Larger than the Elephant: Adorno and the Art of Thinking in Constellations
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| The Elephants, Dalí. Source: Wilipedia |
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 does not explain how his experience relates to the others.
The difficulty concerns how we move from individual encounters towards an understanding of the object they describe. Each man can report what he has felt, but his experience alone does not establish how that feature relates to the animal as a whole.
To explore this problem, we can turn from the elephant to something more familiar: a book. Its different dimensions are readily accessible, yet describing them separately may leave important connections unexplained.
II. What Is a Book?
Consider a book. An editor may approach it in terms of production, publication, and distribution; a designer may attend to its typography, layout, format, and visual composition; a reader may focus on its content and the experience of reading; a chemist may investigate the composition of its paper, inks, and adhesives. Each inquiry selects properties relevant to its particular purpose.
These descriptions can coexist without contradiction. An analysis of the paper’s chemical composition does not invalidate an account of the book’s literary content, just as an examination of its design need not conflict with an explanation of its publication. Each approach can provide reliable knowledge within its own field, revealing a different dimension of the same thing.
Yet their compatibility does not explain how these dimensions are connected in a particular edition. Its format, for instance, might reflect printing costs, assumptions about its intended readership, or the circumstances in which it was expected to circulate. Establishing such connections would require investigating the edition and the conditions surrounding its production.
Understanding a book therefore involves more than assembling accurate descriptions of its properties. We also need to investigate how those properties relate to one another and what their connections reveal about the particular book. This leads to a more fundamental issue: how does the general category through which we identify something shape what we are able to understand about it?
III. What a Concept Leaves Out
For Theodor W. Adorno, this issue concerns the role concepts play in thought. We recognize something as a book by bringing it under a general category that allows us to identify it and distinguish it from other things. Concepts make communication and knowledge possible because they enable us to organize experience and identify common features among different things.
The category book, for example, encompasses novels, scientific treatises, illustrated volumes, religious texts, and countless other publications. It tells us something meaningful about each of them, while leaving their particular histories, material characteristics, and uses undetermined. This selectivity is essential to conceptual thought: a category must apply to different instances to function as a general concept. The difficulty arises when the identification it provides is treated as a complete account of the particular thing.
Adorno’s critique of conceptual identity addresses the tendency to regard an object as though it were fully captured by the concept under which it falls. A concept establishes what something is in general terms, but the particular may possess characteristics that those terms fail to express adequately. Adorno calls attention to this tension through the idea of nonidentity: what something is cannot be exhausted by what thought determines it to be.
This does not mean that things lie wholly beyond understanding or that concepts should be abandoned. We need concepts to identify and investigate what we encounter, yet the particular can reveal inadequacies in the categories through which we understand it. Thought must remain responsive to what its existing concepts leave unexplained.
Adorno’s concept of constellation develops this possibility. Rather than relying on a single conceptual determination, thought can bring several relevant determinations into relation in an effort to understand the particular more adequately.
IV. Thinking in Constellations
A constellation places concepts and determinations in a configuration whose significance depends on what their relations allow us to understand. Identifying something establishes a category; listing its properties records what we know about it. Thinking in constellations involves a further step: examining how selected features illuminate one another and contribute to a more adequate understanding of the particular.
Consider a book with handwritten annotations, folded pages, and visible signs of wear. These features provide clues about its history, although their significance is initially uncertain. An annotation may respond to a passage, a folded page may mark a section of interest, and a worn cover may indicate extensive handling. None of these features alone establishes how the book was used or what it meant to a previous owner.
To investigate further, we might examine the annotations in relation to the passages they accompany, compare the marked pages with the book’s contents, and identify the edition. Information about previous ownership or the circumstances in which the volume circulated could add further context. If several annotations concern a recurring topic, their distribution throughout the text might support an interpretation of the reader’s interests. Such a conclusion would remain tentative, since the marks could have other explanations and the available evidence might not establish who made them or when.
The value of this investigation lies in the way its findings begin to qualify one another. A comment can be interpreted more precisely in light of the passage beside it, while the distribution of several comments may suggest a pattern that no single annotation reveals. The physical condition of the volume and any available historical information can further shape that interpretation. What emerges is a more specific account of this copy, grounded in connections among its textual, material, and historical features.
This is the kind of movement Adorno’s concept of constellation helps us understand. The aim is not to connect everything that can be associated with an object, but to arrange relevant determinations so that their relationship clarifies something significant about it. The configuration must answer to the particular under investigation; otherwise, it remains a collection of descriptions or an arbitrary set of associations.
In Negative Dialectics, Adorno writes: “Solely constellations represent, from without, what the concept has cut away from within.” The formulation captures the distinctive purpose of this approach. By gathering concepts around the thing to be understood, thought can bring into view aspects that a single conceptual determination leaves unexpressed. The result is a more differentiated understanding of the particular, achieved through the relations among its determinations rather than through the application of one general category alone.
V. What the Constellation Can—and Cannot—Do
The constellation provides an orientation for inquiry, but it does not guarantee the adequacy of the interpretations it produces. Its methodological difficulty lies in deciding which determinations are relevant, which connections deserve attention, and how much explanatory weight a particular configuration can bear.
These decisions require judgment. Evidence and argument can support an interpretation, while objections or new information may expose weaknesses in it. Another configuration may account for the available material more convincingly, prompting us to revise our earlier conclusions. Adorno’s proposal encourages this kind of investigation, but it does not supply an automatic procedure for settling every interpretive dispute.
That limitation does not make all interpretations equally persuasive. A configuration may establish connections that clarify its subject and remain consistent with the available evidence; another may rely on arbitrary associations or draw conclusions that its evidence cannot sustain. We can examine these differences and give reasons for preferring one interpretation over another without claiming that a definitive test will resolve every disagreement.
The constellation thus directs thought towards a more adequate understanding while leaving the evaluation of particular interpretations open to argument and revision. Its promise depends on the quality of the inquiry, not on a guarantee built into the method itself.
VI. Beyond the Impasse
The blind men and the elephant illustrate the difficulty of understanding something through partial encounters. Adorno’s constellation offers a way to approach that difficulty by investigating how different determinations contribute to an account of the particular thing they describe.
The resulting knowledge need not be complete to be meaningful. Interpretations can be more or less adequate, depending on the connections they establish and the evidence they can explain. Their incompleteness gives inquiry a continuing task rather than making understanding impossible.
Thinking in constellations allows us to approach a particular without treating a single conceptual description as the final word on what it is.
References
Adorno, T. W. (1973). Negative dialectics (E. B. Ashton, Trans.). Seabury Press. (Original work published 1966).
Jarvis, S. (1998). Adorno: A critical introduction. Routledge.
Kaufmann, D. (2000). Correlations, constellations and the truth: Adorno’s ontology of redemption. Philosophy & Social Criticism, 26(5), 62–80.
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