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How To Read Adorno on How To Read Hegel
*Steven Helmling *
/ University of Delaware/
helmling@udel.edu
(c) 2007 Steven Helmling.
All rights reserved.
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But the essay ["as form"] is also more closed [than
"systematic" thought], because it works emphatically at the
form of its presentation. Consciousness of the non-identity of
presentation and subject matter forces presentation to
unremitting efforts. In this alone the essay resembles art.
--Adorno, "The Essay as Form" 18
Criticism has power only to the extent which every successful
or unsuccessful sentence has something to do with the fate of
humankind.
--Adorno, "On the Crisis of Literary Criticism" 307
The dialectic's protest against language cannot be voiced
except in language.
--Adorno, Hegel 121
1. This essay is part of a larger study about how Adorno writes, and
how self-consciously he writes: about how his thinking and his
writing are functions of each other, implicated in each other, how
indeed they /produce/ each other. My premise is that in Adorno's
usage such terms as "constellation," "dialectic," "concept,"
"negation," and "immanent critique"[1 <#foot1>] exert their force
as much on questions of (to adapt Gertrude Stein) "how the writing
of critique should be written"--how Adorno's own writing is
written--as on questions of critical or cognitive motives or
purposes. Their /point-d'appui/ is how to write as much as, maybe
more than--or perhaps simply /as/--how to think. It is usual in
this connection to cite Adorno's mid-1950s essay, "The Essay as
Form," because it is so patently a manifesto for Adorno's own work
as a writer-critic. Shierry Weber Nicholsen's Exact Imagination,
for the most prominent example, makes "The Essay as Form" the
centerpiece of her chapter on "Configurational (sc.
"Constellational") Form" (103-36; see especially 105-13, 123-30).
I want here, however, to treat an essay much more charged and thus
more suggestive for Adorno's writing practice and for his view of
language, the important late text dating from 1963, "Skoteinos, or
How to Read Hegel"--an essay not only about reading Hegel, but
about the problems of philosophical writing and expression in
practice, and specifically about Adorno's own critical practice.[2
<#foot2>]
2. The idea that Hegel's writing--his "textuality"--can facilitate a
discussion of his work was just emerging in the period (1962-63)
when Adorno was writing "Skoteinos." It doesn't feature, for
example, in early Heidegger, Gadamer, or KojÃ(r)ve, nor in
Hyppolite's magnum opus of 1946, Genesis and Structure of Hegel's
Phenomenology of Spirit. The later Heidegger's "linguistic turn,"
however, put the problem of "literature and philosophy" on the
agenda, and by 1966 Hyppolite appropriated the theme in "The
Structure of Philosophic Language According to the 'Preface' to
Hegel's Phenomenology of the Mind," his contribution to the 1966
Johns Hopkins conference that brought "French theory" (then called
"structuralism") to America. Younger participants included Lacan
and Derrida (and de Man, in attendance, though not on the
program), for whom Hegel on the one hand and problems of
"representation" on the other were equally central preoccupations
(see especially Derrida's Glas and his essays on Hegel in Margins
of Philosophy). Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy
develop relevant questions in a series of texts, most interesting
for our purposes The Literary Absolute (originally published in
1978), whose titular provocation was generated by a discussion of
the Jena circle's negotiation of the tensions between what the
authors inventively term "eidetics" (philosophy) and "aesthetics"
(literature) in an "eidaesthetics" that in effect, and usually
against the intentions of these figures, foregrounds the writing,
the /written-ness/, of the philosophical text, and perforce also
its writer, as intrinsic to its condition or horizon of thought;
thus the dynamic that makes "the Subject" absolute could not but
entail "the literary absolute" as well. While Lacoue-Labarthe and
Nancy mention Hegel only glancingly in The Literary Absolute,
others, preeminently Andrzej Warminski, read passages in Hegel
closely as "allegories of reading" and writing.[3 <#foot3>] (None
of these treatments, by the way, adduces "Skoteinos.")
3. As we know, this style of commentary proscribes virtually any
resort to "the Subject" as a critical category: "the Subject" is
summoned almost exclusively as an object of ideological unmasking,
which its historical implication in ideologies of "the absolute"
quite justifies. Programmatic taboos can, however, be
constraining. It's one thing to deconstruct Hegel's prose; it's
something else to foreclose inquiry into Hegel's avowed
motivations and investments in (his own) writing. (For me, Werner
Hamacher's commentary on Hegel negotiates the conflicting demands
most satisfyingly.) But just such an inquiry into Hegel is what
"Skoteinos" undertakes. I follow Nicholsen in thinking that
Adorno, too, warrants such an inquiry. The project is all the
edgier in the case of "Skoteinos," because Adorno does not aim to
assess Hegel dispassionately; on the contrary, "Skoteinos" engages
with problems of philosophical writing that are clearly close to
the quick for Adorno and for his own writing. To the extent that
Hegel looks to be something like Adorno's "Covering Cherub"--no
other figure except Freud could possibly summon Harold Bloom in
connection with Adorno--"Skoteinos" raises, indeed, agonizes over,
problems that are much more, and more tellingly, Adorno-specific
as well. In particular, as we'll see, Adorno's objections to
Hegel's lapses /as writer/ tell us much about Adorno's
self-consciousness ("anxiety" of, one might say, many more things
than "influence") about his own effort to get right what his great
precursor got wrong. In the process we'll see Adorno elaborating
what amounts to a poetics of critique, a poetics, moreover,
overtly modernist in its relation to problems of language,
expression, and representation.
4. Let me sketch some premises for what follows concerning Adorno's
view of language. Adorno rejects the /adequatio/ theory current
since Plato, that language "represents," or should represent, more
or less accurately or "adequately," a world whose precedence is
the standard against which any representation must be measured.
Adorno nowhere works out programmatically his case against that
view and the metaphysics sustaining and sustained by it, but the
pervasiveness of this idea throughout his corpus has prompted many
to see in Adorno a "family resemblance" to or an anticipation of
Derrida. Adorno's theory and practice of language, of
philosophical writing-and/as-thinking, emphatically dissent from
any value-scheme rooted in the obedience of language to "what is,"
to a pre-existing, pre-given "reality." And the same refusal of
/adequatio/ as measure of the relation of word and thing attaches
to "the concept," which is to say, to thinking itself. Neither,
though, is critical "negation" simply an affair of fidelity (sc.
/adequatio/) to "what should be"--the usual comeback, since at
least the Renaissance, to Plato's dismissal of art: that what art
copies is a "golden [or "second"] nature," closer than actual
nature itself to the Platonic ideal. Adorno's presuppositions are
Hegelian, and modernist, as if having "overcome metaphysics" in
advance--though of course Adorno makes this move /not/ (as Hegel
and Nietzsche do) with the air of liberating philosophy from a
false problem, but rather of obliging it to confront a dilemma
that is far heavier.
5. As I read him, Adorno's view of language is close to Nietzsche's
in "Truth and Lie in an Extramoral Sense": language as not a
re-presentation of some precedent standard-setting reality, but
rather a tool, or even a weapon, a survival adaptation, like the
claws and fangs of the tiger. (Adorno would of course find
Nietzsche's imagery disagreeably fierce; likewise he might think
the figuration of "weapon" and "tool" too suggestive of
instrumentality.) Like Hegel, like Lacan, Adorno finds in the
slippage or "nonidentity" between reality and language--what "The
Essay as Form" calls "the non-identity of presentation and subject
matter" in the first epigraph above--the space where desire and
will, and critique, and art, make their case and their campaign
against "what is." Such motifs in Adorno as "dialectic,"
"concept," and "negation" are functions of that performative agon
language incites between conflicting human interests and indeed
between human interests and material circumstance itself. When
Adorno writes that "dialectics means intransigence towards all
reification" (Prisms 31), it is clear that "dialectics" operates
in language and in thought--or I'd better say, in
language-and-thought, because I can't see any sense in which
Adorno separates the two: indeed, their correlation is not only
everywhere assumed in the Adorno force-field, but virtually named
in the Hegelian category of "the concept." When Adorno alludes to
"the kinetic force of [the] concept" (Philosophy of Modern Music
26), he is evoking the power of "the concept" to unfreeze, unfix,
set back into kinesis, the congealed and hardened petrifications
of ideology--to enact, in other words, what Hegel memorably calls
"the power of the negative." "Negation" is the alternative to,
indeed the critique of, /adequatio/: not the mind's deplorable
failure to see things as they really are, but on the contrary, the
mind's "dialectical" dissonance ("non-identity") with what is, in
which is coiled the critical potential of affect and critique. To
this extent, "the power of the negative" is convertible with the
power of "dialectic" itself--and this is a kind of power activated
in semiosis: in language and in thinking: in /making/ meaning, not
in more or less accurately (or "adequately") /discovering/ (and
then "representing") it. Like Hegel, Adorno puts "negation" in the
place where "representation" used to be--and if that way of
putting it risks exaggeration, I'll hope to find my license in
Adorno's maxim that in matters like these "only exaggeration is
true."
6. This sketch, albeit brief, suggests the extent of Adorno's
immersion and investment in Hegelian themes and vocabularies--a
way of introducing some of the interest of attending to his advice
in "Skoteinos, or How to Read Hegel."
"SKOTEINOS"
7. The Greek word "/skoteinos/"--it means "the obscure one"--was an
ancient epithet for Heraclitus; as title for Adorno's essay it
makes a complex gesture: it reprises Adorno's chronic (and
Hegelian) animus /against/ (Cartesian) "clarity" and "/certitudo/"
("the cold and brutal commandment of clarity . . . amounts to the
injunction that one speak as others do and refrain from anything
that would be different and could only be said differently" [Hegel
106]) on behalf of the more difficult duty incumbent on
philosophy, namely adhering to "the matter in hand" at whatever
cost in "obscurity" (99-107; cf. "Essay" 14-15). Hegel is often
taken as standing to Kant somewhat as Aristotle stands to Plato,
and this philosophical chestnut is discernible in Adorno's 1965
lecture series (nearly contemporaneous with "Skoteinos"),
Metaphysics: Concept and Problems, in which Aristotle and Hegel
are the organizing binary; but "Skoteinos" goes further in
implicitly nominating (and valorizing) Hegel as something like an
avatar of the Heraclitean alternative to the Plato-and-Aristotle
legacy (a.k.a. "Western metaphysics," "logocentrism," etc.) so
implicated in modernity's "dialectic of enlightenment." For
Hegel's (and Adorno's) program of undoing the fixities of received
thought Heraclitus is, of course, an apt totem. But the subtitle
of Adorno's essay--"How to Read Hegel"--is where, for our
purposes, the action is: it indicates the essay's preoccupation
with Hegel as exemplar of the problems and possibilities of
the-philosopher-as-writer. Indeed, "Skoteinos," we'll see, mounts
a powerful critique of Hegel precisely on the charge that his
failures as /writer/ compromise his "claim to truth" as
/philosopher/ (Hegel 146). Implicit throughout is the manifold
ways in which Hegel serves as an inspiration, but also a
cautionary example, for Adorno's own ambitions as philosopher and
as writer.[4 <#foot4>]
8. "Skoteinos" begins with an uncompromising assertion (not, for
once, an "exaggeration"!) of Hegel's difficulty or obscurity:
The ways in which Hegel's great systematic works . . . resist
understanding are qualitatively different from those of other
infamous texts. With Hegel the task is not simply to
ascertain, through intellectual effort and careful examination
of the wording, a meaning of whose existence one has no doubt.
Rather at many points the meaning itself is uncertain, and no
hermeneutic art has yet established it indisputably . . . .
For all their pettiness and /ressentiment/, Schopenhauer's
tirades about Hegel's alleged bombast evidenced a relationship
to the matter itself, at least negatively, like the child and
the emperor's new clothes, in a situation where respect for
culture and fear of embarrassment merely dodge the issue. In
the realm of great philosophy Hegel is no doubt the only one
with whom at times one literally does not and cannot
conclusively determine what is being talked about, and with
whom there is no guarantee that such a judgment is even
possible. (Hegel 89)
On the following page Adorno declares a quoted sentence from Hegel
"a match"--i.e., comparably difficult--"for Hölderlin's most
advanced prose of the same years" (90; cf. "Parataxis" 134).[5
<#foot5>] Adorno urges that Hegel's thematic of the
disintricability of part and whole is enacted in Hegel's writing,
with the consequence that Hegel's word-by-word meaning must be
inferred with the aid of the reader's (developing) sense of
Hegel's overall "conceptual structure," not, as per usual, the
other way around. In a quotation from Hegel's Difference Between
Fichte's and Schelling's System of Philosophy, Adorno advises:
The passage becomes susceptible of interpretation in the light
of knowledge of the general train of Hegel's thought,
especially the conceptual structure of the chapter, but it
cannot be interpreted from the wording of the paragraph alone.
(Hegel 91)
Despite Adorno's (presumably pointed) non-mention of the
"hermeneutic circle" here, his account of interpretation as a
process of continual back-and-forth of interadjustment between the
larger "conceptual structure" and the more immediate processing of
"the wording" evokes the textual habitus of modernist literature,
in which "structure," "form," and "configuration" (sc.
"constellation") are not mere epiphenomena of the meaning of the
text, but its very constituents:
To the person who holds doggedly to the wording and then in
disappointment refuses to get involved with Hegel because of
his unfathomable quality, one can offer little but
generalities . . . . There is a sort of suspended quality
associated with his philosophy, in accordance with the idea
that truth cannot be grasped in any individual thesis or any
delimited positive statement. Form in Hegel follows this
intention. Nothing can be understood in isolation, everything
is to be understood only in the context of the whole, with the
awkward qualification that the whole lives only in the
individual moments . . . however, this kind of doubleness of
the dialectic eludes literary presentation . . . it cannot in
principle achieve the unity of the whole and its parts at one
blow . . . . Every single sentence in Hegel's philosophy
proves itself unsuitable for that philosophy, and the form
expresses this in its inability to grasp any content with
complete adequacy. If this were not the case, the form would
be free of the poverty and the fallibility of concepts that
Hegel tells us about. (Hegel 91-92)
For Adorno, at issue here are not deficits in Hegel's skill as a
writer; rather, Hegel's foregrounding of the failures elicited
here amounts to a unique success--the evocation of an experience
that is the very "truth" of our condition, and indissociable from
predicaments that Hegel registers as endemic to language itself:
if Hegel's verdict that no individual sentence can be
philosophically true holds outside his own work, then each
sentence should also be confronted with its linguistic
inadequacy . . . the unclarity for which [Hegel] never ceases
to be reproached is not simply a weakness; it is also the
force that drives him to correct the untruth of the
particular, an untruth that acknowledges itself in the
unclarity of the individual sentence.
Best able to meet the demands of this predicament would be a
philosophical language that would strive for intelligibility
without confusing it with clarity. (Hegel 105)
Although in one place Nicholsen treats "intelligibility" and
"clarity" as synonymous (Hegel xxv), she elsewhere (see Exact
Imagination 91-92) distinguishes them along the lines amenable to
our discussion above of interpretation as a vigilant
back-and-forth between a developing sense of the larger
"conceptual structure" and the more immediate experience of "the
wording": "intelligibility" ("/Verständlichkeit/" [Drei Studien
339]) results from this (crypto-"hermeneutic circle") attention to
structure or form as well as word-by-word meaning; whereas the
"clarity" that would be a trap ("/Klarheit/" [Drei Studien 339])
would spring from a fixation on "the wording alone." Adorno has a
suggestive metaphor for this process: you must learn "How to Read
Hegel" the way an Ã(c)migrÃ(c) learns an adopted language: not with your
nose in the dictionary, but by full immersion in the verbal and
textual environment with the "linguistic sensorium" open (Hegel
107; the Ã(c)migrÃ(c) image recurs in "The Essay as Form" [13]).
9. Adorno speaks of the "doubleness of the dialectic elud[ing]
literary presentation" as a predicament incumbent on philosophy
(including critique, theory, and other such truth-discourses)
generically and as such. But later in the essay, Adorno talks as
if some measure of this deficit in Hegel is Hegel-specific, a
symptom of Hegel's carelessness as a writer, his "stylistic
indifference" to "linguistic praxis," even the "skeptical relation
to language" that Hegel "raised . . . to a stylistic principle"
(Hegel 118)--as if Hegel has forgotten his own dialectical premises:
Constellation is not system. Everything does not become
resolved, everything does not come out even; rather, one
moment sheds light on the other, and the figures that the
individual moments form together are specific signs and a
legible script. This is not yet articulated in Hegel, whose
mode of presentation is characterized by a sovereignly
indifferent attitude toward language; at any rate it has not
penetrated into the chemism of his own linguistic form. In its
all-too-simpleminded confidence in the totality, the latter
lacks the sharpness derived from the critical self-awareness
that, in combination with reflection on the necessary
disproportion, could bring the dialectic into language . . . .
Vagueness, something that cannot be eliminated in dialectic,
becomes a defect in Hegel because he did not include an
antidote to it in his language . . . . The loyal interpreter
of Hegel has to take account of this deficiency. It is up to
him to do what Hegel failed to do: to produce as much
conciseness of formulation as possible in order to reveal the
rigor of the dialectical movement, a rigor that is not content
with such conciseness. (Hegel 109-10)
Hegel failed "to bring the dialectic into language"--yet elsewhere
Adorno usually speaks as if dialectic and language were
indissociable--as if error could lie only with those (positivists
and empiricists) who deludedly suppose that dialectic could ever
be purged from language. Left vague here is the question whether
the "antidote" Hegel should have found for the "vagueness" Adorno
deplores should have been a greater "intelligibility," amounting
to a more self-conscious and concrete apprehension of the
inevitable predicament of vagueness itself (which may well have
augmented the vagueness rather than reducing it). However that may
be, "the loyal interpreter of Hegel" (here, Adorno himself) offers
"to do what Hegel failed to do": to elicit the "critical
self-awareness" in which Hegel fell short, and thus to "bring the
dialectic into language."
10. Adorno seems to me to overstate his case here; I have always taken
Hegel's frequent (if ad hoc) comments on language (the metaphysics
of grammar, syntax, and the copula, the form of the judgment, the
proposition, the syllogism, etc., as shapes and shapers of
consciousness) as self-consciously and self-referentially
operative in Hegel's own writing, in theory if not always so
self-consciously in (writing) practice. Hegel's global premise
that the result of thought is indissociable from the thinking
process that produced it, linked so firmly in the Phenomenology's
"Preface" to the necessary difficulty of reading and writing
philosophy, participates in the period shift in the conception of
literature from, in De Quincey's terms, "literature of knowledge"
to "literature of power," or more broadly the shift from a
conception of literature as repository of valuable truths
extracted from experience, to a conception of reading and writing
as themselves a kind of experience. "Experience" (philosophical)
is another theme salient in Hegel's "Preface,"[6 <#foot6>]
everywhere assuming that the philosophical adventure of Spirit is
a narrative, a historical narrative, and not merely narrated but
enacted or performed in the labor of the philosopher's (Hegel's)
writing of the text and of the reader's reading of it. "The power
of Spirit," writes Hegel near the opening of the Phenomenology,
"is only as great as its expression, its depth only as deep as it
dares to spread out and lose itself in its exposition" (6). What
Hegel regularly advocates as the "dialectical movement" of
consciousness--the condition of "the power of the negative," when
indeed it is not imagined as the very thing itself--is enacted in
the forms and formats of language, including written language, to
the effect that subject and object interact in a participatory
/methexis/ that anticipates the poetics of Romantic and modernist
literature (from the mirror to the lamp), and the linguistic
vision developed from von Humboldt (recall Hegel's ambition to
"teach philosophy to speak German" [Letters 107]) to Sapir and
Whorf, all the way indeed to the contemporary meme of
"performativity," so thoroughly does Hegel sublate language's
supposed "representational" or "constative" responsibilities into
its "negative" or "performative" powers (Hegel 109; "Parataxis"
134). Such are the stakes when Derrida calls Hegel "the last
philosopher of the book and the first thinker of writing" (26).
Hegel's polemic about philosophy is always also a polemic on
behalf of a certain program for philosophical writing--a way of
putting it that recalls Richard Rorty's phrase about "philosophy
as a kind of writing," except that Rorty's phrase, not least in
his own usage, can too readily seem reductive (as if it means
"philosophy as /nothing but/ a kind of writing") in ways that
diminish both philosophy and writing. Hegel (and Adorno, and many
others who would presumably refuse Rorty's characterization of
"private ironists") aspires to enlarge both terms.
11. I'll risk a digression here to illustrate how Hegel's sense of
language overlaps with Adorno's, and also how they differ, in ways
that might clarify Adorno's complaint that Hegel is "sovereignly
indifferent" to language.[7 <#foot7>] Our proof-text (so to speak)
is the astonishing sequence of paragraphs in the "Preface" to the
Phenomenology in which Hegel dramatizes the fermentation or
sublation by which the merely "ratiocinative" import of the
philosophical proposition becomes "speculative." Crucial to
Hegel's account of the process and the effects of this
"becoming-speculative" is the figuration, frequent throughout the
Phenomenology and especially in the "Preface," of movement versus
fixity: whereas the "proposition" in "ratiocinative thinking" aims
to fix or stabilize or define a meaning, the labor and the reward
of "speculative thinking" (Hegel urges) is to set the properties
thus fixed back into motion, into a jostling "unrest" that answers
to the very movement of the reading-and-thinking consciousness
itself, as it scans a sentence, sequentially, word by word,
subject, verb, predicate, the will to understanding reaching
always forward for the next semantic/syntactic member, even as it
processes each new input retrospectively, against what sense has
been collected so far, so that the "movement which is thinking
apprehension . . . runs back and forth" until at last--and this is
the very point of "speculative thinking" for Hegel--"the movement
itself becomes the object" and "goes beyond" the grammatical parts
of speech thus mobilized, even as this movement is at times
(inevitably? at any rate, properly, and even providentially)
"checked in its progress" and "suffers, as we might put it, a
counterthrust" (Phenomenology 36-37). In this vertiginous
hurly-burly, much more dizzying in Hegel's full text than in my
excerpts, the sentence or "proposition" appears as a sort of
conduit through which the "meaning" sloshes back and forth as in
the ebb-and-flow of liquid pulsing in adjoining lengths of
pipe--to the effect that "the general nature of the judgment or
the proposition"--i.e., the traditional device by which philosophy
tried, syllogistically, to stabilize chains of deduction from
premise to QED--"is destroyed by the speculative proposition"
(Phenomenology 38). "Power of the negative" indeed! Terms that the
ratiocinative proposition identifies, and virtually equates, the
"speculative proposition" maintains in their difference, thus
arraying the identity and the non-identity before the mind
simultaneously.
12. The trouble, says Hegel, is that the very format of the
proposition itself, its shape and its conventional acceptation
(Adorno would say, the ideology of its "form"), conditions us to
read ratiocinatively rather than speculatively:
The philosophical proposition, since it /is/ a proposition,
leads one to believe that the usual subject-predicate relation
obtains, as well as the usual attitude toward knowing. But the
philosophical [sc. "speculative"] content destroys this
attitude and this opinion. (Phenomenology 39)
The part of this that is a complaint remains a complaint today,
two centuries later: from the poets, artists, and composers of
modernism to the theorists of postmodernism, "the prison-house of
language" has prompted calls to un-make, to "destroy" if necessary
(or possible), the usual ways of making sense--a program
ubiquitous in Adorno's own investments: in the modernist art he
valorizes, in the philosophical and political commitments his work
undertakes, in the burdens and the self-consciousness he assumes
for his own writing practice. But Hegel's response to the
predicament--his faith in the "speculative" power of the
"counterthrust"--is sanguine to the point most moderns scorn as
complacency: "We learn by experience," writes Hegel, "that we
meant something other than we meant to mean; and this correction
of our meaning compels our knowing to go back to the proposition,
and understand it in some other way" (Phenomenology 39). The
dramatic reflexivity here--as if the "proposition" just now being
"speculatively" read stands revealed, at a stroke, as a
proposition the reader himself (Hegel) had earlier written--sets
the writer in a relation to his "own" words not to be so frontally
problematized again for 175 years (Barthes, Foucault, Derrida).[8
<#foot8>]
13. But the prophetic radicalism of Hegel's gesture is softened by his
complacency about the incommensurability of language (mediated and
mediating, irredeemably "universal") and perception (immediate,
sensual). At the opening of the "Sense-Certainty" chapter, Hegel
casts the inevitable "universality" of language as a sort of
saving grace against the solicitations of "sense-certainty":
It is as a universal that we /utter/ what the sensuous is . .
. . Of course, we do not envisage the universal This or Being
in general, but we /utter/ the universal; in other words, we
do not strictly say what in this sense-certainty we /mean/ to
say. But language . . . is the more truthful; in it, we
ourselves directly refute what we /mean/ to say.
(Phenomenology 60)
Hegel is surely one of the first, and still one of the most
thorough, to theorize the problematic of language, the "crisis of
representation" that Adorno and other moderns find so
anguishing.[9 <#foot9>] It is a theme familiar to students of
modern culture: we might mention, to start with figures Adorno
himself critiques, Husserl's /epochÃ(c)/ of (in effect) "mediation"
itself in the name of a "return to the things themselves"; and
Heidegger's "jargon of authenticity," a mystification (in Adorno's
view) that fantasizes recovering a "primordial" immediacy, or
achieving at least an immediate sense of the /Angst/ that should
attach to the loss of that primordiality. Adorno sees something
similar at work in the lush orchestral effects of Wagner and the
faux-primitivism of Stravinsky; more visceral lunges toward
immediacy animate Dada and Surrealism, and the mystiques variously
attaching to Van Gogh, Gauguin, and /les fauves/. In literature,
writers have been seeking since Romanticism to make their writing
more life-like, which has typically meant more "immediate," less
familiarized by the mediations of literary tradition and
convention; this is the claim especially staked out by the
"realist" novel. Some poets can sound the theme with something of
Hegel's sense of the "happy" potentials peculiar to language by
reason of its inevitable "universality"--MallarmÃ(c)'s flower absent
from all bouquets, e.g.--but more typical, especially in the
twentieth century, has been the much-discussed aspiration to "the
concrete," understood as the opposite of the conceptual, the
universal, the abstract: "No ideas but in things" (Williams), "Not
ideas about the thing but the thing itself" (Stevens). Williams
and Stevens can sound, Kant notwithstanding, as if this program
could be realized.
14. There is a reach of Adorno's thinking that can look very like a
version of this "immediacy"-hunger, and its association with, or
expression as, a distrust of "the concept" and all its works.
Adorno is as alive as anyone to the liability of the concept to
reification or hypostatization: to becoming, as Nietzsche warned,
a stale counter of thought and feeling that threatens to become a
narcotic against thinking and feeling both. To prevent such
hypostatization of "the concept," to keep it concrete, is primary
among the many tasks Adorno assigns to "the labor of the concept"
(see my "During Auschwitz" paragraphs 9-15). But there is another,
more complicated liability attaching to the concept, which
manifests most often and most elaborately in Adorno in connection
with Kant. Adorno is usually on Hegel's side of the Hegel/Kant
binary; but perhaps the most important of Adorno's still-Kantian
commitments is an entailment of his critique of idealism, the
"identity thinking" that identifies thinking and being, and which,
in Adorno's view, ultimately vitiates Hegel's thinking. Here
Adorno's construction of the problem is Kantian and materialist at
once: Kantian in that the inaccessible, unknowable /Ding an sich/
cannot be mastered (though it can be hypostatized, a sort of
/illusion/ of "mastery") by "the labor of the concept";
materialist or Marxist in that the reaches of experience Adorno
calls "non-conceptual" are not merely (as in Kant's trinity)
sheerly cognitive, moral, or aesthetic, but social and historical
as well.[10 <#foot10>] Adorno follows Benjamin in seeking in
"mimesis" an approach to making the "non-conceptual" available to
art and language without betraying, by rendering it conceptual,
its non-conceptual character. The point: contra the (modern)
ideology of the aesthetic as usual, Adorno repudiates rhetorics of
immediacy that call for an "absolute negation" of the concept in
the name of recovering "non-conceptual" (sensual, concrete,
immediate) experience. For Adorno, only through the "labor of the
concept" can the limits of the concept be tested and
probed--indeed, /experienced./ Beyond those limits, "mimesis" and
other such strategies of the "non-conceptual" offer not a
triumphant victory over or liberation from "the labor of the
concept" but rather a tragic or "unhappy" brake on its potentials,
a check to "the power of the negative."
15. And so Adorno consistently scorns, as an ideology that not only
defaults from the "labor of the concept," but makes a
righteousness of doing so, all Romantic and modern aesthetics of
recovering immediacy: Adorno accepts the imperative to "make it
new," and all the burdens and impossibilities of that task in a
numbed, instrumentalized, "administered world," and to that extent
he can make common cause with many an artist--Proust, for
example--whose theory (if one may use the word) might subscribe to
naïve rhetorics of immediacy. Still, Adorno joins that
understandable and nostalgic longing or "ontological need" to his
own subtler and more challenging Hegelian account of aesthetic
experience, according to which the transit from immediacy to
mediation is necessary and, though irreversible, may nevertheless
sublate further into what Hegel calls "mediated immediacy":
indeed, it's only the "mediated" part of the response, Adorno
would say, that enables the "reader" of the new artwork not merely
to /experience/ the freshness (or "immediacy") of the new, but to
/know/ that immediacy for the complexly mediated thing experience is.
16. All that notwithstanding, Adorno is typically "modern" in casting
this problematic of "immediacy" in dark and desperate colors, an
instance or symptom or pretext--even a "medium"--for "unhappy
consciousness" of a very specifically modern type. In Hegel's
terms, we might characterize modernity's anguish over lost
immediacy as the latest reinvention of the "unattainable beyond"
underlying our species being's chronic "unhappy consciousness";
Adorno is notable only for the intensity with which he renders or
performs this problem. And here, too, his complaints about Hegel's
language are part and parcel of his unease with what we usually
reprehend today as Hegel's Panglossian "happy consciousness," for
the modern anguish about the irredeemable mediatedness of language
is something Hegel simply does not feel. Again, Hegel finds a
(typically) providential grace of /Geist/, not a tragic
estrangement or fallen-ness, in the circumstance that "[what] is
meant [in "sense-certainty"] /cannot be reached/ by language,
which belongs to consciousness, i.e., to that which is inherently
universal" (Phenomenology 66). Or as Hegel puts it elsewhere,
"because language is the work of thought, nothing can be said in
it that is not universal" (Encyclopedia [§ 20] 49)--and that (for
Hegel) is /good/: for from that condition, Spirit will learn the
limitations of sense-certainty, of perception, and eventually even
of the merely "ratiocinative" powers of "Understanding." Moreover,
Hegel seems confident that language can and will do the job by
itself: the inadequacy of the "ratiocinative proposition" to
"speculative" consciousness is a redemptive difficulty, a sort of
/felix culpa/, that "seems . . . to recur perpetually, and to be
inherent in the very nature of philosophical exposition"
(Phenomenology 40); hence Hegel is not moved to call for a new
language or a new grammar that can express the "speculative"
meaning that the old propositional language cannot. The challenge
is rather to the reader than to the writer: the "speculative"
(new) insight is to be /read out/ of the old proposition by the
reader, rather than /written into/ it by the writer. Hegel's
complacent faith in the dynamic of the "counterthrust" apparently
rationalizes his "sovereign indifference" to his own compositional
practice: the counterthrust will wreak its speculative work on the
ratiocinative inertia of what the writer "meant to mean"
regardless. Hegel anticipates both deconstruction and Harold Bloom
by the ironic route of a faith that there is a special providence
of "misreading" that mis-shapes our texts, rough-hew them how we
will.
17. By contrast, for Adorno, as for so many modern writers and
thinkers, it is upon the writer that the burden falls when
historically new predicaments call for historically new ways of
writing or representing them--and if the predicaments are chronic,
that only makes more urgent the need for newly "defamiliarizing"
(re- or de-) constructions of them. If Adorno (et al.) bewail the
need for new expressive means to escape from old "familiarized"
fixities of consciousness, Hegel enjoys a more robust confidence
not only in the power of the new to unfold itself, but also in the
fundamental benignity of the past which can thus be more
generously and happily sublated--"preserved" in, even as it is
"cancelled" by, the new. (For Adorno and other moderns, the
anxiety--"dialectics at a standstill"--is that the cancellation
part won't take effect.) Hegel would have savored Nietzsche's
quip, in Twilight of the Idols, that "we are not rid of God
because we still have faith in grammar" (Portable Nietzsche 483);
but he would have taken the point rather as endorsing the
continuity than protesting it. I'm trying here to "motivate" the
contrast of Hegel's textual effect or affect (to come back to the
question of "affect") with the "unhappy consciousness" of Adorno
and, so frequently, of modernity at large.[11 <#foot11>]
18. For many readers of Adorno, the "unhappy consciousness" may
effectively eclipse the Hegelian point about mediation--as if
"immediate experience" and "unhappy consciousness" were tantamount
to the same thing, or were each the other's object. When Adorno
writes that "all philosophical language is a language in
opposition to language, marked with the stigma of its own
impossibility" (Hegel 100), one might think of Beckett or of
Wittgenstein; I suspect Adorno's "unhappy consciousness"
imperative motivates much in his discourse that might pardonably
be mis-taken for a version of the immediacy-hunger of so much
modern aestheticism. In my own experience of reading Adorno, the
chronic motif of the "non-conceptual" seems to imply some
qualification, some im-mediation or de-mediation, of mediation
itself. And from (so to speak) the other end of the telescope,
Adorno finds much more threatening and anguishing than Hegel the
potential in language to "fix" or "freeze" or (borrowing a
Platonic word) "hypostatize" thought-moments that ought to remain
or be rendered fluid--an anxiety widespread, under various
aliases, in modernity (Lukács's "reification," Wittgenstein's
"category mistake," Whitehead's "fallacy of misplaced
concreteness"). When Horkheimer and Adorno, in Dialectic of
Enlightenment, warn of "the universality necessarily assumed by
the bad content of language, both metaphysical and scientific"
(22, Cumming translation), they are sounding a familiar modern
theme, and a theme in which concerns about feeling and thinking
fuse with issues of writing--and of the /burdens/ incurred by
serious writing and serious writers. No less than the poet must
the philosopher struggle to get the "exact curve of the thing"
(T.E. Hulme) down on the page; to quote "Skoteinos" again:
The moment of universality in language, without which there
would be no language, does irrevocable damage to the complete
objective specificity of the particular thing it wants to
define. The corrective to this lies in efforts to achieve [an]
intelligibility [that is] the opposite pole to pure linguistic
objectivity. The truth of expression flourishes only in the
tension between the two. (Hegel 106)
The complaint here about Hegel's overestimation of the universal
is a legitimately philosophical point--that "the truth of
expression" involves both the (bad) universality of language and
its inevitable contravention of the "concreteness" of the
particular--but "the bad content of language" ("/der schlechte
Inhalt in der Sprache/" [Dialektik 39]) also encodes a
"higher-level" version of the "tension [the "performative
contradiction"?] between the two." In translation, the English
suggests a "content" distinct from the container: whereas the
German ("/Inhalt/") can imply a more disintricably Aristotelian
fusion of form-and-content (form as content, content as form), of
substance and form as indissociable correlatives of a single
spatio-temporal manifold, for which the nearest English I can
think of is Hopkins's (admittedly outrÃ(c), but conveniently
Aquinian) "inscape." Cumming's translation, "bad content,"
suggests better than Jephcott's "faulty content" (Dialectic 17,
Jephcott translation) that the "bad content" is formal beyond any
particular content: the "bad content," along the lines of "bad
infinity," involves the "universality"-effect itself. But Adorno's
point is not, /pace/ Williams and Stevens et al., that this "bad
content" should be overcome; the point is that it /can't/ be--with
the consequence that this "bad content" itself must be part of
what a critique of universality performs.
19. The difficulty of such writing and reading, what Hegel called the
"labor and the suffering of the negative," is just the /askesis/
Adorno charges Hegel with having shirked. Hence what might seem
the near-/ressentiment/ of Adorno's complaint that Hegel is
"sovereignly indifferent" to language--to the extent at least that
it amounts to the complaint that Hegel doesn't share Adorno's
/Angst/ in addressing an historical crisis that requires
crisis-agitations in critique's own expressive means. Which is
not, of course, at all to discount Adorno's point: frequently
enough, Hegel does indeed write with a haste and an impatience
that seem willfully to incur, even defy, the risks of using
language "as if" transparently--though Hegel seems to me to incur
the risk knowingly, not naïvely. On the other hand, there are no
motifs in Hegel corresponding to such chronically and insistently
self-reflexive evocations of thematics-and-technics,
theories-and-practices, as Adorno's "immanent critique,"
"dialectical image," "constellation," "mediation," "expression,"
"parataxis," "mimesis," and the like.
20. The further question for Adorno is, what can a practitioner of
"immanent critique" (an Adorno) /do/ in the face of the
reification, "the [false] universality necessarily assumed by the
bad content of language"? As we've seen, Hegel's adviso--that we
must "go back to the proposition, and understand it in some other
way" (Phenomenology 39)--assigns the task to the reader, not the
writer; moreover, Hegel's stipulation that we must "understand . .
. in some other way" is prodigiously vague. As for the strategies
usual to the modern literary arts, Adorno (as we've seen)
considers that they mistake their medium if they really suppose,
or hope, that they can eliminate "universality" by reverting to
(Keats) "sensations rather than thoughts," mobilizing the mantra
of "concrete-not-abstract" against the supposed pitfalls of
thinking as such--as if not noticing (perfect illustration of
Hegel's point about language "speaking the universal") that when
we invoke "the concrete" in this way, we are using the word
abstractly. As for the logical positivists who sought to reduce
language to a mathematical ideal of immutable significations ("the
most recent school of logic denounces--for the impressions they
bear--the words of language, holding them to be false coins better
replaced by neutral counters" [5, Cumming translation]); Adorno
regards them as a virtual /ne plus ultra/ of the dead-end of "the
dialectic of enlightenment."
21. Adorno, of course, carries no brief for "abstraction": his
imperative is to concretize the abstract. As he writes in "The
Essay as Form":
Higher levels of abstraction invest thought neither with
greater sanctity nor metaphysical substance; on the contrary,
the latter tends to evaporate with the advance of abstraction,
and the essay [i.e., philosophical writing as Adorno would
prescribe it] tries to compensate for some of that.
The point is that to concretize the abstract is to grapple with
it, not to refuse it, as so many Romantic-to-modern aestheticisms
make a glamorous "impossibility" of attempting to do:
Thought's depth depends on how deeply it penetrates its
object, not on the extent to which it reduces it to something
else . . . . The essay quietly puts an end to the illusion
that thought could break out of the realm of /thesis/,
culture, and move into that of /physis/, nature. ("Essay" 11)
For Adorno, all such efforts to /escape/ the predicaments of
language--to escape from the mediations of culture into
un-mediated nature--are not only futile, but (variously)
ideological: dupes of a false consciousness more comprehensive
than the version of false universality they would evade. For
Adorno, it is part of philosophy's task, part of the /askesis/
specific to the agon of philosophical labor, to confront
head-on--not to evade, but fully to /suffer/--the dilemma that
"all philosophical language is a language in opposition to
language, marked with the stigma of its own impossibility" (Hegel
100). Immanent critique must own that it operates from /inside/
the horizon of the problems it takes on: from /inside/ the
"impossibility" it protests, and that it must, as writing,
dramatize. Entire success in philosophical projects cannot be
expected: and least of all from any program guided by the
expectation that part of the success would be utter clarity of
results:
To the extent to which philosophy makes an ongoing effort to
break out of the reification of consciousness and its objects,
it cannot comply with the rules of the game of reified
consciousness without negating itself, even though in other
respects it is not permitted simply to disregard those rules
if it does not want to degenerate into empty words.
Wittgenstein's maxim, "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one
must be silent," in which the extreme of positivism spills
over into the gesture of reverent authoritarianism
authenticity, and which for that reason exerts a kind of
intellectual mass suggestion, is utterly antiphilosophical. If
philosophy can be defined at all, it is an effort to express
things one cannot speak about, to help express the
nonidentical despite the fact that expressing it identifies it
at the same time. Hegel attempts to do this. (Hegel 101-02)
The expressive demand for "a philosophical language that would
strive for intelligibility without confusing it with clarity"
(Hegel 105) engages contradictions rather to display and dramatize
than to reconcile them; the differences between them cannot and
/should/ not, for purposes of critique, be "resolved": to preserve
the "objective contradictoriness" (Negative Dialectics 151) of the
dilemma must be one of the conditions--"the labor and the
suffering," indeed--of philosophy as such.
22. A related difficulty from which Adorno would forbid philosophy to
flinch is one for which Hegel, again, supplies the terms: the
"Preface" to the Phenomenology recurs repeatedly to the figure of
"fixity" ("/das Fixe/")--for example in the famous passage about
"tarrying with the negative," in which Hegel announces the program
for a new, a /modern/, philosophy, in the very terms (restoring
"sensuous apprehension" to over-cerebral and -systematic ways of
thinking) that a later age will deploy against thinking and "the
universal" themselves. Hegel writes that ancient philosophy sought
the proper and complete formation of the natural consciousness
[and] made itself into a universality that was active through
and through. In modern times, however, the individual finds
the abstract form ready-made; the effort to grasp and
appropriate it is more the direct driving-forth of what is
within and the truncated generation of the universal than it
is the emergence of the latter from the concrete variety of
existence. Hence the task nowadays consists not so much in
purging the individual of an immediate, sensuous mode of
apprehension, and making him into a substance that is an
object of thought and that thinks, but rather in just the
opposite, in freeing determinate thoughts from their fixity so
as to give actuality to the universal, and impart to it a
spiritual life. (Phenomenology 19-20)
Anxious moderns, worried that intellectualism desiccates feeling,
may yearn to purge thought altogether; for Adorno, as here for
Hegel, to impoverish either is to impoverish both. The good news,
symmetrically, is that to rejuvenate either is to rejuvenate both;
thinking and feeling cannot and should not be sundered. But in the
figure of undoing "fixity," Hegel anticipates the modern
aspiration to undo what we would now call the reifications of
habit and ideology. (I have discussed elsewhere Adorno's
characterization of "immanent critique" as aiming to "reliquify"
apprehensions that familiarization and false universality have
"congealed," "hardened," "frozen," "petrified" ["Immanent
Critique" 101-03; cf. Negative Dialectics 97].) And it would be
easy to see Hegel here as anticipating the modern suspicion of
Plato, whose search for the eternal, the "really real," was ready
to dismiss "the concrete" altogether in favor of a "form" or an
"idea" whose guarantee of "real"-ity was, precisely, its
unchangingness--its (in Hegel's terms) "fixity." And here we see
another way in which the "Skoteinos" essay's insinuation of a
Heraclitean Hegel implies a fundamental philosophical sympathy as
well as a comparable "obscurity" or "difficulty" of expression:
The substance of Hegel's philosophy is process, and it wants
to express itself as process, in permanent /status nascendi/,
the negation of presentation as something congealed, something
that would correspond to what was presented only if the latter
were itself something congealed . . . . Hegel's publications
are more like films of thought than texts. The untutored eye
can never capture the details of a film the way it can those
of a still image, and so it is with Hegel's writings. This is
the locus of the forbidding quality in them, and it is
precisely here that Hegel regresses behind his dialectical
content. (Hegel 121)
The "film" metaphor insinuates that Hegel's rush and blur, however
admirably it may "reliquify" what had been congealed, can generate
an immediacy-effect that goes too far in the other direction, thus
imperiling the "speculative" consciousness that would maintain the
"content" as dialectical rather than "regress[ing] behind" it.
23. Here, as elsewhere, Adorno charges such deficits to Hegel's "lack
of sensitivity to the linguistic medium" (Hegel 121)--again, that
"sovereignly indifferent attitude toward language" (109)--a lack
or lapse with more than merely stylistic consequences: Hegel's
failure "to reflect on his own language," Nicholsen writes, "is
the failure of his philosophy": she goes on to confirm that it is
on this ground that Adorno "differentiates himself from the Hegel
who failed to reflect on language" (Exact Imagination 93). It
might sharpen a point to draw a contrast: Nicholsen takes Adorno
as defending Hegel's mimetic or gestural, non-conceptual language,
and deploring his apparently unwitting or inadvertent lapses into
anti-mimetic, over-abstract expression. It seems to me the
reverse: that Adorno regards the mimetic and musical features of
Hegel's prose as the persistence of a sort of linguistic
unconscious that intermittently manages to get the better of
Hegel's programmatic determination to transcend the "limits of
language"[12 <#foot12>]:
Perhaps however, the antilinguistic impulse in his thought,
which perceives the limits of any particular existing thing as
limits of language, was so deep that as a stylist Hegel
sacrificed the primacy of objectification that governed his
oeuvre as a whole. This man who reflected on all reflection
did not reflect on language; he moved about in language with a
carelessness that is incompatible with what he said. In the
presentation his writings attempt a direct resemblance to the
substance. Their significative character recedes in favor of a
mimetic one, a kind of gestural or curvilinear writing
strangely at odds with the solemn claims of reason that Hegel
inherited from Kant and the Enlightenment . . . . The
romanticism that the mature Hegel treated with contempt, but
which was the ferment of his own speculation, may have taken
its revenge on him by taking over his language . . . .
Abstractly flowing, Hegel's style, like Hölderlin's
abstractions, takes on a musical quality. (Hegel 122)
Here Hegel seems to succumb, against his own principles, to an
unwitting "romanticism," and thus lapses into mimesis that repeats
(or "reflects") the "substance" his "dialectic" should be
rendering speculative, should be subjecting to a "determinate
negation" whose force and effect would be ineluctably critical, a
"counterthrust" to the substance's received, "fixed," "congealed,"
reified and reifying acceptation.
24. But as the passage continues, Hegel's unwitting contravention of
his own anti-mimetic commitments develops unlooked-for potentials:
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 if
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 mean. 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.
(Hegel 122-23)
Both Nicholsen (Exact Imagination 92) and J.M. Bernstein (43-4)
take this passage as commending Hegel's "musical" and "romantic"
(Nicholsen) or (Bernstein) "more than logical"
(i.e.,"non-conceptual") effects as attesting Hegel's deliberate
effort "to rescue, in the medium of the concept, the mimesis that
the concept represses"--but I see the passage as staging a more
conflicted apprehension of Hegel than that. I can't substantiate
(but neither could Nicholsen or Bernstein refute) my reading by
rigorous appeal to Adorno's exact wording; as we've seen, Adorno
advises that reading Hegel (and, implicitly, Adorno) requires a
back-and-forth between the words on the page and your (developing)
sense of the "conceptual structure" and "of the general train of
Hegel's thought": Hegel's meanings, Adorno warns, "cannot be
interpreted from the wording . . . alone" (Hegel 91)--and in fact
the paragraph above is followed by a further elaboration of that
theme.[13 <#foot13>]
25. So, emboldened by the license Adorno thereby extends, I'll suggest
that when Adorno writes that "philosophy as a whole is allied with
art in wanting to rescue, in the medium of the concept, the
mimesis that the concept represses," he is suggesting that Hegel's
prose, whether abetted or duped by Hegel's "sovereignly
indifferent attitude to language," achieves such an effect against
its author's intention: that it is "Philosophy," not (always)
Hegel, that has willed this "rescue" of the "mimetic." We've
already seen Hegel anticipating the postmodern maxim that
"language speaks us." Just as, above, "the romanticism that the
mature Hegel treated with contempt" took its "revenge" by infusing
his "abstract" style behind his back with a Hölderlinian
musicality, here Adorno intimates that Hegel's unself-consciously
mimetic /practice/ has gotten the better of his avowedly
anti-mimetic /theory./ The point: it's the practice that "rescues"
what the theory "represses." Thus Hegel, impresario of "the
concept" (at least as he himself reinvented it), aspiring to soar
"beyond" the concept, suffers instead a fortunate fall "back
beneath the concept." The prophet of "the end of art" in its
sublation into philosophy reinvents philosophy, despite himself,
as a quasi-Romantic kind of art, of music, mimesis. Classic
/Aufhebung/: philosophy's Hegelian mission to "end" (or "cancel")
art proves rather to prolong ("preserve") it. Or such seems to me
the suggestion, the /alchimie du verbe/, of Hegel's "disempowered
concepts . . . use[d] as imageless images of what they mean" (the
English-speaker recalls this Plato-haunted problematic in Shelley,
a poet the reverse of "sovereignly indifferent" to language), not
to mention the profanatory ("enlightened") hubris of Alexander
cutting the Gordian knot. If "immediacy"-hunger too often drives
artists to refuse the concept in favor of a plunge into the
non-conceptual concrete, Hegel's Promethean aspirations soar the
other way, to levitate "beyond" the concept into the ozone of the
too-rarefied/reified abstract.
26. But whatever his point about Hegel, Adorno in this passage has the
air of finding, as if in despite of what Hegel "meant to mean," a
model for Adorno's own attempt "to rescue, in the medium of the
concept, the mimesis that the concept represses": that is, to undo
the "/chorismos/" of philosophy from art, of "the [allegedly,
ideologically "abstract"] concept" from "the [mimetic] concrete,"
of thinking from feeling. Adorno's commitment to rehabilitating,
by "concretizing," the concept, shows the labor of "rescue" to be
a double project: both a rescue of the mimetic /from/ the "bad
content" of the concept (i.e., from its liability to reification,
abstraction, false universalization, etc.); but also,
reciprocally, a rescue /of/ the concept from its liabilities by
way of a determined discipline of the concrete, maintained in the
writing by a mimetic /methexis/ between the writing and "the
matter at hand." The negative project of keeping "the concept" and
"the concrete" from /betraying/ each other--for the naïve
de-mediations of anti-intellectual art practices attest that this
is a double danger--can be reimagined to open the prospect of "the
concept" and "the concrete" /redeeming/ each other.
27. It's something like this project that Rolf Tiedemann characterizes
as "Adorno's Utopia of Knowledge," in a formulation evincing an
exuberance Adorno never allowed himself. But Tiedemann isn't
forgetting Adorno's /Bilderverbot/ on utopia, nor his stipulation
that the Stendhalian "promise of happiness" can today be evoked
only negatively, as a "/broken/ promise"; when Tiedemann cites
Adorno using the phrase, it's as a contrafactual: "The utopia of
knowledge would be to disclose the nonconceptual with concepts
while not imitating them" (qtd. 132, from Negative Dialectics 10).
But if Tiedemann can seem too sanguine here about utopian promise,
in another sense he breaks this particular promise too much, to
the extent that, in order to argue Adorno's favor to "mimesis" as
an antidote to the conceptual, he overstates Adorno's despair of
"the concept." What he seems to me to miss is the twofold ambition
of Adorno's project, to redeem the mimetic and the concept /both./
Hence Tiedemann presents as Adorno's utopian escape from (not
"rescue" of or in) "the medium of the concept," the program
announced in Adorno's 1931 inaugural lecture, "The Actuality of
Philosophy": "/interpretation of images/" (132; italics
Tiedemann's), which proposes, Tiedemann's argues, a "mimesis"
secured against, or insulated from, conceptualization by reason of
its grounding in the "historical image" or "dialectical image"
that Adorno theorized in collaboration with Benjamin--and in
which, again, "concretization" is a driving motivation. (Tiedemann
quotes a letter to Adorno, in which Benjamin characterized the
Arcades Project as testing "the extent to which it is possible to
be 'concrete' in the context of the philosophy of history" [132].)
The image, especially the photographic image, figures as guarantor
of the concrete, and only the more poignantly when the image is of
(say) a Paris vanished long ago. (Nadar was for Benjamin what
Atget and Lartigue are for us.) Benjamin, more hopefully and more
naively than Adorno, construes the photographic concrete as other
and antidote to "aura." (Post-Baudrillard, it may rather appear as
an "aura" in its own right.) In any case, and however illusorily,
the photograph quite affectingly preserves the vanished historical
past; with Benjamin's Baudelairean sense of evanescence in mind
(and compare Adorno's "Idea of Natural History") we might liken
this "preserving" to the more conservative prong of the twofold,
"cancel-and-preserve" /Aufhebung/-effect. As for the other prong,
the "dialectical image" mobilizes its "power of the negative"
precisely in its presentation of the vanished past. The image, we
might say, enacts that double-rescue evoked above: preserving a
vanished past, but also preserving its own concreteness against
the liabilities of hypostatization and abstraction ("bad content")
imperiling "the concept."[14 <#foot14>]
28.
But Adorno also had his differences from Benjamin, best documented
in their 1938 correspondence (some call it a "debate") following
Adorno's rejection of Benjamin's "Baudelaire" essay. Most
relevantly for us, this dispute hinged on the stasis of "the
image," its stillness, its fixed-ness. As Adorno wrote later, in
critical /hommage/ to his friend:
[Benjamin] was drawn to the petrified, frozen or obsolete
elements of civilization, to everything in it devoid of
domestic vitality . . . . The French word for still-life,
/nature morte/, could be written above the portals of his
philosophical dungeons . . . . Benjamin's thought is so
saturated with culture as its natural object that it swears
loyalty to reification instead of flatly rejecting it . . .
the glance of his philosophy is Medusan. (Prisms 233)
Adorno wants a critical "mimesis" that will imitate not merely the
static object, but the "dialectical movement" of "theory" in agon
with it, the "kinetic force of the concept" that struggles to
"negate" the merely given. About the "Baudelaire" essay, Adorno
complained that:
the mediation which I miss, and find obscured by
materialistic-historical evocation, is simply the theory which
your study has omitted . . . one could say that your study is
located at the crossroads of magic and positivism. The spot is
bewitched. Only theory could break this spell--your own
resolute and salutarily speculative theory. It is simply the
claim of this theory that I bring against you here. (Complete
Correspondence 281-83)
In other words, Benjamin's "ascetic refusal of interpretation" has
shirked "mediation" and "theory," a.k.a. "the labor of the
concept."[15 <#foot15>] If "concept" is to "image" as "subject" is
to "object," Benjamin's "materialistic-historical evocation" has
overstressed the "object" in its effort to bypass "theory," and
the problematics attaching to the agency, the "subject," of
theory. (Benjamin is explicit that this is the motive of his
"literary montage": "I needn't /say/ anything. Merely show"
[Arcades 476].) By contrast, Adorno's "negations" always evince
the agency of the critical subject (alias "theory" in the
quotation just cited)--a contrast of critical /theory/
substantiated most palpably in writing /practice/, in the contrast
between Benjamin's "/nature-morte/" mimesis of "dialectics at a
standstill" that lays Benjamin's prose itself under the Medusan
pall of a stasis-effect, versus the agitations of Adorno's
energetic and volatile, even hyperactive writing. If Benjamin's
method wants (to adapt MallarmÃ(c)) to /aboutir dans un image/,
Adorno's reversal of that direction is signaled in the adviso from
Dialectic of Enlightenment that "dialectic . . . interprets every
image as writing" (24, Cumming translation). The "image" is to be
"reliquified" into writing, a writing that pulses with "the
kinetic force of the concept."
29. This kinesis--this aspiration to enact "process" and "the negation
of presentation as congealed"--is part of what makes Adorno's
writing so challenging, so agitated, so energetic, so difficult,
and not only for us to read, but also (such was the challenge he
imposed on himself) for Adorno to write. And here, too, Hegel
serves as a cautionary example, insofar as it is Hegel's
commitment, tonally or stylistically as much as substantively, to
"happy consciousness" that betrays his radical premises,
"regresses behind his dialectical content." Thus does Hegel's way
of writing, his "sovereign indifference" to language,
compromise--and not, contra Hegel, in a providentially good
way--what Hegel "meant to mean":
In the Phenomenology Hegel still wanted to believe that
[philosophical] experience could simply be described. But
intellectual experience can be expressed only by being
reflected in its mediation--that is, actively thought. There
is no way to make the intellectual experience expressed and
the medium of thought irrelevant to one another. What is false
in Hegel's philosophy manifests itself precisely in the notion
that with enough conceptual effort it could realize this kind
of irrelevance. (Hegel 138)
To "realize this kind of irrelevance": it's a cheeky formula for
Hegel's noble hankering after an "Absolute knowledge" that would
break free from "the medium," language, altogether--as if, in
aspiring to the transcendence of the "end of art," Hegel
contravened the very condition, the achieved immanence, of his own
"Absolute philosophy":
He who entrusts himself to Hegel will be led to the threshold
at which a decision must be made about Hegel's claim to truth.
He becomes Hegel's critic by following him. From the point of
view of understanding, the incomprehensible in Hegel is the
scar left by identity-thinking. Hegel's dialectical philosophy
gets into a dialectic it cannot account for and whose solution
is beyond its omnipotence. Within the system, and in terms of
the laws of the system, the truth of the nonidentical
manifests itself as error, as unresolved, in the other sense
of being unmastered, as the untruth of the system; and nothing
that is untrue can be understood. Thus the incomprehensible
explodes the system. (Hegel 146-47)
That last quotation, from the closing paragraph--i.e., the
peroration--of "Skoteinos" (Hegel 146-47) pulses with high
energies: the "scar," the problem "beyond omnipotence," the
"incomprehensible" that "explodes"--on the
next-to-last-page!--Hegel's mighty "system": this is a peroration,
even by Adorno's standards, of unusual force, /ore rotondo, multo
con brio/.
30. How words on a page can propose a system and then "explode" it
would be hard, indeed impossible, to explain according to
/adequatio/ conceptions of language, those ruled by the
"logocentric metaphysics" of "representation." (And, by the way,
/whose/ words? Is it Adorno who has exploded Hegel's system, or is
it Hegel who has exploded it despite himself, and even
unawares?--as in the rhetoric of de Man and Derrida, according to
which texts less suffer deconstruction at the hands of the critic
than "deconstruct themselves.") Yet an /adequatio/ acceptation of
language proves, as the peroration continues (we know Adorno's
penchant for long paragraphs), to have persisted in Hegel's
thinking-and-writing, which is to say that Adorno here diagnoses
how Hegel himself falls victim to "the bad content of language,"
the falsifying "universality"-effect that implies, that can only
arise from, a logocentric metaphysics of "representation," of
thing and word conceived on the model of original and copy, of
which the telling symptom in Hegel is the motif of "identity":
For all his emphasis on negativity, division, and nonidentity,
Hegel actually takes cognizance of that dimension only . . .
as an instrument of identity . . . . This is where the
idealist dialectic commits its fallacy. It says, with pathos,
nonidentity. Nonidentity is to be defined . . . as something
heterogeneous. But by defining it nonetheless, the dialectic
imagines itself to have gone beyond nonidentity and be assured
of absolute identity. (Hegel 147)
It is as if Hegel complacently inferred, from all his
/Geisteswanderung/, that "the identity of identity and
nonidentity" really were so simply an identity, and not always and
necessarily an irreducible nonidentity as well. (Why Adorno
appears /not/ to be hoist by his own pÃ(c)tard insofar as his own
"negative dialectics" seems to undertake a comparably "absolute
[rather than "determinate"] negation" of "identity" is a rum
question, which may one day seem richly symptomatic for our
period.)[16 <#foot16>] But it is along these lines that the
closing sentences of "Skoteinos" aim to clinch a critique of Hegel
in which the /philosophical/ lapse can't be disentangled from the
/literary/ lapse, that is, from Hegel's inattention (or "sovereign
indifference") to language as the fundamental condition of "the
concept":
One cannot move from the logical movement of concepts to
existence. According to Hegel there is a constitutive need for
the nonidentical in order for concepts, identity, to come into
being; just as conversely there is a need for the concept in
order to become aware of the nonconceptual, the nonidentical.
But Hegel violates his own concept of the dialectic, which
should be defended against him, by not violating it, by
closing it off and making it the supreme unity, free of
contradiction. (Hegel 147)
For Adorno, as we have seen, "contradiction" is virtually a
condition (necessary, not sufficient) of truth; again, our
administered world's "objective contradictoriness" (Negative
Dialectics 151) is just the "truth content" critical writing must
try to express. The very last words of "Skoteinos" are these:
only by a Münchhausen trick, by pulling itself up by its own
bootstraps, could [dialectic] eliminate the moment that cannot
be fully absorbed, a moment that is posited along with it.
What causes the dialectic problems is the truth content that
needs to be derived from it. The dialectic could be consistent
only in sacrificing consistency by following its own logic to
the end. These, and nothing less, are the stakes in
understanding Hegel. (Hegel 147-48)
These, and nothing less, are the stakes of Adorno's own project.
"The dialectic that eludes literary representation," the
"inexpressible" that the writing of critique obliges itself to
(try to) express, are burdens incumbent on the imperative to
express /both/ the ideological condition /and/ (or rather, by way
of) its critical "negation." Its /critical/ (sc. "determinate")
negation, not (Ã la Hegel) its /utopian/ ("absolute") negation:
Adorno's diagnosis of Hegel's failures here implies the program of
his own critical activity. The "embittering part of dialectics"
(Negative Dialectics 151), the principled "unhappy consciousness"
of critique, prescribe a "taboo on utopia" precisely as
prophylaxis against all "imaginary solutions" and false
(ideological) consolations, which can look to some like
"defeatism," what one commentator has drily diagnosed in
left-discourses generally as a "will-to-powerlessness" (Niethammer
138-42). Hence the prohibitive conflictedness of what Adorno's
labored "immanent critique," his critical writing, "the chemism of
[Adorno's] own linguistic form" (Hegel 109), his "literary
presentation," aims to express: the "objectivity of [social]
contradiction" (Negative Dialectics 151-53), to cite one of his
pithier formulations, or "dialectics at a standstill," to cite
another he borrows from Walter Benjamin (e.g., Arcades 463, 865,
911). Adorno's critical performative must perform both the
"standstill" /and/ the "dialectic," both the "contradiction" /and/
the "objectivity," both the promise and its broken-ness--both the
utopia, so to speak, /and/ the ideology.[17 <#foot17>]
/ Department of English
University of Delaware
helmling@udel.edu /
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Notes
1 <#ref1>. See my "Constellation and Critique" and "'Immanent
Critique' and 'Dialectical Mimesis.'"
2 <#ref2>. Apart from a few asides, Nicholsen's Exact Imagination
considers "Skoteinos" only briefly (91-93) in connection with
Adorno's critique of "clarity," a point reprised in a broader
context in the "Introduction," co-authored with Jeremy J. Shapiro,
to her translation of Hegel: Three Studies, in which "Skoteinos"
is the concluding "study" (Hegel xxv-xxxiii). J.M. Bernstein, in
his essay "Negative Dialectic as Fate: Adorno and Hegel" (Huhn
19-50), cites "Skoteinos" for what it implies about Adorno's sense
of the limits of "the concept" (on which, more later).
3 <#ref3>. See, especially, the last three chapters and the
"Epilogue" in Warminski. This would be the place to mention as
well de Man's two essays specifically on Hegel, "Sign and Symbol
in Hegel's Aesthetics" and "Hegel on the Sublime."
4 <#ref4>. This gambit is not original with me. Nicholsen and
Shapiro write that Adorno's Three Studies critiques Hegel but also
serves as "Adorno's self-defense in the medium of Hegel" (Hegel
xxix-xxx), and J.M. Bernstein confides, in "Negative Dialectic as
Fate," that he likewise takes "Skoteinos" as "explicating 'How to
Read Adorno'" (Huhn 39), though it's not particularly a premise of
that essay.
5 <#ref5>. Hegel's most recent biographer argues that Hegel's
writing practice was crucially influenced by Hölderlin's
proto-"modernist" example (Pinkard 82, 676n79).
6 <#ref6>. It is also the subject of the second of Adorno's "Three
Studies" of Hegel: "The Experiential Content of Hegel's
Philosophy" (Hegel 53-88).
7 <#ref7>. For more on this, see Nicholsen 93.
8 <#ref8>. For Jean-Luc Nancy on this passage, see Speculative
Remark 10-19; on "the proposition," see 73-101. For Hamacher's
reading, see Pleroma 5-8, 78, and the following note.
9 <#ref9>. See Warminski 163-79 for a detailed reading of Hegel's
treatment, in the "Sense-Certainty" chapter of the Phenomenology,
of "the 'this' and meaning"--instantiation, for Hegel, of the
ineluctable universality of language, insofar as apodictics like
"this," "here," and "now" designate not only "this" particular
(here, now), but also, more abstractly, particularity in general,
particularity as such, particularity as (oxymoronic as it sounds)
universal. For Hamacher's reading of these passages, see Pleroma
206-19. Hamacher stresses the "now" more than the "this," in order
to elicit the subl(im)ated sacramentalism in Hegel's pleromatics
of "the time of reading" (and of writing). Hamacher is especially
suggestive on Hegel's metaphors of eating (communion, the Mass,
the Last Supper, etc.), ingestion of food being an operation in
which "this" meal becomes my nourishment for "now" that, while
time-limited, stakes some claim on the eternal. Hamacher quotes
Hegel on how sense-certainty, like writing (like digestion),
evacuates what it feeds on: "In order to test the truth of this
sensuous certainty a simple experiment is all that is required. We
write this truth down . . . . When we look again /now, today/, at
the written truth, we shall have to say that it has become stale"
(Phenomenology 60; qtd. Pleroma 208). Oddly, Hamacher's discussion
of the same passages on the "proposition" that I quote above
passes over Hegel's dizzying observation that "we learn by
experience that we meant something other than we meant to mean;
and this correction of our meaning compels our knowing to go back
to the proposition, and understand it in some other way"
(Phenomenology 39)--for here Hegel suggests that if writing can
"stale [sense's] infinite variety," it can also, as speculative,
open access to constant freshness. For Adorno, by contrast, the
danger of staleness (including the dynamic by which radical
expressive innovations become familiarized, conventional,
ideological) is chronic, and the necessary freshness hard to get
at best, and most of the time "impossible."
10 <#ref10>. For a lucid exposition of this aspect of the
Kant-Adorno relation and its relevance to Adorno's socio-political
concerns, see Huhn, "Kant."
11 <#ref11>. For an extended discussion, see my "During Auschwitz."
12 <#ref12>. It's my impression that the impact of Derrida and
deconstruction has encouraged an assimilation of "mimesis" to
"representation"--that is, encouraged suspicion of mimesis's
implication in the same logocentric problem of /adequatio/,
original and copy, presence and absence, noumenon and phenomenon,
etc., that entails representation, reference, and language at
large. Martin Jay helpfully refines this picture by making
explicit a point often left implicit in accounts of what Adorno
took from Benjamin, namely that Benjamin projected "mimesis" (and
"dialectical image," "allegory," etc.) as variously alternative
to, evasion of, or complexifying supplement to the Platonic
metaphysic. Benjamin's quest was for some degree of ontological
restitution of disenchanted modernity's traumatic losses; Adorno's
more "materialist" and "nominalist" rigor was famously
inhospitable to Benjamin's "Platonizing residues," but the point
remains that for Adorno, the liabilities of "mimesis" as ideology
(from the sympathetic magic of prehistory to the
fantasy-identifications encouraged by the culture industry's "mass
deception") provoke potentials of resistance in artistic
"semblance"--to "negative," that is to say critical, effect. I
have elaborated this under the rubric of "dialectical mimesis" in
"'Immanent Critique' and 'Dialectical Mimesis'"; see also Michael
Cahn. On Adorno's debts to and differences from Benjamin, see
Nicholsen's Exact Imagination, chapters 4 and 5.
13 <#ref13>. For the pleasure of it:
Hegel has a twofold expectation of the reader, not ill-suited
to the nature of the dialectic. The reader is to float along,
to let himself be borne by the current and not to force the
momentary to linger. Otherwise he would change it, despite and
through the greatest fidelity to it. On the other hand, the
reader has [also] to develop a slow-motion procedure, to slow
down the tempo at the cloudy places in such a way that they do
not evaporate and their motion can be seen. It is rare that
the two modes of operation fall to the same act of reading.
The act of reading has to separate into its polarities like
the content itself. . . . With Hegel philosophy becomes the
activity of looking at and describing the movement of the
concept. (Hegel 123-4)
It seems a warrantable inference, though Adorno doesn't make the
point explicitly, that it is "the movement of the concept" that
renders the concept phenomenal, transitive, negative, and thereby
makes Hegel's "looking at and describing" it ineluctably mimetic.
14 <#ref14>. See especially Tiedemann 132-35. Zuidervaart,
concerned to ground Adorno's politics and aesthetic
philosophically, usefully stages this operation in the rather
different terms of "sublation and imitation" (180-82).
15 <#ref15>. For more on this see my "Constellation and Critique,"
especially paragraphs 22-23.
16 <#ref16>. Rose makes something like this argument in her
fascinating essay, "From Speculative to Dialectical Thinking:
Hegel and Adorno." Rose's argument is brief (indeed, it's a
conference paper) but profound, and remarkable not least because
it defends Hegel against Adorno, in effect turning Adorno's
critique of Hegel back on Adorno himself. "Adorno reduces
[Hegel's] /speculative/ to /dialectical/ thinking, replacing
recollections of the whole by judged oppositions" (54)--that is,
it's not Hegel who betrays the dialectic by making it serve
"identity," but Adorno who betrays "the speculative" by confusing
it with, and confining it to, a reflexively antinomic thought-tic
that reifies what Hegel aimed to loosen. Through the nineteenth
century--indeed, through the young Lukács--the argument over Hegel
was, who were his real legatees, Left-Hegelians, or Right-? The
premise was that Hegel's legacy was property worth fighting for
title to. Since Stalin and Hitler, Hegel has looked like a
Panglossian apologist for totalitarian or authoritarian statism,
and Adorno's critique of Hegel has usually been welcomed in that
spirit. (This bias discounts Adorno's effort to validate what can
still be potent in Hegel.) But Rose goes daringly against the
grain in valuing Hegel against modern anti-Hegelians from
Nietzsche on: in addition to the essay just cited, see her
remarkable brief for (in effect) "happy consciousness," "The
Comedy of Hegel and the /Trauerspiel/ of Modern Philosophy."
17 <#ref17>. For more on Adorno's recurrences to Benjamin's
"dialectics at a standstill," see my "Constellation and Critique"
paragraphs 2-13, and "'Immanent Critique' and 'Dialectical
Mimesis'" 113-17.
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