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Literary Research/Recherche littéraire 21.41-42 (2004): 298-303 Exploring Adorno’s Dialectic Tom Huhn, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Adorno. New York: Cambridge UP, 2004; 428 pp.; ISBN: 0521775000 (pbk.); LC call no.: B3199.A34C36 As experience is rheumatic – and the recognition of a new one is often crippling – why wonder that our relationship to it is ambivalent? We wish to understand and be understood, to judge and be judged, but, for the most part, we fear the attendant pains accompanying these experiences, because they transform us at our weakest joints, signalling the sad farewell to the youthful and innocent creatures we were, while guiltily greeting the new necessities of an old life. We simultaneously yearn for, and shun experience. This polyvalent contradiction motivates Adorno’s thinking, in which experience and the contradiction just mentioned, are not merely problems of ‘what’ and ‘how,’ but also of ‘when’ and ‘why.’ In juggling the metaphysical, epistemological, socio-historical, and aesthetic problems of experience, Adorno dexterously assembles his critical theory and negative dialectic. Moreover, it is only in this constellation that Adorno’s concept of experience is legible, and only with this concept is his negative dialectic articulate. In short, the negative dialectic, and the experiences it hopes to make possible require objects that appear to be located wholly outside of philosophy. As he puts it in Negative Dialectics: Philosophical contents can only be grasped where philosophy does not impose them.… Its substance would lie in the diversity of the objects it seeks…. To those objects philosophy would truly give itself rather than use them as a mirror in which to reread itself, mistaking its own image for concretion. It would be nothing but full, unreduced experience in the medium of conceptual reflection. (13) In light of this, Brian O’Connor’s Adorno’s Negative Dialectic is startling. For while O’Connor rightly argues that Adorno’s negative dialectic is to be [end page 298] understood as the “foundation of the sort of reflexivity – the critical stance – required by critical theory” (ix), he also holds, rather reductively, that “Adorno sees it as his task to establish a new form of [theoretical] philosophy that through a metacritique of epistemology will be capable of rescuing the idea [in its vernacular sense] of experience” (3). While this purely epistemological sketch of Adorno’s work may initially appear to be accurate, even appealing, the whole it represents distorts – though admittedly in a provocative way – Adorno’s thought by hypostasizing an aspect of it: the subject-object relation, whose mediation is the experience of a subjective determination of an object. This experience, however, when recognized as a conceptual determination of the object, and thus as extrinsic to the object itself, repositions the subject by acceding to the social, historical, metaphysical, or aesthetic priority of the object in order to preserve in experience a ‘moment’ of non-identity intrinsic to experience. This negative moment of recognition initially allows for the differentiation and relation between a distinctly particular subject and an object via a concept, which – in a critical investigation – expresses its epistemological limitation in terms of the difference between what is known and experienced, and what emphatically exists. “In truth,” Adorno says, “the subject is never quite the subject, and the object never quite the object; and yet the two are not pieced together out of any third that transcends them” (Negative Dialectics, 175). However, “the difference between subject and object cannot be simply negated. They are neither an ultimate duality nor a screen hiding ultimate unity. They constitute each other as much as – by virtue of such constitution – they depart from each other” (ibid., 174). But this is just to say that, for Adorno, the epistemological and conceptual limitation, which the negative dialectic uncovers in its first moment, implies a metaphysical horizon, which must subsequently be critically expanded in order to understand what these epistemological and conceptual limitations are. In short, Adorno’s retraction of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries’ epistemological warrant to know something in its entirety correlatively implies a metaphysical expansion of the possible practices of knowing, without positing the eventual coincidence of knowledge and being. Against this understanding of Adorno’s dialectic, for which J.M. Bernstein argues with nuance in his contribution to The Cambridge Companion to Adorno (19-50), O’Connor pursues his purely epistemo-logical agenda by focusing on Adorno’s concept of experience and his negative dialectic as a reaction against eighteenth- and nineteenth-century epistemology, and to the competing philosophical approaches of Heidegger and Husserl. This is reflected in the explanatory progression of O’Connor’s book. Chapter 1 (“The Role of German Idealism in the Negative Dialectic,” 15-43) outlines and explains the Kantian and Hegelian [end page 299] tendencies in Adorno’s negative dialectic; Chapters 2 and 3 (“The Structure of Adorno’s Epistemology: The Priority of The Object,” 45-69, and “The Structure of Adorno’s Epistemology: The Role of Subjectivity,” 71-98) then proceed to show how these two tendencies inform Adorno’s unique conception of the dialectic; finally, chapters 4 and 5 (“The Critique of Kant,” 99-126, and “Adorno on Husserl and Heidegger,” 127-64) identify and explain Adorno’s critical engagements and differences with the philosophers mentioned. This analytical structure emphasizes a laudable – though unfathomably alien to Adorno – effort on O’Connor’s part. In cleaving Adorno’s work at its apparent joints, O’Connor proceeds to interpret Adorno’s work (primarily Against Epistemology and Negative Dialectics) from an Anglo-American, i.e. ‘analytical’ perspective, despite the fact that, as Robert Hullot-Kentor remarks, Adorno’s work, and Aesthetic Theory in particular, “is written in utter opposition to what we [Anglo-Americans] are” (Cambridge Companion, 195). This approach allows O’Connor to emphasize the potential points of contact between philosophers like Wilfred Sellars, Thomas Nagel, and John Searle, as well as Adorno’s relevance to contemporary debates in the philosophy of mind (“Appendix: Subjectivity and Its Irreducibility – an Adornian Alternative,” 92-8). This might make Adorno’s work palatable and accessible to a broader audience (just as his presentation of Hegelian dialectics – in particular of the master/slave dialectic – is sure to make Hegel comprehensible to the analytically inclined). Unfortunately, O’Connor’s effort to popularize Adorno’s negative dialectic seriously undermines the accuracy of his analysis. Indeed, O’Connor’s attempt to explicate the negative dialectic to the analytical philosopher may explain his strictly epistemological bias, and his glossing over of a number of crucial themes in Adorno, such as the latter’s adoption (and, arguably, refashioning) of Benjamin’s “constellation” and “mimesis” (though Benjamin is alluded to in the context of Adornian materialism, 59-65). This absence becomes acutely problematic when O’Connor identifies and discusses the three distinct concepts of subjectivity present in Adorno’s work (84-92). He concludes that “[f]rom what we have seen we cannot say that Adorno offers a rigorous synthetic theory of subjectivity, but he certainly has a number of important views that add up to an interesting position” (92). The typical Adornian response to O’Connor’s conclusion would be twofold: first, that a systemic account of subjectivity – an uncritical theory – subordinates a concrete subject to the conceptual system, and thereby liquidates the individual. Such an outcome is anathema for Adorno’s critical theory. Second, by ignoring the constellation formed by these distinct, though nevertheless interactive conceptions of subjectivity, O’Connor cannot see that “[a]s a constellation, theoretical thought circles the concept [end page 300] [of subjectivity] it would like to unseal, hoping that it may fly open the lock of a well guarded safe-deposit box: in response, not to a single key or single number, but to a combinations of numbers” (Negative Dialectics, 162). On at least this issue, O’Connor’s popularization of Adorno’s thought is fundamentally wrong – and this error is worrying, since it calls into question the intended readership of Adorno’s Negative Dialectic. If, on the one hand, O’Connor’s book is intended as an introduction to Adorno’s philosophy for the analytic philosopher, it misrepresents Adorno by excising crucial components of Adorno’s work. If, on the other hand, O’Connor’s analysis is intended for the specialized Adorno scholar, which might justify his intentionally narrow epistemological focus, then the absence of any mention of fundamental Adornian notions – if only en passant – is a serious and disorienting oversight. O’Connor’s account, then, perpetuates the contradiction of experience we began with, instead of explicating its historical, metaphysical, aesthetical, and conceptual development, whose successful articulation would alleviate our pain and thus resolve the contradiction. To remedy the ‘rheumatism’ inherent to experience, O’Connor amputates the afflicted limbs. He reduces experience to the epistemological difference between subject and object. And this amputation is manifested in O’Connor’s explicit refusal to engage the historical, sociological, and aesthetic relations between art and philosophy. As he puts it, “No book-length examination [of Adorno’s dialectic] has yet appeared in English […] and those in German have tended to interpret Adorno’s philosophical work through the framework of his writings on aesthetics and sociology” (x). While he does goes on to note that it is “perfectly permissible” to engage Adorno’s dialectic from this interdisciplinary perspective, “it comes with the built-in disadvantage that it does not address the purely philosophical justifications that Adorno actually gives for the various claims made in his negative dialectic” (ibid.). Both of O’Connor’s assertions contain errors. First, and perhaps trivially, at least one book-length study of Adorno’s dialectic has been published in English prior to his – namely Yvonne Sherratt’s Adorno’s Positive Dialectic (Cambridge UP, 1996). Second, and disastrously for O’Connor’s book, his disciplinarily disfigured account (which treats aesthetics as a distinct discipline from philosophy) is incapable of grasping a fundamental tenet of Adorno’s synthetic approach to philosophy and art. “Both keep faith with their own substance through their opposites: art by making itself resistant to its meanings” (Negative Dialectics, 15), and thereby remaining non-identical for as long as we treat of an object as a work of art; “philosophy by refusing to clutch at any immediate thing” (ibid.), and hence to automatically identify an object as an exemplum of a concept. Philosophy allows a work of art to continue living by recognizing the non-identity of cognition with its object. [end page 301] O’Connor’s attempt to ‘rehabilitate’ Adorno’s work to fit within a ‘purely philosophical’ framework robs his philosophy of the content he is trying to set free. Furthermore, the ‘built-in disadvantage’ of interdisciplinary research is one of the cardinal virtues of Adorno’s approach: philosophy is not hermetic, nor is it an otiose dabbling at a history of ideas. Thankfully, the collective effort of The Cambridge Companion to Adorno, edited by Tom Huhn, does not suffer from the same confusions or errors as O’Connor’s book. Huhn’s editorial work elegantly fashions a book for its intended audience, while also containing discussions of considerable interest to the Adorno scholar. Furthermore, it demonstrates that a book-length treatment of a particular aspect of Adorno’s work is not necessary to explain it, nor that a lucid introduction to a thinker as notoriously difficult as Adorno requires a dearth of complexity. All that is needed is a superlative understanding of Adorno. To illustrate, I need only refer to J.M. Bernstein’s contribution to the volume, titled “Negative Dialectic as Fate: Adorno and Hegel” (19-50). Not only is Bernstein’s essay an excellent corrective to many of the problems found in O’Connor’s book, but it also identifies, in a superbly Adornian manner, the transitions and transformations between the metaphysical, historical, epistemological, and aesthetic elements in Adorno’s work. As Bernstein points out, in Adorno, “the governing speculative proposition, his version of the identification of subject and substance, is that history and nature are one, whose fullest expression is the claim that philosophy, as the domain of the presumptively autonomous concept, and art, as the practice that preserves the materiality of the sign, are one” (20). Bersntein’s acuity is characteristic of the Companion’s presentation of Adorno’s work, and Huhn’s elegant collection does justice to many of the fundamental relations in Adorno’s corpus. Moreover, since the Companion does not restrict itself to the purely dialectical facets of Adorno’s philosophy, Huhn and his contributors can, from as many vantages as possible, attempt to untangle the contradiction of experience. To this end, Robert Hullot-Kentor (“Right Listening and a New Type of Human Being,” 181-97), Max Paddison (“Authenticity and Failure in Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music,” 198-221), and Lydia Goehr (“Dissonant Works and the Listening Public,” 222-47) explain why Adorno’s philosophy of music (and art in general) is such an important feature of Adorno’s philosophical project. They develop the simple fact that, for Adorno, if an aesthetic object were completely successful in expressing its content, there would be no need to create more works of art. The artistic impulse could rest, fully consummated. However, the material fact that works of art continue to be produced means that there has been no truly successful work of art. And in order to understand this, [end page 302] the philosophy of art requires an articulate notion of aesthetic production and consumption, and a criterion of success by which the production and consumption of a work of art can be assessed. But such a criterion cannot be formally or abstractly determined. It must be read from the current conditions of Art – and these conditions are historical and sociological. Moreover, insofar as the criterion of successful production and consumption is normative, and thus opposed to an empty formalism, it requires a critical assessment of the norms governing current production and consumption – the objective conditions and the subjects that these conditions pertain to – in order to determine the legitimacy of the criterion. Thus, the success of artistic production and consumption is intimately related to the current social and historical situation of individuality and morality. Artistic success and failure, for Adorno, is an index of morality. These features of morality and its social situation are further addressed by Stefan Müller-Doohm (“The Critical Theory of Society as Reflexive Sociology,” 271-301), Christoph Menke (“Genealogy and Critique: Two Forms of Ethical Questioning of Morality” 302-27), and Gerhard Schweppenhäuser (“Adorno’s Negative Moral Philosophy,” 328-53). Their essays, in turn, discuss Adorno’s application of the negative dialectic, especially his focus on particular objects of experience in order to free the difference between the object, as it is conventionally understood in its socio-historical context, and the potential meanings this object contains in opposition to its received significance. This surplus of meaning, which has been conceptually subordinated, and the fragile contingency it presents an attentive thinker with bring us full circle – back to both the Companion’s first essay by Bernstein and to the beginning of this review. The rheumatism of experience reveals itself to be the old fear of the contingent and unknown, which Adorno’s dialectic disabuses, but only in relation to the socio-historical, aesthetic, and metaphysical objects that present themselves in their difference and irreducibility to what is and has been known. Adorno’s critical theory thus requires objects completely other than thought in order for thought to be. And experience requires that something never before experienced can be recognized. Both point past the concept, by way of the conceptual. In virtue of these varied, but interconnected approaches to Adorno’s work, The Cambridge Companion to Adorno is a significantly better book than Adorno’s Negative Dialectic, precisely because the Companion remains true to Adorno’s thinking by presenting it within its constellation, and stubbornly refusing to provide reductive, easily digestible deductive arguments on Adorno’s behalf. In understanding its singular purpose to accurately present Adorno’s thought, the Companion offers something to both the student and the specialist.
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