Unrestrained Individuation: The Young Franco Moretti

Political Theory, 1997

Sociologia & Antropologia, 2024

This study addresses Theodor W. Adorno’s dialectical literary criticism and shows how it arises from the critique of an alternative model of literary (and cultural) criticism, closer to the critique of ideology in its more traditional sense in texts from the 1930s written by two other authors affiliated with the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Herbert Marcuse and Leo Löwenthal. In addition to describing Adorno’s view of these two ways of approaching literary objects and calling attention to their yields and limitations, this study emphasizes how Adorno’s criticism dialectically conducts the immanent critique of artistic forms to its opposite extreme, reaching, by a deep dive into the particular of the works, their most general meaning. This enables the author to overcome a certain impasse that is configured in the dichotomy between internalist and externalist criticism of literary works, insofar as his model of literary criticism considers the contradictory character of art in modern capitalist society: neither mere ideology that simply restores domination nor a sphere preserved from social contradictions, but a sphere that, in its relative autonomy, comprises a social truth.

The paper makes the case that Adorno’s frequent recourse to small or minor literary forms of presentation was deeply motivated by his epistemic, ontological, and moral commitments. In his considerations of the genres of the aphorism and the essay, Adorno explicitly comes out on the side of discursive fragmentation as resistance to the illusion of completeness and conceptual systematicity, and as an implicit critique of the false totality. Based on Adorno’s remarks, the term that best describes his fragmentary way of thinking and writing foregrounding its status as a modality of action and its mimetic impulse is gesture. Adorno’s negative dialectics is a gestic mode of reflection, rejecting metaphysical closure and openly pointing towards a utopian horizon.

1999

The cover notes erroneously suggest that this is the first English assessment of Adorno's life and work. Even leaving aside the more specialised works on Adorno, this claim neglects several excellent introductions, most notably those of Rose (1978), Jay (1984) and Jarvis (1998). Since the first two of these are listed in the author's bibliography, I think we can point the finger at overzealous marketing by the publisher. Compared with these authors Brunkhorst is pitched at a level of accessibility between Jay and the more complicated Rose and Jarvis. Brunkhorst focuses on a few selected themes, and his book is perhaps not as well rounded as some of the other introductions. But he makes up for this by providing more than Rose or Jay on Adorno's relation to his philosophical contemporaries (especially Heidegger) and to recent continental critical theory, without becoming as dense as Jarvis's sustained philosophical study. Published as part of a series on Political Philosophy Now, Brunkhorst's book actually places more emphasis on philosophical aesthetics than on politics, perhaps inevitably, given Adorno's scanty contribution to political theory per se. But Brunkhorst cleverly turns this round by emphasising that, for Adorno, in their very alienation from practical politics, experimental forms of art and philosophy make an important political intervention by preserving forms of freedom which have vanished from actual political life. Brunkhorst focuses on Adorno's central dialectic of identity and nonidentity. The closed-in identity of the modern subject is reactively constructed through its fascinated horror at anything non-identical to it, at otherness and difference. So are the totalising systems of thought and closed societies with which that subject is entwined. What is feared and envied is projectively terrorised and forced to conform to the dominant order, by either conceptual or actual violence. Genocide is the ultimate expression of this twisted logic of exclusion: the other is not merely rejected, but exterminated. Brunkhorst examines the connection between Adorno's theory of freedom and his experience of exile from and return to Germany, steering a course between biography and intellectual history. Adorno's privileged upbringing and hothouse education as a musician and philosopher with the Scho¨nberg school in Vienna and the Horkheimer circle in Frankfurt is covered, as are

This essay examines three texts that were published in 1950: Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism, Adorno et al.’s The Authoritarian Personality, and Octave Mannoni’s Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization. I use these texts to examine critical theory’s colonial unconscious through its silence on the colonial problem and the marshaling of psychoanalysis to justify colonialism. In its first part I look into how Césaire’s Discourse challenges Adorno’s historiographical narratives, civilizational units of analysis, conceptual building blocks, and modality of critique in The Authoritarian Personality. I then engage Césaire’s critique of Mannoni’s deployment of psychoanalysis to account for the dependency of the colonized on the colonizer. I conclude by highlighting how both Adorno’s notions of the liquidation of the individual by an increasingly standardized society and colonial notions of weak individuality (Mannoni) rely on a psychoanalytic notion of ego weakness. These critical diagnoses lamenting the deficit of individuals, which no longer exist in a late capitalist era characterized by standardization in the metropoles or have not yet come into being as they are still entangled in culture in the peripheries, foreclose the possibility of emancipatory political practice and internationalist solidarity by excising revolutionary subjects and their practices from the domain of the political.

Since the initial work began on this paper a substantial shift has taken place in its theoretical focus. This shift, which can be considered a furthering of the initial critique offered in the abstract, came about because of continued research, writing, and reflection. There are good reasons for rethinking the meaning of subjectivity. Stemming largely from German Idealism, the philosophy of consciousness or subjectivism, to which Adorno's theoretical work has been consistently and unfairly categorized as, has been replaced by the paradigm of intersubjectivity which is based on communicative rationality. The rational and subsequent completeness of this shift has often been characterized as a theoretical necessity, with the hoped for consequence of ensuring that theories of the social are able to proceed beyond the confines of idealism, structuralism, poststructuralism, positivism and even early critical theory, particularly Adorno's brand of critical theory. Despite the question of whether or not such a complete paradigm shift was necessary, the fact remains that it has occurred. One consequence of this shift has been the reception and treatment of Adorno's work, which seems to sway between either the outright dismissal of his theoretical legacy, or its division and separation with the aim of adapting it to current contexts. This has resulted in a popular and persistent interpretation of Adorno's work that centers on the notion that, in its original form, it can offer no further contribution to political practice or to the project of emancipation. This shift can be summarized by what we call here "primitive terms," specifically: subjectivity, aesthetics, mimesis, self-reflection, the social, truth and freedom.

Both Adorno’s book of aphorisms, Minimal Moralia, and Brecht’s lyrical production during his years in Los Angeles address alienated or, as Adorno calls it, damaged life. This article discusses primarily the parallels and intersections of Adorno’s Critical Theory and Brecht’s Marxist theory and praxis of literature. In Los Angeles, the “mausoleum of easy going,” as Brecht dubs it in his Journals, Brecht and Adorno find themselves confronted with a system of “totalitarian capitalism” (Adorno and Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment) that cannot be represented as a whole but only in its symptoms and extremes. It is the goal of Adorno’s moral aphorisms as well as Brecht’s Hollywood Elegies to render visible the system’s “business- as-usual” normality in all its damaging contradictoriness. In both cases, this making visible occurs by means of linguistic techniques of estrangement. The goal in both Brecht’s and Adorno’s writings in Los Angeles is to refunction alienation by means of estrangement. In the end, the exile’s status as an outsider is dialectically revalorized as knowledge about the inside of damaged life.

Culture, Theory and Critique

In this article I reframe the Marxist tradition of ideology critique as it is practised by T.W. Adorno and Fredric Jameson. I argue that the phenomena of replication is a dominant feature in their accounts of ideology, which I demonstrate through a comparative analysis of their work. Part one addresses Adorno’s understanding of ideological replication especially in relation to philosophy and culture. Part two does the same for Jameson and examines his attempts to draw limits on Adorno’s work. In the final section I begin by arguing that Jameson misreads key Adornian themes such as the culture industry. Nevertheless, Jameson’s critique of replication addresses important postmodern developments related to culture and multi-national capitalism. I conclude by addressing Adorno and Jameson’s views on collective political action in the context of Occupy Wall Street. I argue that taken together, their work offers a constellation of insights into the utopian and ideological features of OWS.