Adorno on beauty, Part 2

Posted on March 7, 2025 | Comments Off on Adorno on beauty, Part 2

 

       Adorno continues:

However, putting the concept of beauty on the Index — as many psychologies have done with the concept of the soul and many sociologies with that of society — would amount to resignation on the part of aesthetics.

The claim that most needs explaining is the bit between the dashes: Psychology, which is nominally the study of the psyche or soul, long ago dispensed with the category of the soul. That observation probably isn’t all that surprising. It might, in fact, just be a familiar point about secularization. Christians used to think that people had souls, but the psychologists have doubtless convinced you by now that all you really have is a “mind” or a “self.” Give the neurologists a chance and they’ll probably talk you out of having a mind. It’s Adorno’s second example that could make a person wonder: Sociologists often try to get by without a concept of society. Adorno, I hasten to point out, is right about this: Michael Mann begins his great trilogy on The Sources of Social Power by remarking that he would, if he could “abolish the concept of ‘society’ altogether,” though he promptly grants that this “may seem an odd position for a sociologist to adopt.” Maybe it’s not that odd, though. No-one knows better than a sociologist not to treat a society like a thing—not to say that society does x and society does y. It is Mann’s recommendation, therefore, that we treat any society as a congeries of “multiple overlapping and intersecting power networks”—networks whose respective borders are unlikely to line up, meaning that the network of economic power will tend to share some but not all of its territory with, say, the network of administrative power. In nearly all cases, the economy and the administration (and the culture and the military) will have different maps. They won’t coalesce into a single, discrete “society.”

There are other ways of giving up on the concept of society, of course, but Mann’s version is at least perspicuous. What we’ll want to see now is that Adorno’s observation holds quite generally—that disciplines routinely turn against their foundational concepts and name-bestowing objects of study.  The scholars of religion are quick to tell you that the term “religion” isn’t good for much—that no-one has ever come up with a definition of religion that covers all the instances one intuitively wishes to group under that name; or worse, that this particular term—re-ligio, a “re-reading” or a “binding fast”—is heavy with Western-for-which-read-Christian assumptions, in a manner that inevitably misdescribes all other religions, subtly rearranging them in order to make them more like Christianity or at least more intelligible to Christians. The historian of Japanese Buddhism finds late-Tokugawa officials, having just guaranteed New England merchants “freedom of religion,”  turning to each other and asking: What did we just grant them? Freedom of what now? Or again: Scholars of literature are the ones who have had to worry that the distinctions we draw between “literary” and “non-literary” writing are finally quite arbitrary. The avid but amateur reader knows that some books have fully earned their status as literature; the literature professor is less sure. The professors have also had to face the fact that the very term “literature” acquired its current meaning rather late—across the late eighteenth century, if the lexicographers are right—which means that whatever Shakespeare thought he was doing, he couldn’t have been writing “literature.” It is at this point that we will have to worry whether we aren’t making a recondite mistake whenever we read as literature a text that was written before there was “literature.” That’s a claim that can itself be made in impeccably literary terms: The word literature is itself a feat of verbal creation, a category created where formerly there was none. There are no works of literature per se, only works that we describe as literature and that we could equally well describe otherwise.

If you sit with these positions for a minute, you will be in a better position to appreciate how unexpected this sentence of Adorno’s is. For such self-consciousness about one’s central concepts—a reflexive turn heightened unto skepticism—is just the sort of thing that critical theorists are always asking for. A scholar of Buddhism who rejects the category of “religion” is a “critical historian of religion.” The literature professor who told his colleagues circa 1987 that “there was no such thing as literature” had gone over to “theory.” What we can now say is that Adorno is urging us not to do this—he is asking us to avoid the critical turn—at least for now and at least as regards aesthetics. He is suggesting that we not place beauty between scare quotes and so delaying the project of a critical aesthetics. More surprising still, he seems to associate the critical attitude with the apparatus of Catholic censorship—that’s the Index that appears early in the sentence: the pope’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the Index of Forbidden Books, which was still in effect when Adorno started work on Aesthetic Theory. Sometimes, one suspects, intense self-consciousness about concepts mutates into the rote policing of language. And Adorno isn’t having it.

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Adorno on beauty, Part 1

Posted on February 17, 2025 | Comments Off on Adorno on beauty, Part 1

 

Can there be an Adornian theory of beauty? It is not a category that one expects Adorno to have been drawn to. In one section of Aesthetic Theory, he calls for “a radically darkened art,” and that, of course, is just Adorno playing to type. That’s the Adorno who has inspired multiple American punk bands to release albums called Minima Moralia. A page or two later, still in Aesthetic Theory, he praises one version of modern poetry for having “defected to the enemy” — for having declared war, I guess, upon poetic things. Adorno would seem to prefer a verse that poisons nightingales and shoots skylarks from the air. Later in the same volume, he dedicates an entire essay to the ugly, and there we will find him praising “the penchant of modern art for the nauseating and physically revolting.” “The apologists for the status quo,” he says, get to ruin the world confident that the artists will beautify at least some of the resulting wreckage. In the midst of general ugliness, they will create pockets of “idle beauty.” So maybe that’s the Adornian theory of beauty right there—and maybe it’s theory you’d been expecting: Beauty is the happy face that kept artists put upon catastrophe.

The surprise, then, is to realize that this is not, in fact, Adorno’s final word on beauty. Yes, fine: Beauty is affirmation and apology and kitsch. But are we willing to consider the possibility that there is more to beauty that its readiness to acquiesce? Can negative dialectics find something worth affirming in beauty—and will that something itself be negative? Can you picture Adorno with a nosegay in his fist?

The way to start answering these questions is to read the essay  on beauty that begins at the bottom of p. 50 in Aesthetic Theory. Here’s the first sentence:

If anything, it is beauty that originated in the ugly, and not the reverse.

And with that, new questions already interpose themselves—specific questions to replace the general ones with which we began. Why, after all, does Adorno start here? What does this sentence even mean? What is he after? The trick will be to figure out who (broadly) Adorno is disagreeing with — and to realize going into it that the answer is likely to involve metaphysics. Why might someone think that beautiful things are primary or original and ugly ones in some sense secondary? Here, then, is a chain of argumentation: A person might not unreasonably hold that all things possess form, each thing its form, and they might think, further, that form typically involves purpose or function. Iron has served many different purposes over the centuries, and each change of purpose has been accompanied by a change in form; iron can come to us variably as a lathe treadle or a hand-crank corn sheller or a smelting ladle. Cartilage, too, takes different forms: it is there, in not readily visualized fashion, in your knee (to protect the bone), but also there, juttingly, in your outer ear (where it captures and directs sound waves into the ear canal). It is this simple point about form—different forms for different purposes—that will do most of the hard work for the classical theory of beauty. We are, after all, in the habit of judging things to be well-formed. That particular phrasing may not come to you intuitively, but this species of judgment surely does. You are accustomed to assessing the fitness of the things. But then I don’t want to just give up on the phrasing, which adds a little something of its own. For if I call something “well-formed,” I might just be saying that it is good, that it was well designed for its purpose. (“In a well-formed watermeadow it is as necessary to keep it perfectly dry at one time as it is to place it under water at another.”) But equally, I might be saying that it is handsome, or shapely; I might even be casting about for a way to call a man beautiful. The word “well-formed,” then, is the term from ordinary language that without strain conjoins the beautiful and the good. My point is that if you continue on in this connection, you might eventually find yourself arguing that the human mind is set up to apprehend fit things as beautiful—or even that fit things simply are beautiful and that the experience of beauty is the delight we take in their fitness. That, then, would be your opportunity to claim that beauty is primary (which — you can glance now back up to the top of the paragraph — is the opposite of what Adorno is arguing): Everything, again, has a form; and a large majority of things are at least moderately well-formed, if only because things that are not well-formed tend not to stick around for very long: the ill-formed, the anomaly, the freak.

The task now is to flip that argument on its head. The view that takes ugliness to be primary will have to adopt a competing metaphysics. Here’s one way to get at the thing: In Virgil’s Aeneid, as in most other classical epics, the stakes of a great many episodes are properly cosmic. As readers, we’re not just following Aeneas—we’re not just concerned for the hero, not just reading to find out what happens to him next, not just hoping that it will fare well with him. We’re reading, rather, to find out what will happen to, well, everything — to the entire cosmos. We are awaiting the verdict on the nature of reality.

  I think this is especially clear in the first book of the Aeneid—ie, early in the poem—when the Trojan ships are first scattered by a great storm. (That’s the tempest that blows Aeneas’ band of refugees to the shores of Dido’s Carthage.) You might remember: Juno has created this storm in order to vex the Trojans, and in order to do so, she has had to approach the divine wind-keeper and seduce him into turning loose the squalls over whom he has custody. As Virgil tells it, the winds are universally known to be dangerous and so kept in prison. Killer squalls, held in a dungeon:

But high in his stronghold Aeolus wields his scepter,
soothing their passions, tempering their fury,
Should he fail, surely they’d blow the world away,
Hurling the land and sea and deep sky through space.
Fearing this, the almighty Father banished the winds
to that black cavern, piled above them a mountain mass
and imposed on all a king empowered, by binding pact,
to rein them back on command or let them gallop free. (Fagles 1.69-76)

What I hope you’ll notice is how generalized the language becomes here—that’s the mark of the epic shifting over to rude ontology. It’s not just that the winds can damage Sardinia or the Florida coast. They can “blow the world away.” We might notice how the poem shifts for a single line into a sublime and elemental sci-fi image: The stuff of the planet whirling in a void. When reading an epic, you should stop whenever you run into sci-fi language like this, because that’s when the epic is turning metaphysical. And what we see here is the possibility of a world of contending and unruly forces; Dryden’s translation of the same pages speaks of “mixed confusion.” But let’s notice, too—because this is crucial—that this disorder is just a possibility, since the gods have undertaken a cosmological effort to keep the world ordered when it is not naturally and by necessity ordered. You might say, then, that there are rival ontologies in the Aeneid—a ontology of order vs. an ontology of disorder (or chaos or strife). The epic isn’t only concerned with the founding of Rome — it’s trying to figure out whether order or disorder is going to win in the cosmos—and of course it superimposes that battle of cosmic principles onto the Roman story. Maybe the more accurate way to put this would be to say that the poem posits a single, riven ontology: the universe is capable equally of order and disorder. Order might be in evidence, but the possibility of cataclysmic disorder can never be discounted. Order is available, but only through commitment and effort—including the efforts of regal gods whose powers are great but not entire.

        What I’m trying to say is that the storm isn’t just an ordinary, old narrative obstacle. If anything, it functions a bit like the especially nasty pre-credit kill with which some horror movies begin. Virgil’s epic starts by flaunting its nightmare and apocalyptic antithesis, as the poet sets off to write against the chaos and mixed confusion that the reader glimpses in the storm. The Trojans, as a people, have been scattered. And Aeneas’ ships have now just been scattered—that’s a scattering within a scattering, a diaspora twice-dispersed. If you can grab hold of the epic’s ontological thread, you might be able to make sense of the Aeneid as a poem against the scattering and against the storm. Early on, Venus tells Aeneas that she has seen “scatt’ring” birds regather into a flock—“all united in a goodly team.”

Such, then, is what it might mean to claim that ugliness comes first and that beauty follows on: The fundamental condition of the cosmos is disorder, chaos, or strife. Order and form and purpose and beauty must accordingly be built (and guarded and, where necessary, repaired). That’s the position that Adorno wants us, at least, to consider—though his opening phrase, “if anything,” is enough to suggest that he doesn’t really credit this version any more than he does its opposite, it being a hallmark of dialectical philosophy that antitheses arrive in pairs, as polarized conceptual fields, and that one couldn’t possibly talk about either “ugliness” or “beauty” if the other weren’t already in view. Let’s agree, then, that the ugly and the beautiful are coeval, but having said that, let’s also consider the status of beauty in a world that is fundamentally geared towards ruin.

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Jargon of Authenticity, Day 10

Posted on October 15, 2024 | Comments Off on Jargon of Authenticity, Day 10

 

 The next passage is aswarm with allusion. Adorno’s polemic is fiercer than ever, but each blow comes gloved in an underexplained citation. Reading these sentences is a lot like watching a scholar throw books at his rivals from out of a high library window. The spectacle is entertaining enough, and it’s pretty clear that someone is about to get beaned, but it would be nice even so to know what has got the book-bombardier so exercised and why he’s chosen to lob these particular titles. The best thing I can do under these circumstances is to annotate Adorno’s missiles. Here’s the passage:

This [the aura] is accompanied by the assurance that it is non-binding, which makes it freely and flexibly available for many different uses, or to put it in the paramilitary lingo of the day: ready for action. The standing complaint that the jargon files against reification is itself reified. It, the jargon, falls under Richard Wagner’s definition of a “special effect,” which he associated with bad art: that it is an effect without a cause. The man deserted by the spirit speaks in mechanical tongues. The insinuated and nonexistent mystery is actually an open secret. The expressionist slogan “every man is chosen” comes from a play by Paul Kornfeld, who was murdered by the Nazis; but once you discount the counterfeit Dostoevsky, all it is good for is the ideological self-satisfaction of a petty bourgeoisie that has been threatened and humiliated by developments in society. 

Now for some annotations. Let’s start with “the man deserted by the spirit.”

1) Jaspers and Marx: The first point to bear in mind is that some widespread versions of German existentialism had a strongly Protestant cast. Karl Jaspers, in particular, was a Protestant through and through — that’s biographically true, but it is also altogether obvious from his writing. It would be misleading, in fact, to say only that Jaspers set out to devise a Protestant existentialism. That formulation would understate the case. Let us say, rather, that Jaspers constructed Existenzphilosophie as a kind of secularized Protestantism — a philosophical program whose deepest insight is that the very structure of human experience is Protestant. Jaspers can to that extent do away with the really existing Protestant dominations — he never presses his readers to convert to Lutheranism, nor does he imply that he is writing for already Protestant readers — because his philosophy’s central finding is that there are no non-Protestant options. Existence itself is evangelical. You can thus tell whether you’d find it worth reading Jaspers by asking yourself first whether you’d be amused by his particular ingenuity — the inventiveness of a smart person arriving over and over again at Protestant positions via non-theological and non-scriptural means.

Jaspers, then, was yet another German intellectual writing in defense of spirit, Geist, though to be fair, he tended to sidestep the word — the word but not the idea. At the heart of Jaspers’s program is a familiar dualism. Science can tell us a lot about the material world, but it will never be able to account for our experience and especially for the open horizon against which we are compelled to make choices: what kind of person you’re going to be; what you’re going to care about; what to do with the rest of your day. That’s the domain of the spirit — the thing that science (or sociology or behaviorist psychology) can’t get at. Philosophy itself can’t tell you what to choose; its role is precisely to bring into view the freedom with which you elect your commitments. Jaspers stands near the end of a long line of German intellectuals who opposed Germany’s headlong industrialization in the late nineteenth century, including the reform of the that country’s educational system to introduce a lot more STEM. The older intellectuals — the ones who wanted to defend the old humanities education, often on something like liberal-arts grounds — tended to talk about Kultur and Bildung and Geist: culture and self-cultivation and spirit, and the easiest way to tell the difference between Jaspers and his sometime friend Heidegger is to realize that Jaspers’s Existenz has absorbed those three terms and Heidegger’s Sein really hasn’t.

          The other thing to notice is that Adorno’s Jargon of Authenticity has a subtitle, which the old English-language edition, however, omits: Zur deutschen Ideologie, “On the German Ideology.” That’s a reference back to Marx, obviously — an unusually bald one for Adorno — but why this is suddenly relevant will now require explaining in turn. The German Ideology was the second of two books that the young Marx wrote, with Engels help, attacking the Left Hegelians of the 1840s — attacking, in other words, his friends and allies and mentors. Now the Left Hegelian that Marx was closest to was Bruno Bauer, the Protestant theologian turned radical democrat under whom Marx had planned to write his Habilitation or second doctoral dissertation. (This is worth dwelling on: for a period, Marx was planning on getting an advanced degree in Protestant theology.) The positions for which Bauer became famous in the 1840s were twofold:

1) that Hegelianism properly understood committed a person to radical democracy or even to something rather like anarchism, the self-organization of the multitude beyond law or fixed political institutions; Hegelian Geist — spirit or mind — turns out to be a name for a network capable of reflecting on itself and setting its own ends, though once he had declared himself an atheist, Bauer came to prefer the word Bewusstsein, “consciousness,” presumably to avoid the Christian connotations of the word Geist (mind-spirit-ghost);

 2) that radical Protestantism is the closest you can get to geistige democracy while still falling short of the real thing; that a Hegelian anarchism is the apotheosis of Protestantism, the next step beyond Quakerdom and Anabaptism and the hotter versions of Lutheranism; the point not to miss is that Bauer thought that anyone who wasn’t Protestant first was going to have trouble living in a radically democratic, self-governing society — that the path to revolution ran through Protestantism.

And it was on this point that Marx most obviously broke with Bauer. The very first sentence of The Holy Family — Marx’s first book against the Left Hegelians — says that “real humanism in Germany has no enemy more dangerous than that spiritualism which puts ‘Geist‘ or ‘self-consciousness’ in the place of the real, individual person.” The word Spiritualismus stands out in German and makes clear that what Marx (and Engels) had in mind were the more extreme Protestant sects, the ones who, in their efforts to strip away all the mediations standing in between them and God, began to downplay even Scripture. If what you want is a living relationship with God, then maybe the Bible itself is just another distraction, a verbal idol and icon. Maybe you don’t need to be a reader to get close to God. What Marx and Engels are saying, then, is that Bauer and his followers have turned radical democracy into a Pentecostal politics, a just barely secularized evangelicalism. The democracy that had told you it was for everyone turns out on closer inspection to be reserved for Methodists.

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Jargon of Authenticity, Day 9

Posted on June 12, 2024 | Comments Off on Jargon of Authenticity, Day 9

The question that arises at this point is how we can identify a word as belonging to the jargon of German existentialism. The English-speaking reader probably won’t have this problem. If you’re American and reading someone under the spell of German existentialism, chances are you’re going to be able to tell, even if you didn’t know it when you picked up the book. And the reason you’re going to be able to tell is that there will be this set of words that the author will have either left in German or gratuitously capitalized. But the German reader has to make due without these clues, since the word Dasein really is just the German word for “existence.” German also capitalizes the noun form of Being whenever it appears. Adorno, moreover, has noticed that the words that make up the jargon of existentialism aren’t, in fact, the more obviously offbeat entries in the Heideggerian lexicon; they aren’t “the presence presences” or Beyng-with-a-y. For the most part, the jargon is made up of words like “queer” — an ordinary, if contested, English word that became central to the history of American Foucauldianism even though it didn’t originate with Foucault himself.

        So how again do you recognize a word as jargon? Here’s Adorno:

Many of them [the terms in question] could be used in other constellations with nary a wink at the jargon: the word Aussage [“statement” or “utterance”], when an epistemologist needs a concise way of designating the judgments of predication…

Here it is enough to know that the word Aussage [“statement”] shows up routinely in German discussions of Aristotelian or Fregean predication. It’s the term for any claim that we might plausibly judge to be true or false, for which Anglophone philosophers prefer the rather fussier “proposition.”

       So Aussage has a perfectly reasonable use outside the jargon. And so does the word “authenticity” itself:

or the word eigentlich [“authentic”]—though here one must be careful—including as an adjective, whenever the essential is to be distinguished from the accidental…

Adorno says that “authentic” is fair game even when it’s an adjective, and the reason he needs to tack on that extra reassurance is that in German, the word eigentlich is first and foremost an adverb, so common and conversational as to have lost much of its proper meaning. If a German says “Why not?” — in the sense of “Might as well” — he is likely to insert an eigentlich in the middle: “Why eigentlich not?” Or perhaps you’ve made an assumption about your German friend: “You must have hated that movie.” And she responds: “Actually, no. Eigentlich nicht.” Sometimes the word has the force of “anyway” — to indicate that you are getting around impatiently to a question that you’ve been meaning to ask or that you are expressing your belated confusion: “What are you doing anyway?” or “What exactly are you doing?” “Was machst du denn eigentlich?” The point is that no-one is going to tell Germans to stop using eigentlich in any of these several vernacular and semantically bleached ways. It would be silly to even try. But to that implicit concession, Adorno has added two points: First, that eigentlich in its dictionary form is not altogether useless; we will occasionally want to know whether a particular something is “authentic.” Second, that the existentialist use of eigentlich is something else again, deviating importantly from its dictionary usage.

        We’ll also notice that Adorno is a bit nervous about the word “authentic,” even before it was seized on by the existentialists: “here one must be careful” — presumably on by now familiar anti-essentialist grounds. Adorno doesn’t want anybody presiding over who or what gets to count as authentic. One might wonder, then, why he doesn’t just give up on the word altogether. Why include it on his list of the jargon’s innocent uses, when he doesn’t think the word is all that innocent? The answer is simple, which is that he knows he has used the word himself, in earlier writing, and he is pre-empting the hostile reader who might otherwise be tempted to point this out. He finds himself compelled, in other words, to make a little confession, like so: The jargon includes ordinary words, “statement” or “authentic”…

or the word “inauthentic,” where something fractured is meant, an expression that no longer lines up directly with what is expressed: “Radio broadcasts of traditional music, music conceived in the categories of live performance, have as their undercoat a feeling of the as if, of the inauthentic.”

The point not to miss is that the quotation comes from Adorno’s The Faithful Repetiteur, which had only just appeared in 1963, the year before The Jargon was published. Adorno, in other words, is quoting himself. He’s caught himself using the word that this entire volume seems to be arguing against—the word that provides the book with its sneering title—and he accordingly feels compelled to account for himself:

In this case, the word “inauthentic” is performing a critical function, the determinate negation of something illusory. 

It’s not clear to me that what Adorno is describing really is a “determinate negation.” (That’s Hegel’s term for the idea that the mind can grasp any particular thing only in contradistinction to other relevant objects. The mind cannot apprehend the identity of an object directly, in the absence of contrast or opposition; something can be cognized as what it is only by also knowing what it is not.) If anything, all Adorno seems to be doing here is assuring the reader that he, at least, isn’t using the word “inauthentic” ideologically, in order to prop up some other class of objects—in this case performances—as “authentic.” He is simply combating a certain media lie—the illusion that the radio is giving us the real thing—and he is doing this, he implies, by amplifying the feeling of inauthenticity that has been part of our experience of the radio all along.

    He continues:

The jargon, however, extracts “authenticity”—and its opposite—from out of any such context of insight and understanding. 

If I say “Everybody knows that reality television isn’t real,” I am not making strong claims about the nature of reality or our ability to know it. I’m not claiming to be able to give a metaphysical account of how reality is actually constituted. All I’m saying is that this thing that purports to be real is palpably fake (and that its fakeness is widely acknowledged). I also haven’t introduced the word “real” into the conversation; when I say that reality television is not real, I am simply holding the genre to the standard of its own choosing. The problem, then, with the existentialists is that they do claim to know what makes some people authentic and others not, and they are willing to make that determination of anyone and everyone, even of people who never claimed to be authentic in the first place — people, that is, who haven’t invoked the criterion.

But it turns out that you can only go so far in protecting the words from the jargon:

One isn’t about to hold the word Auftrag — an “order,” “errand,” “task,” or “mission” — against a company that has just received one. But possibilities of this kind remain crabbed and abstract. Anyone who presses them too far is headed for a blankly nominalist theory of language, in which words are nothing more than exchangeable tokens, untouched by history. 

This last sentence is trickier than it initially appears. Adorno seems to be warning his readers against nominalism—that’s the idea that most words (all words?) are just names and that the concepts that these refer to don’t rest on anything real. The spin-off of nominalism that most of us are steeped in is some version or another of “the social and discursive construction of reality.” It’s the position you are taking any time you announce that “gender isn’t real” or “race isn’t real”—that these are above all ways of talking. We classify people and things one way; we could just as well classify them lots of other ways. The puzzle here is that Adorno is demonstrably a nominalist, as are nearly all critical theorists and indeed anyone who has read a lot of Nietzsche. It is genuinely odd to find Adorno shoo-ing his readers off the path to nominalism. And recognizing this should allow us to see that Adorno is not, in fact, condemning nominalism as such; he’s not actually promoting the realism that wants us to believe that gender and race aren’t just constructs. It is only a certain extreme nominalism that he wants to guard against—not all nominalism, just the blank and ahistorical kind. The mistake would be to treat each individual usage of a word as though it were a stipulative definition, empowered blithely to elect its own meaning: Let x mean y. And the problem with stipulative definitions is that they instruct us to ignore the entire range of ambiguous and secondary meanings that nearly any word will have accrued. They require us to suppress whatever associations come to mind and are to that extent de-contextualizing, asking us to prescind individual words from their broader verbal and social contexts. (That’s what Adorno means when he says that this approach is “crabbed and abstract.”) The alternative, of course, would be to let the context back in—to let the word be “touched by history.” But in that case, we can’t continue to use the German words enlisted by the right-wing existentialists by pretending that those sub-Heideggerian usages don’t exist or don’t apply. A German speaker’s verbal and social context now includes the jargon, which can’t be wished away.

He goes on:

History makes its way into every word and so blocks each one from retrieving its putative Ursinn, its original definition and primal sense, which is what the jargon is always chasing after. 

The last clause undertakes a characteristically Adornian reversal — so quick and dainty a spatula-flip that a reader could easily read right past it or register it only as a fleeting perplexity. Adorno, after all, wasn’t addressing the people who embrace the jargon; he was addressing the ones who reject it, the ones who want to keep their language uncontaminated by the weird philosophers. What this last clause is saying, therefore, is that the two groups converge on a quintessentially Heideggerian mistake, which is to think that they can resurrect at will the earlier meanings of a word. The jargoneers want to return language to Homeric Greece and the barbarian forests beyond the Roman limes. The anti-jargoneers aren’t as ambitious; they just want to protect the common usages that predated the jargon itself. But at heart, the impulse is the same: if they aren’t careful, the opponents of existentialism will repeat the errors of their enemies.

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Jargon of Authenticity, Day 8

Posted on June 8, 2024 | Comments Off on Jargon of Authenticity, Day 8

The next bit is going to introduce some new terms, and it will help us understand what Adorno is saying if I spend some time first preparing the conceptual ground. His claims here turn on our perceptions of structure and system. This gets at some of the fundamental debates among critical theorists and their cousins over the last seventy-five years. If you are finding your way through critical theory for the first time, you are going to have to work out your own answers to a few fundamental questions, because the theorists you’re reading will give you lots of different answers, among which you will have to choose: Do you think it is the tendency of nature, society, and language to settle into more or less stable structures? And if so, do you think structure is a good thing? The point is that anyone answering these questions in tandem has lots of different options. To wit:

1. Structure is elusive, but it would be better if we had more of it.

2. Structure is our common condition, and that’s just as well.

3. Structure is our condition, and this is our doom. We should labor to dismantle the structures that ensconce us.

4. Structures and systems are themselves myths. Nothing ever coheres as tightly as those words imply. It’s probably too much to even speak of “nature” or “society” or “language,” since those words all imply more structure than the whirlwinds in question actually have. Our problem, then, is never “the system”; we suffer, at worst, from the mistaken perception of system.

If, now, you come out as an anti-systemic thinker — if, that is, you are convinced that structures exist, but announce that you don’t like ’em — there are some further determinations you will have to make. What, for one, do you take to be the alternative to “structure”? Is the idea to arrange the stuff of nature or the stuff of society in some other way — a way that the word “structure” doesn’t capture? You might determine, for instance, that an “organism” is not a “structure,” which word suggests to you an edifice or built design. You might then conclude that organic arrangements are preferable to engineered ones. Alternately, though, you might conclude that the idea is to do away with arrangements altogether, and not just mechanical ones — to liberate the members of a structure, so that they might in an open field fashion their own temporary and shifting relationships, provided, that is, that they don’t prefer simply to do without relationship.

     Adorno is about to claim that the existentialists are muddled in their approach to language-as-system. We know that Heidegger, after the war, wanted to roll back what he saw as the technological takeover of language. He thought that people had increasingly come to treat language as a mere tool — as though English and German were rival communication devices, or as though language in general were some ingenious ancient technology. He also thought that modern linguists tended to conceive of all language on the model of cybernetics and binary code. And he thought that the primal, poetic vocation of language was to disclose to us the stuff of the world, to help the world manifest before us, whereas a language conceived of as mere tool was likely to tote up the world’s many things and re-package them all as “information.”

       Here, then, is Adorno. The jargon prizes authenticity and wants us to have a more authentic relationship with language. But in the process…

The ether is sprayed mechanically about; the atomistic words are freshened up without their being changed. It is thanks to what the jargon calls Gefüge, “structure,” that they are granted precedence over structure itself. The jargon, objectively a system, deploys disorganization as its principle of organization, the decay of language into words by themselves.

Let’s note first: The jargon has its own word for “structure” — a stoutly German word, even though modern German is perfectly happy with die Struktur. This is a jab, of course, at the Heideggerians linguistic nationalism; they have swapped out the Latin word in favor of some nativist alternative. The word, in fact, is artisanal in just the way you might expect — it comes from the verb fügen, which means to fit together in the manner of a woodworker, to connect pieces together to make a more complex object. You could just about translate it as “joinery,” but you might also think about how English-language writers sometimes use the word “fabric” as a gauzier alternative to the rectangular articulations of “structure”, as in”the fabric of society.”

But then what is Adorno’s objection? The problem, as he sees it, is that the followers of Heidegger want to transform our relationship to language in some fundamental way, and they want to make it less technological. And yet their way of doing this, via the jargon, is both piecemeal and weirdly mechanical. What Heidegger thought it would take a poet to accomplish—the rescue of our language from the spirit of technology—the jargoneers think anyone can accomplish just by pushing any of fifteen or twenty verbal buttons. The jargon is at once too much of a system and not nearly enough of one. Not nearly enough of one, because it has given up on the ambition to transform language top to bottom. Convinced of impending verbal catastrophe, it is nonetheless resigned to changing almost nothing, rejuvenating a handful of words on an individual basis, and altering even these almost not at all. A systemic crisis requires a system response, and the jargon isn’t that. But it is also too much of a system, it in that it amounts to a rulebook, a series of steps. Say X and you will be authentic. Say Z and you will undo the Forgetting of Being.

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Jargon of Authenticity, Day 7

Posted on June 2, 2024 | Comments Off on Jargon of Authenticity, Day 7

Vikings attending Viking Fest were dialed in to a Sunday morning viking wedding reenactment.

 

Adorno was just explaining that people who use the jargon treat individual words as though they were magic — and not in a good way. He’s about to elaborate:

The individual word partakes of a secondary transcendence; transcendence ready-made and straight from the factory; a changeling that has been swapped in for the transcendence that was lost. Elements of empirical language are manipulated in their rigidity…

…”massaged,” I think we would say…

…as though they were elements of a language true and revealed; for speaker and listener alike, the empirical familiarity of these sacred words counterfeits a downright bodily proximity. 

An example should make this clear: Let’s say that in a Heideggerian mood, I remark that the words “thing” and “object,” which we typically treat as synonyms, are nothing of the sort. A “thing” is not an “object,” as we should be able to see if we examine the two words’ respective etymologies. In old English, as in the other Germanic languages, a “thing” initially referred to a free people gathering to discuss matters of common concern — a tribal assembly, as it were — and then over time it came to refer, as well, to any one of those matters: something that might concern us, an item, an issue. The German word for object, meanwhile, is Gegenstand — that which stands over and against me. This suggests an entity that, while separate from me, exists only in relation to me. The precise English equivalent is “obstacle.” You might want to pause here to let that one sink in. The ordinary German word for “object” invites us to see all of the world’s things as obstacles. But then the word object is if anything even worse. It shares the prefix ob-, obviously — “in the direction of” or “in front of” — but in the place of sta-, “to stand,” it has iac-, “to throw.” An “object” is something that has been thrown at you or in front of you — a missile, a rock, a fresh obstacle, debris. At best, calling something an “object” should communicate surprise: How the hell did this get here? More likely, it communicates: Duck! Knowing this, I might now resolve to think of the stuff of the world as “things” and not as “objects” — to conceive of the world as an occasion to gather and an invitation to my concern, and not as so much litter or shrapnel.

We can plunge back into the sentence. Maybe we can now see what Adorno meant by “secondary transcendence.” At least in this case, by championing the word “thing,” I am attempting to revive an earlier set of meanings; trying to go back behind even Middle English, which had already lost the sense that “thing” could also mean “assembly”; vowing to remember the Icelandic Althing or Danish Folketing every time I so much as refer to a screwdriver or a lawn chair. I can’t, of course, revive the unfathomably different social conditions under which the word “thing” meant both “object” and “tribal gathering,” but I can convince myself that I am silently invoking that history every time I write the word “thing,” and I can convince myself, too, that rejecting the word “object” will bring me closer to objects, will render them less alien, by training me not to conceptualize them as impediments. But attempted piecewise, via individual words, and without our doing anything to change the general status of objects in capitalist societies (mass-produced, disposable, universally exchangeable), my embrace of the Anglo-Saxon “thing” amounts to little more than philosophical cos-play. I accomplish next to nothing by intermittently looking around my dining room with the eyes of a Norseman.

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Jargon of Authenticity, Day 6

Posted on May 7, 2024 | Comments Off on Jargon of Authenticity, Day 6

Adorno was just listing terms that belong to “the jargon” — and also remarking that many of them are ordinary German words, not immediately recognizable as jargon if cited out of context. He goes on:

The point, then, is not to compile an Index Verborum Prohibitorum of fast-selling noble nouns, but to ponder the linguistic function of such terms in the jargon.

A reader might be wondering here about the phrase “noble nouns.” That’s a single, compound word in the original, which Adorno has formed by attaching the prefix Edel- to the word for “noun.” It is, as best I can tell, Adorno’s coinage, though it follows an established pattern in German. English, like German, refers to helium and neon and the like as “noble gases,” but Germans extend that formulation to many other things, in a way that English speakers don’t, often marking out the high-grade or special members of some class by attaching to it the prefix Edel-. A German gem is a “noble-stone.” Stainless steel is “noble-steel.” That said, we won’t want to overlook the soft oxymoron that Adorno has generated around his coinage: The terms in question are noble, sure, but they are also good business — “fast-selling.” Their very nobility has been diluted or indeed hucksterized, hawked by journalists and pundits, on the lips of every pretender.

     The Latin phrase, meanwhile, is Adorno’s riff on the Catholic Church’s Index of Forbidden Books, for which he has substituted “Index of Forbidden Words,” the idea being, of course, that he is repudiating the role of censor. He wants us to keep track of the jargon, but he’s not going to tell anyone to delete its terms from their vocabulary.

      He continues:

Its lexicon consists of rather more than noble nouns anyway. At times it even seizes upon [otherwise] banal words, holds them aloft and then bronzes them in the fascist manner, which wisely commingles the plebeian with the elite.

The first thing to notice about these two sentences is that they give one good reason to forgo censorship. The jargon, Adorno says for a second time, features many ordinary German words — one is tempted to say “common nouns,” in juxtaposition to those nobles one — and it would be downright silly to interdict basic and everyday terms from the German vocabulary. A contemporary American professor could just about instruct his students to stop using (and mostly misusing) the word “ontology,” but he’s hardly going to tell them to stop using the word “body.”

But this passage is, of course, more alarming than that, since Adorno is beginning to elaborate now on his big point — that something about how educated Germans spoke, as late as the 1960s, still sounded kind of fascist. And this particular observation about fascism’s verbal style — that it employed a mixed idiom that oscillated promiscuously between the demotic and the high-flown — could easily remind the reader of a second book, one that preceded Adorno’s by some sixteen years: This would be Viktor Klemperer’s LTI – Lingua Tertii Imperii, or “Language of the Third Reich,” a set of reflections on the idiosyncrasies of Nazi German, compiled in notebook-form during the ’30s and ’40s by a Jewish-at-birth literature professor and published to great acclaim in 1947. Adorno, in other words, had a model.

        But the writers he is about to name are neither of them Klemperer. Once you know who he’s talking about, in fact, the next sentence is downright alarming:

The neo-romantic poets who drank their fill of the choicest vintages, like [Stefan] George and [Hugo von] Hofmannsthal, by no means wrote their prose in the jargon; many of their intermediaries, however, did — [Friedrich] Gundolf, for instance.

To remark now that Stefan George is usually regarded as the most important German modernist poet — and that Hofmannsthal was his Austrian twin, his sometime collaborator and lifelong frenemy, is not yet to say nearly enough. The most important thing to know about George is that he started his career as a junior member of the Mallarmé circle in Paris, slurring his name to Shorsh in place of the crisply Germanic Gay-yor-guh, and that he ended his career as the official poet of Germany’s hard Right and indeed of the Nazis. He thus enters cultural history as the intermediate step between the queer aestheticism of the 1890s and National Socialism; he was the guy who, while writing poems that typically remind English speakers of Eliot or Pound or Yeats, also helped publish numerous volumes of literary history with swastikas in their front matter and titles like The Poet as Führer. This is explainable: George and his followers — he was famous for having followers — united around a stalwart program to dismantle the institutions of the modern world. They wanted to roll back a whole range of depersonalized social forms: capitalism, large cities, rule-based organizations of any kind, industrialism and its technologies, mass media, mass politics. We should be careful here, since this was at one point a fairly common program and came in lots of different versions, not all of which landed on the political Right. The Rousseauvian Left could still sign onto that platform. So could the Jeffersonian republicans, on the understanding that to be a true American is not to be European, is not to be civilized; to be American is to remake yourself for the better in conditions of relative hardship (away from big cities and settled institutions &c). What made the George Circle distinctive, then, was twofold: First, it championed poetry as the alternative to (over)civilization — poetry and not, say, the frontier. The poet-prophet would play the role that Americans more typically assign to the cowboy or the Nebraska pioneer. Poetry would keep open the possibility of a life lived beyond the industrialized anonymity of mass society. That’s the first distinctive point. The second distinctive point is that the George Circle thought that fascism would make the world safe for aesthetes and queer people — if not the Nazis, then at least some hypothetical other fascism that at least some of them, for a time, mistook for really existing National Socialism.

     What I can add now is that Gundolf was for many years George’s favorite disciple — and the one tasked with translating the Circle’s program into accessible prose. It’s that divvying up of duties that seems to interest Adorno here. We can give the right-wing poets a degree of credit — credit, that is, for not having resorted to a standardized idiom even when writing prose. But it was the literary historian’s job to re-state the tenets of their fascist aestheticism in terms that lent themselves to codification and repetition — to take the rarefied discourse of George’s “Secret Germany” and make it not-so-secret. And what Adorno thinks he has noticed is that the postwar existentialists are still talking in the accents of the fascist-bohemian middlebrow.

      Adorno continues:

Particular words only become jargon through the constellation they deny, through each word’s posing as unique. What the singular word has lost in magic is acquired for it in a dirigiste manner, as though measures had been implemented. 

“What the singular word has lost in magic…” The place to start here is with the observation that words used to have magic but now mostly don’t — that’s clearly a linguistic variant of Weber’s disenchantment thesis. Adorno has omitted an important explanation here that serves as the backdrop to his more targeted comments — namely, that a great many modern intellectuals have regarded poetry as a way to combat disenchantment. Let’s start with one familiar understanding of magic: The sorcerer is the person who can speak something into being, via spell or incantation. Any anti-mimetic theory of literature, then, will ask us to think of poetry as a species of lesser magic. Poets do not merely write down what they see in front of them; they are the inventors of worlds. The fictioner gives ongoing evidence of the mind’s creative powers. But that’s not the end of it. Anyone who subscribes to speech act theory or social constructivism or the doctrine of mind-dependent social kinds is claiming to find this sublunary magic at every turn, IRL, and not just in the library. It turns out that we routinely speak things into being. The word “spell” means both “abracadabra” and “to list in their proper order the letters that make up a word.” At root, the word “incantation” just means “song.” “Grammar” is “grimoire.” A disenchanted language, then, would be one that is unwilling to unleash the powers of alphabet, song, and grammar, content only ever to describe and transcribe and record — a language that makes nothing, backed by a theory of language that sees all words as secondary, as following on from the things they merely designate, a theory that grants language no creative force. To this we need merely add that many modern poets really have tasked poetry with keeping alive the creative force of language — word-magic — in periods when that rival view of language (as so many tokens) has come to prevail; with charming the reader beyond the constraints of analytic understanding; and perhaps even with safeguarding the ancient and esoteric wisdom that mere science has tended to overwrite. For a period, Stefan George belonged to an esoteric circle in Munich that called themselves the Cosmics. W. B. Yeats was a wizard in the Order of the Golden Dawn.

        If you go back now and look at Adorno’s last two sentences, what will jump out is that Adorno is talking still about the jargon and not about poetry. On the basis of this passage alone, we can’t say what Adorno thinks about those properly poetic attempts to restore the magic of language, though in other essays, he does express a guarded admiration for George, and especially for the intransigent, homophile nonconformity of the poète maudit. The point here, however, is that the jargon has its own way of trying to re-enchant language, and that this way is ham-fisted, bullying, and hopeless. The jargon inherits from the poetry to which it is adjacent the project of re-enchanting language, but is really bad at it. I’d go so far as to say that this short passage offers a theory in passing of what makes jargon jargon; it teaches you how to recognize when a word has been annexed to some jargon. The problem with jargon is that it claims to produce the thing that it names — that’s the magic bit — without the speaker having to make any additional effort. Someone speaks the word “identity” and concludes that they have thereby fashioned a stable persona, without having to understand how selves get assembled or pausing to worry about how our ego constructs tend to come unstuck over time. I speak the word “intersectionality” and believe that I have thereby already done the hard work of solidarity. Having been told that networks of oppression typically overlap, I spare myself the labor of figuring out just how they are articulated — here, now — and I find myself with nothing to say about how the matted skein of domination might yet be unraveled. Each term pretends singly to some such power, even though they are all interlinked, tending, in fact, to be defined in terms of one another: “intersectionality” gets defined with reference to “identity”; anyone explaining “identity” asks first if you understand “positionality” and so on. And the terms themselves are rhetorically quite flat. Repetition alone will tend to routinize them and so strip them of their verbal mojo. The jargon will never achieve the insinuating and uncanny character of the well-turned poetic line, that weird cadence that can make verse sound like an improvised hex: “And I will show you something different from either / Your shadow at morning striding behind you / Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; / I will show you fear in a handful of dust.” Words like “identity” and “intersectionality” have been assigned their bogus magic by professorial explanation and glossaries compiled on college websites. They are magic only by decree, pedantically enchanted.

 

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Jargon of Authenticity, Day 5

Posted on April 10, 2024 | Comments Off on Jargon of Authenticity, Day 5

We begin a new paragraph.

In Germany a jargon of authenticity is spoken— and even more so, written; the badge of societalized chosenness, elevated and folksy at once; a sublanguage playing the role of prestige dialect.

A bit of exegesis will get us going. On a first pass, the word most likely to cause trouble is “societalized,” which in German is a Weberian term of art, vergesellschaftet. (And yes, Adorno is not immune to using jargon in his campaign against jargon.) That word — or rather its noun form, Vergesellschaftung — plays an important role in Weber’s thinking, where it refers to social relationships that have been mediated through exchange or the contract (rather than the communitarian ties of kinship and the like). We might more readily grasp the point, and even retain most of the phrase’s Weberian flavor, if we swapped in the word “rationalized” or even “modernized”: The jargon is “the badge of rationalized, modernized chosenness.” That last word, “chosenness,” is a reminder that existentialism has its origins in Kierkegaard’s Protestantism, with perhaps a secondary reference to Judaism; Existenzphilosophie creates a secular elect or a chosen people. The elitism of the stance is irritating enough — hence, the move from “spoken” to “written”: existentialism is a set of poses struck by educated people. But what really seems to be irking Adorno is that this elitism has been reduced to a verbal code and something like a method. (The word I’ve translated as “badge” sometimes means “identifying feature,” but sometimes means “dog tags.” The phrase could thus also read “the tags of societalized chosenness,” where “tags” can mean both: standardized keywords entered as metadata and how you might identify a corpse.) In existentialism, the process by which you achieve your authenticity is supposed to be radically individual. No-one can help you. Sartre has that famous bit about how when you seek advice, you choose the person to advise you, which person probably won’t tell you something that you didn’t preselect for. In other words, you bear responsibility for whatever position you arrive it. And a lot of junk existentialism strikes heroic poses around this — the lonely-individual-struggling-to-make-meaning-in-a-fundamentally-absurd-universe. The heroic bit probably gets at the “chosenness.” Existentialists can’t help but feel that they are special, that they aren’t das Man, the They, the Anyone. Against this, Adorno means us to notice that the existentialism was itself a kind of group-think, a social trend whose followers achieved a false individualism only by using standardized terms and cycling through repeatable steps.

But that’s not actually the meeting of opposites that most has him exercised here. He is plainly more interested in the twofold character of existentialist jargon, which is “at once elevated and folksy.” The German terms that Adorno uses in the last clause deserve a quick look: Untersprache and Obersprache, under-language and over-language. In English, the word “sublanguage” does sometimes get used to refer to a jargon or whatever, lacking a regional base, isn’t quite a dialect — “sublanguage” as in “subculture”: “The use of emojis can be considered a whole sublanguage of its own.” The German word isn’t any more common than its English equivalent, but I did find one usage that suggests that it can mean a dialect-understood-as-inferior. Obersprache is, if anything, even less common than that, but does occasionally get used to refer to the high or official form of a language as contrasted with some putatively lesser patois. At any rate, Adorno is pointing out something unusual about Existenzdeutsch, and he must be thinking in the first instance of Heidegger. Most of the time — in English as in German — we think of jargon as relying heavily on elevated, Greek and Roman roots, the way that science and medicine do: We insist on calling snails and slugs “gastropods,” which makes them sound more alien than they really are, as though we didn’t have such creatures in these parts, as though all animals came from somewhere else, when even for taxonomical purposes, we could just call them “belly-feet.” But Heidegger makes a point of using good, sturdy German words; it’s just that he uses them in non-intuitive ways — ways that have to be learned. So what Adorno means is that among the Heideggerians a down-home idiom has begun to function in mandarin ways, which — he’s right — is quite unusual.

The next six sentences are best considered as a unit:

The jargon extends from philosophy and theology—not only of Protestant academies—to departments of education, adult education centers, and youth organizations, even to the elevated diction of the representatives of business and administration. While the jargon overflows with the pretense of profound human sensitivity, it is just as standardized as the world that it officially negates; the reason for this lies partly in its mass success, partly in the fact that it sends its message automatically, just from the way it is put together, thereby sealing that message off from the very experience that should inspire it. The jargon has at its disposal a modest number of words that click into place like signals. “Authenticity” itself is hardly the most conspicuous of the bunch; it serves, rather, to light up the ether in which the jargon flourishes and the cast of mind that latently feeds it. Some examples were serve for the time being: existentiell [“existentiell” when used by a Heideggerian, “existential” in ordinary German]; in der Entscheidung [in the decision]; Auftrag [the task]; Anruf [the call]; Begegnung [the encounter]; echtes Gespräch [a genuine conversation]; Aussage [an utterance]; Anliegen [a concern]; Bindung [a commitment]; one could add to the list any number of terms-that-aren’t-terms with a similar ring. 
.

“Terms-that-aren’t-terms”: Adorno is referring again to the existentialists’ tendency to devise jargonized uses for ordinary German words, which all of these are, with the exception of the first.

Some — like Anliegen [a concern], which is logged in the Grimms’ dictionary and which [Walter] Benjamin could still use innocently — have only taken on their changed coloring since getting drawn into this Spannungsfeld, this “field of tension” — that’s another one for the list.

An English-speaking reader will likely be put off by this paragraph’s fusillade of German. Patience is the best counsel. The details don’t matter, at least for now. You will not be quizzed on this vocabulary. Adorno is just warming up, listing in advance some of the headwords for which his devil’s dictionary will eventually supply entries. At some point, you will want to know what is interesting about the word Begegnung, but there will be time for that later.

The importance of this paragraph lies elsewhere. For if we consider what Adorno is actually doing — and not just what is he is claiming — then we can extrapolate from these lines three questions; questions that Adorno has put to pop existentialism in Germany and that we might, following his example, put to any philosophy as it enters the educated mainstream:

1) What are its buzzwords? Faced with a philosophy in wide circulation, our first task will be to compile a lexicon and catalog its boilerplate: identity, intersectionality, lived experience, a particular way with participles (minoritized groups where once there were “minorities”; the unhoused where once there were “homeless people”; the variously assigned and identifying); Black and Brown bodies, where once there were persons; and, indeed, those capital B‘s themselves, which undo the de-essentializing and lower-case diminution of an earlier generation in favor of a fresh round of monumentalization presumed permanent.

That’s the first question. Next we ask…

2) How have these buzzwords been taken up by the government and the corporations, “the representatives of business and administration”? A college’s Queer Student Union promises to “work to improve student life for all gender identities.” Amazon does them one better, “encouraging all Amazon employees to … ‘speak their truth'” and promising to “provide full support of all … gender identities.” Similarly, I have a pretty good idea of what the Combahee River Collective meant by “intersectionality.” But we’re still going to have to work out what the secret police mean by the word: “I am a woman of color,” says the CIA officer in the recruitment video, “I am a cis-gender millennial who has been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder. I am intersectional.”

3) How do these buzzwords standardize what they claim to promote? How, indeed, does verbal repetition introduce homogeneity into philosophical positions that typically promise the opposite? What are the protocols of routinized identity-assertion? What do we do when lived experience enters our texts mostly as a truncated verbal meme, ie, as “lived experience”?

At this point, a clarification becomes necessary. It would be possible to put Adorno’s question to any intellectual scene in Western Europe or North America over the last 250 years or so — and probably to many others besides. It would be possible, I mean, to inquire for any moment about the unexpected ties between dissident philosophy and officialdom, even when these have nothing to do with existentialism. But as it happens, our American present, in the 2020s, has a lot to do with existentialism. For it is in the idiom of identity and intersectionality that Sartreanism and its cousins most obviously survive into the present — subsumed, to be sure, buried and repackaged, but no less recognizable for that. We could make the point in terms of intellectual history, by remarking that Judith Butler completed a PhD in the 1980s under an important Sartre scholar and that of the seven French theorists that Butler discusses in Subjects of Desire, their first book, only Sartre gets a chapter of his own. But we could also make the point just by examining contemporary identity practices: When a group gathers for the first time, the reason to expect each and every person in attendance to give their pronouns is an impeccably Sartrean one. To see this, one need only consider the alternative, which would be to signal that anyone who wants to is welcome to give their pronouns — welcome, but not obliged. The point of the obligatory version– the point, that is, of requiring the normie to say “he/him” — is not only to put non-binary and non-conforming people at ease, by turning the giving of pronouns into a ready habit and rule of etiquette, though of course it is that, too. Just as important, the universal introduction-by-pronoun severs the link between gender presentation and gender identity, allowing no-one to hide behind their secondary sex characteristics; and more important still, it compels every person in the room to own their gender identification, to speak it as an identification, and to do so repeatedly, in a way that makes clear that we each maintain an identity only through free and recurring acts of affirmation. “My name is Christian Thorne, and I use he/him pronouns” — until the day I don’t. Anyone with a little time on their hands can confirm the broader point for themselves. Polity’s 2014 introduction to existentialism regularly slips into the idiom of identity: “We are always a ‘not yet’ as we press forward, fashioning and re-fashioning our identities.” And conversely, K. Anthony Appiah’s 2005 book on The Ethics of Identity is brimming with existentialist formulations: identity is a matter of “making a life,” “the final responsibility” for which “is always the responsibility of the person whose life it is.” In one thought experiment, Appiah praises a person for excelling in a particular identity “because of his commitment.” It is when we recall that “lived experience” was actually Beauvoir’s term — l’expérience vécue — that it begins to seem possible that some of Adorno’s arguments, and not just his questions, will carry over to the present, as we watch the jargon of authenticity mutate into the jargon of identity.

 

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Jargon of Authenticity, Day 4

Posted on February 24, 2024 | Comments Off on Jargon of Authenticity, Day 4

Heidegger enters the scene on the third page. Here’s the paragraph in full:

This [Kracauer getting shown the door by the Rosenstock circle] was well before the publication of Being and Time. In that work, Heidegger introduced authenticity par excellence, in the context of an existential ontology and as a philosophical term of art; so, too, did he pour into the mold of philosophy the object of the Authentics’ less theoretical zeal; and in that way he won over all those in whom philosophy strikes a vague chord. It was through Heidegger that confessional demands became unnecessary. His book acquired its nimbus by describing as full of insight — by presenting to its readers as an obligation true and proper — the drift of the [German] intelligentsia’s dark compulsions before 1933. Of course in Heidegger, as in all those who followed his language, a diminished theological resonance can be heard to this very day. The theological obsessions of those years have seeped into the language, far beyond the circle of those who at that time set themselves up as the elite. Nevertheless, the sacred quality of the Authentics’ language belongs to the cult of authenticity rather than to the Christian cult, even when — for temporary lack of any other viable authority — the Authentics end up resembling Christians. Prior to any consideration of particular content, their language molds thought in such a way that it adapts to the goal of subordination even when it thinks it is resisting that goal. The authority of the absolute is overthrown by absolutized authority. Fascism was not simply a conspiracy, although it was that; it originated, rather, in a powerful current of social development. Language provides it with a refuge; in language, the still smoldering disaster speaks as though it were salvation. 

A reader might launch into this passage and think they have arrived at the main event, the smackdown, Adorno vs. Heidegger. This is what I came to see. That would be wrong — consequentially so. For anyone trying to make sense of The Jargon of Authenticity, nothing is more important than noticing that Adorno is taking much of the onus off of Heidegger, who was at most an important relay for a malign turn in German intellectual life that happened well before he started writing. Stripped of all detail, what this page is saying is that the problem goes well beyond Heidegger. Focusing too much on Heidegger lets too many other intellectuals off the hook.

       I’d like to go ahead and extract three theses from this paragraph — they are, I think, the book’s major claims — and pause to ask what implications they might have for anyone trying to reckon with the revival of fascism in our own generation.

        Thesis #1) Anti-fascists, when studying fascist thought, should be prepared to cast the net widely. At some level, Adorno’s approach isn’t all that unusual. On the basis of this paragraph alone, we could think of The Jargon of Authenticity as his attempt at an Intellectual Origins of National Socialism, and we might note that the book appeared at more or less the same time as the classic volumes on that topic: Stern’s Politics of Cultural Despair (1961); Mosse’s Crisis of German Ideology (1964). It’s just that Adorno proposes figures of his own, alongside the agrarian ethno-nationalists and anti-Semites and pan-German Wander-birds unearthed by Mosse and Stern. He thought that the early existentialists had something important to contribute to the making of fascism — an authoritarian cast of mind that typically posed as religious and sometimes even posed as free. But unlike Mosse and Stern, Adorno was also interested in the survival, after 1945, of this proto-fascism. The fundamental task of all historical study is to judge matters of continuity and rupture — to identify what in any historical constellation has been inherited and what has been made anew. And there is perhaps no period for which this most basic of historiographic questions has higher stakes than Germany in the 1950s. What did the Germans (and their minders) manage to remake after the war, and perhaps build from scratch? And what was carried over from the 1930s and ’40s? (Who rebuilt the bombed-out cities if not Nazi architects? Who staffed the reopened public schools if not Nazi teachers?) Adorno, at any rate, is offering his own version of what we might too innocuously call the Continuity Thesis.

      Thesis #2: Even radical philosophy has a way of remaking itself as an idiom, a set of verbal commonplaces, a lingo for the educated classes. This indicates a break with Adorno’s usual method. You can pick up Negative Dialectics if you want to see Adorno grapple with the technicalities of Heidegger’s philosophical program — if, that is, you want to watch him crawl inside of that program and flush out its impasses and contradictions from the inside. The reason, one concludes, that Adorno decided finally that The Jargon of Authenticity did not belong in that volume is that he is in this case not interested in philosophy qua philosophy, and certainly not interested in its subtle failures. If anything, he is interested in the success of modernist German philosophy, but as something other than philosophy — interested, I mean, in the making of a Heideggerian-existentialist patois that got spoken, apparently, by a lot of people who weren’t philosophers — people “far beyond the circle” of adepts. What I’d like us to notice for now is that this position is doubtless repeatable. Adorno hands us a question that we might want to ask and at intervals re-ask: How does the late-modern Bildungs-bourgeoisie deploy to its own ends the philosophical argot with which its professors have equipped them? We might, for instance, want to chart the fate of critical theory itself as it moves from the classroom to Left Twitter and Left Tumblr and various workplaces. And when we ask that question, we will want to avoid a certain temptation, which will be to blame the speakers of this or that philosophical jargon for not getting it; we will have to choke back the lecture that we have at the ready, the one that pronounces ex cathedra that That’s not what Heidegger (or Foucault or Butler) really said. If Adorno is right, then philosophy attains its (malleable) historical force only in reduced form, as a vulgate. It’s the crude version that we should be keeping an eye on.

       Thesis #3: Fascism draws some of its intellectual energies from people who do not regard themselves as fascists and who may even take themselves to be anti-fascist. I can specify the matter like so: Many of the intellectuals that Adorno sees as preparing the way for Heidegger and for what he is content to call fascism were Jewish — either active Jews (like Rosenzweig or Buber) or men from Jewish families (like Rosenstock or the Ehrenbergs). In fact, the one figure that Adorno has cited approvingly (Borchardt) was way closer to the fascists than the unnamed figures he is now attacking. This is bound to shake up our understanding of fascism. Hans Ehrenberg was a vocal member of the movement that defied the Nazi takeover of the Protestant churches. Rosenzweig and Buber made landmark contributions to the revival of modern Jewish philosophy. Adorno’s argument is outrageous if wrong and disturbing if right: Your positions, as they enter the world, will not remain *your* positions. Even your anti-fascism can be transposed into a fascism. Call it the ruse of un-reason.

One way to capture the force of Adorno’s theses would be to update them, speculatively, for the revival of fascism in our generation. You could, if you wanted, enter the ranks as an anti-fascist philosophical watchdog. You could tell us that members of Trump’s inner circle have been reading Julius Evola, that they’ve met with Aleksandr Dugin. You could warn us again about Nick Land and the lure of Dark Enlightenment. You can bone up on de Benoist and the French Nouvelle Droite. But if we follow the page in front of us, then this isn’t nearly enough and may be something of a distraction.  For a decade, Nick Land was a professor of Continental philosophy at the UK’s most famously left-wing university. Alain de Benoist was first introduced to American readers by a journal founded by Lukacsians. Fascism, if it is to succeed, will have to find a perch in ordinary discourse, including educated discourse. And some of that discourse is likely to be your own. The Benoist circle call themselves Les Identitaires.

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Jargon of Authenticity, Day 3

Posted on February 10, 2024 | Comments Off on Jargon of Authenticity, Day 3

 

We should be able to pick up the pace. Adorno has just said that it should be impossible for a free and independent mind — a mind that accepts the basic principle of all philosophy, which is that thought is to bow to no authority; that it is to accede to no position if authority is the only thing the position has going for it — it should be impossible for such a mind to submit to revealed religion. But that is exactly what the followers of Kierkegaard seem to be demanding. The Patmos people make the perverse demand that a freethinker freely submit to a paradoxically optional Absolute.

          He goes on:

The ones who closed ranks [against Adorno’s friend Kracauer] were anti-intellectual intellectuals.

That’s probably clear enough from what I’ve just written. I’ll just add that the phrase “anti-intellectual intellectuals” could serve equally well for a long tradition of skeptical anti-philosophers — thinkers who draw on stores of deep learning and use the methods of philosophical argument in order to discredit philosophy, reason, knowledge, or science. If you want to talk a philosopher out of philosophizing — if you want to persuade him that the problems that matter to him can’t be solved by philosophical means or that philosophy is actively making his life worse — you are presumably going to have to give him some sound arguments. You will have to learn to turn philosophy against itself. Kierkegaard said that his philosophy was a course in retrieved simplicity. Anyone reading Kierkegaard is learning to abandon the intellectual sophistication that is required to read Kierkegaard.

          Next sentence:

They proved to themselves their higher unity by shutting out the person who did not make a profession of faith in their manner, the way they all bore witness to one another. 

A few small things: Adorno was one of the first philosophers to pay close attention, on dialectical grounds, to the dynamics of exclusion — to pay close attention to what any particular conceptual formation has to exclude in order to maintain its integrity and to worry about the fate of the excluded terms. You can already see this in The Dialectic of Enlightenment, whose simplest, unsuperseded observation is that enlightened people have a way of dealing cruelly with anyone they deem unenlightened. There is even a whisper of Schmitt’s enemy-thesis in this sentence: We’ve already been told that the intellectuals in question had joined  different denominations and religions. Their affinity was to that extent fairly abstract and could only be brought into focus via a scapegoat.

        More:

What they championed spiritually, they entered into the ledger as their ethic, as though a person’s adhering to the doctrine of some higher being were enough to elevate his inner rank, as though the gospels had nothing to say against the Pharisees. 

What I’ve translated as “entered into the ledger” is a single word in German: buchen — they’ve “booked” their religious commitments; they bring a bookkeeping mentality to their own spiritual accomplishment. They’re keeping score. They want credit. The bit about the Pharisees is easy enough to parse: If I call someone “pharisaical,” I might just mean that they are being self-righteous, holier-than-thou. But I might also mean something more specific: that they are rigidly enforcing the external forms of religion and caring not enough about the spirit, that they want above all to be seen to be religious. It may come as a small surprise to realize that Adorno is in this instance siding with the gospels.

  In this last as in so many other respects, it is easy to get Adorno wrong. Many of us have read maybe two chapters of the Dialectic of Enlightenment in college and have him pegged accordingly — as the guy who thought that Francis Bacon led to Hitler. You’ll have to read rather further in Adorno to realize that in his thinking, the familiar Counter-Enlightenment positions don’t come off any better than the scientists or the lumières. If anything, they come off quite a bit worse. 

    That’s what makes the opening pages of The Jargon so instructive. The intellectuals who denounce the Enlightenment are most often promoting some version or another of religious revival, and that’s an option that Adorno rejects out of hand. Elsewhere, in an important essay on Schönberg, he writes that ”our epoch refuses to vouchsafe us a sacred work of art” and that “sacred art has become impossible.” We’ll want to know why he thinks that, given that he felt at least some affinity with religion — the kind of affinity that any heterodox Marxist might feel for Christian socialism or liberation theology. And we should note: It’s not that he thought that religious art was available but pernicious. He thought that the path to a genuinely religious art was blocked (and that attempts to fashion such art were therefore doomed and perhaps for that reason alone retrograde). Still, it’s a puzzle. “It would be advisable to think of progress in the crudest, most basic terms: that no one should go hungry anymore.” That, too, is Adorno, making it clear that he was pretty close to Brecht after all. And one might think that Judaism and Christianity are helpfully crude in just this way — the way of the-last-shall-be-first-and-we-hold-all-things-in-common. Why wouldn’t someone trying to imagine the redeemed society avail himself of their accumulated historical power?

        The short answer is that Adorno is pretty sure this power has been dispelled for good. At heart, the claim that sacred art has become impossible is just Adorno’s restatement of Walter Benjamin’s great argument about the death of the aura. The simplest way to put this would be to say that art will never be special again, and if you still think that art is sort of special, that’s only because you have never lived in a world where artworks were genuinely special: singular and hummingly charismatic. The fancier way to put it would be to say that all art has undergone a many-sided process of decontextualization. The passage from church to museum deconsecrates the object in a single blow, removing it from the web of practices in which it was formerly suspended, stripping it from the believers who perceived it as sacred to begin with and handing it over to an endless parade of schoolchildren and tourists. Ceremonial pipes go unsmoked. Greek icons end up unkissably behind glass. Sacred art has become impossible because framing an object as art is all it takes to negate its sanctity.

      But then museums are just part of the story. Walter Benjamin was interested above all in the fate of art after the 1880s, when photography was mainstreamed, and as of the 1920s, when sound recording took off. And the point here, of course, is that photographs and records decontextualize art all over again. They do so rampantly, in fact, by reproducing any artwork a thousandfold. Anyone who walks into the Sistine Chapel is likely to have seen its ceiling a hundred times already, before seeing it now, “for the first time,” and is unlikely to feel that they are in the presence of God. They’re just happy they got to hear the band play its greatest hit. Fresh experience gets shelved in favor of the three-dimensional augmentation of the already-known. In the age of the postcard and the dorm-poster, you can’t remember when you first saw Girl with a Pearl Earring or Starry Night or The Birth of Venus. You have never not seen them.

         So that’s most of Adorno’s point: Art this routinized is going to have trouble conveying the sacred. The last time I listened to Bach’s Easter Oratorio, I was vacuuming the house. To this, he adds the simple observation that the churches are much weaker than they used to be. Science now carries most of the intellectual authority. Thus Adorno: “How is cultic music possible in the absence of a cult?” How is ritual music possible when so few people attend the rites? An artist who wanted to create in a religious idiom would be speaking a language that most people no longer understand. And such art wouldn’t be sacred. It would just be … there.

        So what happens when artists try to create religious art all the same? They can travel the path of the subject, but if they do that they will inevitably miss their target. A devotional poem about the Christian’s ardently pious inner life is not a poem about God; it’s a poem about a Christian. Alternately, then, they can travel the path of the object, which would mean rejuvenating some of the old religious iconography, only to suffer the fate of Chagall’s etchings of Moses and Jeremiah and Rachel — images whose storybook naïveté preemptively invites viewers to regard the Hebrew Bible as folklore. Anyone who knows their Adorno might remark at this point that he advocated an iconoclasm, which we might hold out as a third option, the path of neither subject nor object. A big part of his project, in fact, is to update the old Judeo-Protestant ban on images. Short version: 1) He is preoccupied, on dialectical grounds, on the gap between things and the concepts, words or terms that claim to capture them, and so fixated on the way in which representation is likely to betray its objects. 2) He subscribes to the Marxist prohibition on spelling out how communism is likely to function, which irritates many readers of Marx, but is, in fact, altogether defensible. If the whole point of communism is for people to make their own society together — and to remake it ongoingly — then the society they build and re-build obviously can’t be spelled out for them in advance. Their constituent power has to remain the gap in your thinking. The point is easy to defend on political grounds, but aesthetically something of a mess, since iconoclasm is an unpromising platform for anyone looking to make sacred art. Adorno’s essay on Schönberg’s Moses und Aron boils down to his amazement that the composer had had the gumption to devise an opera, of all things, on the subject of iconoclasm, a Gesamtkunstwerk on a biblical theme whose lesson is that we should stop trying to represent sacred things, a Singspiel in which anyone who sings turns out to be sinful for that very reason.

  We’re in a good position to appreciate the book’s next sentence:

A full forty years later [after the Patmos incident — in the 1960s, therefore, as Adorno was writing The Jargon of Authenticity], a retired bishop walked out on a conference at a Protestant academy because an invited speaker had cast doubt on the possibility of sacred music today. 

At least we can be pretty sure who that invited speaker was.

He too felt absolved from, or had been warned against, getting mixed up with people who do not toe the line; as though critical thought had no objective foundation but were instead a kind of subjective lapse.

It would be easy to mishear Adorno as voicing the liberal intellectual’s familiar complaint against believers, which is that they are intolerant. But that’s not really what he’s saying here. In fact, we might as well correct a second misapprehension while we’re at it. It is common for readers to complain that Adorno is finally apolitical or even anti-political — that he talks often enough like a Marxist and still manages to land upon a pessimistic quietism. It’s not hard to see where readers get that idea, given that he rejected what were in his lifetime all the available political options. But what we see here is Adorno hewing to one of the classic Marxist positions — the one that affirms the priority of the political. Critique has an “objective foundation.” In this instance, that means: The position of religion really has changed — socially, structurally, and as it were objectively. Under those conditions, no one can rescue religion simply by doubling down  on belief, by promising to believe all the harder. Big changes in the social order cannot be overcome by adjusting one’s subjectivity.

 We read on. Adorno is still talking about the bishop who stormed out:

People of his type combine the tendency that Borchardt called “putting oneself in the right” with the fear of reflecting on their reflexive reactions—as if they didn’t altogether believe themselves.

In this instance Adorno’s claims are easy enough to identify. Beliefs arrived at by existentialist methods could seem uniquely fragile. I have chosen a set of commitments, but I know that I have chosen them freely and that they lack strong justifications. I have merely chosen them. And if I keep this perspective before me, as the existentialists would have me do, one might reasonably ask whether I really believe my own beliefs. Certain types of philosophical reflection are, in fact, no longer available to me. I can’t ask, for one, whether my beliefs are true or right — or whether some new experience hasn’t shown them to be false. I didn’t claim they were true to begin with; and new experience can’t falsify them. Any questions of this nature can only prompt new confessions of their groundlessness. The first bit, meanwhile, says little more than that some of these religious types act self-righteously. The curious thing is that Adorno bothers to cite Rudolf Borchardt in order to make the point, since the point is simple enough, and Borchardt was one of those rare German Jews who became fascists if never quite Nazis. He was the very model of a freak-Right literatus, totally committed to the legacy of the European humanities; to antiquity, in fact, though opposed to the Renaissance, which he thought of as having destroyed antiquity in the guise of reviving it, and committed to channeling this other, stranger, poetic-prophetic antiquity, which channeling he combined with a virulent German nationalism. He was also Adorno’s favorite alt-Right poet; his essay in praise of Borchardt has got to be Exhibit A in any attempt to depict Adorno as a mandarin of the Left. (Adorno likes the phrase “putting oneself in the right” enough to mention it in that essay, as well, though in neither case does he provide a citation. In the essay, at any rate, Adorno is explaining how much he likes a short neo-cavalier poem that Borchardt wrote in the voice of a sexually loose woman who is leaving her current lover in favor of a richer man — and one of the things he likes most about the poem is that it is non-judgmental, ironic but not satirical. Borchardt, he says, does not “put himself into the right.”)

      He goes on:

They still sense the old danger of losing, again, what they call the concrete—of losing it to that abstraction of which they are suspicious and which cannot be eradicated from concepts. They consider concretion to be promised in sacrifice, and first of all in intellectual sacrifice.

It might be easiest to illuminate this point without specific reference to German existentialism. Adorno often comes out against philosophies that think they can break through to something outside of thought (outside the concept, outside of abstraction) simply by affirming it. I affirm particularity or materiality or specificity or the individuum or the concrete —meaning: I say that it’s what I care about; I tell others that it’s what should matter to them; it’s what they should give priority in their thinking. This is all pretty hapless — I will happily second Adorno on this point — because those terms are themselves all abstractions. If I say that I am intellectually committed to particularity, then I am committed to no particular particularity and am therefore not committed to particularity at all. Or more bluntly: Just saying “let’s think about objects” obviously doesn’t get you to the objects. You don’t get to, y’know, vote for the object.

Adorno, in other words, shares with the existentialists (and vitalists and pragmatists and object-oriented ontologists) their suspicion of abstraction or mere thought. But he doesn’t think that there is a ready exit out of abstraction; there is no short-cut to concretion. He is, for most purposes, what we might call a reluctant idealist. The task is to dialectically overcome the idealism that is our fundamental cognitive condition, on the understanding that this can’t be done non-philosophically, by, for instance, kicking stones. And to that extent, he is not in fact the kind of anti-philosopher for which he (and other critical theorists) are often mistaken. (The first sentence of Negative Dialectics is “Philosophy lives on….”) The existentialists seem to think that you can get closer to the stuff of the world if you just stop thinking about it. The later Heidegger settled on the idea that  poetry is writing that is content not to know its objects, a writing that summons the objects into view while presuming to tell you very little about them. Poetry is the sacrifice of thought; it teaches us how to un-think the world.

   We see here now, already for a second time, an issue that is going to recur again and again throughout the book, which is that Adorno is plainly attacking his intellectual cousins and potential allies. It is from Adorno, after all, that many of us first learned to distrust abstraction. Here’s one of the most famous sentences from the opening pages of Negative Dialectics: “At this historical moment, philosophy’s true interest lies with those things in which Hegel professed to be least interested: with the concept-less, the individual, and the particular; with everything that has, since Plato, been written off as ephemeral and insignificant and which Hegel festooned with the label of ‘lazy existence.'” Adorno seems committed enough to the “concrete” that I couldn’t without checking remember whether this sentence included that word. What Adorno is opposing, then, is what he sometimes calls “simulated immediacy” — the pretense that one can dispense with concepts altogether or use them in a way that somehow neutralizes their inevitable abstractness — the illusion, then, that we can throw our arms around the uncognized object and still know that we are doing that. Negative dialectics offers, at best, a highly intellectualized path back to particularity, one that requires extended feats of philosophical virtuosity, in which the thinker hijacks the apparatus of abstraction and forces it on an accelerated schedule to the breakdown that it would eventually have suffered anyway. The alternative that Adorno is warning against is the one that says that we can sidle up to the stuff of the world if only we train ourselves not to think; and by using the term “intellectual sacrifice,” sacrificium intellectus, he is aligning the existentialists with a history of anti-intellectual religious authoritarianism, an ethos of mental submission, that was formulated paradigmatically by the Jesuits, from whom the phrase has been borrowed.

      A short capper:

Heretics baptized this circle “The Authentics.”

The verb is, of course, a jab. Kierkegaard’s philosophical Anabaptists have been re-baptized. It is, after all, what they wanted.

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