Between Sign and Image: Adorno on Communication, Expression, and Non-Identity

1. The Problem of Language

Language enables us to identify objects, describe situations, and communicate our experiences to others. Through words and concepts, we establish distinctions and make aspects of the world intelligible. These operations are indispensable to knowledge, yet they raise a question about the relation between our descriptions and what they describe. When a concept allows us to recognize something and communicate our understanding of it, what happens to the features that do not fit within its established meaning? The categories we employ direct attention towards certain aspects of an object while leaving others unarticulated, so that a description can be informative without being exhaustive.

Theodor W. Adorno investigates this difficulty within a broader critique of modern thought. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, written with Max Horkheimer, he examines how the pursuit of rational knowledge becomes intertwined with the desire to make nature predictable and controllable. Their critique also raises a problem concerning language: the means through which reality becomes intelligible shape our relation to what we seek to know. To understand this problem, we must examine how language functions within rational thought and what happens when its established forms of intelligibility are treated as sufficient.

2. Language as Sign and Image

In “The Concept of Enlightenment,” Horkheimer and Adorno connect the development of rational knowledge with a transformation in the relationship between human beings and nature. Enlightenment seeks to overcome fear by making the world intelligible, replacing dependence on unknown forces with knowledge that enables prediction and control. Classification and generalization become essential to this project because they allow phenomena to be compared, explained, and brought under general rules. Yet this achievement comes at a cost when whatever cannot be registered or calculated loses its standing as a legitimate object of knowledge.

Their discussion of language brings this tension into focus through the distinction between sign and image. As a sign, language serves identification and calculation, allowing something to be distinguished and incorporated into an ordered system. As an image, it retains a relation to likeness and representation. Horkheimer and Adorno write: “As sign, language must resign itself to calculation; to know nature, it must renounce the claim to resemble her. As image, it must resign itself to being a likeness; to be wholly nature, it must renounce the claim to know nature” (2002, p. 13).

The passage belongs to their wider critique of the separation between conceptual knowledge and mimesis. Scientific knowledge depends on distinctions and procedures that make phenomena intelligible, whereas mimetic relations involve a responsiveness to the world that cannot be fully captured by classification. The problem arises when these possibilities become divided into separate domains and calculative knowledge claims exclusive authority over what counts as understanding.

Horkheimer and Adorno do not offer a simple choice between signs and images. Their formulation exposes the predicament created by the separation itself: language cannot simply abandon calculation in favour of resemblance, since likeness alone does not provide knowledge. Yet calculation becomes impoverished when it excludes other ways of relating to nature. Their critique concerns the historical narrowing of experience that occurs when one mode of intelligibility becomes the measure of all others.

This diagnosis raises a further question about philosophical language: how does the articulation of meaning relate to the experience that a particular formulation seeks to express?

3. Communication and Expression

Philip Hogh’s Communication and Expression provides a framework for examining the relation between linguistic meaning and the demands placed on philosophical language. Communication makes thought available to others, allowing claims to be discussed, challenged, and assessed. Yet a philosophical statement cannot always be adequately understood by extracting its informational content. Its meaning also depends on the choice of terms, their relations to one another, and the way the argument develops through their formulation.

Expression draws attention to this constitutive role of language. The wording of a philosophical claim participates in what it means, since the associations of its terms and their relations within an argument shape the thought being articulated. A paraphrase may preserve the basic information conveyed by a statement while losing something of its conceptual movement or emphasis. Expression therefore concerns the particular form through which meaning becomes available, rather than an inward experience that remains inaccessible to communication.

Adorno’s “Theses on the Language of the Philosopher” adds a historical dimension to this problem. Philosophical language inherits words whose meanings have developed through particular intellectual and social histories. Terms arrive with established associations that affect how they can be used and what they allow a thinker to articulate. Philosophical writing must therefore work through its linguistic inheritance: the choice and arrangement of words help shape the content of thought rather than merely recording ideas formed independently of language.

Communication and expression thus identify related but distinct aspects of philosophical language. Communication concerns the articulation of meaning that can be shared; expression directs attention to how that meaning takes shape in a particular formulation. This distinction does not simply reproduce the opposition between sign and image, although both discussions challenge the assumption that language can be understood through a single function.

The difficulty becomes especially significant when philosophical language seeks to articulate something that its inherited terms do not adequately capture. Adorno’s account of non-identity helps explain why this difficulty arises and why it cannot be resolved simply by making our descriptions more precise.

4. Non-Identity and Mimesis

In Negative Dialectics, Adorno challenges the assumption that knowledge is complete when an object has been brought under a general concept. Concepts allow us to identify, compare, and explain what we encounter, but they do so by selecting characteristics through which the object becomes intelligible. Those characteristics may be relevant without exhausting what the object is. Adorno’s notion of non-identity names the discrepancy between an object and the conceptual identity through which thought comprehends it.

This discrepancy informs his insistence on the priority of the object. Thought does not determine its object entirely from its own resources; it responds to something that can resist its expectations and expose the inadequacy of its categories. The priority of the object does not imply access to a reality untouched by thought, since knowledge always involves conceptual mediation. Rather, it requires concepts to remain answerable to what they seek to understand and open to revision when their explanatory reach proves insufficient.

Mimesis helps illuminate the kind of responsiveness this demand involves. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno examine the repression and transformation of mimetic impulses in the development of civilization; in Aesthetic Theory, Adorno explores the significance of mimesis for art. Across these contexts, mimesis cannot be reduced to literal imitation or treated as an immediate route to reality beyond thought. It points towards a relation in which the subject becomes receptive to what it encounters, allowing the object to affect its response rather than simply imposing established categories upon it.

This bears directly on the problem of language. Naming and description make objects intelligible, but they can also obscure features that do not fit an established conceptual identity. Non-identity reveals the limits of such determinations, while mimesis raises the question of how thought might become more responsive to what they leave unresolved. Neither guarantees that language will adequately express its object. Together, however, they clarify why accurate identification and successful communication cannot, by themselves, serve as complete measures of philosophical understanding.

How, then, can thought investigate an object without allowing any single conceptual determination to settle its meaning? Adorno’s account of constellation offers a way to pursue this question.

5. Thinking in Constellations: A Case Study

In Negative Dialectics, Adorno presents constellation as a way of approaching an object through the relations among concepts. Rather than assuming that one definition can adequately capture what something is, thought brings different determinations into a configuration whose relations disclose aspects that an isolated concept might leave obscure. The aim is not simply to accumulate descriptions, but to let their interaction reveal tensions and connections that alter our understanding of the object.

We can apply this approach to the problem of philosophical language by relating expression, non-identity, and mimesis. Expression draws attention to the particular linguistic form through which meaning develops. Non-identity explains why that formulation cannot be presumed to exhaust its object. Mimesis raises the question of how thought might remain receptive to features that established concepts fail to accommodate. Considered together, these concepts modify one another’s significance: expression becomes philosophically consequential because what is articulated may exceed its formulation; non-identity exposes the limits of conceptual articulation; and mimesis directs attention towards the responsiveness those limits demand.

This configuration connects the form in which thought becomes intelligible with the limits of its claims and the possibility of a more receptive relation to its object. The concepts remain distinct, yet their relations allow us to investigate how philosophical language might acknowledge the limits of identification without abandoning conceptual thought.

This is our interpretive construction, inspired by Adorno’s account of constellation rather than a configuration he explicitly formulates in these terms. Its validity depends on whether the texts support the connections and whether those connections illuminate the problem under investigation. Constellatory reading therefore requires close textual analysis: the relations among concepts must be demonstrated rather than assumed.

6. What Language Can—and Cannot—Do

Adorno’s philosophy of language brings the limits of conceptual thought into view by examining how meaning is articulated, communicated, and related to its object. Communication makes philosophical claims available for discussion, while expression draws attention to the particular formulations through which thought takes shape. Non-identity shows why neither successful articulation nor conceptual identification guarantees that an object has been fully understood; mimesis raises the possibility of a more receptive relation to what established categories leave unresolved.

Constellatory thinking extends this insight into a method of interpretation. By examining how concepts qualify and illuminate one another, we can develop a more differentiated understanding without treating any single definition as exhaustive. Philosophical language remains indispensable to knowledge, but its critical force depends on its capacity to examine its own limitations and remain responsive to what its formulations do not fully capture.

References

Adorno, T. W. (1973). Negative dialectics (E. B. Ashton, Trans.). Seabury Press. (Original work published 1966)

Adorno, T. W. (1997). Aesthetic theory (R. Hullot-Kentor, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press.

Adorno, T. W. (2007). Theses on the language of the philosopher. In D. Burke, C. J. Campbell, K. Kiloh, M. Palamarek, & J. Short (Eds.), Adorno and the need in thinking: New critical essays (pp. 35–40). University of Toronto Press.

Hogh, P. (2017). Communication and expression: Adorno’s philosophy of language (A. Hofstätter, Trans.). Rowman & Littlefield.

Horkheimer, M., & Adorno, T. W. (2002). Dialectic of enlightenment: Philosophical fragments (E. Jephcott, Trans.). Stanford University Press. (Original work published 1944)