No More Learning

The way in which the essay appropriates concepts is most easily comparable to the behavior of a man who is obliged, in a foreign coun- try, to speak that country's language instead of patching it together from its elements, as he did in school. He will read without a dic- tionary. If he has looked at the same word thirty times, in constantly changing contexts, he has a clearer grasp of it than he would if he looked up all the word's meanings; meanings that are generally too narrow, considering they change depending on the context, and too vague in view of the nuances that the context establishes in every individual case. Just as such learning remains exposed to error, so does the essay as form; it must pay for its affinity with open intellectual experience by the lack of security, a lack which the norm of established thought fears like death. It is not so much that the essay ignores indis- putable certainty, as that it abrogates the ideal. The essay becomes true in its progress, which drives it beyond itself, and not in a hoarding obsession with fundamentals. Its concepts receive their light from ater- minus ad quem hidden to the essay itself, and not from an obvious ter- minus a quo. In this the very method of the essay expresses the utopian intention. All of its concepts are presentable in such a way that they support one another, that each one articulates itself according to the configuration that it forms with the others. In the essay discreet1 separated elements enter into a readable context; it erects no scaftbl? ' - ing, no edifice. Through their own movement the elements crystallize into a configuration. It is a force field,just as under the essay's glance every intellectual artifact must transform itself into a force field.
The essay gently defies the ideals of clara et distinctaperceptio and of absolute certainty. On the whole it could be interpreted as a protest againt the four rules that Descartes' Discourse on Method sets up at the beginning of modern Western science and its theory. The second of these rules, the decomposition of the object into "as many parts as possible and as might be necessary for its adequate ~olution,"fo~r- mulates that analysis of elements under whose sign traditional theory
7. Ren6 Descartes, A DiscourseOn Method, trans. John Veitch (NewYork: E. P. Dut- ton, 1951), p. 15.
TW. Adomo 161
? 162 The Essay as Form
equates a conceptual order with the structure of being. But the object of the essay, the artifact, refuses any analysis of its elements and can only be constructed from its specific idea; it is not accidental that Kant treated art-works and organisms analogously, although at the same time he insisted, against all romantic obscurantism, on distinguishing them. Thewhole is to be hypostatized into afirst principlejust as little as is the product of analysis, the elements. In opposition to both, the essay is informed by the idea of that interaction which in fact tolerates the question of elements as little as that of the elementary. Neither are the specific elements to be developed purely out of the whole, nor vice versa. Theartifactisamonad,yetitisnot;itselements,assuchofacon- ceptual kind, point beyond the specific object in which they gather themselves. But the essay does not 'follow these elements to that point where they legitimize themselves, on the far side of the specific object; otherwise it would turn into a bad kind of infinity. Rather, the essav comes so close to the here and now of the object, up to the point where that object, instead of being simply an object, dissociates itself into those elements in which it has its life.
The third Cartesian rule, "to conduct my thoughts in such an order that, by commencing with the simplest and easiest to know, I might ascend by little and little, step by step, to the knowledge of the more ~ o m p l e x , "is~sharply contravened by the form of the essay in that it begins with the most complex, not the most simple, which is in every instance the habitual. The essay as form will be a good guide for the person who is beginning to study philosophy, and before whose eyes the idea of philosophy somehow stands. He will hardly begin by read- ing the easiest writers, whose common sensegwill skim the surface where depth is called for; he will rather go for the allegedly difficult writers, who shed light on what is simple and illuminate it as a "stance of the mind toward objectivity. " The naivetC of the student, to whom the difficult and formidable seems good enough, is wiser than the adult pedantry that admonishes thought with a threatening finger to understand the simple before risking that complexity which alone entices it. Such a postponement of knowledge only prevents knowl- edge. In opposition to the clich6 of the "understandable," the notion of truth as a network of causes and effects, the essay insists that a matter be considered, from the verv first, in its whole complexity; it counter-
acts that hardened primitiveness that always allies itself with reason's current form. Whereas science treats the difficulties and complexities of an antagonistic and monadologically split reality according to the
8. Ibid.
9. [In English. ]
? expectation of this societyby reducing them to simplifyingmodels and then belatedly differentiates them with fabricated material, the essay shakes off the illusion of a simple, basically logical world that so perfectly suits the defense of the status quo. Its differentiation is no supplement, but its medium. Established thought readily ascribes that differentiation to the mere psychology of the author and then thinks that it has adequately dealt with it. The pompous scientificobjections to over-sophistication actually do not aim at the impertinently unreli- able method but at the irritating aspects of the object which the essay reveals.
The fourth Cartesian rule that one "should in every case institute such exhaustive enumerations and such general surveys" that one "is sure of leaving nothing out" - this ultimate principle of systematic thought - reappears unchanged in Kant's polemic against Aristotle's "rhapsodic" thought. This rule corresponds to the particular objec- tion to the essay that, in the words of the schoolmaster, it is not exhaus- tive, while it is clear that every object, and above all a cultural object, encloses endlessly many aspects, the choice among which can only be determined by the intention of the knower. The "general survey'' would only be possible if it were determined in advance that the object in question can be fully grasped by the concepts which treat it; that nothing is left over that could not be anticipated by these concepts. Following that assumption, the rule requiring the exhaustive enumer- ation ofthe individual elements claims that the object can be presented in an airtight deductive system:a supposition of aphilosophy of identi- ty. As a practical technique of thought, as for example in its insistence on definition, the Cartesian rule has outlived the rationalistic theorem on which it was founded: a comprehensive general view and a con- tinuity of presentation is urged even upon empirically open scientific procedure. In this fashion the intellectual conscience that should, in Descartes' philosophy, keep watch over the necessity of knowledge is transformedintothearbitrarinessofa"frameofreference. "" Inorder to satisfya methodological need and to support the plausibility of the whole,itbecomesanaxiomaticdoctrinethatisbeingsetupasthegate- way to thought while no longer being able to demonstrate its own validity or proof. Or, in the German version, it becomes a "project" (Entwurf)that, with the pathos-laden claim of reaching into being, sim- ply suppresses its subjective conditions. The insistence on the continuity of thought's process tends to prejudice the inner co- herence of the object, its own harmony. A continuous presentation would contradict material that is full of antogonisms as long as it did
10. [In English. ]
? 164 The Essay as Form
not simultaneously define continuity as discontinuity. Unconsciously and far from theory, the need arises in the essay as form to annul the theoretically outmoded claims of totality and continuity, and to do so in the concrete procedure of the intellect. If the essay struggles aes- thetically against that narrow-minded method that will leave nothing out, it is obeying an epistemological motive. The romantic conception of the fragment as an artifact that is not complete in itself but openly striding into infinity by way of self-reflection, advocates this anti- idealist motive even in the midst of idealism. Even in its manner of delivery the essay refuses to behave as though it had deduced its object and had exhausted the topic. Self-relativization is immanent in its form; it must be constructed in such a way that it could always, and at any point, break off. It thinks in fragmentsjust as reality is fragmented and gains its unity only by moving through the fissures, rather than by smoothing them over. The unanimity of the logical order deceives us about the antagonistic nature of that on which it wasjauntily imposed. Discontinuity is essential to the essay; its concern is always a conflict
brought to a standstill. While the essay adjusts concepts to one another by virtue of their function in the parallelogram of the forces of the materials, it shrinks back from the over-arching concept under which particular concepts should be subordinated; what the over-arching concept merely pretends to accomplish, the essay's method recog- nizes as insoluble while nevertheless attempting to accomplish it. The word "essay" - in which thought's utopia of hitting the bull's eye unites with the consciousness of its own fallibility and provisional nature - indicates something, like most historically surviving ter-
minologies, about the form, the importance of which is magnified by the fact that it results not programmatically but as a characteristic of the form's groping intention. The essaymust let the totality light up in one of its chosen or haphazard features but without asserting that the whole is present. It corrects the isolated and accidental aspects of its insights by allowing them to multiply, confirm, and restrict themselves - whether in the essay's proper progress or in its mosaic-like relation to other essays; and it does so not by abstracting characteristic features
from its insights. "Thus the essay distinguishes itself from a scientific treatise. He writes essayisticallywho writes while experimenting, who turns his object this way and that, who questions it, feels it, tests it, thoroughly reflects on it, attacks it from different angles, and in his mind's eye collects what he sees, and puts into words what the object allows to be seen under the conditions established in the course of writing. "" Thediscontentwiththisprocedure,thefeelingthatitcould
11. Max Bense, "Cber den Essay und seine Prosa," Aferkur 1:3 (1947), 418.
? all go on indefinitely, has its truth and untruth. Its truth, because in fact the essay comes to no final conclusions and makes explicit its inability to do so by parodying its own apriori; it is then saddled with the guilt that is actually incurred by those forms that erase every trace of arbi- trariness. Yet that discontent with the essay is at the same time untrue because, as a constellation, the essay is not arbitrary in the way that it seems to a philosophical subjectivism which translates the exigencies of the object into those of its conceptual organization. The essay is determined by the unity of its object, together with that of theory and experience which have migrated into the object. The essay's openness is not vaguely one of feeling and mood, but obtains its contour from its content. It resists the idea of the master-work that reflects the idea of creation and totality. Its form follows the critical thought that man is no creator, that nothing human is creation. The essay, always directed towards artifacts, does not present itself as a creation; nor does it long for something all-embracing, the totality of which would resemble creation. Its totality, the unity of a form thoroughly constructed in itself, is that of non-totality; one that even as form does not assert the. thesis of the identity of thought and thing, the thesis which in its own content the essay rejects. Freedom from the pressure of identity occa- sionally provides the essay (and this is lacking in official thought) with an aspect of ineffaceability, of inextinguishable color. In Simmel cer- tain foreign words - cachet, attitude - betray this intention, without it being treated theoretically as such.
The essay is both more open and more closed than traditional thought would like. It is more open in so far as, through its inner nature, it negates anything systematic and satisfies itself all the better the more strictly it excludes the systematic;residues of the systematic in the essay such as the infiltration of literary studies with ready-made, wide-spread philosophical commonplaces, by which these studies try to make themselves respectable, are of no morevalue than psychologi- cal banalities. On the other hand, the essay is more closed in that it labors emphatically on the form of its presentation. The consciousness of the non-identity between presentation and presented material forces the form to make unlimited efforts. In that respect alone the essay resembles art; otherwise, on account of the concepts which appear in it and which import not only their meaning but also their theoretical aspects, the essay is necessarilyrelated to theory. To be sure, the essay relates itselfto theory as cautiously as to the concept. It neither deduces itself rigidly from theory - the cardinal fault of all LukAcs' later essayis- tic work - nor is it a down-payment on future syntheses. Disaster threatens intellectual experience the more strenuously it ossifies into theory and acts as if it held the philosopher's stone in hand. And yet,
T. W. Adorno 165
? 166 The Essay as Form
intellectual experience itself strives by its own nature toward such objectification. This antinomy is mirrored by the essay. Just as it absorbs concepts and experiences, so it absorbs theories. However, its relation to them is not that o f a standpoint. If this lackofa standpoint is no longer naive and dependent on the prominence of its objects; if the essay rather uses the relationship to its objects as aweapon against the spell of beginnings, it parodically practices the otherwise only feeble polemic of thought against mere standpoint philosophy. The essay swallowsupthetheoriesthatarecloseby;itstendencyisalwaystoward the liquidation of opinion, even that from which it takes its own impulse. The essay remains what it always was, the critical form par excellence; specifically, it constructs the immanent criticism of cultural artifacts, and it confronts that which such artifacts are with their con- cept; it is the critique of ideology. "The essay is the form of the critical category of our mind. For whoever criticizes must necessarily experi- ment; he must create conditions under which an object is newly seen, and he must do so in a fashion different from that of a creative author. Above all the fragility of the object must be probed, tested; this is pre- cisely the meaning of the small variation that an object undergoes in thehandsofitscritic. "" Iftheessayisaccusedoflackingastandpoint and of tending toward relativism because it recognizes no standpoint lying outside of itself, then the accusation implicitly contains the con- ception of truth as something "ready-made," a hierarchy of concepts, an image of truth that Hegel destroyed in his dislike of standpoints: in this the essay touches its polar opposite, the philosophy of absolute knowledge. The essay would like to cure thought of its arbitrariness by taking arbitrariness reflectively into its own procedure instead ofmask- ing it as spontaneity.
Hegelian philosophy, to be sure, remained trapped in the inconsis- tency that it criticized the abstract, over-arching concept, the mere "result," in the name of an internally discontinuous process, while at the same time, in the idealist tradition, speaking about dialectical method. Therefore the essay is more dialectical than the dialectic as it articulates itself. TheessaytakesHegelian logicatitsword:neithermay the truth of the totality be played off immediately against individual judgments, nor may truth be reduced to individualjudgments; rather, the claim of the particular to truth is taken literally to the point where there is evidence of its untruth. The risked, anticipatory, and incom- pletely redeemed aspect of every essayistic detail draws in other details as negation; the untruth in which the essay knowingly entangles itself is the element of its truth. Untruth certainly also resides in the essay's
? basic form, in its relation to what is culturally preformed and derived as though it were something in-itself. But the more energetically the essay suspends the concept of some first principle, the more it refuses to spin culture out of nature, the more fundamentally it recognizes the unremittingly natural essence of culture itself. Up to the present day, a blind natural interconnectedness, myth, perpetuates itself in culture. It is precisely this upon which the essay reflects: its proper theme is the interrelation of nature and culture. It is not by coincidence that, rather than "reducing" the artifact, the essay immerses itself in cultural phenomena as in a second nature, a second immediacy, in order through persistence to remove the illusion of immediacy. The essay deceives itself as little as the philosophy of origins about the difference between culture and that which underlies it. Yet for the essay, culture is not some epiphenomenon superimposed on being that must be elim- inated, but rather what lies underneath is itself artificial (thesei), false society. Thus, for the essay, origins have no priority over the super- structure. The essay owes its freedom in its choice of objects, its sovereigntyvis-2-visall prioritiesI3offact or theory to the circumstance that for it all objects are equally near the center, to the principle that casts a spell over everything. The essay refuses to glorify concern for the primal as something more primal than concern for the mediated, because to the essay primacy itself is an object of reflection, something negative. It corresponds to a situation in which the primal, as a stand- point of the mind within the falsely socialized world, becomes a lie. It covers a wide territory from the enshrinement as primal words of his- torical concepts extracted from historical languages, to academic in- struction in "creative writing;"I4 from craft-shop primitiveness to re- corders and finger-painting:'' in every instance the pedagogical neces- sity sets itself up as a metaphysical virtue. Thought is not exempt from Baudelaire's rebellion of poetry against nature as a social reservation. Even the paradises of thought are only artificial, and in them the essay indulges. Since, according to Hegel's dictum, there is nothing between heaven and earth that is not mediated, thought may only hold true to the idea of immediacy by way of the mediated, but it becomes the prey of the mediated the instant it grasps directly for the unmediated. Cun- ningly, the essay settles itself into texts, as though they were simply there and had authority; without the illusion of the primal, it gets under its feet a ground, however dubious, comparable to earlier theological exegesis of holy writings. The essay's impulse, however, is
13. [In English. ]
14. [In English. ]
15. [In English. ]
? I68 The Essay as Form
the exact opposite of the theological; it is critical: through confronta- tion of texts with their own emphatic concept, with the truth that each text intends even in spite of itself, to shatter the claim of culture and move it to remember its untruth - the untruth of that ideological facade which reveals culture's bondage to nature. Under the glance of the essay second nature becomes conscious of itself as first nature.
If the truth of the essay gains its momentum by way ofits untruth, its truth is not to be sought in mere opposition to what is ignoble and pro- scribed in it, but in these very things: in its mobility, its lack of that soliditywhich science demands, transferring it, as it were, from property- relationships to the intellect. Those who believe they must defend the intellect against the charge of a lack of solidity are the enemies of intellect: intellect itself, once emancipated, is mobile. As soon as it wants more than simply the administrative repetition and manipu- lated presentation of what already exists, it is somehow exposed; truth abandoned by play would be nothing more than tautology. Thus his- torically the essay is related to rhetoric, which the scientific mentality, since Descartes and Bacon, has alwayswanted to do awaywith; that is, until, appropriately in the age of science, rhetoric decayed and became a science suigeneris, the science of communication. Of course rhetoric has always been a form of thought which accommodated itself to com- municative language. It directed itself to the unmediated: the substitute-satisfaction of its audience. Yet the essay preserves in the very autonomy of its presentation, through which it distinguishes itself from the scientific mode of communication, traces of the communica- tive with which science dispenses. The pleasures which rhetoric wants to provide to its audience are sublimated in the essay into the idea of the pleasure of freedom vis-A-vis the object, freedom that gives the object more of itself than if it were mercilessly incorporated into the order of ideas. The scientific consciousness, which is directed against any anthropomorphic idea whatsoever, was always closely bound up with the reality principle and similarly hostile to happiness. While hap- piness is supposedly the goal of all domination over nature, it always appears to the reality principle as regression to mere nature. This can be seen even in the highest philosophies, including Kant's and Hegel's. Reason, in whoseabsolute idea these philosophies have their pathos, is denounced by them as something both pert and disrespectful as soon as it challenges the established system of values. Against this inclina- tion theessayrescues asophisticelement. Thehostilitytohappinessof official critical thought can be felt particularly in Kant's transcendental dialectic: it wants to eternalize the boundary between understanding
and speculation, and, according to its characteristic metaphor, to pre- vent any "roaming around in intelligible worlds. " While self-critical
? reason should, according to Kant, keep both feet planted on the ground, indeed should ground itself, it follows its innermost principle and seals itself off against anything new as well as against curiosity, the pleasure principle of thought, that is also upbraided by existential ontology. What in the content of his thought Kant projects as the goal of reason, utopia, the production of humanity, is disbarred by the form of his thought, the theory of knowledge; it forbids reason to go beyond the realm of experience, which, caught in the machinery of mere material and unchangeable categories, is reduced to that which always was. But the object of the essay is the new as something genu- inely new, as something not translatable back into the staleness of already existing forms. By reflecting the object without doing violence to it, the essay silently laments the fact that truth has betrayed happi- ness and thus itself; this lament incites the rage against the essay. In the essay the persuasive aspect of communication, analogously to the functional transformation of many traits in autonomous music, is alienated from its original goal and converted into the pure articula- tion of presentation in itself; it becomes a compelling construction that does not want to copy the object, but to reconstruct it out of its concep- tual membra disjecta. But the objectionable transitions in rhetoric, in which association, ambiguity of words, neglect of logical synthesis all make it easy for the auditor, yoking him to the speaker's will: all these are fused ik the essay with its truth-content. Its transitions disavow rigid deduction in the interest of establishing internal cross-connections, something for which discursive logic has no use. It uses equivocation neither out ofslovenliness nor in ignorance of their proscription by science, but to clarify what usually remains obscure to the critique of equivocation and its mere discrimination of meanings: whenever a word means avariety of things, the differencesare not entirely distinct, for the unity of the word points to some unity, no matter how hidden, in the thing itself;however, it is obviously not the case that this unity, as claimed by contemporary restorative philosophies, can itself be taken simplyasaunityoflinguisticaffinities. Hereaswelltheessayvergeson the logicof music, the stringent and yet aconceptual art of transition; it aims at appropriating for expressive language something that it for- feited under the domination of a discursive logic which cannot be cir- cumvented, but may be outwitted in its own form by the force of an intruding subjective expression. For the essay is not situated in simple opposition to discursive procedure. It is not unlogical; rather it obeys logical criteria in so far as the totality of its sentences must fit together coherently. Mere contradictions may not remain, unless they are grounded in the object itself. It isjust that the essay develops thoughts differently from discursive logic. The essay neither makes deductions
? 170 TheEssayasForm
from a principle nor does it draw conclusions from coherent in- dividual obsenlations. It co-ordinates elements, rather than subor- dinating them; and only the essence ofits content, not the manner ofits presentation, is commensurable with logical criteria. If, thanks to the ten- sion between presentation and what is presented, the essay - compared with forms which indifferently convey a ready-made content - is more dynamic than traditional thought, it is at the same time, as a con- structed juxtaposition of elements, more static than traditional thought. In that alone rests the essay's affinity to the visual image; except that the essay's static quality is itself composed of tensions which, as it were, have been brought to a standstill. The slightly yield- ing quality of the essayist's thought forces him to greater intensity than discursive thought can offer; for the essay, unlike discursive thought, does not proceed blindly, automatically, but at every moment it must reflect on itself. This reflexion, however, does not only extend to the essay's relation to established thought, but also to its relation to rhet- oric and communication. Otherwise the essay, while fancying itself meta-scientific, would become vainly pre-scientific.
The relevance of the essay is that of anachronism. The hour is more unfavorable to it than ever. i t is being crushed between an organized science, on one side, in which everyone presumes to control everyone and everything else, and which excludes, with the sanctimonious praise of "intuitive" o r "stimulating," anything that does not conform to the status quo; and, on the other side, by a philosophy that makes do with the empty and abstract residues left aside by the scientific apparatus, residues which then become, for philosophy, the objects of second- degree operations. The essay, however, has to do with that which is blind in its objects. Conceptually it wants to blow open what cannot be absorbed by concepts, o r what, through contradictions in which con- cepts entangle themselves, betrays the fact that the network of their objectivity is a purely subjective rigging. It wants to polarize the opaque, to unbind the powers latent in it. It strives to concretize con- tent as determined by space and time; it constructs the interwovenness of concepts in such a way that they can be imagined as themselves inter- woven in the object. It frees itself from the stipulation of those at- tributes which since the definition in the S~)mposiumhave been ascribed to ideas; the notion that ideas "exist eternally and neither come into being nor pass away, neither change nor wane;" "A being eternally created in itself and for itself;" and yet the essay remains idea, in that it does not capitulate under the burden of mere being, does not bow down before what merely is. It does not measure what is by some eter- nal standard, rather by an enthusiastic fragment from Nietzsche's later life: "Ifwe affirm one single moment, we thus affirm not only ourselves
? but all existence. For nothing is self-sufficient, neither in ourselves nor in things: and if our soul has trembled with happiness and sounded like a harpstringjust once, all eternity was needed to produce this one event- andinthissinglemomentofaffirmationalleternitywascalled good, redeemed, justified, and affirmed. "16 This with the exception that the essay mistrusts suchjustification and affirmation. For the hap- piness that Nietzsche found holy, the essay has no other name than the negative. Even the highest manifestations of the intellect that express happiness are always at the same time caught in the guilt of thwarting happiness as long as they remain mere intellect. Therefore the law of the innermost form of the essay is heresy. By transgressing the ortho- doxy of thought, something becomes visible in the object which it is orthodoxy's secret purpose to keep invisible.
Translated b~Bob Hullot-Kentor and Frederic Will
16. Friedrich Nietzsche, MeWill ToPower,trans. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (London: Weidenfeeld and Nicolson, 1968), pp. 532-533.
A Quarterly Journal of Critical Thought I
STAME: TheCrisisoftheLeft FRASER: Legal Amnesia PICARD: New Black Economic Strategy TISMANEANU: Romantan (,'omrnunism OFFE: The Future of the Lobor Market HULLOT-KENTOR: Introduction to Adorno ADORNO: The Idea of Natural Hislory
Notes a n d Commentary: SIEGEL: The Reagan "Revolution" SOLLNER: NPO-Consematism@ Critical Theoly EISENZWEIC: Zzonism and Delectiue Fiction ZERZAN: Taylonsm and Unionism LOWENTHAL: Goethe and False Subjectiuity
Review-Symposium o n Soviet-Type Societies LUKE, ULMEN, SZELENYI,BAUMAN,~
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