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Theodor W Adorno Theodor W Adorno Prisms Translated from the German by Samuel and Shierry Weber Ninth printng, 1997 First MIT Press paperback editon, 1983 First MIT Press editon, 1981 Copyright © Theodor W Adorno 1967 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any informaton storage and retrieval system, without permission in writng from the publisher. Contents Series Foreword 6 Foreword by Theodor W. Adorno 7 Introduction: Translating the Untranslatable, by Samuel M. Weber 9 Cultural Criticism and Society 17 The Sociology of Knowledge and Its Consciousness 35 Spengler after the Decline 51 Veblen's Attack on Culture 73 Aldous Huxley and Utopia 95 Perennial Fashion – Jazz 119 Bach Defended against His Devotees 133 Arnold Schoenberg, 1874 1951 147 Valéry Proust Museum 173 The George-Hofmannsthal Correspondence, 1891 1906 187 A Portrait of Walter Benjamin 227 Notes on Kafka 243 page_5 Series Foreword From Hegel and Marx, Dilthey and Weber, to Freud and the Frankfurt School, German social theory enjoyed an undisputed preeminence. After the violent break brought about by National Socialism and World War II, this tradition has recently come to life again, and indeed to such an extent that contemporary German social thought has begun to approach the heights earlier attained. One important element in this renaissance has been the rapid and extensive translation into German of English-language works in the humanities and the social sciences, with the result that social thought in Germany is today markedly influenced by ideas and approaches of Anglo-American origin. Unfortunately, efforts in the other direction, the translation and reception of German works into English, have been sporadic at best. This series is intended to correct that imbalance. The term social thought is here understood very broadly to include not only sociological and political thought as such but also the social-theoretical concerns of history and philosophy, psychology and linguistics, aesthetics and theology. The term contemporary is also to be construed broadly: though our attention will be focused primarily on postwar thinkers, we shall also publish works by and on earlier thinkers whose influence on contemporary German social thought is pervasive. The series will begin with translations of works by authors whose names are already widely recognized in English-speaking countries – Adorno, Bloch, Gadamer, Habermas, Marcuse, Ritter – and by authors of similar accomplishment who are not yet so familiar outside of Germany – Blumenberg, Peukert, Schmidt, Theunissen, Tugendhat. Subsequent volumes will also include monographs and collections of essays written in English on German social thought and its concerns. To understand and appropriate other traditions is to broaden the horizons of one’s own. It is our hope that this series, by tapping a neglected store of intellectual riches and making it accessible to the English- speaking public, will expand the frame of reference of our social and political discourse. THOMAS MCCARTHY page_6 Foreword to the English Editon Although the author is delighted that for the first time one of his German books is now to appear in English – in a very meticulous and thoughtful translation – he is none the less fully aware of the difficulties which confront such texts in the English-speaking world. That he is no stranger to Anglo-Saxon norms of thought and presentation has been demonstrated, the author believes, in his English-language writings: his contributions to The Authoritarian Personality, his essays on music sociology for the Princeton Radio Research Project, and subsequent studies such as ‘How to Look at Television’, or ‘The Stars Down to Earth’.1 These norms are essential to him as a control, lest he reject common sense without first having mastered it; it is only by use of its own categories, that common sense can be transcended. This, however, must remain the author’s aim as long as he considers matters of fact to be not mere fact, unreflected and thing-like, but rather processes of infinite mediation, never to be taken simply at face-value. He cannot accept the usual mode of thought which is content to register facts and prepare them for subsequent classification. His essential effort is to illuminate the realm of facticity – without which there can be no true knowledge – with reflections of a different type, one which diverges radically from the generally accepted canon of scientific validity. To justify this procedure it would have been best to restate the considerations now collected in the Negative Dialektik.2 The author has decided against this not merely for considerations of 1. cf. The Authoritarian Personality (New York, 1950; paperback edition, New York, 1964); Radio Research (New York, 1941 ff.); ‘How to Look at Television’, The Quarterly of Film, Radio and Television VIuII (Spring 1954), p. 214 ff.; ‘The Stars Down to Earth’, Jahrbuch für Amerikastudien 2 (Heidelberg, 1957). 2. Frankfurt am Main, 1966. page_7 time, but also because one of his primary concerns has been not to accept uncritically the conventional opposition between methodology and material knowledge. In thus presenting a book that consists of individual studies, he hopes to be able to concretize that type of knowledge towards which he is inclined. Even without an explicit epistemology, the essays should be able to speak for themselves. If this is possible, it will be due in no small measure to the quality of the translation as well as to the Introduction by Samuel M. Weber, which the author would wholeheartedly endorse as an accurate presentation of his intentions were he not afraid, in so doing, of seeming immodest. Finally, the author could wish for nothing better than that the English version of Prisms might express something of the gratitude that he cherishes for England and for the United States – the countries which enabled him to survive the era of persecution and to which he has ever since felt himself deeply bound. T. W. A. FRANKFURT, MARCH 1967 page_8 Translatng the Untranslatable Samuel M. Weber Man lives with things mainly, even exclusively – since sentiment and action in him depend upon his mental representations – as they are conveyed to him by language. Through the same act by which he spins language out of himself he weaves himself into it, and every language draws a circle around the people to which it belongs, a circle that can only be transcended in so far as one at the same time enters another one. Wilhelm von Humboldt Je suis au bout de l’anglais. James Joyce page_9 The translation of philosophical prose, of cultural criticism, might at first glance seem to pose few problems, at least by comparison to that of poetry. Literature is said to define itself through the union of form and content, the ‘how’ taking precedence over the ‘what’. A poem should mean but be. By implication, the being of non-imaginative, non-literary writing is absorbed in its meaning, which is situated beyond language. Here it is the ‘what’ that counts, the means of presentation being considered incidental. The convenient distinction between literature and non-literature, however, evaporates at the lightest touch of reflection on the history of philosophy. Are Plato’s dialogues non-imaginative? Hegel’s Master and Servant? Is the form, structure and language of their argument merely a bridge to reach conceptual content on the other side? Is the language of great philosophy merely a means of presentation? Or is it the constitutive medium in which content crystallizes and from which it can no more be detached than the meaning of a poem from its form. Such considerations, however rudimentary and evident, are enough to transport one to the very limits of English and of the conceptual horizons it describes. For if it is true that philosophy in its greatest productions is no less imaginative, no less literary than literature, then what is literature? It is not that a definition is lacking no phenomenon as complex and vital as literature is susceptible of univocal determination – but rather that there is no name in English for that which as ‘literature’ is too broadly described, as ‘poetry’ too narrowly. Efforts at circumscribing the difficulty with notions such as ‘imaginative’ writing or ‘fiction’ are no more satisfactory. Is the Symposium, the Phenomenology of Mind fictitious? Non-imaginative? The circumscribed phenomenon, nameless in English, has a name in German: Dichtung. The essays collected in Prisms are not Dichtung. They are literature, if by literature is meant language in which imagination, fiction and form are moments which constitute the ‘content’, a content which in principle can be distinguished from that of Dichtung, if at all, through its less mediate relation to truth. Like Dichtung specificity of Adorno’s thought page_11 is inseparable from its articulation. If conceptual concreteness may be measured by the density with which thought and articulation permeate each other, then Adorno’s style can be characterized by the constant striving to be concrete. It is, however, a concreteness which has no place within the intellectual horizons of English. In English what is concrete is what is immediate, tangible, visible. Whatever the historical causes of this empirical orientation may have been, contemporary English does not tolerate the notion that what is nearest at hand may in fact be most abstract, while that which is invisible, intangible, accessible only to the mind may in face be more real than reality itself. ‘Aren’t there enough words for you in English?’ Joyce was once asked: ‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘there are enough, but they aren’t the right ones.’1 Words such as Dichtung, Geist, Sache, all of which may easily be attacked as imprecise and unclear, nevertheless designate a dimension of intellectual experience which has its concreteness in the dynamic nature of thought; they designate moments, stages of the mind on its way to truth.
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