Adorno [on] - 'Immanent Critique' and 'Dialetical Mimesis' in Adorno & Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment.pdf - Adorno - MKTK

‘‘Immanent Critique’’ and ‘‘Dialectical Mimesis’’ in Adorno

and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment

Steven Helmling

Given the ubiquity of the phrase ‘‘immanent critique’’ in Theodor

Adorno’s oeuvre, both early and late, it is surprising that what Adorno might

have meant by it has received such perfunctory attention from commenta-

tors, most of whom treat it as a self-evident premise to dispose of on the

way to weightier matters. 1 Yet in this phrase, Adorno comes as close as he

does anywhere to naming something like a programmatic ambition for his

work, its distinctive method as well as its more comprehensive aims. The

accomplishment it proposes is meant not only to distinguish Adorno’s work

(and that of his Frankfurt School colleagues) from the conventional critical

1. Most valuable for my purposes have been Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Nega-

tiveDialectics:TheodorW.Adorno,WalterBenjamin,andtheFrankfurtInstitute (Sussex:

Harvester Press, 1977), 66–69 (especially useful in delimiting some crucial differences

between Adorno and Horkheimer); Robert Hullot-Kentor, ‘‘Introduction to Adorno’s ‘Idea

of Natural History,’ ’’ Telos 60 (1984): 105–7; and J. M. Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchant-

mentandEthics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 87–90. For a special-

ized argument for immanent critique as a method at once of interpretation and of aesthetic

evaluation, see Christopher Menke,TheSovereigntyofArt:AestheticNegativityinAdorno

andDerrida (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998), 136–43.

98 boundary 2 / Fall 2005

practices of his era, but to model a riskier, more comprehensive range of

critical effort, and thus to challenge criticism-as-usual to enlarge its scope,

to take on greater burdens, to aim, even at the price of failure, at ever-more

daunting tasks. Adorno means to bring critique itself into the critical cross-

hairs, to enlarge or arouse the very self-consciousness—even the ‘‘bad con-

science’’—of critique, and he means the consequences to bear not merely

on the kinds of objects critique might target, or the kinds or method or scope

of the arguments it might mount, but on the very writing practice in which

critique performs itself, in which it accomplishes as much of its program as

it manages to deliver on.

So rather than take ‘‘immanent critique’’ as a given, I want in this

essay to try to focus fault lines and contradictions in Adorno’s theory and

practice of immanent critique that seem to me suggestive and illuminating

for the antithetical or dialectical uses to which Adorno turns it, or, better,

allows or suffers it to turn his writing. I aim to set the ‘‘performative contradic-

tion’’ (as Jürgen Habermas calls it) of Adorno’s immanent critique in relation

to other constructions (Walter Benjamin’s) and/or critiques (Georg Lukács’s,

Habermas’s) of it, in ways that I think illuminate from a novel angle all these

ﬁgures and the issues at stake in their disagreements over what critique is

and how it should conduct itself. I mean to expound Adorno’s immanent cri-

tique as not only a critical program but also a performative one, that is, a

reﬂexive self-consciousness about his own writing practice as well, and thus

a considerable motivation of the ﬂair and drama that are so distinctive to the

energetic carriage of his ‘‘dialectical’’ sentences.

Since, in what follows, I want to foreground the implication of Adorno’s

writing practice as enactment of the varied ambitions connoted by the

phrase ‘‘immanent critique,’’ it is with some chagrin that I report that I can-

not read Adorno in German without a trot. In writing about Adorno, I have

tried to subject knotty passages to readings as detailed as I can make them

but which nevertheless do not claim to be offering a speciﬁcally ‘‘stylistic’’

response; if I have shied away from quoting the German, it is precisely in

ordernot to seem to make such claims. I have been careful, in the process of

composition, to consult the German when it has seemed prudent; and when

the German has raised doubts about my argument, I have backed off, or

sought a different way of pursuing my point. I am trying to say that I am wary

of the pitfalls my poor German lays for me, and have done my cautious best

to avoid them. That said, I think that in an increasingly global culture, critical

discourse must increasingly rely—indeed, it had better admit the extent to

which it always has relied—on translations. (Even our most enviably polyglot

Helmling / ‘‘Immanent Critique’’ and ‘‘Dialectical Mimesis’’ 99

colleagues—George Steiner, Paul de Man, Fredric Jameson—must rely on

translations for the Koran, Orhan Pamuk, Dostoyevsky,TheTaleofGenji...)

And I think it would be a shame if critics stimulated by work from all over

the planet felt disqualiﬁed from comment on anything in languages in which

they lack ‘‘literary competence.’’ In resolving to write on Adorno, I have had

to overcome considerable hesitation, but my keen interest in him, and my

conviction that I could illuminate problems that others had overlooked, have

obviously gotten the better of my scruples.

‘‘Immanent critique,’’ then: by this usage, Adorno clearly intends to do

more than merely take sides in the long contention over what critique is, or

should, or can, be. Rather, he means his own practice to enact a critique of

the debate itself, and to model larger possibilities and challenges beyond it.

A chronic ambition of critique has been to get outside the critical object, to

achieve ‘‘objectivity’’ about it, or ‘‘critical distance’’ from it. Both in its Kantian

and its Marxist senses, critique has turned on issues of inside/outside; and

the pursuit of the inside track has largely belonged to ‘‘hermeneutic,’’ as

opposed to ‘‘critique.’’ ‘‘Hermeneutic’’ sanctions the interpreter’s sympathy,

or even identity with the object—precisely the stance ‘‘critique’’ rejects as

imperiling objectivity. As usual, when confronted with a dichotomy in our cul-

ture’s way of conceptualizing its problems, Adorno takes the dichotomy itself

as an ideological problem or wound—his code word is chorismos (Greek

‘‘separation’’)—that his own critical labor will attempt to overcome or heal.

Hence his ‘‘immanent critique,’’ which encodes the ambition to get the criti-

cal ‘‘subject’’ inside what we might then no longer so simply be able to call

critique’s ‘‘object’’; Adorno frequently contrasts it with ‘‘external’’ critique,

critique ‘‘from outside,’’ or even, if rarely, ‘‘transcendent critique.’’ 2 Adorno’s

most sustained contrast of ‘‘immanent’’ with ‘‘transcendent’’ criticism comes

in the peroration of the 1949 essay ‘‘Cultural Criticism and Society’’ (it is this

peroration that rises to the climax of ‘‘To write poetry after Auschwitz is bar-

2. See especially Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cam-

bridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981), 33; and Theodor W. Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure

Reason, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001), 20.

Twice, Adorno characterizes his own work as ‘‘metacritique’’—in the subtitle to his book

on Husserl (AgainstEpistemology:AMetacritique), and in the opening section, on Kant,

of Part III of NegativeDialectics (‘‘A Metacritique of Practical Reason’’). In both cases, the

word amounts to a kind of sarcasm at the expense of philosophical systems founded on the

premise that certain problems can be ‘‘bracketed off’’ from, or declared to be ‘‘transcenden-

tal’’ to, others. Adorno affronts these ‘‘transcendent critiques’’ by dilating to encompass,

and thus reintroduce, all that Husserl and Kant have tried to exclude. In this application,

there appears a family resemblance of ‘‘immanent critique’’ with deconstruction.

100 boundary 2 / Fall 2005

baric’’): ‘‘The alternatives—either calling culture as a whole into question

from outside under the general notion of ideology, or confronting it with the

norms which it itself has crystallized—cannot be accepted by critical theory.

To insist on the choice between immanence and transcendence is to revert

to the traditional logic criticized in Hegel’s polemic against Kant....The

position transcending culture is in a certain sense presupposed by dialectics

as the consciousness which does succumb in advance to the fetishization of

the intellectual sphere.’’ Whereas, says Adorno, ‘‘dialectics means intransi-

gence toward all reiﬁcation’’ 3 —in particular, the ‘‘spurious harmony’’ of what

he elsewhere calls, in condemnation of Lukács, ‘‘Extorted Reconciliation’’ 4

(observe how, as the passage develops, immanentcriticism and dialectics

begin to operate as functionally convertible terms):

[Immanent criticism] pursues the logic of its aporias, the insolubility of

the task itself. In such antinomies criticism perceives those of society.

A successful work, according to immanent criticism, is not one which

resolves objective contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one

which expresses the harmony negatively by embodying the contra-

dictions,...initsinnermost structure. Confronted with this kind of

work, the verdict ‘‘mere ideology’’ loses its meaning. At the same

time, however, immanent criticism holds in evidence that the mind

has always been under a spell. On its own it is unable to resolve the

contradictions under which it labours. Even the most radical reﬂec-

tion of the mind on its own failure is limited by the fact that it remains

only reﬂection, without altering the existence to which its failure bears

witness. Hence immanent criticism cannot take comfort in its own

idea. It can neither be vain enough to believe that it can liberate the

mind directly . . . nor naïve enough to believe that unﬂinching immer-

sion in the object will inevitably lead to truth by virtue of the logic of

things....Thelessthedialectical method can today presuppose

the Hegelian identity of subject and object, the more it is obliged to

be mindful of the duality of the moments....Theveryopposition

between knowledge which penetrates from without and that which

bores from within becomes suspect to the dialectical method, which

sees in it a symptom of precisely that reiﬁcation which the dialectic is

obliged to accuse....Notheory, not even that which is true, is safe

3. Adorno, Prisms, 31.

4. Theodor W. Adorno, NotestoLiterature, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, vol. 1 (New

York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 216–40.

Helmling / ‘‘Immanent Critique’’ and ‘‘Dialectical Mimesis’’ 101

from perversion into delusion once it has renounced a spontaneous

[i.e., ‘‘immanent’’] relation to the object. Dialectics must guard against

this no less than against enthrallment in the cultural object. It can sub-

scribe neither to the cult of the mind nor to hatred of it. The dialectical

critic of culture must both participate in culture and not participate.

Only then does he do justice to his object and to himself. 5

If ‘‘the very opposition between knowledge which penetrates from without

and that which bores from within’’ is itself a symptom of the problem, then

the logic of that aporia requires a method that aspires to do both, and ‘‘the

insolubility of the task’’ is not its disqualiﬁcation but an attestation of its

necessity. Adorno’s practice thus assumes for immanent critique burdens

both critical and hermeneutic: making each immanent to the other and, at

the same time, making each the other’s critique.

And thereby Adorno implies as well an ideological critique of each—

of critique and of hermeneutic—as usually practiced: critique’s ‘‘distance’’

from the object now appears as not an objectivity to be striven for but

an alienation to be overcome; while hermeneutic’s ‘‘inwardness’’ with the

object, attesting the interpreter’s sympathy with the interpreted text (a moti-

vation extending through belles lettres ‘‘appreciation’’ back to biblical exege-

sis), now appears as an ideological entrapment that critique must struggle,

however vainly, to breach. (Immanent critique, then, is critique of critique,

and not merely in the sense of autocritique.) At stake, needless to say,

is not the critic’s mere decision in advance between two menu items, two

kinds of critique, internal and external. Adorno’s premise is that all critique is

from ‘‘inside’’—inside of history, of economy, of culture, politics, ideology—

and that ‘‘external critique’’ is ideologically deluded, or self-blinded, or self-

trivializing, if it supposes that it has gotten, or can or should get, ‘‘outside’’

the determinations of the social. Immanent critique, then, is less a program

that critique should aspire to than a predicament that critique must try not

to ﬂinch from.

An immanent critique thus conceived incurs complex burdens—and

since Adorno resists generalization, let us begin with consideration of a par-

ticular instance: a section ofNegativeDialecticsthat proposes an immanent

critique of Heideggerian ‘‘ontology.’’ Adorno concedes that the Spirit in our

age has a legitimate ‘‘ontological need,’’ to which Heidegger and others are

offering, so to speak, ‘‘an imaginary [i.e., ideological] solution.’’ His imma-

nent critique means to interpret the genuine (and symptomatic) need or

5. Adorno, Prisms, 32–33.

Adorno [on] - 'Immanent Critique' and 'Dialetical Mimesis' in Adorno & Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment.pdf

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