Adorno: The Essay as Form

"The person who interprets instead of unquestioningly accepting and categorizing is slapped with the charge of intellectualizing as if with a yellow star; his misled and decadent intelligence is said to subtilize and project meaning where there is nothing to interpret."
- Theodor Adorno, Essay as Form

If you want to understand Theodor Adorno and critical theory, read Adorno's Essay as Form.  About 20 pages in length, Essay as Form lays out the methods of Critical Theory and ruthlessly criticizes every form of orthodoxy under the sun.  This essay provides a guide to following Adorno's crisscrossing, weaving, and leaping over and around concepts that can seem incomprehensible at first.  Adorno makes the case that such a method reveals the lies in what we believe to be true about concepts and knowledge.

Interpretation of concepts is neither static nor objectively obtainable.  As in art, the original intention of meaning is inexplicable.  We can never understand the psychological and emotional context of a particular steam of thought.  As Adorno writes, "The author's impulses are extinguished in the objective substance they grasp."  Thinking back to Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction and John Berger's The Ways of Seeing, technological changes in the production of art and writing generated  dynamic variables of time and space.  As Benjamin and Berger argue, there is no possible way to determine an author's original mood or circumstances, so we must create our own meaning.

According to Adorno, the essay is separate from science and art, in that it takes the form of truth and presents explicit concepts.  There is no hierarchy of concepts in the essay.  Concepts are woven together like threads in a fabric.  In this way, truth and history are not separate.  When truth exists in a given historical period, that historical period is one of truth and there is no distinction between the temporal and the timeless.  As he writes:

The usual reproach against the essay, that it is fragmentary and random, itself assumes the giveness of totality and thereby the identity of subject and object, and it suggests that man is in control of totality. But the desire of the essay is not to seek and filter the eternal out of the transitory; it wants, rather, to make the transitory eternal.

Hidden within continuity is discontinuity.  The object of the essay is not to ignore what is indisputably certain, but to avoid the idealization of concepts and knowledge.  In a way, this is the ultimate form of revisionism.

Interestingly, Adorno argues against René Descartes' principle rules of method that are laid out in Discourse on the Method.  Namely, that:

1. truth only exists when any bit of doubt has been removed
2. Analysis should be undertaken by dividing the subject into as many smaller pieces as possible
3. Analysis begins with the smallest unit of measure
4. A unit of measure should be presented in as many smaller parts as possible

One of the greatest examples of these Cartesian principle rules of method is Karl Marx's Das Kapital.  Particularly in his method of analysis, Marx breaks down capitalism into numerous elements and starts from the smallest: the commodity.  Did Adorno ever read Das Kapital backwards?  Maybe.  Interestingly, Marxist Geographer David Harvey suggests starting Marx's magnus opus from the end.  What I'm trying to get at is, when we start with the most complex unit of analysis, does that generate the most fruitful thought?  Does starting from the smallest unit of analysis  make the journey to understanding the whole more treacherous?

We can posit that Adorno might have objected to starting from the widest point of analysis due to his criticism of "standpoints."  The essay seeks to demolish the notion that analysis need always originate from a "standpoint."  In many cases, objections to this method reveal the fallacy of the standpoint, that a hierarchy of concepts is indeed a myth.  As Adorno puts it, the essay "... thinks in fragments just as reality is fragmented and gains its unity only by moving through the fissures, rather than by smoothing them over."  A "philosophy of absolute knowledge" is like a fun house of mirrors in that it refracts the truth in unpredictable directions.  According to Adorno, the idea of a reduction to a primal understanding is a lie, whereas the mediated should be the focus of understanding.  Referencing Hegel, he Adorno points out that nothing between heaven and earth is not mediated.

We cannot truly seek to understand a certain subject by a general investigation or exposition of its parts, therefore we must choose which element to examine in detail.  This is the most productive form of analysis.  The essay does not seek to accomplish its task with one masterful stroke of a brush, but seeks to paint its concept over and over with a succession of brush strokes "The consciousness of the non-identity between presentation and presented material forces the form to make unlimited efforts. In that respect alone the essay resembles art; otherwise, on account of the concepts which appear in it and which import not only their meaning but also their theoretical aspects, the essay is necessarily related to theory."  Unknown to idealist representations, the antagonisms of the elements are invisible, but omnipresent.

Still, Adorno cautions us to avoid reducing the essay through the lens of theory:

To be sure, the essay relates itself to theory as cautiously as to the concept. It neither deduces itself rigidly from theory -the cardinal fault of all Lukacs' later essayistic work - nor is it a down-payment on future syntheses. Disaster threatens intellectual experience the more strenuously it ossifies into theory and acts as if it held the philosopher's stone in hand.

At its core, the essay is a critique of ideology.  By creating a presentation that differs starkly from the typical modes of presentation, it offers a critically fresh perspective.  "The essay remains what it always was, the critical form par excellence; specifically, it constructs the immanent criticism of cultural artifacts, and it confronts that which such artifacts are with their concept; it is the critique of ideology."  The essay seeks to reveal the ostensible notions of societal myths, that which resemble culture.  The object of the essay is not to remove this culture, but to determine the true cause that is buried underneath, to reveal, as Adorno puts it, "cultures bondage to nature."

"Therefore the law of the innermost form of the essay is heresy. By transgressing the orthodoxy of thought, something becomes visible in the object which it is orthodoxy's secret purpose to keep invisible."

There are two clear takeaways from Essay as Form.  First, one cannot rely solely on empiricism.  Intuition is a necessary skill in analysis that offers advantages, such as the ability to penetrate deep below the surface of an established modes of thought.  Secondly, we cannot reconcile antagonisms inherent to ideas and concepts, but for a brief moment in the essay.  Happiness, or harmony in thought, is as great an illusion as the notion of a hierarchy of ideas.  "While happiness is supposedly the goal of all domination over nature, it always appears to the reality principle as regression to mere nature."  The essay is ultimately a betrayal of empiricism, which seeks to keep secret its illusory hierarchy, static definitions, and definite notion of truth.