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.