Language Without Soil: Adorno and Late Philosophical Modernity

7. The Idiom of Crisis: On the Historical Immanence of Language in Adorno

c h a p t e r 7 The Idiom of Crisis: On the Historical Immanence of Language in Adorno Neil Larsen I ‘‘The whole is the untrue.’’1 This phrase, one of the signatures of Adorno’s most unmistakable work, Minima Moralia, points to an irony that perhaps not even its author could have discerned. Notwithstanding the truth of its bitter rebuke to the Hegelian dialectic as apology for capitalist modernity, as a philosophical dictum in its own right it would itself have to be judged false, fatal to any aspiration to dialectical thought. To that much, of course, Adorno himself also testifies, both in practice—for neither Minima Moralia nor any other of his works reflect any doubt that critical theory, as part of its own conceptual movement, must strive for the totalization of its object—but also in theory: one need look no further than to Minima Moralia itself than to have this confirmed: ‘‘Dialectical thought opposes reification in the . . . sense that it refuses to affirm individual things in their isolation and separateness: it designates isolation as precisely a product of the universal.’’2 A refusal to isolate means a commitment to totalize, albeit a non-Hegelian one. The alternative would be to succumb to the reified consciousness of the object in its sheer immediacy. The ‘‘whole’’ may be the ‘‘untrue,’’ but that does not make the part the truth. Both become 117 118 On the Historical Immanence of Language in Adorno false, at least from the immediate standpoint of ‘‘wrong life’’ reflected, consciously and without apology, by Minima Moralia. The less conscious, perhaps inadvertent, irony in these words, however, is how true they become in relation to Adorno’s own formal mode of selfpresentation —that is, as a reflection on the relationship of his thinking to the language and style in which it is conveyed. With only a few exceptions, this is a language that, outwardly at least, resists its own mediation by any formal standard of systematicity or argumentative blueprint. Any reader of Adorno, from the newcomer to the initiate and academic exegete, experiences this, for example, in the great difficulty one has in summarizing— and also at times in retaining—his arguments. As I can confirm from my own experience in teaching Adorno’s works and assigning my students to produce such summaries, this can seem to be a virtually impossible task. The end result is often little more than a list of citations, almost always a sampling of Adorno’s aphoristic and dialectically tensed sentences. Consider for example—taking Horkheimer’s coauthorship as moot in this regard —the chapter on the Culture Industry in Dialectic of Enlightenment. How is one to outline or condense the logic of its argument as a whole? One can attempt a gloss, or look up one of the reasonably good ones already published, but sooner or later, if the text itself is followed closely, the conclusion seems inevitable that this logic, though everywhere in force, does not so much develop by stages as it reiterates itself continuously and in shifting empirical and polemical contexts. From its opening statement—‘‘Culture today is infecting everything with sameness. Film, radio and magazines form a system’’3 —the ‘‘whole’’ is, in essence, already expounded, and, although someone not immediately persuaded by it might in the end succumb to the sheer thrust—almost a kind of fury—of its will to truth and to its sociological sweep, nothing in Dialectic of Enlightenment that follows can be said to take on the burden of proving it, or any other in the series of emphatic, unrelentingly indicative-mood sentences that follow it and that, in effect, make up the entire text of chapter and work themselves. Here, as, to one degree or another throughout Adorno’s corpus, the ‘‘untruth’’ of the ‘‘whole’’ can only be eluded through constant exertions to wrestle the latter into virtually every lexical predication. That Adorno’s thinking at any given point in its development and formal presentation forms a coherent, exquisitely reflective, and mediated whole, supple and adaptive, is in no way contradicted by this. But the movement of thought through language is at the same time an inward, condensing movement of language within itself, a movement toward what is, for the logical organization of Adornean critical prose, a fusion of dialectics and 119 Neil Larsen style...