Language and History in Adorno's Notes to Literature

Ulrich Plass

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135866198
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Language and History in Theodor W. Adorno's Notes to Literatureexplores Adorno's essays on literature as an independent contribution to his aesthetics with an emphasis on his theory and practice of literary interpretation. Essential to Adorno's essays is his unorthodox treatment of language and history and his elaboration of the links between the two. One of Adorno's major but often-neglected claims is that truth is relative to its historical medium, language. Adorno persistently and creatively tries to narrow the gulf between truth and expression, philosophy and rhetoric, and his essays on literature are practical examples of his effort to critically rescue the rhetorical dimension of philosophy. Rather than relying exclusively on aesthetic concepts inherited from his predecessors in the Western tradition (Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard), Adorno's essays seek to transgress and transcend the conceptual limitations of aesthetic discourse by appropriating a non-conceptual, metaphorical vocabulary borrowed from the literary texts he investigates. Thus, Adorno's interpretations of literature mobilize an alternative subterranean, primarily essayistic and fragmentary discourse on language and history that eludes the categories that tend to predominate his thinking in his major work, Aesthetic Theory. This book puts forth the claim that Adorno's essays on literature are of central relevance for an understanding of his aesthetics because they challenge the conceptual limitations of philosophical discourse.

Chapter One

The Art of Transition

It is a very good sign when the harmonious bores are at a loss about how they should react to this continuous self-parody, when they fluctuate endlessly between belief and disbelief until they get dizzy and take what is meant as a joke seriously and what is meant seriously as a joke.

—Friedrich Schlegel¹

I. BAD WRITING

Adorno’s prose is not beautiful.² It seems to both attract and repel readers for its density, strangeness, and hermeticism, although, as the translator of ND recalls his first impression of the work, Adorno’s “sentences were clear… . His syntax rarely needs disentangling like that of most German philosophers since Kant; he is not as addicted to making up words as they are” (ND ix). Just like Hegel, Kant, Husserl, or Heidegger all have their unmistakable style, there is an instantly recognizable Adorno sound, and unique stylistic features characterize his writing.³ The aim of this chapter is to discuss Adorno’s style and his ideas of what an essay is, how it works, and how it relates to philosophical thought.

The difficulty of Adorno’s language is due less to the use of a highly specialized vocabulary (his is not an obscure professional language; he draws his terminology from the canon ofWestern philosophy and everyday language) and more to the complexities of textual composition, the bewildering pseudo-logical transitions, the caesuras, the repetitions, and the rhythm of accelerating and slowing down. Adorno has a pronounced preference for apodictic statements, and despite his mostly hypotactic constructions, much of what he writes sounds oddly paratactic, because the overall structure eschews the gradual and linear development of an argument. Irritating to many readers is that while Adorno’s central philosophical—and polemical— claim is the dialectical “priority of the object”⁴ and the mournful recollection of “sensuous particulars,”⁵ his writing is for the most part frustratingly abstract,⁶ saturated with high-flown theoretical terms such as “reflection,” “object,” or “reification” (although a German term such as “Verdinglichung” sounds less intimidating than the Latinistic “reification”). What makes Adorno’s style so daunting is that there is a compositional, music-like quality to his abstractions. While he was working on his AT, Adorno claimed that his writing had a close affinity to Hölderlin’s late theoretical texts, and he held up Hegel as the model of a negatively productive style. I suspect that there is some validity to these claimed elective affinities. The following sentence from Adorno’s Hegel studies might also be applied to Adorno himself:

Abstractly flowing, Hegel’s style, like Holderlin’s abstractions, takes on a musical quality that is absent from the sober style of the Romantic Schelling. At times it makes itself felt in such things as the use of antithetical particles like “aber” [but] for purposes of mere connection: “Now because in the absolute, the form is only simple self-identity, the absolute does not determine itself; for determination is a form of difference which, in the first instance, counts as such. But because at the same time it contains all differences and form-determination whatever, or because it is itself the absolute form and reflection, the difference of the content must also appear in it. But, [emphasis added by Adorno] the absolute itself is absolute identity; this is its determination, for in it all manifoldness of the world-in-itself and the world of appearance, or of inner and outer totality, is sublated.” No doubt Hegel’s style goes against customary philosophical understanding, yet in his weaknesses he paves the way for a different kind of understanding; one must read Hegel by describing along with him the curves of his intellectual movement, by playing his ideas with the speculative ear as though they were musical notes. Philosophy as a whole is allied with art in wanting to rescue, in the medium of the concept, the mimesis that the concept represses, and here Hegel behaves like Alexander with the Gordian knot. He disempowers individual concepts, uses them as though they were the imageless images of what they intend. Hence the Goethean “residue of absurdity” in the philosophy of absolute spirit. What it wants to use to get beyond the concept always drives it back beneath the concept in the details. The only reader who does justice to Hegel is the one who does not denounce him for such indubitable weakness but instead perceives the impulse in that weakness: who understands why this or that must be incomprehensible and in fact thereby understands it. (HS 122; GS 5: 354)

This is no mean description of what is required when one reads Adorno. The idea that philosophical writing wants to transcend the concept, but is ultimately forced to subordinate the particulars to the concept, is articulated frequently by Adorno. It is central to his notion of the essay as form. That a paradoxical procedure aimed at transcending the concept conceptually must evoke incomprehension is not an incidental effect; it is integral to the experience of reading Hegel—and Adorno. The only understanding possible, to echo Friedrich Schlegel’s hope for a future understanding of understanding,⁷ is an understanding of non-understanding. Especially daunting to understand is the role of particles. If Hegel uses an antithetic particle such as “aber” to connect two thoughts where a simple “und” would do, the philosophical intention, the ubiquitous urge to proceed dialectically, supersedes the standard and “correct” use of language. The strategic and anti-normative purpose of such a style is to constantly encourage skepticism about the assumption that some uses of language are “natural” while others are “contrived.” For Adorno, thinking is primarily a matter of exposition, of presentation [Darstellung]⁸—only by becoming form does thought take place. This implies much more than mere verbalization. Adorno’s ruminations on matters of style and exposition repeatedly address the idea that the particular thoughts or concepts are musical notes; music—or thinking—occurs only where the single notes are put together in an appropriate sequential manner. Hence, Adorno’s thinking on style always circles about modes of connection and transition: he was enormously fond of Benjamin’s idea of constellations and configurations as forms of sudden, even aleatory cognition, underscoring an affinity between aesthetics and epistemology. It is no wonder that these two notions have become almost sacred terms in Frankfurt School criticism.⁹ In the citation from Hegel just quoted, Adorno italicizes Hegel’s deviant use of aber to point out that instead of serving as an antithetical conjunction, it serves as a means of transition. Similarly, Adorno’s own use of connectives is not always straightforward. To be sure, there is no lack of coordinating, subordinating, and antithetical elements. Adorno, who criticized Benjamin’s late paratactic style and thought for a lack of mediation (see CC 131; BW 173), is particularly fond of a style that accumulates words that not only signal mediation, but also separation and opposition. The cumulative effect of such elements is contradictory: they all signal a movement and process; at the same time, Adorno’s style has been criticized for being “static.”¹⁰ I might at least propose a provisional phenomenal description here: Adorno’s texts owe their static effect to their peculiar back-and-forth movement. His readers are likely to be discouraged by the endless oscillation of Adorno’s negative dialectic thought, which seems to exhaust itself in a circle of rephrasing and repositioning of reasoning.¹¹ But it is unclear whether this feature is a debilitating limitation or even a serious defect of this particular post-Idealist thinking, or whether it accounts for the unmitigated and autonomous force of the form of his writing. Perhaps one must give as much weight to Adorno’s style as to his thought, conceding that one cannot consider the thought without at the same time accounting for how it is presented linguistically. Indeed, one can claim that Adorno’s exploration of the limits of philosophical thought renders his productive reconceptualization of philosophy inherently linguistic and rhetorical. As Britta Scholze persuasively demonstrates, the crux of Adorno’s philosophy, especially in his essays on art, lies in his claim that truth cannot be separated from its medium of expression.¹²

Consistent throughout Adorno’s writings is his dislike for all philosophical systems and his refusal to commit to a large, authoritative form, which has prompted other philosophers, like Hellmuth Plessner, to surmise that the author Adorno simply lacked the patience to pursue a long and extended argument,¹³ or, worse still, that his insistence on small and spontaneous forms turned itself, as Susan Buck-Morss has argued, into a self-contained and closed-off system.¹⁴ Adorno’s essays acquire authoritative force primarily by virtue of structures of repetition and inversion—their contrived, rhetorical character is usually apparent from the first sentence. Adorno is deeply suspicious of a hermeneutic attitude that believes in the cognitive power of stylistic simplicity and clarity. No wonder that he has been pitted in the culture war over “good” versus “bad” writing as a proudly “bad” writer who defies all pressure to conform to an easily consumable style.¹⁵ For Adorno, the role of the public intellectual never entailed an imperative to simplify and clarify his ideas. On the contrary, whenever Adorno addressed the non-academic general public, he spoke according to script, leaving no room for spontaneous extrapolations or simplifying summaries. Only during his university lectures did he speak completely freely, extemporizing frequently. Adorno suspects clarity to be a form of perfect deception, a mode of closing oneself off from reality. Complete clarity is not only reductive, it would also be tantamount to a system of total paranoia, since it sees itself threatened everywhere by obscurities and ambiguities that must be eliminated. “One should not allow oneself to be terrorized by the demand of clarity that every step be verifiable.”¹⁶ What is easily understood is also epistemologically worthless; most likely, the presumably easy or obvious statement will be a mere repetition of something already known, a worthless tautology. “Only what [people] do not need first to understand, they consider understandable; only the word coined by commerce, and really alienated, touches them as familiar” (MM 101; GS 4:114). The immediate claim here is that everyday language is alienated language. And implied is: Philosophical and poetic language respond to this alienation. The seeming incomprehensibility of such “artificial” language responds to the real but unconscious incomprehension typical of everyday use of lan-guage.¹⁷ Adorno’s language resembles literary language in the sense that it seeks to provide the experience of something different or new by breaking up the patterns of habit and stereotype characteristic of colloquial language. False familiarity, that is, ideology, is best countered by a style geared towards unsettling the sense of security and control provided by language that merely conforms to and repeats the conventional phrases. Adorno means this not in a merely prescriptive sense; it is an insight drawn from the philosophical experience of reading Hegel’s prose. To brand the difficulty of Adorno’s style as an accidental trait, a matter of personal style, means to pass over the historical impetus of his project. It is helpful to recall how close Adorno is to Karl Kraus’s critique of language¹⁸ and the critique of the power of the phrase to constitute reality. Adorno also agrees with Heidegger’s critique of Gerede (idle talk; Adorno himself prefers to talk of Geschwätz [chatter]), which he quotes approvingly in JA: “What is said-in-the-talk as such spreads in wider circles and takes on authoritative character. Things are so because one says so.”¹⁹ One could say that it is the authoritative character of chatter that triggers, as a desperately polemical response, the authoritative tone of Adorno’s language. Adorno confidently counters Heidegger’s view of chatter as “metaphysical invariance” by claiming the necessity of abolishing the dreadful state of affairs [Unwesen]: “This confusion [Unwesen] has arisen and can be gotten rid of; we do not need to bemoan it and leave it in peace as if it were the essence of Dasein” (JA 101; GS 6: 480).

Doggedly addressing the problem of difficulty is, for Adorno, an integral part of the essay form itself. In his famous essay on the essay, “On the Nature and Form of the Essay,” Georg Lukács observes that “criticism and the essay generally speak of pictures, books and ideas… . The essay always speaks of something that has already been given form.”²⁰ Adorno fully shares this insight: as form, the essay is not creative. Because it can only address something that precedes it, the essay is characterized by a particularly close affinity with its object, thus being especially well suited for Adorno’s overall philosophical intention of redeeming the priority of the object. “Object,” however, means more than the concrete subject matter—the narrative or the verse—that the essay interprets. Since the artworks interpreted by Adorno resist interpretation—because they are, in one of the key terms in AT, enigmatic—the essay itself must come to resemble its objects without imitating them. Affinity with modern art means that the essay grants priority to its resistant and withdrawing object—rather than its own subjectivist will and intention—by foregoing a teleological aesthetic narrative for the sake of an often strikingly non-linear, hyberbolical, abrupt, repetitive, and disjunctive form of representation. Adorno’s essays on literature do not provide philologically sound,²¹ extended, and careful close readings of literature. Instead one encounters a dense textual network of allusions, quotations, polemical asides, sudden interpretive insights, philosophical and historical contextualizing, and sometimes rapturous exaggerations. More than most other philosophers, Adorno was aware of the difficulty and complexity of his writings, even admitting on occasion that he did not understand them himself. Most of his texts contain self-reflective moments in which Adorno tries to come to terms with problems of style and exposition—at times these stylistic or poetological considerations seem to be the main content of his writings. One of the most salient features of Adorno’s philosophy is thus its meta-poetic dimension: some of Adorno’s most remarkable sentences are actually sentences about questions of language, form, representation, and rhetoric. One cannot understand Adorno’s philosophy without taking into consideration how it reflects on itself as language.

II. SIGN AND IMAGE

From a historical perspective, Adorno’s essayism is the result of a dominant modernist concern with a growing gulf between language and experience, eloquently but mythologically expressed in Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s “Letter to Lord Chandos.”²² Adorno himself frequently and passionately laments the decline of language. The historical process of this decline is characterized by a growing discrepancy between language as a means of communication and as a means of subjective expression. For Adorno, language has two sides: On the one hand, it serves as an instrument for communicating something external to it. This is the semiotic and semantic dimension of language. On the other hand, language is more than a system of signs. In DE, Adorno and Horkheimer suggest a theory of language that is based on the notion of the word as both sign and image. From the perspective of the duality of the word as sign and image, enlightenment is a process of rationalization during which language becomes increasingly removed from image: “With the clean separation between science [Wissenschaft] and poetry [Dichtung], the division of labor which science had helped t...