Stars Without a World

[R]edemption and history can exist neither without each other nor within each other but only in tension, the accumulated energy of which finally desires nothing less than the sublation of the historical world itself. For the sake of nothing less than this, however, can the idea of progress still be thought in the age of catastrophe.

—Theodor W. Adorno, “Progress”¹

Life actually does not automatically take care of people.

—Theodor W. Adorno, The Stars Down to Earth²

On March 31, 1945, Theodor Adorno took a nap in the middle of a Southern California afternoon while listening to the radio. Afterward, he recorded the following remarkable dream:

After I heard the radio announcement of Eisenhower’s call for the Germans to lay down their arms, I fell asleep in the afternoon and dreamt I was in South Germany, in a large room with a bay window looking out onto a market place, in Würzburg or Amorbach. It was a warm night—much warmer than it ever is in the German summer. The sky was a deep greeny blue, of a shade only seen in theatre decorations. It contained a myriad little shining stars which, however, were all identical with each other and arranged in a symmetrical order. I turned my head to get a better view of the show, but when I did so, the wallpaper-like star pattern moved before my eyes, like in a film. In my dream I thought: this is impossible, the stars are not all the same size, nor are they arranged symmetrically. So I concentrated on looking at them more closely. To my delight I discovered a group of stars, a constellation, which stood out from the general pattern. It consisted of larger and brighter stars. Admittedly, each of them seemed more like an electric light. At the same time, the efforts I was making to look at them and my skepticism in the midst of my dream made me wake up. The entire thing can have lasted no more than a second. The dream made me feel exceedingly happy.³

This is arguably the quintessential exile’s dream, one that imagines the dreamer’s past and present arranged under a single constellated sky. The émigré scholar longs for Southern Germany from Southern California as military leaders begin to negotiate the peace that will allow for his homecoming. But of course it is the stars that hold our attention, as they held Adorno’s. Flickering between destiny and decoration, the starry canopy gives up its compositions only with determined effort, and even then, the sense of uncertainty is so pronounced it rouses the dreamer from his sleep. What seems auratic may well be inauthentic—a cluster of electric lights simply shining larger and brighter than the stars themselves—but the dreamer nevertheless awakens into a state of terrific and concentrated self-satisfaction.

All one has to do is adjust one’s vision ever so slightly. The figure of the constellation may be the most ubiquitous philosopheme to emerge from the Frankfurt School and Adorno’s correspondence with Walter Benjamin. However, as James McFarland observes, the figure is undeniably a strange one: dogged as it is by scientific anachronism and occulted meaning, it would seem underdetermined as a figure of modern overde-termination.⁴ Fittingly, Adorno expressed wariness about the trope as early as May 1931, in his inaugural lecture to the philosophy faculty at the University of Frankfurt, noting that while he “speak[s] purposely of grouping and trial arrangement, of constellation and construction,” such images must “divorce themselves centrally from the archaic, the mythic archetypes [Urbilder].”⁵ Adorno’s California dreaming nevertheless attests to a desire to tease the singular out of the system, to find one’s fate in the unrelenting symmetries of the universe’s ordinary wallpaper; notably, he never abandoned the figure of the constellation, and continued to ponder, awake and in sleep, the meaning gathered in the stars. In what follows, I return to Adorno’s odd little book on popular horoscopes, The Stars Down to Earth, to consider how it might unwittingly register the...