Late Marxism ADORNO, OR, THE PERSISTENCE OF THE DIALECTIC Fredric Jameson LATE MARXISM LATE MARXISM FredricJameson THINKHI\IJICJ\L E I� �S VERSO London • New York First published by Verso 1990 © FredricJameson 1990 This eclition published by Verso 2007 All rights reserved The moral rights of the author have been asserted 1 3 57 9 10 8 6 4 2 Verso UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F OEG USA: 180 Varick Street, New York, NY 10014-4606 www.versobooks.com Verso is the imprint of New Left Books ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-575-3 ISBN-10: 1-84467-575-0 BritishLibrary Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Printed in the UK by Bookmarque Ltd, Croydon, Surrey For PerryAnderson Contents A Note on Editions and Translations lX INTRODUCTION Adorno in the Stream of Time PART I BalefulEnchantments of the Concept I Identity and Anti-Identity I5 2 Dialectics and the Extrinsic 25 3 Sociologyand the Philosophical Concept 35 4 The Uses and Misuses of Culture Critique 43 5 Benjamin and Constellations 49 6 Models 59 7 Sentences and Mimesis 63 8 Kant and Negative Dialectics 73 9 The Freedom Model 77 IO The History Model 88 II Natural History 94 I2 The Metaphysics Medel III viii CONTENTS PART II Parable of the Oarsmen I Biastowards the Objective I23 2 The Guilt of Art I27 3 Vicissitudes of Culture on the Left I39 4 MassCulture asBig Business 145 5 The Culture Industry asNarrative 151 PART III Productivities of the Monad I Nominalism 157 2 The Crisis of Schein 165 3 Reification 177 4 The Monad as an Open Closure 182 5 Forces of Production 189 6 Relations of Production 197 7 The Subject, Language 202 8 Nature 212 9 Truth-Content and Political Art 220 CONCLUSIONS Adorno in the Postmodern 227 Notes 25J Index 262 A Note on Editions and Translations I have here often retranslated quotes from Adorno's works afresh (without specific indication). The available translations are uneven, to say the least; E.F.N. Jephcotts's Minima Moralia, and more recently, Rodney Livingstone's In Search of Wagner, are elegant Anglo-English; John Cumming's Dialectic of Enlightenment has a stronger German accent, which I for one must welcome since I believe, with Pannwitz, that the translator should allow 'his language to be powerfully affected by the foreign tongue ... [and should] expand and deepen his language by means of the foreign language'.' In particular, Adorno's sentences try to recover the intricately bound spatial freedom of Latinate declension, objects that grandly precede subjects, and a play of gendered nouns that the mind scans by means of the appropriately modified relative. Chiasmus here becomes the structural echo by one part of the sentence of another, distant in time and space; and the result of these internal operations is the closure of the aphorism itself; definitive, yet a forthright act that passes on, not into silence, but into other acts and gestures. Adorno should then be the occasion of forging a powerful new Germanic sentence structure in English; and this is why I must find altogether misguided the strategy of Christian Lenhardt, the English translator of Aesthetic 1heory who breaks up sentences and paragraphs and produces a literate and respectable British text which I can no longer even recognize (but see on this his exchange with Bob Hulot-Kentor'). Thus, unfortunately, this whole monumental undertaking will have to be done again, something that must also be said for E.B. Ashton's even more unfortunate version of Negative Dialectics, where the most basic terms are misrendered, making whole passages (which are already difficultenough at the best of times) altogether incomprehensible. Readers ix X A NOTE ON EDITIONS AND TRANSLATIONS obliged to go on using this version should make a note of the most urgent howlers: Ta uschverhaltnis is in particular not 'barter' but simply 'exchange system' (very much as in 'exchange value'): Ver mittlung is scarcely 'transmission' but will be again recognizable as the well-known 'mediation' (and note that mittelbar and unmittelbar - normally 'mediated' and 'immediate' - are here frequently 'indirect' and 'direct' for some reason); Anschauung is, finally, not 'visuality' but is conven­ tionally rendered, since the very first Kant translations, as 'intuition'. The first group of these errors (along with the significant but incompre­ hensible excision of the name of Karl Korsch at one point) might lead a paranoid to believe that this translation aimed precisely at producing a post- and non-Marxist Adorno 'for our time'; the third, however, could only imply a complete innocence of the philosophical tradition. Still, all the translations strike occasional sparks, and I am fortunate in having had them all to rely on. Page references to the most frequently quoted works are given within the text, first to the German, and then to the English, versions (even where the latter has not been used), and designated by the following abbreviations: AT Aesthetic Theorie, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 7 (Frankfurt: Suhr­ kamp, 1970) Aesthetic Theory,trans!. Christian Lenhardt (London: RKP,1984) DA Dialektikder Au fklarung (Frankfurt:Fischer, 1986, original 1944) Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans!. John Cumming (New York: Herder & Herder, 1972) MM Minima Moralia(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986, original 1951) Minima Moralia,trans!. E.F.N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1974) ND Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1975, original 1966) Negative Dialectics, trans!. E.B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973) NL Notenzur Literatur(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1981) PNM Philosophie der neuen Musik (Frankfurt: Europaische Verlagsan­ stalt, 1958) Philosophy ofModern Music, trans!. Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster (New York: Seabury, 1973) W Versuch uber Wagner(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1952) In Search of Wagner,trans!. Rodney Livingstone (London: Verso, 1981) INTRODUCTION Adorno in the Stream of Time This book offers detailed readings of three major works written wholly or in part by Adorno at various stages in his career: Dialecticof Enlighten­ ment, published in 1947, the Negative Dialectic of 1966 and the posthu­ mously published Aesthetic Theory. I have, however, drawn extensively on other books- the essays calledNo tenzur Literatur,the Minima Moralia, and the Wagner book, as well as other relevant materials. I have considered these writings synchronously, as parts of a single unfolding system, as though the various Adornos, in the various stages of their youth and decay (as in 2001), were all 'sitting around a table in the British Museum' together. In historiography - whether it is that of a form, a national population, or a single productive psyche - the decision about continuity or disconti­ nuity is not an empirical one; asI've said elsewhere, it is taken in advance, as a kind of absolute presupposition, which then determines your subse­ quent reading and interpretation of the materials (sometimes called 'the facts'). We are very well placed to see that today, we who have witnessed the unfurling of a great wave of counter-revolutionary historiography designed to 'prove', for example, that the French or Russian revolutions accomplished very little save to interrupt, with their mindless bloodshed, a peaceful economic progress already on course and well under way. Such 'history' offers a true Brechtian estrangement-effect, which runs in the face of common sense {that is to say, our received ideas) and gives us something new to argue about: the argument will be most productive if it also includes some rethinking of periodization itself, which has come to be one of the central theoretical issues for an age that is at one and the same time profoundly ahistorical and avid for historical narratives and narrative reinterpretations of all kinds - an appetite, as it were, for 3 4 LATE MARXISM poststructural gossip (including the newer histories} that is something like a compensation for the weightlessness of a fall out of history unlikely to last for long. The alternative - an account of Adorno's career in various stages,' including as its obligatory backdrop the exciting wartime flights across Europe and North America, and the postwar return to a Germany in rubble (with the subsequent emergence of a student movement in the sixties}, done in the various appropriate Hollywood and Tv-docudrama styles - has generally ignored the philosophical or aesthetic components, whose lifelong persistence it is not difficult to show/ and fastened on the easier matter of political opinion: in other words, when did he stop believing in Marxism? (or rather, since Horkheimer and the 'School' are the inescapable intellectual and financial context here, when did 'they' stop believing in Marxism?). I will argue against this rather shallow view of the nature of political commitment, ideological choice, and philosophical and literary production. Apostasies are real enough, and excellent dramatic material; but this is not at all what happened to Adorno during the Cold War and afterthe return to Restoration Germany in the Adenauer period. He went on, indeed, to write his two major works, examined in the present study: projects that establish him as one of the greatest of twentieth-century Marxist philosophers; and as my title suggests, it is to document the contributions of Adorno to contempor­ ary Marxism that the present book was written. It is not, indeed, people who change, but rather situations. This can also account for the alterations in my own views of Adorno, whose work has itself varied in significance for me according to the historical decade: Adorno was for me a crucial methodological discovery in the declining years of the Eisenhower era, when it seemed urgent to invent some conception of the dialectic itself in the North American context.