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Abstract
This article examines Adorno’s use of the notion of mediation, which at first glance appears to be problematic and aporetic. While the emergence of such a concept marks Adorno’s renewed interest in Hegelian philosophy, and a distancing from Walter Benjamin’s thought, the understanding of mediation should not be reduced to the Hegelian model. This article will argue that Adorno introduces such a concept to explain theory’s necessity and verifiability, as well as the experience of the object. Only by taking these two issues (the mediation between concepts and between subject and object) in their interconnection is it possible to explain the role of mediation in Adorno. I will argue that the idea of ‘constellations’ put forward in the Dialectics furnishes us with a model of mediation that goes beyond its original Hegelian formulation.
Notes
1 Deborah Cook, ‘Adorno’s Critical Materialism’, Philosophy and Social Criticism, 32(6) (2006), pp. 719–37.
2 An example of such a reading is offered by Michael Rosen in Hegel’s Dialectic and its Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 153–78. The author writes: ‘Mediation answers Adorno’s need to give conceptual expression to the relationship between transcendental and empirical phenomena: meaning processes and their material substrata’ (p. 175). However, according to Rosen, Adorno is not justified in his appropriation of the notion of mediation from Hegel, in that such a notion can legitimately work only in the context of Hegelian philosophy (pp. 176–7). That is to say, mediation is to be understood, in its connection with immediacy, as a part of the structure of the Idea, where the oppositions of the understanding no longer hold valid. More specifically, according to Rosen, three crucial requirements must be met: (i) that the true is the whole, (ii) that determinate negation has a positive result, and (iii) that the content of thought develops independently (pp. 89–90). It is evident that Adorno does not hold the same requirements as valid; thus, his concept of mediation fails to conceptually express the connection between subjectively generated concepts and the object. Another example of a reading which takes Adorno’s understanding of mediation in a purely Hegelian sense is that of Peter Osborne in The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (London: Verso, 1995). In defending Benjamin’s notion of mediation from Adorno’s criticisms, Osborne denounces its narrow Hegelian understanding, writing: ‘It is almost a cliché of Benjamin criticism to say, following Adorno, that Benjamin’s dialectical images lack mediation. But Adorno is surely right insofar as what he means is that they lack the kind of immanent conceptual mediation expounded by Hegel as the structure of dialectical logic. He is wrong, however, to suggest that they lack mediation altogether; wrong to reduce the concept of mediation to a narrowly Hegelian form’ (p. 151).
3 See Rosen, Hegel’s Dialectic and its Criticism, pp. 153–78.
4 See Brian O’Connor, ‘The Concept of Mediation in Hegel and Adorno’, Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain, 39/40 (1999), pp. 84–96; Brian O’Connor, ‘Adorno and the Problem of Givenness’, Revue Internationale De Philosophie, 63(227) (2004), pp. 85–99; Nicholas Joll, ‘Adorno’s Negative Dialectic: Theme, Point, and Methodological Status’, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 17(2), 2009, pp. 235–53. Joll provides the reader with a very clear and insightful characterization of the features of mediation in Adorno. He does not interrogate the legitimacy of the use of such a concept (whether it can be imported from the Hegelian context into a philosophical project which does not share the same presuppositions) but rather places the accent on its failure, the so-called mismediation, in which the moment of non-identity emerges.
5 In a letter from September 1936 Adorno states: ‘I have also undertaken a renewed and fruitful study of Hegel.’ Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence 1928–1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 147.
6 See Rolf Tiedemeann, ‘Concept, Image, Name’, in T. Huhn and L. Zuidervaart (eds) The Semblance of Subjectivity (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, Citation1997), p. 133.
7 Theodor W. Adorno, Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen, Gesammelte Schriften, Band 2 (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp Verlag, Citation1962), p. 80/Kierkegaard. Construction of the Aesthetic, trans. and ed. R. Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, Citation1989), p. 54.
8 Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophische Frühschriften, Gesammelte Schriften, Band 1 (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1973), p. 336/‘The Actuality of Philosophy’, Telos, 31 (Citation1977), p. 126. Here, however, the ‘dialectical images’ are referred to as ‘historical images’: Ibid., p. 338/p.128.
9 Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectic (New York: Free Press, 1977), p. 97.
10 Ibid., p. 96.
11 As late as 1964, in his Portrait of Walter Beniamin, Adorno expresses similar reservations with regard to the possibilities of Benjamin’s method: ‘His philosophy of fragmentation remained itself fragmentary, the victim, perhaps, of a method, the feasibility of which, in the medium of thought, must remain an open question.’ If, on the one hand, this statement expresses the regret at the project’s unfortunate lack of completion, on the other hand, it makes clear that philosophical thinking requires more than images, for instance theory and mediation: Theodor W. Adorno, Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft I/II, Gesammelte Schriften, Band 10 (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1977), p. 250/Prisms, trans. S. and S. Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, Citation1981), p. 239.
12 According to Stefan Müller-Doohm’s biography of Adorno, at the Institute for Social Research Adorno was in charge of negotiating Benjamin’s contributions to the Zeitschrift, which were considered especially problematic by Horkheimer. See Stefan Müller-Doohm, Adorno – A Biography (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2005), p. 257.
13 Adorno writes: ‘Motives are assembled but they are not elaborated. In your covering letter to Max you presented this as your express intention, and I am well aware of the ascetic discipline you have imposed on yourself by omitting everywhere the conclusive theoretical answers to questions involved, and indeed only reveal these questions to the already initiated. But I wonder whether such asceticism can be sustained in the face of such a subject and in a context which makes such powerful inner demands … Panorama and “traces”, the flâneur and the arcades, modernity and the ever-same, all this without theoretical interpretation – can such material as this patiently await interpretation without being consumed in its own aura?’ Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence 1928–1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 281.
14 Ibid., p. 282.
15 Ibid., p. 283.
16 Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time, p. 151.
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid.
20 Nicholas Joll interprets mediation as addressing the problem of the relation between universals and particulars (Joll, ‘Adorno’s Negative Dialectic’, p. 234). Such an interpretative line of inquiry offers a different entry point into what I hereby outline as the problem of the mediation between subject and object, emphasising the meaning-constitutive or classifying function of the subjective pole, which apprehends the object in the same way that a universal apprehends a particular: Ibid., p. 236.
21 We could agree here with Brian O’Connor’s analysis, which suggests that, for Adorno, mediation purports to offer ‘a solution to every problem of modern philosophy.’ See Brian O’Connor, ‘The Concept of Mediation in Hegel and Adorno’, p. 91.
22 G. W. F. Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic, trans. T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting and H. S. Harris (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett, 1991), pp. 35–6.
23 Ibid., p. 122.
24 To put it in Hegel’s own words: ‘ß) the dialectical moment is the self-sublation of theses finite determinations on their own part and their passing into their opposites’ (Ibid., p. 128).
25 Theodor W. Adorno, Drei Studien zu Hegel, Gesammelte Schriften, Band 5 (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp Verlag, Citation1970), p. 259/Hegel: Three Studies, trans. S. Weber-Nicholson (Cambridge, MA, & London, England: The MIT Press), p. 7.
26 Ibid., p. 257/p. 7.
27 Adorno, Negative Dialektik, Gesammelte Schriften, Band 6 (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp Verlag, Citation1970), p. 188/Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York & London: Continuum, Citation2007), p. 183.
28 Theodor W. Adorno, Drei Studien zu Hegel, p. 252/Hegel: Three Studies, trans. Weber Nicholson, p. 3.
29 Ibid., p. 255/p. 5.
30 Ibid., pp. 273–4/p. 27.
31 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik, p. 15/Negative Dialectics, trans. Ashton, p. 3.
32 Ibid. p. 23/p. 11.
33 Ibid.
34 Ibid.
35 Ibid., p. 173/p. 172. Translation modified.
36 Ibid. Translation modified.
37 Ibid., pp. 184–5/p. 183.
38 Ibid., p. 185/p. 184.
39 Ibid., p. 172/p. 170.
40 As I have already pointed out in the introduction, Michael Rosen’s work has the great merit of acknowledging the methodological difficulties that Adorno’s concept of mediation encounters when it abandons the conceptual framework of Hegelian philosophy. Rosen writes: ‘Mediation … has its place with immediacy as part of the unintuitable, apparently paradoxical ontological structure of the Idea, developed and justified in the Logic. Adorno, however, in taking the concept over as part of philosophical ordinary language, removes it from the context in which the experience of Thought might give its only rigorous justification’ (Rosen, Hegel’s Dialectic and its Criticism, pp. 176–7).
41 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik, p. 172/Negative Dialectics, trans. Ashton, p. 171. Translation modified.
42 Nicholas Joll, for instance, gives a provisional definition of objective mediation as consisting ‘simply in subjective mediation having some object’ (Joll, ‘Adorno’s Negative Dialectic’, p. 236). That said, the author does draw important attention to the normative aspect of objective mediation, i.e. to the fact that a particular can also fail to fulfil its concept (and not only to the fact that the concept can fail to do justice to the particular): Ibid., p. 236. This happens when the notion of ‘rational identity’ is at stake, i.e. the identity between an ‘emphatic’ concept and a particular which does not yet fulfil the qualities that such a concept predicates: Ibid., p. 243. An example of this would be the particular instantiations of freedom failing to fulfil the concept of real freedom (Ibid.).
43 The problematic nature of ‘objective mediation’ is especially addressed by Brian O’Connor, in ‘The Concept of Mediation in Hegel and Adorno’.
44 Deborah Cook, ‘Adorno’s Critical Materialism’, p. 721.
45 Ibid.
46 In the Dialectic of Enlightenment Adorno and Horkheimer explain that the primitive experience does not consist in the opposition between material and spiritual but between the ‘intricacy of the natural’ and the individual. The first act of naming comes out of the gasp of surprise in front of the unusual. The expression of human fear soon becomes its explanation, crystallizing into the word and concept for the sake of controlling the unknown. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklärung, Gesammelte Schriften, Band 3 (Frankfurt a/M: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1981), p. 31/Dialectic of Enlightenment (London & New York: Verso, 1997), p. 15.
47 Rosen, Hegel’s Dialectic and its Criticism, pp. 175–6.
48 O’Connor, ‘The Concept of Mediation in Hegel and Adorno’.
49 Ibid., p. 93.
50 Theodor W. Adorno, Ästetische Theorie, Gesammelte Schriften, Band 7 (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970), p. 15/Aesthetic Theory, trans. R. Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 5.
51 Ibid. However, despite the obscurity of the form-content correspondence, the analogy of the concepts-object mediation with the mediation at stake in the artwork also enables us to shed some light on the operations of conceptual mediation, as we will see in the case of constellations.
52 Joll, ‘Adorno’s Negative Dialectic’, pp. 244–5.
53 Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectic, pp. 101–2.
54 Adorno, Negative Dialektik, p. 44/Negative Dialectics, trans. Ashton, p. 33.
55 Ibid., p. 27/p. 15.
56 Ibid., p. 36/p. 25.
57 Ibid.
58 Ibid., p. 63/p. 53.
59 In this respect, Adorno writes: ‘Hegel taught that the meanings of concepts are both to be pinned down, more scientifico, so that they can remain concepts, and also to be “set in motion,” altered according to the dictates of the object, in order not to distort it’ (Adorno, Drei Studien zu Hegel, pp. 309–10/Hegel: Three Studies, trans. Weber Nicholson, p. 70).
60 Theodor W. Adorno, Noten zur Literatur, Gesammelte Schriften, Band 11 (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp Verlag, Citation1974), pp. 21–2/Notes to Literature, vol. 1, ed. R. Tiedeman, trans. S. Weber Nicholson (Columbia University Press: New York, Citation1991), p. 13.
61 Theodor W. Adorno, Ästetische Theorie, p. 16/Aesthetic Theory, trans. Hullot-Kentor, p. 6.
62 Ibid., p. 252/p. 168.
63 In this respect, Adorno writes: ‘But the Essay does not develop its ideas in accordance with discursive logic. It neither makes deductions from a principle nor draws conclusions from coherent individual observations. It coordinates elements instead of subordinating them, and only the essence of its content, and not the manner in which it is presented, is commensurable with logical criteria’ (Adorno, Noten zur Literatur, p. 32/Notes to Literature, vol. 1, ed. Tiedeman, trans. Weber Nicholson, p. 22).
64 Adorno here writes: ‘Just as riddle solving is constituted, in that the singular and dispersed elements of the question are brought into various grouping long enough for them to close together in a figure out of which the solution springs forth, while the question disappears – so philosophy has to bring its elements, which it receives from the sciences, into changing constellations … into changing trial-combinations, until they fall into a figure which can be read as an answer, while at the same time the question disappears’ (Adorno, Philosophische Frühschriften, p. 335/‘The Actuality of Philosophy’, p. 127).
65 Adorno, Negative Dialektik, p. 166/Negative Dialectics, trans. Ashton, p. 163.
66 Adorno, Noten zur Literatur, p. 22/Notes to Literature, vol. 1, ed. Tiedeman, trans. Weber Nicholson, p. 13.
67 Ibid., p. 31/p. 21.
68 My interpretation here differs from Nicholas Joll’s reading, according to which negative dialectic, by identifying the absence of reconciliation, might foster the possibility of a better situation, or might even attempt ‘to determine the reconciliation … that such non-identity intimates’ (Joll, ‘Adorno’s Negative Dialectic’, pp. 244–5.
69 In this respect, it would be interesting to compare the workings of conceptuality in constellations, as governed by an immanent internal logic that binds concepts together, and the workings of the ‘law of form’ in the artwork, as it is characterized in the Aesthetic Theory. In both cases, they are organised according to internal laws, i.e. the binding nexus of concepts or the ‘inner consistency’ of a work of art, yet, despite such autonomy, their truth ultimately refers back to objectivity. What is relevant here is the fact that the primacy of the object necessarily passes through the subject.