Abstract
Richard Rorty’s idea of a postmetaphysical or poeticized culture has never been discussed in connection with the work of Theodor W. Adorno. In general, a discussion of the differences and similarities between these two philosophers is still a desideratum. In this chapter, Schulenberg clarifies whether Adorno’s thought has contributed to the establishment of a poeticized culture. This also implies the question of whether it is possible to call Adorno an antifoundationalist theoretician. The analysis is divided into two parts. First, Schulenberg discusses Adorno’s critique of prima philosophia and of the traditional concept of philosophical truth. Analyzing Adorno’s idea of aesthetic form, as well as his conception of the truth content of the artwork as one of the most important terms of his aesthetic thought, Schulenberg argues in the second part that Adorno does not radically reject the traditional notion of philosophical truth, but rather develops a reconstructed version of it. The link that he establishes between aesthetic form and truth cannot be found in Rorty’s thinking. Consequently, Adorno’s thought complicates the idea of an antifoundationalist narrative of progress and emancipation.
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Notes
- 1.
Marcel speaks, for instance, of “the falseness of so-called realist art, which would not be so untruthful if we had not in life acquired the habit of giving to what we feel a form of expression which differs so much from, and which we nevertheless after a little time take to be, reality itself” (2000: 235). Further below in the text, he critiques realist literature even more radically: “And this is why the kind of literature which contents itself with ‘describing things,’ with giving of them merely a miserable abstract of lines and surfaces, is in fact, though it calls itself realist, the furthest removed from reality and has more than any other the effect of saddening and impoverishing us, since it abruptly severs all communication of our present self both with the past, the essence of which is preserved in things, and with the future, in which things incite us to enjoy the essence of the past a second time. Yet it is precisely this essence that an art worthy of the name must seek to express; then at least, if it fails, there is a lesson to be drawn from its impotence (whereas from the successes of realism there is nothing to be learnt), the lesson that this essence is, in part, subjective and incommunicable” (2000: 241–242).
- 2.
For an illuminating discussion of Proust’s use of metaphor (or “metaphorische Transposition”), see the chapter “Die entzauberte Welt: Flaubert, Zola, Proust” in Peter Bürger, Prosa der Moderne (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1987), 275–300, especially 289–300.
- 3.
In “Part One: On the Prejudices of Philosophers” in Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche attacks metaphysics as foundationalist thought. The parallels with Rorty’s version of pragmatism are obvious: “[…] the things of the highest values must have another origin of their own—they cannot be derivable from this transitory, seductive, deceptive, mean little world, from this confusion of desire and illusion! In the womb of being, rather, in the intransitory, in the hidden god, in the ‘thing in itself’—that is where their cause must lie and nowhere else!’ This mode of judgement constitutes the typical prejudice by which metaphysicians of all ages can be recognized; this mode of evaluation stands in the background of all their logical procedures; it is on account of this their ‘faith’ that they concern themselves with their ‘knowledge’, with something that is at last solemnly baptized ‘the truth’” (2003: 33–34). For a detailed discussion of the Rortyan idea of a literary or poeticized culture, see the chapter “Richard Rorty’s Notion of a Poeticized Culture” in Ulf Schulenberg, Romanticism and Pragmatism: Richard Rorty and the Idea of a Poeticized Culture (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 31–41.
- 4.
In this context, see Ulf Schulenberg, “Auf der Suche nach den finsteren und fensterlosen Hauptquartieren: Adorno in der Postmoderne,” Diskursanalyse: Theorien, Methoden, Anwendungen, ed. Johannes Angermüller et al. (Hamburg: Argument, 2001), 209–221.
- 5.
In this context, see Andrew Bowie, “Adorno, Pragmatism, and Aesthetic Relativism,” Revue internationale de philosophie, Vol. 227, No. 1 (2004): 25–45; and Tom Rockmore, “Is Marx a Pragmatist?,” Pragmatism Today, Vol. 7, No. 2 (2016): 24–32.
- 6.
Peter Bürger’s attempt to show the limitations of Adorno’s modern aesthetic theory, without counting him among the postmodern theorists avant la lettre, still deserves our attention. Bürger continues the argument he developed in Theorie der Avantgarde (1974) in Das Altern der Moderne: Schriften zur bildenden Kunst (Frankfurt am Main. Suhrkamp, 2001); see especially the first two essays: “Das Altern der Moderne” (10–30) and “Der Anti-Avantgardismus in der Ästhetik Adornos” (31–47).
- 7.
See Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). In addition, see Michael Ryan, Marxism and Deconstruction: A Critical Articulation (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1982).
- 8.
For a detailed discussion of the Adornian and Benjaminian notion of constellation, see Jameson’s Late Marxism: Adorno, or, The Persistence of the Dialectic (New York: Verso, 1990), 49–58; and Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute (New York: The Free Press, 1977), 90–95.
- 9.
In this context, see Peter Bürger, “Über den Essay: Ein Brief an Malte Fues,” Das Denken des Herrn: Bataille zwischen Hegel und dem Surrealismus (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992), 7–14. In addition, see the interesting chapter “The Dialectic of the Scriptible: Barthes and Adorno” in Steven Helmling, The Success and Failure of Fredric Jameson: Writing, the Sublime, and the Dialectic of Critique (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2001), 21–46; and Jan Philipp Reemtsma, “Der Traum von der Ich-Ferne: Adornos literarische Aufsätze”; Dialektik der Freiheit: Frankfurter Adorno-Konferenz 2003, ed. Axel Honneth (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005), 318–362.
- 10.
For a discussion of Adorno’s aesthetic theory, the following volume is still particularly valuable: Burkhardt Lindner and W. Martin Lüdke, ed., Materialien zur ästhetischen Theorie Th. W. Adornos: Konstruktion der Moderne (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980). See also Albrecht Wellmer, The Persistence of Modernity (Malden, MA: Polity, 1991).
- 11.
See, for instance, Jameson’s Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, The Seeds of Time (New York: Columbia UP, 1994), and The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–1998 (New York: Verso, 1998). In this context, see also Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity (New York: Verso, 1998); and the chapter “From the Consumer Society to Postmodernism” in Douglas Kellner, Critical Theory, Marxism, and Modernity (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1989), 146–175.
- 12.
In this context, see David Jenemann, Adorno in America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). In addition, see Martin Jay, “Adorno in Amerika,” Adorno-Konferenz 1983, ed. Ludwig von Friedeburg and Jürgen Habermas (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983), 354–387.
- 13.
For interesting discussions of Adorno’s idea of the truth content of the artwork, see the chapter “Contradiction as Truth-Content: Adorno and Kant” in Andrew Bowie, Adorno and the Ends of Philosophy (Malden, MA: Polity, 2013), 38–53; and Jameson, Late Marxism, 220–225.
- 14.
In this context, see Adorno, Metaphysics: Concepts and Problems and my Conclusion. See also Max Horkheimer, “Materialism and Metaphysics” in Critical Theory: Selected Essays, 10–46.
- 15.
For a discussion of Adorno’s metaphysics, see Brian O’Connor, Adorno, 86–109; and the chapter “Materialism and Metaphysics” in Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction (Malden, MA: Polity, 1998), 193–216. In this context, see also Alfred Schmidt, “Begriff des Materialismus bei Adorno,” Adorno-Konferenz 1983, ed. Ludwig von Friedeburg and Jürgen Habermas (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983), 14–34.
- 16.
In a famous passage at the beginning of Negative Dialectics, Adorno establishes a clear opposition between traditional metaphysics and contemporary philosophy’s interest in particularity, nonconceptuality, and transitory signs: “The matters of true philosophical interest at this point in history are those in which Hegel, agreeing with tradition, expressed his disinterest. They are nonconceptuality, individuality, and particularity—things which ever since Plato used to be discussed as transitory and insignificant, and which Hegel labeled ‘lazy Existenz’” (2007: 8). In “Materialism and Metaphysics,” Horkheimer contends that “[m]aterialism, unlike idealism, always understands thinking to be the thinking of particular men within a particular period of time. It challenges every claim to the autonomy of thought” (1999: 32). Regarding Adorno’s understanding of particularity and contingency, see also his “Short Commentaries on Proust,” Notes to Literature, Vol. 1, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia UP, 1991), 174–184.
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Schulenberg, U. (2019). “Kunst hat soviel Chance wie die Form”: Theodor W. Adorno and the Idea of a Poeticized Culture. In: Marxism, Pragmatism, and Postmetaphysics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11560-9_4
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