Adorno: The Recovery of Experience

6. Proust: Experience Regained

INTRODUCTION In his “micro-commentaries” on À la recherche du temps perdu, Adorno describes Proust’s revolt against a “subsuming form imposed from above” (1974a, 203). Challenging the conventional representations of universal and particular, Proust, Adorno claims, takes seriously Hegel’s argument that “the particular is the universal and vice versa, both are mediated through one another.” The link that Adorno wants to make between Proust and Hegel concerns the role of rationality (that is, conceptual understanding) in expressing fundamental truths. Just as, for Hegel, the true must be expressible in the concept, so, as Adorno reads him, Proust wants to balance the powers of intuition with the insights of rationality. This is why, for Adorno, Proust’s answer to the withering of experience is superior to that of Bergson. Adorno makes this point clear in his 1965–66 lectures on negative dialectic. One could almost say that precisely the attempt of the Proustian novel to put the Bergsonian philosophy to the test, has refuted to a certain extent the Bergsonian outbreak attempt, for the very reason that Proust makes use of the instrument of rational . . . cognition in order to reach the concrete, to reach the indissoluble as he had conceived it, exactly as would have been ruled out according to the sense of Bergsonian epistemology. (2003a, 109) What Adorno finds in Proust, then, is a way of reaching the concrete, of bringing the particular to language, from within the framework of the discursive 139 6 Proust Experience Regained concept.1 Proust, according to Adorno, shows that to take realism seriously— the attempt to describe the thing in the most exact fashion possible—necessitates the saturation of the real with the experience of the subject. In the 1965–66 lectures on negative dialectic, Proust is described as having succeeded to a certain extent where Bergson and Husserl had failed.2 I want to argue that this comment is explained by the profound affinity between the theory of experience that governs Adorno’s discussion in negative dialectic and the goals of Proust’s literary technique. The intention of negative dialectic is to outline the form of an outbreak attempt that would remain within the concept, hence avoiding the errors of Husserl and Bergson. This is expressed clearly in the preface, where Adorno describes his task as that of “break[ing] through the delusion of constitutive subjectivity with the power of the subject” (1966, 10). The “delusion” that Adorno refers to here is equivalent to the claim that an object can be known only when it is conceived as an exemplar (or instantiation) of a general property; hence the object is known when it is given a transferable “value,” according to how it is classified by a subject.3 Prior to its subsumption under the subject as the moment of form, the particular is blind and formless. This, of course, is a constructed (or mediated ) immediacy: experiential items are prepared for their entry into the classificatory structures of constitutive subjectivity by the prior evacuation of their significance for a subject, the meaning that attaches to how they are experienced . The transformation of the experiential item into the empirical exemplar leaves behind what Proust calls the déchet of experience—its refuse or waste (1999a, 2280). It is reality when seen as mediated by a process of subtraction , which takes place as the elimination of the experiencing subject from the determination of the cognitive significance of experience. Proust’s novelistic masterpiece represents an attempt to recover the role of the subject in experience, and therefore comprises a critique of the consequences of disenchantment . Proust’s subject is neither a blank surface on which impressions are embossed, nor is it the forming moment of cognition that synthesizes blind particulars. Proust’s subject is one that is reactive, responsive, and above all sensitive to the minutest details as harboring deeper significance. At one point, Proust’s narrator speaks of the “interior violin” whose strings are “tightened and relaxed by simple differences of temperature, of exterior lighting” (1999a, 1621). It is this instrument, the subject’s very responsiveness to the significance of the world, which “the uniformity of habitude has rendered silent.” When Adorno talks of using the strength of the subject to break through constitutive subjectivity, he means a process that would reverse the constitutive abstraction that drives disenchantment by finding a way to allow the experience of the subject to inform the cognitive sense of concepts. The idea of using the subject to reverse the...