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.