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Theodor Adorno on the Essay: An Antidote to Modernity

How does Theodor Adorno conceptualize the essay as an antidote to modern life’s obsession with science?

What is the significance of the essay for intellectual history? How does it interact with prevailing norms of academia and knowledge production in general? This article explains the answer that Theodor W. Adorno, Frankfurt School philosopher and cultural theorist, gave to this question. It begins by discussing the ambivalent stance with which Adorno begins the essay, before moving on to an explanation of his conception of culture and its domination by capital. Another critical concept of his work, that of reification, is then discussed and examined, before Adorno’s argument in defense of the essay as an antidote to an overriding fixation on scientific forms of knowledge production is set out in detail.

Theodor Adorno on The Essay and Philosophy

Adorno begins The Essay as Form with a conjoined defense and castigation of the essay. On the one hand, he takes aim at the conception of knowledge production, which is interested only in saying all there is to be said, proceeding only from the most basic or fundamental presumptions, describing what is given as it is given without augmentation. In other words, Adorno’s starting point involves a criticism of the pseudo-scientific seriousness of academia in general, and academic philosophy in particular.

Correspondingly, Adorno defends a more pluralistic conception of intellectual value, which permits interpretation beyond the intention of a work, beginning one’s interpretation in media res ( in the midst of things), an analysis of cultural objects without a compulsory tether to something more foundational, and so on.

Yet at the same time, Adorno takes aim at the essay just as he defends it. He opposes the essay insofar as it takes the form of a slick commercial product, an uncritical regurgitation or acclamation of culture, an extension of the culture industry. In a sense, the defense and critique of the essay both take the oblique form of a plea for greater self-awareness in intellectual activity.

The Essay’s Commercial Potential

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Adorno begins his discussion of the essay with the warning that the essay has the potential to be or become an utterly commercial product. The terms of this warning, and its significance, must be understood in light of the centrality of Adorno’s critical stance towards mass culture, which he theorized in more detail (along with his long-time collaborator and fellow Frankfurt School bigwig Max Horkheimer ) in the Dialectic of Enlightenment .

The conception of culture in Dialectic is an essentially Marxist one, and indeed an extension of certain Marxist ideas (e.g, commodity fetishism ) into terrain Marx himself did not take them. It holds that the logic of domination, which is constitutive of the capitalist mode of social and economic production, is equally a feature of culture.

The critical historical shift towards the creation of a “culture industry” is the internalization of marketability to the work of art itself, and, therefore, the impossibility of purposelessness in the work of art. Adorno puts the point this way:

“Everything has value only in so far as it can be exchanged, not in so far as it is something in itself. For consumers the use value of art, its essence, is a fetish, and the fetish—the social valuation [ gesellschaftliche Schätzung ] which they mistake for the merit [ Rang ] of works of art— becomes its only use value, the only quality they enjoy”.

That culture, the site (at least historically) of experimentation and freedom from prevailing social norms, has been colonized by capital shows how all-devouring the capitalist system of value really is.

Adorno’s Alternative Vision of the Essay

So if the choice is not between the spurious objectivity of academic prose, or the complicity and uncritical disposition of fluff, then what is Adorno’s alternative vision for the essay as a form of writing?

Adorno is concerned, for one thing, with the essay’s ambition to go beyond the confines of philosophy and yet construct a kind of purer way of speaking about concepts like “being.” To claim for itself a kind of “primordial” status, to claim that it can avoid the obligations of conceptual thought, and that it can “abolish objectified thought and its history,” the essay commits itself to become totally meaningless.

It is the mutual encroachment of science to the realm of art and vice versa that Adorno laments so bitterly. The essay is firmly in the realm of art, and so, for Adorno, it must resist what he calls “fraternizing with reification,” which is the exact thing that art has to protest, resist, and oppose.

But what is reification? Reification is a concept developed by the Hungarian Marxist social theorist and literary historian György Lukács, who had a formative influence on Adorno as a younger man. Lukács defines it as, “the structural process whereby the commodity form permeates life in capitalist society.” Science is, for Adorno, a site of reification – the promise of liberation from stupidity and brutality by science has been broken, and science is now itself irrational.

The Problem With Science

The problems which Adorno finds with science – in particular, its rigidity and its unreflective empiricism – are (in a sense) where Adorno feels the essay finds its raison d’être. As much as the encroachment of science on art and art on science trouble him, so too does the inflexibility of the “division of labor” which has taken place between art and science in the first instance. The very existence of the essay undermines the determination to find a place for every kind of knowledge and its pre-conditions.

Indeed, in order to identify the potential he sees in the essay as a form, Adorno goes back to the origins of the term essay, in Montesquieu , and in particular to its initial meaning as “attempts” or “tries.” It is in its very modesty, even if that is often a false modesty, that the value of the essay is revealed. It makes room for non-totalizing intellectual activity, for, “the consciousness of nonidentity, without expressing it directly; it is radical in its non-radicalism, in refraining from any reduction to a principle, in its accentuation of the partial against the total, in its fragmentary character.”

This is why it is so harmful for essayists to attempt to claim that they have, in fact, bested the philosopher or the scientist in the source for primordial language or foundational knowledge – they are meant to offer a direct contrast, a clear alternative, to this way of thinking in our intellectual life.

Adorno on The Essay as a Philosophical Tool

Yet for Adorno, the value of the essay as a philosophical tool runs deeper. In particular, the essay is a kind of rebuke to the conception of knowledge as directly and straightforwardly reflecting the structure of reality. The essay rebukes the idea that historical products (which are necessarily contingent, not embedded in the structure of reality as such) are, at best, a subject for secondary, lesser forms of understanding.

In fact, more abstraction does not invest thought with greater importance or profundity, and the essay reflects the radical disjunction between one’s grasping for the total and how liable one is to actually understand it:

“The essay, however, does not try to seek the eternal in the transient and distill it out; it tries to ren- der the transient eternal. Its weakness bears witness to the very non-identity it had to express. It also testifies to an excess of intention over object and thereby to the utopia which is blocked by the partition of the world into the eternal and the transient. In the emphatic essay thought divests itself of the traditional idea of truth.”

As Adorno has it, what is true and worth saving about the essay is, from the scientific point of view, untrue. Indeed, the discipline of rhetoric – to which the essay in some sense belongs – has long been “scientized,” reduced to the new discipline of “communications.” Science’s antipathy to the idea of anthropomorphic tendencies in knowledge production makes the essay a direct provocation for the kind of scientism which Adorno takes aim at in various points of his work.

It is in the pleasure of the essay, both of the writing and of the reading, that this provocation reaches its climax. Adorno observes that happiness is, for a certain kind of philosopher – in particular Kant and Hegel – a regression to the most basic parts of our nature, and a failure to show continence in the face of curiosity, which is (as Adorno has it) “the pleasure principle in thought.”

The essay deploys this principle as a seduction, going a step beyond the orator whose relaxed, listenable manner of speaking beguiles one into failing to notice the ever-enclosing net of persuasion. The logic of the essay is local – it must fit together, its transitions must make sense of themselves, but not of things at large or as such (“it co-ordinate elements instead of subordinating them”). It has no broader project in mind for these elements. For Adorno, the essay is an anachronism – contemporary life is inhospitable to it.

4 Ideas by Theodor Adorno That Changed the World

By Luke Dunne BA Philosophy & Theology Luke is a graduate of the University of Oxford's departments of Philosophy and Theology, his main interests include the history of philosophy, the metaphysics of mind, and social theory.

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The Theory of the Essay: Lukács, Adorno, and Benjamin

• Kauffmann, R. Lane
• Advisor(s): Jameson, Fredric R. ;
• Kirkpatrick, Susan

This study treats three German philosopher-critics – Georg Lukacs, Theodor W. Adorno, and Walter Benjamin – whose theories of the essay, considered together, are the most comprehensive attempt yet made to define the essay as a cognitive and philosophical form. The introduction envisages a descriptive-historical poetics of the essay as a methodological standard by which to evaluate the theories just mentioned. The aim of such a poetics would be to elucidate the ways in which particular cognitive projects are actualized in essays through specific literary-discursive devices.The central chapters offer a close analysis of the ideas of Lukacs, Adorno, and Benjamin on the essay, situating each theory in its historical and intellectual context. (The two main documents here are Lukacs' 1910 essay on the essay in his Soul and Form, and Adorno's 1958 "The Essay as Form," in his Notes on Literature. Benjamin left no explicit theory of the essay; his ideas on philosophical method and form – ideas which strongly influenced Adorno – are culled from his study on the baroque Trauerspiel and from his later essays.) These theories are compared with respect to such themes as the historical development of the essay, its dominant aesthetic and philosophical functions (with particular regard to whether the essay is "systematic" or "fragmentary" in nature), and the role of the subject in the act of cognition which is embodied in the essay form. Each theory reflects its author's particular version of Marxist dialectics, his distinct view of the interrelations between aesthetics, cognition, and social reality. Thus, for example, the young Lukacs sees the modern essay as an alienated, fragmentary form which strives for an ideal "system" (this ideal being exemplified by the unity and "immediacy" of Plato's essay-dialogues). The nostalgic longing of Soul and Form reappears in the totalizing Marxism of Lukacs' History and Class Consciousness (1923). For Adorno, by contrast, the essay registers a utopian protest against such totalizing systems. Adorno considers the essay to be the formal enactment of "negative dialectics" (as he named his philosophy); fragmentation is its basic principle.Whereas Adorno's theory is contrasted to that of Lukacs, his practice of the essay is juxtaposed to Benjamin's experiments with the form. The now famous aesthetic dispute between Adorno and Benjamin of the thirties is re-examined in terms of the rhetorical strategies evidenced in their critical writings. It is argued that Benjamin was more attentive than Adorno to the cognitive responses of readers, and that in some ways his essays came closer to satisfying the normative aims of "negative dialectics" than did the essays of Adorno himself.Each of these theories is a "cognitive utopia," a kind of philosophical wish-fulfillment, in that each theorist projects his own ideal Essay as the solution to the most basic problems of modern culture and society. While none of these theories gives an entirely satisfactory historical account of the essay genre, they still serve as interpretive master keys to the essays of the theorists themselves.Or perhaps as clues for a theory of the modern critical essay. Whatever their differences, these thinkers are alike in seeing the essay as a function of the cognitive experience of a writing subject. Thus they belong to a familiar anthropology of discourse which in recent years has been sharply challenged by "poststructuralist" theories. The poststructuralists-among them Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, and Barthes – reject the notion of a controlling subject of discourse in favor of the "free play" of the language of the text. The concluding chapter imagines a confrontation between Marxist utopias of cognition and poststructuralist utopias of language – two alternative poetics for the modern critical essay.

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4. The Essay as Form (1958)

From the book essays on the essay film.

• Theodor W. Adorno
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Chapters in this book (33)

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Thinking as Gesture from Adorno's Essay as Form

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This essay presents a careful interpretation of Adorno's classical text The Essay as Form, published in 1958 as the introduction to his Notes on Literature. Since it thickly condenses many of Adorno's general views, the Essay poses great hermeneutic challenges to readers. The paper, first, elaborates on the essay more broadly as a genre and identifies a spectrum between science and art each individual essay draws from to forge its particular hybridity. Second, the example is discussed as an epistemologically potent trope oscillating between subsumption and singularity. This internal tension renders the example particularly qualified to serve as the conceptual basis on which interpretative themes in the essay can be discovered. Three lines of interpretation are suggested: (a) poetological for the essay/Essay's definition, goal, and method; (b) critical/dialectical for its treatment of concepts and in relation to content; and (c) epistemic for the modern separation of art and science. The conclusion comes back to the issue of exemplarity.

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In an effort to clarify Adorno's aesthetic position, I argue that Adorno embraces a version of the Kantian thesis concerning art's autonomy and that he criticizes transcendental philosophy. I discuss how Adorno provides the outlines for a dialectical conception of artistic truth and how this aspect of Adorno's thinking is applied in his argument with Hegel. This paper also engages Adorno's assessment of the Enlightenment through his interpretation of twentieth-century literature. Returning to the example of art as a sign of historical truth, I conclude my study by stressing the political implications of Adorno's position.

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The notes for Theodor Adorno’s courses in the 1960’s are important resources not only for an understanding of his magnum opus, Negative Dialectics, but also for developing critical responses to this problematic philosophical heir of idealism. Particularly noteworthy among the volumes that have appeared so far is from Adorno’s 1965 course on metaphysics where he engages in a sustained reading of Aristotle’s Metaphysics and explicitly connects it with the project of Negative Dialectics. Adorno’s chief concern is to demonstrate, by way of Eduard Zeller’s work, that Aristotle is indeed a proto-idealist and that his ontology is comprised of a fundamental dualism. Adorno is not an informed reader of Aristotle, as his reliance on Zeller makes clear, but he succeeds in drawing the reader’s attention to the organizing force exerted by  upon . The interest in this organizing force is motivated by an interest in the ethics that is consequent upon it: an ethics that ignores the sufferings of the concrete in the name of a rational ideal. While there are echoes of this in Aristotle’s ethical writings, his account of imagination in De Anima ought to give pause to an account as reductive as Adorno’s. In De Anima, Aristotle provides an account of the imagination () that makes it a power reducible neither to  nor to . The imagination, a power of the bodily senses, and especially sight, is a power that grants to thinking its power but is itself the unmotivated actualization of the purely potential. This essay argues that such a power resists interpretation into any dialectical schema insofar as it constitutes a distinct power of the human animal. At the same time, such an interpretation provides a possible route out of the ethical impasse of the unthinkable concrete.

Philip Turetzky

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