The Memory of the Mime: Adorno's Paradoxical Subject more

The memory of the mime: critical theory’s gestures towards the future. Every now and again a biographical titbit achieves such an impossible degree of poetic veracity that it leaves behind the pedestrian and inherently mendacious realm of the anecdote and takes on some of the dignity of apocrypha. Exemplary amongst such hopefully dubious biographical apotheoses is the story of the meeting between Theodor Adorno and Charlie Chaplin in Malibu. The great dialectician who compared Hitler to a cross between suburban barber and King Kong meets, and is mimicked, by a man who not only performed a wonderful, demystifying mimesis of the Great Dictator, but who also gave Hitler a nemesis in the form of a Jewish barber whose similar haircut and moustache, belied the latter’s ultimate non-identity and thus ability to oppose his fascist double. This is the story: At a cocktail party in around 1946, Adorno is introduced to “2-time academy award-winning” actor Harold Russell. Adorno reaches out his hand, which is then greeted by the claw-tipped prosthetic arm bestowed on Russel by the war. Adorno we imagine half aborts a sudden jerking back his hand, but his face remains set in what, by his own description, is a ‘ghastly’ grimace -- the stillborn child of his initial horror, unsuccessfully mutated into a polite smile. No sooner has 1 this little drama unfolded than Adorno realises that Chaplin is quote “playing back the scene” unquote to the delight of all assembled and Adorno in particular. The story, recounted by Adorno in an essay in Ohne Leitbild, has two major sources in English. The first, in the Yale Journal Of Criticism, opens with what its author seems to regard as a typically bleak quote from Minima Moralia. The quote putatively on the “impossibility” of humour in dark times is then juxtaposed with Adorno’s delight with Chaplin’s comic talent, a move which places the essay in what Adorno would have called the ‘belated’ genre that suggests that rumours of his stodginess have been greatly exaggerated. The second major source is Jürgen Habermas’s “Philosophical Political Profile” of his former mentor, which Habermas opens with the Chaplin story. Although it is almost identical to Adorno’s, Habermas’s rendition improves greatly on the original. Paraphrasing what Borges said of Pierre Menard and Cervantes: to tell Adorno’s story verbatim as Adorno is one thing, but to tell exactly the same story as Jürgen Habermas requires all that confounds metaphysics in genius. 2 Habermas’s mimesis of Adorno in telling Adorno’s story brings out the story’s significance by transforming a “mere” mimesis into a gesture that reveals itself as an originary imitation. By telling the story of the world’s premiere Adorno impression, as itself an imitatio Adorno that precedes Habermas speaking in his own voice, Habermas suggests something of considerable significance for the future of critical theory. Namely, he suggests that the voice which follows the mimicry -- Habermas’s voice -owes its very voice – its irreducible singularity to the mimesis of the teacher who is being mimicked. This is all the more significant because the idea that is pointed to here -- which Habermas evokes in his gesture – is at the heart of Adorno’s corpus. This is the notion of mimesis as the conditio sine qua non of the subject. It is the subject which is at the centre of the contests for critical theory’s future. But as Habermas’s Adorno mimesis reminds us, Adorno’s original conception of the subject -- at the birth of critical theory was already a gesture towards the future that owed its existence to the memory of a mime. A few words about gestures: There is a venerable tradition that evokes someone’s ‘gestures’ as the most eloquent testimony to the existence of something to which the gesture can only gesticulate -- specifically, to what is singular in the 3 human being. After our death, something of that which transcends our biographical particulars is recalled by those who remember us in an obscure movement of our hands, eyes – sometimes legs. Here, the gesture, which does not point, nonetheless evokes that which cannot be pointed out because precisely insofar it is irreducible to any particular, it is something that is not, or as Ernst Bloch would say: ‘not-yet’. It is in this sense of the gesture in which Adorno’s subject is a gesture to the future. It is an index to a singularity that exists precisely in that it does not-yet exist, an openness, a mutually constitutive covenant with contingency, that in these elements points to an as yet non-existent universal in which such a singularity could be recognised. In his essay Subjekt und Objekt Adorno makes the programmatic statement that the subject is “less” the more it “is”, -- the more that it is ‘given’. At one level, this statement continues Adorno’s ceaseless polemic against Martin Heidegger. Playing with Heidegger’s own use of the ordinary expression, ‘es gibt’-- “there is” -- Adorno states that the more ‘there is’ a subject –the more that the subject can be regarded as something ‘given’ – the more that Heidegger is, perversely, right to see this ‘there is’ as implying a ‘gift’ –that the being of the subject owes “its “very being to something else that “gives itself” to itself. But for Adorno 4 this “being given” means that precisely that the subject is not. Where it demonstrably owes its identity to something else it is not a subject, but an object. Insofar, as it is “Given”, moulded by something outside of it itself, it is an exemplar of the heteronomy that is the opposite of a subject. This is because, for Adorno that which ‘gives’ the “gift” of subjectivity ‘in’ (as Heidegger might say) ‘its givenness’ is no more than the processes of subjectivisation that occurs in a given social order: to make the classic Hegelian point: what appears as ‘immediate’, is in fact – the most abstract, precisely because the process which led to its ‘obviousness’ is precisely obscured. For Adorno, all talk of “Being” and its “gifts” are mere mystifications of these conditions in a register of authoritarian piety. In a similar vein, Adorno thinks that “existentialist” visions of the subject which putatively oppose subjectivity to any kind of “givenness” repeat the same conceptual and ontological contradiction of the idea of subject, via the inevitable fetishistic focus on the gratuitous “acts” in which the indelible groundlessness of the subject is supposed to be proven. In the irrationality of the‘act’, Adorno sees only the proof that the Abgrund from which the subject is supposed to have “leapt”, is the all-to-real ground of contemporary society’s irrational core. 5 For Adorno the story of the subject is the story of the Dialectic of Enlightenment. As much as both the book of this name to narrates a descent from nightmare into nightmare to which it refers, the book’s authors’ also belie the accusation of performative contradiction by affirming the existence of a Utopian kernel in the idea of both the subject and the enlightenment which gives its birth. To show this I am going to offer a reconstruction of how Adorno sees the dialectic of enlightenment operating in the realm of subjectivity. It is the story of the same dialectic with regards to the neighbouring constellation of experience and work. My starting point here is a Faustian allegory. Goethe’s Faust begins his long night with a repudiation of the knowledge that he has accumulated in the course of his scholarly pursuits. Offered knowledge sub speciae aeternetatas : Faust, like any good modern sells his soul for experience. Insofar as Faust’s choice can be seen as exemplary of the modern subject, his repudiation of “knowledge” in favour of experience is not reducible to the realisation that “Alle Theorie ist grau” when “ das Lebensbaum grün ist. In fact what Faust chooses is the temporality of modernity whose demotion of the eternal ‘rigs the game’ such that from this initial move, all choices (including the choice of knowledge) will be choices for experience. The results of this choice 6 are paradoxical. On the one hand, it results in what a sentimental existentialism will call the “groundless ground of the modern world”, on the other hand, however, the rejection of the knowledge of ‘eternal things’, is also the attempt to ground a new basis for authority (i.e. knowledge) in the results of experience. ( On this point, c.f. Lacan’s seventeenth seminar) In this allegory, the Faustian repudiation of knowledge no longer involves seeing knowledge as an intuition of that which endures and thus transcends the flux of experience. When this happens, knowledge seeks its ultimate source in the flux to which its concept was once opposed. From this comes the unifying idea behind so many of our ‘obvious’ or spontaneous conceptions of “modern” subjectivity: one way or another everything that claims to legislate over experience must ultimately derive from experience. Even for Kant experience is the ever-bustling court of appeal to the Critique of Pure Reason’s tribunal. “Modernity”, then can be conceived is that which looks to experience to ground that which gives meaning to experience: aesthetics, ethics, even theology. Thus we have not only the idea of “empiricism” (which explicitly says that knowledge must be gained through experience), but also the pathos inherent to all those attempts to ‘save’ experience from empiricism – from 7 phenomenology to Benjamin’s constellations: we step back, not only from experience to its ground, but from experience as the result of synthesis (the neo-Kantian notion), to experience as founded in noesis (understood as an immediate apprehension of the whole) The “Faustian” idea here is simple and lends itself to a formula to which all of Werner Herzog’s films stand as a monument: subjectivity is hubris. The pathos of Adorno (and Herzog) is to say that ‘though the modernityinstituting elevation of experience does mean hubris, and that hubris by definition invites tragedy, we can never reject this hubris without also throwing humanity back to the mercy of a nature which only this hubris has ever called anything but unforgiving chaos. (Elsewhere, I have made use of a ‘three line formula for all Werner Herzog films. The formula goes like this: 1) Subjectivity is hubris 2) But nature is chaos. 3) Ergo, everyone gets eaten by a bear. As is well known, the key story of the Dialectic of Enlightenment tells that the advance of enlightenment and the concomitant 8 existential/political inflation of subjectivity leads to the antithesis of enlightenment in the ensnaring of the subject in the cage wrought by instrumental rationality and the subsequent sacrificial delivering over of this cage to the omnipotent irrational forces which it has been the dream of enlightenment to escape. For Adorno, the dialectic of enlightenment is played out in the realm of knowledge and experience, when experience is made to sacrifice itself (in a reversal of the ideal of modernity) to ‘knowledge’. This occurs through the persistent pressure for experience to give up its non-identity in “work.” In essay after essay Adorno describes the way in which enjoyment, pleasure, eroticism and leisure are threatened with annihilation by becoming their putative opposites: i.e. yet another example of unceasing social labour. (Thus, Adorno anticipates the Zizekian notion – actually derived from Lacan’s eighteenth Seminar) that the contemporary super-ego is the imperative to enjoy. All the spheres of experience whose non-identity with the present operational schemas of society is nonetheless, by the concept of this society, supposed to found society’s future, are threatened with extinction 9 by the requirement that they exist only when they have been transformed into a recognisably exchangeable social substance.1 To understand Adorno’s conception of the subject, we need to understand what he is not saying in these kind of claims. The best place to see this -and a good panacea to misunderstanding Adorno generally -- is Adorno’s review of Aldoux Huxley’s Brave New World. Huxley’s dystopian portrait of the not-too-distant-future shows an administered world in which pleasure (via sex and drugs) is the fulfilment of fundamental social imperatives. Where experience is conceived as work, individuals are subjected to what Adorno elsewhere calls ‘fun morality’. Under the injunction to enjoy, enjoyment becomes a social duty, as is particularly obvious, when sex and drugs like SOMA are explicitly used ‘get over’ any intransigent aspects of experience that resist being turned into something socially exchangeable. However, much as Adorno recognises something of his own thought in Huxley’s dystopia, 1 John – when I gave my paper on Thursday morning, I improvised a note, around about here, about how, Adorno’s polemic, about the re-transition of experience into work, is absolutely antithetical to the redemptive paradigm – in Feher’s sense, which conceives, as Arendt says, politics, community &c. precisely under the sign of work. Adorno’s Rettung wants to ‘save’ experience FROM precisely this kind of redemption. That is why, theologically, Rettung refers to resurrection of the body – as well as the soul, it is not a matter of ‘transmuation’, it is a matter of being-left-alone. In my own work, notes and in the original version of this paper in fragments, I have spoken about Adorno’s curious affiliation with a decadent tradition that he, ultimately rejects (c.f. Construction of the Aesthetic), but is nonetheless sympathetic, in terms of the idea (and the pathos) of notions of redeeming from redemption. This was also, in a sense, behind my question to Robert Savage about gnosis, which I have previously been quite confused about, but now think I understand at least in relation to Adorno’s project and to my own. More on this later. 10 he also vehemently criticises Huxley for implying that to critique such a world one would have to take up arms against pleasure and eros tout court in the name of some more robustly civilisation-building ideal: in fact, he says, that ultimately, to take arms against pleasure, is to put oneself firmly on the side of humanity’s oppressors. This kind of objection shows exactly why it is wrong to see Adorno as a kind of angry super-ego figure who irrationally enjoins us (in the name of a higher rationality) to keep listening to Schönberg until it stops hurting. It is exactly the ‘endure it until you like it and improve yourself at the same time’ that Adorno critiques as the imperative of the culture industry in its high and lowbrow forms. In line with this, Adorno can be seen attacking Huxley’s position on two fronts. First, he argues hat Huxley’s attack on pleasure mistakes the precious utopian baby of rational materialism for squalid utilitarian bathwater. Striking out at pleasure, Adorno thinks, threatens, the allimportant, constantly provocative utopian power in the very simple idea that it is bad for people to suffer and good for them to be happy. Oversimple though this might be in unchallengable isolation of its formulation, without some idea like Adorno sees us giving into the myriad sophisms that would portray suffering as necessary for some 11 ‘higher purpose’. Second, Adorno suggests that there is a bad concept of utopia behind Huxley’s otherwise respectable dystopia. Like all the utopias Adorno rejects – this implicit utopia betrays utopia by conceiving it positively, as work. For Adorno utopia and redemption means saving something in its non-identity – the opposite of transforming it into something already recognisable as the ‘good’.2 In saying that for Adorno the subject is a gesture towards the future: I have been trying to suggest that the core idea of subjectivity as singularity – the irreducible singularity of experience -- requires that subjectivity is most itself in its gesture – as that which does not yet signify, because it is not yet fabricated into a mere particular by the universal of its society. As such, it is gesture ‘to’ the future. However, it is extremely important that we understand the dialectical nature of this claim. Precisely insofar as subjectivity is not the more it is ‘given’ , but lies instead in non-givenenss’ -- its gesture to the future -- the subject is actually to be found, within the object, as that which is least objective – “least given” – or determined in the object. What this means is that the truth of the subject is to be found in what is incomplete in the animating 2 Another long, explanatory section was excised from here…late in the day. This is a crucial point, which I normally would have re-emphasised. The idea is that the viewpoint of ‘redemption’ – that x is saved if it is transmuted into a certain (mythic) concept goes explicitly against all of modernity’s reliance on experience (especially the concept of democracy), by suggesting that life/politics/modernity must be ‘saved’ by being turned into something else. By assuming that this transition represents a ‘good’ that is already known, and not to be-established, the suggestion, is the opposite of democracy – politics as work, i.e. the redemptive paradigm. 12 universal concepts of the society. The gesture of the subject is something that gains its animation from what is incomplete in the ideals of the enlightenment. These ideals point, for Adorno to the noncompletion of the project of the subject, as Castoriaidis would say, to the project of autonomy.3 This is why the subject’s existence’ is so utterly intertwined with the immanent critique of the universal ideals of the society that have made its birth something between an abortion and a promise. The task of critical theory across its generations and into its indeterminate future, continues to involve taking these ideas as more than the shibboleths of the given social order. They are what points beyond the merely given to the principles on which the order was founded in particular the idea of a universality which would generate a singularity (the subject) which this universal would itself be generated by, in a relation of non-violence. Obutse or theological as this may sound, this expression names nothing other than a fundamental underlying concept in the ideas of secular 3 What I find most profound about Castoriadis is the idea of the magmas – the ontology of indeterminacy and determination, as suggesting the way in which societies/psyches &c. are at once, ‘determinate’ entities, and on the other hand irreducible to such things, such that ‘being is that which requires creation to access it’ [Lefort quoting Merleau-Ponty]. Adorno’s conception of the subject, for me brings out and should be seen as referring to the non-determinate nature of both the psyche and the social imaginary, as well as the warning, that this indeterminacy is not a priori good: it produces everything Gulags as much as Heller’s ‘good people’. Adorno seems extraordinarily scrupulous to me in regards to playing the freedom of the subject, of against its natural imbededness in a way that neither ends in some vision of determination (as you think Roberts and Murphy are presently aiming at, in fear of the abyss) OR allowing some voluntaristic affirmation of indeterminacy in itself. Instead, he outlines, as far as I’m concerned the paradoxical conditions of AUTONOMY as always oriented towards a future. 13 humanism and democracy. These ideals have always rested on both promising and relying on a subject who could be given by society without ceasing to be a subject, just as the subject itself is a promise that these universals could be instantiated without their own basis being betrayed in the subject’s sacrifice. But as much as Adorno thinks that the subject, and its future relies on what is incomplete in ‘universal’ ideals of the Enlightenment. Adorno is also eminently aware of universality’s tendency to hide an irrational particularism precisely where it is proscribed and precisely where the universal is most frequently and hypocritically invoked. Thus, there are, phenomena like Weber’s proscribed Calvinist distinctions emerging within the beating heart of rational universalism. To such things, Adorno would have said, as he did say, in a formula which should be the epitaph of philosophy as well as its annunciation: “yes, reality is as dialectial as all that.” And it is in this context, that we should take Adorno’s reminder that mimesis is the precondition of being a human being: that we become human only by imitating other human beings. The idea of mimesis is the reminder of a universal capacity that predates and is also the precondition of the singularity that is promised in the universal ideals of enlightenment. For Adorno every imitation is an 14 original imitation because both the one who imitates and the one who is imitated are both something that is indeterminate in the midst of their determination – musical piece and performer, self and other, both of them are contingent on their future in, through and as something else. Both mimic and the mimed are openings towards the future of themselves and of the society which has only partially ‘given them’. But something else has allowed this future to remain as -- in a more emphatic sense than this trite expression usually names -- a ‘real possibility’ within the present. This ‘something else’ is the condition of the subject’s gesture. It is Mimesis – that which allows the singularity of the subject to come about as something distinct from the sum total of the mutilations inflicted on the through subjectivising disciplines. We can see this not-quite-present element of subjective singularity in every relationship in which we “learn” from others, but where the strict division between pedagogue and pupil has broken down. All that in friendship and love transcends mere conformity with the imperative to have healthy social and sex lives speaks of this. What goes on between friends, between teachers and students, across generations, is the creation of singularities through the mutual imitation of something not-yet given. Critical theory has known this since its outset, that the subject – a singular voice -- was possible through the imitation of that which was least other in the other. The future of critical theory lies in the originality which (paradoxically) 15 emerged from and in another sense, was this imitation: Being is that which requires creation to access it (Lefort quoting Merleau-Ponty), but creation itself is an original imitation, the imitation of that which is notyet (hence indeterminate) in the other, as the possibility of creativity in the self. This is something that the generations of critical theory (Adorno, Habermas, Honneth) have always known, not only because it is something explicitly formulated (in Adorno’s work) but because of what each generation has become, in its singularity, through the other. The future is its own ground, but this is the affirmation of the truth of the link, that each generation has with its past and not the formula of discontinuity. It is originality, creativity, singularity that makes the link, and not deference – the homage comes closest, as Habermas’s version of the Chaplin story suggests when the student’s gestures become most recognisably her own.4 4 I have changed the conclusion ever so slightly from what I read, because I kind of summarised the last bit, by way of making the time limit. 16