Neglected or Misunderstood: Introducing Theodor Adorno

269 Pages·2017·1.4 MB·English

by  Stuart Walton

First published by Zero Books, 2017
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Text copyright: Stuart Walton 2016
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CONTENTS
Preface and Acknowledgements
Introduction: Nothing Innocuous Left
Chapter 1 Society and the Individual
Chapter 2 History, Philosophy, Politics
Chapter 3 Metamorphosis of the Dialectic
Chapter 4 Aesthetics and the Promise of Happiness
Chapter 5 Cracking the Shells: Adorno in the Present Day
Bibliography
Notes
For Laurence Coupe
Preface and Acknowledgements
It has become customary to begin any study of the work of Theodor W.
Adorno, especially one intended to function in some sense as an
introductory guide, by pointing out that he would have strongly
disapproved of it. More introductory guides were the last thing a
damaged intellectual world needed. What it required instead was
thinking that did not already take its own premises for granted, that
pushed all its thoughts to a dialectical extreme, until, in his celebrated
formulation, they no longer understood themselves as thoughts.
Summarising, explicating, simplifying were the work of a dead academic
tradition that critically failed to understand the profound need for
critical thinking. In a world enmortgaged to the destruction of human
experience, experience itself only lived in the gaps and fissures that
remained in the consciousness of those who had not wholly surrendered,
guilt-stricken survivors of the twentieth century’s catastrophes as well as
present-day flâneurs in the cultural metropolis.
The present work, then, sits uneasily alongside its companion volumes
on other neglected and misunderstood contemporary theorists. For one
thing, Adorno is hardly neglected. He is a set text, a modern master, a
major thinker, whose theoretical innovations have achieved classic
status, and whose body of theory is held to display obvious continuities
with other modern and postmodern intellectual currents. This was
admittedly not always so in the English-speaking world. When I arrived
in Oxford in 1983 to begin studying for a doctorate on his work, I was
warmly greeted at a sherry evening for new graduates by one of my
college’s senior Fellows with the cordial wish that my scholarly days
would be fruitful, and would result in my finding somebody more
interesting to write about than Adorno. In this latter, I conspicuously
failed, with the result that, more than thirty years later, I have written
the kind of introductory guide for which I can only hope he would have
forgiven me.
On the second point, as to whether his work has been misunderstood,
the answer seems resonantly obvious. In the view of much academic
philosophy and cultural studies, Adorno is a truculent pessimist and
stubborn elitist, the tyrannical father-figure who won’t let you watch TV
until you’ve done your homework, and the monothematically fastidious
representative of a mandarin culture blown aside not so much by the
monstrous evils of his own historical hour, as he himself thought, as by
the democratising jamboree of popular distractions that pitched camp on
its cleared ground, once principally cinema and television, now more the
Internet and video-gaming. A familiar interpretation of his theory of the
culture industry has it that he wanted us to use our leisure time not in
consuming mindless entertainments, but in studying provocative and
challenging artworks and books that would enable us, in the words of a
short online video summary: ‘to expand and develop ourselves… and to
acquire the tools with which to change society’.1 This makes him sound
like a latter-day self-help merchant, a spiritual aerobics instructor for the
masses, urging consumerism’s slobs to get some mental exercise. Not
only did Adorno argue that the links between autonomous artworks and
the victims of a repressive social conformism had been broken, probably
irreparably, but he particularly criticised the capitalist conception of
leisure time as the continuation of laborious duty. The colonisation of
consciousness by the culture industry was such that no straightforward
nostrum for counteracting it was conceivable. Moreover, his social
philosophy is not an injunctive or didactic programme, not a practical
manifesto of any sort, but more a diagnostics of the post-traumatic soul,
the report of an infinitely attentive insight, aware of its own material
historical roots.
A theoretical apparatus can never be frozen outside the onrush of
time, and made applicable to all ages and all societies. It too stands on
the moving platform of history, itself a product of the society in which it
arises. The critical theory of the Frankfurt School, among whose first
generation Adorno played an outstanding role, was more conscious of its
own historical situatedness than most. While it diagnosed the tendencies
of a society careering towards barbarism, it simultaneously suffered the
fate prescribed by those tendencies, being banished on political and
racial grounds to a distant sunny exile, in a social milieu that would
prove to be a preview of the future of Europe after the rain. The very
least one can hope to achieve in a monograph of this nature, against the
impulse to reduce what was once a living stream of thinking to a
summary of key points, is to set it in motion once more, to apply its own
technical procedures to the large subjects it addressed – what western
philosophy knows as the largest subjects of all – and to wonder
constructively what dialectical efficacy might still animate it in the
already fifty-year-old world that has succeeded it.
Terry Eagleton wasn’t at the sherry evening, but nor did he attempt to
wean me off Adorno. His own critical appraisal of Frankfurt School
thought made him an inspiring supervisor, as well as one who
encouraged in my work the indispensable habit of self-reflection. His
influence on this book may be historically distant enough, but remains
present in the textures of its thinking.
I might have stumbled on through half a lifetime in the Anglophone
intellectual habitus before I came upon some reference to Adorno in a
compendium of modern cultural theory, instantly mistaking him for one
of the gloomy uncles of the European philosophical family, had it not
been for Laurence Coupe, who lent me his copy of Prisms when I was
eighteen. Through long nights of wakeful study, I annotated the essays in
it as the most rudimentary means of even partially understanding them.
The essay on Kafka opened unsuspected new horizons of interpretation,
while the demolition of jazz struck a minor-seventh chord in a young
man whose own most recent musical commitment had been to a
movement that wanted to demolish official youth music once and for all.
My sincere gratitude is due to both these intellectual mentors. I would
also like to thank Douglas Lain for his editorial oversight of the book,
the other early readers of the proposal, Christopher Derick Varn and
Alfie Bown, and the book’s copy-editor, Elizabeth Radley.
The rest I owe to my first and greatest teacher, Sheila Walton.
Stuart Walton
November 2016
Introduction: Nothing Innocuous Left
Survival itself has something nonsensical about it.
Minima Moralia
Wilhelmine Germany in the early years of the twentieth century was a
nation in flux. Politically restive at home and reckless abroad, it had
entered a state of constitutional transition after the resignation of the
enfeebled Iron Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, in 1890, early in the reign
of Kaiser Wilhelm II. Wilhelm was not a man for the prudent background
role his grandfather had taken as monarch, but actively intervened in the
affairs of state from day to day, pulling the strings of a succession of
puppet Chancellors as Germany was gradually transformed from its
eastern flank by a seeping Prussian militarism. Countervailing currents
within the national culture produced progressive developments in
education and the arts. Liberal academies that emphasised the virtue of
freethinking individualism opposed the militarised schooling to which
the majority of boys were subjected, replacing sword-drill and morning
musters with intellectual expansiveness and the spirit of questioning. An
adventurous, socially dissident tendency in the arts propelled Germany
to the leading edge of the European avant-garde, the provocative
dramatic works of Frank Wedekind throwing a rope bridge between
Ibsenite naturalism and the coming formal assaults of expressionism,
while painters sought greater spiritual honesty through a hard-contoured
representational style that gradually, via a series of fissiparous short-
lived movements, turned either abstract or rigidly geometrical in the
cubist manner. The Kaiser had issued a forlorn proclamation to the effect
that it was only art if he recognised it as such, and prompted the
regressive use of black-letter Gothic in printed documents that would
persist into the National Socialist era. Meanwhile, the political boat was
rocking since the formation in the 1890s of the Social Democratic Party
(SPD), candidly Marxist at its inception and destined improbably to
become the largest electoral force in Germany as early as 1912, when it
was kept out of power only by a succession of expedient conservative
coalitions, in which Prussian military and Catholic ecclesiastical
influences combined to thwart the impending advance of a discontented
proletariat.
The Hessian city of Frankfurt on the river Main had been a lightning-
conductor for the national constitutional upheavals of the previous
century. After the liberal revolutions of 1848, it became the seat of the
first democratically elected legislature in Germany, a body that met in St
Paul’s cathedral and was promptly liquidated for its pains the following
year, when the Prussian monarch, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, despite being
offered something resembling the role of constitutional sovereign by the
legislators, announced that he would not accept what he viewed as ‘a
crown from out of the gutter’. A war of unification between Austrian and
Prussian interests fought over seven weeks of 1866 led to the
Prussification of the whole of Germany, a process in which Frankfurt
with its liberal political culture and its voluble free press was forcibly
incorporated into the new administrative province of Hesse-Nassau. It
was at around this time that Bernhard Wiesengrund, a successful wine
merchant and exporter, relocated his business from the small market
town of Dettelbach near Würzburg into the city of Frankfurt. Established
in 1822, the business was thriving sufficiently that a move to the trade
fairs and well-heeled custom of a commercial entrepot made obvious
sense, and eventually, in 1864, Bernhard and his wife Caroline moved
up in the world to a four-storey house in the residential quarter of the
old city, in an imposing grand terrace, Schöne Aussicht, on the north
bank of the Main. The address already had a certain cultural cachet:
Arthur Schopenhauer had lived at number 16 for the last twenty-seven
years of his life, having died only four years before the Wiesengrunds
moved into number 7, next door to the painter Friedrich Delkeskamp,
while Felix Mendelssohn, a summer guest in 1836 of the Schelble
musical family who lived at number 15, wrote of the enviable prospect
between trees along the river, with its plethora of boats and barges and
its pretty shores opposite. Indeed, the street name means ‘beautiful
outlook’, a German cognate to the French belle vue. On Bernhard’s death