{"id":1816,"date":"2026-07-26T15:06:26","date_gmt":"2026-07-26T20:06:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/?p=1816"},"modified":"2026-07-27T07:11:01","modified_gmt":"2026-07-27T12:11:01","slug":"adornos-jargon-of-authenticity-day-12","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/articles\/adornos-jargon-of-authenticity-day-12\/","title":{"rendered":"Adorno’s Jargon of Authenticity, Day 12"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

The Dessert: Harmony in Red (The Red Room), 1907. Creator: Henri Matisse. (Photo by Heritage Art\/Heritage Images via Getty Images)<\/p><\/div>\n

The task in front of us now is to get comfortable with the German word Aussage<\/i>. Let\u2019s start from scratch by noting that Aussage <\/i>tacks the prefix aus- <\/i>to the root –sag<\/i>-. These happen to be two German words with near English equivalents that show very little etymological drift and whose meanings you could accordingly guess: aus <\/i>means \u201cout\u201d; -sag-<\/i> means \u201csay.\u201d Together, they form the verb aussagen<\/i>, \u201cto say out,\u201d or, better, \u201cto state\u201d or \u201cdeclare.\u201d In modern German, you are most likely to hear the word Aussage<\/i>\u2014a \u201csaying out\u201d\u2014in one of two domains. 1) Aussage <\/i>is a legal term meaning \u201ctestimony\u201d or a \u201cstatement.” You can tell a German policeman that you <\/i>wish to make an Aussage<\/i>. In Germany, you can\u2019t exactly plead the fifth, but you can \u201cwithhold die Aussage<\/i>.\u201d Perjury is false-saying-out: one word, no hyphens. 2) At the same time, Aussage <\/i>appears routinely in philosophical writing, where it means \u201ca proposition\u201d\u2014a sentence capable of being true or false: an assertion. In German, propositional logic is Aussagenlogik<\/i>.<\/p>\n

So apparently the lesser German existentialists and neo-mandarins took a shine to the word Aussage<\/i>. I hadn\u2019t noticed this before Adorno pointed it out, but he seems to have been right about this. We don\u2019t have to take his word for it. We might consider, for instance, a short essay that appeared in 1969 in the house journal of the Union of Swiss Freethinkers. The author of that essay wants his readers to know that he\u2019s not all that impressed by Europe\u2019s generation of 1968\u2014the longhairs, the student activists, the young leftists tossing around words like \u201cestablishment\u201d and \u201crevolution.\u201d As best he can tell\u2014and this really is the heart of the essay\u2014the hippies just want to play pinball. (\u201cI walk into a restaurant stocked with arcade games of all kinds, and I never get over my amazement at the rapture, nay, the ecstasy, with which young people have at these contraptions.\u201d) The essay quickly sketches in a few antitheses; it names the opposites of pinball, various activities that carry the substance that pinball machines putatively lack. The first is what I think I am meant to call lovemaking: \u201cWhen I was young, I had better things \u2026 to do with my girlfriends than play arcade games.\u201d One is charmed, at least, to find a European conservative complaining that the hippies were insufficiently interested in sex. The second, more predictably, is reading: \u201cIt is impossible to imagine one of these young people ever picking up a book, except perhaps some tawdry crime novel.\u201d Third, and most tellingly, the essay identifies what should really be going on in a bar: People should be talking<\/i>, and not just talking, but attitudinizing<\/i>, sounding off, insulting politicians, being disagreeable. This kind of barstool punditry, the author says, gets a bad rap: It might be ill-informed; it might barely be cogent; but a visitor will marvel even so at the sight of half-drunk men speaking their minds. The essay\u2019s point, then, is that one cannot envision Switzerland\u2019s hairy and pinball-besotted teenagers holding their own at the Stammtisch<\/i>. And its way of putting this is to point out that young people “do not sit together in order to have a conversation, because they have nothing to say\u201d\u2014or rather: they \u201care utterly without Aussage<\/i>.\u201d They “neglect the life of the mind\u201d; they are\u2014and this is the name of the essay\u2014a \u201cYouth without Aussage<\/i>.\u201d<\/p>\n

The following year, a Swiss humor magazine published a single column complaining that Aussage <\/i>was taking over conversational German like an invasive species, a rapidly growing weed: \u201clike ribwort.\u201d This second author clearly had educated German-speakers in mind. It\u2019s the sort of word, he says, that people reach for to gussy up a late modernist art that has lost its ability to surprise: \u201cthe composer who has the underside of the piano beaten with a hammer, the playwright who banters his thrownness-into-nothingness into the bottomless depths of sheer boredom.\u201d Artists of this kind \u201chave nothing to say, and yet they make an Aussage<\/i>.\u201d These are the usages that survive in everyday German, even now, when the word gets used in connection with film or literature or art. \u201cThat novels makes a strong political Aussage<\/i>.\u201d \u201cWhat was that movie trying to say? What was the Aussage<\/i>?\u201d If something is \u201cmeaningful\u201d or \u201csubstantive\u201d or \u201cpersuasive,\u201d or if it \u201ccarries weight,\u201d you can say that it is aussagekr\u00e4ftig<\/i>: statement-strong. It doesn\u2019t have to be a museum installation. It could be, like, your cover letter. The word has plainly survived the Swiss satirist\u2019s scorn. \u201cAussage,\u201d he wrote in 1970, is a meaningless, \u201cnothing-saying\u201d word. Some writers, the ones who can\u2019t \u201cscrape together anything readable,\u201d can at least \u201cscrape an Aussage<\/i> into the light.\u201d<\/p>\n

Adorno was not alone, at any rate, when he wrote the following:<\/p>\n

The word <\/b>Aussage <\/i><\/b>[statement or testimony] \u2026 would have us believe that the speaker’s very existence communicates itself along with the [statement\u2019s] subject matter and that it is the former that confers upon the latter its dignity. All it would take to render speech inauthentic, the jargon intimates, would be to remove the surplus furnished by the speaker\u2014an utterance that paid strict heed to the matter at hand [aka the thing] would be a fateful lapse.<\/b><\/p>\n

As of the early 1960s, an Aussage<\/i> derived its authority from \u201cthe surplus furnished by the speaker.\u201d What we can say now, then, is that the jargoneers\u2019 use of Aussage <\/i>was in some respects rather close to the contemporary American idiom \u201cI\u2019m just speaking my truth.\u201d Both suggest a determination to speak authentically, to convey the substance of one\u2019s experience without trimming it to fit and without caring if the declaration rubs other people the wrong way. And both achieve authenticity only by subjectivizing truth, transforming a conviction into an immediate, non-negotiable claim on reality. Of course, the two idioms\u2014\u201cto make an Aussage<\/i>\u201d and to \u201cspeak your truth\u201d occupy rather different sociological registers. Adorno is about to tell us that the word Aussage <\/i>reeks of Augurenernst<\/i>\u2014the \u201csolemnity of the augurs,\u201d Roman priests interpreting the will of the gods. And indeed the word seems to have been favored by West Germany\u2019s hierocrats\u2014professors and intellectuals and well-spoken radio pastors. An Aussage <\/i>is \u2014or was\u2014spoken by initiates to signal the profundity of educated men. \u201cSpeaking your truth,\u201d meanwhile, emerged out of humanist psychology, 12-step recovery programs, and feminist consciousness raising. Its paradigmatic speaker is thus the survivor or self-actualizer. And yet both rely on a surplus of that speaker to shut down further reflection: once a statement is grounded in existential authenticity, questioning its factual accuracy or logical coherence is framed as a breach of ethics or an attack on personhood. The Swiss hater-of-pinball said that the bearers-of-Aussage<\/i> need possess neither \u201cknowledge\u201d nor \u201cinsight\u201d; it is enough for a person to have a position<\/i>. A German art critic, writing in the 1950s, praised the Fauves for giving up on illusionism\u2014for no longer trying to capture what the eye sees\u2014for seeking a merely \u201cformal order\u201d of bold outlines and unmixed color. \u201cThe main Aussage<\/i>\u201d of a Fauvist canvas, he wrote, \u201clies in its color harmony,\u201d an \u201carrangement\u201d of bright blocks that delights the viewer before he even registers what the painting is representing. Haftmann went so far as to say that this formalism initiates \u201cthe destruction of the object.\u201d (91) And there it is: The Aussage <\/i>cancels the thing, the matter, die Sache<\/i>. (Haftmann also wrote, of Max Beckmann, that \u201cevery one of his pictures is an existential statement\u201d\u2014an Aussage aus der Existenz. <\/i>(273)) And with that, Adorno has identified yet one more way in which the subject can smother the object\u2014bracket it\u2014render it irrelevant: You can extinguish the object with your truth.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The task in front of us now is to get comfortable with the German word Aussage. Let\u2019s start from scratch by noting that Aussage tacks the prefix aus- to the root –sag-. These happen to be two German words with … 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-1816","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1816","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=1816"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1816\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1820,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1816\/revisions\/1820"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1816"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1816"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1816"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}