Adorno: The Recovery of Experience

4. Failed Outbreak I: Husserl

No correction of an error of idealist epistemology would be possible without necessarily producing a new error. —Adorno, Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie INTRODUCTION A fragment in Adorno’s notebook, scribbled in May 1960, suggests a common thread for the entirety of his philosophical oeuvre. Adorno locates the source of this thread in a single childhood experience: “Since my earliest youth,” he claims, “I knew that everything that I stood for found itself in a hopeless struggle with what I perceived as the anti-spirit incarnate (das Geistfeindliche schlechthin)—the spirit of Anglo-Saxon natural-scientific positivism” (2003b, 14). What Adorno saw in positivism was, in a literal sense, the withering of experience. The living context of communication with the world in language, the mutual enrichment of subject and object, had now given way to a scene of devastation: the living context usurped by the deathly dregs of life (1993a, 27). Adorno’s interpretive strategy will be to try to use the experiencing subject to break out of the mutilated experience within the constituting subject. In practice , this will mean recovering the potential of cognitive concepts to work as a form of expression. This is what Adorno means when he talks of giving the concept a turn toward nonidentity (1966, 24). In his critique of Husserl, Adorno will argue that epistemological inquiry as such presupposes the narrowing of experience that, historically, inaugurates the constituting subject. 89 4 Failed Outbreak I Husserl We cannot “step outside” the frame that governs what counts as genuine knowledge, the frame of epistemological inquiry, and reach across to recapture the subjugated elements that would make cognition whole. But what the negative dialectic—the “rational process of revision against rationality” (1973, 87)—will do is to drive epistemological concepts to the point where they express, through their innermost structure, the experience of diremption. In this way, epistemological concepts will disclose the experience of suffering that has become sedimented within them. Adorno’s intention in his metacritique , then, is to coax epistemological concepts to express what is presupposed by their operation as epistemological concepts. Rather than simply subsuming experience as dismembered conceptual contents, the concept becomes a riddle the deciphering of which points to the historical world: it discloses the world in the form of spiritual experience. Adorno will have much to criticize in the way Husserl tries to recover pretheoretical experience. There is a denial of mediation in the phenomenologist ’s appointed task of description, similar to the illusion that permeates empiricism. This, in fact, is the constitutive error of epistemology. Adorno will claim that there can be no bare description of experience without at the same time drawing on categories that disrupt its immediacy; and so the subject must be active even in the effort to “describe” what is before it. The very attempt to describe an experience, in the medium of the classificatory concept, corrupts it. The true dialectician must be aware of this betrayal by her language, and must force language to work against its tendency to emasculate experience. The task for dialectic will be to use language —concepts—to create a force field, where a genuine spiritual experience will resonate in the frictions created among its components. What Adorno calls the rescue of the rhetorical moment in thinking points to the self-conscious employment of the resources of language to recover the cognitive potential of the moment of expression (1966, 66). Again, however, it needs to be stressed that this will take place within the classificatory concept , not by leaping outside of it. Spiritual experience takes off from the insight that the objectivity of cognition requires more, not less of the subject (1966, 50). Without this strengthening of the subjective moment, philosophical experience “wastes away” (verkümmert). What a subjectively strengthened philosophy is aiming at, as Adorno puts it in an oft-cited phrase, is “the full, unreduced experience in the medium of conceptual reflection” (p. 25). In Adorno’s handwritten notes for his lectures on negative dialectic in the winter semester of 1965, this phrase ends in a colon, followed by the words (in quotation marks) geistige Erfahrung—“spiritual experience” (2003a, 114). Geistige Erfahrung rescinds the dissolution of experience in epistemological inquiry by using the subject to recover the expressive element of epistemological concepts. The historical 90 ADORNO experience sedimented in those concepts, Adorno believes, is the self-mutilation of the subject. As we shall see, the argument turns on the...