adorno (Critical Models)

Against stupidity, though containing a not-insignificant portion of its own
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introduction (not adorn0): "Recall that he [Adorno] did not think that a thinker (or a reader) could any longer produce a whole system of thought, as Hegel purportedly produced a whole system, and especially not a system that is articulated in the form of a culminating Idea."

On Theory and Praxis

pesudoactivity

In Gottfried Keller there is a passage where he calls the demand for something edifying a “gingerbread word.”

The physiognomy of praxis is brute earnestness. This earnestness dissolves where the genius of praxis emancipates itself: this is surely what Schiller meant with his theory of play. The majority of actionists are humorless in a way that is no less alarming than are those who laugh along with everyone. The lack of self-reflection derives not only from their psychology. It is the mark of a praxis that, having become its own fetish, becomes a barricade to its own goal."

on 'praxis' : "Whoever imagines that as a product of this society he is free of the bourgeois coldness harbors illusions about himself as much as about the world; without such coldness one could not live. The ability of anyone, without exception, to identify with another’s suffering is slight. The fact that one simply could not look on any longer, and that no one of goodwill should have to look on any longer, rationalizes the pang of conscience. The attitude at the edge of uttermost horror, such as was felt by the conspirators of 20 July who preferred to risk perishing under torture to doing nothing, was possible and admirable.24 To claim from a distance that one feels the same as they do confuses the power of imagination with the violence of the immediate present. Pure self-protection prevents someone who was not there from imagining the worst, and even more, from taking actions that would expose him to the worst.

Solidarity with a cause whose ineluctable failure is discernible may yield up some exquisite narcissistic gain; in itself the solidarity is as delusional as the praxis of which one comfortably awaits approbation, which most likely will be recanted in the next moment because no sacrifice of intellect is ever enough for the insatiable claims of inanity. Brecht, who as the situation at that time warranted was still involved with politics and not with its surrogate, once said, in effect, that when he was honest with himself he was au fond more interested in the theater than in changing the world.b Such a consciousness would be the best corrective for a theater that today confuses itself with reality, such as the happenings* now and then staged by the actionists that muddle aesthetic semblance and reality.

"Many movements defame theory itself as a form of oppression, as though praxis were not much more directly related to oppression. In Marx the doctrine of this unity was inspired by the real possibility of action, which even at that time was not actualized.1 Today what is emerging is more the direct contrary. One clings to action for the sake of the impossibility of action."

On Philosophy

Traditional philosophy’s claim to totality, culminating in the thesis that the real is rational, is indistinguishable from apologetics.3 But this thesis has become absurd.

"Satiety has become an insult a priori, whereas the sole point of reproach about it would be that there are people who have nothing to eat; [the alleged idealism that especially in today’s Germany so pharisaically sinks its teeth into an alleged materialism frequently owes its self-proclaimed profundity merely to repressed instincts.20 Hatred of comfort engenders in Germany discomfort at prosperity, and it transfigures the past into a tragedy.] However, this malaise does not at all issue solely from dark and troubled waters but rather once again from far more rational ones. The prosperity is due to an economic upswing, and no one trusts its unlimited duration."

His behavior echoes a proposition from Hofmannsthal, which indeed he puts in the mouth of Clytemnestra, consumed by fear: “There must be proper rites for everything.”6

6. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “Elektra”: Tragödie in einem Aufzug frei nach Sophokles, orig. 1904, in Gesammelte Werke in Einzelausgaben, ed. Herbert Steiner, vol. 3 of Dramen (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1959), 29–30. The reference is to Clytemnestra’s words in her response to Electra’s intimation that a sacrifice must be made to appease the situation, meaning the murder of her mother:

CLYTEMNESTRA: We need only make subservient to us

the powers that are scattered somewhere. There are

rites. There must be proper rites for everything.

(Electra: A Tragedy in One Act, trans. Alfred Schwarz, in Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Selected Plays and Libretti, ed. Michael Hamburger [New York: Pantheon Books, 1963], 27–28)

wrong wishes - "so too whomever the genius to dominate nature has granted the ability to see far into the distance, sees only what he habitually sees, enriched by the illusion of novelty that gives its existence a false and inflated significance. His dream of omnipotence comes true in the form of perfected impotence."

"In general one may venture the hypothesis that a philosophy mobilized in an auxiliary role--nowadays most evident in existential ontology--actually has only a reactionary function."

:"No one can reproduce the pain of another in one’s own imagination. The transcendental apperception comes down to the same thing.7"

and later: "There is hardly a stronger argument for the fragile primacy of the object and for its being conceivable only in the reciprocal mediation of subject and object than that thinking must snuggle up to an object, even when it does not yet have such an object, even intends to produce it.11"

"The notion of someone who sits down and “reflects about something” in order to ascertain something he did not know beforehand is as distorted as the inverse idea of winged intuition. Thinking begins in the labor upon a subject matter and its verbal formulation: they ensure its passive element. Put extremely: I do not think, and yet that itself is surely thinking."

"Benjamin once alluded to this with the dictum that to every respectable thought belongs a respectable portion of stupidity as well.29 If thought avoids this dictum for the sake of the chimera of its primordiality, if it scents in every concrete object at once the danger of concretization,30 then the thought is not only lost to the future--which would be no objection, almost the contrary--but in itself it will be unconvincing. Yet it is therefore all the more decisive that those very tasks, the fecundity of which determines in turn the fecundity of thought, are autonomous; that they not be imposed but pose themselves: this is the threshold separating thinking from intellectual technique. Thinking must desperately navigate between such intellectual technique and amateurish dilettantism. "

Cf. Adorno: “The greater demands Benjamin makes of the speculative concept, the more unreservedly, one might almost say blindly, does this thought succumb to its material. He once said, not out of coquettishness but with absolute seriousness, that he needed a proper dose of stupidity to be able to think a decent thought” (“Introduction to Benjamin’s Schriften,” Notes to Literature, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen [New York: Columbia University Press, 1992], 2:225).

Convulsively, deliberately, one ignores the fact that the excess of rationality, about which the educated class especially complains and which it registers in concepts like mechanization, atomization, indeed even de-individualization, is a lack of rationality, namely, the increase of all apparatuses and means of quantifiable domination at the cost of the goal, the rational organization of mankind, which is left abandoned to the unreason of mere constellations of power, an unreason that consciousness, dulled by constantly having to consider the existing positive relations and conditions, no longer dares rise to engage at all.

on "second nature"/"Opinion" "More in keeping with the times is good old common sense* that, while priding itself on its own reasonableness, at the same time spitefully repudiates reason, knowing that what matters in the world is not thought so much as property and power, a hierarchy it would have no other way. What parades as the incorruptible skepsis of someone who will have no dust thrown in his eyes is the citizen shrugging his shoulders, “What in God’s name could there be on the horizon,” as is said at one place in Beckett’s Endgame, the complacent announcement of the subjective relativity of all knowledge.13 It amounts to the view that stubborn and blind subjective self-interest is and should remain the measure of all things."

Religion of Revelation:

"Will itself would be possible only where the conviction about the contents of belief already exists, that is, precisely that which can be gained only by an act of will. If religion at last is no longer folk religion, no longer substantial in the Hegelian sense11--if it ever was that at all--then it becomes something taken up contingently, an authoritarian view of the world, in which compulsion and caprice intertwine. It was insight into this situation that probably induced the theology of Judaism to stipulate virtually no dogmas and to demand nothing but that people live according to the law;" [...]

Even if this allows the antinomy of knowledge and faith to be circumvented and the very alienation between the religious precept and the subject to be bridged, the contradiction continues to operate implicitly. For the question of where the authority of doctrine comes from was not resolved but rather removed as soon as the Haggadah element had dissociated itself completely from the halachah element. The excision of the objective element from religion is no less harmful to it than the reification that aims to impose dogma--the objectivity of faith--inflexibly and antirationally upon the subject. The objective element, however, no longer can be asserted because it would have to submit itself to the criterion of objectivity, of knowledge, whose claim it arrogantly rejects.

Christianity is not equally close to all ages, and human beings are not affected timelessly by what they once perceived as good tidings. The concept of daily bread, born from the experience of deprivation under the conditions of uncertain and insufficient material production, cannot simply be translated into the world of bread factories and surplus production, in which famines are natural catastrophes wrought by society and precisely not by nature. Or, the concept of the neighbor refers to communities where people know each other face to face. Helping one’s neighbors, no matter how urgent this remains in a world devastated by those natural catastrophes produced by society, is insignificant in comparison with a praxis that extends beyond every mere immediacy of human relationships, in comparison with a transformation of the world that one day would put an end to the natural catastrophes of society. Were one to remove phrases such as these from the Gospel as irrelevant, while presuming to preserve the revealed doctrines and yet express them as they supposedly should be understood hic et nunc, then one would fall into a dichotomy of bad alternatives. Either revealed doctrines must be adapted to contemporary circumstances: that would be incompatible with the authority of revelation. Or contemporary reality would be confronted with demands that are unrealizable or that fall short of their most essential concern, the real suffering of people. Yet if one were simply to disregard all these concrete socio-historically mediated conditions and to heed literally the Kierkegaardian dictum that holds that Christianity is nothing other than a nota bene--namely, the nota bene that God once became man without that moment entering consciousness as such, that is, as a concretely historical moment--then in the name of a paradoxical purity revealed religion would dissolve into something completely indeterminate, a nothingness that could hardly be distinguished from religion’s liquidation Anything more than this nothingness would lead immediately to the insoluble, and it would be a mere ruse of imprisoned consciousness to transfigure into a religious category this very insolubility itself, the failure of finite man, whereas it instead attests to the present impotence of religious categories."

On Progress:

"In Benjamin progress obtains legitimation in the doctrine that the idea of the happiness of unborn generations--without which one cannot speak of progress--inalienably includes the idea of redemption.d This confirms the concentration of progress on the survival of the species: no progress is to be assumed that would imply that humanity in general already existed and therefore could progress. Rather progress would be the very establishment of humanity in the first place, whose prospect opens up in the face of its extinction. This entails, as Benjamin further teaches, that the concept of universal history cannot be saved; it is plausible only as long as one can believe in the illusion of an already existing humanity, coherent in itself and moving upward as a unity. "

"If progress is equated with redemption as transcendental intervention per se, then it forfeits, along with the temporal dimension, its intelligible meaning and evaporates into ahistorical theology. But if progress is mediatized into history, then the idolization of history threatens and with it, both in the reflection of the concept as in the reality, the absurdity that it is progress itself that inhibits progress. Expedient expositions of an immanent-transcendent concept of progress pass sentence on themselves by their very nomenclature."

"This imago of progress is encoded in a concept that all camps today unanimously defame, that of decadence. The artists of Jugendstil declared their adherence to it. Certainly the reason for this is not only that they wished to express their own historical situation, which in many ways seemed to them biological morbidity. Their urgency to immortalize their condition in an image was animated by the impulse--and in this they agreed profoundly with the Lebensphilosophen--that truth was only preserved in that part of them that appeared to prophesy their own and the world’s downfall. Hardly anyone could have expressed this more concisely than Peter Altenberg: “Mistreatment of horses. It will stop only when passersby become so irritable and decadent that they, no longer in control of themselves, mad and desperate in such cases, commit crimes and shoot down the cringing and cowardly coachman------. Inability to tolerate the mistreatment of horses is the deed of the decadent neurasthenic man of the future! Until now people have had only enough wretched strength not to have to bother with other peoples’ affairs of this sort------.”e Thus Nietzsche, who condemned pity, collapsed in Turin when he saw a coachman beating his horse. Decadence was the fata morgana of this progress that has not yet begun. The ideal, even if it be narrow-minded and willfully obstinate, of a complete, life-renouncing distance from any type of purpose was the reverse image of the false purposefulness of industry, in which everything exists for something else. The irrationalism of décadence denounced the unreason of the dominant reason. A separated, arbitrary, privileged happiness is sacred to irrationalism because it alone vouches for what has escaped, while that immediate notion of happiness of the whole--according to the current liberalist formula, the greatest possible happiness for the greatest possible number of people--barters happiness away to the apparatus, the sworn enemy of happiness,"

In the translation of historical desperation into a norm that must be adhered to there echoes that abominable construal of the theological doctrine of original sin, the idea that the corruption of human nature legitimates domination, that radical evil legitimates evil.

To desperately posit an isolated, allegedly ontological concept of the subjectively spontaneous against the societal omnipotence, as the French existentialists do, is too optimistic, even as an expression of despair; one cannot conceive of a versatile spontaneity outside of its entwinement with society. It would be illusory and idealistic to hope that spontaneity would be enough here and now.

Nevertheless this totality itself is also semblance. The rigidified institutions, the relations of production, are not Being as such, but even in their omnipotence they are man-made and revocable. In their relationship to the subjects from which they originate and which they enclose, they remain thoroughly antagonistic. Not only does the whole demand its own modification in order not to perish, but by virtue of its antagonistic essence it is also impossible for it to extort that complete identity with human beings that is relished in negative utopias. For this reason inner-worldly progress, adversary of the other progress, at the same time remains open to the possibility of this other, no matter how little it is able to incorporate this possibility within its own law.

In bourgeois society, which created the concept of total progress, the convergence of this concept with the negation of progress originates in this society’s principle: exchange. Exchange is the rational form of mythical ever-sameness. In the like-for-like of every act of exchange, the one act revokes the other; the balance of accounts is null. If the exchange was just, then nothing should really have happened, and everything stays the same. At the same time the assertion of progress, which conflicts with this principle, is true to the extent that the doctrine of like-for-like is a lie. Since time immemorial, not just since the capitalist appropriation of surplus value in the commodity exchange of labor power for the cost of its reproduction, the societally more powerful contracting party receives more than the other. By means of this injustice something new occurs in the exchange: the process, which proclaims its own stasis, becomes dynamic. The truth of the expansion feeds on the lie of the equality. Societal acts are supposed to reciprocally sublate themselves in the overall system and yet do not. ( )