Robert Hullot-Kentor. Things Beyond Resemblance: Collected Essays on Theodor W. Adorno. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. xii + 322 pp. $34.50 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-231-13658-7.
Reviewed by Thomas Wheatland (Department of History, Assumption College)
Published on H-German (July, 2007)
An Adorno Renaissance? Critical Theory and George W. Bush's America
Since the centennial celebration of his birth on September 11, 2003, the work of Theodor W. Adorno has been gaining a wider audience on both sides of the Atlantic. Three biographies were timed to coincide with the festivities in Frankfurt am Main, and a steady stream of formerly unpublished writings from the Adorno archive are now appearing in print.[1] Nearly all of these writings are already available in English translation or are in the pipelines at various presses. We may be witnessing the emergence of an Adorno Renaissance.
On the one hand, it seems inconceivable that the current interest in Adorno could ever match the breadth and intensity of interest achieved in the immediate wake of the New Left. From the late 1960s through the 1980s, Adorno and with him the legacy of the Frankfurt School enjoyed an intense and vigorous examination throughout Europe and the United States. How could such a phenomenon recur without the scrutiny and outrage regarding the Vietnam War, the bewildering dangers and destructiveness of the Cold War, and the renewed interest in the intellectual legacy of Karl Marx? On the other hand, however, this earlier reception of Adorno's writings and thought created many false assumptions and characterizations that might help fuel the current revival as old myths are de-bunked and Adorno is grappled with anew. As the common images of Adorno as a "German mandarin" and "cultural elitist" are re-investigated, we can wrestle again with the unrelenting complexity of his philosophical and critical theoretical commitments and to re-consider Adorno's thought regarding regression, conformity, and the domination implicit in reason within our own time.[2]
The timing, then, is ideal for the publication of Robert Hullot-Kentor's collected writings on the work of Theodor W. Adorno. The product of over twenty years of work, Hullot-Kentor's book shatters many of the myths that have emerged regarding Adorno and provokes us to recognize the consistency and complexity of Adorno's thought. In addition to being one of Adorno's most dedicated readers and expositors in the English speaking world, Hullot-Kentor also works as a distinguished translator of Adorno's writings. Beginning with Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic (1989), Hullot-Kentor has gone on to translate Aesthetic Theory (1997) and Philosophy of New Music (2006) and is in the process of completing work on Negative Dialectics (forthcoming), in addition to his work as editor of the recently published Current of Music: Elements of a Radio Theory (2006).
The demands Adorno places on his readers and translators are well-known, even to those only casually familiar with his writings. He constructs lengthy, complex sentences by liberally employing independent and dependent clauses. Like the musical composers that he admired, Adorno stretched the German language in a manner similar to the way in which atonality and dissonance stretched the pre-existing confines of classical composition. At the same time, Adorno was also committed to the legacy of German Idealism. Believing that the conclusions of dialectical thinking were meaningless without an appreciation of the process of dialectical logic, Hegel and his disciples sought to develop a writing style that resisted simplification. For Adorno, this purposefully intricate writing style took on a moral imperative as he came to recognize the alliance that could be forged between discursive complexity and the concept of non-identity that lay at the heart of his philosophical project. In addition to the sophistication and elliptical nature of Adorno's style, the reader also is rewarded with Adorno's considerable wit and passion for wordplay. His word games and allusions to other authors and other texts are not only cleverly embedded within his texts, they also serve vital functions by helping to illustrate, underscore, and/or problematize various ideas or themes. Form and content thus are wedded to each other in a manner that is both dazzling and intimidating for the German reader. As Jürgen Habermas, Adorno's younger colleague, recalled: "Adorno was a genius. I say that without a hint of ambiguity. In the case of Horkheimer or Marcuse, with whom, by the way, I had a less complicated and, if you like, more intimate relationship, no one would have ever thought of saying such a thing. Adorno had an immediacy of awareness, a spontaneity of thought, and a power of formulation which I have never encountered before or since. One could not observe the process of development of Adorno's thoughts: they issued from him complete--he was a virtuoso in that respect. Also, he was simply not able to drop below his own level; he could not escape the strain of his own thinking for a moment. As long as one was with Adorno, one was caught up in the movement of his thought. Adorno did not have the common touch, it was impossible for him, in an altogether painful way to be commonplace."[3]
The marriage of form and content provides a more considerable challenge for Adorno's translators. Completely literal translations are wholly inadequate for a thinker and linguistic stylist of Adorno's abilities. Not only must the translator be sensitive to replicating as closely as possible the virtuosity of the German original, he or she must also possess a firm grasp of the academic disciplines (philosophy, aesthetics, sociology, psychology, literary studies, and musicology) and traditions (German Idealism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and modernism) that Adorno drew upon to formulate his own ideas. This care and rigor has been the hallmark of Hullot-Kentor's English translations of Adorno, and they similarly equip him to be one of the most astute commentators on Adorno's thought.
For some, Adorno's lack of a "common touch" has led to utter bewilderment; for others, it has led to considerable confusion and disagreement regarding the meaning and importance of particular aspects of Adorno's legacy. Things Beyond Resemblance has much to offer both audiences (the perplexed and the partisans), but it is not a book for newcomers or the uninitiated. Hullot-Kentor is neither aiming to paraphrase nor to distill Adorno's thought. Writing in the same spirit as his translations, Hullot-Kentor remains sensitive to Adorno's intentions and aims. For Adorno, the simplification and/or clarification of his thought would have represented a destructive distortion of his writings' form and contents. Rather than offering something akin to an "Adorno for Beginners," Hullot-Kentor is writing for Adorno's intermediates and experts, whom he provides with many useful clarifications and elucidations of Adorno's thought and style.
Hullot-Kentor's introduction, ironically entitled "Origin is the Goal," makes a provocative, stirring case for Adorno's contemporary significance for North American readers. Primarily exploring the development of Adorno's concept of regression, Hullot-Kentor partly uses this inspiration as an analytic tool for examining George W. Bush and contemporary U.S. society. In one of several provocative moments, he writes, "Adorno's philosophy took shape in dread recognition of the reversion of society to the primitive.... The problem that marks the center and circumference of his thought was the effort to comprehend and perhaps even circumvent this logic of progress as regression. Without a doubt the preeminent reason that his work must be of vital concern in the United States is for what precisely can be learned from it in a nation that has so palpably entered primitive times" (pp. 2-3). As this quotation also makes clear, Hullot-Kentor uses the concept of regression both to introduce his readers to the ways in which Adorno viewed the world and to his formulation of a philosophy of negative dialectics. Thus, the concept of regression becomes a stepping stone for introducing readers to other crucial components of Adorno's approach to critical theory--such as his understanding of the dialectic of enlightenment, his concerns regarding non-identity, his use of concepts more broadly, and the way in which aesthetics formed an essential complement to negative dialectics. The result is an ideal starting point for the essays that will subsequently follow.
The book is divided into sixteen essays. Although each section was written independently and can stand on its own, an exhilarating effect is produced by situating them together in this format--much in the same way that an individual painting is transformed when thoughtfully incorporated into an exhibit. Each essay possesses its own distinct message and focus, but when they are all assembled together they interpenetrate one another, helping to illuminate Adorno's complex themes and concepts in a manner similar to the prisms that Adorno used as a model for his own writings. This remarkable achievement is largely possible because the collected writings interweave so many of the same themes continuously throughout the book. As a contribution to the series in which it is included, the book not surprisingly concentrates on exploring and clarifying Adorno's aesthetics, but Hullot-Kentor is careful to show how Adorno's aesthetics was an integral part of his philosophy, social theory, and music criticism. Thus, the focus on aesthetics helps to clarify Adorno's understanding of the dialectic of enlightenment and the inspiration for his negative dialectics, while at the same time these philosophical discoveries help to clarify Adorno's artistic and musical preferences.
The book and its component essays cannot be simply classified into thematic categories, because of the work's prismatic structure. Each essay grapples with a different set of Adorno's concepts in slightly different ways. The first essay, "Back to Adorno," for example, begins with an exploration of the reasons for the declining U.S. interest in Adorno's work during the 1990s. While some of the reasons are clearly self-evident (such as the decline of German Studies, the growing unfamiliarity with German Idealism, the erosion of interest in Marxism, and the numerous poor translations of Adorno's work in English), Hullot-Kentor may surprise some of his readers by also holding American intellectuals' interest in poststructuralism and postmodernism responsible. This is a provocative point, and it would have been fascinating to see the author develop it more explicitly. In part, this would have been of interest because many U.S. readers of Adorno have made the case that his negative dialectics and philosophy of non-identity have affinities with the deconstructive impulses and methods of French intellectuals such as Derrida. Hullot-Kentor's distancing of Adorno from the traditions of French theory becomes all the more intriguing, because he then carries out a rigorous analysis of the origins and authorship of The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) to illustrate how misunderstood Adorno was by Jürgen Habermas, one of critical theory's most articulate critics of poststructuralism.
Habermas applauded the analysis of the Enlightenment that formed the basis for Horkheimer and Adorno's The Dialectic of Enlightenment, but simultaneously rejected the critique of reason that emerged from it. Habermas viewed this treatment of reason as a Nietzschean gesture imported into the project by Adorno rather than Horkheimer. Thus, Habermas distanced the two authors from each other in order to rescue Horkheimer's materialist theory of society and at the same time question Adorno's negative dialectics in reason's name. Hullot-Kentor sympathizes with the bewilderment that Adorno's critique of reason has created among readers such as Habermas, but he strongly rejects the implication that Adorno shares much in common with the French disciples of Nietzsche who inspired the poststructuralist movement. According to Hullot-Kentor, Habermas and other like-minded critics of Adorno have failed to recognize that Adorno was not simply aiming to articulate a destructive critique of reason. Instead, he was also attempting to recuperate reason in the process. As Hullot-Kentor explains, Adorno "is pursuing a critique of reason by way of reason. How this is possible is not obvious; if it were, it would not have occupied all of Adorno's life. But Habermas missed the point. Adorno, he insists, became entangled in a radical denunciation of reason that could not ground itself. Realizing this, the best Adorno could do was to ignore the contradiction. This was possible in Adorno's case because he could distract himself with art" (p. 31).
In rejecting Adorno's relationship to aesthetics, Habermas revealed his own failure to comprehend the relationship that Adorno recognized between reason, aesthetics, and the Enlightenment. As Hullot-Kentor clearly shows, Adorno's integration of reason and aesthetics made him a true heir of the Enlightenment--a thinker following in the footsteps of both Kant and Schiller. Adorno's interpretation of the dialectic of Enlightenment highlighted the domination and self-sacrifice inherent in the "cunning of reason," and aesthetics offered an alternative orientation to the natural world that remained firmly grounded in reason. Hullot-Kentor explains: "In art, domination is able to become liberation, the truth of the whole, because the same process of the domination of nature that society carries out occurs within the art work; the same sacrificial act of reason is carried out by art through its construction. The dialectic of enlightenment is the inner process of the art work.... However, whereas the sacrifices required by self-preservative reason in the actual domination of nature are silenced by the semblance of necessity woven by the principle of identity, art mourns the sacrifices it carries out. Art undoes its self-identity by the same process through which it establishes its self-identity. This is the form of art's cunning.... Art works take themselves apart as they put themselves together, and as they do so the progressive Hegelian dialectic is brought to a standstill in a moment of expression. Art becomes memory of nature in the mourning of its caesuras" (p. 43).
The book's title essay "Things Beyond Resemblance" helps to clarify Adorno's aesthetics--the topic that emerged as the reconciliation of Hullot-Kentor's investigation of Adorno's critique and attempted recuperation of reason. This subsequent essay then complements "Back to Adorno" by addressing the specifics of Adorno's aesthetics. "Things Beyond Resemblance" reflects on the unpublished English version of Adorno's The Philosophy of New Music in an effort to explore the ways in which exposure to American mass culture informed the text and to consider the reasons why Adorno radically re-imagined this book and destroyed his original English translation of the early 1940s. These concrete analyses then provide the impetus for a conceptual re-appraisal of The Philosophy of New Music that provides an opportunity for Hullot-Kentor to reflect on Adorno's musical taste and its relation to his political and philosophical agendas.
Hullot-Kentor has devoted serious consideration to music's distinctive aesthetic and cognitive properties. These equip music with enormous power, but it is (alas) a power that can be completely corrupted--as Adorno frequently noted. This potential for corruption does not suggest, however, as many of Adorno's casual readers assume, that he preferred the music of the symphony hall over popular music; Adorno was not a cultural snob. Instead, Hullot-Kentor insists that Adorno's Philosophy of New Music was as much of an attack against "classical" music as it was against "pop." The commercial forces of the market place had invaded both--leaving only the "new" music, which stubbornly resisted these forces of cultural assimilation as a viable aesthetic option. Hullot-Kentor rightly sees The Philosophy of New Music as an aesthetic manifesto in which Adorno links clear issues of artistic right and wrong to his assessments of musical quality. What makes this manifesto so different from others is that it was not written for the revolutionary masses. Writing in the wake of Hitler's rise to power and during the opening salvos of the Second World War, Adorno understood that the Nazis had raided and corrupted Germany's rich cultural legacy and shown that both "pop" and the "classics" could be appropriated for barbaric purposes. The "new music" of the early Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School resisted such appropriation by rejecting the impulse to dominate nature. By shattering musical conventions left and right, the young Schoenberg was able to rupture the dialectic of enlightenment by producing a music of non-identity in which the subject does not wield mastery over its object. As Hullot Kentor explains, the "potential of art, then, is the ability to restore to nature the qualitative, historical dimension that subjectivity, enthralled with the spurious objectivity of its own lawfulness--a considerable act of imagination that claims to be its opposite--deprived nature of in the first place by dominating it and transmuting its raw material" (p. 62).
The next essay, "The Philosophy of Dissonance," explores what particularly attracted Adorno to the music of the early Schoenberg and what led him to see atonality as an artistic correlate to his philosophical concerns regarding non-identity. Adorno, according to Hullot-Kentor, believed that "this isolated music had, in the strength of its isolation, become a singular repository of critical historical experience.... [A]rt becomes the unconscious writing of history through its isolation from society" (p. 70). The early Schoenberg thus represented a reaction against both the "classical" music of symphony halls and the "popular" music of the dancehalls. Schoenberg's "new music" could not be readily appropriated for the commercial purposes of "pop" music, and at the same time it shattered the semblance of beauty and the illusion of pure subjectivity that were the hallmarks of "classical" music. As Hullot-Kentor explains, "what Schoenberg discovered--according to Adorno--was that the impulses sedimented in the material could be bindingly organized according to principles of contrast. Dissonance, the bearer of historical suffering, would be the rational order binding together melody and harmony" (p. 70).
In the succession of these first three essays, Hullot-Kentor demonstrates the technique that he deploys throughout the book. Although each essay is initiated by a distinctively different provocation, each cumulatively builds on the previous ones in a manner that Adorno would have admired. The style and aims of Adorno's writings are consequently preserved by the book's prismatic architecture. Adorno famously inverted Hegel's dictum resulting in the memorable phrase "the whole is the false." None of these essays aims at risking a distortion of Adorno's thought in an effort to communicate a distilled sum-total.[4]
The book is also filled with several provocative challenges to the standard images that many may possess of Adorno. In addition to rescuing Adorno's critical theory from the poststructural camp and challenging the clichéd image of Adorno as über-snob, Hullot-Kentor also takes aim at several other common misperceptions of Adorno in the United States. First, in "Title Essay: Allegory and the Essay as Form" and then in "What is Mechnical Reproduction," Hullot-Kentor re-evaluates the relationship between the work of Walter Benjamin and Adorno in a manner likely to grab the attention of readers from the fields of cultural studies and media studies. In addition to challenging the traditional notions of Benjamin's influence on Adorno, Hullot-Kentor also challenges some of Benjamin's most frequently cited theses on art, technology, and aura that have been used to dismiss Adorno's work. Too frequently, Benjamin and Adorno have been juxtaposed as tragic hero and villainous "company man." To correct this misperception, Hullot-Kentor dismantles the caricature of Adorno as Benjamin's nemesis by highlighting how illogical and problematic Benjamin's writings on mass art were. When juxtaposed with the other essays and their ruminations on Adorno's aesthetic theory, the criticisms of Benjamin help to underscore the validity of Adorno's concerns regarding the culture industry and the redemptive capacity of serious art.
Second, Hullot-Kentor is likely to also capture the attention of many intellectuals whose introduction to Adorno has been mediated through the writings of Frederic Jameson. Although Jameson has proclaimed a firm allegiance to Adorno and cited Adorno's writings as a main inspiration for his own approach to literature and art, Hullot-Kentor questions the validity of these claims through a close reading of Jameson's writings. These readings lead Hullot-Kentor to question Jameson's appraisal of Adorno, as well as to question Jameson's critical project and its popularity.
Things Beyond Resemblance is a book Adorno scholars will appreciate. While it may leave some with lingering questions about how to situate Adorno's sociological writings into Hullot-Kentor's interpretation of the philosophical and aesthetic writings, it will satisfy many readers who find Adorno's negative dialectics and aesthetic theory elusive. This is no small feat, and it should prove to be a valuable resource for those re-examining Adorno in the wake of his apparent revival.
Notes
[1]. Detlev Claussen, Theodor W. Adorno. Ein Letztes Genie (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 2003); Lorenz Jäger, Adorno--Eine politische Biographie (Munich: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2003); and Stefan Müller-Doohm, Adorno: Eine Biographie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2003). See also Theodor W. Adorno, Briefe an die Eltern, 1939-1951 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2003); Theodor W. Adorno, Kinderheit in Amorbach (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2003); and Theodor W. Adorno, Vorlesung über Negativ Dialektik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2003). Subsequently, several other collections of lectures and correspondences have been published--most notably, several volumes of the Adorno-Horkheimer letters.
[2]. Another book promoting a similar goal of re-evaluating Adorno and his writings was published this spring by the University of Minnesota Press. This book focuses particular attention on Adorno's experiences in exile to revise and to re-appraise Adorno's engagement with U.S. mass culture: David Jenemann, Adorno in America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).
[3]. Jürgen Habermas, Autonomy and Solidarity, ed. Peter Dews (New York: Verso, 1992), 220.
[4]. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life, tr. E. F. N. Jephcott (New York: Verso, 1974), 50.
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Citation:
Thomas Wheatland. Review of Hullot-Kentor, Robert, Things Beyond Resemblance: Collected Essays on Theodor W. Adorno.
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
July, 2007.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=13366
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