Adorno’s Pessimism:

Language and A Consideration of Two Critiques of Adorno’s Social Theory

Rowan G. Tepper, M.A.

Axel Honneth in The Critique of Power and Jürgen Habermas in The Philosophical Discourse of
Modernity offer closely related critiques of the work of Theodor Adorno and the project of critical
theory initiated by Max Horkheimer at the Institute for Social Research, and put forth in the
programmatic text, the Dialectic of Enlightenment. These critiques are alike also in the fact that they deal
almost exclusively with the theory of society put forth in the Dialectic of Enlightenment in which social
power is conceived as the internalization of the drama enacted in the domination of nature to serve
human interests. This domination then turns against the dominator. The attention paid to Adorno’s
later philosophical works is cursory at best and negligible at worst. Habermas raises the question of
how Horkheimer and Adorno’s second-order critique may escape the performative contradiction
that results from the critique of the grounds upon which critique is based. Habermas writes in The
Philosophical Discourse of Modernity,

With this kind of critique, enlightenment becomes reflective for the first time; it is performed with respect to its
own products – theories. Yet the drama of enlightenment first arrives at its climax when ideology critique itself
comes under suspicion of not producing (any more) truths – and the enlightenment attains second-order
reflectiveness.
As instrumental, reason assimilated itself to power and thereby relinquished its critical force – that is the final
disclosure of ideology critique applied to itself. To be sure, this description of the self-destruction of the critical
capacity is paradoxical, because in the moment of description it still has to make use of the critique that has
been declared dead. It denounces the Enlightenment’s becoming totalitarian with its own tools. Adorno was
quite aware of this performative contradiction inherent in totalized critique. 1
Moreover, while Habermas alludes to the manner in which Adorno works within this performative
contradiction in Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory, he does not discuss this at length. In Negative
Dialectics and Minima Moralia, Adorno works within this contradiction, which, to use Louis
Althusser’s concept, is thoroughly overdetermined. The path on which we can follow Habermas in
tracing the movement of Adorno’s thought in these works leads us to a satisfactory hypothesis
regarding the larger issue that Axel Honneth raises about Adorno’s theory of society, namely that his
theory of society is completely “expressed in the concept of total domination (which remained
unchanged from his analysis of fascism) that completely ignores the entire dimension of social action

1
Jürgen Habermas The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures Translated by Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge:
MIT University Press, 1990), pg. 118-9

1
and is committed to the idea of an administrative manipulation of psychically weakened members of
society.”2 Furthermore, Honneth asserts that “[Adorno] did not notice the obstacles to cultural-
industrial manipulation: subcultural interpretive styles and forms of perception – that is, cooperative
interpretive accomplishments.”3 And most strongly that: “The one-dimensionality of Adorno’s
analysis of the culture industry is simply the theoretical result of a conceptual reductionism in his
theory of society.”4

Honneth’s criticism bears merit as a criticism of Adorno’s theory of society as presented in

Dialectic of Enlightenment. However, Honneth claims that the theory of society as presented in Dialectic
of Enlightenment persisted relatively unadulterated in Adorno’s later cultural/social thought. However
this reading of Adorno’s social thought is reductivistic. Honneth virtually ignores Adorno’s later
philosophical works and discusses almost exclusively Adorno’s specifically sociological works. 5 Most
importantly, Honneth neglects the vital dimension of language. The sole mention of Adorno’s major
work, Negative Dialectics, is by way of saying that “Adorno made this task of a self-criticism of
conceptual thought, in all its radicality for his own for the first time in the subsequent development
of his philosophical theory. In Negative Dialectics, published in 1966, he attempts to ‘transcend the
concept by means of the concept’ – that is, to demonstrate immanently by means of a philosophical
analysis philosophy’s own questionable status.”6 While the validity of this assertion is
unquestionable, it ignores the fundamental interrelated nature of philosophy, society, culture and
politics. Honneth reduces the concept of philosophy operative in Dialectic of Enlightenment, to “the
reflective form of a critical theory that discovers in each step of conceptual reflection a piece of the
continued history of domination. Therefore, strictly speaking, it prohibits itself…. [and] since they
[Horkheimer and Adorno] know that philosophy itself is lodged within the civilizing structures of

2
Axel Honneth, The Critique of Power, Translated by Kenneth Baynes (Cambridge: MIT University Press, 1991), pg 100.
This position is not unfounded, although, as I will demonstrate is founded upon an incomplete consideration of
Adorno’s texts. Helmut Dubiel, in Theory and Politics (Which Honneth cites) writes that “Only politically isolated,
organizationally unaffiliated individuals are capable of theoretically advocating collective interests.” Helmut Dubiel, pg
101
3
Ibid, pg. 80
4
Ibid., pg 81
5
In the chapter of The Critique of Power that treats Adorno specifically, Honneth cites the following works: The Dialectic of
Enlightenment, “Der Artist als Statthalter”, “Sociology and Empirical Research”, “Reflexionen zur Klassentheorie”, “Late
Capitalism or Industrial Society”, “Resume uber Kulturindustrie”, “Prolog zum Fernsehen”, “Freizeit” , “Television and
the Patterns of Mass Culture”. “Individuum und Organisation”, “Antisemitism and Fascist Propaganda”, “Die revidierte
Psychoanalyse”, “End of Internalization”, Aesthetic Theory, Minima Moralia, and Negative Dialectics. However, the latter two
are cited only once each, and the former thrice.
6
Ibid, pg 63

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instrumental thought, they must deny it any claim to positive knowledge.” 7

The theme that I wish to address here is that of whether the interrelation between culture,
society, politics and philosophy that Adorno establishes and moreover that corresponds well with
the interdisciplinary agenda of the Institute for Social Research can establish techniques of discourse
that can at once communicate the nonconceptual and nonidentical and at the same time be used by
philosophy and critique as a means by which a total critique of culture may be conducted without
falling into the performative contradiction that Habermas finds in the Dialectic of Enlightenment and
that forms the backbone of Honneth’s critique. Furthermore, it will be seen that discourse eo ipso is
the locus of both the transmission of power and of resistance. Moreover, I will attempt to isolate, in
Negative Dialectics, Minima Moralia and a number of his essays collected in Notes To Literature, means by
which Adorno’s philosophical methodology of critique may elude the aporias of power. I will also
show how this elusion may account, indirectly, for the deficiencies that Honneth points out.
Dialectics and linguistic presentation serve the joint purpose of permitting critique to take its own
grounds as its object without falling prey to the downward pull of collapsing foundations. Moreover,
the discourse of domination is mediated by the discourses of critique. Through these mediations
alone can society remedy its ‘bad totality.’ Negative dialectics, by virtue of the fact that they do not
completely reduce the nonidentical to the same, allows for subcultures to emerge and for power
relations to become mutable. These nonidentical remnants within the totally administered world may
enter into relationship with one another to form constellations of subcultural resistance.

I. The Relation of Philosophy to Society / Overdetermination of Dialectic, and the Culture

Industry

In the section of Negative Dialectics entitled “Dying Today,” Theodor Adorno offers, in a
critique of Heidegger, a telling statement regarding his view of the fundamental interrelation that is
present in at all times between philosophy and cultural, social and political elements. Adorno writes
that “metaphysical reflections that seek to get rid of their cultural, indirect elements deny the relation
of their allegedly pure categories to their social substance. They disregard society, but encourage its
continuation in existing forms, in \the forms which in turn block both the cognition of truth and its
realization.”8 I take this to say that philosophy is essentially constituted in relation to these auxiliary

7
Ibid, pg 61-2
8
Theodor Adorno Negative Dialectics Translated by E.B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), pg 368

3
fields and that to philosophize without reference to these fields is tantamount to complicity with the
existing order. This is the heart of Adorno’s later critique of Heidegger; that Heidegger in attempting
pure metaphysical thought without reference to social factors was complicit in rise and rule of
fascism apart from specific philosophical differences. Furthermore, in Metaphysics: Concept and
Problems, Adorno writes that philosophy cannot be separated from its social and cultural conditions:

I think I owe it to you, therefore to say something about the intertwinement between what is commonly called
culture and metaphysical questions. You will have noticed that at some crucial points in my argument – and the
discussion I am carrying on at present is what people call a methodological discussion – I have not drawn the
currently accepted, epistemological conclusions from the intra-cultural experiences of metaphysics: that while
the consciousness of the absolute depends on the given state of cultural consciousness, the absolute is
untouched by it…
My position is as follows: …how things which have happened were possible – not only has an epistemological
or nosological influence on the question about the nature of metaphysics but really and directly affects the
metaphysical answers… We have no option but to measure by our concrete experience; and that within the
constellations which now define our experience all the traditional affirmative or positive theses on
metaphysics… simply become blasphemies… the immanence of culture, and the amalgamation of cultural
categories and ideas with metaphysical ones, has the tendency to deprive these ideas themselves of their
objective truth, to reduce them to the level of the subject… such tendencies ‘mediate’ the ideas. 9
This is to say effectively that to each metaphysical or philosophical position carries with it a cultural-
societal context. The forms encountered in metaphysics and philosophy is constitutively related to
the forms of socio-cultural and political experience, which then refer back to metaphysics. They
return, however, primordially to the social. Furthermore, the socio-cultural implications of
metaphysical thought manifests itself as spirit and thence, “the effect of this dignity [of spirit] is that
power, social success, comes to be the criterion of metaphysical truth.” 10 Thus, the metaphysics of
identity necessarily implies a vulnerability to fascism. The nature of the relation between philosophy
and culture, however, is not an abstract relation, but one that is rooted in the determinate historical
conditions. The relation is not opposition, but dialectical contradiction. The relation is not
immediate either, they are mediated by the particular object, in Metaphysics, Adorno writes,

Although this demand is seemingly made out of charitable concern for the victims, in fact it reduces them to
the objects of a thinking which manipulates and calculates them and assumes in advance that it is giving them
what they need and want. By the evaluation manifested in such ostentatiously noble injunctions, and the people
they pretend to serve are in reality debased. They are treated by metaphysics in fundamentally the same way as
by the culture industry.11
The nature of this historically determined contradiction and connivance between philosophy

9
Theodor Adorno Metaphysics: Concept and Problems, Edited by Rolf Tiedemann, Translated by Edmund Jephcott
(Stanford: Stanford, 2001), pg 220-222
10
Adorno Negative Dialectics, pg 401
11
Adorno Metaphysics, pg 124

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and culture must be more clearly understood. This dialectical contradiction, like all of the
contradictions that Adorno presents, is not a simply Hegelian contradiction, which Louis Althusser in
“Contradiction and Overdetermination” exposes as false. This simplicity, he argues is a result of
what Adorno would refer to as identitarian thought on the part of Hegel. Althusser writes “The
simplicity of the Hegelian contradiction is made possible only by the simplicity of the internal principle
that constitutes the essence of any historical period. If it is possible, in principle, to reduce the totality… to
a simple internal principle, this very simplicity can be reflected in the contradiction…”12 Thus, if Althusser’s
critique of Hegel is correct, then both the dialectic between culture and philosophy and moreover,
the Dialectic of Enlightenment become at once more complex and at the same time more explicable.
This new possibility of explication is brought in Althusser’s critique by the concept of
overdetermination, of which I will make use. By the nature of overdetermination, the past remains
active in determining the course of history in the present and future. Of overdetermination,
Althusser writes “…contradiction is never simple, but always specified by the historically concrete forms in which it
is exercised. It is specified by the forms of the superstructure… specified by the internal and external
historical situation which determines it on the one hand as a function of the national past… and on the
other as functions of the existing world context…”13 Furthermore, a contradiction may be
“overdetermined in the direction of a historical inhibition, a real ‘block’ for the contradiction or in
the direction of revolutionary rupture but in neither condition is it ever found in the ‘pure state’.”14

This would be to say that the contradiction between culture and philosophy or myth and
enlightenment is, for Adorno, overdetermined in the first sense of a historical inhibition. Both Axel
Honneth and Jürgen Habermas in their critiques see Adorno’s diagnosis of culture and philosophy in
the sense of an inhibitive overdetermination. This is, indeed, how Horkheimer and Adorno in
Dialectic of Enlightenment see the intertwinement of myth and enlightenment and the relation between
philosophy and culture. Moreover, Horkheimer, in the third chapter of Eclipse of Reason, sketches out
the manner in which a revolution is subverted to reinforce the power that is dominant. Moreover,
this is the manner in which the culture industry operates, preventing real resistance. Language itself,
in its guise of everyday use and universal communicability, is subverted and “serves a communicative
ideal that is actual an ideal of manipulation; today the word that is designed to be understood

12
Louis Althusser “Contradiction and Overdetermination” in For Marx (New York: Verso, 1996), pg 103
13
Ibid, pg. 106
14
Ibid.

5
becomes… a means to degrade those to whom it is addressed to mere object of manipulation…” 15
Here we must first see what composes the historical contradiction posed in Horkheimer and
Adorno’s historical moment by Enlightenment. The superstructural aspect is clearly enough seen:
mass culture and mass politics. The historical situation is late capitalism, the rise of the industrial
bourgeoisie, the commoditization of culture, the creation of national and global markets and
advances in communication, and furthermore, this historical situation is generative of the principle
problem for Horkheimer and Adorno, namely the instrumentalization of language and reason.
Moreover, the dialectical contradiction between man and nature is the same, such that this
contradiction is overdetermined in such a way that, rather than inhibiting the greater domination of
nature, the domination is exercised over other men as well. Thus, because this domination is
communicated and furthered by culture, this overdetermined contradiction becomes subsumed to
the contradiction between philosophy and culture. The culture industry is the name given by Adorno
to this contradiction; the product of the dialectical contradiction between the two is society through
in the medium of the social. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno write that:

Culture today is infecting everything with sameness…the conspicuous unity of macrocosm and microcosm
confronts human beings with a model of their culture: the false identity of universal and particular. All mass
culture under monopoly is identical… Those in charge no longer take much trouble to conceal the structure,
the power of which increases the more bluntly its existence is admitted.16
Culture has always contributed to the subduing of revolutionary as well as of barbaric instincts. Industrial
culture does something more. It inculcates the conditions on which implacable life is allowed to be lived at all. 17
Furthermore, in Minima Moralia, Adorno writes;
Socially, the absolute status granted to the individual marks the transition from the universal mediation of social
relation… to direct domination, where power is seized by the strongest. Through this dissolution of all the
mediating elements within the individual himself, by virtue of which he was, in spite of everything, also part of a
social subject, he regresses, impoverished and coarsened, to a state of a mere social object. 18
Finally, in 1963, in an article entitled The Culture Industry Reconsidered, Adorno writes:

The total effect of the culture industry is one of anti-enlightenment, in which, as Horkheimer and I have noted,
enlightenment, that is the progressive technical domination of nature, becomes mass deception and is turned
into a means for fettering consciousness. It impedes the development of autonomous, independent individuals
who judge and decide consciously for themselves. 19

15
Theodor Adorno, “Words From Abroad” in Notes To Literature Volume One, Translated by Shierry Weber Nicholson
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), pg 191
16
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno Dialectic of Enlightenment, Translated by Edmund Jephcott, Edited by Gunzelin
Schmid Noerr (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), pp. 94-5
17
ibid, pg 123
18
Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, Translated by E.F.N. Jephcott (New York: Verso, 1974), pg 150
19
Theodor Adorno ”The Culture Industry Reconsidered” in The Adorno Reader, pg 238

6
Thus, the effects on society of the culture industry are dependent upon the façade of immediacy;
that is, it produces the appearance that the world is immediately available to the subject and that the
entire category of mediacy disappears. Honneth writes that, “Deprived of all distance through the
spatial and temporal incursion of the media world into private life and blinded by the abundance of
the media, each person now stands powerless before the flow of information… In both tendencies –
the continuously perfected synthesizing of the world of sense perception and the advance of media
consumption into everyday life – Adorno sees a transformation of the usual modes of reception that
leaves the individual a helpless victim of an all pervasive media reality.” 20 Correspondingly, the forms
of social domination imposed upon subjects in society are inculcated in the subject and the means by
which domination is achieved is forgotten and becomes unconsciously accepted; as Horkheimer and
Adorno wrote in Dialectic of Enlightenment: “[they] no longer take much trouble to conceal the
structure, the power of which increases the more bluntly its existence is admitted.” 21 As much as the
domination of power over society is realized through mediate terms, those mediating terms are
covered over and forgotten. Adorno identifies particular means by which power asserts its dominion
over men: mass culture, networks of social control, metaphysical beliefs, processes of reification, and
language itself.

In Althusser’s terms, the culture industry and social power in general, is an overdetermined
dialectical contradiction between the dominated and the social power that dominates them. This can
be seen as an analogue to the Marxist contradiction with which Althusser himself most concerned,
the contradiction between Capital and Labor. The culture industry is an amalgamation of
superstructure, ideology, determinate conditions and relations to nature, society and individuals. It is
thus not at all surprising that although it forms a blockage to change, it is not in “a pure state”. 22 It
can no more stamp out the potential for resistance than it can prevent the appearance of
‘unauthorized’ cultural products. The question that must be addressed is the manner, for Adorno, in
which this overdetermined contradiction is impure. The answer to this question has the potential to
address the critiques both of Honneth and Habermas, respectively, that Adorno’s conception of a
totally administered society does not allow for organized social resistance and that reflective critique
effectively undermines itself by critiquing the normative grounds upon which it is founded.

20
Honneth, pg 78
21
Dialectic of Enlightenment, pg 95
22
Althusser, op. cit.

7
 II. Performative Contradiction; Discourse, Language and Presentation

In The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Jürgen Habermas writes that if Horkheimer and
Adorno “want to continue with critique, they will have to leave at least one rational criterion intact for
their explanation of the corruption of all rational criteria.”23 This is to say that the heart of their
performative contradiction lies in the fact that the total critique of rationality as instrumental leaves
critique groundless. Albrecht Wellmer, writes in “Metaphysics at the Moment of Its Fall” of the
same performative contradiction that is present in Adorno’s later work, albeit in a more refined
form, that “Adorno’s attempt to use the idea of reconciliation to defend a ‘strong’ concept of
truth… was doomed to failure… Adorno, in this critique of ‘identity-thinking’ had rendered himself
so dependent on certain premises contained in Nietzsche’s critique of conceptual thought that he
could only fend off its consequences by an act of violence. Adorno’s postulated solidarity with
metaphysics in the moment of its fall basically means fidelity to the idea of truth.” 24 This is to say
that the performative contradiction into which Adorno’s critique falls is absolutely logically necessary
and ineluctable from within its rational structure. However, Wellmer, like Habermas, sees this
performative contradiction as unavoidable and posing an impasse for Adorno. However, it seems
that both Wellmer and Habermas seem to misconstrue Adorno’s use of the theme of reconciliation
and redemption; in the final aphorism of the Minima Moralia, Adorno writes that

Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere technique.
Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevasses,
as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light. To gain such perspectives without
velleity or violence, entirely from felt contact with its objects – this alone is the task of thought. 25
This is to say that what Adorno intends through the theme of messianic redemption is not that
redemption can be really attained or is meant in a literal sense. Its use is purely thematic,
metaphorical and above all rhetorical. It is to highlight just how radically contradictory a perspective
that is truthful and totally critical must be in relation to the world. Moreover, the redemptive theme
is indicative of the task that Adorno specifies for thought. Thought is to gain a perspective which
mediately reveals the world as it is and as it might be, rather than the false and supposedly immediate
reified image presented by the culture industry and identifying thought. Furthermore, Adorno writes
earlier in the Minima Moralia that “Essential to [thought] is an element of exaggeration, of over-

23
Habermas, pg 126-7
24
Albrecht Wellmer, Endgames, Translated by David Midgely, (Cambridge: MIT University Press, 1998), pg 198
25
Minima Moralia, pg 247

8
shooting the object, of self-detachment from the weight of the factual, so that instead of merely
reproducing being it can, at once rigorously and free, determine it. Thus every thought resembles
play…”26 Thus, thought is to at once derive this perspective from its objects, yet at the same time
over-shoot them and not merely reproduce them. This means that, at least in theory, thought is
capable of departing from its objects and not be merely representative; that is, thought itself has a
faculty by which it may resist the compulsion to identity and thus resist external domination.
Moreover, in the same aphorism, writes that identifying thought that considers this detachment
“mental disorder” or “mere wrongness,” is not in actuality irresistible, that it “can be refuted at every
step by demonstrating the non-identity which it will not acknowledge, yet which alone makes it
thought… Distance is not a safety-zone but a field of tension. It is manifested… in delicacy and
fragility of thinking.”27 Thus, thought itself is eo ipso capable of resistance, and indeed, resistance is
the primal impetus to thought. This, however, merely demonstrates that the contradictions that
Wellmer and Habermas argue from are performative rather than absolute. However, the question
remains a practical one; that is, in what manner is resistance possible in concretio and in argumentation
and also, by the same token, how thought is subverted by domination and identity.

At this point we turn to a key passage in Negative Dialectics in order to elucidate a response to
these questions. Adorno writes that of its own nature, a thing exceeds identification, that “This
‘more’ is not imposed upon it but remains immanent to it, as that which has been pushed out of it.
In that sense, the nonidentical would be the things own identity against its identifications.” 28
Furthermore, he writes that “The constellation illuminates the specific side of the object, the side
which to a classifying procedure is either a matter of indifference or a burden. The model for this is
the conduct of language.”29 Furthermore, “Language thus serves the intention of the concept to
express completely what it means. By themselves, constellations represent themselves 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.”30 Thus, language is a, if not the, means by which the nonidentical may be
expressed. This expression of the nonidentical serves the purpose of the refutation of identifying

26
Ibid, pg 126-7 See also Dialectic of Enlightenment, pg 92 “Only exaggeration is true.”
27
Ibid, pg 127
28
Adorno, Negative Dialectics, pg 161
29
Ibid, pg 162
30
Ibid.

9
thought. However, it is painfully obvious that language does not serve only this end. Language is all
too readily subverted, as Adorno notes with Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment,

Thought finds itself deprived not only of the affirmative reference to science and everyday phenomena but also
of the conceptual language of opposition. No terms are available which do not tend toward complicity with the
prevailing intellectual trends, and what threadbare language cannot achieve on its own is made good by the
social machinery.31
This is to say that language and discourse for Adorno are equivocal; they can serve the ends both of
resistance and of domination. A decade after the publication of Negative Dialectics, Michel Foucault
writes succinctly in The History of Sexuality, Volume One that:

Discourse transmits and produces power; it reinforces it, but also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile
and makes it possible to thwart it. In like manner, silence and secrecy are a shelter for power, anchoring its
prohibitions; but they also loosen its holds and provide for relatively obscure areas of tolerance. 32
Thus, language itself becomes complicit in the social domination brought about by the culture
industry, mass society and identifying thought. However, despite this complicity, Adorno, both alone
and in collaboration with Horkheimer, does not consider it hopeless to use language to the end of
resistance. As cited above, ordinary language tends to be complicit with domination. It can be
thought that through constant use, the mediate nature of language is forgotten. This conception of
language is remarkably similar to Nietzsche’s theory of the origin of language and truth presented in
“On Truth and Lie in a Non-Moral Sense,” in which Nietzsche writes:

It is this way with all of us concerning language: we believe that we know something about the things
themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers; and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for
things – metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities… Truths are illusions which we have
forgotten are illusions…33
For both Nietzsche and Adorno, language is primordially creative and only subsequently subverted.
Language is not initially an identification of its object, but an abstraction from the particular which is
then applied beyond. When it is forgotten that language is an abstraction and is thought to represent
the object in its entirety; it is when language becomes instrumentalized and conducive to
domination. Thus, it is imperative to restore to language its creativity. If this is not possible, as is
most often the case, it is the usage of language that must be creative if discourse and subsequently
thought is to fall into untruth and mere identification.

31
Dialectic of Enlightenment, Preface (1944 and 1947), pg xv
32
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume One: An Introductions, Translated by Robert Hurley, (New York:
Vintage, 199), pg. 101
33
Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie in a Non-Moral Sense” in Philosophy and Truth, Edited and Translated by
Daniel Breazeale (Atlantic Highlands: The Humanities Press, 1979), pp. 83-4

10
 Thus, if language can be restored to its originally mediate nature, language can, at least in its
historical moment serve as a means of resistance to social domination. Moreover, because this
language released from domination permits the expression of the nonidentical in the object of
expression, these non-identical fragments can then enter into relation to one another in the form of
a constellation that specifically refers to an object which is not, or is not yet there. This constellation
of the non-identical defines the subcultural ‘pockets of resistance’ that Honneth finds to be missing
in Adorno’s social theory. The question then becomes, in what way language can be made to once
again function mediately without destroying thought by abandoning discursive rationality. This
pitfall is precisely the one into which Adorno sees Heidegger falling. Though poetic language may be
used to express the nonidentical, thought itself cannot be poetic and metaphorical. Poetic and
metaphorical conceptions of thought, such as Heidegger’s readings of Holderlin present poetic
thought and language as immediate access to Being, and as such already functions to present false
immediacy and blind thought to its own mediacy and the mediacy of language. 34 Neither can poetic
language or the modification of language be so radical as to “destroy the unity of language [which]
would constitute an act of violence equivalent to the one that unity perpetrates.” 35 If language were
shattered, communication would be rendered impossible and thought rendered impotent and
humanity reduced into brute nature, which would be just as terrible as reified domination.

Dialectical Presentation – Form and Content

The dialectical relationship between form and content that Adorno elicits from Holderlin’s
poetic use of parataxis also reflects the dialectical relationship between research and presentation
that Helmut Dubiel notes was an essential part of the program of the Institute for Social Research in
the 1930’s. Dubiel writes that “the method of dialectical presentation consists mainly in the
reception, integration, and overcoming of disciplinary analysis… it synthesizes them [the results of
research] in a procedure Marx called presentation. By such synthesis the developed theory achieves an
integral picture of ‘concrete’ reality.”36 Presentation is thus both dialectical in structure and dialectical
in relation to empirical research. Dubiel notes that presentation is on the philosophical and rhetorical
level, which becomes specified to a particular field of research and that research is reintegrated into

34
Theodor Adorno “Parataxis, On Holderlin’s Late Poetry” in Notes to Literature, Volume Two, Translated by Shierry
Weber Nicholson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992)
35
Ibid, pg. 136
36
Helmut Dubiel, Theory and Politics, Translated by Benjamin Gregg (Cambridge: MIT University Press, 1985), pg. 127

11
the level of presentation, and in the final result “they are then integrated, at the level of presentation,
into a comprehensive theory that must be continually justified against the analytical, methodological,
and technical standards of the particular disciplines.” 37 Thus, the presentation in language, rhetoric
and concepts, in which an interior dialectic is operative, is in a dialectical relationship with research,
which provides a portion of the content of the presentation. However, neither the presentation
totally determines research, nor does research completely determine presentation. Thus,
modifications to the form of language can and does have an important effect on and relationship
with actual social reality. This functional analogy between the program of the Institute in the 1930’s
and Adorno’s philosophical methodology might be considered coincidental, if not for a section in
Negative Dialectics entitled “Presentation” in which he writes:

The presentation of philosophy is not an external matter of indifference to it but immanent to its idea. Its
integral, nonconceptually mimetic moment of expression is objectified only by presentation in language. The
freedom of philosophy is nothing more than the capacity to lend a voice to its unfreedom… To philosophy
expression and stringency are not two dichotomous possibilities. They need each other; neither one can be
without the other. Expression is relieved of its accidental character by thought, on which it toils as thought toils
on expression. Only an expressed thought is succinct, rendered succinct by its presentation in language; what is
vaguely put is poorly thought.38
Thus, form and content are in a relation analogous to the relations between thought and expression,
thought and language, and presentation and research, as practiced in the Institute for Social
Research. We can also generalize this to the relation between language and its contents as a whole.
Thus we see the dialectic play out in concretio in society, and thus Adorno’s commentary on
Holderlin’s use of parataxis has implications for political praxis just as much as metaphysics does. In
his essay on Holderlin, Adorno writes “through the presentation the familiar becomes unfamiliar. Its
familiarity becomes an illusion…” 39 This presentational method is parataxis, through which
“aconceptual synthesis turns against its medium; it becomes a constitutive dissociation. Hence
Holderlin merely gently suspends the traditional logic of synthesis… [through] artificial disturbances
that evade the logical hierarchy of a subordinating syntax… this gives form its primacy over
content…”40 Thus, the forms of presentation, linguistic constructions, rhetorical devices
fundamentally affect the content of thought, and the language that is actually spoken and written in
society has concrete effects upon the social body itself. Thus, in theory, a universal language would

37
Ibid, pg 154
38
Negative Dialectics, pg 18
39
“Parataxis…” pg 129
40
Ibid, pg 130-2

12
be the instrument of total domination. Thus also, Adorno can inveigh against linguistic purists in
“Foreign Words” and consider proposing new forms of discourse as valuable to society, as in “The
Essay as Form.”

Thus, it is ultimately essential for thought that resides in the locus of paradox, of
performative contradiction, to utilize the form of its presentation to express the content which, if
expressed plainly, would, as soon as it was written or spoken, become instrumental in domination.
Cultural and political power dictates the content of thought and language indirectly by imposing
uniformity of presentation. That which does not conform to the standards of presentation is
condemned as cryptic, confused or unintelligible if it is deemed not to be of immediate danger to
societal power; if otherwise, it is condemned more strongly as the words of a lunatic or criminal.
Thus, linguistic conventions form an armature of power in an understanding of language and power
remarkably similar to that of Michel Foucault, from his earliest works to his last, specifically in his
concept of ‘rules of exclusion.’ Discourse becomes a primary means by which the total society
standardizes and reifies the individual and thus propagates the dominance of political power.
Language, as it is standardized, transmits power more and more effectively, yet at the same time by
its own nature, as noted by Foucault, is only metastable and allows for change and modification
from within and infiltration from without.

In “On the Use of Foreign Words,” an early, far less pessimistic Adorno writes in conclusion
that:

While the writer still always thinks that he is quoting from his education and from special knowledge, he is
actually quoting from a hidden language that is unknown in the positive sense, a language that overtakes,
overshadows and transfigures the existing one as thought it were itself getting ready to be transformed into the
language of the future… The power of an unknown, genuine language that is not open to any calculus, a
language that arises only in pieces and out of the disintegration of the existing one; this negative dangerous, and
yet assuredly promised power is the true justification of foreign words. 41
Interestingly this view is not at all repudiated by Adorno, as late as 1959, in “Words From Abroad.”
Rather it is presented more forcefully. In this later piece, Adorno writes that “Foreign words
constituted little cells of resistance to the nationalism of World War I. The pressure to think along
prescribed lines forced resistance into deviant and harmless paths, but in times of crisis gestures that
are in themselves irrelevant often acquire disproportionate symbolic significance.” 42 However, in this
later text, he attributes the practical efficacy of the introduction of foreign words into language to
41
Theodor Adorno “On The Use of Foreign Words” in Notes To Literature Volume Two, pg 291
42
"Words From Abroad”, pg 186-7

13
the specific historical qualities of the German language. However, this is only true insofar as the
Germanic family of languages is spoken by a smaller population, that is hemmed in geographically
by languages that are only related distantly: to the west and south, it is bounded by languages of
Latinate origin, to the east, by languages of the Slavic and Finno-Ugric families. Thus, until recently,
German and its related languages were relatively isolated, and, as Adorno notes, only partially
infiltrated and made part of a linguistic community by Latinate culture and language during the age
of the Roman Empire. Both of these factors increase the emphatic and subversive power of foreign
words in the German language, whereas other languages incorporate foreign words with far greater
ease. However, the subversive power of foreign words can be inferred to increase with the
geographical and linguistic distance of their origin; the more alien the word, the more anathema it is
to political powers.

Furthermore, in “Words From Abroad” Adorno strengthens his assertion of the critical
value of the use of foreign words and terminology. He writes that:

The discrepancy between the foreign word and the language can be made to serve the expression of truth.
Language participates in reification, the separation of subject matter and thought. The customary ring of
naturalness deceives us about that. It creates the illusion that what is said is immediately equivalent to what is
meant. By acknowledging itself as a token, the foreign word reminds us bluntly that all real language has
something of the token in it… it illuminates something true of all words: that language imprisons those who
speak it, that as a medium of their own it has essentially failed. 43
Furthermore, this indicates that Wellmer’s conjecture that “the consensus theory of truth can be
understood as an attempt to achieve Adorno’s intention of salvaging an emphatic concept of truth…
Habermas has characterized the idea conditions under which a consensus could be called ‘rational’
with reference to the formal structures of an ‘ideal speech situation,’” 44 should be considered to be
either false or failing completely on its own grounds. Thus, the presuppositions regarding language
that can be presumed to underlie Habermas’ critique of Adorno is effectively preempted by Adorno
in this essay. Furthermore, when Habermas writes that the critique present in Dialectic of
Enlightenment, “strictly speaking, prohibits itself…. [and] since they [Horkheimer and Adorno] know
that philosophy itself is lodged within the civilizing structures of instrumental thought, they must
deny it any claim to positive knowledge,”45 Habermas neglects the fact that for Adorno, philosophy,
far from submitting to instrumental thought, possesses means by which it may elude and oppose

43
Ibid, pg 189
44
Wellmer, pg 197
45
Habermas, pg 61-2

14
instrumental rationality. The means, aside from those present in the dialectic of form/presentation
and content/research, include, importantly, the introduction of foreign words in the form of
terminology. Adorno writes “Terminology, the quintessence of foreign words… especially in
philosophy, is not only thing-like rigidification but also its opposite: critique of the concepts’ claim
to exist in themselves when in fact language has inscribed in them something posited… [and]
destroys the illusion of naturalness…”46 Thus, presuming that this is confirmed in Adorno’s other
texts, we can see this as a rebuttal to Habermas’ critique, insofar as philosophy has a creative
potential to alter its form and content, it may preserve immanently and in its concept, potential to
critique “civilizing structures” without falling immediately into performative contradiction. It still, as
a historical discourse within society, possesses the capacity to not merely critique, but attempt to
effectuate social change and encourage resistance by refusing to confirm the naturalness of everyday
language.

The fact that language itself is at the same time an instrument of power and at the same time
carries in it the seeds of resistance is, in fact, confirmed in Negative Dialectics and the Minima Moralia.
In the latter, Adorno writes that “Words in their entirety are coming to resemble the formulae which
used to be reserved for greeting and leave-taking… the voices of speakers are… being replaced, even
in their finest intonations by socially prepared mechanisms.” 47 These mechanisms inhibit both
thought and action, however, the pure factum loquendi cannot be eliminated; words are still spoken;
the absolute absence of communication that Wellmer finds to be the necessary consequence of a
Habermasian ‘ideal communication situation’ would be, as a historical occurrence, an absolute
tyranny. Moreover, in Negative Dialectics, Adorno specifies the essential nature of language when he
writes:

Dialectics – literally: language as the organon of thought – would mean to attempt a critical rescue of the
rhetorical element, a mutual approximation of thing and expression, to the point where the difference fads.
Dialectics appropriates for the power of thought what historically seemed to be a flaw in thinking: its link with
language, which nothing can wholly break… In dialectics, contrary to popular opinion, the rhetorical element is
on the side of content… Mythical is that which never changes, ultimately diluted to a formal legality of
thought.48
Moreover, a few pages prior, he writes that “no matter how hard we try for linguistic expression of
46
Adorno, “Words From Abroad”, pg 189-190 This is yet another point at which Adorno presents a scathing critique of
Heidegger’s philosophy. According to Adorno, Heidegger’s philosophy serves the systems of political power through its
use of supposedly natural terms at once presents a false immediacy and at the same time attempts to disguise the fact
that it too is terminological.
47
Minima Moralia, pg 137
48
Negative Dialectics, pg 56

15
such a history congealed in things, the words we use will remain concepts… there is a gap between
words and the thing they conjure. Hence the residue of arbitrariness and relativity in the choice of
words and the presentation as a whole.” 49 This confirms our suspicion that language constitutes the
primary means through which critique may be effective and that the elements of rhetoric, formal
variation, structural strategies among others constitute means by which the performative
contradiction is eluded; critique uses language in novel ways such that while based upon a concept of
truth, it is no longer premised on the “tools of Enlightenment” because it invents new tools out of
the same substratum.

Language, employed creatively by dialectics is the means by which “perspectives may be

fashioned that displace and estrange the world” 50 and by which coercive power is opposed by a tool
of its own functioning. Furthermore, it is language in its rhetorical and dialectical employment as
well as the introduction of foreign words that “will allow a spark to flow in the constellation into
which it is introduced.”51 The question that follows is of what elements this constellation is
composed. The answer is twofold and rebuts the critique presented by Axel Honneth’s Critique of
Power, that is, that Adorno neglects the possibility of organized resistance and that “Up through his
last writings Adorno is convinced that in late capitalism it is solely the administrative means of direct
and indirect force that bring individual actions together into the order of a social system.” 52

However, for Adorno, the introduction of a foreign word is particularly subversive under
certain conditions. Moreover, the empirical fact of the existence of the Institute for Social Research
and its organizational structure contradict Honneth’s thesis. Evidently, there is organizational
potential in society and language that is other than “administratively directed social integration.” 53
This potential is present in words and concepts, which enter not into relationship not only with
other words and concepts, but things and people. This is the twofold structure of the constellation
induced by the manipulation of language. These constellations can denote a social structure or
organization that is not yet present and thence play a constitutive role in the formation of social
organizations and subcultures, in the same manner that they can constitute peoples and their
particular societies.
49
Ibid, pg. 52-3
50
Minima Moralia, pg 247
51
“Words From Abroad”, pg 192
52
Honneth, pg 93
53
Ibid, pg 92

16
 The analogy to the constitution of people through language and the dialectical relationship
that is thereby sustained through the relation of languages to people is particularly instructive when
seen in relation to an essay by Giorgio Agamben in Means Without End: “Languages and Peoples”, in
which he writes that in modern political discourse “two contingent and indefinite cultural entities
[language and peoples] transform themselves into almost natural organisms endowed with their own
necessary laws and characteristics.” 54 However, he introduces the thought that the relationship
between Gypsies as a people and jargons is analogous to the concepts of peoples and language, that
is to say “it sheds light on that truth which the correspondence between language and people was
secretly intended to conceal: all peoples are gangs and coquilles, all languages are jargons and argot.”55
This is to say that the apparently self-evident unities of language and peoples that are ennobled as
self evident in the forms of the State and national languages, are not only contingent structures, but
ones intentionally produced.56 Thus, the distinction between foreign and native words collapses and
language, for Adorno, becomes an amalgamation of words and grammars that serve at least an
implicit aim in the same manner as the creation of argots and jargons. It is a relatively uncontroversial
assertion that this is the manner in which philosophy and any subversive discourse operates. It is
the reciprocal movement that Agamben notes, that a people is defined by a language/jargon whose
status is contingent on a posterioi political determinations, that is particularly novel when brought into
relation with Adorno’s thought on language and society. It serves to make explicit an idea seemingly
latent but necessary and operative in Adorno’s theory of society. This is to say that should the
language use of a discipline, group of disciplines, region or subculture diverges sufficiently from the
prescribed discourse of societal power that language will function as an argot and reciprocally define a
subcultural entity with its own principles of organization.

Thus conceived, a shared terminological and formal language that is heterogeneous to the
established discourses of power is the pre-condition for organized resistance to power and in any
case facilitates the critique of established power. This helps explain the predilection found in
academia for the formation of self-organized organizations, such as the Institute for Social Research,
that directly or indirectly resist cultural and political domination. These groups have the added
advantage of being far less rigid than official organizations, both by virtue of their more ad hoc
54
Giorgio Agamben, “Languages and Peoples” in Means Without End: Notes on Politics, Translated by Vincenzo Binetti and
Cesare Casarino, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), pg 66
55
Ibid, pg 67
56
Ibid, pg 64-5

17
organization and by virtue of the fact that language is still recognized as mediate. Thus, the perpetual
introduction of new terminology and neologisms furthers the independence and lessens the
ossification of these organizations.

The tendency, however, is for any organization, and even more so, any discipline, to ossify in
the absence of the regime in opposition to which it was formed. This is mainly because the system
of socio-political domination is so thoroughly overdetermined that in the absence of active
opposition, subcultures become absorbed. The primary reason for the advantage possessed by
philosophy, as envisioned by Adorno, is that it is committed to both freedom and truth, in
opposition to any historical moment of oppression. However, it is evidence of the danger of the
ossification of any discipline that positivism can claim the title of philosophy and be utterly passive
and complicit in the machinations of power. The important point here is that subcultural resistance
is not only present in potential in Adorno’s philosophy, but evidenced by it.

18
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Minima Moralia Translated by E.F.N. Jephcott (New York: Verso, 1974)

Negative Dialectics Translated by E.B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973)

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Notes to Literature, Volume Two, Translated by Shierry Weber Nicholson (New York: Columbia
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