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Thinking the Object: Peirce’s Signs and Adorno’s Constellations

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1. Thinking and Its Object We understand reality through signs and concepts. Signs allow us to investigate events, formulate hypotheses, and communicate findings; concepts enable us to identify objects and establish relations among them. Yet the means through which we understand something also shape what we are able to recognize about it. How, then, can thought work through its representations while remaining responsive to the reality they are intended to disclose? Charles Sanders Peirce and Theodor W. Adorno approach this problem from different philosophical traditions. Peirce examines how signs participate in reasoning and scientific inquiry, while Adorno investigates the limitations of conceptual identification. Their respective notions of marshalling of signs and constellation of concepts offer a way to explore a common concern: how the relations among the elements of thought contribute to understanding an object. Their approaches nevertheless differ in emphasis. Peirce focus...
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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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