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:
“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.