Note
Note: the following has been abstracted from the Fifty Key
Contemporary Thinkers by John Lechte, Routledge, 1994.
Adorno was born Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno in 1903. According to
Martin Jay he may have dropped the Wiesengrund when he joined the Institute for
Social Research in New York in 1938 because of its sounding Jewish. Between 1918
and 1919, at the age of 15, Adorno studied under Siegfried Kracauer. After
completing his Gymnasium period, he attended the University of Frankfurt where
he studied philosophy, sociology, psychology, and music. He received a doctorate
in philosophy in 1924. In 1925, Adomo went to Vienna to study composition under
Alban Berg, and at the same time he began to publish articles on music,
especially on the work of Sch枚nberg. After becoming disillusioned with the
'irrationalism' of the Vienna circle, he returned to Frankfurt in 1926 and began
a Habilitationschrift on Kant and Freud, entitled 'The concept of the
unconscious in the transcendental theory of mind'. This thesis was rejected, but
in 1931, he completed another: Kierkegaard: The Construction of the Aesthetic,
which was published in 1933 on the day of Hitler's rise to power. Once his
thesis was accepted, Adorno joined the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research
after Max Horkheimer became director. To escape from Nazism, the Institute moved
to Z眉rich in 1934, and Adorno moved to England.
In 1938, Adorno rejoined the Institute, which was now located in New York,
and worked on the Princeton Radio Research Project, headed by Paul Larzarsfeld.
While in America he worked on a number of different projects, including one with
Thomas Mann on Doktor Faustus. With Max Horkheimer, Adorno sounded a
pessimistic note about Enlightenment reason in the Dialectic of Enlightenment
which was first published in 1947. In 1953, at the age of 50, Adorno left the
United States and returned to Frankfurt to take up a position with the
Institute, and in 1959 he became its director following the retirement of
Horkheimer. By the end of the following decade Adorno became embroiled in a
conflict with the students who occupied the Institute's offices. Adorno died in
1969 in Switzerland while writing what many believe to be his most important
work, Aesthetic Theory.
Current debate on Adorno's work has, in part, centred on the extent to which
he anticipates aspects of postmodern and post-structuralist thought. Particular
attention is often given here to Adorno's critique of 'identity-thinking' in his
Negative Dialectics . While it is necessary to understand what Adorno
means here, we should also bear in mind a number of points which clearly
separate his project from those inspired by nominally French thought.
Let us begin with science. While Julia Kristeva has said that structuralist-inspired
semiotics must take its cue from developments in quantum physics, and while Jacques
Derrida cites G枚del directly in
formulating his philosophical notion of 鈥榰ndecidability鈥?that is, while
semiotics and post-structuralism in France have forged bonds between the natural
and the human sciences - Adorno, like other members of the Frankfurt School, saw
modern science as inherently positivist. As Adorno aimed to produce a
dialectical thought which did not 'positivise' in any way, science in general
was treated with the greatest suspicion, if not contempt. Science in Adorno's
philosophy would even be the form of thought he most opposed given that, like
positivism in general, it is seen to be absolutely dependent on the logic of
identity. Philosophy has allowed itself to be terrorised by science, Adorno
claims. But philosophical truth does not equal scientific truth, and philosophy
should not shy away from this. In sum, 'Philosophy is neither a science nor the
"cogitative poetry" to which positivists would degrade it in a stupid
oxymoron'.
Second, Adorno retains - albeit more in his works of cultural criticism than
his philosophy - the distinction between 'essence' and 'appearance' (a
distinction rejected by contemporary French thought of post-structuralist
inspiration) in order roundly to reject the superficial nature of appearance in
modern capitalist society. For Adorno, the world of appearance, as for Plato
before him, is a world of images and mere semblances, a world of relativism and,
most of all, of reification. On this reading, reification and commodities in the
capitalist world are almost identical; commodities take on a life of their own
independently of the conditions of their production. Commodities hide the truth
of their illusory nature. They serve to titillate 'the reified consciousness'
which is 'a moment in the totality of the reified world'. Moreover, by contrast
with recent French thought, ideology still plays an important part in Adorno's
analyses of social conditions, even if, as he shows in Prisms, the
analysis of ideology can no longer rely on the 'transcendent' method, where the
critic claims to be detached from the milieu being analysed. The difference
between 'essence' and 'appearance' entails the ideological effect of
reification. For behind the reified appearances, lies the truth of the
'phantasmagoria' of commodity production. This truth is that human beings,
despite what they might think, are unfree; they have restrictive forms of
thought and action imposed upon them by the existing social conditions of
capitalist production; they live in 'the open air prison which the world is
becoming'.' People adapt to these conditions rather than oppose them.
Consequently, the freedom that Simmel talks about in the same context is a myth.
'In a state of unfreedom', says Adorno, 'no one, of course, has a liberated
consciousness.鈥?/p>
Finally, Adorno places far more weight on the role of consciousness than is
the case with comparable French thinkers such as Lacan
or Foucault. Although he spent
time developing ways of escaping a reductive view of the individual as 'socialised',
and although his position here is in other respects complex, Adorno's view of
the unconscious is extremely simple. First of all, the unconscious (like Freud's
work in general) receives little elaboration in Adorno's philosophy. On one of
the rare occasions in which he actually refers explicitly to the unconscious in Negative
Dialectics, he says:
'When the doctrine of the unconscious reduces the individual to a small
number of recurring constants and conflicts it does reveal a misanthropic
disinterest in the concretely unfolded ego; and yet it reminds the ego of the
shakiness of its definitions compared with those of the id, and thus of its
tenuous and ephemeral nature'.
Even if 'shakiness', 'tenuous', and 'ephemeral' suggest a movement away from
the primacy of consciousness, there is little evidence that the unconscious
poses a real obstacle to philosophy or to thought.
In other words, Adorno still seems to be far more beholden to a logic of
identity than some of his more recent readers suggest. On the other hand, it is
also true that his aspirations are in the direction of a thought that is not
wholly and solely indebted to the logic of identity. Thus when he begins to
rethink the nature of philosophy in Negative Dialectics, Adorno makes two
key points: first, that philosophy 'lives on' after the Marxist attempt to
discredit it for being too idealist had failed; and, second, that philosophy
needs a sense of its own impotence before the materiality of the world in order
that it might remain creative and open to the new. The materiality of the world
is philosophy's inexpressible side. The essential character of philosophy thus
consists in being only too well aware of the limitedness of the concepts with
which it works. 'Disenchantment of the concept is the antidote of philosophy.'
In effect, a truly creative philosophy - which, for Adorno is philosophy - seeks
out those things which are a challenge to thought itself. These things can be
generally designated by the terms 'heterogeneity', or more pointedly, by
'nonidentity'.
Unlike Hegel's system in which the
heterogeneous element would be reclaimed dialectically through the principle of
the ,negation of the negation', Adorno announces the principle of 'negative
dialectics', a principle which refuses any kind of affirmation, or positivity, a
principle of thorough-going negativity. Thus negative dialectics is nonidentity.
This key element in Adorno's thought has a number of synonyms in addition to the
ones we have given above - for instance: 'contradiction', 'dissonance',
'freedom', 'the divergent', and 'the inexpressible'. Despite the importance of
nonidentity, Adorno also says that no thought can in fact express nonidentity:
for 'to think is to identify'. Identity thinking can only think contradiction as
pure, that is, as another identity. Where, and how, then, does nonidentity
thinking actually leave its mark on thought? In short, what is the material
basis of negative dialectics in thought?
To begin with, the material aspect is not philosophy as poetry, or as art.
For philosophy as art is equivalent of the erasure of philosophy. Nor is
philosophy permitted, according to Adorno, to give in to an aesthetic impulse.
This does not of course preclude experimenting in the presentation of new
concepts, a process which may lead to poetry, just as the most avant-garde art
might be an immanent conceptualisation. Nevertheless, philosophy must 'void its
aestheticism'. 'Its affinity to art does not entitle it to borrow from art,' and
here Adorno continues the point in a tone for which he has become notorious '. .
. least of all by virtue of the intuitions which barbarians take for the
prerogatives of art.' All that philosophy can do in such circumstances is
continue as philosophy. To give up in light of the impossibility of expressing
nonidentity would imply that philosophy had misunderstood the heterogeneous,
dissonant nature of nonidentity; in other words, to give up in this sense is to
misunderstand that nonidentity is impure - not even a pure contradiction.
'Thoughts intended to think the inexpressible by abandoning thought falsify the
inexpressible.' Nonidentity is possibly philosophy's hidden, negative telos. It
was thus Marx's mistake to think of the end of philosophy in precisely these
terms.
The other sense in which philosophy might come to an end is if it took the
form (as in Hegel) of Absolute knowledge. Then every problem confronting
philosophy - especially its relationship with the material world would be
resolved through the affirmative principle of the negation of the negation which
produces an affirmation.
By a surprising series of reversals, Adorno turns philosophy's potential
limitations into a philosophical gesture whose implications are perhaps now only
beginning to be appreciated. 'In principle', Adorno confirms, 'philosophy can
always go astray, which is the sole reason why it can go forward'. Philosophy,
therefore, is a negative dialectics in the strongest sense; it is itself the
very nonidentity it seeks to conceptualise. In this, the role of language
becomes crucial because language is equivalent to the presentation of
philosophy's 'unfreedom' as equivalent to the impossibility of conceptualising
nonidentity. Were language to cease to be important in philosophy, the latter
would 'resemble science'.
Adorno's declarative statements in Negative Dialectics need to be read
in conjunction with his work in aesthetics and literary criticism. In this
regard, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, written during the
Second World War in an aphoristic style counters, like Kierkegaard (on whom
Adorno also wrote), Hegel's dialectical theory which 'abhorring anything
isolated, cannot admit aphorisms as such'. In his reflections on a diversity of
topics, Adorno seeks - practically, we may assume - to make a philosophical
statement, one that takes up the place of the heterogeneity of human experience.
Similarly, Adorno's attraction to avant-garde music and art, particularly the
music of Sch枚nberg, Webern, and Berg, was strongly motivated by a desire to see
avant-garde works defy the homogenising effects of the commercialisation (read:
reification) of art, where art objects would be reduced to exchange-value.
Subjectivity is reduced to the status of a 'mere object' by exchange-value.
There is thus a desire in Adorno to preserve the sanctity, as it were, of
subjectivity embodied in the art object, against the onslaught of the market
where value is equated with price. Through a paratactic style (juxtaposition of
statement with the link between them being made explicit), and other devices,
Adorno's presentation of his theory of aesthetics in Aesthetic Theory
participates in an effort to by-pass the reduction of art and thought to the
culture industry. Unlike his French counterparts who tend to engage with
exchange-value in order to subvert it from the inside, Adorno lauds difficult
art and philosophy; for, as he sees it, only through a struggle to understand
can value be given its true rights here. Modernism, as the movement embodying
the renewal of value, would thus be essentially avant-garde where the work of
art -'even the simplest'- becomes a complex tour deforce. This avant-garde
strategy is the point of resistance to reappropriation by the market system.
Some (e.g., Lyotard) have come to see Adorno's approach as a last-ditch
attempt to maintain a boundary between high art and popular culture just at a
time when the logic and social basis of such a boundary is becoming untenable in
the name of the very political values (e.g., opposition to conventional Marxism)
to which Adorno himself subscribed. Furthermore, in light of Bataille's work, it
is clear that exchange-value can be subverted as much by the very 'low' elements
(obscenity) in social life, as by the highest and most spiritually charged
products of the avant-garde. Both can entail the distancing necessary to counter
the ephemeral immediacy of consumer pleasure. Perhaps the 'low' even more than
the 'high'; for ultimately 'high' art depends on the judgement of criticism as
to its nature and quality; it is thereby incorporated into the play of concepts.
In other words, avant-garde art and philosophy become interdependent and all the
more so - if an analogy with Negative Dialectics holds - to the extent that the
art object becomes inseparable from its materiality (nonidentity). Grasping the
force and significance of avant-garde art requires the use of concepts which can
never do a work justice; for the materiality of the work constitutes its
uniqueness, and this defies conceptualisation. As Peter Osborne has remarked,
'It is out of this critique of identity-thinking that Adorno's basic conception
of aesthetic experience, as the experience of the "non-identical",
arises.'
Overall, Adorno's Aesthetic Theory struggles to reach an accommodation
between avant-garde art that risks being 'normalised' and reified in capitalist
society, and the essentially radical autonomy of art objects which qua art
objects are singularly out of harmony with the social conditions (including
criticism) which enable them to speak at all. There is another aspect to the
question, however, one that perhaps Adorno forgets. It is that the
conceptualising facility itself could become impoverished through a continual
rejection of its worth and efficacity. While the detail of art which defies the
system because it defies conceptualisation is no doubt fundamental,
conceptualisation might well be also. In other words, what Adorno does not
readily acknowledge is that a certain degree of identity philosophy is as
essential as material nonidentity.
