Steven Helmling

Department of English
University of Delaware
helmling@udel.edu

 

As was already pointed out in Dialectic of Enlightenment, strict positivism crosses over into the feeblemindedness of the artistically insensible, the successfully castrated. The narrow-minded wisdom that sorts out feeling from knowing and rubs its hands together when it finds the two balanced is–as trivialities sometimes are–the caricature of a situation that over the centuries of the division of labor has inscribed this division in subjectivity. Yet feeling and understanding are not absolutely different in the human disposition and remain dependent even in their dividedness. The forms of reaction that are subsumed under the concept of feeling become futile enclaves of sentimentality as soon as they seal themselves off from their relation to thought and turn a blind eye to truth; thought, however, approaches tautology when it shrinks from the sublimation of the mimetic comportment. The fatal separation of the two came about historically and is revocable. . . . Ultimately, aesthetic comportment is to be defined as the capacity to shudder, as if goose bumps were the first aesthetic image. What later came to be called subjectivity, freeing itself from the blind anxiety of the shudder, is at the same time the shudder’s own development; life in the subject is nothing but what shudders, the reaction to the total spell that transcends the spell. Consciousness without shudder is reified consciousness. That shudder which subjectivity stirs without yet being subjectivity is the act of being touched by the other. Aesthetic comportment assimilates itself to that other rather than subordinating it. Such a constitutive relation of the subject to objectivity in aesthetic comportment joins eros and knowledge.

 

–Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory 331

 
The 1944 “Introduction” to Dialectic of Enlightenment announces the book’s indictment of “enlightenment,” that it has abdicated “[die] Arbeit des Begriffs” (Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialektik 14). The German phrase–a Hegelian chestnut–is Englished as “the labor of conceptualization” in John Cumming’s 1972 translation (xiv), and as “the work of concepts” by Edmund Jephcott in 2002 (Jephcott xvii).¹ Together the two translations show, as neither can by itself, the stretch of the German, which suggests both the work that concepts do, and the labor that making ourselves conscious of the problematics of the concept–“thinking about thought” (Cumming 25), “to ‘think thinking'” (Jephcott 19)–imposes on us. “The concept” is too diffuse and ubiquitous a theme in Adorno to treat here. It evokes the mind’s engagement at once with the world and (à la Hegel) with its own self-consciousness in that engagement; for Adorno, the “labor of the concept” is an imperative from first to last. I want to test the premise that for Adorno, complementary to the project of thinking about thinking–“the concept”–is an effort or struggle that I will call “the work of affects” or “the labor of affectualization.” Horkheimer and Adorno thematize this labor in their “excursus” on Odysseus and the Sirens, as a founding myth of what Adorno consistently denounces as “ataraxia“–a culture-wide affective discipline, or repression, which grounds the instrumental “domination of [external] nature” in an internalized, instrumentalizing domination of affect itself. “The need to lend a voice to suffering,” writes Adorno, “is the condition of all truth,” a premise that rejoins affect and concept, feeling and thinking, to enact Adorno’s protest against the separation of these categories–these domains of experience–in Western culture (Negative Dialectics 17-8). For Adorno, “the labor of the concept” itself involves laboring to uncover, focus, articulate, and express its properly affective elements, however repressed or distorted, fetishized or reified. Affect must be completed, “rescued,”² even redeemed, by being concretized in the labor of, in the Hegelian formula, “apprehending it as thought”; likewise, thought–the labor of the concept–must suffer the ordeal through which alone thinking may be apprehended as feeling. Adorno urges that to “think thinking” obliges us to think our feeling, to feel our thinking–and (what our traumatic history has perhaps most inhibited in us) to feel our feeling as well.

 

This essay explores Adorno’s “labor of affectualization” both as theorized in his arguments and as performed in his writing practice–in the modernist and self-conscious way, to adapt Gertrude Stein, that his writing is written. A touchstone throughout will be Adorno’s chief model and counter- or cautionary example, the “optimistic” authorial carriage of Hegel, whose utopian promise Adorno’s “unhappy [critical] consciousness” would reinscribe under the rubric of the “broken promise.” I hope to enlarge our sense of the function or “effect” of “style” (to call it that) in Adorno’s critical project, with reference to other figures (Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, Freud, Heidegger) that can be “constellated” usefully with it. I conclude with a look at the 1944 “Introduction” to Dialectic of Enlightenment, in which the deliberate “difficulty” of the book is thematized as motivated by the difficulties, both intellectual and emotional, of its historical occasion (enlightenment’s calamitous devolution into the barbarism of World War Two). I also read the book’s first chapter, which enacts the program (both critical and affective) for which the “Introduction” serves as manifesto. The larger aim is to describe, evoke, and, in ways other commentators on Adorno seem to me to have missed, to account for the sheer power and voltage of Adorno’s critical output, in which thinking and writing–and feeling–seethe, and in their agitation impel each other to levels of force quite unlike anything to be found in the work of anyone else.

 

Aesthesis and Anaesthesis

 

Adorno’s desire to “rescue” repressed affect finds perhaps its most extreme test, a sort of limit-case, in a 1959 lecture in which Adorno speaks feelingly of “the emotional force of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason” (30). Most readers today, I wager, will raise eyebrows at this characterization. It was apropos of Kant, after all, that Terry Eagleton joked that in the tradition of philosophical aesthetics, “the aesthetic might more accurately be described as an anaesthetic” (196)–and indeed Adorno himself characterizes Kant’s aesthetics elsewhere as “a castrated hedonism, desire without desire” (Aesthetic Theory 11). Adorno’s Kant anticipates that “heroism of modern life” (the black-suited bourgeoisie assisting in stoic dispassion, “not breaking up its lines to weep,” nor even presuming to expect a speaking role, at the funeral of its own passional energies) to which Baudelaire paid the back-handed compliment of an uncharacteristically muted mockery. Kant’s “emotional force,” that is to say, partakes of that struggle against emotion and feeling that Dialectic of Enlightenment traces back to the episode of the Sirens in the Odyssey. Eagleton’s “anesthetic” notwithstanding, for Adorno, Kant’s “emotional force” lies in the ineradicable felt force of the agon itself, the drive for “domination” of emotion and affect, given that the reified norm, in Adorno’s indignant indictment, typically cedes the victory to numbness not only in advance, but also in principle.

 

Adorno’s project is heavily invested in an ambition to undo this anaesthesis or (Adorno’s own frequent protest-word) “ataraxia“–that is, to redeem the numbness programmatized in modern, bourgeois, enlightenment projects, whether aesthetic or scientific; or, if “redeem” seems too messianic, to “rescue” (Adorno’s own word) for “critical” and “conceptual” purpose the affective force normatively repressed in our culture’s sundering of thought and feeling. This is an ambition emphatically not to be realized by simply adding an “effect,” lending atmospherics to the substance of an argument, much less the adrenaline jolts of a moralized ressentiment. Adorno evokes the “emotional force of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason” to prepare for the broader stipulation, a page later, that “the same, the identical theses may have completely different meanings within the general parameters, the general emotional thrust of a given philosophy” (Kant’s Critique 31). Which is to say that the “emotional thrust,” the affect and cathexis, of an argument are not some merely epiphenomenal froth upon a putatively substantive content or “theses” that might as well (or better) be considered dispassionately. No, Adorno here states explicitly that the content, the “theses,” bear different meanings according to the argument’s “emotional thrust”: the affective cathexis of the text thereby becomes determinative, even constitutive, of the text’s “meanings.” Thus the programmatic dispassion of critique generically stands revealed and indicted as an ideology, “an imaginary” conquest of fear, another instance of that “anaesthesis” or “ataraxia” that Dialectic of Enlightenment laments as an impoverishing entailment of our civilization, a bourgeois “coldness” (Minima Moralia 26), from Homer’s Sirens to Baudelaire’s “modern heroism” and beyond. If I risk putting this in tones that may seem a bit overwrought, it’s to underline the point that Adorno here renders explicit a program, for critique at large and for his own critical practice in particular, that his writing everywhere enacts.

 

Adorno protests the analytic disjunction or (his code-word) chorismos (Greek for “separation”) of sciences, knowledges, discourses. He aims to rejoin these discourses dialectically in configurations or “constellations” whose transgression against positivist habits of categorization is much of their heteroclite, fish-and-fowl, apples-and-oranges point. For modern purposes, the milestone of enlightened chorismos is Kant, whose intervention in the “contest of faculties” was meant to produce a ceasefire, a disengagement of the combatants–in Kant’s time, philosophy and theology. Kant’s covert motive was that philosophy displace theology as arbiter among the disciplines, but his overt proposal was that the warring faculties agree to disagree: they were separate discourses, exercising different kinds of “Reason” on different, non-overlapping, problems. The outcome was not what Kant had hoped for: while philosophy and religion were engrossed in their “contest,” the real power was passing to the empirical sciences and their new, and (Adorno thought) fatally narrow canons of truth and fact. This disaster–how enlightenment thinking neutralized, indeed, reversed its own radical potential–is what Adorno meant by “the dialectic of enlightenment.” The “contest of faculties” was protracted and often covert, but as time passed the outcome was increasingly clear. For the losers (philosophy, religion, and art), the defeat was sweetened by a sequestration that allowed each of them to reign in its own highly circumscribed domain. This “enlightenment” regime tolerates aesthetic discourses as specialized disciplines on condition that they moderate or renounce their claim to “truth”; by the same token, the truth-discourses of science offer as condition (almost as guarantee) of their “truth”-value their principled refusal of any affective voltage. Implicit in this compact is that “affect” as such is without truth-value: is even, indeed, an obstacle to truth. Adorno assails these ideological premises constantly, and he ends his career, in Aesthetic Theory, with his most sustained effort to valorize art’s claim to being a kind of “truth-discourse”–in part by stipulating the conditions under which art achieves truth, in part by so reconfiguring the question that one puzzles to remember how art can ever have seemed not “true.”

 

Aesthetic Theory labors to redeem the aesthetic by undoing the chorismos of thought and feeling that has deprived art of philosophical efficacy. Indeed, the most insistent theme of the book’s vast ensemble of theme-and-variations is that art and philosophy are phases of a continuous activity; neither is valid without the other; they need each other; they complete each other. Adorno is tireless in urging that the restoration of critical force to art involves the “labor of the concept”; but he is pretty tight-lipped about the complementary program, of restoring to philosophy (and critique, theory, science: to what he wants to restore as “truth-discourses”) something of the affective or aesthetic charge or cathexis they only illusorily renounce in any case. This reticence raises two embarrassments I want to acknowledge here. The smaller one is that Adorno’s reticence about affect produces, absent argued discriminations from him, some slippage in my account between “affect” and such terms as “feeling,” “cathexis,” and “suffering.” On this I can only beg your forebearance, and hope my speculations earn their keep. The other embarrassment is more substantial: if Adorno means to “rescue” affect, then why is “affect,” as a theme, so repressed in his work? Why isn’t he more explicit about it? The answer I’d most like to give is that Adorno counts on the high affective voltages of his writing to make the point, as if coming right out and saying it would be a gaffe on the order of explaining why a joke is funny. Modernism generally plays down affect, in ways sometimes to be read as a kind of (mock-) ataraxia (Céline), sometimes as a kind of restraint (e.g., “impersonality”) meant actually to heighten affect, but generally as a refusal or critique of the excesses of so much nineteenth-century art (academic painting, Chopin, Wagner–too many examples). Adorno shares in that critique, and I would say his work risks an emotionalism that most tight-lipped moderns refuse. I suppose, too, that Adorno shied away from making the case explicitly for fear of its being mis-taken to mean that philosophy is a “merely subjective” expression, that is, “aesthetic” in precisely the diminished senses that Adorno means to protest and redeem in his dialectical reinvention of it in Aesthetic Theory. Adorno regularly protests against the “merely subjective” gambit, as a reductive psychologism; in Adorno’s own account of the subject/object relation, there is no such thing as the “merely subjective” because the very condition of subjectivity is its dialectical engagement with the objective. (For Adorno, “the concept” is the function of this engagement, the medium or mediation of the subject’s dialectic with the objective.)

 

In any case, the implication of the affects in the “truth-discourses” is ubiquitous in Adorno–for example in his surprisingly frequent assimilations of philosophy (et al.) to music: in the very title of Philosophy of Modern Music; in the resonances with Hegel in the Beethoven fragments (see any of the numerous references in the book’s Index); and in quotations like this one, from the early (1932) essay, “On the Social Situation of Music”:

 

Music will be better, the more deeply it is able to express–in the antinomies of its own formal language–theexigency of the social condition and to call for change through the coded language of suffering. . . . The task of music as art thus enters into a parallel relationship to the task of social theory. . . . solutions offered by music in this process stand equal to theories. (Essays on Music 393)

 

But the premise is put more globally in many places–as in this, from the late (1961) essay, “Opinion Delusion Society”:

 

The moment called cathexis in psychology, thought’s affective investment in the object, is not extrinsic to thought, not merely psychological, but rather the condition of its truth. Where cathexis atrophies, intelligence becomes stultified. (Critical Models 109)

 

Or, as he writes elsewhere, “the need to lend a voice to suffering is the condition of all truth” (Negative Dialectics 17-8). And in what is undoubtedly his most-remembered utterance–“To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” (Prisms 34)–Adorno might seem to limit the argument, by citing an atrocity that threatens to beggar all affect, indeed, all expression–which would have to mean, all critique as well. For surely Adorno’s anxiety about poetry after Auschwitz encompasses anxiety about the continuance of critique and philosophy after Auschwitz as well–a way of putting it that helps uncover the utopian wishfulness in the famous assertion that “philosophy lives on because the moment to realize it was missed” (Negative Dialectics3). But those who deplore what they take to be the hair-shirt defeatism or melodramatizing “unhappy consciousness” of the “after-Auschwitz” remark would do well to ponder Adorno’s own comment a decade and a half later:

 

I once said that after Auschwitz one could no longer write poetry, and that gave rise to a discussion I did not anticipate . . . [I]t is in the nature of philosophy–and everything I write is, unavoidably, philosophy, even if it is not concerned with so-called philosophical themes–that nothing is meant quite literally. Philosophy always relates to tendencies and does not consist of statements of fact. . . . it could equally well be said . . . that [after Auschwitz] one must write poems, in keeping with Hegel’s statement in his Aesthetics that as long as there is an awareness of suffering among human beings there must also be art as the objective form of that awareness. . . . [The question whether one can write poetry after Auschwitz should rather be] the question whether one can live after Auschwitz. . . . [I]n one of the most important plays of Sartre . . . a young resistance fighter who is subjected to torture . . . [asks] whether or why one should live in a world in which one is beaten until one’s bones are smashed. Since it concerns the possibility of any affirmation of life, this question cannot be evaded. And I would think that any thought which is not measured by this standard, which does not assimilate it theoretically, simply pushes aside at the outset that which thought should address–so that it really cannot be called a thought at all. (Metaphysics 110-1; cf. Negative Dialectics 362)

 

This passage brings together a number of themes I want to foreground here: the evocation of high ambition, or vocation, or doom (“everything I write is, unavoidably, philosophy”); the adviso that in philosophy “nothing is meant quite literally”; the rootedness of art and philosophy alike in “an awareness of suffering,” and in the duty to objectify (in the Hegelian sense) that suffering; the ultimate question of “the possibility of any affirmation of life,” tellingly evoked by way of Sartre, rather than the (at the time) more fashionable, certainly more affectively subdued, mot on suicide from Camus’s Myth of Sisyphus. And indissociable from these thematics is the affect that the passage mobilizes on behalf of that thematics–mobilizes, or indeed communicates, and I mean “communicate” in the sense not of transmission from sender to receiver, but of a making-common, of communion, between writer and reader, and in that sense the evocation of “an objective form” of “that awareness [of suffering among human beings].”

 

Adorno’s writing, indeed, in the largest sense, his project, involves an affective investment–that “labor of affectualization,” or “work of affects”–and to that extent his project is something like “aesthetic” in the radically enlarged senses of Adorno’s own Aesthetic Theory. Adorno’s aesthesis is quite the reverse of the glamorous “strong pessimism” and “tragic” ecstasies in which Nietzsche affects to find art’s “redemption by illusion.” All such exaltations of strength and tragic heroism Adorno disdains as “imaginary consolations”; his own ideation tends rather to abjection–and not as the elective asceticism so (ambivalently) conjured by Nietzsche, but as the traumatic burden imposed on us by history, a burden of anguishes in which critique inevitably participates, which it can only attempt, however impossibly, to “work through”:

 

Unquestionably, one who submits to the dialectical discipline has to pay dearly in the qualitative variety of experience. Still, in the administered world the impoverishment of experience by dialectics, which outrages healthy opinion, proves appropriate to the monotony of that world. Its agony is the world’s agony raised to a concept. (Negative Dialectics 6)

 

The concept of agony must be, must be concretized as, must be made (in the writing, in the reading) agonizing–and agonistic. If Wittgenstein famously sneered that the concept of sugar is not sweet, Adorno consistently retorts, in effect, that the concept of suffering ought surely to hurt. Indeed, given the implication of sugar in the development of the Atlantic slave trade, the American plantation system, the development of banking, credit, and other fiduciary devices in the inauguration of capitalism, I would expect Adorno to urge that the concept of sugar must be very bitter indeed to the critical intelligence that is mindful to “constellate” the concept, including the brutal history, with the sensual and quotidian spatio-temporality of your mocha latte. The proposition that “the concept of sugar is not sweet” is true only in a trivial (and trivializing) sense; “agony raised to a concept” can only be a lie if in the raising conceptualization makes itself into an analgesic against the agony. The very phrase protests the habit of thinking that conceptualization “raises” painful material above (away from) suffering: on the contrary, in Adorno the agony is what “the concept” raises itself to.

 

“Agony Raised to a Concept”

 

Hence, in “lending a voice to suffering,” critique itself must be painful. We might call this Adorno’s “after-Auschwitz” imperative, with the stipulation that in Adorno’s work this critical affect long pre-dates Auschwitz–not to mention that two of Adorno’s most poignant books (Minima Moralia and Dialectic of Enlightenment) were composed, literally, “during-Auschwitz.” Dialectic of Enlightenment scorns the official optimisms and triumphalisms of modernity’s ideological cheerleaders–from the “revolutionary” scenario of the Stalinist left through the meliorist grand narrative of liberalism to the apocalyptic fantasias of fascism–since it was in pursuit of these diversely ideological happy endings that so much horror was unleashed. Whatever their other conflicts, it was the policy of all three camps that the needs of morale-management (propaganda) must cast critical questioning and truth-telling of any kind as “defeatism” and “pessimism”–reminder enough that critical “unhappy consciousness” like Adorno’s was, in his own lifetime, quite the reverse of ivory-tower indulgence. In the context of this optimism/pessimism force-field, Adorno’s citation of Hegel as advocate for an awareness of human suffering is telling, because it was Hegel’s “optimism” as much as Marx’s that underwrote the official optimism of Soviet Marxist-Leninism. For many, especially after the War, Hegel’s sanguine view of human history seemed, especially in light of Hegel’s professional success post-1816, a “false consciousness” or worse, a Panglossian dishonesty. Adorno often chides Hegel on not dissimilar grounds (“the guaranteed paths to redemption [are] sublimated magic practices” [Jephcott 18]); the Right Hegelians did, after all, have a case.³

 

I think it’s fair to say that every critique or reservation Adorno mounts of Hegel involves this issue: the ideological delusions, the imaginary consolations, the false consciousness, the bourgeois “coldness” (Minima Moralia 26) of Hegel’s “happy consciousness.”⁴ There is for Adorno a “darker” Hegel–a Hegel of repressed-always-returning “unhappy consciousness”–and Hegelian precept and Hegelian example figure everywhere in Adorno’s work. The vocation of the concept, the dialectic, mediation, contradiction, negation; the imperative to rethink historically the un- or trans-historical Platonic-Aristotelian “hypostases” of hallowed philosophical tradition; the deconstruction (if you’ll permit the anachronism) of the hallowed metaphysical binary of appearance and reality, noumenon and phenomenon; the insistence on the philosophical dignity of the latter (that phenomena have, contra Plato, a “logos” and that there is, in consequence, a phenomeno-logy): these and many other Hegelian motives attest to Adorno’s large investment in Hegel. Not for nothing does Adorno observe, in one of the Beethoven fragments (#24): “In a similar sense to that in which there is only Hegelian philosophy, in the history of western music there is only Beethoven” (Beethoven 10).

 

For Adorno as for Hegel, philosophy/critique is no ivory-tower exercise for a “disinterested” elite, but rather a labor in the service of humankind. Both write in the long “physician to an age” tradition, which makes “unhappy consciousness” part of the illness to be cured: this is the programmatic impulse registered in the serenity of Hegel’s own textual voice, which has so often seemed to the politically conscious unduly “optimistic”–as if Hegel looked on the horrors of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars with a smile of unflappable composure. Adorno’s concern lest such textual effect, or affect, be taken as a merely “subjective” expression of the author has its analogue in Hegel’s own cautions about the solicitations of “unhappy consciousness.” Hegel, we should remember, writes in the historical moment when “happiness” first became charged with political and social meanings and emotions. Thomas Jefferson made its pursuit an inalienable human right in an age when Rousseau, Lessing, Schiller, Wordsworth and many others dared imagine a “sentimental” or “aesthetic education” in which the promise of cultivated pleasures would supplant corporal punishment as incentive to learning, indeed, to self-making. (Compare the crucial role Hegel assigns in the Phenomenology to Bildung, between “ethics” [Sittlichkeit] and “morality” [Moralität].) It was after all the age of Schiller’s “play,” of his Ode “An Freude” so stirringly set to music by Beethoven (and now the anthem of the European Union), of the utopian visions of Fourier, Saint Simon, Robert Owen. For these and other figures of the great Revolutionary age, the thrilling prospect here was of “happiness” (or the pursuit of it) as a collective, popular, democratic endowment or “right”–no longer the elite privilege exclusive to those fortunate enough to be philosophers, as it was for Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Epicureans, and after (for all of whom eudaimonia was, again, a pursuit heavily invested in dispassion).

 

Hegel of course knows that happiness, especially collective human happiness, is easier said than done: how, in an age of revolutionary and counterrevolutionary violence, to keep from despairing over your morning newspaper–this is precisely the problem with which Hegel grapples in the famous “slaughterbench of history” passage in his 1830 lectures on The Philosophy of World History. Hegel doesn’t merely own that history is a nightmare; his further aim is to prescribe for the demoralization that historical consciousness entails. Hegel notes first the simplest defense-mechanism–self-congratulation on having escaped the carnage:

 

we draw back from the intolerable disgust with which these sorrowful reflections threaten us, into the more agreeable environment of our individual life–the Present formed by our private aims and interests. In short we retreat into the selfishness that stands on the quiet shore, and thence enjoy in safety the distant spectacle of “wrecks confusedly hurled.” (21)

 

But the other temptation, the more dangerous one, Hegel seems to imply, anticipating Nietzsche, is ostentatious despair of the breast-beating and hand-wringing sort. Such “sentimentalities” (as Hegel calls them) can become self-perpetuating, for

 

it is not the interest of such sentimentalities, really to rise above those depressing emotions; and to solve the enigmas of Providence which the considerations that occasioned them, present. It is essential to their character to find a gloomy satisfaction in the empty and fruitless sublimities of that negative result. (21; see also 34-5)

 

Only Terry Eagleton still chides Adorno’s “during-Auschwitz” despair as “defeatism,” but to many others today it can still seem to be precisely such a kind of critical “unhappy consciousness”: at best a merely personal whining, at worst a kind of moral Pecksniffery, in either case a source of (Hegel) “gloomy satisfactions” that can become compulsive or addictive in the fashion most recently theorized (“Enjoy your symptom!”) in Slavoj Zizek’s ingenious reinventions of Lacan, or protested in accents of Nietzschean brio in the “kynicism” of Peter Sloterdijk. Adorno, as it happens, anticipates these very objections in a fragment in Minima Moralia (written contemporaneously with Dialectic of Enlightenment, in the last year of World War Two):

 

Subjective reflection, even if critically alerted to itself, has something sentimental and anachronistic about it: something of a lament over the course of the world, a lament to be rejected not for its good faith, but because the lamenting subject threatens to become arrested in its condition and so to fulfill in its turn the law of the world’s course. Fidelity to one’s own state of consciousness and experience is forever in temptation of lapsing into infidelity, by denying the insight that transcends the individual and calls his substance by its name. (16; on the following page the “name” is spelled out: “society is essentially the substance of the individual.”)

 

I take “good faith” here to be ironic: Adorno is accusing “such sentimentalities” (as Hegel calls them) of something very like a Sartrean “mauvaise foi,” a moralized or psychologized version of Rousseau’s “amour-propre,” a (dubiously) “good faith” that Adorno wants to turn, like a Nietzsche in reverse, into a “bad conscience.” What gives critical “unhappy consciousness” its validity is that it belongs to “the matter at hand,” and to the critique of it, not merely to the subjectivity of the critic.

 

Some qualifications are necessary here: Hegel posits “unhappy consciousness” (Phenomenology 111-38) to diagnose precisely the sort of moral addiction or compulsion outlined above. He presents it as coincident historically with the advent of Christianity in the Mediterranean world, and as confluent with Greco-Roman Skepticism and Stoicism. For Hegel, “unhappy consciousness” expresses a relation to some “beyond” that is inaccessible in this world; it thus assumes an “abstract negation” of this-worldly attachments, and of the very possibility of this-worldly happiness as such. For this specific but chronic historical-spiritual disorder, Hegel believes that the fullness of history has, in the modern age, at last enabled a philosophical remedy, which the Phenomenology prescribes: a critical self-consciousness that will redeem the promise of this-worldly happiness by the practice of “determinate negation.” Hegel distinguishes between the two kinds of negation, “abstract” versus “determinate”: “abstract negation” is negation wholesale, allowing for no discriminations of quality; it thus enjoys the all-or-nothing force of merely quantitative judgment, and entoils itself in all the regressions of “bad infinity”–a formula anticipating the Thanatos of the implacably punitive super-ego diagnosed by Freud. “Determinate negation,” by contrast, is qualitative: it negates (criticizes) some particular state of things, and with a particular concept of some better state of things to replace or “sublate” it. “Determinate negation” thereby contributes to the coming-into-existence of a better world.

 

The later Hegel was wont (as his younger self was not) to portray this process in providential Christian terms. Christianity originated in the “abstract” (or “symbolic”) and Asiatic consciousness of ancient Judaism, but by virtue of its long and shaping experience in Western history–the Hellenization that assimilated it with art and philosophy, the Romanization that politicized it and accommodated it to the needs of statecraft, and the Germanization that suffused it with the spirit, even the libido, of freedom–Christianity so evolved as to realize, in modern times, the qualitative fulfillment or “incarnation” of what had originally been its merely “abstract” promise: the realization, from the Asiatic premise that “one is free,” through the classical aristocracy of “some are free,” to the democratic ideal emerging in the revolutionary events of Hegel’s own lifetime that “all are free,” that the state should represent all citizens.

 

To the extent that Hegel intends “unhappy consciousness” as a diagnosis or symptomatics of a malaise specific to the mood or mode of “abstract negation,” it might seem exactly the wrong phrase to apply to the textual effect or affect of Adorno’s critical project, which always seeks to “objectify” its claims, to refuse any construction of them as “merely subjective.” But the passage just quoted makes clear that the distinction between “subject” and “object” is one that Adorno’s writing practice, no less than his arguments in such essays as “On Subject and Object” (Critical Models 245-58), effectively refutes–for the passage not only diagnoses the malaise in question, but confesses its own infection as well. “The lamenting subject” suffers this malaise or “unhappy consciousness” will he or nill he–“even if [especially if?] critically alerted to [him]self.” Where Hegel proposed a rationale for overcoming “unhappy consciousness” and attempted to realize it as an effect or affect in his philosophical writing, Adorno more conflictedly insists that the despair of the critic cannot and should not be so complacently “overcome” in the critique: it is stuff and substance of “the matter in hand,” of the problems critique addresses. To claim to have transcended or “sublated” “unhappy consciousness” is for Adorno a false consciousness, “an imaginary solution to a real contradiction.”

 

Hegel’s “Happy Consciousness”?

 

For Adorno, clearly, the premise of Hegel’s “optimism” is generally circulated too simple-mindedly. In every chapter of the Phenomenology, after all, the human race, groping after happiness, relapses into ironically inventive and original new forms of “unhappy consciousness.” Indeed, the narrative of Hegel’s Phenomenology is scarcely less insistent than the Bible itself that moral misery is both chronic and productive for humankind, from Genesis 3’s access of shaming knowledge, or knowledge-as-shame, to Paul’s “I had not known lust, except the law had said, Thou shalt not covet” (Rom. 7:7), and John of Patmos’s “Revelation” of the fury of divine vengeance. In the Bible, “consciousness” is regularly projected as both effect and cause of pain, fear, suffering and anguish of spirit–“For in much wisdom is much grief; and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow” (Eccles. 1:18). Greco-Roman culture does the same, from the tears of Achilles and Priam, the family curse driving the Oresteia, and the fated suffering of Oedipus to the lachrymae rerum of Vergil. Greek philosophy projected a relief from such suffering, and in the narrative of Hegel’s Phenomenology, “Reason” makes its “first, and therefore imperfect, appearance” with “the beyond” of the “supersensible world” (87-8), a passage allegorizing the advent, in Socrates and Plato, of the high philosophic tradition. The elite subculture of ancient Greek “philosophy” was strongly invested in overcoming affective unhappiness, and often philosophy seems virtually “identifiable” with eudaimonia, a “happiness” whose condition is liberation not merely from unhappy affects, but from affect as such. In the Plato-and-Aristotle tradition, affect itself is unhappy, and the eudaimonia of the philosophers is projected precisely as antidote or narcotic (Eagleton’s “anaesthetic”) against the vagaries of affect rather than as a redemption of happiness in any affective sense.

 

Viewed through the historical lens of Hegelian “unhappy consciousness,” the Greek discovery of what Hegel calls “the supersensible” appears as too complacently oriented to the apatheia of “the beyond”; on Hegel’s showing, not until Christianity humanized the transcendent as “God” incarnate, and abjected itself before this God as a slave before its master, could unhappiness provide “Reason” with its proper (because at last duly cathected) challenge, that of overcoming unhappiness and abjection as such. Greek “Reason” was de-anthropomorphized; it could not thus appear as “master” in relation to the philosopher-“slave”; only as projected in human form can God, or “Reason,” inspire the kind of unhappiness that becomes consciousness in the first place. To say that in Hegel’s Phenomenology it is Reason that incarnates itself in human form is to indicate Hegel’s most fundamental reinscription of Christianity. “Reason is the slave of the passions”: Hume’s aphorism, read Hegel-wise, may illuminate my point here, stipulating of course that “the passions” are the unhappy ones. Hegel projects “Reason” as the slave destined, in abjection to the master, first to conceive and finally to attain an “independent [and “happy”] self-consciousness” that the master will never know. Try to project this allegory onto the Greek philosophical tradition, and you get a notably chillier picture: something like Plato’s Republic, with the philosophers as “guardians” in serene service to Logos itself as represented by, but precisely not personified or incarnated in, the philosopher-king, spinning the ideological fictions necessary to keep the benighted populace happily in the dark of the benignly ideological cave. Not for Plato and Aristotle, elite beneficiaries–“masters”–of a “some are free” society, any consciousness or idealization of the self as slave. Only in Diotima’s allegory of love in the Symposium does ancient Greek “philosophy” approach an abjected self-idealization, and an “unhappy consciousness” that is dynamic and productive, because affective, in anything like Hegel’s way.⁵ How telling that its name should be “love.”

 

So much, on Hegel’s showing, for “the first, and therefore imperfect appearance of Reason.” By contrast, at the close of the “unhappy consciousness” section, Hegel stages for “Reason” a more consequential second coming. The closing paragraph dramatizes the unhappy consciousness’s search for “relief from its misery” (Phenomenology 137); its very last sentence announces the advent to consciousness of “the idea of Reason.” What immediately follows, the next unit of the text, is the section (about a fifth of the Phenomenology ) called “Reason.” In the “unhappy consciousness” section, the alienations of “the beyond” are entoiled in early Christianity’s abjected sense of sin and guilt ([Spirit’s]”action . . . remains pitiable, its enjoyment remains pain” [138]), and the search for a “relief” from such “miseries” involves the “sublation” of such antithetical categories as action and obedience, guilt and forgiveness, particular self-surrender and universal will, by the ministrations of a “mediator,” a word whose antithetical connotations for a Protestant (Christ/priest) Hegel leaves in play, evidently to register the ambivalence of the Christian legacy. The driving force in Hegel’s narrative is “the negative,” the “unrest” and “counterthrust” associated with the not-at-all Platonic/Aristotelian theme of “freedom”: markers of Hegel’s determination to portray the very conflictedness of his World-Spirit history–and the affective no less than the logical extremity of its painful contradictions–as the agonizing but creative ordeal from which “the idea of Reason” first emerges in a form sufficiently “dialectical” to meet (or inaugurate) the challenges of the human story that Hegel wants to tell. Only as incited by affect (“unhappy consciousness”) does (Hegelian) “Reason” effectively enter, and change, history.

 

The Hegelian grand narrative projects the fulfillments of Spirit as still far off, as “not yet,” and so qualifies Hegel’s supposed “optimism.” The “slaughterbench of history” passage amply attests to Hegel’s own “mental torture” at the state of the world, the misery against which the “optimism” of his writing, style as well as substance, attempts something like an exorcism, a performativity in the spirit of “fake-it-till-you-make-it,” a veritable therapy for the Weltgeist at large, anticipating “joyful sciences” from Nietzsche and William James’s “healthy-mindedness” to Wilhelm Reich, Norman O. Brown, and the self-esteem or “recovery” movement of today. One of Hegel’s own most striking ideograms (or “constellations”) for this project is reserved for the climactic lines that conclude the Phenomenology where the “Calvary of absolute Spirit” is juxtaposed to the secularized image of the sacramental chalice of communion from Schiller’s “Ode to Friendship” (493; for shrewd comment on Hegel’s misquotations of the Schiller, see Kojève 165-8). Here what Hegel had called in the 1802 “Faith and Knowledge” “the speculative Good Friday, which used to be [considered] historical” (qtd. in Kaufmann 100), meets, if not quite a speculative Easter, at least a speculative chalice of the wine that, for Hegel, should not merely betoken, but should actually be the communion of Spirit with, or better, as Human Consciousness, Reason, and Spirit as such. The Cross first, then the Resurrection: this Christian ur-narrativization of the evil/good, damned/saved binary re-enacts itself in Hegel’s paradigmatic assumption that happy consciousness can only be–and eventually will be–wrested from the unhappy kind. This is the ordeal Hegel calls “the labor and the suffering of the negative,” an ordeal he pictures, indeed, as Spirit’s harrowing descent into hell, to own or become death itself, to risk its “utter dismemberment” as the necessary condition of “finding itself”:

 

this is the tremendous power of the negative; it is the energy of thought, of the pure “I.” Death, if that is what we want to call this non-actuality, is of all things the most dreadful, and to hold fast what is dead requires the greatest strength. . . . But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself. . . . Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being. This power is identical with what we earlier called the Subject. (Phenomenology 19)

 

Spirit’s near-death experience lends itself to our thematics of the “labor of affects”: overcoming ataraxia in a liberation or re-animation of affect, as fundamental to, even constitutive of Spirit’s project, and its eventual reward–a project proleptic of many nineteenth- and twentieth-century reinventions of heroism as a psychological quest-ordeal, from Wordsworth and Coleridge, Baudelaire (“Voyage à Cythère”), Browning’s “Dark Tower” to Eliot’s The Waste Land, from the sensationalisms of Delacroix and Géricault to Nietzsche’s “strong pessimism” and Wagner’s grandiose dooms, to Freud (Everyman an Oedipus of anguishing self-inquiry) and Mann and Valéry. And, of course, Adorno. Any such list risks silliness, but it seems to me that Hegel’s supposed “optimism” has too long obscured his place in the range of figurations and applications of “tarrying with the negative.”

 

Diagnosticians of Critique

 

“Unhappy consciousness,” then, is a chronic human problem, something like, if not a “human nature,” then a chronic foible of our “species-being.” But there is a more (so to speak) parochial manifestation of the problem, the “unhappy consciousness” very specifically of critique. Adorno indicts critique for shirking the “labor of the concept” with a plangency, an “unhappy consciousness” palpable and audible in the very tone and voice of his prose, in a way to forbid the forgiving thought that critique’s fault has been merely a kind of laziness, or stupidity; the further premise that the labor of conceptualization implies also a “labor of affectualization” evokes deficits more morally cathected, deficits of honesty and of courage as well. It is a prominent theme in Dialectic of Enlightenment that “enlightenment” congratulates itself for its courage in facing a demythologized world stripped of the comforts of traditional illusions, but has proven itself to be motivated, no less than “myth” itself, by a drive to master and/or deny “fear,” to achieve an “imaginary” comfort or self-assurance in face of a world more complicated and threatening than enlightenment thereby dares to acknowledge.

 

Hegel makes similar observations, though (usually) more as satiric jabs at common-sense philosophizing than as Adorno’s lamentation over culture-wide pathologies. Hegel, indeed, diagnoses every possible reason for what we might call a “resistance to philosophy”–fear of a death-like “loss” of the self in “doubt and despair” (Phenomenology 18-20, 49-51), “shame” at confronting the intellectual challenge and the “alien authority” of the new (35), “the conceit that will not argue” (41), narcissistic “enjoyment” in (or fixation on) one’s own unwittingly tautological “explanations” (94, 101). The one obstacle that does not occur to Hegel is the reader’s potential intellectual incapacity: Hegel writes not only as a writer/thinker utterly undaunted by the prodigious complexities his inquiry generates for itself, but as if in entire confidence that any reader not debilitated by the moral deficits just mentioned will be fully capable of following where Hegel leads. (I will confess to moments of thinking this the most extravagantly utopian of Hegel’s many dizzying “optimisms.”) When Hegel notes that “a fear of falling into error sets up a mistrust of Science,” he is referring to the enlightenment program, since Bacon and Descartes, of arriving at truth by eliminating all error and illusion: a skeptical, Occam’s-razor approach predicated on the hope that when error has been pared away, the remainder will be truth. But Hegel advises that we should “mistrust this very mistrust”:

 

Should we not be concerned as to whether this fear of error is not just the error itself? Indeed this fear takes something–a great deal in fact–for granted as truth . . . [e.g.,] certain ideas about cognition as an instrument and as a medium, and assumes that there is a difference between ourselves and this cognition. Above all, it presupposes that the Absolute stands on one side and cognition on the other, independent and separated from it, and yet is something real; or in other words, it presupposes that cognition which, since it is excluded from the Absolute, is surely outside of the truth as well, is nevertheless true, an assumption whereby what calls itself fear of error reveals itself rather as fear of the truth. (Phenomenology 47)

 

Hegel goes on to diagnose what appears as merely intellectual error in psychological terms, as a vanity and insecurity vitiating the intellectual courage of the inquirer. (Hegel becomes something of a psychologist of the foibles specific to intellectuals, an impulse and an interest Adorno continues.) Hegel indicts this unwitting “fear of the truth” as rationalizing an “incapacity of Science,” as indeed “intended to ward off Science itself, and constitute an empty appearance of knowing.” What Hegel calls “natural consciousness” (empiricism, that is, “sense certainty” elevating itself to a scientific claim) resists the “path” of the Notion (a.k.a. “the labor of the concept”) because “the realization of the Notion, counts for it [natural consciousness] as the loss of its own self” (Phenomenology 49). “The road can therefore be regarded as the pathway of doubt, or more precisely as the way of despair”–shades here of “tarrying with the negative” (19)–and “natural consciousness,” economizing its experiential investments to maximize pleasure and minimize pain, shrinks from the discomforts of such a path. But for Hegel, this despair and doubt are part of the “necessary progression and interconnection of the forms of the unreal [“natural”] consciousness [that] will by itself bring to pass the completion of the series” (50). Hegel goes on to outline, in effect, a therapy of Geist in its struggles with such despair and doubt, with the “anxiety” that attends them, with the “sentimentality” that resorts to a wishful optimism or eudaemonism against them, with the “conceit” that will tempt Geist to fortify its “vanity” in the face of such threats of “loss of self.” Hegel ends with the promise that the “unrest” of thought will eventually overcome the “inertia” these despairs produce, to renew the quest for truth or “the Absolute” (51-3).

 

For Adorno, Hegel’s concluding promise rings false because Hegel speaks as if it were not a “broken promise” in the here-and-now world. Hegel’s genial and confident tone, in effect, belittles the resistance to philosophy–as if to laugh us out of our intellectual timidity–and offers its own brio as, so to speak, a down-payment on the world-historical promise of eventual redemption and happy consciousness. By contrast, Adorno, most of all in Dialectic of Enlightenment, means to frighten us into new awareness: not only of our very real peril, in the age of industrialized total war, but of the numbness and despair with which we have so far confronted it–or rather, contrived not to confront it. What Hegel satirizes as merely local or personal resistances or failures within the discipline of philosophical inquiry, Adorno diagnoses as a culture-wide pathology, whose lethal potential is all too evident in the age of Auschwitz and Hiroshima.

 

Fear and Enlightenment

 

The relevant response to that lethal potential is fear. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, fear is both a key theme and an overarching effect. In Adorno’s philosophical and critical tradition, fear, among the principal components of “unhappy consciousness,” has held a special, even a rather glamorous, place. In Hegel’s master/slave narrative, the “struggle for recognition” surmounts nature only if life is at stake in the struggle. For the slave who buys life at the cost of bondage, the trauma of mortal fear in combat remains the necessary condition of the subsequent achievement of “independence,” “self-consciousness,” and an instigating conception of “being-for-self.” Nietzsche similarly finds an authenticating experience of “pure terror,” “original pain,” and the like as the sine qua non of (just what wimpy modernity has closed its eyes to) “tragedy”; absent such experiences of terror, there arises (has already arisen) what Francis Fukuyama calls, following Kojève’s famous splenetic “end of history” footnote (158-62, n6), the “last man” problem: the fear that, should utopia ever arrive, humankind, delivered at last from all mortal challenges, will devolve into a thumb-sucking limbo of material complacency and moral insignificance. This anxiety motivates the conflicted attachment of so many to violence, as a guarantee (in ways René Girard diagnoses) of the values lost upon the “last man.” To be sure, anxieties lest the revolution happen non-violently would seem to be overblown. But the prospect that revolution might banish suffering and unhappiness altogether arouses ambivalence. Even Marx, in the most utopian of the 1844 manuscripts, the section called “Private Property and Communism,” avows that come the revolution, not all suffering will end, but only the “alienated” kind: “for suffering, apprehended humanly, is an enjoyment of self in man” (87). We need our fear, to make ourselves heroic.

 

Further ideological uses of a glamorized fear also figure in the more individualized inflections of these themes running from Kierkegaard to Heidegger and early Sartre, in which fear is the guarantor of spiritual maturity and courage, a sort of macho philosophique, an openness of the self to moral extremities of fear and anxiety, refusal or innocence of which would be inauthenticity or “mauvaise foi.” In Kierkegaard, although the “religious” is the valorized other of the merely “aesthetic” life–Kierkegaard’s version of the “last man” vacuity–the political itself appears as, categorically, aesthetic: an evasion of the more challenging fears and tremblings that Kierkegaard projects as the exclusive (why not say) “enjoyments” of the most authentically lived life. Similarly in Heidegger, a courageous “being-towards-death” individuates and valorizes the existential Dasein against the massed, faceless, inauthentic “they” (“das Man“); compare Lacan’s grammatologized and historicized version of the story of the devolution of “modern man” from subject-“je” into object-“moi.” Adorno was prescient in complaining that such rhetorics resonated all too readily with the political vulgarizations of the cheerleaders for Thanatos (“Viva la muerte!”) and the SS Übermenschen flouting death’s-head insignia, encouraged by Himmler in explicitly Nietzschean language (“self-overcoming,” etc.) to withstand the urgings of conscience that would impede them in their heroic task of massacring the innocents.

 

For Adorno, by contrast, “the goal of the revolution is the elimination of anxiety. That is why we need not fear the former, and need not ontologize the latter” (Complete Correspondence 131). For me, indeed, one of the most attractive things about Adorno is his visceral refusal of any such glamorization of fear, not least because the “violence” of which some intellectuals speak so grandiosely is often merely figurative–indeed, sheerly “imaginary.” Hegel’s “tarrying with the negative” (“to hold fast what is dead requires the greatest strength”) becomes in Adorno the more muted formula, “the embittering part of dialectics” (Negative Dialectics 151). Not for him the accents of Zarathustrian bravado, snook heroically cocked at the void. Adorno is more like Freud (and, with qualifications, Marx) in conceiving fear as a humiliation, a non-elective ordeal imposed on us by the brutality of our historical circumstances, a suffering that may or may not elicit heroism from some of the sufferers, but that is sure to damage and debase, not to ennoble, most of its victims. Like Freud, Adorno distrusts rhetorics that align the experience of fear with moral grandeur or spiritual profit, including those, like the “last man” anxiety, that put the case negatively. For Adorno, indeed, to posit the debasement of the “last man” as an argument against utopia would be ideological delusion: as if the “last man” deprivations weren’t already epidemic in the nightmare of our “administered world.” The motive Adorno most readily shares with Lacan, though Adorno’s moral plangency is at the farthest possible remove from Lacan’s knowing Schadenfreude, would be precisely his alarm at the masochistic human addiction to misery, to sentimentalizing rhetorics of amor fati, to the problematic neatly summarized by Zizek’s sarcastic injunction “Enjoy your symptom!” and instantiated by Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Kojève). Like Lacan, again, Adorno aligns this “weakening of the ego” with a “neutralization of sex,” a “desexualization of sexuality” (Critical Models 72-5) that oddly joins Marcuse’s “repressive desublimation” with de Rougemont’s extension of the Nietzschean “last man” lament to Eros. About the administered world’s “castrated hedonism, desire without desire,” Adorno’s diagnosis would be very much the Lacanian shake of the head at having given way on desire (Aesthetic Theory 11). (One recalls here Weber’s “iron cage,” “sensualists without heart,” etc., in the peroration to The Protestant Ethic.)

 

So Adorno affects no pose, à la Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, of facing down the abyss from which the rest of us cower away in denial; nor, on the other hand, does he make as if to smile it away, as Hegel does. If Adorno’s critical “unhappy consciousness” avoids the Scylla of Hegelian “optimism,” it equally steers clear of the Charybdis of (self-regardingly) “strong pessimism[s]” of the anti-utopian type so often mobilized in critiques of modernity. Adorno’s anxieties about modernity are not Huxleyan, but Orwellian, conjuring not the pampered “last man” whom Nietzsche so haughtily disdains, but rather the brutalized “administered subject” whose abasement before the domination of a “rationalized” world is achieved at the price of a “weakening of the ego” to produce the ironically named “authoritarian personality,” disciplined and conditioned in the regimes of the workplace and the routines of commodified pleasure as managed by the culture industry, a colonizing and exploiting appropriation, “for others,” of all “spirit,” of all subjecthood.

 

The 1944 “Introduction”

 

Written during the darkest days of World War Two, while Horkheimer and Adorno were refugees in the U.S., the Dialectic of Enlightenment manifests the “unhappy consciousness of critique” as a deliberate cathexis of fear in writing. Keeping the date of composition in mind–late 1943 to early 1944: “during Auschwitz”–the book aims to arouse the fear narcotized in enlightenment chorismos, the “division of labor” which assigns feeling and thinking to different agencies (art and science) to the detriment of both. (“The narrow-minded wisdom that sorts out feeling from knowing and rubs its hands together when it finds the two balanced is–as trivialities sometimes are–the caricature of a situation that over the centuries of the division of labor has inscribed this division in subjectivity” [Aesthetic Theory 331]). Horkheimer and Adorno project the ataraxia that enlightenment makes programmatic as foundational to the “dialectic of enlightenment” the book means to diagnose. Later in his career, Adorno frequently avowed the ambition to “rescue” this or that ambition, program, or value that modernity is in danger of forgetting; the project of excavating the “emotional force” of Kant’s philosophy (above) is an example, but it is a dim echo of the much more urgent, larger-stakes effort in Dialectic of Enlightenment to reawaken the energy of terror against which the enlightenment has deludedly, compulsively numbed itself. Fear is not merely the “textual effect” or affect of Dialectic of Enlightenment, but also the “motivation” of its thematic or indeed thetic burden, announced in the book’s opening sentences:

 

Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity. Enlightenment’s program was the disenchantment of the world. It wanted to dispel myths, to overthrow fantasy with knowledge. (Jephcott 1)

 

The book will go on to argue–or I had better say, to evoke, agitatedly, breathlessly, and reiteratively, in a way to enact its thematic of the deadlock or “standstill” that has reversed the developed world’s “progress” into “regress”–that so far from having “liberated [ourselves] from fear,” our very fear of fear, our anxious repression of our cultural and historical anxieties, has left us enslaved to fear every bit as much as the primitive trapped in the cycle of compulsive rituals that palliate the terror of human impotence in a terrifying world. Enlightenment prides itself on having escaped that cycle, but this very pride has become an illusion and a denial, a “sympathetic magic” against dreads cognate with those that entrap the primitive; the devolution of philosophy into positivism and technology has made of “scientific method” a denial of the unknown, an ethos that assimilates the unknown to the known, the new and the different to the “same old same old.”

 

Hence our aborted “enlightenment,” “triumphant calamity,” progress reverting to barbarism, in obedience to an as-if fated “compulsion to repeat.” Hence “the curse of irresistible progress is irresistible regression” (Jephcott 28). The fear of fear itself has driven enlightenment to an illusory exorcism of fear, made this impulse its analgesic, its will to deny, in short, its “imaginary victory” over fear, a freedom from fear the more delusional, and (therefore) the more compulsive, the more terror threatens to engulf it. The social and other dislocations of modernization produced turmoil because the new is frightening–and it’s a collective reflex in societies engulfed by rapid development to try to master collective fear by refusing the new. Whatever affronts or perplexes or challenges enlightenment’s canons of domestication arouses “fear,” which enlightenment promptly and preemptively represses. “The cause of enlightenment’s relapse into mythology is to be sought . . . in the fear of truth which petrifies enlightenment itself” (Jephcott xvi).

 

What the book argues about fear, repression, and the anxiety of the new, it also enacts in the writing. Against the backdrop of World War Two, the contrast of Horkheimer and Adorno’s authorial carriage with Freud’s is a useful handle. Freud’s “stoic” composure–the shocking disclosures delivered in tones of measured calm; the outrages to common sense and morals rendered only the more stinging for the lucidity of the delivery; the scandalized “resistances” to his work which Freud anticipates, and serenely takes as confirmation of it–all this is at the furthest remove from Dialectic of Enlightenment, whose prose is overwrought, urgent, and (often) recklessly obscure. And deliberately, self-consciously so, as we can read in the book’s 1944 “Introduction,” a manifesto in justification of the book’s obscurity and difficulty. The argument evokes and coordinates three axes of “difficulty,” each motivating, and motivated by, the others: the psychological difficulty of our traumatic history, past, present, and future; the intellectual difficulty of the philosophic-critical tradition whose materials the argument mobilizes; and the darkly enigmatic carriage of the self-consciously, deliberately difficult prose style of Dialectic of Enlightenment itself.

 

Dated “May 1944,” just days before the allied landings in Normandy, and reprinted without change in subsequent editions and translations, the “Introduction” insists that the “difficulties” of the text are not to be set aside, that they are bone and blood of the book’s argument and intended effect, indeed, of its project and its problem: that they are “motivated,” programmatic, in ways the authors outline, “make thematic,” in the “Introduction” itself. If the text proper enacts or performs–the mot juste here is suffers–the difficulties of “the matter in hand,” the “Introduction” more explicitly reflects on them, and thus initiates the challenge of the text. From almost the opening sentence, the difficulties of the project are foregrounded:

 

The further we proceeded with the task the more we became aware of a mismatch between it and our own capabilities. What we had set out to do was nothing less than to explain why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism. We underestimated the difficulty of dealing with the subject . . . . (Jephcott xiv)

 

The echo of Rousseau’s famous lament–“man,” born free, lives everywhere in chains–announces an attempt “to explain why” this should be so; the following sentence similarly conjures with the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach in a way to suggest, Marx’s provocation notwithstanding, that “interpreting” the world is quite difficult enough, even in default of changing it, and assumes (what Marx can only rhetorically have seemed to question) that there is continuity, not antithesis, between interpreting the world and changing it. In any case, “consciousness” is not a problem Horkheimer and Adorno are prepared to dismiss:

 

We underestimated the difficulty of dealing with the subject because we still placed too much trust in contemporary consciousness. While we had noted for many years that, in the operations of modern science, the major discoveries are paid for with an increasing decline of theoretical education, we nevertheless believed that we could follow those operations to the extent of limiting our work primarily to a critique or a continuation of specialist theories. Our work was to adhere, at least thematically, to the traditional disciplines: sociology, psychology, and epistemology. The fragments we have collected here show, however, that we had to abandon that trust. . . . in the present collapse of bourgeois civilization, not only the operations but the purpose of science have become dubious. The tireless self-destruction of enlightenment hypocritically celebrated by implacable fascists and implemented by pliable experts in humanity compels thought to forbid itself the last remaining innocence regarding the habits and tendencies of the Zeitgeist. (Jephcott xiv)

 

What had initially looked to be a set of “specialist” problems (“sociology, psychology, and epistemology”) turns out to challenge “philosophy” itself–and to challenge it not only on its wonted ground of “theoretical” awareness but also, more radically, on the higher-stakes ground of politics, culture, science, and the very fate of civilization, grounds on which philosophy has wanted to maintain a detached “innocence” that, Horkheimer and Adorno charge, even the most willfully “innocent” can no longer pretend is tenable. The urgency of the crisis is to be read in the very texture, the very “fragmentary” quality, of the text we are about to read: we might have expected that the move from specialist disciplines to the discipline of disciplines, philosophy, would entail an integration and comprehensiveness denied the specialisms (or rather, that the specialisms renounce on principle); instead, Horkheimer and Adorno’s “philosophical” effort to overcome the fragmentation of intellectual culture can itself yield only “fragments.” In the context of 1944, a phrase like “the tireless self-destruction of enlightenment” might have suggested images from front pages and newsreels of bombed-out cities, whole cultures reduced to rubble, to “fragments.” As we’ll see, Horkheimer and Adorno diagnose enlightenment as a rapaciously “analytic” (that is, atomizing, separating, distinction-making) habit or drive, or driven-ness, of thought that has already, in the name of science, fragmented the field of intellectual labor from within. Enlightenment’s divvying-up of disciplinary turf, modernity’s settlement of the “contest of faculties” thematized by Kant, this “innocence,” this renunciation of the larger, integrated, theoretically aware or “self-conscious” view that opens itself to the largest problems of the culture, is a large part of the problem, a major symptom–indeed, the pathology itself–of the “dialectic of enlightenment” Horkheimer and Adorno aim to diagnose and to prescribe for.

 

The effort “to explain why” the world is in such dire straits obliges philosophy to overcome its wonted (ideological) “innocence,” to estrange or defamiliarize habits of thinking and of language long since turned ideological:

 

If public life has reached a state in which thought is being turned inescapably into a commodity and language into a celebration of the commodity, the attempt to trace the sources of this degradation must refuse obedience to the current linguistic and intellectual demands before it is rendered entirely futile by the consequence of those demands for world history. (Jephcott xiv-xv)

 

This seems a very “period” modernist or avant-garde disavowal of received conventions, but also a warning–for “even the most honorable reformer who recommends renewal in threadbare language reinforces the existing order he seeks to break by taking over its worn-out categorial apparatus and the pernicious power-philosophy lying behind it” (Jephcott xvii). Renewal of our debased language will involve expression and thinking, will contravene conventional cultural “demands” that are both “linguistic and intellectual”; the antinomy long dominant in Western critical discourses between the “textual” and the “thetic” is to be collapsed, even something like “deconstructed,” not only in the argued theory but even more in the self-consciously difficult writing practice of Dialectic of Enlightenment.

 

But in dissenting from “current linguistic and intellectual demands” here, Dialectic of Enlightenment declares a crucial difference from (even implies a critique of) avant-gardism as usual, for in the modern arts, the search for new and uncorrupted expressive means typically identifies the “concept,” generically, as the enemy, and mobilizes against it in the name of the “concrete” particular, whose redemptive quidditas or “authenticity” the familiarizations of intellect have allegedly habituated and debased. (This axiomatic–why not call it an “ideology”?–replicates itself, of course, in many philosophical texts, and hence some of the Frankfurt School’s particular “existentialist” bêtes noirs, e.g., Heidegger, Jaspers, Scheler.) The twentieth-century arts, too, want to reclaim “truth,” but usually by circumventing the very conceptuality Horkheimer and Adorno set in place as a sine qua non of their project and conceiving “truth” aesthetically, as “immediate [that is, unmediated] experience.” From the Hegelian viewpoint of Horkheimer and Adorno, “mediation” simply is “the labor of the concept”; its repudiation, in the arts as in the empirical sciences, is itself an important symptom (Adorno’s frequent name for it is “nominalism”) of the predicament of modernity–that is, of the “dialectic of enlightenment”–that their book means to expose and indict. And redeem or “rescue,” in large measure, again, by the “labor of the affects,” that is, affectualizing “the labor of the concept” itself.

 

“Mythic Fear Turned Radical”

 

I want now to risk a very lengthy quotation that will display these difficulties, and a few new ones, together. It is one of the many projections in Dialectic of Enlightenment of the arc from prehistory to the present, from animism to enlightenment, and it enacts the “progress/regress” motif in the paradoxical gesture of a narrative whose point is to enact the failure of its own progress, to display the inextricability of progress and regression even at the risk of seeming to identify terms whose non-identity would seem to be the very condition of “dialectic” itself. So we have a thematic burden carried less in the details of what the sentences state or argue, than in the formal character of a passage that conducts itself as a quasi- or (even) pseudo-narrative. Crucially, the theme–the failure of progress, the regression to primitive unreason–is charged with dread by reason of the very cryptic-ness of its strange oracular utterance, its broad-brush laying about with complex and loaded terminologies whose meanings or connotations are not clarified or delimited, and above all its rhythm, its air of driven and breathless haste:

 

The murky, undivided entity worshipped as the principle of mana at the earliest known stages of humanity lived on in the bright world of the Greek religion. Primal and undifferentiated, it is everything unknown and alien; it is that which transcends the bounds of experience, the part of things which is more than their immediately perceived existence. What the primitive experiences as supernatural is not a spiritual substance in contradistinction to the material world but the complex concatenation of nature in contrast to its individual link. The cry of terror called forth by the unfamiliar becomes its name. It fixes the transcendence of the unknown in relation to the known, permanently linking horror to holiness. The doubling of nature into appearance and essence, effect and force, made possible by myth no less than by science, springs from human fear, the expression of which becomes its explanation. This does not mean that the soul is transposed into nature, as psychologism would have us believe; mana, the moving spirit, is not a projection but the echo of the real preponderance of nature in the weak psyches of primitive people. The split between animate and inanimate, the assigning of demons and deities to certain specific places, arises from this preanimism. Even the division of subject and object is prefigured in it. If the tree is addressed no longer as simply a tree but as evidence of something else, a location of mana, language expresses the contradiction that it is at the same time itself and something other than itself, identical and not identical. Through the deity speech is transformed from tautology into language. The concept, usually defined as the unity of the features of what it subsumes, was rather, from the first, a product of dialectical thinking, in which each thing is what it is only by becoming what it is not. This was the primal form of the objectifying definition, in which concept and thing became separate, the same definition which was already far advanced in the Homeric epic and trips over its own excesses in modern positive science. But this dialectic remains powerless as long as it emerges from the cry of terror, which is the doubling, the mere tautology of terror itself. The gods cannot take away fear from human beings, the petrified cries of whom they bear as their names. Humans believe themselves free of fear when there is no longer anything unknown. This has determined the path of demythologization, of enlightenment, which equates the living with the nonliving as myth had equated the nonliving with the living. Enlightenment is mythical fear radicalized. The pure immanence of positivism, its ultimate product, is nothing other than a form of universal taboo. Nothing is allowed to remain outside, since the mere idea of the “outside” is the real source of fear. (Jephcott 10-11)

 

This passage illustrates the fundamental–and entirely deliberate–narrative contradiction of Dialectic of Enlightenment, for the momentum of the passage, its energy or, so to speak, body-language as one reads, is narrative–we are reading a story–and yet it is a rum question at the close what, if anything, has been narrated. The passage ends much as it began–enlightenment ends where animism began–in fearful denial of the new or the “outside”; here as elsewhere, what is narrated is the failure of the narrative to achieve narrativity, that is, to accomplish the development, to unfold the new, which would be the sine qua non of narrative, the crucial change or “event” (outcome), the indispensable thing-to-be-narrated in the first place. The burden of this (specifically narrative) “performative contradiction” is that “the curse of irresistible progress is irresistible regression” (Jephcott 28)–and the non-transitive steady-state syntax of that sentence, subject and predicate joined by the present-tense copula, could stand as emblem of just what the narrative’s progress/regress enacts, or rather prevents being enacted. A particularly cryptic crux is the word “tautology,” here anticipating Adorno’s later assault on “identity thinking.” In the passage, “tautology” is not, to be sure, simply identifiable with “identity,” but acts as something like the surrogate of identity–of the retro- or primary identity of the origin (arché), not of the ultimate identity (telos) of the “Absolute.” As actant, in other words, “tautology” appears here as the fated antagonist of “language,” of “separation,” of apprehension of “the Other,” of non-identity, and of “dialectical thinking” itself: at the recurrence of “fear,” all achieved differences relapse, as if in obedience to the downward pull of a gravitational field, back to the ground of “tautology” again.

 

But Horkheimer and Adorno want to preserve the Hegelian narrative as well as to cancel it; hence, near the middle of the passage, the agitating appearance of “language,” “concept,” and “dialectic” come onstage and momentarily seem, as narrative actants, capable of breaching the closure of “tautology,” the regime from animism to enlightenment, and of enabling a truly narrative movement of change. “Tautology” figures as their nemesis, the ruin of all that they would seem to promise. From the primitive awe of the spirit-name and its “linking horror to holiness,” the mere utterance of which becomes “expression” and then “explanation,” there arises a rudimentary anticipation of “the division of subject and object,” and hence the very Hegelian sense that “language expresses the contradiction that it is at the same time itself and something other than itself, identical and not identical. . . . [thus] speech is transformed from tautology into language.” It is as much from the interaction of these terms as from any extant notion we might have of their meaning that we infer what “tautology,” “language,” “dialectic,” and so on, connote here, what role they play in the “night of the world” drama unfolding on the page.

 

We note the entry here of “contradiction,” a key term in Frankfurt School discourses, and of the problematic of “identity/non-identity” Adorno will later elaborate in Negative Dialectics. In this passage, the next term to agitate the text is “dialectic” itself, here staged as the condition of a redemption of the “concept” from its demotion to “the unity of the features of what it subsumes,” a nominalist formulation that reduces the “concept” to a mere enabling fiction. Against such nominalist dismissals of “the concept,” the text goes on to retroject what Adorno elsewhere calls “the kinetic force of [the] concept” (Philosophy of Modern Music 26) as Hegel “dialectically” reimagined it, back into antiquity, asserting that the concept “was . . . from the first, a product of dialectical thinking, in which each thing is what it is only by becoming what it is not.” The language of “dialectic” and “becoming” here summons the highest Hegelian vocation of the concept and of philosophy, which sets what can be thought against, and as the critique or “negation” of, what merely is, as a volitional element in the temporal stream (or narrative) of “becoming.” Having introduced the terminology, and the promise, of the dialectic, the passage now reverts to program, to stage the miscarriage of that promise: for “this dialectic remains powerless as long as it emerges from the cry of terror, which is the doubling, the mere tautology of terror itself.” (“Emerges from”: enlightenment may suppose it has surmounted the primal terror, but it has merely repressed it, and thus, unconsciously, prolonged it.) The passage then moves to enlightenment, which seeks to escape the “tautology of terror” by “demythologization,” by a systematic conquest of the source of fear, the unknown, and its conversion to knowledge–but this impotent dialectic continues despite itself, and unwittingly, to “duplicate” the “tautology of terror” rather than to undo it.

 

That some such reversal or catastrophe befalls the enlightenment program, the general drift of the passage makes clear–though neither narratively nor, so to speak, syllogistically, is the exact course of this miscarriage spelled out. Rather there follows a sequence of problematic assertions, and oddly it is in the more obscure of these that the extent and irony of the failure emerge most clearly–in, for instance, the most challenging sentence here, which is also the shortest: “Enlightenment is mythical fear radicalized” (Jephcott 11). It happens this is a sentence (“Aufklärung ist die radikal gewordene, mythische Angst” [Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialektik 32]) that I prefer in Cumming’s translation: “Enlightenment is mythic fear turned radical” (16). Both translations preserve the etymological and other connotations of “radikal” in the German, but that buzzword makes harder rather than easier the question of what the sentence might mean. For the politically left reader Horkheimer and Adorno address, the first connotations of “turned radical” would be of progress, of “radicalization” as a desirable conversion or development: something has advanced from a complacent, muddled superficiality, has been “made conscious,” has been made political: radicalized. So far, the sentence might be read as endorsing the very ideology of enlightenment that, the context makes clear, the authors are in fact attacking.

 

Another first-take reading, not incompatible with the first, might read “radicalized” or “turned radical” to suggest something like an eruption or explosion of mythic fear, as if announcing a sudden and transforming release of affects hitherto repressed and held in check–and of course the sudden unblocking of long-repressed energies is a familiar figure for revolution. But again, context counsels otherwise–the “universal taboo” is clearly a universal repression–so “radicalized” or “turned radical” clearly must mean something else: must mean, indeed, virtually the opposite: must mean something like, “enlightenment is primordial fear precisely not bursting up into expression from below, but on the contrary driven downward, back to the fundamental, to the roots.” “Radicalized,” in short, might mean “repressed”–the reverse of its usual connotation. The most apposite model I can adduce here is Freud’s account of trauma in section IV of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, according to which frightening stimuli “invade” the sensorium, which responds with a defensive “hypercathexis” the paradoxical aim of which is to achieve an “anticathexis,” by means of which the floods of overwhelming stimuli can be “mastered” and “bound,” and rendered thus “quiescent.” (Freud is elaborating here the “compulsion to repeat”–a model whose pertinence to Dialectic of Enlightenment seems the more compelling for going unmentioned by the authors.)

 

And yet, having worked through the twists and turns above, not “cancelled” but “preserved” in all this conflictedness of suggestion and connotation against context and larger thought-rhythms, there persists some residue, some still-utopian potential, of the first reading: that enlightenment is indeed, or may somehow again be, a radicalization of mythic fear in the sense projected in the “labor of affectualization,” in effect the program of Dialectic of Enlightenment itself: to awaken the fear, terror, angst, dread that “the dialectic of enlightenment” has so far narcotized and repressed, and draw from the jolting accesses of affect thereby released a newly radicalizing energy that will make of “the unhappy consciousness of critique” an engine of advance and of the new, rather than a pitfall, a syndrome–an ataraxia–of defeat and repetition.

 

This “and yet,” I want to argue, is the “dialectical” condition and/or effect of Adorno’s so affective and affecting prose. His challenge is as much moral and emotional as intellectual: as much about confronting fear–as immediate affect, as mediated concept, as meta-fear: the fear of fear itself–as about meeting the interpretive and cognitive challenges of a tough text in the daunting tradition of Hegel-and-Marx and after. This text, both in the writing and in the reading, enacts or suffers what it argues: the imperative labor of facing, in thought and in feeling, the Angst that has paralyzed thought and feeling both. The difficulty of the prose is meant to inflict this Angst on the reader, this “labor and suffering of the negative.” But–“and yet”–it is meant to agitate as well anxiety’s antithetical or dialectical other, hope–however unemphatic in the argument, however merely implicit in the movement, of the text.

 

Most of my description here has made Dialectic of Enlightenment sound like a very despairing book–extravagantly, floridly despairing. It is indeed a text answering to Harold Bloom’s fine formulation, “an achieved anxiety” (96). But of course Horkheimer and Adorno do not mean to incite affects of fear for their own sake; that would be “mimesis” of the merely ideological kind–mere “repetition” of “symptom,” not critical negation. On the contrary, their “immanent critique” intends a “working-through” that must begin by making the traumas and anxieties of World War Two available to consciousness, even at the cost of terror, as indispensable prerequisite to any breach of the paralyzing captivity in which modern consciousness has languished. Adorno intimates as much in an unwontedly straightforward passage from a 1967 essay, originally a radio talk, called “Education after Auschwitz”:

 

anxiety must not be repressed. When anxiety is not repressed, when one permits oneself to have, in fact, all the anxiety that this [after-Auschwitz] reality warrants, then precisely by doing that, much of the destructive effect of unconscious and displaced anxiety will probably disappear. (Critical Models 198)

 

Hence the paradoxical “textual effect” (or affect) of Dialectic of Enlightenment, that what might seem Horkheimer and Adorno’s ne plus ultra of despair nevertheless achieves a kind of “relief” in what seems at first merely to repeat the very affects from which relief is sought. Only after an evocation of the pain and fear that have paralyzed us can there be any release of affective energies whose freeing might augur possibilities more hopeful: that there remain potentials of consciousness (thought and feeling, agony and concept, eros and knowledge)–potentials, in short, of critique–still to be mobilized. The critical is not yet–“not yet”–the utopian, nor is the promise (Stendhal’s promesse du bonheur) quite vouchsafed, let alone realized, its “broken”-ness repaired. Nevertheless, for all its extremities of Angst and terror, Dialectic of Enlightenment manages to arouse hopes that Freud or Weber would dismiss with a sadder-but-wiser shake of the head.

 

Critique and/as Utopia

 

I want to close with further consideration of how this happens–this “labor of affectualization,” this dialectical transubstantiation of despair into something like hope. The example above derived “hope” as something like a negatively stated motif inferable from what looks to be on its face a very dark passage indeed. I want now to locate such effects in, and ascribe them to, the compositional form or rhythm of Horkheimer and Adorno’s text: in the climax of chapter 1 of Dialectic of Enlightenment. We have been looking so far at passages from that program chapter of the book, passages–“Enlightenment is mythic fear turned radical,” e.g.–that have evoked the evil, the “triumphant calamity,” of the “dialectic of enlightenment.” For more than three quarters of its length, the chapter has diagnosed the “repression” of fear under whose pall enlightenment has sleep-walked into terror and evoked the fear itself to undo that repression. At a determinate point (we will look at it shortly) the text introduces, then prosecutes, its case for the necessity of critique–“thought” itself–as the only possible relief of our predicament. But from this sanguine argument, I want to elicit something more elusive: what I might call an intimation of the utopian, or (perhaps better) a “utopia-effect,” that is less argued in the book’s propositional content or logic (the Bilderverbot against picturing utopia remains in force), than enacted in its verbal energy, and even more in the book’s larger structural rhythms, its “through-composition,” to inflect the musical term with some of the connotations Adorno’s usage lends it, what he elsewhere calls the “agency of form” (Notes on Literature 114).

 

The peroration, in the very last paragraphs of the chapter, reprises the motif of “thought” and its agency here evoked as “revolutionary imagination” and “unyielding theory”:

 

The suspension of the concept, whether done in the name of progress or of culture, which had both long since formed a secret alliance against truth, gave free rein to the lie. In a world which merely verified recorded evidence and preserved thought, debased to the achievement of great minds, as a kind of superannuated headline, the lie was no longer distinguishable from a truth neutralized as cultural heritage. But to recognize power even within thought itself as unreconciled nature would be to relax the necessity which even socialism, in a concession to reactionary common sense, prematurely confirmed as eternal. In declaring necessity the sole basis of the future and banishing mind, in the best idealist fashion, to the far pinnacle of the superstructure, socialism clung all too desperately to the heritage of bourgeois philosophy. The relationship of necessity to the realm of freedom was therefore treated as merely quantitative, mechanical, while nature, posited as wholly alien, as in the earliest mythology, became totalitarian, absorbing socialism along with freedom. By sacrificing thought, which in its reified form as mathematics, machinery, organization, avenges itself on a humanity forgetful of it, enlightenment forfeited its own realization. By subjecting everything particular to its discipline, it left the uncomprehended whole free to rebound as mastery over things against the life and consciousness of human beings. But a true praxis capable of overturning the status quo depends on theory’s refusal to yield to the oblivion in which society allows thought to ossify. It is not the material preconditions of fulfillment, unfettered technology as such, which make fulfillment uncertain. That is the argument of sociologists who are trying to devise yet another antidote, even a collectivist one, in order to control that antidote. The fault lies in a social context which induces blindness. The mythical scientific respect of peoples for the given reality, which they themselves constantly create, finally becomes itself a positive fact, a fortress before which even the revolutionary imagination feels shamed as utopianism, and degenerates to a compliant trust in the objective tendency of history. As the instrument of this adaptation, as a mere assemblage of means, enlightenment is as destructive as its Romantic enemies claim. It will only fulfill itself if it forswears its last complicity with them and dares to abolish the false absolute, the principle of blind power. The spirit of such unyielding theory would be able to turn back from its goal even the spirit of pitiless progress. Its herald, Bacon, dreamed of the many things “which kings with their treasure cannot buy, nor with their force command, [of which] their spials and intelligencers can give no news.” Just as he wished, those things have been given to the bourgeois, the enlightened heirs of the kings. In multiplying violence through the mediation of the market, the bourgeois economy has also multiplied its things and its forces to the point where not merely kings or even the bourgeoisie are sufficient to administrate them: all human beings are needed. From the power of things they finally learn to forgo power. Enlightenment consummates and abolishes itself when the closest practical objectives reveal themselves to be the most distant goal already attained, and the lands of which “their spials and intelligencers can give no news”–that is, nature misunderstood by masterful science–are remembered as those of origin. Today, when Bacon’s utopia, in which “we should command nature in action,” has been fulfilled on a telluric scale, the essence of the compulsion which he ascribed to unmastered nature is becoming apparent. It was power itself. Knowledge, in which, for Bacon, “the sovereignty of man” unquestionably lay hidden, can now devote itself to dissolving that power. But in face of this possibility enlightenment, in the service of the present, is turning itself into an outright deception of the masses. (Jephcott 32-4)

 

At the top of this final paragraph there is some wordplay in the German (Indem er für alle Zukunft die Notwendigkeit zur Basis erhob und den Geist auf gut idealistich zur höchsten Spitze depravierte, hielt er das Erbe der bürgerlichen Philosophie allzu krampfhaft fest [Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialektik 58]) that is better captured in the Cumming than in the Jephcott translation: “By elevating necessity to the status of the basis for all time to come, and by idealistically degrading the spirit for ever to the very apex, socialism held on all too surely to the legacy of bourgeois philosophy” (41). The play of “basis” and “apex” indicts equally both the “realism” of bourgeois self-preservation and the materialism of “official” Marxist-Leninism, and does so most dazzlingly by way of its witty (geistreich) reversal of the usual terms of the figure: bourgeois and socialist thought alike have “elevated” necessity to the “basis,” and “degraded” spirit (Geist) to the “apex.” For good measure, Horkheimer and Adorno characterize this officially “materialist” gesture of Stalinist orthodoxy as “idealist.” Consciousness as volatile as that seems almost to revoke its own “unhappiness” by sheer force of its wit: or at least, putting thus in play (or standing on its head) the cliché pyramid-image for the tired materialism/idealism shibboleth, such wit twists materialism’s all-too-righteous and literal-minded tail.

 

Still, utopian consciousness isn’t given its head; these critical gestures are checked throughout by the reassertion of our ideological condition (turning now to the Jephcott translation): “By subjecting everything to its discipline, [enlightenment] left the uncomprehended whole free to rebound as mastery over things against the life and consciousness of human beings.” But the reversion works both ways, in what had by now begun to manifest as a regular rhythm of ideological condition alternating with revolutionary possibility: “But a true praxis capable of overturning the status quo depends on theory’s refusal to yield to the oblivion in which society allows thought to ossify.”

 

This prose enacts the unremitting agon of a heroically “unyielding theory” against the powers of what the passage licenses us to call “domination uncomprehended”: in the passage’s own terms, the agon is against “the suspension of the concept”; in the Hegelian terms Horkheimer and Adorno evoke throughout, their struggle is for a renewal of “der Arbeit des Begriffs,” the “labor of the concept.” But “the oblivion in which society allows thought to ossify” is a deficit not merely of intellect, but of feeling as well: ataraxia, apathy, anaesthesis, asceticism, “coldness,” Odysseus roped to the mast, the rowers with ears deliberately, technologically deafened against song. The passage fuses concept and affect when it includes diagnosis of the affects, and of the disease or debilitated psychology or “learned helplessness” of the affects, that its own dialectical “labor” means to “work through,” redeem, overcome. Horkheimer and Adorno seek to adapt categories of individual psychological analysis to the domain of the social; more audaciously than Freud–here their alignment is rather with Hegel–they also mean to prescribe, for the social psychology of the “damaged life,” a “labor of concept and affect” that offers some deliverance from “unhappy consciousness.” As in Hegel there is the premise that “unhappy consciousness” results when people are alienated from their own powers and creations, which they can no longer recognize as their own (“the mythical scientific respect of peoples for the given reality, which they themselves constantly create”): resentment against what we take to be an externally “given reality” becomes at once shame at our impotence to change it and guilt at our debilitated desire to do so. In Horkheimer and Adorno’s social diagnostic, “guilt” is not the irredeemable liability with which wisdom resigns itself to (at best) merely coping; rather, “the fault lies in a context which induces blindness,” in a resignation to complicity in collective miseries that paralyzes the very energies that might undo the self-perpetuating structure of collective injury. “That might undo”: sounds utopian? It can sound no other way, in an “administered world” in which we have guiltily relinquished our power, in which our deluded guilt converts our Promethean potentialities into self-contempt and abjected, defeated passivity before “the way it is”: what Fredric Jameson, following Gunther Anders, calls the “Promethean shame” (315). This is an abjection cognate with that which Horkheimer and Adorno decry above, in which “even the revolutionary imagination feels shamed as utopianism, and degenerates to a compliant trust in the objective tendency of history.”

 

In the energy of Horkheimer and Adorno’s prose, there is a “making conscious” as much affective as conceptual. “Consciousness without shudder,” we have quoted Adorno as saying, “is reified consciousness.” The implication is that unreified consciousness, full subjectivity, involves affect as well as cognition. If consciousness ensued (as in Hegel) from mere perception and sensation–of “shudder,” for example–“What later came to be called subjectivity, freeing itself from the blind anxiety of the shudder, is at the same time the shudder’s own development; life in the subject is nothing but what shudders, the reaction to the total spell that transcends the spell” (Aesthetic Theory 331). In this “self-transcending” work Adorno sees something very different from Aristotelian catharsis, prototype of the instrumentalization of affects whose culmination is the culture industry. Adorno opposes catharsis, if that would mean simply the neutralization of affect, the de-cathexis of what had been cathected: as he says elsewhere, “[Aristotelian] catharsis is a purging action directed against the affects and an ally of repression” (238). In Adorno’s model, the “shudder” persists in, indeed it simply is, “the reaction to the total spell that transcends the spell. ” It is both the spell and its transcendence. Just such casting-and-transcending of the “spell” under which enlightenment has lain numbed is the textual effect I have wanted to elicit in Adorno–a “labor and suffering of the negative” that “joins eros and knowledge” (331), affect and concept, and not merely evokes, but enacts, what such labor, sufficiently impassioned, can actually make of “the unhappy consciousness of critique.”

 

Notes

 

1. Citations of the Cumming translation of Dialectic of Enlightenment appear hereafter as “Cumming”; citations of the Jephcott translation appear hereafter as “Jephcott.” Note here also a recent translation of “Excursus I” of Dialectic of Enlightenment: “Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment,” translated and with an introduction by Robert Hullot-Kentor, in New German Critique 56 (Spring-Summer 1992): 101-42.

 

2. On the motif of “rescue” (“Rettung“) in Adorno, see Rolf Tiedemann’s note in Kant’s Critique 239 n4.

 

3.

 

Hegel’s conception of life was so philosophical that conservatism, revolution, and restoration, each in its turn, finds its justification in it. On this point the socialist Engels and the conservative historian Treitschke are in agreement; for both recognize that the formula of the identity of the rational and the real could be invoked equally by all political opinions and parties, which differ from one another, not as to this common formula, but in determining what is the rational and real, and what is the irrational and unreal . . . All the wings of the Hegelian school variously participated in the revolution of the nineteenth century, and especially in that of 1848. It was even two Hegelians who wrote in that year the vigorous Communist Manifesto. But the formula common to all of them was not an empty label; it stood for the fact that the Jacobinism and crude naturalism of the century of the “enlightenment” were henceforth ended, and that all men of all political parties had learned from Hegel the meaning of true political sense. (Croce, What is Living 67)

 

Contrast Croce’s dry irony in those final words with the affective extremity driving the theme in Dialectic of Enlightenment.

 

4. For Hegel as a philosopher of happiness, see Forster 11-125.

 

5. At this point I intended to insert a qualification to the effect that my account here of “Reason” as a sort of narrative actant would apply only to the Phenomenology, and not to Reason’s profile elsewhere in Hegel; I meant to cite in particular the notorious Panglossian aphorism–“What is rational is actual, and what is actual is rational”–from the opening of the Philosophy of Right and Hegel’s response to outraged critics of it in the Encyclopedia Logic 6 and 7–but imagine my surprise to find, in both places, asides on Greek Philosophy confirming my hunch (see Philosophy of Right 10 and Encyclopedia Logic 28-31).

 

Works Cited

 

Works by Adorno

• Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory.Trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997.
• —. Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998.
• —. The Complete Correspondence, 1928-1940. Trans. Nicholas Walker. Ed. Henri Lonitz. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999.
• —. Critical Models. Trans. Henry W. Pickford. New York: Columbia UP, 1998.
• —. Essays on Music. Ed. Richard Leppert. Berkeley: U of California P, 2002.
• —. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Ed. Rolf Teidemann. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001.
• —. Metaphysics. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Ed. Rolf Teidemann. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000.
• —. Minima Moralia. Trans. E. F. N. Jephcott. London: Verso, 1974.
• —. Negative Dialectics. Trans. E. B. Ashton. New York: Continuum, 1973.
• —. Notes on Literature. Vol. 2. Trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson. New York: Columbia UP, 1992.
• —. Philosophy of Modern Music. Trans. Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster. New York: Continuum, 1994.
• —. Prisms. Trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber. Cambridge: MIT P, 1981.
• Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. John Cumming. New York: Continuum, 1972.
• —. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002.
• —. Dialektik der Aufklärung. Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. 3. Theodor W. Adorno. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1996.

Other Works Cited

• Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence. New York: Oxford UP, 1973.
• Croce, Benedetto. What is Living and What is Dead in the Philosophy of Hegel. Trans. Douglas Ainslee. London: Macmillan, 1915.
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