Audre Lorde, Theodor Adorno, and the Administered Word

This essay considers Audre Lorde’s work in and for the feminist magazine Chrysalis alongside Theodor Adorno’s late essays on culture and administration. By analyzing Chrysalis within the twentieth-century history of independent print media, and also by looking to Lorde’s conflict with the magazine, this essay argues that Chrysalis exhibits what Adorno calls an “administrative view” in its production of intellectual and cultural work. However, by reckoning with the institutional contexts of this work, Lorde’s poetry, essays, and editorial service presented a concerted and consistent criticism of administrated thought in feminist institutions. This episode in Lorde’s career, along with Adorno’s turn in his late work toward viewing administrators as agents for the dialectical “correction” of bureaucracies, each offer related but mutually interrogating points on the philosophical and cultural map of the 1960s and 1970s. In addition to helping us analyze the tensions between culture and administration—feminist poetry and its institutionality—this work by Adorno and Lorde also suggests how we as critics might conceive of our own institutional practices and academic contexts.