract and Discourses, tr. by G. D. H. Cole, London 1973, p. 46.

11 Friedrich Nietzsche, Siimtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Biinden, vol. 5, Munich 1980, p. 254. English translation: On the Genealogy of Morals, translated by Douglas Smith, Oxford 1996, pp. 8 9 (the Preface, section 7).

12 Ibid. 13 Cf. J. Habermas, op. cit., p. 141; ET: 116-117. 14 Cf. ibid., p. 137f; ET: 112-113. 15 DA: 24; DE: 8. 16 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik, Frankfurt am Main 1966, p. 20;

English translation: Negative Dialectics, tr. by E. B. Ashton, London 1973, p. 11. For a further development of my argument, cf. 'Dialektik als Vernunftkritik. Zur Konstruktion des Rationalen bei Adorno', in: H. Schnadelbach, Vernunft und Geschichte, I 79ff. ['The Dialectical Critique of Reason. Adorno's Construction of Rationality', included in the present collection].

17 DA: 19; DE: 3. 18 Cf. ibid., pp. 56ff.; DE: 38ff. 19 Max Horkheimer, Zur Kritik der instrumentellen Vernunft, Frankfurt am

Main 1976, p. 124: 'In the very moment of its completion reason has become stupid and irrational. The theme of our time is self-preservation even though there is no self left to preserve.' In his essay 'Vernunft und Selbsterhaltung' Horkheimer writes that ' ... self-preservation is in the process of losing its own subject, the self' (M. Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, Frankfurt am Main 1987, vol. 5, p. 335).

20 DA: 56; DE: 38.

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THEODOR W. ADORNO

21 Cf. H. Schnadelbach, 'Sartre und die Frankfurter Schule', in: Sartre. Ein Kongress, edited by T. Konig, Reinbeck 1988, p. l 3ff.

22 Cf. Anke Thyen, Negative Dialektik und Erfahrung. Zur Rationalitiit des Nichtidentischen bei Adorno, Frankfurt am Main, 1989 [an extract from this work is included in the present collection under the title 'Dimensions of the Non-Identical'].

9

THE DIALECTICAL CRITIQUE OF REASON

Adorno's construction of rationality

Herbert Schnadelbach

Source: Harry Kunnemann and Hent de Vries (eds), Die Aktualitiit der Dialektik der Aujk/iirung, Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 1989, pp. 15-35. Translated by Nicholas Walker 2006.

Adorno begins Negative Dialectics with the following remarks: 'Negative dialectics is a phrase that flouts tradition. As early as Plato, dialectics attempted to establish something positive through recourse to negation. The expression "negation of the negation" later captured this idea in a particularly emphatic form. This book hopes to liberate dialectics from this affirmative character without thereby forfeiting determinacy. One of the book's intentions is precisely to explicate its own paradoxical title' (ND 7: ET: xix). Many readers familiar with the tradition would surely be astonished by these remarks. Did not Kant already describe the dialectic as a 'logic of illusion' and thereby liberate it from its 'affirmative character' by his critical transcendental method? Did not Kierkegaard already attempt specifically to develop the paradox of a dialectic without its traditional affirmative aspects? It is hardly sufficient to respond by pointing out that Adorno was neither an orthodox Kantian nor an existentialist. For simply identifying philosophical 'positions' is of little help if we seriously wish to clarify the 'matter itself' that is signalled by Adorno's title and thus to counter the suspicion that it is either self-evidently familiar or intrinsically absurd. In fact there is nothing new about the idea of dialectic as a 'critical' enterprise. The history of dialectic extends from the paradoxes of Zeno, through the 'Refutations of the Sophists' and Kant's 'transcendental dialectic', up to Hegel's conceptual struggles with 'the philosophy of reflection'. What precisely did Adorno add to this long debate?

The title of my essay is intended to suggest where the novelty of Adorno's contribution essentially lies. It attempts to indicate how Adorno 'flouts' the

THEODOR W. ADORNO

tradition and why his own concept of dialectic can appear to be a merely paradoxical one. I am alluding here to the fact that the dialectic in Adorno presents itself specifically as a 'critique' of reason. Now this too might initially appear to be an entirely familiar idea. Kant's transcendental dialectic already treats speculative reason as a dialectic of illusion, critically dismantling its claims by identifying the limits of genuinely rational knowledge. But the crucial difference in relation to Adorno lies in the fact that Kant endorses and accentuates the relationship between logic and dialectics that we already find in Aristotle and thus refuses any positive role for the dialectic. Insofar as the latter appears in Kant's own 'Dialectic' it is merely as an index of error and as an abdication of reason. On the other hand, if we consider the attempts - like those of Plato or Hegel - to present dialectic as a positive conceptual method, indeed as the proper medium and organ of reason itself, it is immediately obvious that it is not critically directed at reason as such, but rather at certain deficient forms or expressions of rationality: at the rhetorical virtuosity of the sophists, at the conflation of mathematical and philosophical knowledge (of dianoia and noes is), and finally, in Hegel, at the primacy of 'the understanding' [der Verstand]. Hegel unfolds his own dialectic explicitly through the critique, through the self-critique, of the understanding and presents itself as an organ of reason precisely in terms of this critique. Insofar as Adorno combines the Kantian programme of a critique of reason with a positive conception of dialectic he counters Kant and Hegel, that is to say, he takes up a unique position of his own that can be identified with neither. The idea of a 'negative dialectic' is supposed to rehabilitate reason, against Kant, as a capacity for authentic knowledge, while simultaneously preserving it from the speculative hubris of Hegelian philosophy. It is not, therefore, entirely surprising if Adorno's dialectic appears to be 'paradoxical' in character.

Adorno's negative dialectic thus represents the rather difficult enterprise of pursuing, with specifically Hegelian means, an aim that is critical of Hegelian thought. What may well strike many as an indecisive wavering between the positions of Kant, Hegel and Marx is grounded in Adorno's very idea of dialectic as a critique of reason. Of course, today it is necessary to emphasise something which hardly needed pointing out when Adorno's book first appeared in 1966: Adorno saw his own critique of reason precisely as an alternative to the irrationalism which some readers have derived from it. In a theoretical context Adorno himself opposed the immediate appeal to praxis as a way of resolving the problems and enigmas of the contemporary world. Nor could he regard the purely theoretical invocation of praxis as an appropriate solution to these difficulties. The posthumous publication of Adorno's Aesthetic Theory in turn easily suggested that the terminus ad quern if critical theory lies in a transition from the critique of reason to aesthetics and thus ultimately in an aestheticisation of theory itself. 1 In view of the now current defeatism with regard to 'reason', it is


necessary to insist that Adorno did not conceive of negative dialectics as a propadeutic to a post-modern aesthetic relation to the world. He understood it rather as a construction of rationality in accordance with its own immanent concept, that is, of a truly rational rationality. The purpose of Adorno's construction of reason is precisely to enlighten a still irrational rationality about itself, to bring an untrue whole to a true awareness of itself. But this construction still relates critically to dialectical reason itself: 'Dialectical reason, compared with the prevailing rationality, is unreason: only by overcoming and transcending the former does the latter itself become rational' (MM 126). For Adorno the irrational character of prevailing rationality and of Hegelian reason alike rules out the idea of conceptual construction unaccompanied by critical reflection. If this conjunction of rational construction and critique of rationality strikes us simply as paradoxical, we should think of Kant in this connection. For Adorno remains more faithful to Kant's conception of a rational critique of reason than Hegel did. And Kant's construction of rationality also reveals an apparent paradox.

In order to reconstruct Adorno's own construction of rationality it is necessary to go beyond Adorno himself - although this is certainly not because we are so much more better instructed or more insightful than he was. Adorno himself always defended the claim that genuine understanding and genuine critique are inseparable from one another. It may be that Adorno's thought, like that of any philosopher, cannot really be summarised - although even here I have some doubts insofar as it pursues, like most philosophy, a number of remarkably constant themes which can indeed be named and specified - but it certainly resists all paraphrase. The mere paraphrase of Adorno's texts exposes to precisely the fate he feared from the pretence of simply summarising philosophical positions. And the attempt to identify intimately and directly with his texts, in the hope of sustaining the vivid presence of his ideas, only encourages their truth moment to disappear. We can only understand these ideas when we also understand what separates us from this presence. An awareness of this situation should really be hermeneutically self-evident, and is something that we can learn directly from Adorno's own critical practice anyway, even if he himself never makes any positive use of the word 'hermeneutics'. One cannot therefore understand Adorno simply by convincing ourselves, through paraphrasing repetition, that this is precisely what we have done. But a proper hermeneutic awareness of distance implies the very critical dimension in which 'critical theory' was once confident enough to sustain itself. One does no honour to Adorno by withdrawing his own thought from the practice of critique. His work presents us with a task of critical appropriation in which not only Adomo's work, but also our own critique of his work can genuinely be sustained. Whether we have ourselves really advanced any 'further' than Adorno must therefore remain itself an open question.

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I shall not make any assumptions here about changes in the contemporary world since the appearance of Negative Dialectics which now arguably demand a different perspective upon Adorno's work. But I believe that there are essentially three theoretical and historical factors which make a merely immediate and uncritical relationship to Adorno's texts impossible for us. In the first place, the last couple of decades have witnessed a significant change in the philosophical scene, and different intellectual fronts have formed from those which constituted the original horizon of critical theory. It is no longer the oppressive idealist demands for 'system' or the claims of 'logical positivism' that represent the principal philosophical problem. The problem today is rather the undifferentiated appeal to plurality and an irrationalism which has also harnessed the critique of instrumental reason to its wagon. In the second place, we must respect the need for clarity and precision which the reception of analytical philosophy has forced upon us. Such philosophy may not have resolved many problems as such, but it has certainly enabled us to pose the relevant problems more precisely. In the third place, Wittgenstein, Ryle and many others have revealed the problems involved in 'mentalistic' philosophical discourse and have thereby compelled the 'philosophy of consciousness', so strongly established in German academic thought, to reconsider its traditional conceptual paradigms. We can no longer continue to speak of 'subject' and 'object' in the way that Adorno still felt justified in doing. With regard to both 'negative dialectics' and 'critical theory' in general we require a different medium of conceptual explication than the inherited language of 'consciousness' and its 'object'.

I

I should like now to substantiate at least the second of these three points. Adorno tells us that 'dialectic is the rigorous consciousness of non-identity' (ND: 15; ET: 5). The concept of the non-identical thus appears as the key with which we can best unlock Adorno's conception of dialectic. Anyone who attempts to do so soon discovers that the concept of the non-identical must be specified more precisely, and anyone who attempts to specify it more precisely with Adorno's own conceptual means will inevitably fail. The apparently plausible argument that 'the non-identical' is supposed to indicate exactly that which intrinsically eludes conceptual specification cannot actually appeal to Adorno himself since he does attempt to differentiate the various senses of the concept of 'identity' and clarify their internal connection with one another (ND: 143f. and the relevant footnote; ET: 142f.). One can render the intuition of the indeterminate more specific and precise. The intuition of the indeterminate does not have to remain indeterminate in order to be what it is. Or to put it another way: one can intend something indeterminate in a very determinate way. At the same time, I would claim that the non-identical in Adorno is not a concept, but only a conceptual


symbol. We could describe it as a certain space for a concept or as a 'cipher' (to use the word of Karl Jaspers whom Adorno himself despised). The expression 'the non-identical' has become a magical word that is often merely conjured up in the paraphrases of Adorno that now abound. In these contexts the word acquires expressive and attractive power precisely by virtue of its conceptual vagueness, ranging in reference as it already does in Adorno himself from 'A is not A', through the 'thing in itself', to the 'wholly other' of negative theology. The attempt to shed further light upon this range of meanings in an enterprise that easily invites the (once devastating) reproach of being 'undialectical'. I wish to claim that 'the non-identical' in Adorno is a logical metaphor whose fascination depends upon the host of unanalysed associations that it prompts. This metaphor must be resolved into its elements if we would redeem the intention which ultimately stands behind it. It will later become clear that this is also required precisely because Adorno himself defined rationality positively as a thinking which works specifically with conceptual 'constellations'. The idea of the nonidentical, on the other hand, tends to imprison one of his own most important philosophical insights within the cage of a single word.

If we now attempt to establish, with the resources of the 'tabulating understanding', what Adorno effectively means by 'identity', we find ourselves confronted with a rather long list. One might well accept the fact that the principium individuationis in logic, simple tautologies, non-trivial identifying judgements like 'the morning star is the evening star', and analytical propositions are all presented without distinction as exemplifications of 'identity'. The matter becomes more difficult when Adorno also treats subsumption, classification, and even simple predicative judgements, as examples for the conceptual exclusion of the non-identical. Because he does not distinguish between 'identity' and 'sameness', he explicates identity in terms of 'adequacy': whether we are speaking of fact and proposition in the context of adequatio, or of the correspondence between concept and thing, which in tum Adorno generally interprets in terms of the relation between the is and the ought. In other places Adorno accordingly connects identity with 'equivalence' which then leads him to elevate the principle of 'exchange' into a cognitive and constitutive epistemological category. Adorno also gives an ontological twist to these figures of thought, claiming that those who cling to the principle of the excluded middle cannot grasp 'real' contradictions and therefore remain beholden to an inevitably static, harmonising and conformist view of the world. A particularly significant feature of Adomo's thought is the transition he typically makes from logical identity, understood in the broadest sense of the word, to psychological identity in the personal or the social domain. It is only from this perspective that we can understand why the non-identical can plausibly be invoked against the idealist conception of an ultimate subject-object. For that 'identity' is not everything need not disturb an absolute subject as long as the latter does

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not immediately ground its own identity upon the principle of A=A. Fichte was the first to attempt this when he derived the principle A=A from the principle of l=I through appeal to the absolute metaphor of the pure 'act'. Adorno effectively adopted this metaphorical language in its more dynamic Hegelian form and followed Marx in giving it a specific materialist inflection. From the perspective of Adorno's general claim concerning human self-constitution and self-preservation through the domination of nature, the very substance of the dialectic of enlightenment, the seemingly separate aspects and features of 'identity' effectively coalesce to form a continuum for Adorno and produce a single consistent sense. Domination thus also appears as the real foundation of the principle of A=A. We can clarify this point by reference to Adorno's frequent employment of the expression 'identificatory thinking'. The basic idea here is that thinking, considered as an instrument for dominating nature, simultaneously identifies nature and the thinker qua thinker. The identification of natural objects for the sake of theoretical, technical and practical interests, and the establishment of personal and social identity, thus come together to form a single phylogenetic context. From the retrospective theoretical perspective this context can be interpreted as the repressive realisation of the principle of identity within nature and the ego alike. If we also bring the principle of exchange into the theoretical picture, it is easy to see why Adorno combined his critique of idealism with the critique of a society based upon exchange. For the absolute subject-object, empirical and normative forms of adequation, and exchange based upon equivalence, all appear to define one another in turn for Adorno. It is not all too difficult to move from here to certain ways of referring to 'identity' in Adorno which look like straightforward logical errors, especially when we recognise that he never clearly distinguishes between 'identifying something as x' and 'identifying something with x'. In the first place all forms of speech which do not infringe the logical principle of identity are presented as examples of necessarily identificatory thought under the general suspicion that, as mere assertions of identity, they are all nothing but tautologies. Even if it were true that affirmative propositions represent identifications of something as something, this does not imply that they thereby simply express identity (if someone identifies me 'as' this or that, it is surely to be hoped that he does not simply identify me 'with' what he has identified me as). But Adorno apparently infers that we must think in a negative-dialectical fashion not only in order to think critically, but simply in order to think at all.

These rather pedantic observations are intended to show that Adorno does not succeed in connecting his Negative Dialectic, as a logic of the nonidentical, with the Dialectic of Enlightenment with anything like the rigour which he claims. What is presented as an immanent critique of the logic of identificatory thought is frequently simply social theory dressed up in logical-philosophical language. The field of logic and its practitioners


themselves are not directly addressed and therefore feel no obligation to respond. But it is precisely this unacknowledged theoretical deficit in Adorno's work which accounts for the quasi-aesthetic aura that for many people now magically envelops the non-identical (like the effect once exerted by Heidegger's talk of 'being'). We must strenuously resist this tendency, which for his own part Adorno would certainly have distrusted. And this is why we cannot simply take, without more ado, what Adorno himself says about the non-identical as the leading clue for an appropriate reconstruction of negative dialectics as a construction of rationality.

II

If we reflect upon Adorno's principal theses concerning reason, thought and knowledge, we are inevitably reminded of a specific opposition that has been discussed throughout the history of the concept of reason, from Plato onwards, and also implicitly plays an important role in Adorno's philosophy: the difference between the 'noetic' and the 'dianoetic'. This distinction later reappears in Latin terminology as that between 'intuitive' and 'operative' reason. Within the philosophical tradition we encounter the noetic in the image of 'the eye of the spirit'. From Plato through to Husserl and Heidegger the noetic represents the faculty of 'possessing', of having direct insight into, mental content in an act of immediate intuitive 'evidence'. The words 'evidence' and 'insight' themselves clearly refer to the sense of sight and exemplify the metaphorics of vision, a semantic field to which the word 'idea' also belongs if we consider its etymology. The dianoetic, on the other hand, represents the activity of 'reason'. Plato discussed the dianoetic with reference to geometry, whereas Aristotle extended it to the entire domain of the operationes animi through which the soul actualises its dianoetic capacities. The fact that Aristotle also treats the concept of nous itself, the faculty of the immediate apprehension of ultimately selfevident truths, as a function of dianoetic activity represents a distinctive shift in relation to Platonic metaphor of the line, and one which already anticipates that operative reinterpretation of all the intuitive capacities of reason that would emerge explicitly in the modern age. It was Kant who completed this development. In a sense Kant rehabilitated what rationalist metaphysics had attempted to identify as simple intuitiones menti, as innate ideas, insofar as he countered reductionist empiricism by insisting upon the a priori categories of the mind. But of course he thereby reinterpreted and transformed the concept of innate ideas in terms of certain necessary intellectual operations. The renewed appeal to the concept of intellectual intuition, which was announced by the romantic Platonists even before Fichte and Schelling, could only strike Kant himself as a problematic regression to the 'superior tone' adopted by earlier philosophy.2 With respect to the relation between the intuitive and operative aspects of the mind, the basic

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conviction prevailing after Kant is therefore the following: all intuition is sensible, and thinking is merely an intellectual operation. There is nothing to be grasped, let alone 'seen', in purely intellectual terms. Any attempt to question this perspective is generally branded today as a form of Platonism, whether we are thinking here of Husserl's phenomenology or Heidegger's philosophy of being or of Frege and other ontologists who like to populate the intellectual universe with autonomous propositions and intentional objects.

If I now claim here that Adorno was basically a Platonist in this connection - a Platonist of the non-identical - that is not simply intended as a criticism. For Adorno had good reasons for not entirely abandoning what he understood by this enigmatic expression - the non-identical - to the domain of sensible experience. He stubbornly insists upon an ultimate noetic orientation and explicitly binds all thought and knowing to this telos. 'If thought really exposed itself to the thing itself, if its attention were directed at the thing, rather than at the category of the latter, the object itself would begin to speak under the lingering gaze of thought' (ND: 36; ET: 28-29). The 'lingering gaze of thought' here is a specific variation of a basic Adornian theme. His observation concerning that 'contemplation without violence from which all joy in truth derives' (MM 157) reveals that Adorno ultimately views truth in terms of 'evidence'. That is why metaphors of vision abound in Adorno's concept of authentic cognition. They appear almost inevitably whenever Adorno contrasts 'the thing itself' with its mere concept and refers cognition emphatically to the former, and I would say that such metaphors are implicit in all of Adorno's observations in this regard. One cannot simply reduce Adorno's idea of the non-identical to the trivial difference between concept and object, and then accuse him of positing an absurd goal for knowledge since we can never ultimately do without concepts.3 Adorno is not content, like the dominant trend within our philosophical tradition, with simply trying to develop an appropriate concept of the object. For that too would be a 'mere' concept which effectively 'excises' what cognition is after: 'The matter of true philosophical interest at this point in history is precisely that in which Hegel, following the tradition, showed no interest: the non-conceptual, the singular, the particular - that which, since Plato, has been dismissed as the transitory and insignificant, and which Hegel himself labelled "idle existence". The theme of philosophy would be the very qualities which it has formerly denigrated as a merely contingent quantile negligeable. It would be a matter of urgency for the concept to consider what it does not capture, what its own abstractive mechanism excludes, what is not already an exemplification of the concept' (ND: 18; ET: 8). Adorno here understands the concept in purely nominalist terms as an operative schema, as an 'abstractive mechanism', whose application to the object excludes its incommensurable aspects and simply treats the object as an example of a universal. That is why he understands philosophy precisely as the 'cognition of the non-identical' and claims that such cognition 'seeks


to say what something is, whereas identitarian thought tells us what something falls under, what it exemplifies or represents, and thus what it is not. The more relentlessly identitarian thinking besets its object, the further it moves from the identity of the latter' (ND: 150; ET: I 49). Adorno's concept of the concept is constituted in a way that orients critical philosophical thought to a perspective where the concept of the thing no longer distorts our view upon the thing as such. But this is precisely the noetic conception of knowledge originally bequeathed by Plato, for whom dialectic as a philosophical procedure is not the actual medium for the cognition of ideas itself, but merely the path that leads towards such cognition. The path terminates when it opens our spiritual eyes to the vision of the ideas themselves. This corresponds to what Adorno symbolises through the figure of 'the non-identical', and this latter in turn demands a transformation of the idea of dialectic.

All this helps to explain why Adorno did not adopt the apparently more obvious course of appealing to immediate empirical experience, the course pursued by all previous anti-Platonists when they attempted to rehabilitate the world of doxa - 'the non-conceptual, the singular, the particular' - over against the world of the 'ideas'. This is not a possible solution for Adorno because sensuous impressions, sensations or perceptions themselves must also be conceptualised if they are ever to serve as moments of experience. Adorno further intensifies this Kantian insight, in the manner of Hegel, through a dialectical critique of the distinction between sensibility and the understanding, although this critique eventually counters Hegel's conclusions as well. Adorno regards the empiricist cult of the sensuously given, just like the positions adopted by modern ontology, as another bewitched form of prima philosophia. For Adorno 'experience' cannot be championed over against philosophical thought because experience inevitably already involves thought itself, and because Adorno understands philosophy precisely as the thoughtful explication of experience. A 'changed' and therefore post-idealist philosophy would itself be 'nothing but full and unreduced experience in the medium of conceptual reflection' (ND: 23; ET: 13). The experience which empiricism, by contrast, would isolate and separate out from conceptual thought is, for Adorno, something already maimed by our abstractive and methodological procedures. The task of a thinking oriented to experience, an experience which already involves thought, properly leads us into the problematic domain of 'concept and thing' rather than away from it.

Adorno is not an empiricist, therefore, but a noeticist of the nonidentical. He always assumes, especially in his remarks on formal logic, a noetic moment as the goal of the dianoetic operation itself. He therefore refuses the empiricist reduction of the noetic to the purely sensible. But that is also why he rejects all talk of immediate intellectual intuition. And so did Plato. For in Plato, as in Adorno, the dialectic possesses an ultimate noetic

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goal that requires a dianoetic operation in order to reach its own eventual fulfilment. That is why Adorno can say: 'Non-identity is the secret telos of identification, is that which is to be redeemed in the latter; the error of traditional thought is to take identity as its goal' (ND: 150; ET: 149). This telos is dialectical because it presents identificatory thought with something that, according to our common sense view of things, cannot be reached by the means of such thought: how could we identify the non-identical without thereby reducing it to the identical? This explains why Adorno, like Plato, regards the fulfilment of the noetic goal itself as dependent upon the greatest possible conceptual exertion rather than on any renunciation of the latter. Adorno therefore never tires of distancing his own approach from the kind of 'intuitionist' positions which are themselves beginning to appeal to Adorno today. Thus he charges that Bergson effectively 'creates another type of knowledge, through a tour de force, for the sake of the non-conceptual' (ND: 18; ET: 8). And Adorno dedicated an entire book to demarcating his own 'utopia of cognition' from the 'categorial intuition' or the 'intuition of essence' of Husserl, ideas that are also indebted to a Platonic ideal of knowledge. The thing itself, beyond the mere concept of the thing, is precisely not the aletheia of Heidegger's philosophy of being, and that because the respective intentions of the two thinkers were themselves so different. In this regard the respective goal is different because the path that leads to it is also different: 'Thought guards no springs whose freshness might deliver us from thinking. We have no type of cognition at our disposal that differs absolutely from disposing thought itself, the thought which intuitionism flees in panic, and in vain' (ND: 24; ET: 15). Thus Adorno almost prophetically counters the aestheticisation of his own philosophical intentions, for all the affinity between philosophy and art in their common resistance to the identificatory principle: 'What the philosophical concept will not abandon is the yearning that animates art as the non-conceptual, and whose fulfilment flees the immediacy of art as mere appearance. The concept - at once the organon of thinking and the wall between thinking and the object of thought - negates that yearning. Philosophy can neither circumvent such negation nor submit to it. It must strive, by way of the concept, to transcend the concept' (ND: 25; ET: 15).

III

The concept as 'the organon of thinking and the wall between thinking and the object of thought', this is the conceptual dilemma that makes the noetic goal of cognition into a utopian ideal. In Plato the higher faculty of noesis was intrinsically oriented to the 'ideas', and that is why there was in his philosophy no 'wall' between dialectical distinctions and the kairos of true cognition. Adorno's noetic goal can also only be attained by dianoetic means, but the negative dialectic drives us, beyond Plato and Hegel, to the

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recognition that noesis as such must transcend itself as something merely conceptual. That is why Adorno speaks in this connection of the end of dialectic. 'Dialectics unfolds the difference between the particular and the universal that is itself dictated by the universal. Whereas the now conscious rupture between subject and object is unavoidable for consciousness, and furrows everything that consciousness thinks, even objectively, this would come to an end with reconciliation. This reconciliation would release the non-identical, would liberate it from spiritualised coercion, would first open up that multiplicity and diversity of things that dialectics would no longer dominate' (ND: 16; ET: 6). If the difference between the universal and the particular, the 'rupture' between subject and object, is ever transcended, then consciousness will have avoided what is unavoidable for consciousness. If dialectics is simply the consistent consciousness of non-identity, then consciousness will also have escaped from consciousness itself. Adorno says of the subject: 'If its freedom, once upon a time, called a halt to myth, the subject would eventually be delivered from itself, as from the last myth. The nonidentity of the subject, without sacrifice, would be utopia itself' (ND: 275; ET: 281 ). The subject as the last myth, the end of dialectics in the nonsacrificial non-identity of the subject - is this not, once again, the song of the Sirens to which Adorno himself has now succumbed? 4 Does not dialectical sophistication thereby simply pass over immediately into regression?

Hasty assurances to the contrary cannot help us any further here. Adomo's work is permeated by specific intellectual motifs which are increasingly defended today in an irrationalist and counter-enlightenment spirit. These motifs present a difficulty for any attempt to reconstruct Adorno's critique of reason precisely as a construction of rationality rather than relinquishing it to free interpretation as a kind of expressive 'conceptual poetry'. From the beginnings of his career Adorno harboured suspicions about the process of discursive argument. On the very first page of his Metacritique of Epistemology Adorno explicitly appeals to a 'method that hopes to leave argumentation behind' (Metakritik: 9). The goal of cognition is already presented here, beyond all dialectical disputation, as the 'evident' noetic disclosure of that which is. Adorno treats the objective 'disappearance of argument', which Husserl philosophically codifies but does not decipher, as an index of the 'moment' in 'which the rights of argument and counterargument vanish, in which the only task of thought is simply to name what is; what everyone already knows, so that there is no longer need for argument, what does not need to be said, so that no counter-argument still needs to be heard' (Metakritik: 219). With Benjamin's metaphysics of 'the name' and the messianic 'word of redemption' Adorno here appears to provide philosophical sanction for a decisionistic 'end of discussion' in the post-bourgeois age (cf. Metakritik, ibid.). In Negative Dialectics, on the other hand, Adorno partly rehabilitates the process of argument, although the work ultimately still remains indebted to the Benjaminian 'name' and

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the noetic ideal which this implies. It is true that Adorno criticises Benjamin's terms insofar as they 'tend to an authoritarian concealment of their conceptual character' (ND: 59; ET: 53), but he continues to submit every conceptual operations to the ultimate 'hope of the name' (ibid.). The utopian end of dialectics in the 'evident' manifestation of truth still provides the measure for the proper relationship between thesis and argument.

'The task would be to possess cognitions which are not absolutely correct and watertight [ ... ] but are ones in relation to which the question of correctness would annihilate itself. [ ... ] To think dialectically means that the argument should acquire the emphatic force of a thesis and the thesis should harbour all the wealth of that which grounds it' (Minima Moralia: 122). It is true that Adorno himself goes on, in the same sentence, to repudiate 'irrationalism' and the 'promulgation of arbitrary theses that are legitimated through faith in some purely intuitive revelation'. But he still strives after a cognitive perspective where all objections are immediately seen as indications of error. 'The philosophical ideal would be to dispense with accounting for what we do simply by doing it' (ND: 55; ET: 48). But who properly decides whether or when this ideal has been attained? ls this not another example of the 'elevated tone' of philosophy which Kant already censured, a tone which seeks to disarm all further critical questioning? Adorno's general suspicion of argumentation as an expression of instrumental reason and logical domination, along with what he says about 'the priority of content' in critical opposition to positivism (ND: 55; ET: 48), tends to bring him, from a contemporary perspective, into a disturbing proximity with those from whom he most emphatically desired to distance himself. Adorno's claim that the demand to justify one's theoretical assumptions is one that is incompatible with the 'experience of the mind' (ND: 39; ET: 30) could equally have come from Heidegger. We can read in Gadamer, as well as Adorno, that 'method' endangers truth. If one thinks of Adorno's critique of the miscarried autonomy of the subject and his utopia of a 'non-identity without sacrifice', one only has to exchange a term to discover man himself as the 'shepherd of the non-identical'.5 Adorno even appears to repeat the elitist gesture of Heidegger's thought when he says that 'truth is objective, not plausible' (ND: 50; ET: 41) and argues that the 'criterion of truth is not its immediate communicability to everyone' (ND: 49; ET: 41). Is negative dialectics then simply a negative elitist theory propounded by negative dialecticians? 'The construction of truth in analogy with a volonte de taus -the final consequence of the concept of subjective reason - would defraud every human being, precisely in the name of all, of what they need. If an undeserved stroke of fortune has at least preserved the mental outlook of some individuals from total accommodation to the prevailing norms - a stroke of fortune they have often had to pay for in their own relations to the social environment - it falls to these individuals to make the moral or, so to speak, representative effort to say what most of those for whom they say it


cannot see or, injustice to reality, cannot afford to see' (ND: 49; ET: 41). It is not indeed the fate of 'being', but the 'universal context of illusion', the 'spell' of reality itself as ideology, that necessitates the separation between the philosopher and 'the many' in Adorno's eyes, but the basic model is structurally the same as it is in Heidegger, A blinded and deluded form of subjective reason only hinders the expression of the truth, and that is why the task of speaking the truth remains a task for the few. 6

We must bear all of this in mind in order to understand why Adorno seems attractive to many today precisely from the perspective of an antiCartesian counter-enlightenment that would enlighten us about the project of enlightenment. The thesis of the end of enlightenment, of its internal failure, thus appears as the most enlightened thing we can say. The end of the subject is no longer merely proclaimed by Heidegger, but by structuralism and systems theory alike. What is more natural, therefore, than to celebrate Adorno as a 'forerunner' in this regard? The 'priority of content' over mere method - this is now no longer the watchword of phenomenology and the 'remembrance of being', but also of those weighty neo-historicist tomes which regard themselves as superior to the analytical philosophy that has only recently begun to make its influence felt. We can easily find theories concerning the necessity for an educational and cultural elite in many a contemporary newspaper. Why should we not regard Adorno's work as a negative version of the same thing?

IV

In order to counter these suspicions it is not enough to repeat Adorno's formulations, to claim that everything we have said so far is merely half the truth, and thus completely untrue. Against the irrationalism of mere intuition, Adorno says that philosophy 'strives, through the concept, to transcend the concept' (ND: 25; ET: 15). But what does that ultimately mean? How can we actually succeed, by conceptual means, in transcending the conceptual? Does Adorno really mean anything different from a 'thoughtful preparing' for some new dispensation of being? The demand for specific self-reflection upon conceptuality itself, which Adorno expresses in many passages, also remains a mere metaphor until and unless we can show how this critical self-relation on the part of thought is possible and indicate the conceptual acts through wich it is accomplished. The recourse to mentalistic language only encourages a suspicion of solipsism and thus strengthens the impression that negative dialectics is merely a matter for privileged and esoteric thinkers who are monologically concerned with their own barely unintelligible ideas. Adorno says that thought 'need not rest content with its own law-like character; it is capable of thinking against itself without thereby forfeiting itself; and if any definition of dialectic were possible, this might be amongst the best' (ND: 124; ET: 141). Self-reflection as the 'ferment of

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spiritual experience' is grasped here as the active resistance to everything merely mechanical and coercive within thought. The dialectical and antinarcissistic point is that the power for such resistance must be drawn from the mechanical and coercive element of thought itself. This the element in which, for Adorno, the natural compulsion of mere self-preservation finds expression in the 'subjective coercion of the rules of logic' (ND: 143; ET: 141) since 'the only way out of the dialectical context of immanence is through this context itself' (ibid.). In Minima Moralia Adorno already claimed that 'dialectical thinking is the attempt to break the coercive character of logic with its own means' (MM: 284). If that too is not to remain a mere metaphor, then the structure of a thinking that thinks against itself can only described in terms of a logic of critique. This logic of critique is a critical theory of logic accomplished through logical reflection, and in this sense is a dialectic. But it is a negative dialectic because, in one of its most central principles, it challenges Hegel's contention that the negation of the negation results produces affirmation. The self-application of critique, the critical self-reflection of critique, therefore produces no result that is no longer itself subject to critique. The expression 'negative dialectics' is thus another word for a logic of critique with an open result, though it is not for that reason without a goal of its own. In this way this logic of critique is the organon of critical theory itself.

A logic of logical critique is reflexive in character, i.e. is constituted precisely as a self-relation. In this sense it is less a description of certain acts of consciousness than a theory of reflection.7 For its own critical practice is always already thematised internally. We can only consider this impossible if we regard the hierarchical relation of object-language and meta-language as the final word of philosophy. In the context of 'natural' language we know exactly what it means to speak about our speech. Dialectic as a critical logic of the logical itself simply makes methodical use of this process, and this also clearly reveals why Adorno essentially refers dialectic as a critical practice back to language itself. One of the strongest and most striking remarks in Negative Dialectics is Adorno's observation that 'concepts alone can achieve what the concept hinders' (ND: 59; ET: 53). The reflexive dimension appears here as the critical relation of concepts to the concept and the work it performs. The transition from the plural to the singular is deliberately and carefully made: 'Cognition is the trosas iasetai. The flaw which can be determined in every concept makes it necessary to appeal to others. This is source of those constellations which have alone inherited something of the hope of the name. The language of philosophy approaches that name through negation. The claim of immediate truth with which philosophy reproaches words is almost always the ideology of the positive existing identity of word and thing. Insistence upon the single word and concept as the iron gate to be unlocked is also a mere, though indispensable, moment. To be known, the inner character to which cognition clings also


always requires an external aspect' (ibid.). The noetic 'hope of the name' cannot be fulfilled through a single concept, but especially not through any name. For Adorno the concept merely enables us to say what something 'falls under', but it hinders us from saying what something 'is'. In order to reach what the concept hinders concepts must come together in a constellation where they all relate both to something and critically to one another. This is of course the negation of the name, or of the hope for the immediate presentability of something in language, but it is a negation under the sign of the 'hope of the name'.

For Adorno it is constellations of concepts which first allow cognition to 'cling' to the inner character of the object. This metaphor already implies Adorno's idea of conceptual mimesis which must not simply be identified either with aesthetic imitation or with any derived form of intellectual intuition.8 'Thinking without a concept is not thinking at all' (ND: 103; ET: 98). Conceptual mimesis is accomplished through the ever repeated critical thinking through of the object of thought. The difference between thought and the thing sustains the critical distance which allows us to combine selfreflection with a constant 'correction on the part of the object' (ND: 53; ET: 47). This mimesis is a process which turns 'conceptuality [ ... ] towards the non-identical' (ND: 22; ET: 12). Adorno essentially thinks of it on analogy with Hegel's model of 'the experience of consciousness'. This analogy extends to the shared insight that experience is not the mere material of thinking and cognition, but rather its beginning and its goal. Consciousness already possesses experience when it thinks philosophically, and it hopes to develop experience precisely as philosophical consciousness: namely a kind of 'spiritual experience' as Adorno calls it ~ 'full, unreduced experience in the medium of conceptual reflection' (ND: 23; ET: 13). Thus negative dialectics appears in Adorno as a thinking of experience for the sake of experience. The analogy with Hegel ends, from Adorno's perspective, when experience is subjected to the compulsion of the system and thought therefore passes over from the critique of concepts to a critique of the non-conceptual as 'idle existence'. For Adorno idealism in this sense is incompatible with experience. 'The utopia of cognition would be to unseal the non-conceptual with concepts, without thereby making it identical with them' (ND: 19; ET: 10)

But the esprit de systeme is not to be identified with the esprit systematique, and the latter has its own place in Adorno's thought through the stringency with which the experiences of dialectic find their expression in language: 'For philosophy expression and stringency are not two dichotomous possibilities. They need each other. [ ... ] Expression is relieved of its accidental character by thought, on which it toils, just as thought toils on expression. Thought only becomes succinct through its expression, through its presentation in language; what is laxly put is poorly thought. Expression wrings stringency from the very thing expressed' (ND: 27; ET: 18). The stringency of conceptual constellations, which are meant to give stringent expression to

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the thinking of the object through their expressive function, is not a formallogical stringency or rigour, but a linguistic-discursive one. Negative dialectics, understood as a conceptual practice, is the praxis of a discourse which accepts an ideal that demands the stringent expression of unregimented experience in the medium of philosophical language: negative dialectics, as a theory, is the logic of this discourse.

Adorno's own characterisation of the praxis of negative dialectic confirms this interpretation of the constellations or configurations of concepts as a stringent discursive context oriented to the utopian cognitive goal. This is especially clear if we consider the structure of the conceptual models which Adorno himself presents precisely as models of this praxis. Adorno writes as follows: 'To comprehend a thing itself, rather than merely inserting or registering it within a system of reference, is simply to recognise the individual moment in its immanent relationship with others' (ND: 34; ET: 25).

How is this really possible, given that we can 'recognise' nothing in purely immediate terms, that is, by merely looking at it (cf. ND: 37; ET: 27f.)? An answer is suggested by Adorno's remarks on the difference between a classificatory or deductive deployment of concepts on the one hand, and constellations of concepts on the other. He writes: 'the constellation illuminates the specific character of the object, that which is either a burden or a matter of indifference to any classifying procedure. The model for this is the conduct of language. Language offers no mere system of signs for cognitive purposes. Where language appears essentially as language, where it becomes presentation, it will not define its concepts. It lends objectivity to them through the relationship it establishes between concepts centred about the thing. Language thus serves the intention of the concept to express fully what is intended. By themselves, constellations represent from without what the concept has cut away within: the "more" which the concept both would and cannot be. By gathering around the object we would know, the concepts potentially determine the object's interior. The concepts thus attain, in a thoughtful way, what thought has necessarily excised from them' (ND: 162; ET: 162). Adorno thus ascribes to the concept the 'hope of the name' which it is nonetheless incapable of fulfilling precisely because it 'cuts away' what should essentially concern it. The constellation of different concepts, into which it enters, is both the second best and very best solution for this dilemma. Adorno contrasts the constellated structure which allows this from any definitional, classificatory or deductive system and appeals instead to the model of discursive speech and its capacity to 'present' the things of which we speak. Thus Adorno also takes the constellation of concepts, patterned on discursive speech, as his model for metaphysics as a 'legible constellation of the things that are. From these it would receive the matter without which it could not be; it would not transfigure the existence of its elements, however, but bring them into a configuration which permits the elements to come together as script' (ND: 397; ET: 407). When things


become 'legible' in this way, this does not simply imply the duplication or reproduction of that which is. For a subjective synthesis, essentially different from that described by Kant, has already entered into the constellation in question. Adorno clarifies his own concept of synthesis with reference to the process of musical composition and draws an analogy between such synthesis and the disappearance of subjective arbitrariness in the resulting work or composition. 'Subjectively produced, such compositions are successful only where the subjective production disappears in the former. The subjectively created context - the "constellation" - is now readable as the sign of objectivity: of spiritual content. Such constellations resemble writing through the conversion to objectivity, by means of language, of what has been subjectively thought and gathered' (ND: I 65f.; ET: 165).

This of course does not yet indicate the ultimate standard for the objectivity of spiritual content. Adorno tries to illuminate this by extending the metaphor of legibility: reading things as 'the text of their becoming' binds the 'spiritual content' of the object to the history that is 'congealed' and 'sedimented' within it (ND: 58; ET: 52). Adorno singles out this 'reading' as the point of contact between 'idealist and materialist dialectics' (ND: 59; ET: 52). In other words, he essentially binds his concept of negative dialectic to the old hermeneutic claim that to understand something is to understand how it has become what it is.9 He thus develops a quasi-transcendental theory of tradition, devoid of all traditionalism, in which determinate negation furnishes the model for a transformative preservation of the tradition. Adorno thereby combines critical and hermeneutic motifs. 'Amongst other possible versions of the overly narrow questions which inspired the Critique of Pure Reason one in particular should not be neglected: how a thinking that must relinquish tradition can also preserve it in a transformed manner. For this alone is spiritual experience' (ND: 61; ET: 54-55). And in Adorno such experience always refers back to an engagement with texts, though hardly with sacrosanct ones, as is usually the case in academic 'seminars' and 'philosophical research'. Adorno is essentially concerned with dialectic as the transformation and preservation of tradition in philosophical discourse itself.

To 'read things as the text of their becoming' - this formulation clearly reveals how Adorno combines the traditionally Kantian model of the knowledge of objects with hermeneutic and narrative elements. The synthesis of the manifold which produces the unity of the object must be constituted is such a way as to permit the interpretation of the object through the reconstruction of its history. Not formal logic, but the presentational capacity of language here provides the relevant clue for the cognition of the object. But this does not imply the kind of merely narrative understanding which the new historicism would press upon history as the appropriate methodological ideal: 'However much language labours to express the history congealed in things, the words we use are still concepts' (ND: 59; ET: 52-53). The

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history in objects is a congealed history and thus reveals a certain structure. In order to grasp the structure, we must awaken this history to new life, and we can only reawaken the history in 'petrified' things by playing them 'their own tune' .10 Adorno, in agreement with Marx, regards this retrospective transformation as the methodical goal of critical theory in general. If we seriously wished to exploit Adorno's few methodological observations in Negative Dialectics for a theory of cognitive discourse, we should have to relate the inner connection between conceptual, hermeneutic and narrative presentation with the connection between history and structure in the object.

v At this point we glimpse a boundary which I believe cannot be crossed. One can distinguish Negative Dialectics and its noetic utopia of knowledge from intuitionism, irrationalism and the Heideggerian ontology if we reconstruct Adorno's critique of reason as an alternative construction of rationality based upon the presentational capacity of language. From this perspective Negative Dialectics appears as a logic of critical philosophical discourse, one which it is not only rewarding, but also imperative, to develop further. But it is surely impossible to reconstruct negative dialectics as an 'ontology of the wrong state of things' (ND: 20; ET: 11) and its supposedly necessary methodological grounding in the 'matter itself'. Adorno refers his model of the connection between conceptual and hermeneutic-narrative exposition in the negative dialectical method back so directly to the structure of reality itself that, for him, the end of dialectics would coincide with the utopia of a rightly organised society: 'In relation to concrete utopian possibility, dialectics is the ontology of the wrong state of things. The right state of things would be free of it: neither a system nor a contradiction' (ND: 20; ET: 11 ). System and contradiction, constitutive conditions of dialectics as such, are not supposed to be merely subjective and methodological conditions of genuinely cognitive philosophical discourse. Adorno is reluctant to regard negative dialectics merely as a method, and in this he follows Hegel. But he does not wish to accept the basic premise of the Hegel's understanding of dialectic, i.e. 'the presumptuous idealist presupposition that the subject can abandon itself purely and unreservedly to the object, to the thing itself, because the latter reveals itself in the process as what it already is in itself, namely as subject' (ND: 187; ET: 188). In place of this idea Adorno propounds a social thesis: that of the universal mediation of everything individual and particular through the antagonistic totality of exchange society .11 A critique of idealism and a theory of universal mediation would initially appear to exclude one another. But Adorno connects them by following Marx and interpreting the absolute of idealism directly as the totality of society in mystified form and understanding the anti-idealist critique of system as a


philosophical component of the critique of the social system in its entirety. The most important conceptual models of Hegel's dialectic thus seem to be preserved within the context of negative dialectics. Here I would simply mention Adorno's claim that a dialectical interpretation of the individual involves deciphering the universal as an antagonistic whole (cf. ND: 54f.; ET: 45f.). And when Adorno speaks of the 'pre-established disharmony' (ND: 23; ET: 14) he is suggesting a negative version of Leibnizian monadology which is structurally the same as absolute idealism. Whether it is the power of the 'absolute idea' which penetrates and extends to everything ephemeral or, alternatively, the 'spell', the 'context of illusion', of exchange society which does so - in both cases the plausibility of either positive or negative dialectic derives solely from a totalising approach which neither Hegel nor Adorno is capable of justifying through the deployment of the dialectic.

The 'errors' in Adorno's exposition of the non-identical, which we criticised at the beginning, have their roots precisely here. He could only turn his critical anti-idealist thesis of universal mediation into a self-grounding argument if he could also demonstrate that fundamental social antagonism is the ultimate basis of non-identity in all its possible logical variants. It may be difficult to discover the principle of identity within the principle of exchange. But in addition to this Adorno also claims to show that nonidentity in general - whether logical or psycho-social non-identity - can be read as an index of the whole whose untruth is universally represented in the principle of exchange. The relationship between non-identity and social antagonism is supposed to generate the concept of 'contradiction' in this connection. Firstly, Adorno attempts to show that contradictions arise whenever non-identity itself is expressed and, secondly, to present such contradictions in philosophical discourse as 'real', i.e. as representative of the structures of the antagonistic whole. He does not succeed on either count. Adorno writes: 'Contradiction is the non-identical under the aspect of identity', or again: 'It is the index of the untruth of identity, of the absorption of the object by the concept. Yet the appearance of identity is inherent in thought itself, by virtue of its very form. To think is to identify' (ND: 15; ET: 5). In order to substantiate this claim, Adorno would have to show that the various forms of conceptual judgement generate contradictions when they attempt to express anything more than identity. But he could not possibly show this because his examples, as we saw above, never simply exemplify identity. Thus he also grasps the most varied results of dialectical interpretation under the general title of 'contradiction': like the difference between subject and predicate, or the logical distance between universal concept and individual thing. The inadequacy of singular judgements in relation to the entire state of affairs in question, the discrepancy between claim and reality, between reality and possibility, between is and ought - all this is interpreted by Adorno in terms of contradiction. This

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explains why Adorno inevitably regards all substantive thought as dialectical, as if the cases of non-identity, here interpreted as contradictions, would otherwise disappear in purely analytical propositions or tautologies. But it is not true that contradiction arises whenever we express more than identity. The domain of substantive discourse without contradiction is much more extensive than Adorno assumed, and that is why we are not compelled to embrace dialectic to the degree which he thought required.

The second step, the transition from the universal contradictory character of substantive thought to the antagonistic totality, could not convincingly be justified either. Here Adorno closely follows the logical metaphorics which Marx introduced to social theory when he 'coquetted' with Hegel's 'mode of expression' in presenting his own critique of political economy. 12 Given his interpretation of Marx's science of society as a totalising theory based on Hegelian categories, which he had adopted from Lukacs, Adorno developed his doctrine concerning the substantive mediation of every individual phenomenon through the 'social totality' and concerning the formal mediation produced 'by virtue of the abstract regularity of the totality itself, that of exchange' (ND: 54; ET: 47). This even appears to Adorno as the rational core of the so-called 'problem of constitution' (ibid.) The text summarises the entire path that leads directly from the theory of society to dialectics in Adorno's sense: 'Concept and reality have the same contradictory essence. The dominating principle, which antagonistically rends society, is the same which, in spiritualised form, produces the difference between the concept and what it subjugates. That difference assumes the logical form of contradiction because, measured by the principle of domination, whatever does not bow to its the unity appears not as something other than and indifferent to that principle, but as a violation of logic' (ND: 54f.; ET: 48). For Adorno the dominant principle of exchange is the principle of domination that forces everything that differs from itself, in nature or in society, into a form that inevitably appears as a violation of logic in the theoretical sphere. From this perspective it is clear that non-dialectical thought can only appear as an endorsement and consolidation of social repression by theoretical means.

Negative dialectics, considered as the 'ontology of the wrong state of things', is a concept that cannot be salvaged. It rests upon an ontological interpretation of what are merely apparent contradictions in the propositional structures of substantive discourse. This interpretation arises from the fact that Adorno regards such discourse as a direct reflection of reality or at least presents it in an isomorphic relationship to reality. And this is why he can claim that all reference to change, discrepancy, non-equivalence, conceptual surplus etc. - i.e. critical philosophical thought as such - is only possible at the cost of 'violating' logic. Adorno came to this conviction because he identified the critique of idealism and the critique of society. Hegel's absolute idea, which appeared to him as paradigm of 'identity' in general, and the social totality were, for Adorno, two forms of the same

1 "7A


whole, the whole that is untrue. Even in his turn to negative dialectics, which Adorno understood as a materialist turn, Adorno failed to problematise his own totalising appeal to the whole, and thus, for all his critique of Hegel, remained Hegelian himself.

This is also the reason why it is so difficult to determine in Adorno the nature of 'the matter itself', the Sache selbst, to which one should cognitively and conceptually abandon oneself. This question would doubtless have struck Adorno himself as eminently 'undialectical', as a typical challenge from 'conclusive' argumentative and identificatory thought. Since Adorno, like Hegel, is not prepared to distinguish between the 'matter itself' and its presentation, the entire 'matter' is in truth identical with the whole that is presented as such: this is ultimately the one and only object of Adamo's critical theory. The totalising approach of his theory leads to holism. The models of Negative Dialectics, through which Adorno exemplified his idea of constellated thinking, are always concerned with the whole as the untrue. And in truth they only ever concern the totality - even when, and especially when, they are presented through particular and individual analyses. 'To grasp a thing, not merely to insert it within a system of relations, is simply to recognise the individual moment in its immanent context with others' - for Adorno, as a negative Hegelian, this appeal to the discursive and constantly revised presentation of the individual is based entirely upon the greater premise that one can only know something singular or individual when it is properly and immanently related to the whole. 'The negative motif of identity philosophy has retained its power. Nothing particular is true, nothing is, as its particularity claims, simply itself (ND: 153; ET: 152). But the underlying thesis here implies a holistic ontology which can be confirmed neither in idealist nor in empirical terms. How then can a materialist dialectic justify a totalising appeal to the 'matter itself', if the Marxian critique of political economy can no longer be endorsed as the rational core of the Hegelian dialectic?

Nor is it accidental, therefore, that the relevant 'matter itself' coincides with the 'non-identical'. Adamo's theory deploys the intended content of this latter term in so many different contexts of meaning that it cannot be understood without articulating the entire 'ontology of the wrong state of things'. The 'non-identical' too is an all-embracing or total concept and that is why it is so difficult to grasp in terms of examples. In truth Adamo's philosophy consists in a single thought, although this thought cannot be expressed in a proposition. In this respect Adorno resembles Heidegger. But Adorno differs, to his credit, from Heidegger in that he would not have shown the door to someone who dared to ask, 'But Professor, what exactly is the non-identical?' 13 He would rather have struggled to explain it, and have started to do so straightaway. And this difference makes all the difference. In Negative Dialectics Adorno always attempts to provide the most concrete possible exemplification of the various aspects of his claims.

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Nonetheless, such attempts inevitably fail because 'the absolute, as distantly envisaged by metaphysics, would be the non-identical that could only emerge once the compulsion to identity has been dissolved' (ND: 396; ET: 406). The non-identical is thus an imageless image of a whole that is no longer untrue. That is why Adorno also writes that 'cognition which desires content desires utopia' (ND: 63; ET: 56). Negative dialectics does not merely entertain a utopian cognitive goal. Its goal is utopia itself. This Platonist of the nonidentical also follows Plato in refusing to recognise any substantial distinction between theoretical and practical philosophy: his cognitive and his social utopia coincide in the idea of a condition that would no longer require dialectic.

VI

This condition appears again and again in Adorno's writings as a hedonistic utopia of perfect instinctual fulfilment that is not merely bought at the cost of infantile regression. This is the materialist content of the ideas of redemption and reconciliation which Adorno regarded as regulative theoretical and practical principles of all theory: 'Only one who could discover utopia in the blind somatic pleasure that needs no intention and fulfils the last intention would be capable of an idea of truth that will not yield' (MM: 102). This utopian hedonism is one of the most fascinating, and problematic, claims with which Adorno's work confronts us. I believe that it is ultimately responsible for the irrationalist appeal of Adorno's thought in the eyes of many. It is necessary to defend his negative dialectic from this apparent irrationalism and insist that it is intended as a construction of rationality rather than its opposite. The theory of the irrational whole must not itself become irrational - that would be a false adequatio indeed - and Adorno's utopia gives us no good reason to make concessions here. But the price which this defensive strategy exacts today is the abandonment of the ontological interpretation of the dialectic derived from Hegel, Marx and Lukacs and a return to dialegesthai in critical theory itself. 'Dialectic, literally: language as the organon of thought' (ND: 62; ET: 56) can be a rational construction, albeit as negative dialectic, even if reality is not.


Adomo's writings are cited in the text using the following abbreviations: ND: Negative Dialektik, Frankfurt am Main 1966 (ET: Negative Dialectics, tr. E. B. Ashton, London 1973); MET: Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie, Stuttgart 1956; MM: Minima Moralia, Frankfurt am Main 1951; StW: Stichworte, Frankfurt am Main 1969.

Cf. the contributions in: Lindner I Ludke, eds., Materialien zur iisthetischen Theorie Theodor W. Adornos, Frankfurt am Main 1980. Cf. especially Rudiger Bubner, 'Kann Theorie asthetisch werden?', op. cit., p. 108f. Habermas also refers to the 'transference of cognitive competence to art' in Adomo's Aesthetic Theory.

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Cf. J. Habermas, Theorie des kommunikativen Handels, I, Frankfurt am Main 1981, p. 514. Although this cannot be defended in detail here, I believe that Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory stand in a complimentary rather than transitional relationship to one another. I certainly do not think that Adorno's concept of cognition is so aporetic that it simply rules out the idea of rationally reconstructing Negative Dialectics. My essay is intended to show, at least in part, how this might be done.

2 I allude to Kant's essay Von einem neuerdings erhobenen vornehmen Ton in der Philosophie (1796); On a Newly Arisen Superior Tone in Philosophy, ed. and tr. by Peter Fenves, Baltimore 1993, pp. 51--72.

3 Cf. Baumeister I Kulenkampff, 'Geschichtsphilosophie und philosophische Asthetik', in: Lindner I Liidke, op. cit., p. 33f.

4 Cf. J. Habermas, Philosophisch-politische Profile, Frankfurt am Main 1971, p. 182; Philsophical-Political Profiles, tr. by F. G. Lawrence, London 1983, pp. 99-109, especially p. IOOf.

5 Cf. Martin Heidegger, Uher den Humanismus, Bern I Frankfurt 1946, p. 19: 'Man is the shepherd of being'; 'Letter on Humanism', in: Martin Heidegger. Basic Writings, ed. by D. F. Krell, London 1978, pp. 189-242.

6 Adorno's thought also reveals the crux of every 'evidential' theory of truth: the problem of communicability that inevitably strengthens any elitist tendencies on the part of the thinker in question. Adorno's work exhibits throughout a distrust of 'communication' as a potential form of ideology. It is hard to imagine that he would ever have subscribed to a consensus theory of truth, even if he had been prepared to admit the communicative foundations of his own theory. Cf. J. Habermas, Philosophisch-politische Profile, pp. I 84ff; Philosophical-Political Profiles, pp. 105ff.

7 Cf. the further discussion in my book, Reflexion und Diskurs. Fragen einer Logik der Philosophie, Frankfurt am Main 1977, although I do not attempt to develop a full theory of the dialectic there.

8 The difference between aesthetic and conceptual mimesis is the principal reason for the complimentary relationship between Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory which we mentioned above. In this connection cf. J. Habermas.

9 Cf. my article 'Etwas verstehen hei13t verstehen, wie es geworden ist - Variationen iiber eine hermeneutische Maxime', in: H. Schniidelbach, Vernunft und Geschichte, Frankfurt am Main 1987, pp. 125-151.

10 As Marx put it: '[ ... ] these petrified conditions must be made to dance by having their own tune played to them!' Cf. K. Marx, 'Kritik der Hegeleschen Rechtsphilosophie. Einleitung', in: Die Fruhschriften, ed. by S. Landshut, Stuttgart 1955; 'Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right. Introduction', in: Karl Marx, Early Writings, tr. by Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton, Harmondsworth 1975, p. 247.

11 Cf. Christel Beier, Zurn Verhiiltnis von Gesellschaftstheorie und Erkenntnistheorie. Untersuchungen zum Totalitiitsbegrijf in der kritischen Theorie Theodor W. Adornos, Frankfurt am Main 1977.

12 As Marx put it in the 'Epilogue' to the second edition of Capital (1873). 13 As is credibly alleged of an unfortunate student in a seminar of Heidegger's

who had asked what 'being' was supposed to mean.

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10

NEGATIVITY IN ADORNO

Michael Theunissen

Source: Ludwig von Friedeburg and Ji.irgen Haberrnas (eds), Adorno-Konferenz 1983, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983, pp. 41-65. Translated by Nicholas Walker 2006.

There is reason to doubt whether Negative Dialectics actually represents, or was ever intended to represent, something like the 'methodology behind Adorn o's substantive works' .1 But in this text Adorno certainly explicates the concept of negativity which is deployed throughout these works. This would suggest that Negative Dialectics itself can best be interpreted in the light of this concept. In the following discussion I shall attempt to develop the fundamental idea of philosophy which underlies the argument of Negative Dialectics with specific reference to the concept of negativity. This requires some preliminary remarks concerning the specific manner in which Adorno himself employs the word 'negative'. The first task here is to reveal the unifying sense which lies behind his different uses of the word. We shall then trace this sense back to its original ground in Adorno's idea of philosophy itself.

1

The word 'negative', like its counterpart the word 'positive', is intrinsically ambiguous. On the one hand we speak of 'positive' and 'negative' in relation to the distinction between being and non-being in general, and on the other hand with reference to the distinction between what ought to be and what ought not to be. In the first case, negativity relates to specific kinds of propositions, namely those which claim that something is not this or that, that something is not the same as this or that, that something simply is not, that is, does not exist. For the sake of brevity I shall describe this as the negativity of non-being: of that which is not. In the second case, negativity relates to the claim that some state of affairs ought not to be, a claim we can in principle make about anything. In the first case, the negative is directly opposed to the positive. The positive here, ponere in a non-subjective sense,

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refers merely to something objectively posited as being. In the second case, negativity is opposed to the positive insofar as it implies the sense of affirmare as well as ponere. It is thus essentially opposed to the 'affirmative', to something which people otherwise agree in affirming. In this sense the 'negative' signifies what we do not agreed to affirm, or what we wish did not exist: something that ought not to be.

The theories of negation that have been developed in traditional and analytical philosophy alike have all essentially concentrated upon the first kind of negativity. Adorno, on the other hand, is principally concerned with the ontic negativity of what ought not to be, the negativity of the bad. But he can only address the latter as the 'false' because he deploys a concept of untruth that is concentrated explicitly upon a bad or fundamentally deficient reality. Of course, Adorno also refers to the negative in the usual philosophical sense of negation. But he speaks not of the negative as such, but rather of the negative insofar as it appears from the perspective of negativity of the ought.

However various the senses in which Adorno deploys the adjectival expression 'negative' may be, they would all seem to share a common reference to that which ought not to be. This alone is directly relevant to our understanding of Adamo's idea of philosophy. I shall try to show this by clarifying the internal connection between the different senses of the term 'negative' as much as possible. I say 'as much as possible' precisely because the inner unity of the negative in Adamo's thought is problematic. This inner unity is problematic for several reasons: firstly, insofar as it depends upon a concept of identity that is burdened with a number of difficulties and equivocations; secondly, insofar as Adorno interprets identity as 'domination' [Herrschaji], which is then summarised and abbreviated as 'compulsion' [Zwang]; thirdly, insofar as it rests upon the questionable assumption of an essentially isomorphic relation between social domination and that of 'identificatory' thought in general. There is no need to examine all of these problematic aspects of the argument at this juncture. Herbert Schnadelbach has examined the equivocations in Adamo's concept of identity and the difficulties involved in the analogy which he draws between society and identificatory thought.2 And more recently, Axel Honneth has explored the problems attaching to a concept of domination that derives all these features from the purely instrumental control over nature. 3 As far as the present discussion is concerned, it is sufficient to describe the different forms in which negativity reveals itself as compulsive domination, and to explicate the inner relationship of these forms.

The negativity of 'compulsion', which Adorno describes as 'negative in the simplest sense' of the word (ND: 146; ET: 145), manifests itself principally in three forms. The first of these forms that is mentioned in Negative Dialectics is 'identifactory thinking'. The 'concept' in the subjective sense characteristic of such thinking is 'negative', Adorno tells us, because it

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'cuts down' what the thing itself is and 'replaces' it with an identity (ND: 173; ET: 173), i.e. regulates it in a way that dominates and oppresses the object. Adorno already interprets this form of the negative as something ontic, which is why he can describe thought itself as a 'piece of existence' (ND: 63; ET: 57). It is society, in all its previously existing forms, which represents all-encompassing reality here. On the assumption that society has always been built upon the principle of oppressive rule or domination, Adorno can also claim that the supposedly 'essential laws' of society themselves bring the 'negativity that makes the world what it is to the level of the concept' (ND: 169; ET: 168-69).

We only need to explicate social negativity here with respect to its role in the overall theoretical perspective of Negative Dialectics. It is encountered here not only in the 'subjective' form of the concept, but also, and more directly, in the other two principal forms of the negative. Adorno shares Hegel's contention that the objective concept also belongs to reality over and beyond the merely empirically real or given. In this sense the empirically real is supposed to 'correspond' to the objective concept as its 'Bestimmung'. The second form of the negative is the negativity of this concept, or, as Adorno also says, the negativity of 'the universal'. By this he means that the intrinsically real concept of the real is 'fused together with the untrue, with the oppressive principle' (ND: 54; ET: 48).

But the oppressive principle also manifests itself in the empirically real itself insofar as the latter transmits, so to speak, this dominating oppression to thought as such. Hence Adorno's interpretation of the 'fixed' (ND: 46; ET: 39) and 'indissoluble' (ND: 58; ET: 52) moment which threatens to dominate thought by creating the appearance that this moment can never be dissolved. On this interpretation what the young Hegel called 'the positive' assumes the form of an 'immediacy' which, in accordance with Hegel's logic of determinate being, can only present itself as an apparent 'first' because it has already concealed its own source.4 Measured against the criterion of the ought, it is actually a negative. That which ought not to be is the third form of negativity. 5

Adorno presents all three forms of negativity as concrete embodiments of oppressive control or domination. But at this point a certain turning point of thought is also revealed. For it is no longer simply thought that dominates, but rather its own object. Here we have also reached a turning point insofar as thought, which dissolves the apparently indissoluble, is the only ought that Adorno ever presents from his own perspective as 'negative' (ND: 36; ET: 36). And here he is clearly adopting Hegel's claim about the intrinsic negativity of thought itself. But in the process Adorno also intensifies this idea in twofold fashion. In the first place, he equates negativity with critique. Negation in the medium of thought must already constitute critique since it presupposes that the 'positive', in the sense of the real being of the given, is itself intrinsically 'negative' as that which ought not to be.

lRO


In the second place, Adorno interprets critique as a form of opposition. To say that thinking itself is negation specifically implies that it is a kind of 'resistance to what is foisted upon it', a 'repudiation of the demand that it must bow to everything immediate' (ND: 28; ET: 19). The turning point in question indicates not merely a change in the location of power, but ultimately a transformation of the qualitative character of power itself. If identificatory thought is a bad form of domination over the powerless, critical thought is the good power of resistance against the overpowering threat of the immediate. The special role of the negativity of thought itself indicates that the turning point, explicitly grasped as the Archimedean one from which alone the world might be transformed, is also the raw and sensitive point where theory must also fear for itself.

In spite of its special place and role, this negativity still obeys, in a certain sense, the rules of general linguistic usage already described: Adorno calls critical thought negative with reference to the paradigmatically negative, i.e. with reference to the fact that it negates the negativity of domination and thereby exercises a certain power of its own. In Negative Dialectics Adorno can only perceive and individuate his specific theme, namely the 'nonidentical', from the vantage point of domination: the non-identical is what eludes the domination of the concept. But the non-identical is not itself another form of negativity. Adorno describes it as 'negative' only from the perspective of identificatory thought. The 'non-identical' is only experienced as something negative in the current 'unreconciled state of things' (ND: 39; ET: 31), and this precisely because it escapes the domination of the concept. It appears 'negative' insofar as it inevitably appears as something 'divergent or dissonant' (ND: 15; ET: 5), something that eerily defends itself against conceptual identification. Thus the non-identical is indeed something that ought not to be, though only from the perspective of that which itself ought not to be. As Adorno himself puts it: the negativity which is the overt truth that 'necessarily appears in the covert shape of the ever-same' is an 'untruth only for what is itself untrue' (ND: 41; ET: 33).

This implies that, in Adorno's own view of things, the non-identical is the true. Adorno does not ascribe truth to the non-identical simply because he ultimately interprets it, through recourse to Walter Benjamin's 'language of things', as that which intrinsically communicates itself as such (cf. ND: 163; ET: 163-64). For Adorno the non-identical already harbours truth in the way in which it initially presents itself: as what is incommunicable within the historically conditioned language at our disposal. In the nonidentical Adorno would salvage the repressed truth of the 'ineffable' that represented the utterly untrue in Hegel's eyes.6

One might regard the fact that Adorno envisages the non-identical as the site of truth as a conclusion that obviously follows from his original premises: if identity is what ought not to be, then non-identity is naturally what ought to be. But it is less than obvious to say that the non-identical constitutes a

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direct theme of Adorno's theory of negation only insofar as it represents what ought to be. As something simply positive, as something that really is, the non-identical does not form part of the theory at all. And even as the 'non-conceptual' (ND: 21; ET: 11) or the 'conceptless' (ND: 19; ET: 9), which is how it inevitably appears to the traditional philosophical conception of the negative, the non-identical belongs only indirectly to Adorno's theory of negativity itself. It only becomes directly relevant to this theory as the criterion for the critique of the authentically negative. It is only by virtue of the historical power of the latter that we can also understand in what sense it is an inauthentic negative that has been 'imposed' on our experience (ND: 187; ET: 189).7

2

After this preliminary discussion of the different senses of 'negativity' in Adorno we are now in a position to uncover the idea of philosophy which effectively grounds the relative unity behind all these senses. Adorno tells us that the 'negative', the 'false', is the 'arena of dialectic' (ND: 173; ET: 173), of that dialectic which Adorno specifically presents as a 'negative' one. To this extent it seems plausible to begin our quest for Adorno's idea of philosophy with the title 'Negative Dialectics' itself. But Adorno's philosophy can no more be summarised in terms of 'dialectic' than any other philosophy can be. For in conjunction with the dialectical movement itself, this philosophy also constantly traces a movement that 'leads out of the dialectic' (ND: 40; ET: 31 ). The specific characterisation of Adorno's dialectic as a 'negative' one does not really help us further here. The qualification 'negative' refers, on the one hand, to the non-identical and, on the other hand, to the 'false'. As the consistent and emphatic 'consciousness of non-identity' (ND: 15; ET: 5), negative dialectics consists entirely in its own negativity. For in this regard the qualification 'negative' is merely a characteristic marker of identificatory thought. This follows directly from our earlier observation that the non-identical is negative only from the perspective of such identificatory thought. But as 'the ontology of the false state of things' (ND: 20; ET: 11) negative dialectics dissolves itself as dialectic. For if it is ontology, it is itself already false (cf. ND: 148; ET: 146f.). In this respect negative dialectics is a negated dialectic.

Thus the quest for Adorno's idea of philosophy finds itself thrown back once again to the concept of negativity. Dialectic certainly plays a fundamental role in this idea. But how it does so exactly betrays its own negation. In Adorno dialectic also negates itself, and in such a way that it transcends itself. But this self-transcendence is itself dialectical. Dialectic comes to awareness of itself precisely through this self-transcendence. Adorno demonstrates this point by reference to the problem of exclusivity. All dialectic that is fixated solely upon itself raises a claim to exclusive validity. But this


is undialectical. The self-transcendence of dialectic consequently overcomes the undialectical moment that belongs to all mere dialectic (cf. ND: 395; ET: 405f.). Adamo's concept of philosophy will therefore also be dialectical. But its dialectical aspect is not a general dialectic that is merely specified by the addition of the term 'negative'. It is the specific dialectic of a philosophy of negativity. And it is the idea of this philosophy that we must now attempt to clarify and present. It involves a dialectic which transcends itself precisely by passing over into 'metaphysics'. Adamo's reference to a dialectic in transition to metaphysics (cf. ND: 395; ET: 405), in conjunction with the peculiar character of this dialectic, already indicates the ultimate conclusion, as we shall see at the close of our analysis, which he is forced to draw from his own philosophy of negativity.

3

The general understanding of 'negativity' that remains paradigmatic for Adorno - one in which it is primarily interpreted as an expression of the 'bad' - effectively began to crystallise around 1850, although it had already been anticipated by certain tendencies that had emerged at the very beginning of the century. If the later Hegel still attempted to interpret 'evil' as something best characterised as a sort of non-being, Karl Rosenkranz was already prepared to ascribe a kind of emphatic negativity to phenomena such as madness, disease or ugliness in relation to which the negativity of non-being appeared secondary and derivative. This transformation in our conception of negativity reflects the historical experience of the modern age. For with this concept philosophy was essentially reacting to 'the negative dimension of the existing world', something which was indeed already apprehended by the young Hegel (who constitutes in this respect a kind of unconscious point of reference for so many post-idealist thinkers).8 One could describe the kind of philosophy which increasingly reacted to the world in this way as 'negativism', to borrow a term that was deployed in psychiatry around the same time to describe a certain form of pathology.9 In the philosophical context, however, this should not be interpreted to imply any capitulation to 'the negative'. For philosophical negativism understood itself explicitly as a critique of the negative (in the sense of the 'bad' state of things), and this with reference to a correspondingly normative conception of 'the positive'. Such negativism saw itself as an alternative to the 'nihilism' which was also, and not merely by chance, emerging around the same time.

Yet this alternative appears to lead to a certain dilemma. Hegel himself had already transformed metaphysics into the philosophy of history. He was still confident, of course, that the reality of today could be interpreted in relation to the ever-same reality of 'being' in a recognisably metaphysical sense. 10 After Hegel, however, metaphysics effectively forfeited any credibility it had once possessed, at least as far as the prevailing outlook of the time

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was concerned. 'Negativism' could now only occupy the territory of the philosophy of history by interpreting the latter as the theory of the currently existing world, and as a theory which must derive its own principles and perspectives from this same historical world. It also, therefore, intended to derive its criterion of critique from the negativity of the existing world itself. This is the intention which underlies both the critical social negativism of the later Marx and the critical existential negativism of the later Kierkegaard. 11

It remains highly questionable whether such an intention can effectively be realised. For if 'the negative' is indeed the negative character of' the world, and not merely a negative aspect in it, then this world does not seem capable of harbouring 'the positive' within itself at all. This is the central problem with which every form of negativism finds itself confronted. Negativism can only resolve this problem by dissolving this seeming impossibility, by showing that the negative does indeed contain its own opposite. All of the specific dialectical methods peculiar to the philosophy of negativism, like the dialectic of contradiction already deployed in Marx and Kierkegaard, are essentially attempts to demonstrate precisely this. But of course 'the negative' - as I hardly need to underline here - has only revealed itself ever more emphatically and extensively over the last hundred and fifty years. As a result it has become increasingly difficult for philosophical negativism to ascribe what is still 'positive' in the world to this particular world itself. Any philosophy which attempts to respond to the experience of the negative has found itself increasingly driven to locate the positive in something 'other' set over against the existing world. There is therefore nothing left to such philosophy, it seems, but a certain return to metaphysics.

This provides a rough outline of the general territory in which Adorno's philosophy must be situated. It is hardly difficult to show this since the 'negativist' character of his thought is immediately obvious. We simply need to clarify the background which permits us to see how Adorno articulates the central problem we have just discussed. I shall then proceed to examine Adorno's unsuccessful attempts to resolve the problem and show how this failure necessitates the transition from 'negative dialectics' to 'metaphysics'.

In order to confirm Adorno's 'negativism', it is unnecessary to drag out once again his easily misunderstood thesis from Minima Moralia that 'the whole is the untrue' .12 In Negative Dialectics itself he characterises the currently existing world as 'false to the core' (ND: 39; ET: 31 ), as a case of 'absolute negativity' (ND: 352; ET: 361 ). Adorno invests these originally Hegelian expressions with a significant variety of meanings. In its principal sense, 'absolute negativity' in Adorno is not the unthinkable or unsayable with which the concept of the non-identical was concerned, but the un-imaginable and un-speakable character of the negative. The unspeakable involves a certain negation of the negative, which was certainly also part of what Hegel understood by negativity, but in Adorno this is a negation

H!A


which makes what is bad even worse, above and most concretely with reference to the utterly alien character of death. And here it is important to note the theoretical implications of the 'absoluteness' of absolute negativity for Adorno: there is no site or perspective outside or beyond this negativity from which it might be comprehended philosophically. If something which is 'incommensurable with all experience', as he puts it in one of his many formulations of this fundamental problem, 'has become a total a priori', then 'devastated human consciousness no longer possesses a place [ ... ] from which it might ponder its predicament' (11: 286). This insight furnishes the first negative premise of Adorno's thought.

If the negative, now become absolute, is inaccessible to philosophical knowledge from the outside, anyone who seeks the truth of human life, anyone who is unable to renounce this search, must decipher it from the 'estranged form' of current life, as Adorno puts it in Minima Mora/ia (4: 13; ET: 15). That this is indeed possible is the second, and positive, premise of Adorno's thought. To understand how Adorno thinks it is in principle possible to derive truth from untruth itself, we must indeed clarify the claim that the 'the whole is the untrue', or rather the reversed, but equally valid, claim that the untrue is the whole. For if we grasp this claim in the only way that Adorno can meaningfully intend it, it actually reveals the possibility, not the impossibility, of the philosophical knowledge in question. It is quite true that Adorno's critique of the 'social totality' also applies to himself insofar as he is the one who conceptualises society precisely in terms of totality. 13 But we can complete our own analysis here without recourse to the concept of totality. The negative is the whole only in the sense that the negative currently prevails. I am not fathering any further thesis on Adorno himself here. It is implicit in his analysis that the negative character of domination also goes hand in hand with the domination of the negative. We can interpret his references to the 'spell' or 'fatefulness' of domination itself as ciphers for its evidently prevailing negative power. 14 It is not the thesis of the universality of the negative as such, but his interpretation of this universality in terms of domination which stamps Adorno's negativism with its specific character (though it is foreshadowed by Marx in this respect). But if the negative is the whole only because it currently prevails, its universality does not of itself imply that nothing positive exists. It simply implies that the negative leaves its mark upon everything else in the existing world. 15

The negative can be recognised from within because it both harbours and conceals the positive within itself. According to Negative Dialectics, this is presupposed even by the experience of despair over the negative: 'Consciousness could never despair of greyness, if it did not harbour the concept of a different colour whose scattered traces have not yet vanished within the negative whole' (ND: 368; ET: 377-78).

The positive premise is at least as essential to Adomo's negativism as the negative premise. 16 If we attempted to interpret this negativism in a total

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fashion, Adorno's thought would cease to be philosophy at all. A total negativism, or nihilism in the vulgar sense of the word, would simply destroy itself in Adorno's eyes. In his critique of Schopenhauer in Negative Dialectics Adorno makes it quite clear that such negativism, presented as an immediate and undialectical verdict upon the world as a whole, is nothing but an inverted positivism (Cf. ND: 368; ET: 377). Considered more closely, we can see that Adorno's position is essentially distinguished from that of total negativism in two respects: firstly, he holds fast to the possibility of something other than the prevailing state of things, and secondly, he also ascribes a certain actuality to this other possibility, and indeed an actuality within the existing world. 17

Of course, it is one thing to claim the existence of the 'scattered traces within the negative whole', it is another to justify this claim. Adorno must be able to show the plausibility and correctness of his positive premise. And it is this task which first properly defines his specific philosophical standpoint. We can distinguish two strands in Adorno's various attempts to address this question. On the one hand, he makes a series of attempts to resolve the problem in a purely dialectical fashion, which thus fall below the level of thought already occupied by his principled negativism. On the other hand, he undertakes to address the problem on the basis of a genuinely negativist philosophy of history. Here too he appeals to a kind of dialectic, but one that has been developed specifically on the ground of negativism itself.

4

Adorno's purely dialectical attempts to resolve the problem are distinguished from his negativist attempts not merely by the fact that they employ different means for this purpose, but also in a certain sense with respect to the end and purpose in question. This end is only clearly revealed when we compare and distinguish the partial tasks that are involved in the overall task of legitimating his general positive premise. In the first place, and most importantly, Adorno must be able to disclose the actuality of the 'positive' in a concrete manner. But he must also be able to show how our knowledge of this positive can be attained in the first place. This knowledge coincides, according to Adorno, with the kind of thinking that already supposed to represent a critical resistance to the prevailing power of the given. We must therefore also be able to locate the ground of the possibility of the force that animates this resistance itself. But we must be able to do more than this. Adorno entrusts critical thought with the force that Walter Benjamin had once ascribed to historical materialism: that of 'exploding the continuum of history'. 18 What Benjamin here calls the 'continuum' of history, is precisely what Adorno describes in terms of 'immanence' or the 'context of delusion'. But to 'explode' the latter would already be to liberate ourselves from its power. What we need to clarify, therefore, is not merely the force that

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inspires the struggle against this power, but that which suggests the prospect of potential victory. Benjamin believed he could dispense with the latter task because his own unquestioned messianism allowed him to content himself with the observation that we have already been 'endowed' with the 'weak power' of this messianic expectation. 19 Adorno, however, undertakes to translate Benjamin's messianism into philosophical terms through recourse to Hegel's theory of negativity. For in fact Adorno interprets the thinking which possesses the force of 'exploding the indissoluble' (ND: 36; ET: 28) in Hegelian terms as a force of negation. Adorno must also therefore be able to justify this force in philosophical terms, and indeed with the conceptual means already provided by Hegel's theory of negativity. This is precisely the purpose of Adorno's own purely dialectical strategies. And by 'pure dialectic' in this context I understand Hegelian dialectic itself, or one which attempts to spring free of this dialectic without thereby actually establishing an entirely different ground of thought.

But these purely dialectical strategies designed to accomplish Adorno's purpose quickly prove impossible to negotiate. The first way out of the difficulties which Adorno attempts to pursue is the immediate Hegelian one of ascribing the relevant force to negation itself (cf. ibid.). But he finds this to be a purely 'speculative' one, the adoption of which could in turn never provide anything more than a purely speculative solution to the problem.20

The alternative idea of continuing to exploit the Hegelian 'negation of the negation' nonetheless is also effectively closed off to him. I think I believe right in assuming that this is actually what Adorno attempts to do. In the first place, his denial of Hegel's claim for the positive result of double negation is not directed less against the idea of the negation of the negation itself, as against the tendency to ontologise it. For Adorno claims that double negation is certainly valid as far as 'the progress of philosophical knowledge' is concerned (ND: 159, Note; ET: 159). But in fact he also applies the thesis of double negation to objective states of affairs. The idea lives on indirectly in Adorno's conviction that nothing can be redeemed except with reference to death (cf. ND: 382; ET: 391-92) and returns directly in the form in which Marx renewed it as a thesis of the philosophy of history concerning the necessity of universal compulsion for the ultimate realisation of freedom (cf. ND: 148; ET: I 46f. ). But Adorno himself thereby falls back into the mythic conception already rationalised by Hegel's doctrine, into the remarkably uncritical repetition of the trope of the trosas iasetai (ND: 59; ET: 53), the saying that the wound can be healed by what first dealt it.

All of those notions which Adorno develops in distancing himself from Hegel by purely dialectical means without thereby establishing a new ground of thought strike me as quite mythical and magical in character. It would surely be magical to entrust dialectic with the force of 'inwardly breaking out' from the context of delusion, of effectively emerging from this context

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expressly by appropriating its own power (ND: 396; ET: 406). And Adorno's attempt to ascribe this force entirely to the object, independently of any subjective appropriation, appears an even more irrational option. Adorno's claim that 'nothing leads out of the dialectical context of immanence but the context itself' (ND: 143; ET: 14 l) only entangles itself in an unproductive contradiction. For if this context were indeed dialectical, and therefore transcended itself, it would precisely no longer be a context of immanence. But the opposite procedure, that of ascribing the force of liberation unilaterally to the subject, is surely entirely irrational. The idea that it is the 'gaze' of the subject that 'shatters' the husks concealing the truth (ND: 398; ET: 408) only betrays that Adorno himself expects even more of 'intellectual intuition' than the idealist philosophy that he criticises ever dared to do. In distancing himself from Hegel, he adopts the same mythical moment that the speculative theory of negation had already made its own: the gaze of the spirit that 'looks the negative in the face and tarries with it', and precisely thereby expects to acquire 'the magic power' that 'transforms the negative into being'.21

The cognitive optimism that breaks through at this point is hardly something external to Adorno's thought. It also underlies his methodological ideal of the 'constellation' as the assumption that the mystery of time reveals itself in terms of space.22 But this optimism ultimately finds itself at home wherever negative dialectics is ready to inscribe the figures of Hegelian dialectic. For it is most insistently and obviously revealed where Adorno engages with the principal legacy of Hegel's thought, with the idea of a concept that is both subjective and objective in character. Adorno believes he is in a position to judge whether the 'subjective' concept corresponds to its object, or whether the object fulfils its 'objective' concept, i.e. its own vocation or determination (cf. ND: 147; ET: 146), without even asking from what standpoint such a judgement could properly be made. And just as the classical philosophical tradition has always addressed the essence and vocation of man, so too Adorno argues: 'If humanity is to dispense with the compulsion really imposed upon it by the identificatory process, then it must also come to identity with its own concept' (ibid.). But he fails to acknowledge that the identificatory compulsion must also affect mankind's conception of its own concept. The fatal consequence of this failure is that Adorno cannot properly think the 'negativity of the universal' which he nonetheless affirms.

At this point we can also clearly situate Adorno's dialectical theory of society within the context of these purely dialectical - and pre-negativist -strategies. According to this theory, society, like the 'bad' political state in Hegel,23 'still represents, even in its most questionable form, the sum concept of the producing and self-reproducing life of human beings' (7: 335). For all its negativity, therefore, society is never simply negative. We might regard this relativisation of the social negative as one more attempt to

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convince us that the positive is somehow harboured within the negative. For here Adorno also understands the 'sum concept' in a Hegelian sense as itself the real concept of the empirically real. The 'objective irrationality', for example, towards which late capitalism is essentially propelling our society (8: 359f.), involves a kind of self-contradiction: the contradiction between the concept of society and its current reality which can be deciphered from the tension between stasis and dynamism, or between central administration and the forces of the market. But this dialectic of 'concept' and 'reality' also relies upon Hegel's optimistic assumption that the real concept of the negative is what essentially discloses the latter to the process of comprehension.

But Adorno also claims, in the same context, that the properly social dimension itself, or 'mediation' as he also calls it (8: 11 ), has now become invisible. And he supports this claim with a plausible argument: social life is so thoroughly mediated today that 'precisely the moment of mediation is disguised by its very totality' (8: 369). The totalisation of mediation renders the latter invisible because total mediation excludes immediacy and thus creates the appearance that it is itself something immediate. But this obfuscation of what is really social renders society unintelligible. The optimism we have already mentioned is clearly difficult to reconcile with this unintelligibility (cf. 8: 12), which, as he recognises, also places Adorno's own theory of society in question. This optimism ultimately colludes with the absolute negativity which grounds the unintelligibility of society.

5

The optimist implications which are perhaps suggested by Adorno's purely dialectical attempts to resolve his basic problem are not merely pre-negativist, but downright anti-negativist in character. We have claimed that Adorno's other series of attempts to solve the problem, on the other hand, are essentially based upon a genuinely negativist philosophy of history. To the degree that Adorno expressly assumes this negativist ground, he also decidedly reduces his claims to philosophical 'knowledge'. He contents himself with revealing the positive as something actual within the negative character of the existing world. And here he initially falls back on little but emphatic assertion. Adorno's entire philosophy of history, like Benjamin's, remains essentially eschatological. One strand of his eschatological reflections simply assumes the scattered traces in the negative totality as a given. Over against the mere affirmation of such traces, however, this strand of his thought also suggests a certain possibility of knowledge by concretising the idea of traces.

In this connection Adorno presupposes what theologians call prolepsis: the anticipation of the future in the present.24 Adorno's idea of reconciliation here stands in for the future, an idea which forbids 'positive conceptual identification' (ND: 146f.; ET: 145) precisely because it alludes to an open future. But this future is also, as he claims, already present, and that within

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the process of exchange. Reconciliation is intimated by 'the rationality which is also harboured, albeit ideologically, as a promise in the principle of exchange', in 'the ideal of free and fair exchange' (ND: 148; ET: 146-4 7). Adorno certainly assumes, far beyond the mere exchange of equivalents, a kind of communicative relationship between donating and exchanging. 25 In this connection he could have appealed to the Greek word which St. Paul uses to describe to the act of divine reconciliation (katallage), which can also refer to commercial exchange in the market place. But whatever truth value this assertion may possess, Adorno effectively denies it himself. The remark which he makes in almost the same breath - 'what might be otherwise has not yet begun' (ND: 146: ET: 145) - amounts to a denial of any proleptic eschatology. Because Adorno took this remark more and more seriously as he became older, he was increasingly driven to restrict such eschatology to an aesthetics which, like that of Ernst Bloch, presented works of art as an 'anticipatory semblance' [ Vorschein], as a 'representative of things no longer disfigured by the process of exchange' (7: 337). The only thing left behind for real history is a trace that survives 'from the past' (ND: 368; ET: 378). But the earlier denial afflicts this final residual position too. For Adorno simply retreats here to Benjamin's version of a proleptic eschatology that is one oriented to the past, to a conception of history which interprets the past itself as a 'Now Time' which 'is shot through with chips of Messianic time', as Benjamin puts it in the last of his Theses on the Philosophy of History.

But prolepsis is not actually the basic figure of Adorno's eschatology. For indeed the characteristic form of this eschatology would be better described as apocalyptic in character - and this not merely because the author of Minima Moralia was inspired after the example of Karl Kraus to entitle the contemporary drama of world history 'After Doomsday' (4: 61; ET: 54). Adorno's eschatology is essentially apocalyptic pre-eminently in assuming the total absence of the positive in the negative. This perspective contradicts the proleptic eschatology for which the 'reconciled state of things' is also present in its absence insofar as the idea of future reconciliation reaches back into the present. Where the figure of prolepsis is still inscribed in Adorno's apocalyptic perspective, it is only in this sense: the presence of the future points precisely not to that of the positive, but of the negative, that of the catastrophic end of history. This is how Adorno interprets Auschwitz: as an anticipatory manifestation of 'absolute integration', of the 'indifferent disposability of every individual life' (ND: 353; ET: 362).

But this apocalyptic eschatology not only clearly contradicts the authentically proleptic approach, but also Adorno's general axiom that the scattered traces of another colour, beyond the present grey, cannot be entirely absent from the prevailing negative totality. If the apocalyptic perspective contradicted this idea in every respect, it would of course invalidate the negativism to which the perspective itself also remains indebted. What it actually contradicts is simply the hypothesis concerning the real immanence


of the pos1t1ve in the negative. For Adamo's apocalyptic eschatology affirms an immanence - a kind of non-real immanence which could perhaps approximately be described in the way that Husserl describes the presence of objective signification for consciousness: as an ideal immanence.26

In order to examine this more closely, I should also recall the already much discussed final aphorism of Minima Moralia where Adorno says: 'consummate negativity, once squarely faced, delineates the mirror-image of its opposite' (4: 283; ET: 247). This consummate negativity is defined by the consummate absence of the positive. For Adorno this absence constitutes the condition of possibility for negativity to delineate 'the mirror-image of its opposite'. Here Adorno effectively appropriates the thought that had already governed Hegel's procedure in the Logic when he accentuated the 'difference that belongs to distinction into downright opposition'. 27 Something that is merely distinct from something else does not thereby already refer us directly to the latter. Something first refers explicitly to something else only in becoming its opposite. Adorno proceeds to supplement this idea with two specific qualifications derived from Benjamin. One is marked by the telling reference to 'script'. The positive must be 'read off' from the negative. While it is not immanent in the latter a 'real' sense, it can nonetheless be deciphered through a kind of reading. The other is marked by the image of the 'mirror' which suggests the way in which the positive is properly immanent in the negative: it presents itself there in an inverted form. The opposite of consummate negativity can be read off from the latter itself because it is configured there like the inverted letters of mirror writing.

It is pointless to ask after the ultimate justification of this Hegelian idea and its various metamorphoses here. For the entire thought, which Adorno himself clearly regarded as self-evident, rests upon an assumption that cannot be recuperated, as Adorno realises, in philosophical terms. In this context we must acknowledge that apocalyptic eschatology itself can never be recuperated philosophically. For the context of the argument demands that philosophy must relegate apocalyptics to the level of the 'dialectical image': 'We must frame perspectives which could reveal the fractured and alienated character, the cracks and crevices, of the world as it would one day appear, in all its indigence and distortion, in the messianic light.'

But this is impossible since it presupposes a 'standpoint' liberated from the spell of actual existence, that site outside and beyond the negative which absolute negativity has by definition already excluded. A negativism which responds to the demands of the apocalyptic situation itself can no longer therefore be realised in the medium of philosophical cognition. It can now only properly be realised in the domain of art. Adorno's essay 'Notes on Kafka', composed around the same period as Minima Moralia, suggests the intention behind Kafka's writings in precisely the same terms as our aphorism expresses the unfulfillable demand addressed to philosophical

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knowledge. But of course Kafka 'feigns' the site of which we have been speaking.28 Philosophy cannot do what art does because it must forbid itself this fiction.

6

After everything that we have said, it is clear that Adorno's attempt to resolve his difficulties by appeal to a negative philosophy of history must also be regarded as a failure. It is this failure which compels negative dialectics to pass over into metaphysics. When Adorno saw that philosophy, after the moment for its successful realisation had been missed, now called for a kind of critical repetition, he was forced to turn back from an apocalyptic perspective which inevitably demanded too much of philosophy and attempt instead to search out the traces of the positive within the negative. But since the traces in question cannot convincingly be demonstrated as an anticipatory manifestation or glimmer of the historical future, he is compelled to interpret them as a reflected image of transcendence (cf. ND: 394; ET: 404). Negative dialectics passes over into metaphysics as a philosophy of transcendence which is 'sustained solely by the experiences of immanence' (ND: 388; ET: 398). His philosophy certainly illuminates these experiences, and especially those that touch on human happiness. But this transition to metaphysics is not merely something that is externally added on to the body of negative dialectics. It permeates the whole work down its innermost practical purposes and intentions. For negative dialectics concurs with metaphysics precisely in its desire to 'lead out beyond the sphere of immanence' (ND: 388; ET: 398).

Metaphysics must furnish the support that negativism is unable to find anywhere else. In order to grasp what this effectively implies in detail, we must return once again to the concept of non-identity. At the end of the 'Introduction' to Negative Dialectics Adorno translates the concept of non-identity into the language of non-being, of that which is not. This translation must be read retrospectively, that is, from the end of the book where the non-identical is revealed as the 'absolute' (ND: 396; ET: 406). The concept of the non-identical encodes that of the absolute. Now the 'Introduction' concluded with the claim that thought, however negative it is, 'reaches out to touch that which is not'. It thereby reaches out to touch the absolute. And that alone is why dialectic - as the ontology of the false state of things itself false - can yet be true. Only insofar as it reaches out to the absolute can negativism be capable of truth.

We still need to ask, of course, by what right Adorno elevates the non-identical to the status of the absolute. While further clarification of this question does not indeed fully clarify Adorno's right to the concept of the absolute, it vouchsafes some insight at least into the specific significance which Adorno ascribes to this concept. Formally speaking, it is quite possible


to determine and develop the non-identity we discussed at the outset in terms of the absolute insofar as non-identity is specifically defined as the negation of the subject. Positive non-identity also shares this negation of the subject with the negative non-identity that essentially refers to ego identity. 'Non-identity designates both the historical disintegration of the unity of the subject and the emergence of what is not itself subject' (11: 294). The object, which the concept of the non-identical was intended to illuminate, shares this character of non-subject with the absolute in Adorno's sense of the term. It is because Adorno ultimately thinks truth as that of the absolute (cf. ND: 375; ET: 384f.), that he can say that truth finds its original image in 'that which is not subject' (ND: 383; ET: 375).

Adorno's concept of the absolute is specifically characterised precisely insofar as it not 'subject'. For he wishes to think that dimension of the absolute which has remained unthought in every attempt to think it before. Nonetheless the absolute by no means simply consists in the negativity of that which is not. The latter appears at the end of Negative Dialectics in a more differentiated form as 'something that is not, and yet is more than that it is not' (ND: 383; ET: 393), indeed as 'something more than the existent' (ND: 387; ET: 397). The existent' here signifies the world. That which is not is more than the existent since, if it were revealed, it would be 'other than the unspeakable that exists, other than the world' (ND: 393; ET: 403). But it is also more than itself, as that which merely is not, insofar as it shines into the existing world. In the reflected light of transcendence the non-existent, as the wholly other, also reveals the full depth of the object, that 'innerness of objects that also lies beyond them' which is disclosed in the experience of happiness (ND: 365; ET: 374).

7

Having clarified something of Adorno's conception of the 'absolute', we must now, by way of conclusion, interpret our findings explicitly with reference to the question concerning his fundamental 'idea' of philosophy. And in this connection we are principally interested with the relationship between metaphysics and the philosophy of history. If Adorno's thought turns metaphysical precisely in response to the aporias thrown up by his own contributions to the philosophy of history, we can hardly describe that thought, basically and in its entirety, as itself a philosophy of history. It is true that Negative Dialectics tends to create the impression that this is just what it is. But the world that metaphysical thought attempts to transcend only seems, on the surface of the work, to collapse ambiguously into the world of the historical present. Adorno's reference to 'that which is', to 'beings', already equates the historical world with the metaphysically conceived world of appearance. It thus remains unclear whether the 'other' is intended to indicate another world or something other than the world.

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Beneath the surface, however, it is clear that the metaphysical stratum is the fundamental one. Negative Dialectics returns utopia to eschatology, and indeed to a platonised one which no longer expects the eschaton from history itself, but interprets it as an ultimate expression of the 'last things'. The claim to a purely secular utopia dissolves before the insight that no worldly progress could ever 'touch the injustice of death' (ND: 376; ET: 385). Adorno continues, of course, to reflect upon a right constitution of human society. But he judges this rightness itself pre-eminently in relation to the measure of our openness to transcendence. For Adorno, society would be rightly constituted only if it could inaugurate the 'possibility of a right consciousness concerning these last things too' (ND: 388; ET: 398).29

But negative dialectics is not simply a metaphysics, any more than it is simply a philosophy of history. This is the case not merely because it refuses to provide ultimate answers, 30 but rather, and above all, because it also sub/ates metaphysics. This 'sublation' is Adorno's alternative to Heidegger's project of 'overcoming' metaphysics. Sublation also certainly involves a de-struction of metaphysics. But Adorno understands the metaphysics in question not, like Heidegger, as a thinking which effaces a difference, that between being and beings but, on the contrary, as one which fixes a difference, that between this world and another world. 'Destruction' here, as with the critique of Plato from Aristotle to Nietzsche, is directed at the doctrine of two worlds. In his critique of what he calls 'the positivity of the mundus intelligibilis', Adorno also treats Kant as an inheritor of this doctrine. For if the 'ought' is regarded as an 'essential realm in its own right', it inevitably assumes 'another kind of existence' directly opposed to the existing world (ND: 381; ET: 391 ).

But if we remember that Adorno's 'sublation' of metaphysics represents a 'destruction' of philosophical dualism, one cannot avoid concluding that it also reconstructs metaphysics at the same time. This sublation opposes the idea that the other of the apparent world is something intrinsically different from appearance precisely in order to preserve its purely differing character. Adorno's ready appeal to the concept of transcendence already betrays that negative dialectics results in a positively sublated dualism that is surely no further from fixated dualism than it is from monism. Adorno sublates metaphysics positively and negatively at the same time insofar as he repudiates it as ontology, according to his own self-understanding at least,3' and continues it in the shape of a transformed theology. We can also express this in another way: Adorno rejects the hegelianising Marxism of thinkers like Lukacs, which would preserve the totality without the absolute, in order to preserve the absolute without the totality. In Adorno the absolute becomes the opposite of the totality, becomes the smallest and most inconspicuous thing of all, becomes that which is now only accessible to an expressly micrological approach. What is more, and this is the central focus of this philosophy of history sustained by the absolute, we must


recognise that the absolute, shrinking back before the reductive grasp of thought,32 has become real. The absolute is real not merely as the transcendence which has expressed itself, as it were, in certain acute points - 'as if concentrated in an ultimate extremity beyond all forms of mediation' (ND: 392; ET: 402) - but also as the reflection of the transcendence which glimmers forth specifically from the 'slightest and meanest of things' (ND: 392; ET: 402). Thus negative dialectics ends in a theory of negativity which deciphers the 'ought' from what the world treats as that which ought not to be, from Kafka called the 'rubbish of reality' (10 1

: 262). Negative dialects seeks a refuge, beyond all purely metaphysical theology, in a theology of the self-humbling God.

One's ultimate position with regard to negative dialectics will therefore depend upon one's assessment of the truth-potential of metaphysics. From its inception metaphysics itself was already a latent form of negativism, was already a response to the experience of the negative aspect of this world. It was also therefore engaged with a dualism which was basically already sublated in some way, just as 'separation' (chorismos) is already sublated in 'participation' (methexis) in the thought of Plato. Similarly, earlier negativism, insofar as it was grounded in the philosophy of history, has always been connected with metaphysics. One could even define the philosophy of 'negativism' as an attempt to repeat Hegel's explicit sublation of dualism -a hyper-sublation that tends naturally towards monism - with the intention of preserving the truth-moment of dualism. In spite of their often hegelian language, this intention also lies behind the emphatic but un-hegelian distinction between essence and appearance that reappears both in Marx and in Kierkegaard's paradoxical return to Plato. In this sense, we may say that Adorno's negative dialectics brings previous negativism, and with it metaphysics, to explicit conceptual formulation.

But nothing compels us to believe that negativism is indissolubly bound to metaphysical thought. The 'cognitive optimism', to which we referred earlier, is an exemplary indication that, in a certain sense, Adorno's philosophy is not 'negative' enough. It falls behind the idea of negativism insofar as its own dependence upon metaphysics restricts it to pre-negativistic patterns of interpretation. This problem could ultimately be resolved only if Adorno's thought could be detached from metaphysics itself.

There are of course other alternatives beyond that of measuring Adorno's philosophy against its own 'idea'. But amongst them only nihilism in the vulgar sense, the confession of total meaninglessness, it seems to me, provides a comparably significant response to the historical experience of the modern age. But the philosophy of Adorno certainly possesses an advantage over this in one respect insofar as he cannot rest content with simply pronouncing the untruth of the whole. For we must describe Adorno, as he once described Beckett (11: 289), as a 'simplifier of horror' - though one who refuses all simplification.

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Theodor. W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik, Frankfurt am Main 1966 (abbreviated as ND); English translation: Negative Dialectics, tr. by E. B. Ashton, London 1973. In citing or mentioning other writings of Adorno I refer to the standard edition of Adorno's collected writings: Gesammelte Schriften, Frankfurt am Main 1973-1978, with volume and page number respectively. References are also supplied to Minima Moralia. Reflections from Damaged Life, tr. by E. F. N. Jephcott, London 1974.

2 Herbert Schniidelbach, 'Dialektik als Vernunftkritik Zur Konstruktion des Rationalen bei Adorno' (included in the present collection: 'The Dialectical Critique of Reason. Adorno's Construction of Rationality'). In my own view Adorno's concept of identity runs together the following aspects in particular: I. the intelligibility that results from reducing something to what is conceptually understandable about it. 2. the equality or sameness of different things which is not a case of 'identity' at all. 3. identity in the strong sense, namely the self-identity of the subject or the object. Adorno also interprets intelligibility as the identity which thought produces between itself and the thing that it thinks, the result of the identification of the thing with the act of thought. He never even considers the possibility that we might think of this identity, with the Aristotelian-scholastic tradition, as something that transpires precisely in the encounter between thought and the thing. Nor does Adorno distinguish with sufficient clarity between two forms of self-identity: the concrete selfidentity through which something also transcends what it is, and the abstract self-identity in which something is only identical with itself. Whereas identificatory thinking essentially restricts itself to the latter, the cognition of the non-identical is intrinsically oriented to the former.

3 Cf. Axel Honneth, Kritik der Macht. Reflexionsstufen einer kritischen Gesellschaftstheorie, Frankfurt am Main 1985; English translation: The Critique of Power. Reflective Stages in a Critical Social Theory, translated by Kenneth Baynes, Cambridge, Massachusetts 1993.

4 G. W. F. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik, edited by Georg Lasson, vol. I, p. 96: 'Determinate being is the simple unity of being and nothing. By virtue of this simplicity it has the form of that which is immediate. Its mediation, as becoming, lies behind it. The mediation has sublated itself and determinate being therefore appears as a first from which we then proceed.' For a detailed interpretation of Hegel's analysis cf. M. Theunissen, Sein und Schein. Die kritische Funktion der Hegelschen Logik, Frankfurt am Main 1978, p. I 96ff.

5 The general characterisation of the 'negative' which I have provided ignores the 'quintessence of negativity' that is formulated in Adorno's remark that 'what remains the same as itself, pure identity, is the bad' (ND: 126; ET: 121-22). This form of the negative could only adequately be clarified on the basis of a careful examination of the concept of identity in general. It cannot be treated independently insofar as it does not belong to reality, but arises precisely from the way in which thought itself obscures the character of the real. Adorno's remark formulates the programme of an 'ironically' transformed ontology that unveils 'true being' in the Platonic sense, the realm of self-identical forms or ideas, as a rationalisation of the 'immanent context' of society itself. It would ultimately have to be interpreted in the light of the 'de-struction' of ontology that is discussed at the end of my contribution. Adorno attempts this destruction through a kind of reversal of ontology (cf. ND: 352; ET: 358ff.). The irony lies precisely in this reversal.


6 Cf. G. W. F. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik [Lasson], vol. I, p. 77f.; Enzyklopiidie der philosophischen Wissenschaften, §20; English translation: Hegel's Logic, part one of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, translated by William Wallace, Oxford 1975, pp. 29ff.

7 For further discussion of Adorno's remark about the negative that is 'hung over' our experience, cf. Peter Steinacker, 'Verborgenheit als theologisches Motiv in der Asthetik', in: Neue Zeitschrift fiir systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 23 (1981 ), pp. 254-271.

8 As Hegel expressed it in the 'Introduction' to his essay on The German Constitution of 1799/1800; cf. G. W. F. Hegel, Politische Schrifien, edited by J. Habermas, Frankfurt am Main 1966, p. 16.

9 Cf. the entry on 'Negativismus' in: Historisches Worterbuch der Philosophie, vol. 6, columns 691-694.

10 Cf. Joachim Ritter, Hegel und die franzosische Revolution, Frankfurt am Main 1965.

11 For Kierkegaard's position in this regard, cf. M. Theunissen, 'Kierkegaard's Negativistic Method', in: Kierkegaard's Truth: The Disclosure of the Self, edited by J. H. Smith, New Haven and London 1981 (Psychiatry and the Humanities, vol. 5), pp. 381-423.

12 Cf. Friedemann Grenz, Adornos Philosophie in Grundhegriffen. Auflosung einiger Deutungsprobleme, Frankfurt am Main 1974, p. l 14ff.

13 Cf. Christel Beier, Zurn Verhiiltnis von Gesellschafistheorie und Erkenntnistheorie. Untersuchungen zum Totalitiitshegriff in der kritischen Theorie Adornos, Frankfurt am Main 1977.

14 Cf. other formulations of Adorno like: The power of that negativity has prevailed in reality until today' (ND: 146; ET: 145).

15 Adorno expresses this idea very clearly when he points out how 'in the false world the thoughts of closeness, of home, of security, are banished figures' of experience (ND: 41; ET: 33).

16 This does not imply, however, as Grenz claims, that Adorno 'assumes an equivalence between latent positivism and actual negativity' (Grenz, op. cit., p. 136).

17 I refer exclusively to 'actuality' here since Adorno's belief in the possibility of a different order of things is obvious. Indeed this belief even leads Adorno to reinterpret Beckett's nihilism as an expression of utopian hope. The Adorno of Negative Dialectics believes that Beckett's rejection of the actual world immediately suggests the possibility of a different one (Cf. ND: 372; ET: 381). The standpoint from which Adorno ascribes the thought of 'something entirely other' ( 11: 284) to the author of 'Endgame' is a kind of Kierkegaardian faith in the 'ultimate impossibility of despair' (ND: 376; ET: 385). According to Negative Dialectics something like this is also the implicit driving impulse behind Kant's own metaphysical critique of metaphysics.

18 Walter Benjamin, 'Uber den Begriff der Geschichte', in: Gesammelte Schriften, edited by R. Tiedemann and H. Schweppenhauser, vol. 1/2, p. 701; English translation: 'Theses on the Philosophy of History', in: Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, tr. by Harry Zohn, London 1970, p. 265.

19 Benjamin, op. cit., p. 694; ET: 256. 20 I cannot examine Adorno's use of Heglian concept of determinate negation in

any detail here. Cf. F. Grenz, op. cit., pp. 75ff. 21 G. W. F. Hegel, Phiinomenologie des Geistes, edited by J. Hoffmeister, Hamburg

1952, p. 30; English translation: Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by A. V. Miller, Oxford 1977, p. 19. Cf. Martin Puder, 'Hegels Gottesbegriff', in: Neue Deutsche Hefte 12414 (1969), pp. 17-36.

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22 Cf. ND: 163; ET: 163: 'To recognise the constellation in which something stands is also to decipher what it bears within itself as something that has become what it is.'

23 G. W. F. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik [Lasson], vol. II, p. 410: 'The worst state, the state whose reality corresponds least to the concept, insofar as it still exists, is still an expression of the Idea; the individuals still obey a concept that exercises power.'

24 For more on the temporal character of prolepsis, cf. M. Theunissen, 'Der Gebetsglaube Jesu und die Zeitlichkeit des Christsseins', in: Jesu - Ort der Erfahrung Gottes (Festschrift fiir Bernhard Welte), Freiburg im Breslau 1976, pp. 13-68, especially pp. 18ff.

25 For the implicit 'communicative' content of Adorno's concept of reconciliation, cf. J. Habermas, Theorie des kommunikativen Handels, Frankfurt am Main 1981, vol. 2, p. 523.

26 Cf. M. Theunissen, Der Andere. Studien zur Sozialontologie der Gegenwart, Berlin 1977, pp. 50ff.

27 G. W. F. Hegel, Wissenschaji der Logik, vol. II, p. 61. 28 Cf. T. W. Adorno, 101

: 284: 'His work feigns a place from which creation appears as furrowed and as damaged as hell must be in accordance with its very concept.' Just as the concluding aphorism of Minima Moralia suggests that the only proper philosophical response to despair would be 'to look upon all things as they would appear from the standpoint of redemption', so too Kafka perceives the world 'from the perspective of redemption as hell' (101

: 284). He is able to decipher the 'mirror script' because the 'completed untruth ... is the contradiction of itself' (I 01

: 269). Cf. Sabina Kienlechner, Negativitiit der Erkenntnis im Werk Franz Kafkas, Ti.ibingen 1981, p. 148ff.

29 Traugott Koch and Klaus-Michael Kodalle also speak of Adorno's 'repudiation of any form of hope for liberation which could be grounded or realised in history itself'. Cf. 'Negativitiit und Versohnung. Die negative Dialektik Th. W. Adornos und <las Dilemma einer Theorie der Gegenwart', in: T. Koch I K-M. Kodalle I H. Schweppenhauser, Negative Dialektik und die !dee der Versohnung. Eine Kontroverse iiber Theodor W. Adorno, Stuttgart 1973, p. 12. My own contribution differs principally from the general line of interpretation adopted by Koch and Kodalle insofar as I have expressly attempted to reveal the unified conception behind Adorno's understanding of negativity. They believe, by contrast, that Adorno's thought falls apart into a totally 'negative' philosophy on one side and a positively 'mediating' philosophy on the other.

30 Cf. F. Grenz, op. cit., p. 132. 31 Here I must leave open the question as to what extent negative dialectics

also really remains a kind of ontology after all. Further clarification of this issue would certainly have to interpret what Adorno means by claiming that a properly emancipated dialectic does not simply renounce a 'firm core', although it refuses to grant any 'primacy' to the latter (ND: 46; ET: 37-38).

32 Adorno's remark that 'what recedes becomes ever smaller' (ND: 397; ET: 407) also provides the hermeneutic basis for my claim that Adorno wishes to think that in the absolute which all previous thought of the absolute has failed to think. The absolute recedes before thought because thought attempts to seize and draw it forcibly to itself. And it becomes ever smaller because thought seizes and draws ever more of it to itself. The only thing still left for us to think is a smaller, and increasingly inconspicuous, absolute.

11

DIMENSIONS OF THE NON-IDENTICAL

Anke Thyen

Source: Anke Thyen, Negative Dia/ektik und Erfahrung. Zur Rationa/itiit des Nichtidentischen bei Adorno, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989, pp. 198- 221. Translated by Nicholas Walker 2006.

I wish to provide an initial conceptual clarification of what I shall call here the 'dimension of non-identity' in Adorno. The non-identical itself, as a concept, exemplifies the specific approach which Negative Dialectics presents as the model for the critical practice of philosophy: that we should interpret our concepts as 'constellations' rather than as 'definitions' if we are properly to articulate their effective content. If we acknowledge that nonidentity, in one of its aspects, essentially designates the non-conceptual, one could argue that a conceptual explication of the non-identical is not merely impossible, but also violates the very meaning of non-identity and of Adorno's idea of negative dialectics itself. But in fact I shall claim here that the non-identical can be opened up to philosophical discourse -and thus to conceptual reflection and clarification - and I shall therefore attempt to elucidate the rational character of the non-identical in Adorno. Non-identity is not simply the opposed counterpart of identity, not simply the other of identity. It is rather a constructive limiting concept of the conceptual, and of identity itself. That is why it appears impossible to supply a direct and positive determination of non-identity. For a work like Negative Dialectics, centrally concerned as it is with various forms of mediation, cannot simply identify the non-identical as a positive and utopian counter-project to identitarian thinking. Negative Dialectics actually attempts something else: it would rouse careful reflection upon the implications of Hegel's formula concerning 'the identity of identity and non-identity'. If we grasp non-identity as an essential moment of open-ended reflection, then non-identity can assume its conceptual place at the very heart of negative dialectics itself. For the latter is simply the deliberate and effective consciousness of non-identity.

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I spoke of an 'open-ended' reflection: as far as the possibility of knowing objects in general is concerned, this implies that non-identity must actually be grasped as a moment of knowing itself.

Ute Guzzoni has rightly observed that the term 'moment', in the Hegelian sense, is not strictly applicable to non-identity as Adorno understands it precisely because 'the non-identical is specifically not sublated here through the movement of a comprehensive and all-embracing whole [ ... ] For it is only as a moment of the whole that the non-identical can be grasped precisely as a moment'. 1 The moment, understood by Hegel as a speculative concept, 'disappears' in the whole insofar as it is simply the correlate of the concept of 'sublation' [Aujhebung] itself. Adorno does not share this speculative concept of 'moment' as something expressly oriented to the ultimate identity of the true whole in Hegel's sense.

On the other hand, this conception of Adorno's specific approach as a 'dialectic without moments'2 certainly also ends up by presenting identity and non-identity as opposed poles within the process of knowledge; and it furthermore suggests that identity must be associated with falsehood or inadequate knowledge, and only non-identity with true and genuine knowledge. This is why Guzzoni specifically characterises non-identity in terms of 'otherness'.3 For reasons which I shall attempt directly to elucidate, I do not believe that this interpretation of Adorno's thought does full justice to the radicality of his concept of the non-identical.

Adorno's Negative Dialectics, like the philosophy of absolute idealism, is fundamentally concerned with the problem of dissolving the simple rigidity of the bi-polar subject-object structure. Since Kant it has been obvious that knowledge can no longer be adequately comprehended within this framework. But the conclusions which Adorno draws from sustained reflection upon the philosophical theory of knowledge are rather different from those of classical idealism. In many respects Adorno's thought draws upon the level of insight already achieved by idealist philosophy precisely in order to move from a critique of the principle of identity to the systematic rehabilitation of the principle of non-identity, of the priority of the object. And here we must recognise the 'third' aspect of knowledge: as the site where the knowing subject relates reflectively to itself qua knower. This is what idealist philosophy explicates precisely as the moment of 'consciousness'. On idealist assumptions - i.e. on the premise that identity should be recognised as primary - true knowledge is only possible within the context of some ultimate metaphysical medium like 'absolute spirit', the 'absolute ego' or God. Yet paradoxical though it may sound, it is the idealist response to the reflexive problem of a 'third' level of perspective which itself first allows Adorno to develop the concept of a negative dialectic. For if we re-conceive and qualify the affirmatively construed metaphysical medium of the idealist systems, and the absolutised principle of subjectivity they involve, in terms of the concept of the non-identical, we can articulate the idea of an open,


but not simply relativistic, structure of knowing, i.e. of a kind of knowledge that no longer predictably terminates in the ultimate concept of identity. The negative self-relational character of thought cannot be absorbed into an 'absolute' which allegedly arises solely from itself. For the emphatic consciousness of non-identity necessarily requires the material content in knowledge which the idealists believed they could ultimately surpass or renounce.

If we wish, with Adorno, to provide a critical and reflective revision of the subject-object dialectic, as conceptualised in the philosophy of consciousness, we can only do so by systematically rehabilitating the object-side of knowing over against the claims of idealism. And it is precisely here that we must locate the systematic significance of Adorno's insistence upon the 'priority of the object'. Such priority does not imply that the object itself now simply occupies the dominant place formerly ascribed to the subject. For Negative Dialectics once more takes up - against Fichte, Schelling and Hegel - something of Kant's conception of the 'thing in itself'. One can therefore rightly regard the problem of the thing in itself as a key for understanding the 'object' - oriented dimension of knowing in Adorno.

We have seen that Adorno's concept of identity, and thus also his critique of what he himself identifies as the principle of identity, is certainly problematical in several respects. But this critical impulse of this critique of identity thinking cannot be redeemed simply by vaguely invoking the thought of non-identity or positing it over against a 'bad' or spurious identity. In the following I shall attempt to develop the concept of non-identity that is required through a critical discussion of Ute Guzzoni's own proposals and suggestions with regard to this question.4

Adorno's dialectic of identity and non-identity is not presented as an antithetical alternative to philosophical idealism. Adorno does not simply 'oppose'5 the non-identity of identity and non-identity to Hegel's 'identity of identity and non-identity'. Immanent critique essentially understands itself as a critical reflection upon its own object. Adorno's critique of 'idealism' would be unintelligible if it merely implied the enthronement of non-identity in the place of identity. Non-identity is not a 'good' or genuine otherness standing over against an alienated form of identity.

Misunderstandings here are easily generated if we simply take over Adorno's own highly equivocal use of the term 'identity' in this context. And perhaps this is partly responsible for Guzzoni's interpretation of non-identity as a kind of ineliminable 'otherness'. She explicates identity ultimately in term of 'unity' and treats 'non-identity', by contrast, as a predicate of the multiple, the different, the alien, the other. I have already attempted to show elsewhere why 'identity' and 'unity' cannot properly be regarded as synonymous in Adorno.

I think that the basic difficulty with Guzzoni's approach is that she sees the systematic connection between Adorno's theory of society and his theory

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of knowledge as grounded in an 'ontology of the false state of things'. For reasons that have already been mentioned, I do not think this contributes very much to an understanding of Adorno's critique of identity. In the light of her own ontological critique of identity Guzzoni interprets Adorno as if he were offering two equally valid ways of 'placing the priority of identity into question' .6 One way is presented by the Dialectic of Enlightenment and its critique of the 'identificatory domination of everything that is other', while the other way is presented in terms of a 'speculative-categorial dimension' of thinking.7 In her critique of the paradigm of identity, Guzzoni appears to ignore the difficulties intrinsically connected with what we have formulated as the central problem: the transition between the theory of society and the theory of knowledge in Adorno. 8 And this is why her reading does not really distinguish between subjective-instrumental reason and the identity principle of philosophical idealism.

But this effectively treats non-identity simply as a kind of residuum over against the ontologically ossified predominance of the identitarian paradigm. Non-identity thus becomes a 'remainder' which itself fails to touch or affect identity. We could say that this perspective on the question amounts to an ontologising of the non-ontological. The basic position can be formulated as follows: 'We must understand that man's fundamental relationship to the world is not determined by identity: beings cannot be grasped in their being in terms of identity, and there is always a remainder that cannot be represented through the self-sameness of being itself and which eludes every attempt at identification. And man is not a universal power of grasping the world, in which he would simply posit himself as identical with everything other than himself, and his thinking comes to grief in and through experience. [ ... ] Beings are non-identical, that is to say, they are foreign and other precisely because they signify in different and plural ways, because they have become what they are and are caught up in a process of becoming, because they are dependent upon specific situations and constellations.'9

Apart from the fact that it remains unclear precisely why the foreigness and otherness of things is necessarily connected with dynamic becoming and manifold significance, it is of course quite true that beings cannot be grasped or represented in their being in terms of identity. Adorno would certainly agree with this. Any other position here would simply regress to a preKantian metaphysical view of the thing in itself and thereby reinstate a simplistic conception of the relation between subject and object.

But Adorno's conception of non-identity is emphatically not ontological in the sense described. And this is true even if he sometimes, in a potentially misleading way, takes certain ontic moments as a point of departure for critical reflection. One cannot draw a single line through the heart of the relevant dualisms of subject/object, identity/non-identity, the mediate/ the immediate, the unified/the manifold etc., cannot simply identify a standpoint on one side of the division, for which the alternative side would appear

THEODOR W. ADORNO

of the object on the part of the subject is grounded in the resemblance between the objectifying of experience and the becoming of the object.21

This 'becoming' is concentrated in the particular object, and this is how it acquires the character of something given. But because the object can never be articulated or determined purely in terms of itself alone, the object cannot be separated from the process of its own becoming as mere 'result'.

In our previous discussion the immanent universal has only been thematised as the objective determination of things. But the concept of 'expression' also refers us directly to that of language which contains an intersubjective as well as a mimetic moment. This dimension is already implicit in the concept of experience itself insofar as experience is necessarily related to the individual consciousness precisely as its 'own' experience. We can only meaningfully conceptualise this possessive relation on the basis of the distinction between 'my' experience and 'your' experience, and this therefore also refers us to the universal moment that belongs to every individual subject: '"My" ego is in truth already an abstraction, and far from being the primordial experience that Husserl claims it is. Through this possessive relation the ego rather reveals itself as highly mediated. For "intersubjectivity" is already posited in this relation, not indeed simply as a pure possibility of the ego, but rather as the real condition of selfhood without which the qualifying reference "my" ego would be unintelligible' (Zur Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie, GS 5: 231 ). Adamo's critique of the transcendental subject showed that the possessive pronoun 'mine' must be interpreted in terms of an individual consciousness and cannot be universalised in terms of a pure ego. On the other hand, the truth moment of the transcendental approach, for Adorno, lies in the fact that we cannot conceive of the unity of the individual consciousness without reference to a universal moment. But this universality should not be interpreted as a pre-given law-governed structure which individuals always already and always must obey if they are to be capable of unifying their experiences and constituting their own identity, as a structure which can merely potentially be regarded as intersubjective and thus remains a 'pure possibility' in this respect. On the contrary, the 'mine' can only be grasped as specifically distinguished from the 'yours', and intersubjectivity can only be understood as the process in which a self, as a unity of experience that is distinct from any other self, is produced.22 Here 'individuality' is not merely regarded as an accidental or contingent determination of the self in contrast to an essential 'subjectivity' grounded in some pre-given concept of the subject. On the contrary, the other self, as distinguished from oneself, enters into the experience that is essential to the determination of every individual self.

Adorno's concept of experience can thus be read as a critical alternative to the concept of knowledge that attempts to ground its own objectivity and universality by reference to pure laws of thought. For Adorno, the process of 'communication' in which the universality of our experience is generated

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'a logical metaphor which fascinates effectively by virtue of the entirely unanalysed associations which it suggests'. 13 Discussion of this question can certainly serve to shed some light upon the difficulties involved in interpreting this concept. In fact the 'non-identical' is embedded within an extensive field of other expressions all which elucidate, even though none of them alone fully explicates, the concept in question. These expressions, taken together, mediate an idea of what the concept of the non-identical effectively signifies in a particular context. Negative Dialectics offers us a variety of such expressions: the non-conceptual, the concept-less, the other of the concept, the non-conceptual content of the concept, 14 the indissoluble, 15

the qualitative, 16 the immediate, 17 the other, 18 the various, 19 the alien,20 the undisfigured, 21 what is open and unconcealed,22 that which has become,23

that which is not identical. 24

These expressions form a constellation around a shared core of meaning. Formulated negatively, the latter signifies nothing more nor less than what is not identical. The concept of the non-identical acquires its meaning specifically through an experience of negation directed against the 'identical'. But this interpretation of the concept is still unsatisfactory. I suggest therefore that we should understand non-identity as the limiting concept of the conceptual. It is a concept that belongs entirely neither to the sphere of the conceptual, of the identical, nor to the sphere of the simply conceptless, of the mimetic. Specifically as a limiting concept, the non-identical also possesses methodological significance. And here we should remember Max Weber's idea of'ideal-typical' structures of meaning. In this respect 'limiting concepts' - like that of purposive-instrumental rationality for example -essentially perform a heuristic function. While they are not 'definitions', they serve to reveal some relevant context of meaning for understanding phenomena. They disclose the potential meaning of what they investigate insofar as they are formed precisely in and through the investigation itself. This procedure is also characteristic for the concept of the non-identical. The experience of non-identity in knowledge endeavours to explicate the tension between identity and non-identity which itself belongs to the objects of knowledge themselves.

The 'negative of identity'25 involves non-identity insofar as the latter vouchsafes the moment of self-reflection on the part of identity itself. We have claimed that the topos of identity can only be understood from the perspective of an irreducible experience of non-identity. But identity for its part is also the irreducible condition of non-identity. It is already presupposed in any experience of difference between the identical and the non-identical. The non-identical would therefore have to be understood as the critique, not as the other, of the identical. The non-identical relates to the identical in a dialectical rather than a contradictory manner.

The non-identical certainly points to the fact that everything is also more than it is. But this does not imply that the non-identical includes the


identical, has greater extension than the identical. The non-identical is not perceived as the other of the thing in question, but rather marks the possibility of another or different view of the latter - a view which immerses itself in the details of the thing, which acknowledges its particular and individual features. The process of knowing which would know the non-identical in the object is directed not against identity itself, but against identification. 'To that extent the non-identical would mean the very identity of a thing as opposed to its identification.'26 This is a particularly revealing remark. On the one hand, it contradicts any interpretation that would play identity and non-identity off against one another from the perspective of an ontology of false existence, thereby identifying false existence with the identical and the utopia of reconciliation with the non-identical. The dialectic of identity and non-identity would simply be rendered obsolete as a result. On the other hand, it confirms our attempt to differentiate the concept of identity itself. Knowledge of the non-identical is directed towards the identity of the object. Such knowledge identifies the object as something, but also warns against identification in the sense of simply identifying the object with something.

The non-identical is concerned with the particular, not as something against but as something mediated by the universal. Avoiding any hypostasis of the universal, such reflection would remember precisely what conceptual activity itself tends to neglect. 'At this historical juncture, philosophy discovers its true interest there where Hegel, in solidarity with the tradition, revealed no interest: in the non-conceptual, the singular, the particular; in that which has, since Plato, long been dismissed as merely transient and insignificant, in that which Hegel once described as "idle being". The theme of philosophy would then become the very qualities which it formerly degraded, as purely contingent features, to the status of a quantile negligeable.'27 This passage makes abundantly clear that knowledge oriented towards the non-identical in Adorno's sense certainly cannot be described as non-conceptual. It is vital for the concept itself to recognise what it does not fully reach. The inadequate but nonetheless indispensable character of conceptual activity constitutes the effective basis of the idea of a negative dialectic. 'Only concepts can accomplish what the concept obstructs. '28 And further: 'Because that which is does not exist in a purely immediate sense, but only through the concept, we must begin with the concept, and not with the merely given.'29

We can begin to articulate the rights of the non-identical, as it were, in terms of three moments which all belong fundamentally to the object of knowledge, although none can adequately be grasped by the conceptual procedures of identification - and here we are thinking primarily of the way in which something is identified with something else by the process of classification or subsumption. Firstly, there is the qualitative differentiation30 which belongs to any individual thing, secondly the horizon of meaning within which it is bound up in a quite specific way, and thirdly the changeability of the thing through time. I understand qualitative differentiation

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here with Ute Guzzoni as 'the multiplicity of the finite features and characteristics of an individual thing' 31 which present themselves as sensuously perceptible qualities. These finite features and characteristics are also relative to the horizon of meaning in which they are embedded for the knowing or perceiving subject. The experience of the temporal character of the individual thing, on the other hand, raises certain problems about how we are to conceptualise this dimension of the non-identical. In this regard Adorno adopts a rather obscure formulation of Walter Benjamin and calls the temporal experience of knowing the 'reading of a thing as the text of its becoming'.32

The experience and appropriation of these three moments is itself accomplished conceptually. But the concepts are configured as constellations in the context of which alone knowing is first enabled to approach its objects. Constellations form concepts when they identify the object as something. For to identify something as something does not mean, as we saw above, that the object of identification is entirely coextensive with a given concept, but rather embraces the possibility that the object in question is also something else, something further or something more. The important point is that any knowing which becomes an experience of the nonidentical in Adorno's sense is itself bound to the experience of something individual as individual. Knowing transpires in accordance with its very objects. This means that the materiality of objects infuses the reflective process of knowledge itself. The object of knowledge is not self-identically present in the thinking activity of the knower. The experience of the non-identical in things presupposes that the latter do not present themselves to knowledge as identifiable without remainder. It is this insight which motivates Adorno's interest in the systematic rehabilitation of the objectoriented dimension of knowledge precisely along the lines of individual knowing and experience.

2. The priority of the object

Negative Dialectics does not interpret the 'priority of the object' as an alternative to the priority of subjectivity in idealist thought, as if the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity could now simply be presented under reversed signs. 'But critical reflection has no desire to place the object upon the empty regal throne once occupied by the subject, where the object would in turn become an idol. It wishes rather to eliminate the hierarchical relationship itself.'33 Adorno certainly emphasises the material character of the immediate as 'something', which Hegel had ascribed to the constitutive consciousness, over against the identity of constitutive subjectivity, but he is far from appealing to any concept of purely 'immediate knowledge' here. For Adorno himself had explicitly reproached the philosophy of Bergson for treating knowledge as a kind of intuitive immediacy.


The priority of the object is itself mediated. The priority of the object must certainly be upheld, but there are no objects to which knowing could simply relate in a purely undistorted and unmediated fashion. And if it were otherwise, we should be justified in questioning Adorno's understanding of the process of philosophical reflection. The 'third' level of Hegelian reflection would then simply be ascribed to the object-side of our knowledge. Negative Dialectics basically resolves this problem - following the Hegelian tradition itself - by denying that 'the subject' or 'the object' can properly be said to exist. 'Subject is in truth never entirely subject, object never entirely object; yet neither is plucked out of a "third" which would itself transcend them.'34

The idea of the priority of the object is derived from the deficiencies of the idealist concept of mediation, and not from an abstract negation of the priority of the subject. What we might call the disequilibrium between subject and object is established only on the basis of a deficient mode of knowledge. 'By virtue of the inequality within the concept of mediation itself, the subject falls into the object quite differently from the way the latter falls into the former. The object can only be thought through the subject, but nonetheless always maintains itself as other to the subject.'35

The thesis of the priority of the object arises directly from the critique of idealism. It does not imply the primacy of the object over the subject, but simply denies the alleged primacy of the subject. 'Strictly speaking, the priority of the object would mean that there is no object as something abstractly standing over against the subject, but that the object necessarily appears in this way. The necessity of this appearance should be questioned. But just as little, on the other hand, can we say that there really "is" a subject in its own right. The hypostasis entertained by idealist philosophy leads only to incoherent claims.' 36 If negative dialectics were actually to play off the priority of the object against that of the subject, it would simply fall back to a level of reflection inferior to that of idealism itself. Nor indeed does Negative Dialectics simply present the asymmetrical character of subject-object mediation under a reversed sign in this regard. This asymmetry performs an essentially critical function and serves to emphasise that objectivity is not absorbed into or exhausted by subjectivity. But the reflective recognition of this is something that falls precisely to the subject. 'The priority of the object is itself attainable only for subjective reflection, and for reflection upon the subject.'37

But for Adorno, unlike Hegel, the asymmetry of the subject-object relation implies no special ontological privilege on the part of consciousness. In Adorno the priority of the object is grounded genetically: spirit and consciousness originally derives from nature itself, and is something that has 'branched off from the libidinal energy of the human species'.38

That is why the distinction between subject and object is also real and not merely an illusory appearance. 'The separation of subject and object is real

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and illusory. It is true insofar as it expresses, in the domain of knowledge, the real separation, the ruptured condition of human experience, that has emerged through a process of compulsion; it is untrue in the sense that we must not hypostasise this historically produced separation or transfigure it as some essentially invariant feature.' 39 One should certainly not understand 'real' here in a naive realist sense. But Hegel's assumption that objectivity is nothing other than the ego itself40 fails to recognise, according to Adorno, that the subject itself is also objectivity. The empirical something to which subjectivity is intrinsically bound or which lies at the basis of subjectivity allows Adorno legitimately to ascribe the 'third' level we have described -the object-character of reflection upon reflection and the reflection upon otherness - to the side of the object as well as to that of the subject.

What Hegel can only describe as the experience of self-consciousness on the path to the absolute, is for Adorno a moment of distinction at the heart of mediation itself. This moment points, in a negatively dialectical way, to the determinate character of the mediation grounded in the object-side of experience. The non-identical names the qualitative difference which resists the dissolution of the process of knowledge into the principle of subjectivity.

In Adorno's thought the productive progress of experience in knowledge is not generated, as it is in Hegel, by the way that objects in themselves become an 'in itself' for consciousness, but rather already appears in the experience of negation which reflection encounters in and as its object. The negative-dialectical demand that thinking remember the non-identity of its own content as 'something' turns knowledge, for Adorno, into a hermeneutic process without a fixed end or ossified conclusion. Experience and knowledge of the object can never simply come to rest in this process as long as the moment of negation persists as internally constitutive for it. The process of discursive experience remains open, and can never become fully identical with itself.

In this context one can read Negative Dialectics as a theory of knowledge that is seeking after a post-idealist site of authentic knowledge. This site is none other than a subject that has been released from the clutches of a pure philosophy of the subject. The empirical subject now corresponds to the priority of the object. When Adorno emphasises that the priority of the object is something that is itself attainable 'only for subjective reflection, and for reflection on the subject',41 the 'subject' in question refers essentially to the thinking and embodied individual. The 'priority of the object' concerns the object as well as the subject. The negative-dialectical theory of knowledge demands that thinking immerse itself in its objects, that thinking expressly recognise the qualitative aspects of its objects and acknowledge that they cannot simply be dissolved or absorbed into consciousness itself. Knowledge in this sense essentially involves the awareness that its objects are never exhausted in the process of being known. The non-identical is not the unsatisfied remainder of knowledge, but rather an essential part of this


knowledge. Knowledge itself protests here against the totalising claims of conceptual identity. But from the epistemological perspective non-identity also implies that thinking can no longer be pursued or sustained in terms of any 'system'. Thinking is thus effectively exposed to its own objects. Adorno is attempting to conceive the spontaneity of thinking precisely by reference to its objects.

The priority of the object, as acknowledgement of an indissoluble material 'something', can be compared in one respect with Kant's transcendental concept of the 'thing in itself'. Both notions communicate the idea of something ultimately irreducible to knowledge which is nonetheless the condition of the possibility of true knowledge. In Adorno this non-identical 'something' has an essentially material character. And the manner in which it is mediated is not interpreted in formal terms as it is in Kant. That is why Adorno speaks emphatically of a corporeal and somatic moment in all experience.42

Because it is essentially concerned with the individual and particular, non-identity also allows us to acknowledge the non-conceptual character of the whole or the totality. For non-identity implies, though in a non-idealist sense, the category of the infinite. An appropriately transformed philosophy 'would become infinite, in a gentle sense, once it refuses to fix itself in a corpus of countable theorems. Philosophy would discover its content in the manifold variety of objects, free of every confining schema, which spontaneously present themselves to it, or which it would itself seek out; it would truly abandon itself to its objects, no longer treating them as a mirror in which to behold once again its own features, conflating the reflected image of itself with what is truly concrete. Philosophy would be nothing less than fulfilled and undiminished experience in the medium of conceptual reflection'.43 Negative dialectics attempts to realise this experience not by appealing to some allegedly non-conceptual medium, but by rethinking and redirecting the character of a conceptuality hitherto oriented primarily towards identity. And it is discursive processes which must effect this rethinking and redirection. For 'only concepts can accomplish what the concept obstructs'.44 The experience of non-identity is not a-conceptual but is governed by conceptuality itself.

Thus the priority of the object in the theory of knowledge signifies and effects, somewhat paradoxically, the rehabilitation of the subject in the only possible true sense of the word. With the collapse of the idealist philosophy of the subject, the theory of knowledge must now effectively concern itself with the rehabilitation of the empirical subject, if it is not simply to abandon the idea of the subject altogether. It is in this context that the project of Negative Dialectics should ultimately be interpreted.45 In opposition to absolute idealism the idea of negative dialects returns to the Kantian distinction between the empirical and transcendental subject. But with the difference that the subject here is no longer interpreted in the formal terms

THEODOR W. ADORNO

dictated by the structure of transcendental grounding in Kant. The real subject does not properly appear in the philosophy of identity at all insofar as the latter effectively neglected a central feature of the mediation of subject and object: 'For subject, in accordance with its innermost character, is also already object. '46 Over against the Hegelian unity of the reconciled whole in subjective consciousness, Adorno goes out of his way to emphasise the priority of the object in relation to the subject. But how can we analyse this idea in further detail?

The core of the argument concerns the difference between a 'qualitative subject',47 which has not simply been reduced to the idea of the transcendental subject, and the merely 'subjective' in the pejorative sense. According to Adorno something of the heritage of the idealist philosophy of the subject is effectively reflected in our actual use of language whenever we repudiate something as an allegedly subjective knowledge claim or mere opinion.

In the context of the theory of knowledge idealism typically identifies the 'subject' with the 'transcendental subject'. The difference between the empirical and transcendental subject, strongly emphasised by Kant, is relinquished by his idealist successors in their quest to construe an absolutely original transcendental subject. Adorno claims that the idealist primacy of constituted subjectivity produces a curious reversal of the truth: the transcendental subject now appears in a certain sense to be more real than the actual subjects and the subjective consciousness from which the philosopher has merely abstracted. 'In this respect the transcendental subject is "constitutive". '48 In the philosophy of subjectivity the principle of the subject, defined in accordance with the logic of identity, appears as the objectivity which it has itself produced. In a sense the actual subject falls back behind the objectivity of subjectivism. Transcendental consciousness is the sum of those abstractions which the philosophy of the subject has performed upon actual existing subjects for the sake of the pure principle of subjectivity. In an epoch when the subject finds itself increasingly powerless the totality and universality formerly ascribed to absolutised subjectivity undergoes a further and essentially positivist transformation. Identity thinking now manifests itself as the very 'type of apparently anti-subjectivist and scientifically objective identity thinking'.49 The principle of constitutive subjectivity is intensified as knowledge now becomes intrinsically impersonal for the sake of desired objectivity. A false 'priority of the object' is generated when the practice of science treats its object domain simply as a residue of a supposedly subject-less objectivity. 'Subjectivity' is now nothing but the vanishing point of the subject which, as a 'deductible addendum',50 cannot properly know objectivity after all. The moment of subjectivity is thus systematically extruded from the context of the knowing situation. Adorno insists, by contrast, that 'the object can no more be treated as a subject-less residue than it can be regarded as something posited by the subject'.51


We can summarise Adorno's position as follows: the epistemological priority of the object - which neither implies its simple primacy nor reinstates an alternative hierarchy - arises from the subject's own express reflection upon the asymmetry essentially involved in the subject-object relation. The subject is 'form' in the Kantian sense, but the form of knowledge requires the objective content that is to be formed in the first place. At the same time the subject - as an existing, persisting, material something - is itself also object. It is object insofar as it provides 'the solidity of the epistemological ego'. 52 The identity of self-consciousness is intrinsically bound to the empirical ego and is therefore also object. The subject is object insofar as it irreducibly refers and relates to something. The subject possesses the 'capacity for experience'53 only insofar as it is 'something', only insofar as it has experienced itself as object. 'If it is not something - and "something" indicates an irreducible objective moment - the subject is nothing at all; even as actus purus, it requires a relationship to something that acts upon it.'54 The priority of the object represents a fundamental critique of any hierarchy in the relationship between subject and object. Adorno's critique is thus directed at every attempt to posit any first or allegedly absolute principle.

3. Negative Dialectics and experience

The kind of knowledge which remembers the non-identical by recognising the priority of the object can also be grasped as a specific form of experience. Indeed one can read Negative Dialectics precisely as a theory of experience. Experience is here conceived as intrinsically discursive in character, i.e. as something which is shaped and guided by reflection. Experience in this sense arises from a certain way of appropriating the possible objects of reflection, one which preserves the indissoluble character and thus the freedom of the object itself. 'If thought actually abandoned itself to the thing, if it were primarily concerned with the thing rather than the category of the thing, then the object itself would begin to speak under the tarrying gaze of thought. '55 The task of philosophical thought, in manifesting its own freedom for the object, would be to think the shared togetherness of the various. Truth, as 'a constellation in which subject and object essentially permeate one another',56 would represent the 'communication of what is different'. 57

This is how we should understand the utopia of an 'unregimented experience' which would recognise the proper rights of 'the subject as a moment of knowledge'. 58 'Utopia would be the non-sacrificial non-identity of the subject.'59 For a 'full and unreduced experience in the medium of conceptual reflection'60 is only possible through an acknowledgement of nonidentity which also preserves the spontaneity of thought.

We saw how Adorno derives the non-identical character of the discursive formation of experience from meditating upon one moment of Hegelian dialectic, namely the moment of 'negative dialectic'. But in contrast to Hegel,

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this moment can never be dissolved in some ultimate identity for Adorno, and here he stands much closer to Kant. It is the indissoluble 'something' in knowledge which always requires reference to a substantive and material content. 61 But Adorno nonetheless follows Hegel in binding the concept of the non-identical to the dynamic principle of contradiction in dialectical thought.

From Adorno's perspective the dynamic character of the dialectic derives from the negativity of thought itself. Hegel's concept of negative dialectic is also grounded in this negativity. Adorno's negative dialectics effectively remains on the level of Hegelian dialectic where the non-identity of subject and object presents itself as such. It is in this domain of non-identity that Adorno attempts to bring objects and categories of reflection into conceptual constellations which resist the total absorption of things into thought. This resistance is the real motivating force of experience itself. Experience comes into progressive conflict with the conceptual categories that it imposes on its objects. To this extent one cannot describe Adorno's negative dialects in terms of the kind of developmental logic that inspires the Hegelian model. For Hegel the renewed emergence of conflict between identity and non-identity always comes to an eventual standstill. It is true that Adorno derives his specific conception of contradiction as the mediating dynamic of experience from Hegel's idea of dialectic. But Adorno thinks experience as an open process precisely because the non-identical itself is a constitutive moment of knowledge.

For Hegel the process of experience terminates in identity. His argument is based upon the idea of a constitutive self-consciousness which is itself the dynamic bearer of experience. For Adorno non-identity continues to remain in play because his argument is based upon the idea of the object that does not of itself imply the moment of experience. That is why experience in Adorno is always bound to individual experience, whereas experience in Hegel can always be related to the realisation of absolute spirit in the context of universal history.

Adorno's Negative Dialectics corresponds to a certain structural moment of Hegelian dialectic which careful analysis of immanent critique can always discover in Adorno's work. The negative essence of consciousness relates passively to its objects and merely 'looks on' as experience proceeds. This empathising moment of the knowing process, which abandons itself to its objects, acknowledges the non-identical as a moment of truth. Non-identity, as a kind of 'granted nearness', is a moment of reconciliation. 'The reconciled condition would not annex the foreign in the spirit of philosophical imperialism, but rejoice that what is different and remote remains in granted nearness, alike beyond what is one's own and what is alien.'62 In the multiplicity of the various the identity of the subject could be sustained beyond the merely identical precisely as the 'shared togetherness of the various'.63

It is in this context that Adorno strongly emphasises the indispensable


moment of analysis over against Hegel's stress upon the processual movement of synthesis. This passive, phenomenological, relation to experience - which the negative-dialectical moment in Hegel also actually implies -brings Adorno into close proximity to Benjamin's topos of 'dialectics at a standstill'. 64

This means that dialectic cannot be reduced simply to a method of thinking through contradictions. Dialectic is rather a 'methodical operation' through which the diremption between what is given and what is thought is expressly thematised at a meta-level of reflection. It is only this level which can reveal the negative-reflexive self-relation which cannot appear at all 'in the horizon of a natural consciousness that is afflicted by diremption'.65

Dialectic is thus a procedure of conceptual reconstruction and the site where negative self-relation, as consciousness that experiences its own internal difference, is reflectively thematised. Dialectic is the systematic 'beginning' where contradiction enters expressly into thought. 'We can only identify this beginning, the beginning that reveals "the unity of distinction and non-distinction'', through a reflection which rises above the immediate representation of the series of nows and grasps what this representation already presupposes, and sees just how the presupposition of the immediate context of representation is non-thematically contained and thus concealed within the latter.'66

'The reflection into itself in other-being',67 as a moment of other-being in itself, must already be contained in the 'beginning'. This abstraction defines the original methodical step into the dialectic. In this respect Adorno's negative dialectics is indebted to the fundamental speculative structure of speculative dialectics. But the difference between these versions of dialectic - and Adorno would say that it is one that concerns everything - is precisely this: for Adorno the uncovering of non-thematised contradiction is not simply a matter of speculative self-reflection, but is essentially motivated by the material character of the given which prompts thought to address the non-identical.

'Dialectic, as a procedure, is simply to think in contradictions precisely for the sake of, and in opposition to, the contradiction experienced in the thing.'68 How can we clarify and explain this central programmatic claim of Negative Dialectics in relation to the idea of 'unreduced experience in the medium of conceptual reflection'? Adorno's reference to 'the contradiction experienced in the thing' implies that contradiction is a determination of reflection belonging to the thing itself precisely as an antagonistic social totality. The contradiction formulates this antagonistic character as a dis· crepancy between the thing and its concept. Dialectical thinking for the 'sake of contradiction' implies that the discrepancy between thing and concept designates more than simply a difference between res extensa and res cogitans. It implies that the contradiction directed against identity is itself an indication of genuine knowledge. To think dialectically 'through

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contradictions ... in opposition to contradiction' implies that contradiction - over against the traditional conception of truth as adequatio - cannot simply be sublated or eliminated. As contradiction it necessarily remains contradiction against all paradigms of pure identity. Non-identity as the medium of contradiction is an integral moment of a negative dialectic. Adorno's negative dialectic thinks in contradictions for the sake of, and in opposition to, the negative-dialectical moment of contradiction in Hegel. Adorno's negative dialectic resists the resolution of contradiction in the teleological Hegelian manner. We are forced to conclude that 'such a dialectic is no longer compatible with Hegel'69 precisely because the discursive character of the principle of contradiction in Adorno does not permit the progressive resolution of emerging contradictions at every new level in the speculative fashion. Since, in contrast to Hegel, the antagonism which finds expression in the difference between philosophical reflection and existing reality itself remains non-identical, Adorno's 'negative dialectic' represents a thorough and consistent critique of identity thinking in general. It here reveals itself expressly as a logic of critique, and one which cannot decide what its own outcome will be. A negative dialectic in this sense cannot presuppose some epistemological telos which it would finally attain after traversing all the possible stages of knowing consciousness. By virtue of its negativity, a negative dialectic always in principle remains the appropriate site of non-identical knowledge.

The dynamics of Adorno's negative-dialectical logic of critique cannot be reduced to the traditional schema of triplicity and resists the kind of dialectical compulsion characteristic of absolute idealism. For the way in which negative-dialectical thought represents its objects cannot in principle be anticipated in advance. In this sense negative dialectics is essentially a hermeneutics of critical discourse pursued with close and constant reference its respective objects.

Negative dialectics can also be called a hermeneutics on account of the way in which it attempts to think in terms of constellations. The objects of experience are expected to disclose their character in terms of these conceptual constellations. For Adorno such thinking systematically assumes the place occupied in Hegel by determinate negation as an indispensable moment of speculative dialectics. Thinking in constellations, which is intended to preserve the authentic character of its objects, certainly implies qualitative progress of knowledge within our experience, but this topos also directly resists the Hegelian idea of a teleologically determined process of knowledge that receives its final articulation through speculative dialectics. Determinate negation, as a qualitative point of dialectical reversal, is also directly connected for Adorno with the idea of 'sublation'. But he refuses to take over the developmental logic of ultimate synthesis that is associated with this idea in Hegel. Adorno's distinctive emphasis upon the moment of determinate negation rehabilitates the spontaneous character of the discursive

"11 A


process of our experience. True progress is inconceivable for Adorno without full recognition of such spontaneity.

The philosophical concept of knowledge as an acknowledgement of the non-identical in experience is hardly compatible with any kind of developmental logic. The task of thinking in constellations arises directly from the critique of identificatory thinking. The 'constellation' effectively 'illuminates the very specificity of the object which is indifferent to every classificatory procedure or actively impedes it'.70 The dialectic of the conceptual and the non-conceptual already harboured by the thing itself is unfolded through constellatory thinking. 'Constellations alone represent, from without, what the concept itself has cut out from within, represent the 'more' which the concept would wish, but is always unable, to be. In gathering around the thing they would know, our concepts can potentially articulate its inner character, can thoughtfully begin to approach what thought expelled from itself'. 71 This procedure is clearly related to Weber's concept of ideal types, something to which we shall return subsequently. Negative dialectics is a theory of knowledge in a very specific sense insofar as the express rehabilitation of the non-identical moment of experience returns us directly to the substantive and material character of all genuine knowledge. Hegel always conceives the non-conceptual, the content of the concept, as already essentially concept, as something that can always be subsumed under the movement of the philosophical concept. In contrast to every identitarian resolution of the subject-object relation, Adorno emphasises the somatic moment in the experience of knowledge. Corporeality itself cannot simply be subsumed under the cognitive schemata of consciousness. Corporeality represents the rights of the object and simultaneously rehabilitates the sensing and feeling subject. 'The fact that the cognitive accomplishments of the knowing subject, in accordance with their innermost meaning, are intrinsically somatic, affects not merely the founding relation between subject and object, but the dignity of the corporeal itself. The corporeal dimension emerges in the ontic pole of subjective knowledge as the very core of the latter. m The ephemeral character of the sensory aspect of our experience already speaks challenges to the hegemony of the conceptual. The thing itself, the object of the concept, is subject to changes and alterations through which the non-identical exceeds the epistemological framework and parameters of identificatory thought. 'The concept of the non-conceptual cannot stay with itself alone, cannot simply stay within the theory of knowledge; the latter requires philosophy to acknowledge its material character.'73

This somatic aspect of the priority of the object, which disturbs the standard epistemological account of the subject-object relation, implies far more than simply a critique of idealism. The ineliminable ontic residue74 in our concepts calls for a philosophical thinking that strives to do justice to objects as they are experienced, while avoiding the typical dangers of a reductionist empiricism.

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The utopian thought of an unreduced and unregimented experience is simply another expression of the idea of reconcilation in Adorno. The nonidentical is itself the telos of a potential reconciliation. For every experience in the medium of reflection essentially encounters something indissoluble that cannot be captured or recuperated through concepts alone. In this sense we must say that Adorne's contributions to a theory of experience implies a certain 'metaphysical' dimension. His thought is negativelymetaphysical in relation to every identitarian philosophical approach that would necessarily imply the primacy of either subject or object.

In Negative Dialectics Adorno shows that while the separation of subject and object does indeed underlie all of our thinking, this separation is not analogous to that between the ego and the matter of experience. 75 This idea was already the effective impulse behind Hegel's dialectic of the concept. But since the critique of idealism no longer allows us to identify a positive and specific site where every moment of knowledge would finally come together, Adorne's philosophy remains a negative metaphysics. In contrast to every absolutist philosophical programme, such a metaphysics would articulate the experience that what exists is also always more than it is. 76

Only from this utopian perspective of unreduced experience is it possible to understand what Adorno properly means by 'reconciliation'. This concept itself can only be determined negatively. For the rehabilitation of the empirical subject in knowledge, under the constant leading of the object, implies that the concrete 'what' of reconciliation cannot be methodologically anticipated. That is why the category of reconciliation remains so elusive and evocative in Adorno.

But it is nonetheless possible to single out a few specific aspects of 'reconciliation' here. Adorno tells us that reconciliation is concerned with a 'freedom towards the object'. 77 Here he is referring to a liberated process of communication between subject and object, between spirit and nature. 78 This is possible where dialectic has come to a standstill,79 where we are capable of really tarrying with the object,80 where things that are different and distinct nonetheless communicate with one another. 81 It is possible through renunciation of the domination of the self-positing subject,82 through the convergence of corporeality and theoretical consciousness as a model of authentic praxis,83 through the elimination of meaningless and unnecessary suffering, 84 through the self-reconciliation of 'natural history',85 through an active participation, freed from fear or compulsion, of the individual in the whole.86 Adorno understands all of this as a reconciliation between the subject and the non-ego.87

Reconciliation is bound to the possibilities of experience. The idea of potential reconciliation remains indeterminate precisely because we cannot anticipate the results of an unreduced experience which acknowledges the non-identical in terms of constellations rather than identificatory concepts. It is particular concrete thinking individuals alone who can enjoy such


unreduced experience and help to articulate its full significance. But the truth of such experience can also be measured in relation to the objects of experience themselves.

Adorno tries to suggest the site of unreduced experience by developing Hegel's concept of experience in a critical way, by insisting upon the priority of the object and emphasising the material dimension and original moment of somatic impulse over against the idea of an absolute consciousness. He renounces the idealist priority of the subject in general and gives experience back to actual existing subjects. Reflected experience, where sensuous and cognitive moments coalesce, is intrinsically bound to the personal identity of individuals. And here the utopia of negative-dialectical knowledge acquires an essentially practical dimension. Knowledge and experience is no longer simply the preserve of the absolute subject of Hegel, Schelling or Fichte, but is grasped expressly as a possibility for empirical subjects themselves. An 'unreduced subjectivity' that is open to an 'unconstrained experience'88 is able to communicate with its objects in an undistorted fashion, but this freedom towards the object also presupposes autonomous individuals capable of reflection. The individual's engagement with the world certainly remains subjective, but it is not simply an expression of subjective-instrumental reason. In acknowledging the non-identical, it can be interpreted as a reconciliation with a 'plurality that is no longer hostile' to the self. In the medium of reflection it is not the ineliminable transcendental 'ego' but the 'qualitative subject' which represents the 'third' alternative over against the absolute heteronomy of experience or the idealist hypostasis of the ego.

In contrast to Bergson's intuitionist position spiritual experience in Adorno's sense is bound up with the conceptual. Existing things are not given immediately, as in Bergson, to some solipsistic faculty of empathy,89

but are always already mediated through the conceptual. Nonetheless, this talk of mediation 'through the concept', if we recognise its potential practical significance, stands in a certain proximity to the concept of intuition. Adorno attempts to avoid the regression with which he reproaches Bergson by insisting that the objects of knowledge are never accessible to knowledge in a presuppositionless fashion. Experience is only possible in relation to an objectivity that precedes individual consciousness. Under the prevailing conditions of rationalisation experience represents 'the unity of a totally socialised society'.90 Such experience naturally falls short of reconciliation in the sense of achieved happiness, but it is still the necessary precondition and potentiality of the latter. Spiritual experience, reflective activity as Adorno understands it, is not merely limited to cognitive, purely conceptual or theoretical capacities in the narrower sense, but also involves a substantive practical dimension. That is why it is the very medium through which the universal context of illusion can in principle be systematically overcome. Negative-dialectical thinking is not concerned with a purely formal mediation of the totality of knowledge. In attempting to preserve the qualitative

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moments of the objects of knowledge such thinking avoids the tendency towards quantification and proceeds instead in a 'conceptual-mimetic' manner. This apparently contradictory expression actually points towards the specific meaning of a negative-dialectical mediation of identity and nonidentity. Adorno speaks in this context of a certain 'elective affinity between the knower and the known'. 91

The experience of such elective affinity is neither mystical nor intuitionist, nor even simply aesthetic, but precisely also discursive under the conditions of rationalisation. For it is characteristic of Adorno's conception of reconciliation that it embraces intuitive-mimetic, rational and metaphysical aspects of experience in equal measure. In the third part of Negative Dialectics, in 'the meditations on metaphysics', it becomes particularly clear that Adorno's approach not only presents a critique of the traditional identity thinking of philosophy, but also suggests the possibility of a kind of 'negative metaphysics'. In this part of the work there are passages which give some indication of how Negative Dialectics could be developed specifically as a form of ethic. For the knowledge and experience of the non-identical also represent the promise of happiness. 'Happiness, the only aspect of metaphysical experience that is more than impotent longing, reveals the inner life of things that simultaneously transcends them.'92 The ethical significance of Negative Dialectics thus lies precisely in the field of subjective experience. 'Metaphysical experience and subjectively liberated experience converge in the idea ofhumanity.'93


1 Ute Guzzoni, Jdentitiit oder nicht, Freiburg/Miinchen 1981, p. 9. 2 Ibid. 3 Cf. ibid., p. 242. 4 I have found Guzzoni's observations in Jdentitiit oder nicht particularly instruc-

tive for my claims concerning the rationality of non-identity. 5 Ibid., p. 35. 6 Ibid., p. 69. 7 Ibid. 8 Cf. ibid., pp. 51, 63, 64, 75. 9 Ibid., p. 17f.

10 T. W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik, in Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 6, Frankfurt am Main 1973, p. 21. ET: Negative Dialectics, tr. by E. B. Ashton, London 1973, p. 10.

11 Guzzoni, Identitiit oder nicht, p. 107. 12 Cf. ibid., p. 105. 13 H. Schniidelbach, 'Dialektik als Vernunftkritik. Zur Konstruktion des Rationalen

bei Adorno', in: Adorno-Konferenz 1983, edited by L. V. Friedeburg and J. Habermas, Frankfurt am Main 1983, p. 70; 'The Dialectical Critique of Reason. Adorno's Construction of Rationality', included in the present collection.

14 Cf. Negative Dialektik, pp. 20f., 23, 141; 17, 24; 49. ET: 8, 11-12, 137, 5, 12-13, 39.

15 Cf. ibid., pp. 38, 163. ET: 28, 161.

,.,,0


16 Cf. ibid., pp. 53f., IOI. ET: 43f., 94. 17 Cf. ibid., pp. 49, 174. ET: 39, 172. 18 Cf. ibid., pp. 163f., 216. ET: 16lf., 216. 19 Cf. ibid., p. 193. ET: 192. 20 Cf. ibid., pp. 174, 192. ET: 172, 191. 21 Cf. ibid., p. 66. ET: 57. 22 Cf. ibid., pp. 31, 43, 66. ET: 30, 35, 56. 23 Cf. ibid., pp. 90, 165. ET: 82, 163. 24 Cf. ibid., p. 192. ET: 192. 25 Guzzoni, ldentitiit oder nicht, p. 105. 26 Negative Dialektik, p. 164. ET: 161. 27 Ibid., p. 19f. ET: 8. 28 Ibid., p. 62. ET: 53. 29 Ibid., p. 156. ET: 153. 30 Cf. Guzzoni, ldentitiit oder nicht, p. 109. 31 Ibid., p. 110. 32 Negative Dialektik, p. 62. ET: 52. 33 Ibid., p. 182. ET: 181. 34 Ibid., p. 177. ET: 175. 35 Ibid., p. 184. ET: 183. Cf. Adorno, Erfahrungsgehalt, in: Gesammelte Schriften

vol. 5 (Drei Studien zu Hegel), Frankfurt am Main 1975, p. 323; English translation: Hegel: Three Studies, tr. by Shierry Weber Nicholsen, Cambridge Mass. 1999, pp. 85-86. Cf. Adorno, Zu Suhjekt und Ohjekt, in: Gesammelte Schriften vol 10.2, Frankfurt am Main 1977, pp. 742, 747; English translation: 'Subject and Object', in: The Essential Frankfurt Reader, ed. by A. Arato and E. Gebhardt, Oxford 1978, pp. 498f. and 503.

36 Adorno, Zu Subjekt und Objekt, p. 754. ET: 508. 37 Negative Dialektik, p. 186. ET: 185. 38 Ibid. ET: 185. 39 Adorno, Zu Suhjekt und Ohjekt, p. 742. ET: 498-9. 40 'The object possesses this objectivity therefore in the concept, and the latter is the

unity of self-consciousness into which it has been taken up; its objectivity or the concept is consequently nothing other than the nature of self-consciousness, and it has no other moments or determinations than the I itself. G. W. F. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik II, Theorie- Werkausgahe vol. 6, Frankfurt am Main 1983, p. 255; English translation: Hegel's Science of Logic, tr. by W. H. Johnson and L. G. Struthers, London 1966, vol. II, pp. 218-219. Cf. Negative Dialektik, p. 176. ET: l 74f.

41 Negative Dialektik, p. 186. ET: 185. 42 Cf. ibid., pp. 191 f., 228. ET: l 90f., 228f. 43 Ibid., p. 25; cf. ibid., p. 24. ET: 13, cf. 12. 44 Ibid., p. 62. ET: 53. 45 Cf. Jiirgen Belgrad, 'Das notige Pochen aufs Nichtidentische', in: Angesichts

objektiver Verblendung, edited by G. Gamm, Tiibingen 1985, pp. 70-115. 46 Negative Dialektik, p. 184. ET: 183. 47 Ibid., p. 54. ET: 44. 48 Adorno, Zu Subjekt und Objekt, p. 745. ET: 501. 49 Ibid., p. 750. ET: 505. 50 Ibid., p. 751. ET: 505. 51 Ibid. p. 751. ET: 506. 52 Ibid., p. 755. ET: 509. 53 Ibid., p. 756. ET: 509-10.

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54 Ibid., p. 747. ET: 502. 55 Negative Dialektik, p. 38. ET: 27-28. 56 Ibid., p. 133. ET: 127. 57 Adorno, Zu Subjekt und Objekt, p. 743. ET: 499. 58 Negative Dialektik, p. 129. ET: 123. 59 Ibid., p. 25. ET: 13. 60 Ibid., p. 277. ET: 281. 61 Cf. ibid., p. l40f. ET: l37f. 62 Ibid., p. 192. ET: 19 l. 63 Ibid., p. 153. ET: 150. 64 Cf. ibid., p. 159. ET: 157. 65 A. Kulenkampff, Antinomie und Dialektik. Zur Funktion des Widerspruchs in der

Philosophie, Stuttgart 1970, p. 2. 66 Ibid., p. 3. 67 G. W. F. Hegel, Phiinomenologie des Geistes, Theorie-Werkausgabe vol. 3, Frank

furt am Main 1970, p. 23; English translation: Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by A. Miller, Oxford 1977, p. 10.

68 Negative Dialektik, p. 148. ET: 144-45. 69 Ibid. ET: 145. 70 Ibid., p. 164. ET: 162. 71 Ibid., p. 164f. ET: 162. 72 Ibid., p. 194. ET: 193-94. 73 Ibid., p. 141. ET: 137. 74 Cf. ibid., p. 142. ET: 138. From Adorno's perspective, therefore, the epistemo

logical status of 'sensation' in Kant remains underdetermined: 'In the Critique of Pure Reason, sensation, as the "something'', stands for the ineliminable ontic moment' (Negative Dialektik, p. 140. ET: 137). Nonetheless, these 'sensations, or matter in Kant's sense' (Negative Dialektik, p. 141. ET: 137) do specifically point towards the material charcter of experience.

75 Cf. Adorno, Zu Subjekt und Objekt, p. 755. ET: 508: The difference between subject and object cuts through both subject and object; it is no more to be absolutised than it is to be deleted from thought.'

76 Cf. Negative Dialektik, p. 164. ET: 161. 77 Cf. ibid., p. 38. ET: 28. 78 Cf. ibid., p. 228. ET: 229. 79 Cf. ibid., p. 159. ET: 157. 80 Cf. ibid., p. 189. ET: 188. 81 Cf. Adorno, Zu Subjekt und Objekt, p. 743. ET: 499. 82 Cf. ibid., p. 755. ET: 508-9. 83 Cf. Negative Dialektik, p. 228. ET: 229. 84 Cf. ibid., p. 202f. ET: 202f. 85 Cf. ibid., p. 347ff. ET: 354ff. Cf. Adorno, Die /dee der Naturgeschichte, in:

Gesammelte Schriften vol. l, Frankfurt am Main 1973, pp. 345-365; English translation: 'The Idea of Natural History', in: Telos 60, 1984, pp. 111-124.

86 Cf. Negative Dialektik, p. 261. ET: 264. 87 Cf. ibid., p. 279. ET: 283. 88 Adorno, Zu Subjekt und Objekt, p. 752. ET: 506. 89 Cf. Henri Bergson, Einfahrung in die Metaphysik, Jena 1929, p. 4. 90 Negative Dialektik, p. 309. ET: 314. 91 Ibid., p. 55. ET: 45. 92 Ibid., p. 367. ET: 374. 93 Ibid., p. 389. ET: 397.

12

THE ANTICIPATION OF THE TRUE CONCEPT OF THE UNIVERSAL

IN ART AND EXPERIENCE

Matthias Tichy

Source: Matthias Tichy, Theodor W. Adorno. Das Verhiiltnis von Allgemeinem und Besonderem in seiner Philosophie, Bonn: Bouvier, 1977, pp. 106-43. Translated by Nicholas Walker.

1. The universal in individual experience

The first task here is to investigate how and in what sense a 'universal' moment can be discovered in what appears to be purely 'individual' experience. The result of this enquiry will show that the abstract universal, regarded as the principle of individuation, comes up against its own limits within the context of concrete experience. We shall then proceed to consider the individual self as something which must be grasped precisely in terms of its actual experience. The analysis of the concept of experience will show that the experience of self-alienation, which we have already discussed, must be interpreted as a limiting case which can help us in tum to determine more precisely the fundamental role of the concept of experience for critical theory in general. The second section of the following discussion, which focuses on Adorno's aesthetic theory, should be interpreted as a further extension of our investigation of the concept of experience. This approach is justified because, for Adorno, the experience of social reality is objectified in the work of art itself, which is precisely why the latter becomes a privileged object of analysis for critical theory. This also helps to explain how the work of art also at least partially transcends its mediated social context and can therefore possess a truth moment of its own.

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a) The universal in the experience of self-alienation

Adorno's critique of the concept of the transcendental subject claims that philosophical cognition can only be attained by acknowledging, rather than abstracting from, individual experience. Only this can properly satisfy Adorno's demand for something 'more in the subject', something which he believes, in contrast to the traditional concept of cognition, is required for the objectivity of knowledge.' For Adorno the universality of the knowing subject can never be posited as an absolute over against the individual subjects themselves. The possibility of moving from individual experience to universal cognition, therefore, lies not in subsuming experience under universal laws of thought, but in discovering a universal moment within individual experience itself: 'The universal cannot be grasped by the subject except through the movement of individual human consciousness. The deletion of the individual would not conjure forth some higher subject, purified of all the dross of contingency, but merely one unconscious of its own experience' (ND: 56; ET: 46). This individual consciousness is also essentially shaped by the 'isolation' [ Vereinzelung] that characterises the individual in individualistic society. If philosophical thought were to abstract from the individual moment of experience, it would forfeit the possibility of grasping the internally contradictory character of social reality that can itself only be experienced in individual terms. The objective untruth of the abstract universal cannot be recognised by reference to this concept of the universal precisely because it claims to have realised its identity with the particular. But the separation of the individual from its own universal, from society, remains objectively determined by the specific character of that universal. The way in which the individual experiences social reality reveals itself therefore not as contingent but rather as objective - in contrast to a purely conceptual approach to knowledge that cannot grasp the contradiction between universal and particular.

The justification for granting individual experience a constitutive function for universal cognition lies in Adorno's conception of individuality itself as a social category.2 This conception also demands that we grasp the apparently immediate self-awareness of the individual as something mediated, and thus to penetrate to the untruth that lies in the seemingly immediate certainty we claim to possess about ourselves and our own experience. The experience of the externality of social reality can therefore only be described as true insofar as it also involves the experience of the externality of the experiencing individual in relation to itself. 3 The truth of a consciousness thrown back upon itself lies in the fact that such consciousness is therefore also in a position to experience the externality and contingency of the universal as a whole.4 But this experience equally reveals the untruth of immediate 'self-certainty' since social reality is only maintained through the activity of individuals and is therefore not absolutely external to them. On

THE UNIVERSAL IN ART AND EXPERIENCE

the other hand, the individual must be grasped as a part of this social reality and thus as something that is also external to itself: 'The untruth of the absolute individual and the truth of its own resistance are almost indissolubly entangled with one another. The task today would precisely be to cut through this entanglement' (Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des /l°sthetischen, Frankfurt am Main 1966, p. 304). Insight into the untruth of the 'absolute individual' yields the possibility of finding something universal within the individual itself. But it equally implies the necessity of grasping the individual self in relation to its own other, not from the idea of its absolute and singular identity, but from the experience into which that otherness essentially enters.

The necessity for this new approach, in Adorno's eyes, is grounded in the fact that the individual has been 'historically condemned' to its present condition, i.e. in the fact that its 'being-for-itself' and its 'being-in-itself' have come into contradiction with one another. On the one hand, this contradiction can be understood in terms of the social separation of the individual from society. 5 Yet Adorno also thinks that the being-for-itself of the individual, which must be re-conceptualised insofar as it still involves a consciousness of self-alienation, harbours a moment that resists the total context of social mediation and that also actualises, at least incipiently, a kind of identity which is not merely grounded in the universal principle of self-identity. This perspective is justified to the extent that the powerless individual already stands in for an alternative conception of the universal: 'The individual survives itself. But the residual trace of the historically condemned individual is now merely what has not been sacrificed to false identity. Its function lies in its functionlessness: in the spirit which is not united with the universal and for that reason can impotently represent the latter' (ND: 337; ET: 343).6

The individual that is here thrown back upon itself does not simply represent itself as such, but rather stands in for the 'spirit' which intends a different reality, a different relationship between universal and particular. To anticipate our later observations on Adorno's aesthetic theory, we can already point out here that such individually conceived 'spirit' becomes objective in the work of art that not only embodies the objective dialectic of universal and particular, but reflects the latter in its own aesthetic form and thereby stands in objectively for a reconciled relationship of universal and particular. 7 The individual is capable of assuming this function for Adorno because the social principle of 'singularisation' can only be experienced in individual terms.8 The objectivity of individual experience, that is grounded in the fact that individual consciousness is not only influenced by social reality but is itself internally mediated, signifies in turn that individual experience becomes a moment of that reality. If we consider the identity of the universal and the individual, itself rooted in the social character of individuation, from the perspective of the individual, it is clear that social reality loses at

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least something of its alien and external character precisely by virtue of this identity. This is only possible because the universality of society can change: 'If the individual embodiment of spirit, as the vulgar separation between the individual and the universal likes to think, is not merely "influenced" by the universal, but is internally mediated by objectivity, then the latter cannot remain simply hostile to the subject. [ ... ] This reconciliation with objectivity, however fragile it may be, transcends the realm of the eversame' (ND: 300; ET: 306).9 But because of the real primacy of the abstract universal, this 'transcending' movement is extremely difficult to discern and can only be recognised in those instances which allow the individual to break out of its 'isolation' and give objective form to its immediate experience. Today, in Adorno's view, it is critical thinking and art which essentially provide an opportunity in this respect. The universal which is harboured in individual experience becomes objective in thinking. But in thinking, as in art too, as we shall see, the dynamic transcendence of the ever-same is also stilled: 'Dialectic is the self-consciousness of the objective context of illusion, not something that has itself already escaped this context' (ND: 398; ET: 406). to But we can nonetheless perceive the movement of transcendence even here. In the light of our earlier discussion of society as a structure that is unconscious of its own character, we can see that critical thinking, interpreted as 'the self-consciousness of the objective context of illusion', is also a moment of reality itself. And this again clearly reveals the significance of the individual in Adorno's philosophy: the individual here is not simply an actual singular self, but the point of departure for a potential counter-movement to the unfolding expansion of the abstract universal into the governing totality. The possibility of this countermovement lies within the individual as an inner tension which impels it beyond mere 'isolation'. On the other hand, it is here that we also encounter the problematic position of critical theory itself. For it must withdraw to a standpoint which already no longer exists and beyond which it nonetheless cannot advance. Here, once again, the conjunction of movement and stand-still finds expression in the character of individual experience itself.

The recourse to individual experience reveals that it harbours the universal, the other of the individual. This in turn implies that we must interpret the individual essentially in relation to its own 'other'. The experiencing individual itself, as the next section will show more clearly, can no longer be grasped as the subject of pure self-preservation precisely insofar as the experienced content necessarily enters into, but cannot simply be sublated within, the process of experience as such. The one who experiences can thus be understood as an individual self that is 'released from the grip of the ego', as a self that is no longer subject to the compulsion to identity. 11

The contribution of the non-identical to the process of experience in which the identity of the individual self is first constituted, leads directly to the concept of self-divesting externalisation [Entiiusserung] which Adorno


deploys in connection with his critique of the drive for pure selfpreservation on the part of the subject. 'Externalisation' for Adorno does not mean that one thing simply renounces or abandons itself to something else, but that something determines its own unity anew in the encounter with something other than itself. 12 Neither externalisation nor experience, therefore, can be interpreted as the kind of purely 'theoretical' relationship to objects that requires the permanent identity of the knowing subject. It is also true, however, that Adorno lacks a fully developed concept of praxis that might help us to determine the individual self in relation to otherness, or the 'practical' self in the broadest sense of the term. This lack derives in part from Adorno's diagnosis of the contemporary impossibility of any immediately and genuinely effective praxis. But it also reflects the fact that Adorno pays insufficient attention to the social character of the concept of praxis insofar as he concentrates principally upon the currently prevailing form of social labour. We have already indicated that Adorno fails to distinguish adequately between the two essential dimensions of the concept of praxis, the relation between agents and their objects and the relation between different agents themselves. But if the specific historical constitution of the social character of labour is essential to the alienation of individuals and to the independent role of society in relation to individuals, then praxis conceived precisely as a relation between individuals, as distinct from their relation to objects, also acquires greater significance. This neglect of the dimension of intersubjectivity means that the question concerning an immanent universal can almost only be pursued and developed, in Adorno's thought, from the perspective of the theory of knowledge. Thus we could disclose a universal moment in individual experience, a universality which points towards the history of the content of experience and thereby towards social activity. On the other hand, the thinking which is capable of giving expression to experience is essentially intersubjective and its universality points towards the universality of individuals and society. The concept of immanent universality could therefore only satisfactorily be clarified and determined by reference to a concept of praxis which grasps the relation of individuals to one another. 13

Apart from this reference to experience or externalisation, Adorno only offers negative suggestions for rethinking the individual self, and this principally in connection with the critique of the principle of self-preservation. An individual self that was not utterly and abstractly identical with itself, that by virtue of its reconciliation with reality would not have to be self-identical in this sense, reveals itself in the light of the ultimate result of pure subjective self-preservation over against nature. This result consists for Adorno in the complete independence of the social system over against individuals which can then no longer preserve themselves as selves insofar as they now also form part of a society that has become alien to them. Since the identity which has been realised up until the present has simply been

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that of the social system itself, a genuinely realised subjectivity becomes inconceivable, and the individual appears to revert to the level of purely natural existence: 'If, under the enormous pressure that lies upon it, the subject falls back schizophrenically into that condition of ambiguity and dissociation from which it had wrested itself free historically, then the dissolution of the subject is at once the doomed and ephemeral image of a different possible subject' (ND: 277; ET: 281). This image of a 'different possible subject' is only 'doomed and ephemeral' from the standpoint and criterion of current society, one which assumes the abstract principle of identity. For the identification of non-identity with ambiguity and dissociation is only valid for the perspective of absolute identity before which everything different and distinct inevitably appears as something merely negative. Hence the possibility of realising a 'different possible subject' still remains open. This open possibility is also grounded in the fact that the self-preserving subject is capable of a second-level reflection upon itself, one which opens this identity up to the non-identical. 14

Adorno certainly does not think of this different possible subject as something that is simply abandoned to nature or as something intrinsically unintelligible: 'Human beings are only humane when they do not simply act as persons or explicitly posit themselves as such. The diffuse dimension of nature, where they are not "persons", suggests the figure of an intelligible being, of a self released from grip of the ego. Contemporary art provokes some sense of this' (ND: 274; ET: 277). The apparent regression, in relation to the identity that has prevailed until now, is also a hint or anticipation of an intelligibility that finds its real expression not through separation from the sensuous, but precisely through the process which unites the sensuous and the intelligible. Adorno's reference to art here will be clarified in connection with the concept of 'spirit' as deployed in his aesthetic theory. Adorno's interpretation of Kant's conception of the 'intelligible character' suggests how we might understand realm of 'the intelligible' without presupposing the idea of self-preserving subjectivityY Kant's concept of the 'intelligible character' designates the harmonious relationship between universal reason and the consciousness of the empirical individual. Adorno adopts this concept, although his own critique exposes its aporias, because he regards the historically most advanced form of consciousness as that of the individual consciousness. But this characterisation can only hold if the consciousness in question also accords with the rational universality of all individuals in relation to one another that is yet to be achieved. Adorno's interpretation of the intelligible character leads back to his earlier characterisation of the individual self: 'For human beings can still conceive of nothing better than such a character; the possibility of being another than one is, where all are locked up within their own selves and thereby locked out of them as well' (ND: 293; ET: 298). The possibility of being 'another than one is' once again refers back to experience or externalisation itself: the


individual self can change precisely through its experience of the other or its externalisation to the other without simply losing itself in the process. Further exploration of this thought would thus require us to abandon our narrow and restricted concept of experience. The form of experiencing the world which springs from the experience of self-alienation is thereby revealed as a limiting case which cannot properly serve to elucidate the full and undiminished concept of experience itself. In this connection our task now must be to show why Adorno regards the work of art as a possible way of realising the identity of the particular without subjection to the compulsion to identity.

h) The concept of experience

Insofar as critical theory takes the experience of alienation as its point of departure, it interprets the development of society as a radical process of mediation in which nothing remains identical with itself and can therefore no longer be experienced as such. The objectification of this experience leads us out of, rather than ever more deeply into, particular and specific experience. It leads us to the conceptual identification of a reality essentially constituted through the activity of the concept. While the critique of society can indeed determine, on the basis of its own analysis of the social, the shape that self-alienated experience takes, it can no longer grasp that self-alienation precisely as experience. 16

This theoretical perspective upon experience also indicates, however, that this experience is not merely true insofar as it expresses the untrue, but that experience as such possesses a truth moment of its own. To speak of experience as such already presupposes that the total functional context of society is not as total as its own concept inevitably implies, that one is therefore carried beyond this context through experience as such. The moment of experience, which cannot simply be derived from the definition of society as a radical context of mediation and therefore retains truth through its opposition to the untruth of the whole, is the moment of immediacy. But we cannot merely rest with immediate experience in this sense insofar as it initially appears, in this immediacy, as something purely individual and contingent. The objective thematisation of self-alienated experience in critical theory can serve as a model for how, on the one hand, we may penetrate behind the mere givenness of immediate experience and how, on the other, we may also avoid dissolving the moment of immediacy in mediation itself. Critical theory exposes the untruth of the social principle of mediation and thus the truth moment of the individual consciousness which claims its immediate being-for-self over against the radical mediation of everything. To this extent reflection upon the immediate experience of the prevailing reality returns to this experience itself. And this movement is what first brings the untruth as such to expression. In this way the

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experience first truly becomes experience in the strong sense of the word. For the latter implies that something is explicitly expressed or experienced as something specific or determinate. The emphatic expression which the object of experience acquires in this way indicates the immanent universality which is currently obscured by the abstract universal that that only recognises experience in an abstract or contingent form. But philosophical experience 'opens up possibilities, which the universal cursorily concedes to the particular, over against the universal that sabotages the universality of such experience. If this universality could be exposed, then our experience of everything individual would change, would relinquish much of the contingency that has irreparably distorted such experience until now, even where it is still capable of stirring' (ND: 52; ET: 42). The purpose of Adorno's critique of the abstract universal is the realisation of the immanent universality of experience, a universality which first makes experience in the strong sense possible. The category of immediacy on its own is insufficient to capture the concept of experience adequately. The relation between immediacy and mediation must therefore be conceptualised anew.

The social principle of radical mediation leads to the distortion of experience because such mediation involves no immanent determination of the object, but effectively reduces the particular to an abstract datum. 17

The objective reason for the divorce between immediate experience and its expression in theory is the fact that the potential immanent universality of the object, on account of the real 'isolation' of the individual, can only properly be revealed by theory itself and its critique of the abstract universal. It is only by virtue of the immanent universality of the experienced content that experience can lead to more than a merely immediate datum that is completely exhausted in its mediation by the abstract universal. That is precisely why Adorno criticises not only the radical mediation of the particular by the abstract universal, but also every attempt to contrast it critically with the notion of some purely immediate experience. The moment of immediacy is true for Adorno because it stands in for what has not yet been subsumed under concepts. But to grasp experience simply as the immediate would contradict both the structure of reality, which can only be experienced in its mediation through social activity, and the idea of the experiencing self that is also supposed to be distinguished, as subject, from the experienced object: 'That in the object which transcends the determinations imposed on it by thought is first returned to the subject in the form of immediacy; and there where the subject feels most certain of itself, in primary experience, is precisely where it is least of all merely subject' (ND: 49; ET: 39). While the immanent determination of the experienced content emerges with the emphatic expression of immediate experience, so too does the non-identity of the subject and its freedom in relation to that content. In this process immediacy is sustained within the persisting distinction between what is experienced and the one who experiences. Experience

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is the experience of something other as other. The possibility of this experience consists in the immanent determination of objects themselves and in the comportment of the experiencing subject in relation to the latter. This comportment must be characterised, firstly, as a kind of openness insofar as the subject does not simply cling to its own identity in the encounter with everything other than itself, and also, secondly, as a form of freedom insofar as a subjective achievement is required in order to penetrate the original immediacy of objects. The correlation between the non-identity of the object, which it possesses by virtue of its immanent universality, and the freedom of subjective comportment in relation to the object is not accidental but internal. 18 In merely immediate experience, the one who experiences is not a 'subject' at all insofar as the experienced content here is simply given and objective, and no distance in relation to the immediate is therefore really possible. The reduction of the experienced object to the mere 'material' of experience corresponds to the subjective orientation of instrumental-purposive control which presupposes the radical separation of subject and object and which itself, for Adorno, produces a loss of freedom. From this perspective, the immanent determinacy of the object is constitutive for the kind of subjective comportment which can sustain its own real otherness with respect to the object. 19

The objectifying of immediate experience can be described as a process in which the immanent universality of the object, the way in which the object has become what it is, is made emphatically explicit. The 'interior' of a particular object must be articulated as its relation to something other than itself, and its immanent universality or history as the process of this articulation. The objectifying of experience does not therefore lead us away from the object as immediately given, but rather into the object itself. This relation between mediation and immediacy implies that experience in the full sense is not distinguished from the conceptual subsumption of merely given data insofar as it lacks the specific components that are constitutive for universal cognition in the abstract sense. It is distinguished from conceptual subsumption precisely by virtue of the different relationship between these components.20 The relevant change of perspective is possible because the immediate here is not an indissoluble 'given', but rather something which has 'become' what it is under specific conditions and circumstances. The experiencing subject also belongs to the immanent history of the experienced content. For the process in which the object has become what it is equally reveals the openness that belongs to the subjective comportment of the experiencing subject.

For Adorno we cannot conceive of the process in which experienced content becomes explicit as something determinate without reference to a specific subjective contribution. The latter consists in transcending the object as it appears in its immediate givenness and thereby revealing for the first time the process in which it has become what it is. The mimesis

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of the object on the part of the subject is grounded in the resemblance between the objectifying of experience and the becoming of the object.21

This 'becoming' is concentrated in the particular object, and this is how it acquires the character of something given. But because the object can never be articulated or determined purely in terms of itself alone, the object cannot be separated from the process of its own becoming as mere 'result'.

In our previous discussion the immanent universal has only been thematised as the objective determination of things. But the concept of 'expression' also refers us directly to that of language which contains an intersubjective as well as a mimetic moment. This dimension is already implicit in the concept of experience itself insofar as experience is necessarily related to the individual consciousness precisely as its 'own' experience. We can only meaningfully conceptualise this possessive relation on the basis of the distinction between 'my' experience and 'your' experience, and this therefore also refers us to the universal moment that belongs to every individual subject: '"My" ego is in truth already an abstraction, and far from being the primordial experience that Husserl claims it is. Through this possessive relation the ego rather reveals itself as highly mediated. For "intersubjectivity" is already posited in this relation, not indeed simply as a pure possibility of the ego, but rather as the real condition of selfhood without which the qualifying reference "my" ego would be unintelligible' (Zur Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie, GS 5: 231 ). Adorno's critique of the transcendental subject showed that the possessive pronoun 'mine' must be interpreted in terms of an individual consciousness and cannot be universalised in terms of a pure ego. On the other hand, the truth moment of the transcendental approach, for Adorno, lies in the fact that we cannot conceive of the unity of the individual consciousness without reference to a universal moment. But this universality should not be interpreted as a pre-given law-governed structure which individuals always already and always must obey if they are to be capable of unifying their experiences and constituting their own identity, as a structure which can merely potentially be regarded as intersubjective and thus remains a 'pure possibility' in this respect. On the contrary, the 'mine' can only be grasped as specifically distinguished from the 'yours', and intersubjectivity can only be understood as the process in which a self, as a unity of experience that is distinct from any other self, is produced.22 Here 'individuality' is not merely regarded as an accidental or contingent determination of the self in contrast to an essential 'subjectivity' grounded in some pre-given concept of the subject. On the contrary, the other self, as distinguished from oneself, enters into the experience that is essential to the determination of every individual self.

Adorno's concept of experience can thus be read as a critical alternative to the concept of knowledge that attempts to ground its own objectivity and universality by reference to pure laws of thought. For Adorno, the process of 'communication' in which the universality of our experience is generated


is essentially that between subject and object, rather than that between subjects themselves (a relation which is not explicitly thematised by the transcendental approach anyway). Thus Adorno also understands the concept of communication in an objective way, describing it as the process in which a certain 'concord' or agreement [Einverstiindnis] between human beings and things is first established. But the dimension of intersubjectivity is also implicit in the concept of experience itself. For the latter is always the experience of an individual, and the identity of the individual - without which we could never meaningfully speak of 'his' or 'her' experience - can itself only be understood in relation to another different individual and thus in the context of the universality of that identity. Adorno's idea of a 'communication of what is differentiated', namely of subject and object, thus ultimately refers back to the dimension of intersubjectivity. But he criticises the allegedly sole truth-constitutive function of intersubjecivity, just as he criticises the transcendental approach in general, precisely by appealing to the 'priority of the object' and the 'communication of what is differentiated'. 23 Yet Adorno's critique of the traditional concept of communication still seems to underestimate the connection between the relation between subject and object and that between different subjects. This is externally evident from the preponderant role which the problem of subject-object clearly plays in his philosophy.

Adorno's idea of the 'communication between the distinguished' can still be accepted as a critique of the traditional concept of communication, even if we retain the traditional claim of this latter concept to describe the intersubjective relation between individuals. We have already pointed out that the experience of something other as other involves a transformation for the one who experiences and for that which is experienced: the one who experiences is determined afresh in his or her own individual being in relation to the object of experience, but equally belongs in turn to the process of becoming that characterises the object of experience. This process can therefore meaningfully be interpreted as a process of 'communication' and can also be transferred to the relation between subjects. But here too this communication continues to be a relationship between 'what is differentiated'. As distinct from the subject-object relation, this relationship must be grasped as a process of reciprocal interaction. Here each individual determines himself or herself afresh through the experience of the relevant other, but also already brings his or her particular identity into this process and also essentially emerges as a specific individual from this process. The 'result' of this communicative action cannot therefore be fixed in the form of an abstract universal consensus or of some purely universal truth content. The universal that is implicit in the process of interacting individuals must be discovered, in accordance with the concept of immanent universality, within the structure of human action itself. Thus Adamo's talk of 'communication between the distinguished' can also plausibly be interpreted in

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relation to the domain of intersubjectivity which Adorno himself did not thematise as such.

The idea of a reconciled relation between subject and object, as our previous reflections have clearly indicated at a number of points, leads us inevitably to the concepts of expression and language. Adorno's conception of experience already reveals that he does not understand 'expression' as a purely subjective activity, but rather as a self-expression of the thing or matter itself. The concepts of expression and language are both crucial to Adorno's aesthetic theory, and closer examination of their significance can therefore be seen as an extension of our analysis of his concept of experience in general. On the other hand, such an examination will also provide the necessary completion of this analysis since Adorno regards the work of art as an objective site for the kind of possible experience which can no longer be descried from the perspective of the theoretical critique of society. The work of art demands an experiential comportment on our part which the work facilitates through the characteristic identity with itself that all other objects of social reality themselves lack. This self-equality of the work of art, liberated as it is from the usual 'compulsion to identity', indicates that it is, at least in part, 'other' than the existing state of things and thereby also points beyond it. The concept of metaphysical experience stands for this orientation to something other which the untruth of current reality demands: 'Because works of art register and objectivate levels of experience that are fundamental to the relation to reality yet are almost always concealed by reification, aesthetic experience is socially as well as metaphysically compelling' (AT: 460, GS 7; ET: 460). This double significance of aesthetic experience, as an experience of society which is also beyond society, i.e. is a metaphysical experience,24 refers to the double significance of genuinely realised experience itself. The experience of current reality is also a transcendence of this reality for although society conceals, through its objective structure, its own untruth to itself and others, this concealment is challenged by the process of experience itself. And this again can be read as another indication that experience cannot be understood as a purely theoretical form of comportment.

2. The relationship between the universal and the particular in the domain of art

The further examination of Adorno's concept of experience in the context of his aesthetic theory requires some clarification of how the work of art, and our appropriate comportment to it, of how aesthetic experience, in contrast to social reality, can claim a truth moment in the first place. Adorno's critique of social reality showed that the coherent relationship between particular objects has largely disappeared, and thus the objective condition for experiencing this relationship has vanished too. From the perspective of

?TJ


the critique of society the conception of the work of art as an internally coherent and meaningful structure has become fundamentally problematic.25

The argument of Adorno's Aesthetic Theory differs from that of his other writings on social and epistemological issues in that here he begins from the truth harboured in the work of art and attempts to understand how works of art can be 'true' over against the untrue social whole. The following discussion takes the concept of aesthetic experience as its point of departure and undertakes to clarify the problem of the social character of art and Adorno's solution to this problem. For the ultimate significance of his reflections on the relationship between the universal and particular that is revealed in the domain of art can only properly be grasped on the basis of Adorno's understanding of the social character of art.

a) Aesthetic experience and the identity of the work of art

Adorno understands aesthetic experience more in terms of the objective form and configuration of the work of art than in terms of a specific attitude or comportment on the part of the subject. The aim of the work of art, for Adorno, is to attain an identity with itself that makes the work internally intelligible in its own right. The work of art can only realise this identity by radically withdrawing from the social context of meaning that is essentially marked and shaped by the universal being-for-another of the world of commodity relations. The work of art moves, therefore, in the domain characterised by the 'comprehensibility of the incomprehensible'.26 The task of aesthetic theory is not to eliminate this constitutive incomprehensibility, but to comprehend the incomprehensibility of the work of art by grasping the latter in terms of its specific relation to social reality. The incomprehensibility of the work of art derives from the fact that it can only realise its self-identity - the condition for comprehending it in terms of itself, the condition of its comprehensibility - in opposition to the social heteronomy from which it must withdraw in order to be a work of art at all.27

The elements or the material, in the broadest sense, through which the work of art is put together themselves derive from reality, but they are also withdrawn from this reality insofar as they are brought into a specific constellation, into a new relationship with one another precisely within the unity of the work of art. It is through this process, itself generated by the dynamic self-identity of the work of art, that the elements in question can first be experienced as estranged elements of reality. The work of art does not picture or duplicate social reality in its untruth, but reflects the latter precisely through its own form as a work of art. The movement through which the work attains its own identity with itself and which itself finds objective form in the particular work must be regarded as the constitutive moment of art as such. For it is through this movement that work of arts

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assume that oppositional relation to reality without which they would simply be objects 'for another'.

Because the work of art can acquire its identity only through this opposition to reality, the experience of the work itself cannot be grasped as a simply immediate one. On the contrary, the experience of the work must begin from the distance between the hearer or beholder of the work of art. 28

This reveals that the concept of experience must be applied in a particular critical way in relation to contemporary art. In comparison with philosophical experience, which begins from individual experience and explains the distortion of our experience on the basis of the analysis of society, the movement objectified in the work of art proceeds in the opposite direction: the work of art aims to become an intrinsically comprehensible experience by withdrawing from the social context of what merely appears to be a matter of immediate experience. 29 The comprehensible character of the work of art can only be grasped from a certain distance to the work, from its constitutive incomprehensibility.

This interplay between distance and immediacy, in which alone aesthetic experience is possible, also makes the presupposed self-identity of the work of art, and thus also its capacity to be experienced as such, deeply problematic. The work of art cannot be something that is immediately given for it can realise its identity only through the process in which it withdraws from current reality and thus transforms the elements that derive from this reality. But the work thereby also remains negatively bound to reality, and the self-contradictory character of the latter enters into the elements of the work of art itself. In its reconciling unity the work of art must partially reconcile the alienated content in order to express it through its own unifying form: 'Paradoxically, art must testify to the unreconciled and at the same time envision its reconciliation' (AT: 251; ET: 221 ). This paradox can only be resolved if we assume within reality itself a reconciling moment that is also of course obscured and distorted by the totalising claim of the principle currently governing society. Art too, like critical theory, is both a contradiction of reality and a moment of that same reality. 30

The unity of art with itself can never be wholly realised because the work of art is essentially a unity of alienated moments.31 This means that the work of art can easily be reduced to the reflective movement through which its acquires its identity with itself. But this reduction cannot be absolute because the work of art, considered as mere form, would simply express the principle of identity and thus forfeit its own constitutive difference over against existing reality. 32 It would also then be impossible to conceive of the particular work of art in its specificity. 33 It is because the unity of the work of art is essentially a unity of differentiated moments and thus a certain realisation of a reconciled identity, that the unfolding experience of art leads us towards the 'other' of art, to the extra-aesthetic domain of reality. Starting from the concept of aesthetic experience which postulates


the inner coherence and comprehensibility of the work of art, we are driven beyond the self-contained character of the work because its elements derive from reality, enter into the work itself as alienated elements, and cannot be really reconciled simply within the reflective movement of the work of art as such. This relationship to reality is not external to the work of art, and we cannot therefore abstract from it in order, for example, to try and grasp the work as immanently as possible. On the contrary, the work of art cannot be understood in its own right unless we also consider what is not simply absorbed without remainder into the unity of the work, even though the work inevitably attempts to incorporate the former within itself. 34

Because the dialectic of unity and difference cannot ultimately be decided in favour of unity, to understand the work of art is to grasp it in relation to something other than itself. This cannot be accomplished by aesthetic experience alone, but only through the contribution of intellectual interpretation or 'aesthetic theory' in Adorno's sense. 35 For Adorno it is also the task of such theory to grasp the relationship between art and social reality as such. We have seen that its relationship to reality is not external to art. The following discussion examines this relationship more closely since this alone can clarify the full significance which the configuration between the universal and the particular, as revealed in art, possesses for critical theory as a whole.

b) The social character of the work of art

If we interpreted works of art merely as objects within the context of social reality, they would simply appear as subject to the principle of radical immanence, and it would no longer be possible to understand their selfidentity or that of aesthetic experience as such. Adorno, on the other hand, interprets 'the immanence of society in the work"6 as the essential social relationship of art itself. The work of art establishes a critical distance to reality precisely because it reflects that reality. Through its very otherness to existing society it already embodies a critique of the latter which, in accordance with its own principle, tolerates nothing other than itself. The self-identity of the work of art, its autonomy in relation to the heteronomy that characterises social reality, must also be grasped therefore as an essentially social relationship. 37

But the critical distance of the work of art in relation to society is never simply guaranteed, but must be generated anew in the process objectified in the work. The work of art is compelled to be modern, compelled constantly to reveal something new, something not simply subsumed under the social principle. 38 Because art cannot grasp this novel moment by the criterion of prevailing reality, it constantly runs the risk of forfeiting its critical distance to reality. There is no a priori criterion for the successful production of a

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work of art. The latter can only be determined on the basis of the immanent coherence of the work of art. 39

According to Adorno, the work of art can only become self-identical and evade the social context of mediation by actualising again, in its own immanent way, the social process of reification, thereby identifying itself with the social principle of identity and reflecting the latter in the process.40 The success of the work of art depends on whether the character of this identity proves to be dynamic, on whether it develops from a unity imposed upon the manifold to become a reconciled identity of the manifold. The latter can only arise from the relationship between different constellated elements and it is this which makes the work of art into something more than a mere thing. The identity of the work of art remains untrue to the extent that it is still determined by the compulsion to identity characteristic of the abstract universal. It is only through the process of aesthetic reflection that this authentic identity is rendered explicit as reconciliation, as the identity of the non-identical.

Thus the relationship of art and society once again reveals the moment of self-preservation through identification with the aggressor, a phenomenon which Adorno had presented in the Dialectic of Enlightenment as one way in which the subject attempts to preserve itself in the face of nature. The work of art can only resist reification by making itself into a thing and this itself initially seems to preclude any expression of meaning or significance that would transcend the realm of existing reality.41 Nor does the content of the work of art consist in any identifiable communication concerning specific states of affairs. It consists rather in the particular way that the work reflects society and thus anticipates a different possibility for society within the work itself. In this sense Adorno regards the content of the work ofart as objective, and not simply as a mere subjective communication on the part of the artist as an individual: 'Art and society converge in the content [Geha/t] of the work of art, not in something external to the latter' (AT: 339; ET: 299). The priority of form over independently identifiable content [lnhalt] for Adorno also derives from the fact that art does not simply oppose to society some specific image of another possibility, but rather represents a process through which society itself is reflected. But this priority stands for the process of mediation amongst the different elements of the work of art, the process in which each element becomes its own 'other'.42 This is what distinguishes the mediation embodied in the work of art from the mediation effected through the current principle of society. The priority of form in the work of art arises from the necessity of releasing the individual elements of the work from the immanent context of society. For only if we do this can these elements be experienced as elements of an alienated reality: 'Form works like a magnet that orders elements of the empirical world in such a fashion that they are alienated from their extra-aesthetic existence, and it is only as a result of this alienation that they master the extra-aesthetic

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essence' (AT: 336; ET: 297). The 'self-preservation' of the work of art in relation to society differs from that of the subject in relation to nature insofar as 'compulsion' is not simply perpetuated, but reflected precisely as identity and transformed into an identity of distinguished moments.43

The unity of the work of art cannot be fixed in prior conceptual terms precisely it is essentially a unity of diverse and distinguished moments. That is also why the truth content of art finds expression in different and distinct works of art rather than in some single concept of art in general.44 Hence Adorno refuses to use the concept of beauty in order to set up rules for the actual production of works of art. The only 'rule' he suggests is that the artist must avoid everything 'unspecific' in the domain of art.45 The meaningful coherence of art must be immanent to the particular work in question and this is why Adorno grasps the work of art as essentially autonomous.46

It is true that the autonomy of art must not be construed as a prior concept or criterion for assessing a particular work of art. But the work art, by virtue of its autonomy, becomes something universal by resisting and thereby already criticising social heteronomy. Adorno's concept of autonomy, which might appear to be a purely 'aesthetic' category, also characterises the eminently social character of the work of art: '[ ... ] art becomes social by its opposition to society, and it occupies this position only as autonomous art' (AT: 335; ET: 296). The social character of art, on the other hand, also means that art claims its own validity only by virtue of prevailing universal social heteronomy.47 This opposition between social heteronomy and aesthetic autonomy leads directly to a fundamental problem of Adorno's aesthetic theory: the question concerning the effective reality of art as a whole.48 From the perspective of the critical analysis of society it is no longer very clear how we can understand the possibility of art at all. In the light of prevailing society, there is a sense in which there is indeed no art: this is the objective justification for Adorno's observation at the beginning of Aesthetic Theory that 'nothing concerning art is self-evident any more' (AT: 9; ET: 1). Insofar as the work of art attains self-identity it breaks through the social principle of radical mediation and thereby creates the impression that the functional context of society is not total after all.49 But because the work of art can only actualise its identity in opposition to society, rather than as a moment of society itself, it necessarily remains an appearance or 'semblance' - not in the sense of a realm utterly removed from reality, but as the appearing of a different possibility that could still be released within existing reality, even though the latter itself does not acknowledge any other alternative as a genuine possibility. 50 Art stands for the possibility of this 'otherness', but it refuses to present it in determinate form. Because art cannot, through its own resources, realise this possibility in social terms, or even identify the point or place from which it this realisation might be undertaken, it always runs the danger of abandoning its critical distance to society. The possibility of art is not grounded in some

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'transcendent' dimension and its autonomy can only be realised through the process which brings elements from social reality into a new constellation with one another. That is why art can never wholly free itself from social heteronomy and secure its own autonomy: 'Artworks are able to appropriate their heterogeneous element, their entwinement with society, because they are themselves always at the same time something social. Nevertheless, art's autonomy, wrested painfully from society as well as socially derived in itself, has the potential of reverting to heteronomy' (AT: 353; ET: 310). The convergence of substantive content and society in art, and thus the objectivity of the latter, is grounded in the way the work appropriates the 'heteronomous', that which is other than itself. 51 Adorno describes this process, where the negative aspect of the identical work of art is sublated in its unity, as a negation of the negation that produces a specific position. 52

But this characterisation is only valid from the perspective of aesthetic experience. The interpretation of works of art leads us back to the elements which the work certainly brings together but cannot entirely sublate insofar as they themselves derive from an alienated reality. The problematic position of works of art in relation to society finds expression in the works themselves insofar as they tend to contradict and point beyond themselves.53 This shows that social heteronomy penetrates to the core of the work of art itself and that the social character of the work not only facilitates its objectivity, but renders complete autonomy impossible and partly transforms it into heteronomy: 'It is only through the progress of reflection that the principle of identity proves to be illusory even in the artwork, because its other is constitutive of its autonomy; to this extent artworks too are alien to positive negation' (ET: 478; ET: 407). The difficulty of engaging productively with Aesthetic Theory arises from the particular position which Adorno ascribes to contemporary art. The possibility of genuine aesthetic comportment cannot be secured merely through the analysis of society or grasped in terms of the concepts informing that analysis. On the other hand, the critique of society, in order to begin at all, must be provoked by the experience of society that art for Adorno is capable of producing in an exemplary fashion. 54

Even if the self-identity of the work of art, its reconciling unification of different elements, can be exposed by social critique as a false semblance, this identity remains more central to a serious engagement with Aesthetic Theory than the reflection that it can no longer be grounded in relation to the current state of society. For it is clearly only from this perspective that the work of art allows us to glimpse a different relationship between universal and particular than the subsumptive one realised in the current form of society. We are justified in starting from here insofar as the critique of society itself is also capable of revealing and conceptualising different relationship between the universal and the particular. The moments which make reconciliation possible in art must be incorporated into the critique of society and the question of their possible social realisation addressed


directly. Thus while aesthetic theory is indeed certainly central to Adorne's philosophy as a whole, this philosophy is by no means complete simply as aesthetic theory. For the critique exercised by works of art, through which they reveal the potential truth within the current untruth of things, can and must also be accomplished in a different way by theoretical reflection. And only the latter can show precisely how aesthetic comportment itself can possess a truth moment at all.

c) The universal and the language character of art

The analysis of autonomy in terms of the social character of art shows that the work of art can only maintain its distance to social reality by turning back upon itself and thereby becoming something 'particular' in the emphatic sense of the word. But the work of art must be something more than a merely singular object if it is to resist the social principle of isolation. It must therefore be possible to discover something universal in the particular work of art.

The opposition between the work of art and the abstract universal makes it impossible to fix or capture the universal moment of the former in terms of any pre-given concept. Just as the autonomy of the work cannot be grasped as an independent concept in its own right, so too we are no longer able to specify any universal characteristics of artistic genre that could function as pre-given rules for the production of authentic works of art. 55

The universality of the work of art cannot be intended directly in the process of production, but can only be discovered through interpretation: That art must a fond perdu become individuated makes its universality problematic [ ... ] If art is supposed whole and unfragmented, it is bound from the outset to fail; if it is jettisoned in order to be won, there is no guarantee that it will return; it is lost insofar as the individuated does not on its own, without any deus ex machina, go over into the universal' (AE: 300; ET: 265). Adorne's demand that the work of art must pass over into the universal can only be understood in the context of his conception of art as a form of cognition. The artist's renunciation of all subjectively given forms makes it possible for something objective to be realised within his or her individual experience.56 The universality of the work of art is therefore grounded in the content by which it converges with social reality. 57 Works of art represent an objective cognition of reality by reflecting it in their own way. And it is in this movement that they become authentic: 'The more authentic the works, the more they follow what is objectively required, the consistency of the matter in question, and this is always universal' (AT: 300; ET: 265). The inner coherence or 'consistency of the matter' reveals itself in the work of art as the constellation into which the heterogenous elements are brought and in which the potential reconciliation of real contradiction becomes objective. The form of the work of art, the constitutive moment of its authenticity, has the task of liberating the individual and heterogenous

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elements in their potential particularity for the first time. The pnonty of form which Adorno emphasises in the work of art thus stands for substantive content as such that can no longer be experienced immediately in social reality itself.

The various elements of the work of art, or its 'material' - which Adorno understands all of the elements entering into the work that derive from reality - are not indeterminate, but are socially mediated and to that extent already also universal. Insofar as these elements are withdrawn from the social context in which they are originally understood, the character of the universal in question changes too: the work of art no longer represents the presupposed principle of society since the universality of the work of art is grounded in the potentially 'collective experience' of prevailing untruth. 58 Because the content of the work of art has passed through the medium of subjective experience, this content can present itself under the aspect of its reconciliation with the subject. To follow what is 'objectively required' does not therefore imply the renunciation of the subjective for the sake of the merely objective, but rather frees the subjective once more in the artistic material that can now be grasped as 'sedimented subjectivity'. 59

The universality of the work of art is not alien to the individual in the same way as the universality of society, but helps to bring the individual's experience into a genuinely binding form.

Because the work of art follows what is objectively required by becoming an authentic work, we can in turn discover in its particularity something universal that is grounded in this objective character. The universality in the particular work of art grounds an intersubjective validity insofar as the particular work of art, by virtue of its immanent universality, can be experienced as something determinate and can acquire its expressive character: 'By entrusting itself fully to its material, production results in something universal born out of the utmost individuation. The force with which the private I is externalised in the work is the I's collective essence; it constitutes the language character of works' (AE: 250; ET: 220). The universality in the 'material', which is no indeterminate material in the case of artistic production, but rather an objectively mediated or determinate one, finds expression in the 'idiosyncratic compulsions' which the artist has to obey. But these are to be understood not as some kind of merely external necessity, but as an indication of a latent supra-individual moment that is harboured within the material of the work of art and comes to expression in the work itself. The universal which results from the production of the work can be interpreted as a 'collective essence', as a universal reconciled with individual subjects, because individual experience essentially enters into the process of artistic production in a way that it does not into the process of discursive knowledge or abstract social labour.

The concept of the language character of art does not imply that art moves purely within the realm of language as an intersubjective medium. It


signifies that something objective comes to speak and express itself here. We have already pointed out that Adorno distinguishes his concept of objective communication from the traditional concept of communication which designates a process in which different subjects come to agree upon an ultimately undetermined object. The work of art is not an object about which one could simply come to agreement in this way. The work of art offers something objective to be understood by virtue of the subjective accomplishment that it involves.

Thus the work of art does not express the subjective intention of the artist, but the potentially 'collective experience' of the currently existing world, and indirectly therefore this world itself. We must consider this, in accordance with our historical situation, from a double perspective: the untrue whole and its potential truth both come to expression here. The untruth of the current world can be grasped as the contradiction between the universal and the particular. From the perspective of conceptuality, which constitutes social reality, there is no such contradiction precisely because it cannot be grasped in purely conceptual terms. But this contradiction can find expression in the work of art because the latter represents a non-conceptual form of cognition. The 'other' possibility which appears in the work of art is not merely subjective in character. It is the objective reconciliation of universal and particular which the existing world implicitly demands because its own immanent contradiction is objective, but not objective for itself, not objective for the concept through which this world is constituted: 'It is not for itself, self-consciously, but in itself, implicitly, that the existing wants something other than itself. And the work of art is the language of this wanting, and the content of the work of art is as substantial as this wanting. The elements of this other possibility are present in reality and they require only the most minute displacement into a new constellation to find their right position. [ ... ] However, the fact that works of art exist signals the possibility of the non-existing' (AT: I 99-200; ET: 174). According to Adorno, the reality which is objectively determined through the contradiction between the universal and the particular can only be experienced by the individual consciousness.60 It is because the concept of experience itself implies the experiencing of something determinate as determinate, because the objective realises itself in this process, that Adorno can interpret the 'reason' of the individual as some· thing objective, as the reason immanent 'in existence itself'.61 By virtue of this relationship it is possible for works of art to express what the existina intrinsically desires, and that is why they are objective.62

This explains why Adorno is able to describe the language of the work of art as the expression of the 'matter itself': 'The expression belonging to works of art is the non-subjective in the subject' (AT: 172; ET: 148). And his concept of the language character of art is similarly directed oriented towards mimetic moment of language. According to Adorno, art as a whole

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attempts to transform the communicative language that moves entirely within the dimension of intersubjectivity into a mimetic language.63 The universality of this language springs from the immanent universality of the work of art and the communicative universality of language thus remains essentially mediated by objectivity: 'Indeed, the truth of works of art can only be conceived through the way in which the transsubjective can be read within the subjectively imagined in itself. The work of art is the mediation of the transubjective' (AT: 421; ET: 364~65). This mediation is possible because the work of art is not something that is simply present as an object, but is something objective that expresses itself precisely as such. The 'in itself' of which Adorno speaks here has itself not yet been realised and he describes it in terms of language, not in terms of some indissoluble reality. 64 Because intersubjective universality is mediated through the non-identity of the subject, it cannot be absolutised as an identificatory universal which subjects in general always already have at their disposal. The individual subjects enter into this concrete universality precisely through their own experience of the objective, and thereby in their own particularity.

The concept of the language character of art captures a relationship between subject and object which is also implicated in the relationship between subjects themselves but is not simply reducible to the latter. The object is determined insofar as it 'passes through the subject'. In the case of the work of art this is most vividly revealed by the fact that the work is something subjectively produced rather than something merely objectively given. Adorno does not describe this productive subject as the individual artist who, for Adorno, also participates as moment amongst others in the process of artistic production, but rather in terms of a 'we', and this alone clearly shows that the intersubjective dimension of the work of art is not a merely secondary feature subsequently added on to the relationship of subject and object: 'The language character of art leads us to reflect upon what it is that speaks through art; this is its veritable subject, not the one who produces it or the one who receives it' (AT: 249; ET: 219). Through its own objectivity and immanent determinacy the work of art acquires a certain independence over against the artist or the potential audience, but it cannot be grasped in turn as something simply objective. Adorno describes the work of art as a social relation which 'bears in itself the law of its own objectification' (AT: 250; ET: 250). That is why we are justified in grasping the aesthetic subject as a 'we'. According to Adorno, this 'we' assumes concrete form in the language of the work of art. This shows that the universality of the 'we' is mediated by the immanent universality of the work of art and cannot be reduced to an abstract concept of 'subjectivity in general'. This 'we' remains indeterminate because it is still bound to society, but must also be seen from the perspective of a possible critique of society and as an anticipation of a social subject that society does not as yet possess. This reveals, once again, that antagonism of the social order reaches into the work of art itself: in the


last analysis the aesthetic subject could only represent a social 'we' that has yet to be realised. It is clear that the relationship between the aesthetic subject and the work of art here cannot be interpreted traditionally in terms of an underlying subject regarded as the indispensable presupposition of anything and everything objective. Works of art intrinsically demand the 'we' as the relevant aesthetic subject. On the other hand, we can also see that the acknowledgement of the expression harboured within the work of art, the experience and interpretation of the latter, also demands an at least partial realisation of intersubjective universality on the part of this 'we'.

Adorno interprets the 'we' as the aesthetic subject on the basis of his own conception of the work of art. He refuses to provide a concept of the social subject that is anticipated in the work of art. This is because although works of art certainly stand in for the possibility of a new and different state of things, they also leave this latter undetermined. Because art is to be grasped as a critique of social reality, it is clear that the social subject which art demands also corresponds with that envisaged by the theoretical critique of the abstract universal. In order to clarify this correspondence further, we shall now attempt to show that works of art, like critical theory itself, can also be interpreted as a critique of the subjective principle of self-preservation. The philosophical critique of this principle has led us to the concept of an individual self whose identity is not constituted through the abstractly universal principle of identity. We therefore need to examine precisely how this critique is also realised in and through the work of art. This convergence between the theoretical and aesthetic form of critique justifies us, on the one hand, in understanding the 'we', which Adorno describes as the genuine aesthetic subject, from the perspective of the immanent universal and, on the other, in bringing the reflections of Adorno's aesthetic theory back into the context of his critique of society and knowledge in general.

d) The critique of the self-preserving subject in the domain of art

Adorno's conception of the work of art as objective must be interpreted in the light of two claims: on the one hand, the work of art expresses the non· identical or nature insofar as it has been reduced to mere material through its domination on the part of the self-preserving subject; on the other hand, the work of art does not represent mere nature but rather anticipates a reconciled relationship between subject and object. And we cannot compre· hend the objectivity of the work of art without reference to the subjectivity which is also distinguished from it. The subject that stands over against the work of art cannot be conceived as a simply self-preserving one precisely because the work of art, by virtue of its immanent organisation, remains something non-identical in relation to the subject. We could illustrate this both with respect to the process of artistic production where the subject follows what is objectively required for the work and with respect to the

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attitude and posture which the work of art requires of the viewer or listener.

The discussion of Adorno's concept of aesthetic experience has revealed that the work of art, in accordance with its inner configuration, demands to be understood in its own terms, although it must also withdraw from the social context of understanding and thus establish a certain distance between itself and its audience. This distance cannot be overcome by simply placing works of art back into this social context, but only by the viewers or listeners abandoning themselves to their experience of the works in question. According to Adorno, this is only possible if the experiencing subject allows his or her identity, which for its part also belongs to the social context, to be put into question. Adorno also describes this process as one of shaking or 'shattering' (AT: 364; ET: 319). But the individual ego does not simply disappear in this process, but comes to experience the untruth of its own immediate self-certainty, and thus also of the principle of identity itself: 'The I is seized by the unmetaphorical, semblance-shattering consciousness: that it itself is not ultimate, but semblance [ ... ] This subjective experience directed against the I is an element of the objective truth of art' (AT: 364/65; ET: 320). The 'subjective experience directed against the I', realised in the work of art, can be directly related to the 'second level of reflection' which Adorno also demands of the subject (where it acknowledges the non-identity and grasps itself as the other of the object itself). Thus too what the work of art demands of the viewer or listener is not the renunciation of subjective identity, but rather its re-articulation and development in relation to the non-identical.65

The critique of the principle of identity becomes objective in the work of art insofar as the otherness of the work with respect to existing reality is grounded in its autonomy and insofar as the process of aesthetic experience does not sublate this otherness but is confirmed precisely through grasping the immanent intelligibility of the work of art. Adorno also interprets the reconciling identity of the work of art, which grounds its non-identity over against the self-preserving subject, as the model for a genuinely 'rational' identity that does not simply perpetuate our original mythical condition. The cognition embodied in the work of art is distinguished from discursive knowing, from the subsumption of the particular under the abstract universal, because the unity of the work retains its elements in their own particularity and difference. The critique which the work of art exercises upon the principle of subjective self-preservation does not produce an abstract negation of this principle, but leads in the direction of a different form of subjectivity: 'Art accomplishes the correction of self-preserving reason, but not by simply setting itself in opposition to it; rather, the correction of reason is accomplished by the reason immanent in the works of art themselves. Whereas the unity of works of art derives from the violence which reason inflicts upon things, this unity is at the same time the source of reconciliation of the


elements of works of art' (AE: 454; ET: 388). The work of art does not simply criticise self-preserving subjectivity by demanding that the subject adopt a different comportment toward itself than it does to its objects. Rather subjectivity itself is transformed once it is properly grasped as the 'concept' of the aesthetic subject. We have already discussed the aesthetic subject as a 'we'. Given this transformation of subjectivity, the 'we' cannot be defined as an abstract universal over against individual subjects them· selves since this would turn it once again into a purely self-preserving subject standing over against nature. The 'we' designates a subjective universality that does not contradict the particularity and diversity of its objects. But this universality can also be grasped as a social subject, as distinct from the social system, because it arises as the objective manifestation of individuals and their experience rather than simply in abstraction from them.

Adorno understands the process that assumes objective form in the authentic work of art as a reconciliation of the contradictory moments that are criticised explicitly in Negative Dialectics, as a reconciliation of subject and object, universal and particular. If we attempt to conceptualise the reconciled relationship that is realised in the work of art, we come up, again, against the problematic relationship between society and art. It is difficult to discern from the structure of the existing world, which is essentially determined by the contradiction between the identificatory concept and the non-identical object, how art is possible at all. But it is equally difficult to see how the reconciling unity of the work of art can rigorously be developed from the real relationship between identity and non-identity. The work of art, which Adorno expressly characterises as a non-conceptual form of cognition, cannot sustain the dialectic of identity and non-identity. They evade this dialectic and anticipate its end in a state of reconciliation. Thus basic approach of Adamo's Aesthetic Theory treats the authenticity of the work of art as the condition of the reconciliation of universal and particular, or subject and object, although this authenticity can no more be grounded in these circumstances than can the possibility of art in general.66

The self-understanding of critical theory itself would imply that we cannot ultimately rest content with this opposition, with the self-same structure of society on one side and the self-enclosed work of art as an immanent process of reconciliation on the other. It is already an index of the untruth of this situation that a particular which reaches out beyond its purely isolated or singular character can only be realised as a work of art and is therefore compelled to remain a 'semblance' of truth. The movement objectively embodied in the work of art must also, in accordance with the critical claim of art, be realised in social terms. Without this implicit claim the work of art would remain abstract in relation to current reality, would thus forfeit its own constitutive moment, its critical distance towards the existing state of things: 'Ultimately, the doctrine of imitation should be

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reversed; in a sublimated sense, reality should imitate works of art' (AT: 199-200; ET: 174). But if this is to be possible, we must also be able to develop the relationship between universal and particular, as this is realised in the work of art, on the basis of our critique of society.67 This is the only way to overcome the indeterminacy of aesthetic categories which arises from the non-conceptual character of art itself. Thus one can see how Adorno's Aesthetic Theory repeats, in a positive key, the concepts which the critical analysis of society and discursive knowledge presented in merely negative terms. But the concepts of the 'social subject', of 'self-equality without the compulsion to identity', of 'mimetic language', all remain conceptually indeterminate. They merely designate the presence of the possibility of something other, but never this 'other' itself. 68 The justification for introducing these concepts directly into the critique of society and of abstract cognition is already clear, in a purely external way, from the fact that they are obviously not merely aesthetic categories. The necessity of deploying the concepts in this way derives from the character of critical theory itself: the act of critique must start from existing reality, turning its power against itself and seeking out the possibility of a different state of things. Given a social reality that is essentially determined by the contradiction between concept and object, or universal and particular, it is necessary to reflect explicitly upon the character of conceptuality as such. And that is why critique can never simply be identified with, or absorbed into, artistic reflection or aesthetic theory.

On the other hand, it is impossible simply to transfer categories from the domain of art to that of society. This difficulty arises from the problematic relation between art and society: the work of art is other than society although the latter expressly tolerates nothing beyond itself.69 In attempting to grasp this 'otherness' in conceptual terms, aesthetic theory inevitably becomes entangled in a socially generated aporia: the acknowledgement or conceptualisation of this otherness already presupposes a transformation of society itself. Aesthetic theory either stays with the theoretical analysis of society, in which case it can no longer adequately understand art, or stays with the immediate experience of the work of art, in which case it can no longer grasp works of art in their relation to society and thus their inner significance. 70 This contradiction, which arises from the separation between philosophy and art, cannot simply be resolved in favour of one side or the other. Adorno attempts to sustain and acknowledge this contradiction by bringing art and philosophy into a more intimate relationship to one another. But if the separation of art and philosophy is not absolute, philosophy must also be able to grasp what allows the reconciled unity of difference to appear in the work of art as a potentially reconciling moment in reality itself.

Adorno brings all these different aspects of the reconciling unity of the work of art together in his concept of 'spirit'. Adorno's interpretation of


the work of art as a non-conceptual form of cognition immediately reveals that he adopts this term from Hegel's philosophy while deploying it in a different sense. For Adorno the spirit of the work of art is precisely what constitutes its otherness in relation to current reality, makes the work of art into something more than a simply given object, and permits the reconciliation of its own elements. But we must then examine the significance of the concept of spirit in relation to his critique of society and cognition in general insofar as these converge with the critique that is exercised by the work of art. The purpose of critical theory would therefore have to be clarified specifically with reference to the concept of spirit.

The concept of spirit would provide one good point of departure for clarifying the relation between the universal and particular in more detail. The critique of society and abstract knowledge could only deploy the speculatively true concepts of the universal and the particular in a negative form because no moments of realisation in this respect could be discovered in the untrue whole. But in the context of aesthetic theory these concepts necessarily remain indeterminate. This situation certainly implies that no completely true concept of the universal and the particular can be produced for as long as social reality, theory and art exclude one another. But Adorno interprets this separation as 'untrue'. That is why his thought must ultimately be addressed in terms of what still points beyond this state of things.


T. W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik, in: T. W. Adorno, Gesammelte Schrifien, Frankfurt am Main, vol. 5, p. 50 (abbreviated as ND); English translation: Negative Dialectic, tr. by. E. B. Ashton, London 1973, pp. 39-40. Adorno's Gesamme/te Schrijien are abbreviated as GS.

2 Cf. T. W. Adorno, Minima Mora/ia, Frankfurt am Main 1971, p. 10; English translation: Minima Mora/ia. Reflections from Damaged Life, tr. by E. F. N. Jephcott, London 1974, pp. 16-17.

3 Cf. T. W. Adorno, 'Individuum und Organisation', in GS: 8: 451-452. 4 Cf. ND: 319-20; ET: 325-26. 5 Cf. Minima Moralia, p. 203. 6 Critical theory ultimately aims to overcome the separation between the isolated

singular individual and the experience of an external, initially unintelligible reality by tracing and determining the consciousness of the individual in relation to its objective source and cause. In this sense there is nothing 'subjectivistic' about taking individual consciousness as the starting point for critical theory. It is true, as H-H. Holz has observed, that this approach reveals certain parallels with the existentialist philosophy of the early Sartre and with Kierkegaard's understanding of the relationship between consciousness and the external world (cf. 'Mephistophelische Philosophie', in: Die neue Linke nach Adorno, ed. W. Schoeller, Munich 1969, pp. 189ff.). But critical theory also corrects this starting point by exposing an objective moment in the apparently subjective domain and a universal dimension in what is apparently purely individual.

7 'Art is the appearance of the social dialectic of the universal and the individual mediated by the subjective spirit. It looks beyond this dialectic insofar as it does

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not simply realise it but reflects it through form'. Cf. 1fsthetische Theorie, GS 6, p. 69 (abbreviated as AT); English translation: Aesthetic Theory, tr. by Robert Hullot-Kentor, London 2004, p. 386. Art can look beyond the real dialectic of the universal and the particular because it is bound to autonomy or 'aesthetic being for self' (AT: 69; ET: 53), to the individual experience in which we must seek out the moments which have not yet been completely subsumed under the abstract principle that governs society.

8 Cf. AT: 385; ET: 336-37. 9 This reversal of perspective is justified in relation to the immanent antagonism of

the abstract universal that excludes the individual moment of experience from itself precisely through the process of subsumption. That is why the context of social mediation can only be regarded as the whole in a critical sense. Insofar as individual experience redeems this criticism the meaning of identity and non-identity with respect to the relation between the individual and society is itself transformed. Thus non-identity no longer arises from the contradiction within the abstract universal, but from the way in which the individual acquires determinacy in its own right, and identity in turn thus comes to recognise itself in its own other. The demand for this transformation is objective and grounded in the universal itself insofar as the latter, once it has been culminated in a purely objective system, no longer represents a concrete possibility of life. Cf. Stichworte, Frankfurt am Main 1969, p. 44.

10 Art represents the culmination of this movement which articulates a reconciled relationship of universal and particular by taking the experienced untruth of the abstract universal as its point of departure. But this is only possible for art, in Adorno's view, precisely because art renounces any direct intervention in reality and sustains the semblance of an indeterminate otherness. The universality of individual experience arises from the fact that it is also the objective experience of social reality, of universality in its untruth. But it can only become explicit as such through critical thought since the prevailing universal obscures its own untruth: 'Through experience and consistent reflection the individual is capable of a truth concerning the universal which the latter, as blindly self-perpetuating power, conceals from itself and from others' (ND: 337; ET: 344). Recognition of the historical truth of the abstract universal, whose untruth lies in its failure to correspond to its own concept, is itself vouchsafed only to a thinking whose own universality does not correspond to that which has been historically realised up to the present.

11 ND: 274; ET: 277. 12 Cf. Philosophische Terminologie, Frankfurt am Main 1974, vol. 2, pp. 236-237.

Adorno emphasises the practical dimension of theory which belongs to it through its own comportment to the object. Adorno has little to say about praxis as such, which must also be thematised if we are to clarify what 'comportment' ultimately involves. His approach derives from the fact that the otherness to which the self abandons itself makes the constitution of concrete individual identity almost impossible, and true praxis therefore appears impossible in turn. Since the system of society denies the individual the concrete possibility of participation, the self cannot properly recognise itself in its other or realise its own identity in relation to the latter. It should nonetheless be admitted that Adorno's concept of praxis is too closely modelled on the concept of labour and is insufficiently open to other ways of conceiving the overcoming of the subject-object relation.

13 In we consider Adorno's 'marginalia on theory and practice', it becomes very clear that he fails adequately to distinguish between the concept of labour and


that of praxis (Cf. Stichworte, pp. l69ff; English translation: Critical Models. Interventions and Catchwords, tr. by H. W. Pickford, New York 1998, pp. 259-278). It is true that his critique of the traditional conception of the relation of subject and object is also directed against the concept of labour conceived simply as the realisation of a subjective purpose in an objective and indeterminate material, and implies a transformation of this relationship into a 'communication amongst diverse elements'. But we have already argued earlier that it is impossible to conceive of a genuine change in the relationship of subject and object without a corresponding change in intersubjectivity. Adorno's claim that praxis 'arose from Jabour' (Stichworte, p. 172; ET: 262) appears highly questionable, therefore, insofar as it seems to leave no room for a relevant transformation at the level of intersubjectivity itself. The distinction between poiesis and praxis, which Habermas develops on the basis of Aristotle, serves to highlight this problematic aspect of Adorno's thought. On the other hand, we might ask whether the communicative grounding of praxis in terms of abstract universal rules does not fall short of Adorno's own insight into the untruth of the abstract universal and thus inevitably relinquishes the concept of the nonidentical in this regard.

14 On the basis of his interpretation of Adorno's thought G. Rohrmoser simply claims that the individual forfeits its selfhood by virtue of the compulsion to identity and concludes that the only 'possible subject' is essentially dissociated in character: 'Negative dialectics hopes to redeem us from the mythical spell of total domination through the abandonment of personal human subjectivity' (Das Elend der kritischen Theorie, Freiburg 1970, p. 33). But close examination of Adorno's Aesthetic Theory clearly shows that the subject's self-abandonment to otherness should not simply be identified with dissociation in this sense.

I 5 Cf. ND: 283ff.; ET: 287ff. 16 'The experience of the powerlessness of the individual, which is resisted by the

principle of individual experience, can hardly be incorporated into the latter' (GS: 8: 243).

17 The distortion of experience refers both to the objective structure of objects and to the individuals who, through the drive for pure self-preservation, extrude all otherness from themselves and cannot therefore properly be understood as concrete subjects of experience. Adorno nonetheless locates the potential for change in individuals insofar as a moment of immediacy is still preserved in their own experience of universal mediation. Cf. AT: 325; ET: 285-6. On account of the objective being-for-another characteristic of the world of commodities the dimension of immediate being-in-itself has passed over into the subject. Cf. AT: 253; ET: 222-3.

18 Minima Moralia, p. 43: 'Not least responsible for the death of experience is the fact that things, subjected to the law of pure purposiveness, assume a form that limits our relationship with them to that of mere manipulation, one that tolerates nothing beyond this, whether any freedom of comportment towards the thing, or any independence on the part of the thing itself, nothing that could live on as an intrinsic experience because it is not simply consumed in the moment of action.'

19 This also shows that the conception of the experiencing self remains entirely abstract as Jong as experience itself is understood as a purely comportment. Experience of otherness precisely as other changes the one who experiences because the self here acquires determination solely in relation to this otherness. On the other hand, subjective activity enters in turn into the immanent universality, into the history, of the object.

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20 The idea of a constellation of concepts gives some indication as to how the relationship of thought and experience should ultimately be described. Cf. Zur Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie, GS 5, p. 52.

21 'This becoming fades and dwells within the thing, no more be reduced to the concept of the latter than divorced from its own result and forgotten. Temporal experience resembles this becoming' (ND: 62; ET: 52). For Adorno's idea of the resemblance between subject and object cf. ND: 153; ET: 150, and Zur Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie, pp. 147-48.

22 ND: 132; ET: 126. 23 'Were speculation concerning the state of reconciliation allowed, then it would

be impossible to conceive that state as either the undifferentiated unity of subject and object or their hostile antithesis: rather it would be the communication of what is differentiated. Only then would the concept of communication, as an objective concept, come into its own. The present concept is so shameful because it betrays what is best - the potential for agreement between human beings and things - to the idea of imparting information between subjects according to the exigencies of subjective reason' (Stichworte, p. 153; ET: 447). Adorno's concept of objective communication cannot be understood without reference to the immanent universality of the object and its history. The object is not merely objective insofar as subjective activity is also sedimented within the former. Here too Adorno's concept of communication points to a relationship between subjects that nonetheless cannot be universalised simply as a form of subjectivity. Thus communication never forfeits its own objective moment for Adorno.

24 For Adorno's understanding of 'the metaphysical' dimension of experience, cf. ND: 354f.; ET: 36lf.

25 'It is self-evident that nothing concerning art is self-evident any more, not its inner life, not its relation to the world, not even its right to exist' (AT: 9; ET: I).

26 AT: 516; ET: 440. 27 In his lectures on aesthetics Adorno speaks of 'the constitutive unintelligibility

that attaches to works of art' ( Vorlesungen zur ,-4.'sthetik, Zurich 1973, p. 5). But the moment of unity or evident intelligibility is equally constitutive: by virtue of their own form works of art claim to be understandable. But since they can only realise their unity through opposition to the general social context of understanding, they will not appear understandable in terms of the latter.

28 'Aesthetic experience first of all places the observer at a distance from the object' (AT: 514; ET: 439).

29 This process can perhaps be illustrated most vividly by reference to the work of Samuel Beckett. It defeats every attempt to extract a meaningful and separable message from it because it moves in a sphere where the categories of reality have lost their validity. It 'emigrates to a standpoint that is no longer a standpoint at all' (AT: 371; ET: 325). But it cannot be reduced to mere form or tautologous utterance since it lives, moves and attempts to derive content precisely through the negation of content, of the elements of reality itself. For Adorno's interpretation of Beckett cf. AT: 333, 371, 474; ET: 292, 32425, 403; Noten zu Literatur, GS 11: 281ff.; English translation, Notes to Literature, tr. by Shierry Weber Nicholsen, New York 1991, vol. I, pp. 24lff.

30 If we attempted to grasp the relationship between art and reality as a purely paradoxical and external conjunction of two heterogenous dimensions, art would forfeit the very critical and dynamic moment which today grounds its right to exist according to Adorno. If we apply this moment of art to the critical approach to society, we can see that the latter cannot be maintained in its full extremity. Society no longer appears simply as the 'ever-same'. This illustrates


one of the most fundamental problems concerning the precise relationship between Aesthetic Theory and the other works of Adorno.

31 Cf. Noten zu Literatur, GS 11: 291; Notes to Literature, vol. I. p. 248. 32 This would also contradict the 'reconciling unity' of the work of art. Cf. AT: 277;

ET: 244-5. 33 Adorno's reflections here are governed by his view that 'every work of art, and

now in retrospect older works of art as well, are effectively confronted by the question as to how, or whether, it is still possible to speak of the particular' (Vorlesung zur ,,fsthetik, p. 27). For Adorno art is concerned less with assuming a position towards specific phenomena of reality than towards the essence of this reality, namely the abstract universal of society itself. This accounts for the primacy of form in relation to content in the work of art. But even if we admit that the process of universal mediation no longer permits us to relate directly to individual phenomena, we might still ask whether Adorno is still able to grasp the specific content of works of art in an adequate manner. Cf. Kaiser's reflections on 'Adornos Asthetische Theorie', in: G. Kaiser: Benjamin. Adorno. Zwei Studien, Frankfurt am Main 1974, pp. 158ff.

34 Cf. Adorno's essay 'Lyric Poetry and Society', in: Noten zu Literatur, GS 11, p. 48ff.; Notes to Literature, vol. I, pp. 37ff.

35 AT: 520; ET: 444. 36 AT: 345; ET: 304. 37 This approach to the social character of art explains Adorno's critique of the

kind of 'engaged' or 'committed' art defended by Sartre in Qu'est-ce que la litterature? or of the 'realist' conception of art propounded by the later Lukacs. Cf. Adorno's essays 'Commitment' and 'Extorted Reconciliation', in: Noten zu Literatur, GS: 409ff. and 251 ff.; Notes to Literature, vol. 2, pp. 76ff.; vol. I, pp. 216ff.

38 The work of art does not attempt to describe this dimension of the new, but merely points towards it. It is not simply other in relation to the existing state of things, but must be grasped as an expression of the process which might lead to another condition of life. For Adorno art is the semblance of this undetermined otherness. Baumeister and Kulenkampff capture this thought succinctly when they claim: The new is not only something other with respect to the old, but it actually says "No", actually intends its otherness.' Cf. T. Baumeister and J. Kulenkampff, 'Geschichtsphilosophie und Asthetik', in: Neue Hefte fur Philosophie 5 (1973), p. 76.

39 The position of the work of art in relation to reality finds expression in the fact that category of the new remains abstract and cannot furnish concepts valid for every work of art as such. The critical moment of art can therefore only be discovered by reference to the particular work of art in each case and cannot be subsumed under a more embracing concept: The category of the new, as the abstract negation of the category of the permanent, converges with the latter: the invariance of the new is its weakness' (AT: 404; ET: 352).

40 'Whereas art opposes society, it is nevertheless unable to take up a position beyond it; it achieves opposition only through identification with that against which it remonstrates' (AT: 201; ET: 176). This implies in turn that the new i1 objectively harboured in the existing order of things. Otherwise the work of art, which does not itself externally import anything new, could never be constituted as such in the first place.

41 The concept of reification possesses a twofold significance for Adorno: it points both to the subsumption of objects under the principle of exchange and to the persisting non-identity of the particular object over against all identification:

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'Both moments are entwined in everything thing-like: the un-identical dimension of the object and the subjection of human beings to the prevailing conditions of production' (ND: 192; ET: 192). This explains why works of art, through their own immanent process of 'reification', can be more than things in the sense of commodities.

42 Cf. AT: 134; ET: 114. 43 'The unity of works of art is their caesura from myth. [ ... ] Thus they do not

extirpate myth but mollify it' (AT: 277; ET: 244). This claim must be interpreted in a twofold sense. The enlightenment that has reverted to myth is not simply perpetuated at the very heart of the work of art which can therefore still disclose the non-identical. But the work of art does not simply regress to a position prior to enlightenment and simply abandon the moment of identity. The work of art realises identity in a form which no longer threatens to fall back into mythological compulsion: 'Works of art are self-likeness freed from the compulsion of identity' equality' (AT: 190; ET: 166).

44 AT: 198; ET: 173. 45 AT: 74; ET: 60. 46 Sometimes Adorno employs the concept of aesthetic 'authenticity' rather than

that of autonomy. Authenticity, in its original sense, expresses the difference between a merely universal consistency and the immanent consistency of the particular work of art. With regard to Adorno's specific interpretations of art, on the other hand, we might ask whether Adorno does not turn the concept of the authentic work into an absolute or abstractly presupposed concept in a way that ultimately limits his understanding of certain important developments of modern art. Cf. M. Jimenez, 'Presence de Adorno', in: Revue esthetique, Paris 1975/1, p. 139ff. The question arises with particular force in relation to Adorno's interpretation of Schoenberg and Stravinsky as paradigm cases of authentic and inauthentic art in his Philosophy of the New Music.

47 Cf. AT: 34; ET: 23~24. 48 Those who defend a purely social concept of art have objected that Adorno's

approach simply equates the autonomy of art with its impotence and that this freedom of art from society in the last analysis robs art of its own freedom too. J. Frede! argues that the autonomous dynamic of art in Adorno ultimately implies an 'autarchy' which prevents the work of art from intervening in reality at all (cf. 'Kunst als Produktivkraft', in: Autonomie der Kunst, ed. M. Muller, Frankfurt am Main 1972). Against this objection we should point out that the autonomy of art allows it to reflect reality critically, that autonomy should not be identified with a purely exclusive form of individuation, that through its autonomy art remains related precisely to its own other. Others have objected that Adorno's concept of autonomy is no longer appropriate to contemporary developments since progressive art has already itself become a commodity (cf. 0. Werckmeister, 'Das Kunstwerk als Negation', in his book Das Ende der A"sthetik, Frankfurt am Main 1971 and Peter Burger, Theorie der Avantgarde, Frankfurt am Main 1974). Adorno himself certainly recognised the problematic character of the concept of autonomy itself: 'Art's autonomy is beginning to show signs of blindness' (AT: 9; ET: I). And in the Philosophy of the New Music he writes: 'Art would perhaps be authentic only when it has relinquished the idea of authenticity itself, the idea that it can only be such and such and not otherwise' (GS 12: 196; English translation: Philosophy of Modern Music, tr. by A.G. Mitchell and W. V. Blomster, New York 2003, p. 217).

49 This also clarifies the relationship between Adorno's aesthetic theory and his critical writings on society which begin from the idea of the social totality which


itself excludes the perspective of the autonomous work of art. But the critique of society is concerned precisely with that which forms the starting point of aesthetic theory, although Adorno finds it difficult to make the possibility of art intelligible within actually existing society. There is a complementary relationship between aesthetic theory and social critique. That is why M. Puder's claim that the term 'aesthetic theory' also applies 'emphatically to the whole of Adorno's work' is at least rather misleading ('Zur "Asthetischen Theorie" Adornos', in: Neue Rundschau 82 ( 1971 ), p. 470). The critique of society certainly refers back to the experience of reality in art, but it cannot be reduced to this because the non-conceptual reflection realised in the work of art alone is insufficient to ground and articulate critique.

50 G. Kaiser points out that Adorno deploys the concept of Schein or 'semblance' in a new way: 'Semblance no longer primarily signifies a reference within the world or one that points away from it, but rather a relation - as the 'appearing' of otherness - to this world' (Benjamin. Adorno, p. 112). But his interpretation of Adorno's thought as a kind of 'eschatology' (op. cit., p. 114) is inappropriate insofar as this otherness does not simply irrupt into the existing order from some external transcendent realm, but must be discovered within that order itself. For Adorno art 'is unable to achieve anything that it cannot extract as a concrete possibility from the society in which it has its locus' (AT: 452; ET: 386).

51 The possibility of objective works of art is grounded for Adorno in the only experience which is still possible for us, namely the immediate experience of universal mediation (Cf. AT: 325; ET: 285-86). Because society can only be experienced in individual terms, this objectivity is not already expressed in the process of artistic production, but can only be grasped in the act of interpretation. This bifurcation between the immediate subjective relation to the work of art and the objective content of the work derives from the separation of individual and society: 'The labour in the work of art becomes social by way of the individual, although the individual need not thereby be conscious of society' (AT: 250; ET: 220).

52 Cf. Vorlesung ::ur ;fsthetik, p. 30. 53 'The double character of works of art is manifest at every point: they change and

contradict themselves' (AT: 337; ET: 297). 54 'Whereas this aesthetic comportment can be effortlessly impugned as inadequate

by the status quo, the latter can indeed only be experienced through this comportment' (AT: 488; ET: 417). From this point of view social critique can relate to society only by means of the work of art, but then it is still precisely concerned with society rather than simply with art as such. We can see this above all from the fact that the critique of society grasps and criticises the restriction of experi· ence to the aesthetic domain precisely by reference to the actual form of society.

55 Adorno notes the decline of aesthetic 'genres' that is characteristic of the contemporary development of art (cf. AT: 296; ET: 262). The distinction of specific genres like the lyric or the drama becomes obsolete insofar as the work of art is now primarily concerned with its own immanent consistency aa such. The difference between music, painting and literature also begins to become indistinct. Cf. Adorno's remarks on 'Art and the Arts', in: Ohne Leitblld, Frankfurt am Main 1973, p. 168ff.

56 Adorno deploys the concept of idiosyncrasy to indicate the way in which art repudiates all simply pre-given forms. There is something objective about this process insofar as the artist is forced to obey 'idiosyncratic compulsions'. These are not so much universal principles as an expression of the need for aesthetic

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specificity. Because idiosyncrasy in this sense is not something purely personal or individual, it can be interpreted as an indication of the intersubjective universality that the work of art intrinsically demands: 'By virtue of its mimetic pre-individual moment, every idiosyncrasy lives from collective forces of which it is unconscious' (AT: 69; ET: 53).

57 For the relationship between social content and the individuated character of the work of art cf. AT: 345; ET: 303-4 ).

58 AT: 251; ET: 220-21. 59 AT: 248; ET: 219. 60 The contradiction of universal and particular also passes through and divides the

latter. Contradiction comes to expression in the particular rather than the universal because the former is intrinsically more than a merely singular datum to be subsumed under a universal concept: 'Because individuation [ ... ] is a social law, society can only be experienced individually. The substruction of an immediately collective subject would be duplicitous and would condemn the work of art to untruth because it would withdraw the single possibility of experience that is open to it today' (AT: 385; ET: 336).

61 Drei Studien zu Hegel, GS 5: 290; English translation: Hegel: Three Studies, tr. by Shierry Weber Nicholsen, Mass. 1999, pp. 46-47.

62 The concept of the objective here must be distinguished from the objectivity that characterises social reality. The latter constitutes itself both beyond and through individuals and cannot therefore be immediately experienced as such. The objective character of the work of art implies that the work is explicitly object for a subject which it needs in order to become an object, which is precisely not the case with the objectivity of society: 'The being-in-itself to which the works of art are devoted is not the imitation of something real but rather the anticipation of a being-in-itself that does not yet exist, of an unknown that - by way of the subject - is self-determining' (AT: 121; ET: I 00). This explains why the objectivity of art cannot be irreconcilably opposed to the subject as something alien: 'in art only what has been rendered subjective, what is commensurable with subjectivity, is valid' (Nolen zu Literatur, GS 11: 291; Notes to Literature, vol. I, p. 250).

63 Cf. AT: 171; ET: 147. 64 Adorno envisages a relationship between subject and object which emerges

when the object intrinsically says what it is and meaningfully presents itself in its own right to the subject (cf. AT: 171-72); ET: 147-48). It is through a kind of language, therefore, that the work of art is more than a merely given object, an object as defined by the measure of the prevailing order of things. Adorno's conception of language reveals a certain parallel with that of Heidegger, as Adorno himself indicates: 'Heidegger is right that there is no in-itself without language; that language therefore exists in the truth, not the truth in language as merely designated by the latter' (ND: 117; ET: 111 ). The difference between their respective positions lies in the fact that Adorno insists upon the constitutive non-identity of subject and object. The object only comes to speak through our own subjective achievement.

65 These reflections clearly show that the aesthetically determined relationship of subject and object involves a third possibility in relation both to the mythological relationship, the purely immediate natural unity of human beings with nature, and the rationally 'enlightened' relationship that generates the unity of the identificatory subject. This alternative possibility emerges from the fact that the ego does not merely vanish in this process of 'shattering', but rather comes to experience how it is itself conditioned by the non-identical. Cf. Vorlesung zur A"sthetik, p. 16.

'!CA


66 The dualism in this relationship between art and society should not be posited as absolute. If we could no longer grasp aesthetic achievement in relation to society at all, the truth moment of art with respect to the prevailing state of things would remain itself abstract and would itself in turn become untrue. The critique of the separation of art and society which Adorno's aesthetic theory itself presents is overlooked by G. Rohrmoser when he describes the relationship between them as follows: 'The truth of works of art is no longer dialectical, but rather paradoxical in the sense in which Kierkegaard opposes a truth which can only be attained by a leap from existing reality to that which is articulated in Hegel' (Herrschaji und Versiihnung: ,,fsthetik und die Kulturrevolution des Westen.1-, Freiburg 1972, p. 12). This accentuated distinction between the 'paradoxical' and the 'dialectical' does not really hold for Adorno's conception of 'negative dialectics'. While it is seems that we cannot conceive of art except through a 'leap' out of the existing order of things, works of art nonetheless converge in their content with society and are precisely objective in this sense.

67 Adorno's aesthetic theory would seem to demand this approach insofar as works of art do not themselves intervene in reality directly. We can only grasp the process which they immanently embody through the social character of theory, even if the work of art itself can exercise an indirect influence upon society: 'The process enacted internally by each and every work of art works back on society as a model of a possible praxis in which something on the order of a collective subject is constituted' (AT: 359; ET: 315).

68 This aporetic position of the work of art points back once again to its non-conceptual character which is the historical condition of its potential truth for Adorno. Cf. AT: 201; ET: 175-76.

69 For Adorno this also produces the separation of art and philosophy which can no longer be grasped simply as different manifestations of a common task. Cf. AT: 495-96; ET: 423- 24. This separation rises from the fact that critical theory begins with the existing order, and seeks to grasp and transform its essential conceptual character, whereas art represents the other to current reality. But critical theory and art do converge in the idea of a third possibility, of an 'other' kind of world yet to be established. This world remains undetermined insofar as we cannot identify or specify an actual movement from the existing order towards this other possibility. This convergence is also manifest in the fact that both art and philosophy can be grasped in terms of a language whose universality points towards an as yet unrealised collective subject. Cf. AT: 197-98; ET: 172-73.

70 Insofar as this relation must be grasped as a constitutive moment of art, aesthetic theory would thereby inevitably fail to do justice to the work of art itself. Cf. AT: 399; ET: 347-48.

jarvis, simon (ed) - theodor w. adorno -- critical evaluations in cultural theory, vol. 1

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