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.