The translator’s hope is that the reconstruction Schweppenhäuser gives of unity of form and content in Adorno and Horkheimer’s mode of presentation, including their reasons for adopting such a mode in the first place, will be useful for future anglophone readers of the Dialectic of Enlightenment who are as dissatisfied with its ham-fisted reception – at the hands of generations of readers who could never distinguish between performative and dialectical contradictions – as they are exasperated by the text of the infamous book itself.
[Picture] Newspaper clippings from “Science Probes the Anti-Semite” in “The Jewish Community Bulletin” (San Francisco, California). June 7, 1946.[Translator’s fn.] Published in: Schmid Noerr, G., Ziege, EM. (eds) Zur Kritik der regressiven Vernunft. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. (2019)
“The Concept of Language and Linguistic Presentation in Horkheimer and Adorno”, by Hermann Schweppenhäuser (1986)
Though Horkheimer and Adorno did not fully work out a theory of language, individual language-theoretical reflections scattered throughout their work, and unpublished during their lifetimes, form the elements of such a theory — sufficient, at least, for attesting to the linguistic reflection and self-reflection of critical theory and the intention behind these reflections.[Editor’s fn.] On this see Gunzelin Schmid Noerr: “Truth, power and the language of philosophy. On Horkheimer’s linguistic-philosophical reflections in his posthumous writings between 1939 and 1946”, in: Max Horkheimer today: Work and Impact, edited by A Schmidt and N Altwicker, Frankfurt am Main 1986, pp. 349–370. – The synchronous arrangement of the two lectures dedicated to language problems during the conference prohibited their discussion in relation to each other; since the speakers were unable to discuss the matter together beforehand due to time constraints, they, like those interested, are referred to the print of both lectures in this volume as a belated starting point for the discussion. [Editor’s note: The contributions by Schweppenhäuser and Schmid Noerr both appeared in the above-mentioned conference volume Max Horkheimer today: Work and Impact.]This was at a time when the self-critical linguistic turn of scientific and philosophical thinking was already underway, and even before critical theory itself achieved this in the form of methodological desiderata prior to the later, pragma-linguistic reformulation of critical theory.
I would like to remind you of this today, to take the calendar occasion as a relevant one, in order to visualize the self-reflective state of this thinking in a language-reflective way. In so doing, I try to concentrate on some essential aspects of both authors’ concept of language and the way of using language – the linguistic presentation of knowledge – that it induces; to indicate the points from which the problem of language is viewed and can be illuminated. The achievement of language is illuminated in its strength and in its weakness and, in the process, a piece of the enlightenment of the Enlightenment is mastered. It turns out that proving one’s thinking on the matter – given the proximity of knowledge and language to one another – only seems easier than elsewhere; but this illusion is the transcendental linguistic illusion itself, which should not conceal from the discerning gaze what it conceals, that which manifests the illusion itself. The closeness of knowledge and language to one another also turns out to be a distortion of the two by each other, a figuration. As a congealed dialectic – which the authors seek to affirm dialectically. This is the core of their effort to find an adequate concept of language. Formulaically, it could be said that they visualize it in two basic elements: in language as a representation and as a manifestation of what is linguistically determined – in the ambiguity of its power to generalize the real and a counter-striving to its own expression of the generalized, including that of generalizing itself. It is the difficult concept of language as a polar arrangement, which Benjamin also asserted early on in his general linguistic treatise of 1916.Cf. Walter Benjamin: Collected Writings, with the collaboration of TW Adorno and G Scholem, edited by R Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, Volume II, Frankfurt am Main 1977, p. 140 ff.; on the role of the treatise in Adorno’s thinking cf. Rolf Tiedemann: “Concept, image, name. About Adorno’s utopia of knowledge”, in: Hamburg Adorno Symposium, published by M Löbig and G Schweppenhäuser, Lüneburg 1984, p. 76 f. – Cf. also Hermann Schweppenhäuser: “Nome Logos Espressione. Elementi della teoria bejaminiana della lingua”, in: Walter Benjamin. Tempo, storia, liguaggio, edited by L Belloi and L. Lotti, Rome 1983, p. 49 ff. [The German version in this volume, pp. 159–174.]
One could describe it, again formulaically and with the intention of providing preliminary orientation, something like this: lingua index suae et rationis, but the index itself is illingual in the sense that language, the objectification and self-illumination of reason – of the logos as word and as spirit – is at the same time also expression: manifestation of something other than language is – “a certain silent order of things,” to use Foucault’s words, a “subgrammar” that relates to the logical-linguistic in a similar way as the unconscious relates to the conscious, as subterranean to manifest history, so that both are in figuration, alternately concealing and yet also penetrating each other.Michel Foucault: The Order of Things, Frankfurt am Main 1974, p. 23. The problem of language is also posed in the sense of such figuration by Horkheimer and Adorno. The subject of the discussion is the language, energy and instinct of reason in its own light, and the language, ergon, work of history and the real subjects in it, in its side facing away from the light. Let me deal with both aspects, which cannot be separated from one another internally, one after the other, first with an emphasis on language as a conceptual representation and then on language as an expression. A few comments on the reflection of both authors’ concept of language – in the manner of their linguistic presentation itself – may conclude the visualization of their concept of language.
§I.
What do we learn from language, the way we use it to make judgments and statements, with regard to the real thing about which we say something and which we judge linguistically? Thus asks Horkheimer in an important reflection published from his estate.Cf. Max Horkheimer: “Trust in History”, in: Neue Rundschau, Volume 95 (1984), H 1/2, p. 8 ff.; recently in: Max Horkheimer: Collected Writings, Volume XII, published by G Schmid Noerr, Frankfurt am Main 1985, p. 119 ff. The answer is twofold: the strength of language is the weakness of its performance, and this weakness is precisely the strength of its intention. – Its strength is generalization: the predicate subsumes the subject “under terms that are the same for everyone.”Ibid. p. 11. The judgments are valid through the universality that they express linguistically: what they express makes them the existing norm, and the norm is founded in law. This is the conceptual realism of language, which itself gravitates towards nominalism. Because “the predicated universal” is “not appropriate to the individual that it is supposed to apply to. The predicate seeks to concretize the subject through something abstract, to determine it through something indefinite.”Ibid. This means that “the name of the subject is provisional,” “the predicate wants to find the right one, the one that unlocks its secret.”Ibid.
It turns out that “the judgment is an attempt” – an attempt that cannot stop, even and especially with the success of generalization – namely to help the real “to express what it cannot say in its silence. That is the meaning of language, which it always intends despite its weakness.”Ibid. – From the other side, this weakness is its strength – strength in the fatal sense. It wants to do justice to the “unique particular”;Ibid. but the universal with which it identifies the particular in the judgment is “always its doom.”Ibid. “Also” – so initially none. Because insofar as language identifies the universal in the individual, it meets with disaster. The fact that the individual is human logically protects him from being treated and destroyed as a non-human. As a human being, he has attributes whose political expression is, for example, human rights, which he is essentially entitled to. If they are not respected, it is a violation of the logic and truth in which they are based by virtue of being, the copula. But what is the basis of the power that so easily overrides logic and truth: the irrational? – The universal is “always fatal” to the particular. For example, in the definition of human rights as bourgeois rights: that of the free and the property-owning, which excludes the unfree and the property-less. To this extent, rationality itself is also the irrational: reason that is done to the subject, that happens to the subject in a nemesis-like manner on both sides of particularization.
The truth of the universal shows itself as an enlightened myth, the universals are the demythologized gods who controlled destinies, just as the gods turned out to be the personified natural power. The nature clarified in myth and the myth clarified in rationalism re-emerge conceptually in the universal as the ideas, forms, laws to which the individual is ‘objectively’ subject. They “express the finiteness,” the disappearance “of the particular: because the subject is an animal, a human being, a man, it must come to nothing. The judgment conceives the living merely as nature, even when it thinks of the particular not in physical but in social categories, as a nation or state.”Ibid., p. 11 f.
This is the real, the historical realism of language, the one that denounces the ideal, the universal realism. With such a denunciation, language criticizes being, the copula, “because in the identity it creates, it logically suppresses in the subject what cannot develop in practice.”Ibid., p. 11. In this respect, words and concepts are actually adequate to what they capture – to the extent that they limit and imprison what they capture. This is the meaning of what Adorno called negative ontology, as he terms it in Negative Dialectics, in which identification is developed as the constraint that prevents the non-identical from achieving its own identity.The logical place of the aesthetic theory can also be identified in Horkheimer’s text; It was preceded by a phase of particularly intense joint reflection by both authors since 1939; cf. Horkheimer, ‘Trust in History’. p. 14. – That criticism of being emerges from the specifying, restricting, negating predication itself: the universal becomes “a negative in language, which it says for denunciation. By subsuming, it specifies suffering.”Ibid.
As a consequence, it is the negation of every predicative judgment as predicative: the immanently forced progression of judgment, which tends to the downfall of predication by name – in the sense of the innermost nominalistic tendency, that of the recognition of the individual res as an indesignable thing in itself.Tiedemann’s in-depth investigation is dedicated to the utopia of language as one of names and its inseparability from the innermost intention of knowledge, as one of the centers of Adorno’s thinking, which points out the limit in advance to the misinterpretation of aesthetic theory as a capitulation of thought to art; cf. Tiedemann, Concept, Image, Name, p. 67 ff. But nominalism – according to both authors – capitulates to the name by which it is called and against whose innermost historical implications it unhistorically – and methodologically – blinds itself.Cf. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno: Dialectic of Enlightenment. Philosophical Fragments, Amsterdam 1947, p. 36. In the text from 1946, Horkheimer says of the progression of judgment that it is the negation of the judgment as fixed and at least keeps the adequate predication open, at least as long as predication does not resolve itself and stand still in identity theses of the idealistic, universalistic kind or nominalistically resigns itself to the infinity of facts as what is merely designable. In this way, language and concept teach truth is dialectical, and that is why “Hegel [hits on] the spirit of language like no other: the determinacy of the finite that it expresses means at the same time its pain and its destruction.” “Whoever says being must necessarily mean power and death.” “The identification of language with truth is diabolical, just as the separation of truth from language is silent despair. This is the highest insight to which its penetration leads.”Horkheimer, “Trust in History”, p. 13.
Therefore, both positions on language that evade this are inappropriate to the insight: the one that idolizes language ontologically (which Hegel himself ultimately fell into with the absolutization of the logos in the face of its historically determined negation) as well as the one that is nominalistically silent. Nominalism is more honest, but at the price of the idea of truth, which linguistic absolutism turns into a lie. Both show themselves to be typical of the era, in the sense of the present, as “positivism”, which “declares language dead”, and as “fascism”, which “galvanises” it – as de-mythologization, the two forms of which determine each other.Ibid., p. 11. The scientifically illuminated language, like the galvanized language, is no longer able to express “the community of suffering”, which silences and neutralizes the community and transfigures the suffering, which they both accept.Ibid., p. 15. This happens to language and with it to people when it is deprived of expression, and no less to expression when it is deprived of language. That the linguistic term “freedom” aims “by concretely thinking about lack of freedom”; The fact that language points to reconciliation with the “power of determination through negation”, i.e. through one’s own weakness, disappears with the manipulated and idolized language.Cf. Ibid. The dialectic of language, which with its strength confesses its weakness and with weakness indicates healing from strength; which “only helps the living to express itself by making it the concept with which it coincides”;Ibid., p. 22. in which “fulfillment and suffering lie undivided” and which precisely preserves the possible divorceIbid., p. 12.– this dialectic still remains to be taken at its word where idolized and correspondingly illuminated language takes the word away from us.
This presupposes that language criticism remains secure in language, despite the distortions that happen to it – that which is objectively given and historically developed, which supports thought and expression, knowledge and criticism of the real.Cf especially Theodor W. Adorno: “Theses on the language of the philosopher”, in: Adorno, Collected Writings, published by R Tiedemann, Frankfurt am Main 1973, Volume I, p. 366 ff. and the same: Jargon of Authenticity, in: Volume VI, Frankfurt am Main 1973, p. 413 ff. – On the criticism of operationalized language cf. Herbert Marcuse: One-dimensional Man. Studies on the ideology of advanced industrial society, Neuwied/Berlin 1967, especially: “The barrier of the universe of speech”, p. 103 ff. and “The triumph of positive thinking: one-dimensional philosophy”, p. 184 ff. Just as memory is constitutive for thinking and knowing in actu, language – according to Hegel, a concrete sign of memory – is, inextricably, constitutive for the person currently formulating it.Cf. G. W. F. Hegel: Complete Works, edited by H. Glockner, Stuttgart 1965, Volume X, System of Philosophy 3, § 458, 462. “Universal concepts form the material of the presentation as well as names for individual things,” says the Dialectic of Enlightenment. “The fight against universal concepts is pointless. However, this does not determine what the dignity of the universal is. The scale of genuses is not at the same time that of significance.” Repeating “the moments that present themselves as the same thing over and over again is more like a futile and compulsive litany than a redemptive word. Classification is a condition of knowledge, not knowledge itself, and knowledge in turn dissolves the classification” – so too in the sense of insight into its historical genesis.Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 260. Without the light of the universal, the concept that creates consensus, there is no binding knowledge – but also no obligation, no compulsion of logic without the logic of coercion in historical reality. Concepts are immanently luminous reason-sense and transcendently sinister expression: that which also shapes autonomous reason heteronomously.
In this sense, linguistic rationality is an expression of habituality as a form of socialization itself. And this is the result of the process of external and internal control of nature and its growing organization. Regarding the genesis, Horkheimer refers to Durkheim and the reflection of early forms of social organization in terms of logical classification,CF Max Horkheimer; The Critique of Instrumental Reason. From the lectures and recordings since the end of the war, published by A Schmidt, Frankfurt am Main 1967, p. 105.as well as the fact that the Platonic ideas reflect less the “secret affinities of things” than those of “power relations”, which, however, can be criticized again through those ideas.Ibid., p. 169. Reason in the bourgeois sense is a form of reflection of social intercourse, of developed exchange, and its rationality is as impressive as the reciprocal equivalence of rights and duties.
Logic is “the money of the spirit” – this is how Marx summarizes in brilliant abbreviation the relationship between the real economic ground and the ground of knowledge, and how the latter can be rooted in the former.Karl Marx: Economic-philosophical manuscripts, in: ibid. and Friedrich Engels, Works, published by the Institute for Marxism-Leninism at the Central Committee of the SED, supplementary volume, 1st part, Berlin 1968, p. 571. The rationality in both is at the same time irrational, and “cleverness”, as it is provocatively called in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, is also stupid. But the contradiction is necessary. Because the bourgeois rationality must claim universality and at the same time develop to limit it. Just as everyone gets their due in exchange and yet social injustice results from it, so too is the form of reflection in the exchange economy, the dominant reason, fair, universalistic and yet particularistic, the instrument of privilege-in-equality.Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 248. Behind the clarity of the judgments of the One Reason are hidden the real opposites in which the subjects, the bearers of the One Reason,Cf. Ibid., p. 102.exist as privileged and unprivileged, as competent and incompetent. Here we need to measure the importance of an idea of ‘communicative reason’ and how it can seriously prove itself in the face of actual ‘asymmetrical communication’, according to the presentations of Habermas and Lorenzer.
As long as the oppressed’s own silent language remains unheard and uninterpreted, prevailing reason itself proves to be deaf – as a deficiency in understanding, a form of reason in its own unreason. Institutionalized in the polished language of traffic, it makes itself incapable of knowledge, can no longer find the healing word, and the better the language and concept function, the more blind they become to their own meaning, the meaning and absurdity of functioning. This is reflected in Wittgenstein’s famous definition, according to which the “use of the word in language is its meaning”.Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophical Grammar, in: ibid., Writings, Frankfurt am Main, Volume IV, § 23 (p. 60). The meaning of the use itself, the trans-linguistic meaning and purpose, remains unconsidered and is itself repelled by the internally fixating logic of the whole occurence, the linguistic concept itself. The universalizing power of the rules of the game is beyond question – but the language is not exhausted in the rule-type of the game; its ‘reflexive’ sense – to use Apelsian-Habermasian terminologyCf Jürgen Habermas: On the logic of the social sciences, Frankfurt am Main 1970, Part III, Chapter 7.– inherently prohibits its ‘reduction’ to this type.
Rather, the self-blinding purpose of mere functioning can only be read in the light of its reflexivity. This also applies to the different functionality of the word in terms of genus, insofar as it is a word of reflexive, non-reduced language. But what does the word and concept of reflexive language achieve? Horkheimer and Adorno put the matter to the test by contrasting the entire sphere of the logos – that of language and reason – with the sphere of wordlessness and reasonlessness – the silent world of the creature, against which language and reason would have to prove themselves. Do they? Does the humanistic logos seriously mean humanization of nature?
§II.
“The lack of reason has no words,” says the Dialectic of Enlightenment. “Eloquent is their possession, which prevails throughout manifest history. The whole earth bears witness to the glory of man” (the zoon logon echon). “In war and peace, arena and slaughterhouse, from the slow death of the elephant overpowered by primitive human hordes based on rudimentary planning, to the complete exploitation of the animal world today, the irrational creatures have always experienced reason. This visible process covers the invisible one: existence without the light of reason.”Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 295 f.
“The world of the animal is without concepts. There is no word to capture the identical in the flow of what appears, the same species in the change of specimens, the same thing in the changed situations.”Ibid., p. 296. The “possibility of re-cognition”, which would go beyond the identification of the “vitally predetermined” – the situational context in the sense of Bühler, for example – is missing.Ibid. here is “no firm knowledge of the past and no clear foresight into the future. The animal listens to the name and has no self, it is enclosed within itself and yet exposed, a new compulsion always arises, no idea extends beyond it.”Ibid.
The medium in which the coercion would be perceived as coercion is missing. This would mean consolation, awareness of happiness – liberating differentiation from burdens, from the constant sameness of being abandoned, the eternal readiness to react in fear. – Now to conclude as follows: ‘Because the idea, the liberating thought, is missing, unreasonable existence is not perceived as painful and is not, because only the idea and concept determine it as painful and horrifying in the sense of an idealistic constitution’ – this conclusion would be absurd. Fear and coercion of creaturely existence are only the epistemological consequence, but metaphysically the ground. Here the fundamentally materialistic meaning of this theory becomes apparent, which it shares with natural and historical philosophical materialism – on the one hand, with Schopenhauer and Schelling and through them with certain mystical theorems; on the other hand, with Vico, the French Enlightenment thinkers and Feuerbach and through them with Marx.Cf. Max Horkheimer: Beginnings of the Bourgeois Philosophy of History, Stuttgart 1930, p. 95 ff. The significance of these connections in critical theory as a ‘materialist theory of constitution’ has previously been illuminated by Schmidt;Cf. Alfred Schmidt: “Max Horkheimer’s Spiritual Physiognomy”, in: Three Studies on Materialism. Schopenhauer. Horkheimer. The problem of Happiness, München/Wien 1977, p. 120 ff. They are of greatest relevance precisely for Horkheimer and Adorno’s concept of language – this is due to the characteristic of language, according to which it is the signature, expression and manifestation of the real; of nature and history as a text to be read.Cf. Horkheimer, The Critique of Instrumental Reason, p. 122.
Spirit and idea, language and expression are then a consequence of that ground, however mediated they always are, and only become self-grounding after their emergence – historically – as knowing and conceiving, as language and text, as practice in the emphatic sense in the light of human – and creaturely – purposes; It is also worth remembering, in precisely this context, Benjamin’s concept of origin.Cf. Walter Benjamin: Origins of the German Tragic Drama, in: Collected Writings, with the participation of TW Adorno and G Scholem, edited by R Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, 1974, Band I, p. 226. – “In order to escape the boringly empty existence,” the authors continue, “a resistance is necessary, the backbone of which is language. Even the strongest animal is infinitely moronic.”Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 297. It is true that “the animal soul […] contains the individual feelings and needs of humans, even the elements of the spirit,” but “without the support that only organizing reason provides.”Ibid.
Their lack “banishes the animal in its form forever, unless the human being, who is one with it through the past, finds and speaks the redeeming word and through it softens the stone heart of infinity at the end of time.”Ibid. This is the materialist formulation of utopia here, in a significant way. – The entire discussion is important because of the aspect under which the animal psychological characteristics suddenly turn out to be human psychological ones: The animal soul shows itself to be the appropriate object of psychology because psychology sees it in the animal the form of psychological and spiritual mutilation and regression of peopleCf. Ibid., p. 296.– of people who are forced to react in creaturely ways under the increased pressure of the existing situation, which include the reaction to signs and signals that serve the purpose of sheer survival – based on the system into which language tends to shrink in the biotechnical universe of society as a whole – as well as the variety of behavior of mimicry with the existing: in general the regression to blind, unsublimated mimesis.
In doing so, the authors provide insight into one of the centers of the language problem. They consider the mimetic origin of language to be a given. It should be noted that the mimetic origin is not the same as what emerges from it – the emancipation from mimesis through language and concept, expression and symbolic manifestation, which remain intertwined with it. And the elucidation of the interconnection is what the theory is concerned with – whether it be called critical, dialectical or aesthetic theory. – In early mimesis, relating to the overpowering surrounding man, his unknown and his terror, this is separated from the sound with which man reacts to it: “The call of terror becomes his name. It fixes the transcendence of the unknown over the known.” “The doubling of nature” – “the echo of real superiority” – “comes from man’s fear, the expression of which becomes an explanation.”Ibid., p. 26; This theory, as a theory of the origin of art based on ethno- and myth-psychology before the turn of the century, can already be found in Aby Warburg, with striking parallels to The Dialectic of Enlightenment. This explanation is – as an echo – first tautology, mimetic tautology; then – through the fixation of the echo – the name of diffusely overpowering nature, which objectifies it into a numinous power over it. “Through the deity, language turns from tautology into language,” the one that expresses “the contradiction.”Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 26.
The explanation of nature becomes possible as a predication and negating specification: first in the magical embryonic form of incantation, worship, the planned mimesis with the intention of gaining power over power – and that literally in the name of powers and gods -; then in the developed form, an explanation of nature first via the depersonalized, semi-mythical, semi-logical archai of the primordial philosophy; then via the ideas and forms of classical, the essences and substances of later metaphysics; finally in the critical and scientific principles and laws in which the entire linguistic rationalization process ends.
This turns out to be dialectical: The original explanation that produced and developed the meaning and meaning of language, shrinks back to naked denomination and designation and establishes the starting point on a higher scale – the scientifically explained through and through and with the operationalized explanation, the technical – in contrast to the magical – universe, which can really be successfully determined, reveals the lack of meaning that provoked the fear of orientation in the beginning. The fully oriented, ‘informed’ world produces a complete horror of itself. The devastating nature of a lack of meaningful language – rather than just informed language in the strictest sense of the word – is becoming evident. The state loses the expression in which it could contain itself, understand itself, without losing the expression with the grasp, the concept. If such expression threatens to become impossible as a whole – hence Adorno’s paradox of the whole is the false -, so it remains as an individual, as a specific expression of the whole: it can be deciphered by the individual forces and powers that shape it.
This is where the objective and methodical sense of a concept of philosophy as interpretation becomes apparent – which Adorno postulated early on, in the programmatic inaugural speech of 1931,Cf. Theodor W. Adorno: “The Actuality of Philosophy”, in: Collected Writings, edited by R. Tiedemann, Frankfurt am Main 1973, Band I, p. 325 ff.and which Horkheimer used in historical-philosophical terms even before that, in 1930,Cf. Max Horkheimer: “Vico and mythology”, in: Horkheimer, Beginnings of the Bourgeois Philosophy of History; One of the key ideas can be found on page 110: “There is no pre-established harmony between the social expressive value of creative achievements and the individual intention on which they are based. The works only gain transparency in the course of history”: through interpretation.before he grasped it in a decidedly programmatic way,Cf. Max Horkheimer: “The Concept of Philosophy”, in: Horkheimer, The Critique of Instrumental Reason, p. 153 ff.and which both then practiced in central pieces of the Dialectic of Enlightenment and since then. As Tiedemann showed in his study of the relationship between language and knowledge in Adorno, which must be explicitly mentioned here, it was Horkheimer, who, on the occasion of Adorno and Benjamin’s debate about the concept of the dialectical image, gave the discussion the decisive turn in terms of expression and theory of interpretation with the reference to the key phenomenon of the commodity, Marx’s commodity fetish as an historical-objective, expressive character.Cf. Tiedemann, Concept – Image – Name, p. 73.
The “word before its rationalization,” both authors write, had “unleashed” the “longing” for the meaning of something different and better.Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 195. It marks the dividing line between the world of the logos and the silent world and thus points to the overcoming of the boundary as a strictly separating one, in both the synchronic and diachronic sense. If in the world of light, the identifying concepts dominate as names of order and classification – in an historically significant sense, for example, the patriarchal one, in which the strictly matriarchal itself is universalized -, then they show their expressive character on the side facing away from the light in the border zone in between – again in an historically significant sense, and here, according to the authors’ theory, exemplary sense, in the position of women in the patriarchal era, which was preceded by the reciprocal position of men – in their middle position between man as man and the unreasoning creature. The middle term is generally the schema. Schematism as a sensualization of the concept and as a logization of the sensual is interpreted in linguistic theory as an expression, with its two sides of the formative and the imprint, within our horizon, the epochal patriarchal horizon, and by virtue of the middle position of the woman between nature and man as man – of the woman as the “mas occasionatus”.Thomas Aquinas, cited in: Horkheimer, The Critique of Instrumental Reason, p. 188. The expressive character of language and the middle position of women equally become a test of the humanization of nature – within and through civilization.
Oppressed for her part, woman has achieved “admission into the world of domination for all of exploited nature,” “but as a broken one.”Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 299. She herself, and through her nature, “reflects to the victor his victory in spontaneous submission: defeat as surrender, despair as a beautiful soul, the violated heart as the loving bosom. At the price of a radical break from practice, at the price of retreating into a protected circle, nature receives its reverence from the Lord of Creation. Art, custom, sublime love,”Ibid.beauty – “appearance of strength through weakness,”Ibid., p. 303.thinking that is more than just ordering, speaking that is other than commanding and operationalizing; they all “are masks of nature,”Ibid., p. 299.imagesCf. Ibid., p. 298.“in which she returns transformed and becomes expressed as her own opposite. Through her masks she gains language,”Ibid.and would therefore remain as mute without the mask as she would be unreadable without the image.
This refers, historically and structurally, to the intermediate layer, that which mediates between nature and culture: the objective expression in a broad sense. This is illuminated by Benjamin’s idea that the ‘superstructure is an expression of the substructure’Cf. Walter Benjamin: Das Passagen-Werk, in: Collected Writings, with the cooperation of TW Adorno and G Scholem, edited by R Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, Frankfurt am Main 1982, Band V, edited by R. Tiedemann, p. 573 f.– ideology is objective appearance, manifestation in which what manifests becomes legible, understandable in the meaning of what is, ultimately, practical criticism of the relationship between the two. While that expression used to mean “not just beauty, but thought, spirit and language itself,” today “language” is something that tends to only “calculate, designate, reveal, and murder” – “it no longer expresses.”Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 302. This is analogous to thinking, the spirit, which lost the power of self-illumination – in linguistic theory, the sense of expression – with the reduction to the instrumental, that of self-preservation;“‘What we call ‘sense’ will disappear.’ Conversation with Max Horkheimer”, in: Der Spiegel, year 1970, No. 1/2.lost in the double meaning of a loss of the possibility of understanding oneself as expression, and thus of giving this loss expression.
While expression was once “vicarious suffering” – in the dimension of historical reflection of nature – this dimension shrinks to that of playing “with horror itself”;Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 302 f.that of the ideology that has slipped into the base. “Nature” becomes “ruin. Only the sophisticated force that survives is right. It is nature herself – the entire sophisticated machinery of modern industrial society is just nature tearing itself apart. There is no longer any medium that expresses this contradiction. It takes place with the stubborn seriousness of the world from which art, thought, and negativity have disappeared.”Ibid., p. 304.“What is dangerous to the prevailing practice is not nature, with which it actually coincides, but rather that nature is remembered.”Ibid., p. 305. Wherever this still happens, the effort of thinking finds expression for it, it proves the counterforce, however precarious, against that disappearance of expression. It must prove itself, on a knife’s edge, as an effort of interpretation – methodologically speaking, as a theory of expression in the decided sense that its expressive characters themselves become the key to its theoretical purpose: its ‘knowledge interested in emancipation’. One of the keys is the concept of expression as a mask.
The mask is not what hides, but conversely what reveals; ‘the being appears in the distortion.’Ibid., p. 298. This is the objective meaning of the expression, which remains obscured in the widely used concept of expression by the subjective meaning, which is precisely the accidental one, and which has had the most fatal effect in the misinterpretation of critical theory that supposedly corrects it or dismisses it as an expressive-aesthetic capitulation of thought. What is in the subjective expression, the accidental expression: imprint and form: in the subject and its expressive person, character mask in the strictly objective sense of the critique of political economy; what is in sensu stricto expression in the work, thing, product, artifact, be it a commodity, an aesthetic structure or an historical influence of whatever kind“Value transforms […] every product of labor into a social hieroglyph.” Karl Marx: Capital, edited by Karl Korsch, Vol. I, Berlin 1932, p. 86.– deciphering and fathoming this constitutes the effort of theory, of philosophy as interpretation, of a materialistic hermeneutics that unravels and reads the features, the traces, the engravings, the ciphers in the historically concrete,Cf. Theodor W. Adorno: “The Idea of Natural History”, in: Collected Works, edited by R. Tiedemann, Frankfurt am Main 1973, Band I, p. 345 ff.translates the silent language of nature and, with the translation, makes it a speaking one. Translated according to the way in which we make a foreign language eloquent in our own, precisely by preserving its signature, the thing -foreign to us, its character external, which we work on and which enriches our own language, so that with it something different, real – not just in nuance but in historical substance – emerges in the language we speak; provided that we are serious about translating.Cf. Walter Benjamin: “The Task of the Translator”, in: Collected Writings, with the collaboration of TW Adorno and G Scholem, edited by R Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, Volume IV, edited by T Rexroth, Frankfurt am Main 1972, p. 9 ff.
Through the problem of translation, we experience the double-sidedness of language itself: as an inner fluid medium of communication and comprehensibility – as meaning – and as an outer hard signature, as writing that has to be laboriously spelled out – as a meaning that has to be unraveled. At the same time, it becomes clear what a utopia of language would be: the Pentecost miracle of communication, in which comprehensibility and meaning merged – the hard idiomatic ciphers, whether mnemonic-intoned or hieroglyphic-silent, would be dissolved in the liquid medium of meaning. It would be the utopia of the name: the substantial unity of meaning and sign, ultimately of subject and object themselves, as both authors extrapolate in several places and with changing emphasis; the unity blocked by the given reality and from which something penetrates into the given reality as if through cracks. People have tried to interpret it as a secretly operating telos with all the effort of knowing, speaking and interpreting. In the Babylonian world of languages and ciphers, of gestures and signs, of symbols and signatures, which seal an internal sense within themselves and which cannot interpret themselves, it is the language of humanity that can unseal and help to understand the sealed meaning of the silent languages: provided that it is inherent in its own expressive character and thus in the schema mediating it and the foreign, the silent expressions.
It is the prerequisite of historically developed language, in which receptivity to matter and nature is, at the same time, receptivity to the thinking that grasps the difference of itself from matter and nature, an opposition each side developed themselves – a language that historical people shaped, just as they are shaped by it, which they use and which at the same time uses them, thereby revealing to them the purpose of its use in the light of which they think, speak and act. Only an un-mutilated language can provide the interpretative scheme that conveys the internally speaking, trans-lingually silent expressions – to which the un-mutilated human language itself belongs, in one element, and to the mutilated language, in its entirety – with the concept, its other element -, and makes this un-mutilated language readable, understandable: knowable in the light of rationality. To make it knowable then also means to become mature – the conceptual language itself is made mature: mature nature through the expression of women, the oppressed, art, protest and thought: mature through the man and the woman, the mature human being to be produced in sensu stricto, that is, the one who only emerges in the perspective of developed language.
The language-concept of critical theory aims at nothing more and nothing less, which may only now be ‘pragma-linguistically reformulated’. If this means seriously humanizing procedural questions that are committed to language and thinking and critically substantiating ‘internal differentiations’, critical theory can put up with it. Internal differentiations – the progression of determinate negation – which affect the attitude of knowledge, the use of language, and restructuring of practical behavior are in the spirit of critical theory. But if we mean the concept and procedures of speaking and thinking that are already affected in their core by reduced forms and standards, operations and procedures, with which they obey prevailing rationality and irrationality, and which, despite all the effort, lose the distinction between criticism and enforcement of that order, the desideratum is absurd. The weight of the objection, which accuses critical negation of the denunciation of consent, is, in fact, too heavy. “What connects people, when language designates the universal, is not so much that they allow themselves to be grasped again in their thoughts by the universal by which they are grasped in reality, but that they say what has power over all. In such a function, language alone shakes the walls between people, behind which the identical is distorted into the equality of the mutilated, into the uniformity of the dominated.”Horkheimer, “Trust in History”, p. 14.
If the discourse in communication should not postpone communication ad Calendas Graecas, should not pile up the ramparts instead of shaking them, communication in the function of the language that Horkheimer speaks of would have to prove itself in view of the procedures that are supposed to guarantee it in the first place – breaking down the consensus for the sake of language, rather than breaking language down for the sake of the consensus; this is also relevant for the idea of “communicative action”, which as a “theory” admits the antinomy in which emphatic practice remains entangled beyond recognition in the era of monopoly. “Blocked” at the point of knowability – but only if language, the expression of shared suffering, is what makes it knowable. If harmony is an illusion thrown over real contradictions, reconciliation is only indicated in the denunciation of harmony. That such denunciation becomes incomprehensible – in the double meaning of the offensive and the unclear articulation, which is summarized in the accusation of the unreasonable – is itself only the intelligibility, or index, of the expression of common suffering; of the identical distorted “into the sameness of the mutilated, into the uniformity of the dominated.”
Adorno exemplified the plight of responsible expression, which turns people against expression for the sake of the causes of people: “Language, as an expression of things, is not absorbed in communication, in communicating to others. But it is not entirely independent of communication. Otherwise it evaded any criticism of its relationship to the matter and reduced it to arbitrary pretense. Language as an expression of the thing and language as a message are interwoven. The ability to name the thing itself was formed by the compulsion to pass it on and preserves it, just as, conversely, it could not communicate anything that it did not have as its own intention, undistracted by further consideration. Such dialectics take place in its own medium and is not just the fall from grace as it is called by the inhumane social zealotry that ensures nothing is thought that cannot be communicated. Even the most honest linguistic procedure cannot eliminate the antagonism between in-itself and for-others. This is made more difficult by the historical moment, in which the communication dictated by the market – symptomatically the replacement of linguistic theory by communication theory – places such a burden on language that, in order to resist the conformity of what positivism calls ‘everyday language’, it inevitably terminates communication.”Theodor W. Adorno: “Skoteinos or how to read”, in: Three Studies on Hegel, Frankfurt am Main 1963, p. 122 f.
This is no less true in view of the regulated and purified languages – principally the systematized expressions or ‘grammars’ of social-natural currents and linguistic conventions in the form of their own purified, ‘transcendental’ norm, which brings them to their adequate concept -, such languages that rationalize the expression of ‘everyday life’, i.e. the complex of ‘system’ and ‘lifeworld’, in accordance with the overall social functionalization of the forms of existence and under their objective constraints. No expression can escape this compulsion; it itself also produces the termination of communication. It is the counter-reaction of expression that resists disappearing in the rationalized – a dialectical figure of speaking language against language, of holding on to its intention rather than its silence. Both authors have stuck to it, trusting in a language in which thought and expression are not cut off by language. The medium of such a language, threatened internally and externally – and never historically unthreatened -, was the medium from which both minds wrested expression – the one that things and people long for and which they always persistently refuse in the state of bewitchment between language and things.
§III.
Finally, let me point out some questions of linguistic presentation induced by this visualization of the language problem and how their overcoming is attempted in the oeuvre of both authors. – One of the initial conditions, as mercilessly imposed on thinking and formulating by the era, is the silent contradiction of the present, roughly – and increasingly – in the form that “the entire sophisticated machinery of modern industrial society is just nature” that is “tearing itself apart.”Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 304. Muteness would have to be given expression. But that expression would not be a saying, not a formula – not the name that can be found “in isolated words and sentences,”Horkheimer, Critique of Instrumental Reason, p. 167.which the diverse new irrationalism nevertheless believes itself to be in possession of with all its powerless and suggestive gestures of incantation (linguistic ones above all). The expression sought is rather the “knowledge” that has been bored into individual realities through “conscious effort” and connected “into a linguistic structure.”Ibid. The effort of thinking, working through the matter itself, and differentiating predication receptive to language are all intertwined, so that every moment of the articulation process is present with the others and through them, the context can be called knowledge, the knowledge an expression of what has been known: the “right name” of things.Ibid. It would be a piece of developed truth, and not simply a given one – it would be the truth that can be put together from right names, that is, only negatively, with undistracted intention. We are not allowed to say the absolute positively – the individual in its historical determination, in the “predicament of nature,”Ibid.the deteriorization reflected thereby, the limited and oppressed, misery and need themselves, which point beyond themselves, remain to be addressed by the right name, which is nothing other than the expression of the limited in the light of its pointing beyond itself.
If it is to be heard, ‘adequate description’ is indispensable – the micrological, physiognomizing process that does not grasp something linguistically until it has been grasped by it and it by language. Formulation, the expression of thinking, depends in what it says on the person who is thinking about it. This only succeeds if formulation, language in actu, gives in to the trait of language through which it is a “presentation,”Adorno, Negative Dialectics, quoted from: Tiedemann, p. 69.a representation of what is said in it. It is no coincidence that both authors used the idiom of dialectical philosophy and theory – the most reflective, most advanced – especially in Hegel’s thought, the problem of language becomes apparent: thinking, contemplation, presenting, the expressive power of language, differentiating, negating predication, all of which constitute the theory in its medium, form the elements of its own theoretical articulation. With that idiom they learned what logical negation is in its linguistic manifestation: specifically, the objection, contradiction, that the subject contributes, and that in the objective, factually determined sense in which dialectics is called ‘organized spirit of contradiction’.
But what is organized can also be explained by the linguistic means through which the objection occurs – specifically by the canon of forms that a developed language provides and which is differentiated beyond any theoretical idiom in the narrower sense; being found also in literary ones, which can only appear untheoretical due to the cultural division of labor, but not in terms of the matter itself, the authentic expression – just as, conversely, theory and philosophy appear to be completely separated from the sphere of expression. Precisely for the sake of the matter itself, for the sake of expression, both authors did not respect the industrial-intellectual division of labor and made use of that differentiated canon of forms; such specific forms of expression of the European Enlightenment, whose name says what has not expired – but then also forms such as the essay, aphorism and fragment, polemic and dialogue, the sober presentation with the power of revealing objections, the ur-philosophical gesture, of standing firm in the name of the truth and of forcing those who continue to talk and argue to pause. An appeal is made by force of the matter itself: an accusation in which the complaint of the oppressed is intended to be made clear.
In this sense, one could say that the authors’ texts simulate speech in writing – a model of communication that is intended to ensure binding, authenticity by force of the matter itself, through writing, communication and understanding. If the style – the linguistic physiognomy of thinking devoted to the matter itself – is criticized for what is incomprehensible about Adorno’s expression, then this is precisely due to the fact that today speech and counter-speech, hearing and being heard, the illuminating and penetrating form of conversation itself, are disappearing socially – and with it also the metamorphosis of such speech and counter-speech, the form of reading with its susceptibility to the readability of the unwritten – and that therefore the character of such speech simulated in writing can no longer be identified. The situation is similar with the brittle texture of Horkheimer’s texts – apart from those that followed the common speech of empirical people divided according to subjects, departments and interests, which spoke to the hidden community within them and in which he was master. Those other texts of Horkheimer’s with such brittle texture, a kind of severe dispensation, the shortest connection between the thought and the thing, which leaves no room for linguistic excess – primarily terminological and methodological – on the one hand and for factual pedantry on the other; the sober, unvarnished, even merciless nature of these texts, which Schmidt emphasized in the structure of later writings,Schmidt: “Max Horkheimer’s Spiritual Physiognomy”, p. 111repels casual reception no less than the conceptual-linguistic expressive movement of the differential transitions in Adorno.
In either case, it requires perseverance and listening to a theorist who thought with his ears: for both of them a concentrated receptivity, which in turn helped them to get to the bottom of things. Both theorists – in view of the patterns that appear before their listening, reading, speaking and thinking, which increasingly sink into each theorist until they take their place – harbored no illusions about the addressee, and, indeed, spoke first of all to imaginary recipients of the text, those imaginary readers who alone have remained the potential readers because the text before them is readable to them; those who can still absorb the text and the speech made objective by it, and as long as other people like themselves have not disappeared. The dialectic in objectification itself provides hope. The all-objectifying violence of the process also delivers the instruments of objectification to everyone: “Language, weapons, machines,” “which should seize everyone,” “must allow themselves to be seized by everyone.”
In this way, the element of rationality asserts itself in domination as something different from it. The objectivity of the means, which makes it universally available, its ‘objectivity’ for everyone, implies the criticism of domination, as the means of which thought arose” – still in the late, concessionless thought of each theorist.Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 51. If the writing preserves it, in the distance between the text and the speech that speaks in it, seemingly inhumanely, in a concentrated manner, then it keeps people bound through opening this distance. Readers retaliate badly – giving in to “equalizing ideology that everyone understands because they don’t think anything of it,”Max Horkheimer: Critical Theory. A Documentation, edited by A Schmidt, Band II, Frankfurt am Main 1968, p. 199.and in which the idea of the “dependence of all conditions controllable by man on real agreement” disappearedIbid. p. 198.– to the thought of independents, to which these poorly- or mis-understood texts testify. If these texts are written in the unwavering thought of ‘real democracy and association’, in the awareness of the “degree of development of socialization” that is only laboriously obscured by the pseudo-democratic forms,Ibid.hen this is precisely why their appeal should not go unnoticed by those who have gained a piece of freedom, however precarious. Using those texts on the path of least resistance – that of a freedom to one’s own lack of freedom -, means to give in to the resistance that lives in those rigorous texts. For their part, such texts express an objectively possible change for the better. According to the old word, writing is the grave of speech, from which it remains to be resurrected – in communication. And so it would be, if it were brought to life through the historical sense that writing preserves in terms such as communio, the Commune, and communism as the kingdom of freedom.
