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Reading Adorno: Language, Mimesis, and Constellation

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1. Why Is Adorno Difficult to Read? Why would a philosophy concerned with society and its transformation make itself so difficult to read? In a conversation with Herbert Marcuse about the Frankfurt School, Bryan Magee raised the difficulty of Theodor W. Adorno’s writing, observing that some passages seemed extraordinarily dense, sometimes almost unintelligible. Although acknowledging the intellectual stature of the school’s members, Magee wondered why their work should be so much harder to follow than that of philosophers who managed to combine complex ideas with clarity and accessibility. Marcuse partly accepted the criticism but suggested that the difficulty might have philosophical significance. Ordinary language, he argued, had become permeated by the established social order, expressing its patterns of thought even when speakers were unaware of them. A critical philosophy that simply adopted familiar forms of expression might therefore reproduce some of the conformity it sough...
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Larger than the Elephant: Adorno and the Art of Thinking in Constellations

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The Elephants, Dalí. Source: Wilipedia I. The Elephant and the Problem of Perspective In the familiar parable of the blind men and the elephant, several men encounter an animal they cannot see. One touches its trunk and describes something like a snake; another feels a leg and compares it to a tree trunk; a third touches an ear and imagines a fan. Each describes something he has genuinely encountered, yet their accounts differ because each has experienced only part of the animal. The story is often told to remind us that our understanding of reality depends on the perspective from which we approach it. What appears to be a complete description may reflect only a limited encounter, leaving other aspects beyond our awareness. The parable nevertheless raises a further problem. If the men are all in contact with the same animal, how might their different descriptions contribute to an understanding of what they have encountered together? Recognizing that each man’s knowledge is partial ...
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Constellation: From Benjamin to Adorno

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1. The Problem: Why Does Adorno Need a Constellation? Philosophy cannot simply do without concepts. Whenever we try to understand something, we identify it as something: an event, an object, a historical process, a social relation. Concepts make such identification possible. Yet as soon as a particular is identified through a general term, a difficulty arises. What is singular about the thing may disappear from view. A concept tells us what an object has in common with other things that fall under the same category, but it does not necessarily capture what is distinctive about this particular one. This creates a tension at the heart of philosophical thought. On one side lies subsumption . If thought relies exclusively on universal concepts, individual things risk being treated merely as instances of a general rule. The particular becomes intelligible by being placed under something more general, but in the process what does not fit that generality may be overlooked. Thought gains o...
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What a Constellation Reveals: Adorno, Language, and the Limits of Concepts

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I. Understanding the Procedure 1. What Conceptual Classification Leaves Out To understand something, we generally begin by identifying what kind of thing it is. We recognize a tree as a tree, a tool as a tool, or an activity as work by identifying characteristics that allow us to distinguish one thing from another. Concepts make this possible: they organize experience, establish distinctions, and provide a basis for knowledge. Without them, the world would remain difficult to recognize and understand. Yet identifying something through a concept involves selecting certain properties as relevant. A tree can be classified by its species, shape, or biological characteristics, but these determinations do not necessarily capture what makes this particular tree what it is: its history, its place in a landscape, or the significance it acquires through its relations with other things. The classification may be correct while leaving aspects of the individual object unexpressed. This dist...
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