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.