{"id":1806,"date":"2026-06-12T09:28:12","date_gmt":"2026-06-12T14:28:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/?p=1806"},"modified":"2026-06-12T11:21:34","modified_gmt":"2026-06-12T16:21:34","slug":"jargon-of-authenticity-day-10","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/articles\/jargon-of-authenticity-day-10\/","title":{"rendered":"Jargon of Authenticity, Day 10"},"content":{"rendered":"

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10.<\/p>\n

Adorno was just pointing out that the jargon typically works not by coining new words but by repurposing ordinary ones\u2014everyday German locutions whose usage will for the foreseeable future be shadowed by Heideggerian murmurings. He goes on:<\/p>\n

What is and is not jargon is decided by whether a word is written with an intonation that positions it as transcending its own meaning; whether individual words are supercharged at the expense of the sentence, the judgment, and the achieved thought. <\/b>Accordingly, the character of the jargon is profoundly formal: it ensures that whatever it is after is largely sensed and accepted through the mere delivery of the words and without any regard for their content.<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

The phrase that jumps out here is \u201cwritten with an intonation,\u201d since intonations, being oral, are precisely what written language lacks\u2014the rising and falling of the voice, some surge of audible feeling or elective emphasis. Adorno seems to be saying, then, that a word can be written in a way that invites flashes of punctual declamation: Say this word with a tremolo. Be sure to elongate the vowel<\/i>. This is what allows otherwise unexceptional words to function as jargon\u2014they are jargonized by performance. Common nouns obtrude from even commoner sentences when plain-sung as micro-liturgies. The quaver in your voice will signal that workaday x means something more\u2014something finer\u2014than what the schmoes take x to mean. Adorno the musicologist has noticed that some philosophical prose seems to come with implicit mood markings: agitato, lacrimoso, espressivo<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Spotting this claim should now prod us to adjust in one consequential way our sense of what Adorno is up to in this book. I wrote earlier that Adorno was compiling a devil\u2019s dictionary\u2014and he is\u2014but that\u2019s not all <\/i>he\u2019s doing. It\u2019s the formalism of this last passage that we won\u2019t want to overlook. If Adorno were just writing a devil\u2019s dictionary, he would have to tell us what the German neo-mandarins meant when they talked about \u201cthe task\u201d or \u201can utterance,\u201d and he\u2019d have to explain why what they meant was bullshit: an ideological mystification, an ethical dodge, a misplaced priority. But for now he is claiming that those meanings don\u2019t actually matter<\/i>, because what the jargon produces is not in the first instance a set of claims whose substance could be parsed and debated. The jargon\u2019s real function is to pump out a vibe of low-rent profundity: numinosity by the fistful.<\/p>\n

What Adorno is asking us to do, then, is to step back and consider the ways that a word\u2014any word or at least a great many words\u2014can begin to function as jargon. One reaches immediately for the easily parodied hallmarks of late-stage Heideggerese: the runaway hyphenation (Sich-selbst-vorweg-schon-bei-seiner-Welt-sein), the nouns redoubled as their own verbs (the world worlds, the thing things), the solemn advertence to etymology, which one undertakes in most instances by yanking at a German word\u2019s prefix, tugging it free as though with a pull ring so that the reader can encounter the subsequent root in semiotically recharged isolation: Ent-fernung, Ent-schlossenheit. Even Dasein eventually became Da-sein.<\/p>\n

If we now look beyond the Anglo-Heideggerians to consider theory-types more generally\u2014native English speakers who \u201cdo theory\u201d and are steeped in the traditions of Continental philosophy and its North American offshoots\u2014then two mannerisms will jump out: two ready-to-hand devices of jargon-creation. These are, of course, verbal stencils.\u00a0 <\/span>You don’t need an achieved thought to use them; you just need to apply the grammatical formula. And unsurprisingly, they have both been imported from the German mandarins:<\/p>\n

1) Take a noun. Write the everyday adjective derived from that noun. Place a \u201cthe\u201d in front of that descriptor and use this new substantialization\u2014this nominalized adjective\u2014in place of the original term. For \u201cpolitics,\u201d write \u201cthe political.\u201d For art, write \u201cthe aesthetic.\u201d For society, write \u201cthe social.\u201d There are ways to justify this procedure, of course; thinkers determined not to reify politics\u2014resolved to resist its cordoning off into an autonomous social sphere with its own institutions and practices and professionals\u2014might write \u201cthe political\u201d in order to make clear that they think that politics is everywhere, in the manner of an aspect or Hegelian Moment, <\/i>and not just in Carson City. Idealism is, however, the price one pays for this de-reification, as the theorist of the political, having thus sublimated poltik<\/i>\u00e1, fails to say anything of consequence about real political alliances, programs, or struggles. The adjective, once promoted to noun, carries its own quiet negation with it. Often enough, the person writing about \u201cthe political\u201d is letting you know that they will not be <\/i>writing about politics, that they don\u2019t think politics are the point. The terms will now begin to dichotomize: the political will mean \u201cI didn\u2019t say politics\u201d; the aesthetic, \u201cI didn\u2019t say art\u201d; as each nominalization begins to carry its anchoring practices only as a disavowed vacancy: No, not society\u2014I didn\u2019t <\/i>say society<\/i>. Anyone who reads extensively in the critical humanities can verify that this Schmitt-tic has by now taken hold of (and etherealized) any number of things once deemed concrete: the curatorial, the sonic, the planetary. I\u2019m told they all have \u201csites.\u201d<\/p>\n

The second mannerism is similar enough to the first that we\u2019ll need to think hard about how they are nonetheless different. The procedure, however, is easily analyzed:<\/p>\n

2) Take an already abstract noun: \u201ctime,\u201d say, or \u201cspace.\u201d Record its adjectival form: \u201ctemporal\u201d or \u201cspatial.\u201d Now add whatever ending will turn this back into a noun: \u201ctemporality\u201d or \u201cspatiality.\u201d Finally, shelve the shorter word and write the pentasyllable wherever possible. This operation can, like the last, be defended. The idea here is that we shouldn\u2019t give automatic priority to mathematical clock-time or the countable boxes of the Cartesian grid. We shouldn\u2019t treat the stopwatch and surveyor\u2019s tape as though they were the true measures of time and space. The terms \u201ctemporality\u201d and \u201cspatiality\u201d are to that extent pluralizing, keyed to the claim that there are lots of different ways of experiencing time and space; or of representing time and space; or of socially constructing time and space.\u00a0 <\/span>There is no time per se; <\/i>there are multiple temporalities. There is no space as such, only multiple spatialities. Newtonianism is just the start of it. The mind, tempted to treat time and space as mere things or neutral containers, must be startled into seeing them again as processes or framings, and the gambit will be to push the terms morphologically further away from object-hood, into second-order abstraction. And yet the -alities are nonetheless rather puzzling. They come directly from Heidegger, for one thing, in the form of Zeitlichkeit <\/i>and R\u00e4umlichkeit<\/i>, and so simply are<\/i> the jargon of authenticity, surviving undiminished some sixty years after Adorno tried to put such words to rest. But what kind of screwy and self-sabotaging Heideggerianism is this that convinces its adherents to ditch a well-watered Saxon root like \u201ctime\u201d in favor of its Latin equivalent, and then requires that we further distend this bit of Norman-colonial Latinity with an Old French suffix? The terms spatiality <\/i>and temporality <\/i>are meant to draw our attention to \u201cthe lived experience of x,\u201d but such words automatically sound more academic, formal, and attenuated to English speakers. Each such word is thus pulling in two directions at once, offering to rescue lived experience while accidentally building a linguistic wall that affectively distances the reader from the very experience it is trying to foreground. That process reaches its culmination with those theory-types who write \u201ctemporality\u201d even when they mean \u201ctime\u201d or \u201cspatiality\u201d when \u201cspace\u201d would do just as well. The derived term pivots and swallows up its parent. A professor of media studies at Stanford writes that “Optical effects [in sci-fi movies] \u2026 re-integrate the spatiality of the spectacle with the \u2018actual\u2019 spatiality of the theater to create a phenomenologically significant experience.\u201d The word \u201cactual\u201d is, of course, the giveaway. On the roster of topos<\/i> words, \u201cspace\u201d is one of the language\u2019s relatively concrete options, at least as compared to geography <\/i>and topography <\/i>and topology <\/i>and chorology <\/i>and bathymetry <\/i> The philologists, it\u2019s true, are fond of pitting \u201cspace\u201d against \u201cplace,\u201d insisting that \u201cplace\u201d is the properly particularizing word and that \u201cspace\u201d always carries with it the geometric forces of de-localization. There\u2019s something to that, of course, but in everyday usage, \u201cspace\u201d is often plenty particular. You can sit in one. All the professor wants to say, therefore, is that the represented space of the movie dovetails with the real space of the movie theater. But instead of writing \u201creal space,\u201d he opts for the de-realized term (spatiality) <\/i>which he then haplessly nudges back towards concretion (actual<\/i> spatiality), while insisting via scare quotes that he is doing no such thing (\u201cactual\u201d spatiality). You\u2019re not going to catch him calling a room a room.<\/p>\n

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10. Adorno was just pointing out that the jargon typically works not by coining new words but by repurposing ordinary ones\u2014everyday German locutions whose usage will for the foreseeable future be shadowed by Heideggerian murmurings. He goes on: What is … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":115,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1806","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1806","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/115"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1806"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1806\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1811,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1806\/revisions\/1811"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1806"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1806"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1806"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}