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MARTIN JAY Adorno Martin Jay Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts Copyright © 1984 by Martin Jay All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Jay, Martin, 1944- Adorno. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Adorno, Theodor W., 1903-1969. 2. Sociologists-Germany (West)-Biography. 3. Frankfurt school of sociology. I. Title. HM22.G3A331984 193 [B] 84-3821 ISBN 0-674-00514-7 ISBN 0-674-00515-5 (paper) For Leo, our mutual friend Contents Acknowledgments 9 Introduction 11 1. A Damaged Life 24 2. Atonal Philosophy 56 3. The Fractured Totality: Spciety and the Psyche 82 4. Culture as Manipulation; Culture as Redemption 111 Conclusion 161 Notes 164 Short Bibliography 188 Index 193 Acknowledgments Susan Buck-Morss, Eugene Lunn, Richard Wolin and Lambert Zuidervaart, each of whom has written distin guished works on Adorno, have kindly read this book in manuscript. I have also benefited from the careful scrutiny of my wife, Catherine Gallagher, and the editor of this series, Frank Kermode. But my greatest debt is owed to Leo Lowenthal, to whom this book is affectionately dedi cated. His friendship with Adorno began in 1921 and lasted for forty-eight years. Ours began in 1968, when I first started working on the Frankfurt School. May it last as long. Introduction 'Wahr sind nur die Gedanken, die sich seIber nicht verstehen. '1 THEODOR w. ADORNO Adorno, let it be admitted at the outset, would have been appalled at a book of this kind devoted to him. The reason would not have been any reluctance on his part to assume the title of 'modern master'; excessive modesty was not one of his more noteworthy personal failings. Rather, Adorno would have had a principled objection to any attempt to render his thought painlessly accessible to a wide audience. True philosophy, he was fond of insisting, is the type of thinking that resists paraphrase. When his friend Siegfried Kracauer once complained of a feeling of dizziness produced by reading one of Adorno's works, he was testily told that only by absorbing all of thep:;t could the meaning of anyone be genuinely grasped. Like the music of Arnold Schoenberg, which, so Adorno approvingly claimed, demanded of the listener 'not mere contemplation but praxis' / his own writing was de liberately designed to thwart an effortless reception by passive readers. In accordance with his dictum, 'the splin ter in your eye is the best magnifying glass',3 Adorno refused to present his complicated and nuanced ideas in simplified fashion. Charging the advocates of easy com municability with undermining the critical substance of what they claimed to communicate, he vigorously defied the imperative to reduce difficult thoughts into the con versational style of everyday lang~age. What he once complained about in Heidegger could perhaps as a result 11 Adorno be extended to him as well: 'He lays around himself the taboo that any understanding of him would simul· taneously be falsification. '4 Adorno, in fact, was highly suspicious of any attempt to extricate the content of ideas from the form of their pre sentation. The artistic side of his temperament bridled at the suggestion that thought could be reduced to a series of unequivocal and straightforward propositions unaffected by the mode and context of their expression. When an American publisher in 1949 balked at translating his Philosophy of Modern Music into English because it was 'badly organized's and a well-meaning editor of an American journal recast one of Adorno's essays to clarify its argument, Adorno decided it was time to return to his native Germany. Not only would he t;scape the homogenizing tyranny of what he, and his collaborator Max Horkheimer, called the 'culture industry', but he also would be able once again to write entirely in German, a language which he claimed had 'a special elective affinity to philosophy and indeed to its speculative moment'. 6 His special brand of that tongue, which became known as 'Adorno Deutsch', was highly controversial, praised by some for its subtlety and flexibility, damned by others for what Karl Popper called 'simply talking trivialities in high sounding language' .7 However one appraises it, Adorno's style stubbornly resists effective translation. The first courageous souls to attempt to render one of his books into English affixed a cautionary preface entitled 'Translating the Untranslat able'.8 Since that initial effort, which was made in the mid-1960s, a number of other Adorno texts have been translated, although with somewhat uneven results. Perhaps significantly, in only a single case has a translator of one work been willing to try his or her hand on another.9 Although, therefore, a selection of Adorno's writing is now available to English-speaking readers, it has been difficult to avoid the sense of missing something essential in our reception of his thought. 12 Introduction Inevitable pangs of bad conscience must as a result accompany any attempt to capture Adorno in an intro ductory work of this kind written in a language other than German. Or at least they become inevitable once we take seriously his desire to resist the domestication of his ideas, rather than interpret it as merely a defence against making his actual arguments available for critical scrutiny or, what is perhaps worse, a weakness for what Arthur Lovejoy once called the metaphysical pathos of obscurity. Given Adorno's slashing critique of middle-brow culture's attempt to provide an instant veneer of sophistication - the 'familiar melodies from the great composers' syndrome - it is difficult to avoid feeling somewhat complicitous with the forces he sought so strenuously to subvert. If, however, the paralysing effects of this guilt are to be at least in part overcome, two consolations suggest them selves. First, the now commonplace argument that the importance of textsjs irreducible to the iQtentionality of their authors allows us to escape somewhat from the hold Adorno, like many other writers, wanted to exert over the reception of his work.1O There are, we now know, jnevit able impulses towards familiarization in the reading of all texts; we cannot fully escape the need to have them make sense for us. When we go one step further and try to rewrite them in another form, the effects of this process are intensified. To try to reproduce the original arguments in a manner wholly commensurate with their original style results in what looks more like a parody than a tribute, however it may be intended. Nor should we forget that those original texts come to us mediated by the interven ing cultural space which includes previous interpretations and misinterpretations. If, as Adorno's friends Walter BenjamIn and Leo Lowenthal liked to argue, the effects of a text, desired or not, are part of its meaning, then Adorno's 'work' now includes its historical impact. In a sense, then, even the commentaries that some may dis miss as mere primers for the fainthearted keep alive the energies unleashed by a creative intelligence. 13 Adorno Or more correctly, they contribute to that process if they fail to serve as complete surrogates for the original texts. The second justification for writing a study such as this is precisely the certainty of that failure. For however much skill or effort can be expended in trying to contain Adorno's achievement in so short a compass, its explosive power will surely burst through and make obvious to any reader the insufficiency of such an endeavour. It is, in fact, my hope that rather than foreclosing any further contact with Adorno's 'raw' texts, whether in German or translation, this exercise will persuade its readers of the value of addressing them directly. Although it is too much to ask, as Adorno did of Kracauer, to master his entire corpus - now in the process of being collected into twenty three volumes by the Suhrkamp Verlag - the imperative to read his own words is especially powerful. For only then will the salutary inverse of this book's inevitable effect be achieved: that estrangement or defamiliarization of our own given ideas which results from any genuine encounter with an intellectual master, modern or otherwise. If our initial move towards domestication has an ultimate justification, it is, I would argue, only in the encouragement of that encounter. Although, then, we cannot be entirely faithful to Adorno's thought and its mode of presentation, we can nonetheless suggest some of its richness by applying two of his favourite metaphors to his own intellectual career. In so doing, we may be able to convey some of the creative tensions within that career without resolving them into what Adorno once called, in reference to the literary criticisms of Georg Lukacs, an 'extorted reconcili ation'.l1 The first of these is the force-field (Kraftfeld), by which Adorno meant a relational interplay of attractions and aversions that constituted the dynamic, trans mutational structure of a complex phenomenon. The sec ond is the constellation, an astronomical term Adorno borrowed from Benjamin to signify a juxtaposed rather 14
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