Part I
Benjamin and Adorno
Literary Themes and Philosophical Debates
1
Against the Reification of History
Benjamin and Adorno on Baudelaire
Corey McCall
History, time, temporality: these have become Heideggerâs terms, or at least these are terms that acquire a strongly Heideggerian resonance, especially during the height of his fame in Germany shortly after the publication of Sein und Zeit in 1927. Reification, of course, is a term one finds in Adornoâs work, though less frequently than one might find it in, say, the work of LukĂĄcs, who made this term the central concept of his History and Class Consciousness (1923).1 Although he does not specifically employ the term âreification,â one finds in Benjaminâs work evidence of related notions such as âself-alienationâ and âphantasmagoria.â2 Memory, experience, historyâthese are among the key concepts that Adorno and Benjamin share during the 1930s, when Benjamin was at his most productive and Adorno still considered Benjamin his mentor. It is during this fraught period that Benjamin conducts his most sustained work on the poet and critic Charles Baudelaire, one of the touchstones, along with figures such as Proust and Kafka, for his mature work.
While it is clear that Baudelaireâs work provides a touchstone for Benjamin, we cannot say the same for Adorno. One finds scattered references to the poetâs work throughout Adornoâs writings, but not the same sort of sustained attention to Baudelaire one finds in Benjaminâs work. However, Adorno carefully reads Benjaminâs writings on Baudelaire during the 1930s, and he critically responds to Benjaminâs essays on Baudelaire during Benjaminâs final decade. It is in this critical response to Benjaminâs writings on Baudelaire that one finds Adornoâs most considered response to Baudelaireâs work as well as a critical response to his friendâs interpretation of Baudelaire as the poet of modern life. Furthermore, these exchanges reveal important things about the later trajectory of Adornoâs work as well, for during the 1930s Adorno delivers his lecture âThe Idea of Natural-Historyâ and publishes his study of Kierkegaard, key texts that both display his debt to Benjaminâs work (his Ursprung des deutschen Traurspiels in particular) and set the stage for his later work. My essay begins with a reconsideration of the debate between Benjamin and Adorno over how one ought to read Baudelaire. Specifically, the exchange of letters in November and December 1938 provides a matrix for understanding their work in the early 1930s. This exchanges points us back to the philosophical context of their work in general and to questions related to the meaning of history in particular. In order to understand Adornoâs critique of Benjamin, we must return to Adornoâs dialectical account of the relationship between nature and history in âThe Idea of Natural-Historyâ and the Kierkegaard book. Indeed, Robert Hullot-Kentor claims that we can read the Kierkegaard study as a rehearsal of The Dialectic of Enlightenment, which construes âsacrifice as the dialectical truth of domination.â3 A careful reconsideration of their exchange of letters in NovemberâDecember 1938 shows that what is at stake for Adorno in Benjaminâs account of Baudelaire as the poet of modernity is the question of dialectic, which he believes that Benjamin neglects. In other words, Adornoâs main worry is that Benjamin reifies history by neglecting the dialectical relationship between history and nature in his Baudelaire writings.4 As I show in the first section, this concern about the lack of dialectical movement in Benjaminâs analysis of Baudelaire in âThe Paris of the Second Empireâ is in part a function of the work that Adorno had been doing in New York, both with Max Horkheimer and Paul Lazarsfeld in 1938. I argue that Adornoâs criticism of Benjamin during this exchange can be better understood if we recall Horkheimerâs critique of Positivism as well as Adornoâs later criticisms of Lazarsfeldâs empirical approach to sociology exemplified in the Radio Research Project, to which Adorno contributed from 1938 to 1941.
While I will not be able to comprehensively analyze the intertextuality one finds in the Benjamin-Adorno relationship here, one important dimension of the manifold relationships between the two menâs work can be found in the claim, advanced by Robert Hullot-Kentor among others, that we read Adornoâs 1933 Habilitationsschrift published as Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic as a work indebted to Benjaminâs Origin of German Tragic Drama and, in addition, that we read Benjaminâs extended engagement with Baudelaire in terms of the Trauerspiel book.5 In his recent reading of Benjaminâs late work in terms of political philosophy, James Martel also suggests that we ought to read Benjaminâs Baudelaire in terms of the Trauerspiel book. So, if the touchstone for both Benjamin and Adorno had been Benjaminâs earlier work on the German mourning-play, then why is Adorno so harshly critical of his friendâs work on the nineteenth century French poet? In other words, why does he believe that Benjaminâs account of Baudelaire in âThe Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaireâ falls into the same trap as Heidegger and Kierkegaard?
This essay attempts to answer this question in three parts. The first section re-examines the debate during the last years of Benjaminâs life over the significance of Baudelaireâs work for critical theory. The second section traces this late dispute between Benjamin and Adorno back to one of its sources: Adornoâs attempt in the 1930s to work out the dialectics of nature and history and focuses first on his lecture âThe Idea of Natural-Historyâ and subsequently on his critique of idealism in his Kierkegaard book. Finally, I return to Benjamin in the final section, which focuses on Benjaminâs attempts to overcome the reification of history. In Adornoâs writings on Baudelaire and in The Arcades Project more generally, reification is typically couched in terms of the phantasmagoria of modern capitalism. Accordingly, the final section focuses on Benjaminâs development of this term out of his reading of Baudelaire as the poet of high capitalism. I do not attempt to adjudicate the dispute between Benjamin and Adorno. Rather, I argue that if we look carefully at how the question of history manifests itself in Benjaminâs writings on Baudelaire and in Adornoâs criticisms of these texts, we can begin to see how this key concept operates in the writings of both men during this period.
The Baudelaire Debate of 1938
The BenjaminâAdorno correspondence includes fascinating and often contentious discussions of Benjaminâs late work on Baudelaire composed during the 1930s. In these exchanges, we can see Adorno become increasingly critical of what he sees as a lack of consideration for dialectic in Benjaminâs treatment of Baudelaire. But what is the significance of this criticism? What does this debate over dialectic (or its lack) in Benjaminâs analysis of Baudelaireâs writings tell us about the work of the two thinkers?
In a letter dated November 10, 1938, Adorno responds to Benjaminâs essay âThe Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire.â He worries that Benjaminâs presentation, both in this essay and in The Arcades Project mores generally, presents a series of phantasmagoria without theoretical explication.6 In other words, Benjaminâs text consists of a series of isolated images without dialectical mediation.7 After noting that he has carefully discussed the dialectical question of the âParis of the Second Empireâ with Max Horkheimer, Adorno states his objection plainly:
If I am not much mistaken, this dialectic lacks one thing: mediation. There is a persistent tendency to relate the pragmatic content of Baudelaireâs work directly to adjacent features of the social history of his time, especially economic ones. Iâm thinking, for example, of the passage on the wine tax, some reflections on the barricades, or the aforementioned remark about the arcades. This seems to me particularly problematic, since the transition from an inherently theoretical consideration of physiologies to the âconcreteâ portrayal of the flĂąneur is especially tenuous.
(SW4: 101)
In other words, Adornoâs critique here amounts to the complaint that the relationship between Baudelaireâs literary production and the socioeconomic conditions to which it relates is simply assumed rather than developed. He finds especially problematic the â[substitution] of a metaphorical statement for a bindingly literal oneâ (SW4:101). Indeed, these substitutions give Adorno a âsense of artificiality.â Most egregious in Adornoâs view is when Benjamin claims that the city transforms into âan intĂ©rieur for the flĂąneurâ (SW4:101). As we shall see in the next section, one of Adornoâs worries is that Benjamin is here falling prey to the same temptation that befell Kierkegaard. Indeed, both the distinction between nature and artifice and the reference to the bourgeois intĂ©rieur figure prominently in Adornoâs 1933 critical reading of Kierkegaardâs notion of the aesthetic, as we shall see in the following section.
Adorno further charges that Benjaminâs project leaves the distinction between the subjective experience of the artist and its objective conditions intact, for it does not adequately account for the manifold connections between them. In other words, subject and object are reified in Benjaminâs analysis. In leaving these terms intact and unmediated, Benjaminâs work fails to do justice to the totalizing effort embodied in Marxism.8 In other words, Adorno charges in effect that Benjamin only pays lip service to Marx because he feels that this is what Horkheimer and the other members of the Institute want to hear, but that Benjaminâs turn to Marx is an artificial one. If we set aside Adornoâs charge of pandering, there is an important philosophical point here which receives its elaboration in Adornoâs âThe Idea of Natural-History.â As we shall see subsequently, in this lecture Adorno proposes to articulate the dialectical relationship between history and nature, so as to avoid the reduction of history to natural fate. Adorno charges that Benjaminâs inattention to the dialectical relationship between history and nature in his account of Baudelaire and the nineteenth century has reified history into something akin to objective fate that remains utterly distinct from subjective experience, and the relationship between subject and object unquestioned. The relationship between nature and artifice and its role in Adornoâs work of the 1930s will be my focus in the next section; in the remainder of this section I shall consider Adornoâs claim that Benjaminâs text as both pragmatic and positivist before turning to Benjaminâs rejoinder.
In his letter dated November 10, Adorno repeatedly characterizes Benjaminâs analysis as pragmatic, and praises âthe ascetic discipline to which youâve subjected yourself in omitting all the crucial theoretical answers and even in making the questions invisible to all but initiatesâ (SW4:99â100). He wonders whether âthe pragmatic content of these subjects ⊠conspire almost demonically against the possibility of its interpretationâ (SW4:100). This question provides a key to my reading, for it both distills Adornoâs criticisms of Benjaminâs methodology and shows whatâs at stake in their dispute. We get a better sense of what Adorno means by this characterization of Benjaminâs work as âpragmaticâ if we consider Max Horkheimerâs use of the term during this period. By 1938 Horkheimer and Adorno had already begun working out the preliminary ideas for The Dialectic of Enlightenment, so we can surmise that Adorno is using the term in much the same way that he and his collaborator will subsequently use it in their published work. Furthermore, he had begun working with Paul Lazarsfeld in January 1938, following Horkheimerâs invitation to work with him at the Institute part-time and on Lazarsfeldâs Princeton Radio Research Project. It was Lazarsfeld who introduced him to empirical social research, and Adornoâs many reservations about this research program are likely informing his reservations about Benjaminâs Baudelaire as well.
Horkheimerâs Eclipse of Reason provides an account of the hegemony of subjective or instrumental reason.9 The eclipse of reason to which the title refers is the eclipse of objective reason, which âaimed at evolving a comprehensive system, or hierarchy, of all beings, including man and his aims.â10 Objective reason gets eclipsed by the rise of modern instrumental reason, which âproves to be the ability to calculate probabilities and thereby to co-ordinate the right means with a given end.â11 Horkheimer traces the origin of instrumental reason back to Empiricism, in particular to the work of John Locke.12 Horkheimer even indirectly references Baudelaire when he claims that the French Symbolists embraced the absurdity of subjective reason:
The French Symbolists had a special term to express their love for the things which had lost their objective significance, namely, âspleen.â The conscious, challenging arbitrariness in the choice of objects, its âabsurdity,â âperverseness,â as if by a sil...