Towards an ethical politics

I Context

According to Adorno, Husserlian phenomenology has placed the transcendental subject at the centre and origin of the meaningful universe, in effect denying the independent existence of all that exceeds the subject. Adorno points out that the subject exists instead by way of a mediation of subject and object, ⁶ but this fact is forgotten by a philosophy dominated by epistemology. ‘As though to punish it’, writes Adorno, ‘the subject will be overcome by what it has forgotten’ (Negative Dialectics, 1997b: 176). In its attempt to assert its subjectivity, the subject is objectified. The ‘centristic identity’ (ibid.) of the constitutive subject – its pretended predominance over the objective field to which it belongs – is formed in the (forgotten) separation of the transcendental I from its immediate relations with external forces and internal bodily sensations. Husserl’s transcendental subject is positioned over and above the factual entity that would be capable of particular experiences. The subject is thereby reified as a mere object of contemplation. When subject and object cease to mediate one another, when the subjective is substituted for objectivity, the subject ceases to live. Adorno’s Negative Dialectics ⁷ attempts to remedy this situation – to reverse the reduction of objectivity to the subject by reorienting philosophy towards the preponderance of the object.

This reorientation proceeds by way of a turn towards the aesthetic that challenges philosophy’s allegiance to identity thinking. Adorno’s term ‘identity thinking’ refers to an impoverishment of philosophy; the Enlightenment project has stalled at the stage of conceptual identification. Progressing little beyond the correspondence theory of Platonic thought, modern philosophy has taken on, as its sole task, the determination of an adequate relation between a universal concept and the particular entity that it intends to cover. That which is non-identical – the qualities and attributes of the particular not covered by the restrictive general concept – is repressed and forgotten by the constitutive subject. The calculative activities of categorization and the creation of equivalence between unlike things facilitate relations of exchange dominant in a market society. In order to challenge this mythic and capitalistic logic that currently restricts the subject and the object, philosophy must draw upon the more expansive rationality of the aesthetic. By doing so, Adorno suggests that philosophy will be able to recognize and address the suffering of the non-identical, and set itself in motion again.

However, a critique of identity thinking is insufficient if it recognizes only the concept’s inability to cover all the qualities of the thing as a form of subjective domination of the objective, because, as Adorno notes, ‘[i]n the simple identifying judgment, the pragmatist, nature-controlling element already joins with a utopian element’ (1997b: 148–9). Adorno draws our attention here to the utopian aims of identification that contain a seed of hope for the future: the desire for unity, reconciliation, non-contradiction. It is important to recognize that the object itself is also often lacking the attributes that the concept, living in hope, would like it to possess.

Philosophy’s cogitative self-reflection on the concept of freedom in relation to the empirical experience of the individual in society bears out this observation. While a human being is more than what the concept of freedom covers, it is also true that through empirical observation, we would conclude that the individual in contemporary society falls far short of the attributes covered by the concept of freedom. Adorno argues that:

The substance of the contradiction between universal and particular is that individuality is not yet – and that, therefore, it is bad wherever established. At the same time, that contradiction between the concept of freedom and its realization remains the insufficiency of the concept. The potential of freedom calls for criticizing what an inevitable formalization has made of the potential. (1997b: 151)

But what is needed here is not a radical libertarianism that would simply let things be in an expression of indifference to the object. As Adorno has it, ‘individuality [is] not the ultimate either’ (1997b: 161). To claim that there is an irrevocable gap separating the subject’s cognitive abilities from the comprehension of the object as a uniquely individual and indissoluble thing is to give oneself over to the current conditions of life. This capitulation to the irrationality of the object as mysteriously unknowable for the subject short-circuits thinking at the level of a primitive identitarianism that robs the subject of its capacity for critical self-reflection upon its own cognitive abilities, and thwarts our potential to instigate social and political change. What is more, according to Adorno, the ‘current cognitive ideal’ (ibid.) that embraces this valorization of the radically unknowable individual blinds us to the fact of our interdependencies and our social nature. The image of the independently existing object is a perversion of the idea of individual freedom that has not yet come into being for humanity. Adorno asserts that ‘the individual is not flatly for himself. In himself, he is his otherness and linked with others’ (ibid.). For Adorno, even in instances of ‘extreme individuation’, ‘universal moments’ can be ‘rediscovered’ as a ‘participation in typicality that is hidden from the participants themselves’ (ibid.: 162). Under current societal conditions, these ‘universal moments’ link even the extremely individuated person back to the ‘typical’ and rigidly conformist demands of society. But key to my inquiry in this article is the question: Could a transformation of social conditions also transform this condition of the individual as a being for something other than herself into a positive ethical and political stance of solidarity with the other?

II Aesthetic rationality: Constellations and the somatic moment in thinking

Adorno suggests that ‘to represent the mimesis it supplanted, the concept has no other way than to adopt something mimetic in its own conduct, without abandoning itself’ (ND, 1997b: 15). At the very moment that philosophy, in the form of positivism, wants to expel mimesis from itself, Adorno aims at a recognition of mimesis as the ground of reason. Rationality requires a mimetic moment if it desires to be anything other than mere formula, but philosophy’s adoption of mimetic conduct cannot be total – otherwise there would be an equally destructive reversal that would result in a mere reflection of the world as it is, making thinking and subjectivity impossible. For Adorno warns that in imitating art, in becoming a work of art itself, philosophy would ‘expunge’ (ibid.) itself. It is important to Adorno, then, that philosophy and art remain distinct, even while we draw attention to their common ground, which includes their mutual embrace of the play that pushes at the boundaries of thinking (ibid.: 14). Common to both philosophy and art is ‘a mode of conduct that forbids pseudomorphosis’ (ibid.). In other words, philosophy cannot imitate the way that art deals in immediacy rather than in conceptually mediated discourse, and art cannot take on the certainty of meaning that conceptual mediation lends to philosophy (ibid.: 15). If philosophy were to model itself entirely upon art, it would forfeit meaning. This is certainly not the result that Adorno is advocating.

‘What the philosophical concept will not abandon’, according to Adorno,

… is the yearning that animates the nonconceptual side of art, and whose fulfillment shuns the immediate side of art as mere appearance. The concept – the organon of thinking, and yet the wall between thinking and the thought – negates that yearning. Philosophy can neither circumvent such negation nor submit to it. It must strive, by way of the concept, to transcend the concept (ibid.). In the negative dialectic, philosophy will adhere to the concept, but it will be cognizant of ‘the yearning that animates the nonconceptual side of art’. (1997b: 15)

History is sedimented both within and without the material object and the concepts that are arranged around it in the constellation. In order to read or decipher the constellation, we must learn to recognize ‘the historic positional value of the object in its relation to other objects’ (ND, 1997b: 163). By cognizing the object in its constellation, by perceiving it in its relation to other objects, we are able to understand the ‘process stored in the object’ (ibid.). Adorno states that the constellational form is modelled upon ‘the conduct of language’ (ibid.: 162), and opposes this to the logic of identity thinking that lends definition to terms through the imposition of cover concepts. Concepts remain subjective determinations independent of any objective ground until they are subordinated to the conduct of language, which orients the concepts to objectivity by placing them in a mimetic relation ‘centered about a thing’ (ibid.).

On its own, the concept can represent only a portion of the thing it attempts to cover, but the constellation can ‘represent from without what the concept has cut away within: the “more” which the concept is equally desirous and incapable of being. By gathering around the object of cognition, the concepts potentially determine the object’s interior. They attain, in thinking, what was necessarily excised from thinking’ (1997b: 162). The constellation adopts ‘the conduct of language’ (ibid.) and models itself on the aesthetic in its aspiration to represent ‘the “more”’ (ibid.). As in the artwork, mimesis, as that impulse or desire to become other, is behind the constellation’s ability to represent more than the single concept is able to on its own. It is important to remember, however, that this yearning for that ‘more’ (ibid.) is negated by the concept itself (ibid.: 14), and ‘[p]hilosophy can neither circumvent such negation nor submit to it’ (ibid.) Because it is not a work of art – because its basic building block is the concept – philosophy ‘must strive, by way of the concept, to transcend the concept’ (ibid.).

The work of constructing and deciphering a piece of writing composed in constellational form is a collective labour conducted by historically mediated subjects. The act of reading the constellation is a mediation of its content by the subject, but in this case, the author of that activity is the reader of the text, who reassembles the elements of the constellations anew. The lines dividing the activity of composition from the receptive passivity of reading are blurred, and both writer and reader must transcend self-interest in their deferral to the primacy of the object and the various objective historical conditions that envelop the entire enterprise. The subject involved in the writing and reading of constellations is not the author or consumer of a work that purports to express or transmit a subjective identity. At the same time, reader and writer (and these poles must be conceived of as fluid, since the composition of the constellation happens anew with each new reading) are able to recognize aspects of themselves and, particularly, their own objective conditions within the constellation.

A philosophy oriented towards aesthetic rationality would be capable of recognizing that ‘thinking … breaks the supremacy of thinking over its otherness, because it always is otherness already, within itself’ (1997b: 201). The mind cannot think at all without its penetration by that which is external, other – the non-identical repressed by the subject, yet essential to it. Thinking, as mental activity, is a generative temporalization: ‘a sort of becoming’ (ibid.: 201), and as such, it cannot be conceived as external to or transcendent of materiality and history. Thought is a becoming that transforms the subject itself; the thinking subject cannot be superior to the difference of the object because it already harbours and produces otherness within itself. It is this awareness of the absolute necessity of otherness to thinking that leads Adorno to commit both himself and his philosophy to ‘total self-relinquishment’ – to ‘immerse ourselves in things that are heterogeneous … without placing those things in prefabricated categories’ (ibid.: 13).

The transcendental subject represses the physicality and factuality of the subject – the historical conditions and physical qualities that make it objectively different from other beings – as it asserts the conformity of its essence with its concept (1997b: 177). In this way, the subject constitutes itself as an object of epistemological reflection, and formal subjectivity is brought into conformity with the objective requirements for the subject’s function in a society dominated by exchange; the subject becomes equivalent to all the other subjects. Adorno claims that formal subjectivity is ‘objectivity that weighs upon the subject’ (ibid.: 18), and yet it is this objectivity, or rather the subject’s recognition of it and reflection upon it, that Adorno sees as the key to the subject’s redemption. Recognition of the subject’s objective conditions and the resulting self-reflection upon those conditions are possible only through the expansion of reason beyond identity thinking – an expansion that proceeds through a dedication to self-relinquishment and as an incorporation of indeterminate aesthetic judgement. Adorno argues that the somatic moment in thinking – the irreducible part of cognition that is ‘not purely cognitive’ (ND, 1997b: 193) repressed by identitarianism – prompts this necessary self-reflection.

The superiority of the mind is a necessary fiction used to rationalize the suffering induced by the subject’s domination of the object and its repression of the non-identical within (1997b: 177), both of which are objective requirements of the principle of exchange that dominates capitalist society. Although it is repressed by the constitutive subject, the non-identical somatic element survives as ‘the unrest that makes knowledge move, the unassuaged unrest that reproduces itself in the advancement of knowledge’ (ibid.: 203). The dialectical tension introduced by this physical moment is what leads Adorno to conceive of the unlikely allegiance of metaphysics and materialism that ‘would be possible only as a legible constellation of things in being’ (ND, 1997b: 407). This tension caused by the repression of the non-identical somatic moment prompts self-reflection, and alerts us to the fact that suffering should not exist, that ‘things should be different’ (ibid.). But things can only be different in a transformed society, so it is up to humanity as a whole to produce the necessary change, which must arise as the negation of physical suffering ‘in the interest of all’ (ibid.: 204).

In Adorno’s ‘Progress’, as noted in Henry Pickford’s commentary upon that essay, and as Deborah Cook demonstrates in her book Adorno on Nature, the author claims that it is not only the individual that has yet to be actualized but also ‘humanity in general’. ⁸ The actualization of humanity would be the coming into existence of ‘a self-conscious global subject’ (1998: 144). This formulation is not without its problems, however, in that its embrace of collectivity risks repeating and increasing the reification and narcissism that result in the irrational identification with both charismatic authority figures and the anonymous mob. Adorno himself notes this when he observes that even (and perhaps most especially) an actualized humanity-as-collective-subject might ‘fail to free itself from the no less obdurate particular interest of the totality’. ⁹ In other words, the ‘self-conscious global subject’ (ibid.), if it is insufficiently self-conscious, risks capitulation to a mythic logic from which neither philosophy nor ‘the organization of the human race’ (ibid.) has been able to free us. The political organization of individual wills that Adorno’s philosophy pursues could not be perceived as a totalizing unity.

Adorno runs this risk in his pursuit of a transformed philosophy and a transformed society, putting his faith in the somatic moment of thought that prompts critical self-reflection. In this self-reflection, born in the spark of tension between sensation and the limitations of a thought that cannot fully incorporate it, emerges the possibility of solidarity with the objectivity of the non-identical. Through this solidarity, subjectivity (both highly individuated, yet aware of its interdependence upon other highly individuated beings) might arise for the first time. The yet-to-be-achieved-subject would be aware of its objective conditions and the ways in which those conditions bring it into unity with other highly individuated subjectivities. Hence the reorientation of philosophy toward aesthetic rationality in Negative Dialectics is both ethical and political; through a remorseful relinquishment of its own mastery, the subject attempts to free both itself and the object and opens up the possibility of a collective subject and a praxis in solidarity with objectivity.

III Aesthetic experience and the expression of suffering

In Aesthetic Theory, the work of art is discussed as a special kind of object that plays out an internal conflict between autonomy and heteronomy. In this, it mirrors the subject itself. The artwork repeats the ‘protohistory of the subject’; it repeats the way it ‘wrested itself free’. ¹⁰ This is one aspect of the truth content of the work of art that must be rescued in order for us to understand the ethical foundation of Adorno’s philosophy and the political implications that follow in its wake. Here, Adorno stages a return to the argument at the heart of The Dialectic of Enlightenment: the subject has attained autonomy through the language of expression, which comports itself mimetically, by becoming more like itself: it declares its selfhood. But in the moment of expression as subjective autonomy, the archaic mimetic impulse must be forgotten, jettisoned from the world of everyday experience, lest the constructed nature of subjectivity be revealed. This is the moment of the division of art from science, mimesis from reason.

The subject’s autonomy coincides with its domination of the object, their separation and polarization. Under these conditions, the language of expression remains unfulfilled, because its goal – the emancipation of the subject – has not yet been accomplished. The subject remains enslaved to the domination it exercises over itself by creating and maintaining the administered world in which it experiences a pseudo-freedom misrecognized as individual autonomy. The non-subjective within is the non-identical – that which falls outside of the parameters of the concept. For Adorno, the subject’s ensoulment occurs within the process of separation into subject and object that represses the non-identical and leads to subjective dominance, the mere appearance of autonomy and ersatz free will. The protohistory of subjectivity is re-enacted in the work of art and it is available to the work of art because, like Freudian repressed content that prompts repetition compulsion, ‘this protohistory survives in the subject and recommences in every moment of history’ (1997c: 113). The suffering produced through this repression, and the pleasure of having produced this suffering through repression, objectively weigh upon the subject, and compel the subject to seek out aesthetic experience. The subject first starts to ‘wrest itself free’ (ibid.: 112) in the primordial shudder, a response to being ‘touched by the other’ (ibid.: 331). The repetition of that event takes place in the realm of the aesthetic.

Having come upon the scene too late with Adorno, we cannot know what the experience of ensoulment would be, since an experiencing subject could not exist prior to the moment of separation between subject and object. But Adorno demonstrates that we can read traces of these moments within the aesthetic object: the tremolo of stringed instruments that marks ensoulment is but one of these moments. Adorno concludes that tremolo is a ‘miserable surrogate’ for the original experience (1997c: 113). He describes this transposition of ensoulment as a ‘modification of mimesis’ (ibid.). In the transmission of these mimetic impulses into the artwork, mimesis is modified from a bodily impulse to become other into an objectified, disincarnated ‘afterimage’ (ibid.) of mimesis.

Even in their modification, the mimetic impulses remain ‘the plenipotentiary in the aesthetic continuum of extra-aesthetic nature’ (1997c: 113). So while the mimetic impulses, as incarnated bodily impulses, remain tied to ‘nature’ as that which is beyond the aesthetic proper because it is beyond subjectivity, they are also the most powerful aesthetic force both within and beyond formal aesthetics. While this impulse falls under the category of ‘nature’, external to and in opposition to spirit, it is only through the mimetic impulse, which engenders identification with domination, that the subject is born as a free will. And it is only in a mimesis of that which transcends this domination that the subject will attain an authentic subjectivity for the first time.

Through what we might think of as the aesthetic shudder, works of art disorient the subject by breaking down the distance it requires to maintain epistemological power over the object. The supplemental term ‘aesthetic’ I have adopted here distinguishes between what Adorno refers to as the primordial shudder and its re-production within the work of art. ¹¹ Adorno notes, referencing Hegel’s theory of the spiritualization of art, that ‘the spirit of artworks produces the shudder by externalizing it in objects’ (1997c: 118). The aesthetic shudder is mimesis of the primordial shudder. The work reveals its truth to the subject ‘as if it must also be his own’ (ibid.: 269), but the force of the shudder is contained by the work of art.

We seek out this experience of the shudder, even though it may contain unpleasant, even painful, moments, in part because we wish to attain knowledge of the suffering incurred by the non-identical, and in part because we seek affirmation of our affectivity in an era of mass reification. As Adorno has it: ‘consciousness without shudder is reified consciousness’ (1997c: 331). The aesthetic shudder is a memorial conception of past terror and its repression, but its cultural preservation and promotion are also a marker of a very present anxiety in the modern world. Adorno explains that ‘under patient contemplation artworks begin to move. To this extent they are truly afterimages of the primordial shudder in the age of reification: the terror of that age is recapitulated vis-à-vis reified objects’ (ibid.: 79). The modern artwork mimics the non-identical other (that which the subject represses in its constitution of itself as subject) by beginning to move.

It is not only in modern works that this protest against reification can be detected; Adorno sees in the depiction of movement in palaeolithic cave paintings ‘the painstaking imitation of the indeterminate, of what has not been nailed down’ (1997c: 326). The movement of the art object is what makes it ‘truly [an] afterimage of the primordial shudder’ (ibid.). The artefact comes alive in a threateningly strange manner. What could be more terrifying, and more exciting, in ‘the age of reification’ (ibid.) than a thing that somehow goes beyond the laws of thing-ness in an animated response to subjective contemplation? In this regard, the aesthetic object rejects the formal laws that govern the relation between subject and object, and the constitution of the subject itself. This is the sense in which the primordial shudder, and the threat it constitutes to the subject, survives in the present; our fragile hold on masterful subjectivity is so easily revealed to be tenuous.

But if this is the case, why do we associate the aesthetic experience of the shudder with pleasure? What is the status of this aesthetic shudder in its relation to other categories of aesthetic experience? If the sublime is for, as Kant has it, the realization of the subject’s control over its own powers and impulses resulting in a sense of self-mastery and pleasure in domination, then we surely cannot describe the aesthetic shudder with reference to this category. Why would we seek an experience that challenges our dominance in this way? Why would we attempt to preserve it in the experience of the work of art? According to Adorno, the mimesis of the primordial shudder and the suffering of the non-identical that results in this aesthetic experience survive because what is even more terrifying to us than threatened destruction of the reified subject is the possibility that its reification will become total:

… for if at one time human beings in their powerlessness against nature feared the shudder as something real, the fear is no less intense, no less justified, that the shudder will dissipate. All enlightenment is accompanied by the anxiety that what set enlightenment in motion in the first place and what enlightenment ever threatens to consume may disappear: truth. (1997c: 80)

‘What later came to be called subjectivity, freeing itself from the blind anxiety of the shudder,’ Adorno writes, ‘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’ (1997c: 331). Recognizing itself reflected in the form of the work of art, the subject breaks with the limitations of instrumental rationality and subjectivity as it is defined by identitarian thinking. This break reveals that within the administered world, there is no room left for what shudders, what lives in the subject. This is how art (temporarily) rescues the subject through the negation of subjectivity as we know it; the subject is (momentarily) rescued from the force of its own subjectification.

Art’s production is driven, even necessitated by the subject’s desire to know the suffering it has caused the non-identical. Restating his claim from Negative Dialectics that through ‘ruthless rationalization, what is most urgent would become contemplative again, mocking its own urgency’ (1997b: 286), Adorno observes later in Aesthetic Theory that ‘suffering conceptualized remains mute and inconsequential, as is obvious in post-Hitler Germany’ (ibid.: 18). The existence of suffering in the world demands art, as a non- or quasi-conceptual attempt to come to knowledge of that suffering. A world without art would be a world in which the subject has become so reified that it can no longer perceive the suffering that exists in the world.

This, according to Adorno, is the truth content of the darkness and negativity of modern art. Adorno argues that the modern work of art, as a non-conceptual attempt to know suffering, operates mimetically, through a process of identifying not only with repressed suffering, but also with the very principle of repression that bars access to the suffering of the non-identical. This mimetic identification with the principle of repression is what makes modern works of art so dark and obscure, and it is what makes the notion of a meaning or a message that can be revealed within the work of art absurd. According to Adorno, ‘darkness must be interpreted, not replaced by the clarity of meaning’ (1997c: 27). To replace this darkness with clarity would be to stamp out conflict and antagonism within the work of art, which would also entail turning a blind eye to the existence of suffering in the world. Adorno writes:

[I]n its pleasure in the repressed, art at the same time takes into itself the disaster, the principle of repression, rather than merely protesting hopelessly against it. That art enunciates the disaster by identifying with it anticipates its enervation; this, not any photograph of the disaster or false happiness, defines the attitude of authentic contemporary art to a radically darkened objectivity. (1997c: 19)

The subject’s capacity to shudder, according to Adorno, is what constitutes aesthetic comportment, and aesthetic comportment is ‘neither immediately mimesis nor its repression but rather the process that mimesis sets in motion and in which, modified, mimesis is preserved’ (1997c: 331). The artwork teaches us that mimesis can be tamed by reason in the guise of aesthetic form. The artwork, as a dialectic of form and mimesis, protects reason by containing the non-identical mimetic impulses, even while it exposes reason as limited and limiting, as dominating and barbaric, as illusory. As Adorno has it, ‘that art, something mimetic, is possible in the midst of rationality, and that it employs its means, is a response to the faulty irrationality of the rational world as an overadministered world’ (ibid.: 53). Aesthetic comportment takes up domesticated mimesis, which no longer threatens us with the regressive reverse image of reconciliation: the orgiastic release of independent subjectivity into undifferentiated being that Adorno sees reflected in the mythic rationality of Platonic metaphysics and modern positivism. Instead, it allows for a sustained challenge to instrumental reason. The mimetic impulse, once the capacity to become other, has been transformed into the ability to recognize difference, to produce and read correspondences and cognize beyond the classification of particular things under determinate concepts. In short, philosophy cannot do without mimesis.

The mimetic capacity of the work of art shows us that form (and by extension reason) can be, in the words of Morton Schoolman, ‘constructed to conform, not to the aesthetic object, but to the objective aspiration of the mimetic capacity of art, which is to represent difference in a way that expresses the wish to spare it the violence inflicted by aesthetic form’. ¹³ Schoolman interprets this conformity to the ‘objective aspiration of the mimetic capacity of art’ as an ethical and political position that goes far beyond a relation of tolerance defined by mutual indifference, and yet he upholds the ineffability of the non-identical as a constant element that the subject must respect, always refusing the impulse to identify. But this is surely not in keeping with Adorno’s own perspective, given that one cannot think without identifying. I read Adorno’s reorientation of reason to the ‘objective aspiration of the mimetic capacity of art’ somewhat differently. I see Adorno’s project as an attempt to expand our understanding of the non-identical, facilitated by a move away from dominating subjectivity. This movement of reason towards ‘the objective aspiration of the mimetic capacity of art’ (1997: 64) would, from my perspective, require the subject to relinquish its self to objectivity. This is the goal of the transformed philosophy that Adorno points to in Negative Dialectics: a philosophy oriented towards the preponderance of the object, set free of a formalized system masquerading as subjective interest, utilizing a tamed mimesis to engender hope in the very denial of a false reconciliation.

Arguing for a ‘politics of the mimetic shudder’, Martin Morris suggests that the shudder reveals the ‘contingency or complete historicity of being’ (2001: 182) and this recognition prompts the self to ‘take responsibility for the illusions of social life which points in the direction of liberatory democratic politics’ (ibid.: 183). I agree with Morris that this shattering of the subject of identitarianism ‘points towards’ a politics of liberation, but this pointing does not, in and of itself, constitute a politics or, even a theory of the political. The aesthetic shudder is, as Morris himself admits, ‘an initial moment’ (ibid.: 186) that allows the subject to engage ethically in a self-recognition that would be the first step towards a reconstitution of the political. This self-recognition would reveal that individual autonomy is dependent upon forces of domination that cause the suffering of the non-identical.

While the shock of the aesthetic shudder is a motivating factor in the rejection of liberal political models and the invention of new ones, any attempt to identify the kernel of a political theory in Adorno’s work would need to move beyond this ethical foundation, ¹⁴ in a search for strategies and organizational models that could inform the ‘liberatory democratic politics’ (2001: 183) that both Morris and I want to associate with Adorno’s project. I suggest that we can find just such an organizational model in Adorno’s adoption of aesthetic self-relinquishment as an ordering principle of the negative dialectic. When philosophy relinquishes itself to the object, it also adopts the mimetic organization of the work of art. In the constellation, as in the work of art, we see ‘the nonviolent integration of what diverges’ (AT, 1997c: 190). The project of building a political theory upon Adorno’s philosophy would draw on this relinquishment that accomplishes a non-violent integration or ‘togetherness of diversity’ (ND, 1997b: 150). Aesthetic self-relinquishment to an aesthetic organization that maintains and fosters conflict by instituting this ‘togetherness of diversity’ (ibid.) would become the strategic model for a reconstruction of the political resembling the artwork insofar as, in its integration of autonomous individuals into a society of diversity, it ‘transcends the antagonisms of existence without perpetrating the deception that they no longer exist’ (AT, 1997c: 190).

IV The lyric: Self-relinquishment and reconciliation

Adorno cautions us that if we want to understand the critique of society present in a work of art, we cannot proceed by applying social concepts from without; the application of determined concepts will impose a false identity. Our approach must be an immanent one, in which the concepts are constructed out of experience and analysis of the relations existing within the work of art itself. ¹⁵ But we must also heed the danger that Adorno perceives in a fully immersive approach like the one advocated at times by Walter Benjamin. ¹⁶ This approach runs the risk of affirming rather than challenging the reduction of objectivity to the subject (ND, 1997b: 176). Instead, Adorno advocates a two-part process in which each part mediates the other. ¹⁷ The first step is an immersive and affective experience of creation, while the second step involves an aesthetic judgement or a series of aesthetic judgements made without recourse to determinate concepts. This process allows for a preponderance of the object because, in the absence of a determinate concept, abstraction of the material, concrete, factual realm is never total. Rather than imposing a predetermined concept upon experience, aesthetic judgement considers the web of relations that condition matter and experience, using inductive reasoning to construct a universal out of the particular. The resulting universal is not an isolated concept, but, rather, a grouping of concepts that illuminates their inclusions and their elisions. In order to engage in this inquiry and subsequent judgement, the subject must relinquish its self; that is, it must break through the constitutive subject with its ‘power to be weak’ (ME, 1991: 70).

This is complicated, however, by the shift away from the liberal subject of free market (non-monopoly) capitalism to the psychological profile that Adorno attributes to individuals living under the conditions of late capitalism. Simon Jarvis notes that according to Adorno, ‘the typical characteristic of the individual under late capitalism is not a strong ego but “ego-weakness” and narcissism’. ¹⁸ While the subject of late capitalism is as much in thrall to the natural impulse of self-preservation as was the liberal subject under the conditions of free market capitalism, the nature of this sacrifice in the name of self-preservation has changed. While the subject, as depicted in Horkheimer and Adorno’s writings on Odysseus in Dialectic of Enlightenment, once repressed ego-centric desire in the name of self-preservation, we are now, under the conditions of monopoly capitalism, faced with a situation in which only ‘mimetic adaptation to what is dead’ ¹⁹ (that is, capital itself) can assure self-preservation. This is because capital and the Welfare State as an arm of capital have taken on the management of the resources necessary to sustain life. ²⁰ In order to preserve the self, the individual must make herself amenable to the forces of capital that guarantee her survival. Therefore, the subject sacrifices its ego in order to make itself fungible: to live according the exchange relations of capital.

The narcissistic subject is produced by conditions in which ‘people … are spellbound without exception, and none of them are capable of love, which is why everyone feels loved too little’ (ND, 1997b: 363). Adapting ourselves to the lifeless ratio of the market, we have become incapable of expressing and experiencing love for one another. Jarvis also notes that the subject of late capitalism, according to Adorno, is no longer ruled by the tension between ego, super-ego and id. Instead, it is (and we are) a narcissistic mess of hedonism and self-destruction: ‘a false reconciliation between ego and id’ (ibid.). This paradoxical attempt to achieve self-preservation through self-destruction conforms to the pagan logic of myth that seeks an end to painful failed individuation in the socially regressive unity of the Platonic One. And all the while, our love-starved narcissism drives an irrational identification with pathological opinion, ²¹ contributing to the rise of fascism as witnessed during Adorno’s lifetime and our own. ²² As a social issue of group psychology as opposed to an individual psychological problem, this mimetic adaptation to the status quo, and the narcissism thereby produced, reach their highest expression in a society that survives by way of the ultimate negativity of genocide and the possibility of total annihilation in the era of the atomic bomb. ²³

Nothing can save us from this society under the spell of the Freudian death drive but a complete reorientation of the natural impulse towards self-preservation. ²⁴ This is what Adorno argues is necessary in his essay ‘Progress’. The reorientation of self-preservation to species preservation that he tentatively supports there would require an act of self-relinquishment, but instead of relinquishing a strong and dominating subject, we would be called to let go of the weak, narcissistic and self-destructive ego in the name of a greater good for all humanity. This would require a strengthening of the ego that would provide the self with ‘the power to be weak’ (ME, 1991: 70).

In the lyric, which, Adorno notes, is generally taken to be the extremely individualized expression of the poet unencumbered by the coercive forces of the social, the reader is, at first glance, presented with an immediacy between the subject and its surroundings of which the modern subject of late capitalism is incapable. But Adorno notes that through this expression of extremely individuated subjectivity, the modern lyric accomplishes objectivity. The lyric poetry of Baudelaire, for example, communicates a subjective expression by retreating into bourgeois self-absorption and atomistic interiority. That this retreat itself expresses something that can be shared with a reader implies that it has achieved this objectivity. Adorno explains that lyric poetry’s expression of bourgeois subjectivity as something separated out from the bustle and commotion of the social, is a socially motivated expression, even if the author of the poem remains unaware of this (LPS, 1991: 43). What are held in common between two subjects (the poet and the reader of the poem) are their participation in, and their recoil from, a social reality that is alien to their own inner experience.

The argument is concisely treated in Aesthetic Theory, where Adorno writes:

… the philosophical interpretation of the truth content must unswervingly construe that truth content in the particular. By virtue of this content’s subjectively mimetic expressive element, artworks gain their objectivity; they are neither pure impulse nor its form, but rather the congealed process that transpires between them, and this process is social. (1997c: 131)

We see the proof of Adorno’s thesis that ‘the lyric work is always the subjective expression of a social antagonism’ (1991: 45) in Baudelaire. In its adoption of the modern as ‘the antilyrical pure and simple’ (ibid.: 44), and in its violent rejection of formal poetic language in favour of what Adorno calls a ‘heroically stylized language’ (ibid.: 45), his poetry stages a protest against the modern situation: the forces of industrialization, commodification, standardization and atomization make the ability to grasp objectivity through an immersion in the subjective a rare privilege of the few. In this socially critical moment, we recognize the falsity of the reconciliation that language offers, because ‘the objective world that produces the lyric is an inherently antagonistic world’ (ibid.); the aesthetic reconciliation offered in the lyric poem is a momentary reconciliation offered to a privileged few, and true reconciliation must involve a transformation of humanity as a whole. Poetic language requires a supplement in order to approach true reconciliation; this supplement is the ‘collective undercurrent’ that ‘provides the foundation for all individual lyric poetry’ (ibid.).

The collective undercurrent ties the author, the work and the audience together in a common endeavour; it is that which ties the semblance of reconciliation back to the collective desire for a break with fatalistic predetermination and brings the subject into a contradictory but also non-combative relation with objectivity. Adorno sees a weak attempt to invoke this collective undercurrent in Romantic poetry’s ‘programmatic transfusion of the collective’ (1991: 45), which is how he refers to its affirmative incorporation of the folk song. Of course, this attempt to invoke a ‘collective undercurrent’ (ibid.) by calling up an ethnic or nationalized past is incapable of engendering subjectivity through objectivity because it affirms the universal over the particular while at the same time employing an exclusionary logic. This invitation to collectivity is a dangerous proposition with serious ramifications. Baudelaire’s modern lyric poetry offers something different as a ‘collective undercurrent’ (ibid.): a negative refusal of the status quo in the form of a modern art that is modern by way of its ‘mimesis of the hardened and alienated’ (AT, 1997c: 21). While, as Adorno notes, ‘Baudelaire neither railed against nor portrayed reification; he protested against it in the experience of its archetypes and the medium of this experience is the poetic form’ (ibid.). The spontaneity and experimentalism of Baudelaire’s approach to language open upon the collective undercurrent of protest against the reification and exploitation that characterize industrial capitalist society. Adorno writes that ‘it is this undercurrent that makes language the medium in which the subject becomes more than a mere subject’ (LPS, 1991: 45).

If it is still possible for us to identify a ‘collective undercurrent’ (LPS, 1991: 45) that could facilitate this self-relinquishment of the weak ego that conceives of self-preservation as mimetic adaptation to that which is dead, then perhaps it is a recognition of bodily suffering. In Baudelaire’s lyric poetry, the poet rejects the reigning ideas of the ‘juste milieu’ and ‘bourgeois social sentiment’ that offer a predetermined response to the suffering of others (ibid.); we see evidence of this ‘collective undercurrent’ (ibid.) in poetry that is ‘truer to the masses … than any “poor people’s” poetry’ (ibid.: 45–6). Just as Baudelaire’s poetry condemns the platitudes of bourgeois morality, Adorno decries the injustice of a morality that shouts out ‘Never again!’ to the concentration camps of Nazi Germany while it represses knowledge of the same practices in Asia and Africa, because ‘the humanity of civilization is inhumane toward the people it shamelessly brands as uncivilized’ (ND, 1997b: 285).

However, the problem lies not with the collectively registered objective impulse (a resounding ‘NO!’ to the suffering of others), but the way in which it is repressed by the ‘ruthless rationalization’ (1997b: 286) of the cold, predetermined moral platitude that can muster merely the semblance of disgust. In contrast to these platitudes uttered, Adorno offers another, necessary, model of bourgeois coldness, when he notes the aloofness that ‘thinking men and artists’ often attribute to themselves, as though, reluctant to play by the rules of polite society, they exist detached from social life, feeling themselves to be ‘a kind of spectator’ (ibid.: 363). According to Adorno, while this withdrawal reveals the operations of the impulse of self-preservation, it also contains ‘a moment of objective truth that goes beyond the appearance of the self-preserving motive’ (ibid.). This is because it involves a recognition of one’s own insignificance that reveals the heroic narrative of the engaged to be nothing more than ideology facilitating the dissemination of empty bourgeois platitudes easily assimilated to the totality. This is why Adorno claims that ‘the inhuman part of it, the ability to keep one’s distance as a spectator and to rise above things, is in the final analysis the human part, the very part resisted by its ideologists … [because] the spectator’s posture simultaneously expresses doubt that this could be all’ (ibid.). In this refusal to be satisfied with life as it is, the ‘thinking man’ and the artist become placeholders for the possibility of real solidarity and mark the beginnings of a critical questioning of the idea and practices of ‘humanity’ that make possible a transformation of self-preservation into species-preservation.

V Aesthetic aura: Immediacy and mediation

Adorno notes that the aura found in nature and pre-modern artworks, in particular religious idols, creates a sense of proximity between self and the absolutely transcendent other, in which an object or image is imbued with the presence of spirit. In the Dialectic of Enlightenment he and Horkheimer state that ‘the work of art constantly reenacts the duplication by which the thing appeared as something spiritual, a manifestation of mana. That constitutes its aura.’ ²⁵ The modern work of art is an aesthetic reenactment of an archaic animistic spiritual event; ‘the appearance of the whole in the particular’ (DE, 1998: 14). Adorno and Horkheimer define mana as ‘that which transcends the bounds of experience’ and as ‘the part of things which is more than their immediately perceived existence’ (ibid.: 10).

Adorno and Horkheimer treat art as a mimetic re-enactment of the archaic principle of mana that encompasses all existence prior to the differentiation of animate and inanimate through the process of individuation. But because art is already disenchanted, this re-enactment does not attain the dissolution of the subject into undifferentiated being; the historical moment of this possibility has already passed. The aura thereby provides the relation between all beings that forms the regulatory spine of both sympathetic magic and aesthetic experience without confusing one for the other. In this sense, for Adorno and Horkheimer, art mimics pagan participation but does not result in the problematic dissolution of the subject into the One of pagan logic, although it certainly does express this impulse as a desire for unity, and can, therefore, be politically dangerous and/or efficacious. For Adorno and Horkheimer, art is removed from the plot of the pagan, although something of pagan magic remains within the work of art.

In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer present art as constituting a world apart from the everyday; ‘each work of art is closed off from reality by its own circumference’ (1998: 14). In its renunciation of all that is external to it, art seems to reject the logic of shamanistic magic, predicated upon the principle of mana, which does not discriminate between material and spiritual; mana presupposes the interconnectedness of animate and inanimate being within an undifferentiated whole. In this sense, art’s creation of a separate sphere for itself already belongs to the rationalized, disenchanted world. ²⁶

But Adorno and Horkheimer argue that art’s separateness paradoxically seals the connection between pagan magic and modern art, as it opposes the ‘pure image’ to ‘corporeal existence’ (DE, 1998: 14), even in the very moment that it sublimates elements of corporeal existence within itself in its creation of the illusion of the ‘whole in the particular’ (ibid.). In other words, while the aura found in nature and religious art aims to make spirit present in the material object, the modern work of art aims to make present the corporeal within it, resulting in the work containing more than its formal identity would seem to allow. In this sense, the modern aura is a reverse image of the traditional aura; it manifests ‘the appearance of the whole in the particular’ (ibid.) by ‘sublating within itself’ elements of the ‘corporeal existence’ that it renounces in its claim to be ‘pure image’ (ibid.). In this sense, the modern work of art performs a mimesis of mana in the production of the aura, but what is produced is a resemblance rather than a reproduction.

Mana ‘fixes the transcendence of the unknown in relation to the known, permanently linking horror to holiness’ (1998: 10). Through its utilization of illusion in the constitution of a separate sphere external to reality, art gains the independence from external factors that is necessary to its function; it is highly differentiated from that which is not art. However, corporeal existence – in the form of the bodily mimetic impulses – is incorporated into the work of art in its function as image. Insofar as expression is an element immanent to art, as Adorno states in Aesthetic Theory (1997c: 110), this claim is true of all art, not only that which aims at a literal representation of objects in the world. But that which is expressed in the work of art is not necessarily the subjective thoughts and feelings of the artist. The work of art, as a particular expression of a society that it is itself exterior to – as a thing existing in a realm distinct from the realm of corporeal existence, which nonetheless expresses that corporeal, material existence – takes on ‘the appearance of the whole in the particular’ (DE, 1998: 14) and ‘reenacts the duplication by which the thing appeared as something spiritual’ (ibid.).

Adorno recognizes that the aura has undergone a transformation in the modern era, but, unlike Benjamin, he stops short of declaring the aura to be defunct in the age of mechanical reproduction. ²⁷ Even ‘administered art’ (AT, 1997c: 311) contains an aura of sorts, although within ‘entertainment art’ (ibid.) the aura resembles nothing so much as a complete reversal of the aura we associate with religious art. Rather than ‘the afterimage of the relation to the absolutely other across an unbridgeable distance’, ²⁸ the aura contained by the products of the culture industry presents this distance as inconsequential. As Adorno puts it, the artwork is ‘divested of mediation’ in its mutation into ‘administered art’ (ibid.). The auratic element is transformed into a consumable good: ‘[e]very close-up in commercial film mocks aura by contriving to exploit the contrived nearness of the distant, cut off from the work as a whole. Aura is gulped down’ (ibid.). This consume-ability endangers the aura, and art reacts swiftly to preserve the aura by ‘concoct[ing] uniqueness’ (ibid.: 45). In doing so, art ‘springs to the aid of an ideology that regales itself with the well-individuated, as if in the administered world such still existed’ (ibid.). It is evident from this observation that we must be careful to distinguish between the various auras at play in art, and the types of effects and affects are prompted in the viewing subject’s response to the aura.

Yvonne Sherratt argues that aura, for both Benjamin and Adorno, induces proximity through the distance it manifests. She explains this paradoxical formulation as emerging from Adorno’s inheritance of the aesthetic concept of receptivity from German Idealism. According to Sherratt, the uninterpretable nature of the aura induces a state of intense receptivity in the subject of aesthetic experience. This formulation might be supported with reference to Adorno’s disdain for those who declare the singular quality of Eichendorff’s poetry to be ‘a mystery that one must respect’ (ME, 1991: 57) on the basis that this statement reveals ‘a lazy unwillingness to muster up the energetic receptivity the poem requires’ (ibid.), but this quotation from Adorno also reveals that the quality of receptivity is not a gift from the work of art passively accepted by the subject. Rather, it is, at least in some part, a subjectively willed position.

Sherratt suggests that the auratic object’s resistance to domination by the subject produces a limited loss of self in the subject, specifically the conscious, cognitive faculties associated with speech and conceptual thought. Drawing upon Freud, Sherratt reads Adorno’s theory of auratic experience as an extreme minimization of ego. ²⁹ She claims that in Adorno’s description of aesthetic experience and self-relinquishment the id becomes predominant. ³⁰ The lessening of the faculties associated with the ego, Sherratt argues, creates a proximity to the object in the dissolution of the boundaries separating the ego from that which is external to it. In other words, the censoring architectures of the ego give way to the impulses of the id, allowing for a mimetic relation bringing subject and object into an immediate relation.

Ultimately, the loss of self and the immersion of the subject in the object described by Sherratt seem closer to Benjamin’s concept of the loss of the aura than Adorno’s theory of the transformation of the aura in the modern era. These elements are certainly not foreign to Adorno’s understanding of the aura, but they are given too much weight in Sherratt’s account. A turn to Adorno’s own writing on the aura and its ability to produce closeness through distance may offer a better sense of his position; when Adorno writes that ‘distance is the primary condition for any closeness to the content of works’ (AT, 1997c: 310), he is highlighting the distinction between form and content. The subject gains closeness to the formal identity of the object when it is able to subsume it under a covering concept. But the content of the object, that which exceeds its formal definition, remains at a distance to the subject. For Adorno, this distance can be traversed only through a critical assessment of the proximity granted through the imposition of a formal identity upon the object in question. The immersion of subject into object is not denied here, but it is treated as a stage in a process. Adorno does not deny the existence of the mimetic relation between subject and artwork in aesthetic experience, but this relation itself is subjected to critical analysis, with the aim of gaining greater proximity to the content of the work of art while still maintaining a critical distance from it.

According to Adorno, ‘the subject cannot intervene [in artworks]’ (1997c: 310). He maintains that Kant’s theory of disinterestedness ‘demands of aesthetic comportment that it not grasp at the object, not devour it’ (ibid.). This devouring of the object would entail the assimilation of the artwork to the subject – an assimilation that would mean that the artwork would be a product of the culture industry that cannot resist, and thereby ends up reaffirming, the status quo. According to Adorno, the work of art resists this conversion from autonomous object into that which is for the ersatz subject (for example, entertainments to fill leisure time) and thereby challenges the model of consumption that rules life under late capitalism. It does this by mimicking the autonomous object, by producing and embodying the illusion of autonomy in a world that denies its possibility.

Adorno perceives a dangerous rejection of the illusory autonomy of art in Benjamin’s diagnosis of the death of the aura in the age of mechanical reproducibility. ³¹ The death of the aura for Benjamin allows for a total immersion in the work of art, which, from his perspective, makes possible a politically committed and politically productive art. ³² But Adorno sees this as evidence of Benjamin’s ‘[i]dentif[ication] with the aggressor’ and that ‘he all too promptly allied himself with the historical tendency that remands art to the empirical domain of practical ends’ (AT, 1997c: 311). By assuming that art could be put to work in the project of political progress, Benjamin forfeits the possibility of an autonomous art and the critical resistance it offers to the practical world, dominated by identitarianism. The death of the aura would mean an end to the separation between the world of art and the practical world, and the end of the critical illusion of transcendence that the work of art offers.

Adorno does not deny the subject’s immersive experience of art; in fact, this immersion is an element of aesthetic experience that he sees as potentially liberating. However, in the absence of the critical distance that the aura allows, Adorno worries that the subject could dissolve into an anonymous, subjectless collective. In effect, we need art, conceived as the site of a mimesis tamed by rationality, to resist the type of participatory relation with being reducing the many to the One that we see in fascist societies. For Adorno, the solution to the political problem of liberal atomism is more individuality, not less. His interest in the self-relinquishment required in aesthetic experience stems not from a desire to dissolve the subject; at this stage of late capitalism, the ability to relinquish the self, to render the constitutive subject weak, requires a strengthening of the ego.

‘Involuntarily and unconsciously,’ Adorno writes, ‘the observer enters into a contract with the work, agreeing to submit to it on condition that it speak. In the pledged receptivity of the observer, pure self-abandonment – the moment of free exhalation in nature – survives’ (AT, 1997c: 73). Yvonne Sherratt claims that Adorno’s reference to a ‘contract’ (ibid.) here is ‘purely metaphorical’ ³³ and reads Adorno as a sort of champion of art as a gateway to a temporary self-abandonment. According to Sheratt, Adorno holds that the aim of aesthetic experience is to allow the subject to aimlessly immerse itself in the aesthetic object. I disagree. The language Adorno uses here indicates that the ego, in its self-relinquishment to aesthetic experience, is operative even though it enters into the contract ‘involuntarily’ and ‘unconsciously’ (ibid.). That which the subject gains through its self-relinquishment to aesthetic experience is, in part, the preservation of the capacity for ‘pure self-abandonment’ and ‘the moment of free exhalation in nature’ (ibid.). So aesthetic self-relinquishment serves the impulse of self-preservation, but whether it preserves a hedonistic, narcissistic and self-destructive subject or an empathetic, other-oriented subject will depend on the presence or absence of a ‘collective undercurrent’ (LPS, 1991: 45). For Adorno, aesthetic experience is not, I argue, contra Sherratt, ‘apart from all instrumentality’. ³⁴ Rather, it is a minimized form of instrumentality that aims to ensure the survival of that which is apart from all instrumentality: natural beauty and the non-identical. In other words, the aesthetic realm is not distinguished from practical life by a lack of instrumentality or a purity of intention. It is, instead, a realm in which the self-preservation and rationality of the practical realm are redirected by their being put into the service of that which defies them.

The self-relinquishment described by Adorno requires the active involvement of the ego. But here, ego is motivated by remorse and an empathetic recognition of the suffering it causes the non-identical, rather than by a drive or impulse to dominate (a drive which, if we take Freud at his word, could dangerously rule the id without the critical censorship of the ego). This recognition of the suffering of the non-identical is possible only for an ego that has itself experienced some form of this suffering in the experience of being weakened by the adaptation of its own impulse of self-preservation to the logic of exchange in capitalist society. Self-relinquishment is the willed act of a subject choosing to make itself passive in an attempt to atone for all the suffering it has effected in its subjectification, its ‘wrest[ing] itself free’ (AT, 1997c: 112).

In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno writes that ‘art is a refuge for mimetic comportment. In art the subject exposes itself, at various levels of autonomy, to its other, separated from it and yet not altogether separated’ (1997c: 53). In the long process of enlightened disenchantment, the mimetic impulse and the comportment that follows from it are exiled from the calculative rationality that comes to dominate social relations and economic transactions. Mimesis, once a mode of comportment within everyday activity, becomes largely limited to the realm of the aesthetic. Within the work of art, the subject exposes itself to the other without dissolving into alterity itself; the subject of aesthetic experience opts to subject herself to this exposure. And unlike the participant in sympathetic magic, some portion of subjective autonomy remains in aesthetic experience.

VI Aesthetic self-relinquishment as solidarity with objectivity

According to Adorno, the work of Romantic poet Joseph von Eichendorff, known for its traditionalism and conservatism, approaches the modernity of Baudelaire’s lyric poetry. The modern element in Eichendorff’s poetry is its renunciation of aristocratic power and of the ego as ‘callous and entrenched within itself’ (ME, 1991: 64). Adorno notes that Eichendorff’s phrase ‘Clouds pass by like heavy dreams’ ³⁵ indicates a relinquishment of the ego invested in the power of the logos. He writes that ‘the lyric poet’s … dispensation from the strictures of logic … grants him the possibility of following the immanent lawfulness of his works’ (AT, 1997c: 55). Here, self-relinquishment becomes a freedom from form that allows one to give oneself to that other, conceived, in this case, as the work of art. In Eichendorff’s line ‘Und ich mag mich nicht bewahren’ [And I don’t care to preserve myself] Adorno reads a remorseful renunciation; the ego ‘wants to make amends for some of the primordial injustice of being ego at all’ (ibid.). The poet’s sacrifice to language, rather than a freeing of oneself from the ego’s censorship in order to maximize the aesthetic receptivity of the id (as Sherratt would have it), is perhaps better understood in the light of this remorse. This self-relinquishment would be the ego’s recognition of the injustice of its excessive domination, not only of nature as that which is external to the subject, but also the punishing domination of the nature within; both the psyche and the body are the objects of this domination. ³⁶

In his discussion of Eichendorff, Adorno introduces the modern language theory of Theodor Meyer that, according to Adorno, was developed independently of Mallarmé, but similarly takes a materialist stance against the tradition associated with Lessing’s Laocoon. Lessing’s understanding of language as a vehicle for sensory experience is challenged by Meyer, who argues that ‘language puts its own stamp on everything that passes through it, including the sensory’. ³⁷ Language is not a vehicle for poetry, but the ‘representational means [Darstellung] of poetry’ (1991: 68). The substance of poetry would not be found in the sensory affect it produces in the reader or listener, but rather in the very linguistic structures peculiar to language. As Adorno notes, thinking of language as a vehicle, as Lessing does, puts language into the service of the expressive subject, who manipulates language in order to externalize his or her interior experience and communicate it to others. ³⁸ Meyer’s language theory is not open to this subjective domination of language, and thereby challenges the very ‘definition of art as contemplation’ (ibid.). Language as the representational means of poetry exists somewhat independently of the poet; it cannot be entirely assimilated to the subjective, because it is subjectively and objectively mediated, and because it projects the illusion of autonomy.

Rather than using language as a tool through which to influence or manipulate others, or to increase one’s power, Eichendorff (according to Adorno) performs an act of self-extinction in the service of language. But this self-extinction is not necessarily to be celebrated as a heroic accomplishment on the part of the poet. Given the circumstances, including especially the historical near-impossibility of a subject capable of having, let alone expressing, an internal thought or feeling, this self-relinquishment to language is simply the only legitimate labour available to the poet in the modern age. Nonetheless, even within this limited range of historically available production, Adorno recognizes a potential challenge to the status quo.

In Eichendorff’s self-relinquishment in the service of poetic language, Adorno perceives a transformation of the subject:

The subject turns itself into Rauschen, the rushing, rustling, murmuring sound of nature: into language, living only in the process of dying away, like language. The act in which the human being becomes language, the flesh becomes word, incorporates the expression of nature into language and transfigures the movement of language so that it becomes life again. (ME, 1991: 68–9)

The transformation of the subject into Rauschen highlights the gap between conceptual language and the non-identical and reminds us of the primordial mimetic relation between things and their names: ‘Things, which have grown cold, are brought back to themselves by the similarity of their names to themselves, and the movement of language awakens that resemblance’ (ME, 1991: 69). As language moves away from concepts and towards the meaningless murmurings of language as language, things are wrested free of their reification and enslavement to the system of categories that lends them their rational meaning. In this rejection of the closeness to the object afforded by determinate judgement, in this spacing or distancing, we find that we paradoxically gain greater proximity between thing and word, and between subjectivity and objectivity.

In Eichendorff’s self-relinquishment, Adorno writes, we see that ‘the objectified nature that has been lost to the subject returns as an animated nature’ (ND, 1997b: 69). The nature that has been lost to the subject as it ‘wrests itself free’ (AT, 1997c: 112) returns through the gift of the poet. As language is exposed as second nature, nature is returned to the subject as ‘animated’ (ME, 1991: 69). Nature is more than merely a subjectively defined concept; it dances with traces of its objectivity. This is not to say that poetry returns us to a golden age prior to the separation of subject and object, nature and culture, self and other, but that in hearing Rauschen, we perceive the potentiality of a future reconciliation. That which has been torn asunder could be made whole again. ‘The poet’s power’, writes Adorno, ‘is the power to be weak, the power not to resist the descending flow of language rather than the power to control it’ (ibid.: 70). In Eichendorff, Adorno finds an aesthetic comportment parallel to his own attempt in Negative Dialectics to ‘use the strength of the subject to break through the fallacy of constitutive subjectivity’ (1997b: xx). By utilizing the power to be weak, willing one’s self into the position of passivity necessary to let objectivity be, the subject opens onto new social possibilities, including the possibility of forging a position in solidarity with objectivity.

As Adorno notes, the ‘artistic subject is inherently social’ (AT, 1997c: 231). Therefore, it has no need of official policies dictating collective practice and approved subject matter. These attempts to institutionalize a false objective ‘collective undercurrent’ (LPS, 1991: 45) are as deadening to the collective subject as they are to the bourgeois individual. So the aim here is not to censure artists or to encourage them to produce works containing approved content. Instead, it falls to philosophy to determine the motivation behind the production of works of art. It is this motive that provides the ‘collective undercurrent’ (ibid.) necessary for the formation of a collective subject modelled on the non-violent integration of contradictory elements within the modern work of art. In the inherent sociality of the artistic subject, Adorno recognizes an address to a ‘collective subject that has yet to be realized’ (AT, 1997c: 231). The creative activity of the artist calls out for the realization of a global subject, but this would require a ‘collective undercurrent’ (LPS, 1991: 45) that would orient such a collectivity away from the pagan logic of the participation of the many in the One.

Adorno identifies the collective undercurrent of modern art as the desire for a collective subjectivity in which the individual remains unique and distinct. If we proceed by way of the mimetic impulse tamed by its subjection to rationality, as it is found in the aesthetic, then such collectivity might avoid the greatest disaster: the regressive dissolution of the subject into pagan participation in the One. But in adopting this aesthetic comportment as a social and political strategy, bridging aesthetic rationality with the instrumentalized rationality of Enlightenment stalled at the stage of identity thinking, we leave the realm of the aesthetic proper. This, of course, runs a very fine risk, given Adorno’s certainty that it is precisely the division between the realm of the aesthetic and the realm of the everyday – the illusion of art’s autonomy – that guarantees the aesthetic rationality that is the foundation for mimetic relations mediated by reason that do not result in the demise of the subject. We must guard against the assimilation of aesthetic comportment to established forms of political subjectivity that uphold the totality.

To realize a collective subjectivity that resists the anonymity of the mob, the ‘negativity toward his own immediacy’ (AT, 1997c: 231) that Adorno observes in the self- relinquishment of the artistic subject to the work must be adopted by all. Adorno’s contribution to this project is to transform his own activity as a philosopher by introducing negative dialectic into philosophy. Through a negative critique of subjective immediacy, we can glimpse the ‘collective subject yet to be realized’ (ibid.). The artistic subject, freed from the demand to dominate in the name of self-preservation, and faced for the first time with the possibility of experiencing objectivity without repressing it or being repressed by it, might open onto the real possibility of a collective ‘we’. And a new praxis, actualized in solidarity with that which is diverse and other, might emerge.