Literary Encyclopedia: Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschä...
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Works by Theodor
Adorno
http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=3540
Theodor Adorno
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Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus
dem beschädigten Leben
[Minima Moralia: Reflections
from Damaged Life]
(2172 words) Print
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Theodor Adorno
(1951)
David Suchoff, Colby College
Domain: Philosophy, Social Science. Genre: Philosophical Criticism. Country:
Germany, Continental Europe.
Theodor W. Adorno’s Minima Moralia. Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten
Leben [Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, 1951; cited here in
the translation by E. F. N. Jephcott, London: Verso 1974] is a collection of
critical aphorisms, short essays and cultural criticism written by the Frankfurt
School philosopher and cultural critic in his American exile from Nazi
Germany. Composed during the years 1944 (Part One), 1945 (Part Two), and
1946-7 (Part Three), Adorno’s 247 separate analyses bear allusive titles which,
while referring to European and American material, point to the work’s
modernist, and ultimately postmodernist critique of the relationship between
avant-garde and mass culture. “Dwarf Fruit”, paradigmatically, contains
Adorno’s revision of Hegel’s totalizing vision, signalling the move toward the
particular in philosophy and cultural criticism in the post-World War II era:
“The whole is false” (p. 50). Defining the individual’s absorption by powers of
the mass, and arguing no less powerfully for retaining the category of critical
thought and subjectivity in the nascent era of postmodernism, Minima
Moralia laid out the themes that concerned Adorno’s later writing, and set the
critical agenda still followed by cultural criticism in its early
twenty-first-century forms.
Minima Moralia was therefore a hinge text for Adorno. Looking back to his
programmatic lecture of 1931, “The Actuality of Philosophy” (Telos 31 [1977]:
120-133) the book’s concrete analyses of American restaurants and their
homogenizing particularity (“Chilly Hospitality”) – and the historical meaning
of tact as both internalized domination, and the attempt to recognize concrete
difference, in the afterlife of Absolutism and its traditional manners (“On The
Dialectic of Tact”) – reflect Adorno’s method of minute cultural analysis in
practice. “For the mind”, as Adorno wrote in 1931, “is not capable of producing
or grasping the totality of the real, but it may be possible to penetrate the detail,
to explode in miniature the mass of merely existing reality” (Adorno 1977, p.
133). Looking forward to his philosophic summa, Negative Dialektik
[Negative Dialectics, 1966], Minima Moralia at the same time insists on
abstract thought, and its “non-identity” with its critical objects, in order to
re-conceptualize the new world of mass-produced experience, and so to break
its dominating spell: “cowed into wanting to be no more than a mere
provisional abbreviation for the factual matter beneath it, thought loses not
only its autonomy in the face of reality, but with it the power to penetrate
reality” (“Keeping One’s Distance”). The task of the critical intellectual is for
Adorno not to withdraw, but to take a position in the force-field created by
conflicting cultural realms: “distance is not a safety zone, but a field of tension”
(p. 127).
In its initial reception, Adorno’s text was understood as a mandarin polemic
against an encroaching mass culture. The pessimism of Minima Moralia, to be
sure, resulted in part from the shock of American commodity culture and its
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ever-encroaching sphere on his modernist sensibility. “Every intellectual in
emigration is, without exception”, as he notes, “mutilated, and does well to
acknowledge it to himself” (“Protection, help, and counsel”, p. 33). Adorno’s
analysis of the mass culture that would “liquidate art” in the 1946-7 section
called “Art-object” was in this sense also self-analysis (p. 226). “The splinter in
your eye is the best magnifying glass” was thus an aphorism that he gave
personal force to (p. 50). “The contradiction between what is, and what is
made, is the vital element of art and circumscribes its law of development”,
Adorno writes, “but it is also art’s shame” (pp. 225f.). The fact that all art is
made, for Adorno, represents its secret but disavowed link to the exploitive
world of labor, and thus to art’s opposite: those “trash” works that shamelessly
imitate things to maximize consumption and profit. “Kitsch”, as Minima
Moralia puts it, “incurs hostility because it blurts out the secret of art and the
affinity of culture to savagery” (p. 226). At the same time, the utopian moment
in the most abject, mass-produced, gas-station art was part and parcel of its
effect. “In the end”, as Adorno writes, “indignation over kitsch is anger at its
shameless reveling in the joy of imitation, now placed under taboo, while the
power of works of art still continues to be secretly nourished by imitation” (p.
225). In this sense, Adorno’s later theme of the liquidation of art is already
presented in Minima Moralia as a crossing of the fixed boundary between
modernist and mass art that would make them wholly separate and unequal
cultural spheres.
As a result, Minima Moralia re-imagines aesthetic categories like “taste”,
bound to the universal by conventional aesthetic discourse since Kant, in the
differential manner of a negative dialectic. “High” art could, in the era of the
commodity – that is, the postmodern age – only define its abstraction and
purity against the manufactured “trash” it abhorred, and “kitsch” hailed the
power of the autonomous individual precisely in the era of its disappearance.
On the one hand, many sections of the text recommend a distance and
withdrawal from mass absorption and its horrors, in passages that often did
little to draw a distinction between American commodity culture and the Nazi
Germany Adorno had escaped: “all collaboration, all the human worth of social
mixing and participation, merely masks a tacit acceptance of inhumanity”
(“How Nice of you, Doctor”, p. 26). On the other, the intellectual’s distanced
withdrawal was perceived, like the scornful work of high art itself, as part of the
field of tension with the mass art and behavior: “there is no way out of
entanglement” (“Antithesis”, p. 27). The category of “taste” appears in Minima
Moralia as the ability to recognize the inevitable contamination between mass
and high culture, without collapsing the two – and hence without the closure of
dialectical synthesis – so that something genuinely new can emerge: “true
works of art […] never at one with taste, are those which push this contradiction
to the extreme, and realize themselves in their resultant downfall”
(“Art-object”, p. 227). A true work of art, in other words, succeeded by failing
the standard of “taste”, and thus by liberating the mass cultural content it
contained. For the “distance of thought from reality is itself nothing other than
the precipitate of history in concepts”, just as social reality could also be
critically released from modernism’s most difficult forms (“Keeping One’s
Distance”, p. 126).
In Minima Moralia, this same principle of liberating the plurality enclosed in
conceptual entities plays itself out in many different registers. In his
re-functioning of psychoanalysis as a social discourse, Adorno reads the closed
ego of Freudian theory, attempting to rule over its aggressive impulses, as an
image of the “collective in a false society”, where its control and exploitation of
the plural strands within could be “most accurately studied”. Thus, in the
“divergent drives” subjected to the “primacy of the ego”, Adorno saw “from the
first, an internalized robber band”, with the “gang-leader of his own self”, his
“eyes shining with the satisfaction of speaking for the many that he himself is”,
and so subjecting his divergent impulses and resources into an exploitive
singularity. “The more someone has espoused the cause of his own aggression”,
as Adorno puts it, “the more perfectly he represents the repressive principle of
society” (p. 45). The title of this section, “Plurale Tantum”, or “Only in the
Plural”, accurately suggests the goal of Adorno’s critique of concepts – meant to
represent particulars, not cancel them – and links conceptuality and the
unified self to a socially constructed rage against the borrowings from
elsewhere that were its foundation: “a human being only becomes human at all
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by imitating other human beings” (p. 154). It is this desire to recover the
foundational, plural sources of personal, linguistic, and national identity that
Adorno liberates with his linguistic parallel, in his famous aperçu that
“German words of foreign derivation are the Jews of language” (p. 110).
Mimima Moralia thus engages in what deconstruction later called a critique of
foundational origins: “the equation of the genuine and the true is untenable”
(“Gold assay”, p. 153). Adorno’s declaration that Nietzsche “fell for the fraud of
saying ‘the feminine’ when talking of women” did not stop some critics from
seeing an alignment between a mass-culture that manufactured dependent
subjects and a process of feminization, in Adorno’s equally strong assertion that
“without a single exception feminine natures are conformist”, and that
“femininity itself is an effect of the whip” (“Since I set eyes on him”, p. 96). As
in his other cultural analyses, Adorno’s point is to describe the construction of
obedient, mass-cultural subjects in order to break the power that prefabricated
gender roles enforced: “the liberation of nature would be to abolish its
self-fabrication” (96). This anti-foundationalism receives some of its earliest
and most forceful post-World War II expressions in his critique of liberalism,
and Minima Moralia’s important but unrecognized early attack on the
post-war containment of ethnic and racial difference by America’s “liberal
imagination”, as Lionel Trilling called it. “Abstract utopia”, and the argument
that “all races are equal”, could be a “boomerang”, according to Adorno, since
it was “too compatible with the most insidious tendencies of society. That all
men are alike is exactly what society would like to hear” (“Mélange”, p. 102).
Such color-blind thinking had actually raised “racial difference […] to an
absolute so that it can be abolished absolutely”, when the real point of social
liberation was to “conceive the better state as one in which people could be
different without fear” (103). Despite Adorno’s refusal to address his identity as
a German-Jewish refugee from Hitler head-on, Minima Moralia can still be
read as an early classic of post-assimilationist thought.
Minima Moralia thus became a harbinger text for the post-World War II
world: for its anti-essentialism, opposing the “liquidation of the particular” (17)
by examining the “waste products, blind spots, that have escaped the dialectic”
(151), for the commitment to a conceptual thought that could break through its
own limits, and for its notion of aesthetic beauty as a “curative sickness” (77),
which lead to the post-aesthetic view of art Adorno espoused in his
posthumously published work Ästhetische Theorie [Aesthetic Theory, 1970].
Adorno’s commitment to recovering the lost plurality beneath reified culture –
in both elite and mass forms – in these ways helped lay the foundations of
postmodern thought. Resolutely modernist in its difficult style, Adorno’s text
insists on a cultural analysis in which thought remains different from its object,
since only in the fresh application of ideas to things and experience could the
liberation of the hidden, but multiple strands of experience be found: “the
value of a thought is measured by its distance from the continuity of the
familiar” (“Gaps”, p. 80). At the same time, Minima Moralia’s anticipation of
postmodern analysis depends on its treatment of the products of mass culture
to an equally negative, but utopian critique, since it is “only when sated with
false pleasure, disgusted with the goods offered, [and] dimly aware of the
inadequacy of happiness […] – can men gain an idea of what experience might
be” (“Invitation to dance”, p. 62).
Minima Moralia is also a precursor text for American New Historicism, for the
analysis of everyday objects and actions that later concerned Cultural Studies,
and – in a more indirect fashion – for Derrida’s deconstruction, which aims to
release the hidden potential of fixed linguistic and social concepts, by carrying
the terms of a seemingly closed tradition into new and unexpected forms. The
largest horizon of Adorno’s perspective, however, is utopian, with his analyses
carrying a substrate of theology of the kind he saw as the strongest element in
the thought of Walter Benjamin, his friend and intellectual influence, whose
name appears in crucial moments in the text. Benjamin also shadows other
passages, where the self is conceived of “theologically”: as the site where traces
of the utopia that escape domination signify an otherness free to become itself
(p. 154). Adorno’s critique of the ethnic “melting pot” as “introduced by
unbridled industrial capitalism” (“Mélange”, p. 103), like his vision of the self
as a manipulated construction – “in many people it is already an impertinence
to say I” – were ultimately utopian attempts to recover the plural origins of the
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twentieth-century self, a “hope, wrested from reality”, that was also Adorno’s
own (pp. 50, 98). That hope, however distant, made Minima Moralia the
definitive work of cultural analysis in its period.
Suggested further reading:
Susan Buck-Morss (1977), The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W.
Adorno, Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt Institute. New York: The Free
Press.
Matei Calinescu (1987), Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism,
Avante-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism. Durham, North Carolina:
Duke University Press.
P. U. Hohendahl (1995), Prismatic Thought: Theodor W. Adorno. Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press.
Martin Jay (1984), Adorno. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
David Suchoff (1994), Critical Theory and the Novel: Mass Society and
Cultural Criticism in Dickens, Melville, and Kafka. Madison, Wisconsin:
University of Wisconsin Press.
Published 20 January 2007
Citation: David Suchoff, Colby College. "Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem
beschädigten Leben." The Literary Encyclopedia. 20 Jan. 2007. The Literary
Dictionary Company. 31 January 2007.
<http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=3540>
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