SOURCE: “Damage Control: Adorno, Los Angeles, and the Dislocation of Culture,” in the Yale Journal of Criticism, Vol. 10, No. 1, Spring, 1997, pp. 85-113.

1. FLYING T.W.A …

To begin with an ending of sorts: at the conclusion to his 1967 Foreword to the English edition of Prisms, Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno suggests, rather formally, that

[f]inally, the author could wish for nothing better than that the English version of Prisms might express something of the gratitude that he cherishes for England and for the United States—the countries which enabled him to survive the era of persecution and to which he has ever since felt himself deeply bound.¹

“Gratitude,” “cherish,” and “deeply bound” are scarcely words that one would generally expect from, or associate with, Adorno, much less with his impressions of the United States, where he resided from 1938 until 1949, first in New York and then in Los Angeles, before returning to Frankfurt to help rebuild the Institute for Social Research. Yet they appear in this fashion in Prisms, and again shortly afterward, in slightly altered form, in a longer meditation on his stay in the U.S., a 1968 essay somewhat curiously titled “Scientific Experiences of a European Scholar in America.” Here he similarly concludes with an expression of “gratitude, including intellectual gratitude, toward America,” and, switching to the first person, with a declaration that “I [n]ever expect to forget as a scholar what I learned there.”²

The following year, while vacationing in Switzerland, four months after having been humiliated publicly by a militant student group and its demands for active political engagement to match a revolutionary political theory, Adorno died of a sudden heart attack.³ And his death consequently lends an eerie sense of epitaphic finality to these “grateful” expressions. Are they to be viewed as a sober revaluation, as mere politesse, or, rather, as a brief instance of retrospective illusion over a particularly difficult period of his life?

More familiar to us, of course, is another, less overtly grateful Adorno, who rails against an array of manifestations of American cultural production, from jazz to Hollywood movies, from astrology journalism to suburban tract housing, from Americans' use of nicknames to their propensity to smile. In an anecdote contained in the “Scientific Experiences” essay mentioned above, for example, he vents his spleen with more characteristically cantankerous wit. Writing of the Princeton Radio Project, in which he participated from 1938 to 1940, he claims that

[a]mong the frequently changing colleagues who came in contact with me in the Princeton Project was a young lady. After a few days she came to confide in me and asked in a completely charming way, “Dr. Adorno, would you mind a personal question?” I said, “It depends on the question, but just go ahead.” And she continued, “Please tell me: are you an extrovert or an introvert?” It was as if she was already thinking, as a living being, according to the pattern of the so-called “cafeteria” questions on questionnaires, by which she had been conditioned. […] Reified minds are in no way limited to America, but are fostered by the general tendency of society. But I first became aware of this in America.⁴

Although any contemporary American critic confronting the depth, rigor, and elusiveness of Adorno's thought runs the risk of misunderstanding the latter's project—of continually posing, much like the “young lady” scholar he describes above, the wrong questions—the aim of this paper is, among other things, to “just go ahead and ask” “personal” questions of Minima Moralia, a particularly “introverted” text that Adorno wrote while in Los Angeles, about America, about himself, and about what exile might mean for philosophy. Taking exception to long-standing claims that the core of Adorno's thought remains constant over the course of his long and extraordinarily productive career,⁵ I shall be examining what is distinct about Adorno's writing from, and understanding of, the U.S.—and how the experience of emigration in “the era of persecution” changed the course of his thinking. For, as Adorno himself comments, “[i]t is scarcely an exaggeration to say that any contemporary consciousness that has not appropriated the American experience, even if in opposition, has something reactionary about it.”⁶ Determining the extent to which Adorno “appropriated” America in Minima Moralia—indeed the relationship between exile, appropriation, and “opposition”—will be the central focus of this study.

In negotiating this rough theoretical terrain between philosophy, autobiography, and cultural critique, I shall be paying particular attention to the role played by the physical and psychical space of Adorno's Los Angeles; as it is in Los Angeles that he developed some of the central theses of Frankfurt School thought. But I also will demonstrate how Adorno's more specific or “local” observations, written of and in exile, are extended, often uneasily, to the realm of the more general and global. Just how genuinely global Adorno's world view might be is, of course, open to contention; I shall argue that, although clearly subject to their own highly problematic blind spots, Adorno's trenchant analyses of cultural politics, national identity and the (shifting and shifty) place of the intellectual can perhaps help to re-orient and refine contemporary academic debates concerning disciplinarity, social space, and the politics of difference.

My aim, it must be stressed at the outset, is not to defend or “recuperate” Adorno's (often mistaken) analyses of American cultural phenomena, but instead to complicate those hasty and often reductive readings that seem to have sedimented into the present “take” on Adorno in the American academy, in which his and Horkheimer's culture industry argument is often taken as a metonym for Adornian thinking on America, indeed for Adornian thinking in general.⁷ The following; however, as it engages largely with one text, can neither attain the systematicity of broader treatments of Adorno's oeuvre,⁸ nor address the wide variety of Adornian texts written in America, or even in Los Angeles⁹; rather, in its attention to Adorno's nervous self-exiles into and from the architecture of his own writing, and in its exploration of the cultural geography of his philosophy, it ought to be viewed as a kind of intellectual provocation, or, in Adorno's own peculiar definition of the term, an “essay.” For if, according to Adorno, “the essay's innermost formal law is heresy,”¹⁰ then at issue here is heresy against one of the century's foremost intellectual heretics, a transgression for which I hope I might be forgiven.

2. BLUE NOTE

Written in 1944-47 and importantly subtitled “Reflections from Damaged Life,”¹¹Minima Moralia [hereafter abbreviated as MM] could perhaps best be described as a kind of philosophical memoir in a period in which writing autobiography, much like writing poetry after Auschwitz in Adorno's best-known and most frequently misunderstood maxim, had, owing to certain historical and psychological “mutilations,” become virtually impossible. “Subjective reflection, even if critically alerted to itself,” he points out in his introduction to the text, “has something sentimental and anachronistic about it.”¹² To combat such sentimentality and anachronicity, Adorno employs an aphoristic style—evanescent and deliberately self-contradictory, “dialectical” but by no means especially methodical.¹³ The text, whose title draws on, and ironically reverses, that of Magna Moralia, Aristotle's ethical treatise, consists of one hundred and fifty-three entries of varying length (none longer than a few pages, most shorter), organized into three parts, or, borrowing a musical metaphor, “movements.” Each part, corresponding to the three phases of the text's composition, is designed to begin with reflections on the “narrowest private sphere” (MM Intro., 18, [11]), the dilemma of the individual thinker or artist in exile, proceeding to engage with issues of “broader social and anthropological scope” (MM Intro., 18, [11]), and ending with philosophical and world-historical declarations; but the pattern is not consistent, the trajectory not particularly “progressive.” Moreover, as Gillian Rose points out, individual entries—or, as Adorno calls them, “points of attack” (MM Intro., 18, [11])—often stand in marked contradistinction to the ones that precede them, so that no aphorism offers the “final word” on a particular issue: instead, a contrapuntal signification system is set up, in which the entries accrue meaning through their “negation.”¹⁴

It is helpful to recognize that the aphoristic mode of Minima Moralia is largely an outgrowth of the fragmentary “Notes and Drafts” section that concludes Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment, completed in 1944. In fact, the entire work, Adorno suggests, “bears witness” to a “dialogue intérieur” with Horkheimer, to whom the book is dedicated and who, like Adorno, was also living in Los Angeles at the time (although because Horkheimer was very ill during much of the time of Minima Moralia's composition, he was not an active interlocutor).¹⁵ As many critics have suggested, Horkheimer was always the more “empirically” inclined of the two thinkers; and here, disencumbered of the demands of a scientistic sociology with which he was arguably always uncomfortable, Adorno gives freer rein to his critical methods as well as to his cultural idiosyncrasies and predilections. It is in this sense that this “dialogue intérieur” is Adorno's most introspective work; but it is (as even his use of the French term possibly indicates) a profoundly unsettled “personal” mode, committed to locating—and standing—its own philosophical and discursive ground, while simultaneously aware of the precariousness, and pitfalls, of writing of and from exile.

The initial entry of Minima Moralia's first part, for example, is entitled “For Marcel Proust,” and it presents a reflection on this paragon of twentieth-century introspection, his class status, and the “departmentalization of Spirit” (Departamentalisierung des Geistes) that threatens to obliterate such introspection. Adorno's “image” of Proust, it should be mentioned at the outset, owes a great deal to Walter Benjamin's; in fact, the latter's brilliant and succinct assertion that the texts which comprise Proust's Recherche “are the result of an unconstruable synthesis in which the absorption of a mystic, the art of a prose writer, the verve of a satirist, the erudition of a scholar, and the self-consciousness of a monomaniac have combined in an autobiographical work,” could perhaps also apply to much of Benjamin's own work, or indeed to Minima Moralia, which at times seems particularly indebted to Benjamin's One Way Street and A Berlin Childhood.¹⁶

“The son of well-to-do parents,” begins Adorno, “who, whether from talent or weakness, engages in a so-called intellectual profession, as an artist or a scholar,”

will have a particularly difficult time with those bearing the distasteful title of colleagues. It is not merely that his independence is envied, the seriousness of his intentions mistrusted, or that he is suspected of being a secret envoy of the established powers. Such suspicions, though betraying a deep-seated resentment, would usually prove well-founded. But the real resistances lie elsewhere.

(MM 1, 21 [15])

These “real resistances” (Widerstände—literally, oppositions), it turns out, as one works through the labyrinthine logic of the entry, emerge from contradictions inherent in the division of labor itself, and, more especially, from the societally endorsed cordoning off of intellectual labor (art and scholarship) from the productive ethos with which, for Adorno, intellectual labor putatively does battle. “The [financially] independent intellectual,” even one who “take[s] pleasure in his work,” can never entirely repudiate this work ethos, which remains the source of the very economic value that enables his “independence.” “Thus,” he concludes contentiously, “is order ensured”:

Some have to play along [müssen mitmachen] because they cannot otherwise live, and those who could live otherwise are kept out because they do not want to play along [nicht mitmachen wollen].¹⁷ It is as if the class from which independent intellectuals have defected takes its revenge, by pressing its demands home in the very domain where the deserter takes refuge.

(MM 1, 21 [15])

This “domain”—art, or critical thought, for in Minima Moralia the terms are, as above, often intertwined—offers no such “refuge” (Zuflucht—literally, place to “flee” to), because a realm outside of productive logic is foreclosed. Whether it emerges from Proust's Paris bedroom or his own writing desk in Southern California—and indeed Adorno's comparison is necessarily an ironic one, because of the radical incommensurability between the living conditions, and objects of critique, of the two men, and moreover because Adorno in 1944 could hardly be considered an “independent intellectual”¹⁸—writing itself cannot help “playing along,” its will not to do so notwithstanding. Furthermore, despite the fact that financially independent intellectuals are ostracized, or rendered “beside the point”—not only by those who actually “work for a living” (Adorno later contentiously calls them “They, the People” in a rare English entry title) but also by those intellectual “colleagues” attached more obviously to cultural institutions¹⁹—this does not exempt them from succumbing to the reproduction of the ideology that benefits the status quo.

That Adorno's shifting rhetoric of open and closed—or, to borrow from his lexicon, “refuge” and its opposite (“subsumption,” “liquidation”)—here seems to offer, and then withdraw, a space for critique, is, of course, an essential element of that critique: its very evanescence and apparent self-canceling mirror the broader process of “groping” for a philosophy that would wrench the “good life” from the jaws of the very bad.²⁰ How the predicament of exile at once informs and prohibits this process—a contradiction which Adorno treats alternately with hyperbole and lament from this very first entry—becomes clearer as one proceeds into the sinews of the text.

“Every intellectual in emigration,” he writes in an early aphorism ironically called “Protection, Help, and Counsel” (Schutz, Hilfe und Rat—a title that in German carries the charge of a police-force motto), “is, without exception, mutilated” (beschädigt) (MM 13, 33 [32]). “His language,” Adorno continues, “has been expropriated, and the historical dimension that nourished his knowledge, sapped” (MM 13, 33 [32]). The situation is exacerbated by the presence of factions within the emigré community; because “[a]ll emphases are wrong, perspectives disrupted,” their attempts to organize politically seem futile. “All this,” he suggests, […] “leaves no individual unmarked” ([a]ll das hinterläβt Male in jedem Einzelnen—it leaves “stains” or “bruises” on people), affecting every aspect of their existence. The public sphere demands absolute conformity (an “unspoken oath of allegiance to the platform”), while “[p]rivate life asserts itself unduly, hectically, vampire-like, trying convulsively, because it really no longer exists, to prove it is alive” (MM 13, 33 [33]).

In the face of this bloodsucking exilic double-bind—to feel utterly alone, but to have no genuine private life—the “damage” mounts, and the emigré intellectual begins to show symptoms. “The eyes,” writes Adorno, “take on a manic yet cold look of grasping, devouring, commandeering” (MM 13, 33 [33]), and, in the “hopeless second struggle” of those alienated from an already alienated population, mutual suspicion reigns. For this intolerable situation, there is no readily apparent solution, and the only course of action is, Adorno suggests, yet more rigorous analysis: “There is no remedy but steadfast diagnosis of oneself and others, the attempt, through awareness, if not to escape doom, at least to rob it of its dreadful violence, that of blindness” (MM 13, 33 [33]).

It is noteworthy how often Adorno, in Minima Moralia and elsewhere, returns to metaphors of vision. Here, a sort of thankless critical insight (“awareness”) opposes the “violence” of “blindness” (ideology and reification); above, the eyes respond to the “hopeless second struggle” within the exilic community. And later, in the same aphorism, he refers to “the blindest self-interest” that was often masked by what he calls “esoteric” philosophy.²¹ The “sight” that would counteract such “blindness,” however, is neither lasting nor easily transmissible to others. Moreover, the “truth” it reveals (Adorno sometimes calls it “reality”) tends, almost immediately, to recede from view.

Along with this recurrent metaphor of vision, another, related, frequently deployed and equally multivalent Adornian figure in Minima Moralia is that of the home and its various architecturally-inclined subdivisions, including domicile, dwelling, and, as we have seen, “shelter.” Where, Adorno repeatedly asks, is “home”? What does it mean to be “at home”? When is a house a home? Of course, such apparently homely questions also bear on nationhood and nationality as well. Indeed, throughout Minima Moralia, Adorno employs the terms Heim (home) and Heimat (homeland, native place) interchangeably, and, given his nuanced awareness of the Nazi appropriation of the terms, almost always ironically. Yet for Adorno, of course, the Heimat could never consist of Blut und Boden, nor even of mother-tongue, however much the loss of the latter emerges as a theme in the pages of Minima Moralia. Nor, for that matter, could it involve the “house of being” associated with an existential “Jargon of Authenticity” of the type of which he accuses Heidegger, whose thought, in Minima Moralia, he links with that of Ludwig Klages. For Heidegger, homelessness or Heimatlosigkeit referred to the state of Dasein's thrownness, which Adorno immediately relates to the idea of racial community (MM 41, 67 [81]). In “dialectical” contrast, Adorno posits dwellinglessness or Obdachlosigkeit as a putatively more specifically socio-historical phenomenon, which is to say a more “materialist” phenomenon, to be disentangled via the “work of the negative.”²²

Consequently, when Adorno inveighs against the ready-made quality of modern homes, calling them, as in entry 18 (“Refuge for the Homeless”²³), “living-cases manufactured by experts for philistines,” or “factory sites that have strayed into the consumption sphere, devoid of all relation to the occupant” (MM 18, 38 [40]), these invectives should not be mistaken for a simple-minded nostalgia for old bourgeois manors; in fact, the latter incite an even greater degree of ridicule, associated, as they are in Adorno, with the bourgeois nuclear family and its manifold social and psychological repressions.²⁴ What Adorno rather seeks to resist is the prefabricated, ready-made thought that could produce the concentration and death camps along with the single-family suburban house with garden. This kind of modern home is, indeed, uninhabitable.

For Adorno, the development of thought had reached an historical juncture in which “Das Haus ist vergangen”—an enigmatic and hyperbolic sentence which signifies “the house is gone,” but also “the house is [in the] past” (MM 18, 39 [41]); that is, the era of the house is no longer. Under these circumstances, Adorno declares with a morose irony, “it is part of morality not to be at home in one's own house” (Es gehört zur Moral nicht bei sich selber zu Hause zu sein²⁵). In this text, whose title implies a search for the most minuscule degree of morality in the face of unprecedented historical mass suffering, such a prescription must be taken seriously. What could it mean to see homelessness as a moral imperative, or even a moral virtue? If indeed, as Adorno suggests at the end of the entry, “wrong life cannot be lived rightly” [Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen—literally, “there is no right life in the false one” (MM 18, 39 [41])], where can one live a “right life”? Is there really to be no “refuge” for the “homeless”?

In various entries in Minima Moralia, Adorno seems to hold out the possibility that the act of writing itself provides a kind of asylum for the exiled thinker. In the series of aphorisms that constitute “Memento” (entry 51), for example, Adorno considers what he calls “properly written texts”—those that have a “purity of expression,” avoid clichés, and have been vigorously honed down by self-editing and deletion. Such texts, he suggests, are “like spiders' webs: tight, concentric, transparent, well-spun and firm” (MM 51, 87 [108]). As if to demonstrate this proposition, Adorno proceeds with an arachnoid exploration of the “home-in-writing” (itself perhaps a modernist cliché):

In his text, the writer sets up house. Just as he trundles papers, books, pencils, documents untidily from room to room, he creates the same disorder in his thoughts. They become pieces of furniture that he sinks into, content or irritable […]. For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live. In it he inevitably produces, as his family once did, refuse and junk [Abfall und Bodenramsch]. But now he lacks a store-room, and […] it is not easy to part with garbage [es ist … nicht leicht vom Abhub sich zu trennen]. So he pushes it along in front of him, in danger finally of filling his pages with it. The demand that one harden oneself against self-pity [means that the writer must counter …] any slackening of intellectual tension with the utmost alertness, and … eliminate anything that has begun to encrust the work. [This encrustation …] may at an earlier stage have served […] to generate the warm atmosphere conducive to growth, but [it] is now left behind, flat and stale. In the end, the writer is not even allowed to live in his writing.

(MM 51, 87 [108])

To comprehend this enigmatic passage, with its melancholic finale, one must unpack the metaphors of refuse and excrement associated with the house of writing. The man who no longer has a homeland produces biodegradable “junk” which it is not easy to get rid of; but the need to “harden” oneself against self-pity requires that the “encrustation” of thought, which, like a kind of intellectual manure, might once have been “conducive to growth,” must itself be “eliminated”; ultimately, because the house is left with only “flat and stale” remains, it becomes uninhabitable. Adorno thus “builds” a house out of writing, replete with intellectual “furniture,” then, in effect, evicts himself, or, rather, is evicted by the—stinking—process of writing. The exile is not allowed to live in his prose, because if exilic writing is indeed a “place to live,” it is a house suffering severe dilapidation.

These examples amply illustrate the difficulty of writing criticism-in-exile, of “taking place” in the negative, of finding a “home” outside of the logic of the administered world. But what of the more “local” observations of the geographical place that Adorno in exile by necessity called home? How is it that Adorno moves cognitively from those specific sites to the broader sight of the universal? Already we have witnessed the comparison of the type of tract housing Adorno must have come across in Southern California to the concentration camps of Europe. But what are we to make of his problematic assertion that “in Anglo-Saxon countries the prostitutes look as if they purveyed, along with sin, the attendant pains of hell” (MM 29, 49 [55]), or of his comments on the burgeoning California physical-exercise culture, in which “all the movements of health resemble the reflex-movements of beings whose hearts have stopped beating” (MM 36, 59 [70])? Minima Moralia is laden with such “site-specific” reflections, cultural details that all somehow flow into the bad totality that must be opposed by critical thinking. To begin to consider Adorno physically and psychically “experiencing” the Hollywood that he loathed—but that he nevertheless recognized as “today's prototypical culture” (MM 36, 58 [68])²⁶—requires that a broader investigation of his exilic situation be undertaken, one particularly attentive to the pitfalls of writing culture.

3. AC-CEN-TU-ATE THE NEGATIVE

It is strange, indeed, almost perverse to imagine Adorno strolling along Malibu beach, a light cotton sweater draped around his neck; or heading over to the supermarket to pick up food for a Sunday brunch; or being driven to nearby Schwab's drugstore for bacon and eggs or a root beer float. Published biographical information from this period of Adorno's life is surprisingly scarce, but, according to the Adorno Institute in Frankfurt, during his years in Southern California, Adorno lived in a large, two-story “Monterey style” duplex at 316 South Kenter Avenue, in the Brentwood Heights section of West Los Angeles.²⁷ This would place him about two or three miles east of Horkheimer's Pacific Palisades “bungalow”—in which meetings of the West Coast Institute for Social Research took place.²⁸ Horkheimer's immediate neighbors were Thomas Mann and Lion Feuchtwanger; while by 1942 Bertolt Brecht, Hanns Eisler, and Herbert Marcuse all lived in the vicinity.²⁹ Slightly to the east of them but west of Adorno (and north of Sunset Boulevard) lived Arnold Schoenberg, on Rockingham Avenue, the street recently made famous by the Simpson murder trial. And, further east but still nearby were the homes of Ernst Lubitsch and Otto Preminger (in Bel Air) and Billy Wilder (in Westwood, near the present site of UCLA).³⁰

In addition to attending the Institute's meetings, Adorno, as is well known, collaborated with Mann on parts of the novel Doctor Faustus, providing the author with a copy of his manuscript version of On the Philosophy of Modern Music as well as regularly discussing the intricacies of Schoenberg's twelve-tone method with him.³¹ This was much to the eventual dismay of Schoenberg³²; but Mann's “gratitude” to Adorno is encoded in the novel's newly-added lyrics to a Beethoven piano sonata, in which Mann inserts the word “meadowground” (Wiesengrund), ostensibly as a token of his appreciation.³³ Less well known is the story, recounted in an only-recently-translated Adorno essay, “Zweimal Chaplin,” of a bizarre occurrence at a party in Malibu that both Adorno and Charlie Chaplin attended. Adorno tells how, at the party, he was introduced to the actor who played a troubled World War II veteran in the film The Best Years of Our Lives (an aptly ironic title for Adorno's Los Angeles experience).³⁴ Out of instinct or politesse, Adorno reached up and sought to shake hands in greeting, only to shudder when he realized that the man, who had actually been badly injured in the war, had a prosthetic iron right hand that Adorno claims looked like a “claw.” Then, to make matters worse, in order to cover up his initial shock, Adorno grimaced in an “obliging” way that must, he notes, have seemed far more horrible, as the actor left the party. Chaplin, who was standing nearby, witnessed the incident, and, to the cathartic laughter of the partygoers but to the apparent embarrassment of Adorno, mimicked the entire scene.³⁵

From these two anecdotes we can discern that Adorno was thus no hermit but inevitably part of a (largely Jewish) community of Southern California German (and German speaking) exiles—a group in which he was, however, not particularly integrated, and about which, as we have already seen, he felt a great deal of anxiety and suspicion. There is a black and white photograph, reproduced in Wiggerhaus's book on Adorno, that succinctly conveys the logic of Adorno's “private” working space. Adorno sits on a heavy wooden chair at his enormous, ornate and certainly European desk of dark wood (probably oak), his bald head craning back toward the camera, a quizzical and impatient expression on his face, as if he has been caught in the middle of working, although there are no papers on the desk. He is wearing a sports jacket and a pair of glasses, and his right hand leans on the writing surface. On the top part of the desk stand little sculptures of African animals—giraffes, a small zebra, and, a little lower, a tiny monkey—that seem to be peering down on him; to his left (and out of focus) is an Asian carved wooden chair representing two long-necked birds. To his right is a rectangular-shaped mirror, beneath which stands a small bureau with a metal “in”-type box on top of it. Further to his right, and behind him, is a sash-window typical of Los Angeles 1940s architecture (with half-closed Venetian blinds) that is actually lower than the top of the very tall desk.

The layout of the room is such that it is tempting if somewhat unrigorous to relate it to Adorno's thinking process in Minima Moralia: the window facing outside (toward the city) is furthest away from him; the mirror closer; and the transplanted European writing desk (with its African and Asian curios³⁶) closest of all. And it is as if this “dialectical” process of observing (through windows, in this case covered by blinds), self-consciously reflecting upon (through the mirror), and writing in the European (and putatively universal) grain inflects all of his impressions of Los Angeles, and of America in general.

And what Adorno “sees” is tawdry, fallen, phony to its core, or strangely pathetic. Consider, for example, his impressions of Californian roads and the surrounding landscape in the sardonically titled “Paysage” (entry 28):

[Roads] are always inserted directly in the landscape, and the more impressively smooth and broad they are, the more unrelated and violent their gleaming track appears to be against the all-too-wild, overgrown surroundings. They are expressionless […]. It is as if no one had ever passed his hand over the landscape's hair. [The landscape] is uncomforted and comfortless.

(MM 28, 48 [54])

The violence of the implementation of (sub)urban planning—these roads are, according to Adorno, “always” inserted into or blasted from (gesprengt) the landscape—is thus akin to a rape, in which the victim (the landscape), coded as female, undergoes a kind of trauma. The smooth, broad and “gleaming” roads, however, cover over the traces (Spuren—which also means lanes on the road) of this act, while the landscape is left to recover alone, for the viewer of the scene, stuck in a moving vehicle, is powerless to help. The conclusion to the aphorism makes this clear:

It is uncomforted and comfortless. And it is perceived in a corresponding way. For what the hurrying eye has seen merely from the car it cannot retain, and the vanishing landscape leaves no more traces behind than it bears upon itself.

(MM 28, 48 [55])

These images of things “hurrying,” “vanishing” and leaving no “traces” or “tracks,” are symptomatic of Adorno's “perception” of America, a perception that is itself uncomforted and comfortless. No matter how “impressive” the surroundings may be, there is something of the sublime in every disappearing particle: “Beauty of the American landscape: that even the smallest of its segments is inscribed, as its expression, with the immensity of the whole country” (MM 29, 49 [55]). In the face of this “immensity”—a rubric that is strangely reminiscent of Conrad's Heart of Darkness—the perceiver of these inscriptions is, like Marlow, unutterably overwhelmed.³⁷

Dotted alongside these roads are motels and restaurants, which serve only to remind Adorno of the old, once-Grands Hôtels. Probably, he notes ironically, “the decline of the hotel dates back to the dissolution of the ancient unity of inn and brothel” (MM 75, 117 [151]). But in its current phase of development, the temporary dwelling place, though separated from bodily pleasure, is all too linked to the “intercourse” of business, itself thoroughly compartmentalized.

That the “Restaurant” is divided by gulfs of antagonism from the Hotel, an empty husk of rooms, is a matter of course, as are the time-limits on eating and on insufferable “room service,” from which one flees to the drugstore, blatantly a shop, behind whose inhospitable counter a juggler with fried-eggs, crispy bacon and ice cubes proves himself the last solicitous host.

(MM 75, 117 [151])

The word “snob” flies off of the page in passages like these, replete with sarcastic quotation marks which themselves indicate a kind of displacement, but each fragment of the observation is in fact thoroughly theorized: Adorno's preference for old hotels is (or so he claims) not so much for their luxury as for their reminder, with their failing central heating and bathroom across the landing, that the human body and hence human subject physically exist, and that a narrative of “progress,” which for Adorno represents the potential annihilation of that humanness, might thereby somehow be resisted. Thus when he calls the modern restaurant “hostess” a “synthetic landlady” whose “true function” is “to see to it that the incoming guest does not even choose for himself the table at which he is to be processed,” and concludes that “her graciousness is the reverse side of the dignity of the bouncer” (MM 75, 117-18 [152]), it is not so much the West-coast diner culture itself but its barely camouflaged link to a lurking violence that is at issue. However, it takes several levels of intellectual “processing” to move from the particular instance to the universal symptom.

In this (bright) light, it is surely significant that one of the nicknames for the Frankfurt School's Southern California meeting place (in Horkheimer's house) was “Grand Hôtel Abgrund,” or Grand Hotel Abyss—a name which seems to pun on Adorno's deleted (or curtailed) patronymic, Wiesengrund.³⁸ The idea of the abyss, perceived as a kind of giant drain of thought and language, irretrievably distanced from any sort of political practice, has, of course, become a familiar critique of poststructuralist writing (think for example of Mark Tansey's painting, “Derrida Queries De Man” which pictures the two dancing on the dangerous edge of a Romantic cliff). A similar critique was applied to Adorno in the 1940s: his detailed analysis of cultural fragments was perceived, by Brecht for example, as dangerously removed from, if not antagonistic to, the realm of praxis: Wiesengrund's “Grand Hotel” of thought was situated too close to the Abgrund.

Yet it is imperative to recognize the political and by no means merely “post-Marxist” impulse in all of Adorno's criticism, even at its most apparently “abysmal.” For, in addition to these sights, or sites, of California—the road, the house, the hotel, the restaurant—Adorno addresses more apparently significant intellectual and political movements in the American grain. One of the more immediately noticeable objects of Adorno's critique in Minima Moralia is the translation of psychoanalysis into “therapy”—an early symptom of that which would only later (in the 1960s and '70s) become a Californian cultural trademark. The Frankfurt School's work is often reductively called Freudo-Marxian (a rubric that, as Jameson points out, is better reserved for Marcuse³⁹); but, in Minima Moralia, Adorno lashes out against the failure of psychoanalysis to resist, or even account for, social forces of domination.

He locates part of the problem in Freud's project itself. In an entry called “This Side of the Pleasure Principle,” for example, Adorno suggests, contentiously, that Freud's “unenlightened enlightenment plays into the hands of bourgeois disillusion” (MM 37, 60 [72])⁴⁰: “As a late opponent of hypocrisy,” Adorno continues, Freud “stands ambivalently between desire for the open emancipation of the oppressed, and apology for open oppression” (MM 37, 60-61 [72]). This “ambivalence” or ambiguity in Freud's thinking leads to a depressing paradox: psychoanalysis, Adorno suggests, “gives us the means for discovering” the “common root” of “mind [or Spirit] and pleasure” (Geist und Lust), but “unintentionally” reproduces a “hostility towards both” (MM 37, 61 [72]).⁴¹

In its North American setting, the “reproduction” of this “hostility” is made manifest by the wide influence of the so-called Horney school. Karen Horney, herself a refugee from Nazi Germany (who incidentally, like Adorno, also taught at the New School for Social Research in the late 1930s), asserted that personal-environmental conditions, as opposed to biological drives, largely determine personality traits and disorders. In Minima Moralia, Adorno considers these theories to be a banalization of psychoanalytic insight; and consequently places American psychoanalysis firmly within the bounds of mass culture, which is itself, and not unproblematically, portrayed as a kind of invading bacterium: “Now that depth psychology, with the help of films, soap operas and Horney, has delved into the deepest recesses, people's last possibility of experiencing themselves has been cut off by organized culture” (MM 40, 65 [78]). That which Adorno derisively calls “ready-made enlightenment” transforms all thought into “mass-produced articles”; and “the painful secrets of the individual history, which the orthodox method [i.e. Freudianism] is already inclined to reduce to formulae, [become] commonplace conventions.” Consequently,

instead of working to gain self-awareness, the initiates become adept at subsuming all instinctual conflicts […]. Terror before the abyss of the self is removed by the consciousness of being concerned with nothing so very different from arthritis or sinus trouble. Thus conflicts lose their menace. They are accepted, but by no means cured, being merely fitted as an unavoidable component into the surface of standardized life.

(MM 40, 65 [78])

At issue here is not merely the fact that psychoanalysis has been “exiled” from its “proper” European setting into the land where people “speak of it but never think of it”⁴²—although that does indeed seem to be part of the problem for Adorno. Rather, the bracketing of social-historical truth and the pursuit of an individually discoverable and reparable set of “symptoms” create a scenario in which the “Real” past—one of collective suffering—is forgotten, and the possible future foreclosed. Or, as Adorno concludes the entry:

Thus psychoanalysis falls victim to the very replacement of the appropriate super-ego by a stubbornly adopted, unrelated, external one, that it taught us itself to understand. The last grandly-conceived theorem of bourgeois self-criticism has become a means of making bourgeois self-alienation, in its final phase, absolute, and of rendering ineffectual the lingering awareness of the ancient wound, in which lies hope of a better future.

(MM 40, 66 [79-80])

The “awareness” of the “ancient wound” (uralten Wunde)—what this “wound” or “sore” might be, and what caused it, are, significantly, left unstated⁴³—is numbed by a therapy that, through use of mind-measurement techniques such as Rorschach, personality, and intelligence-quotient standardized tests, focuses on hygiene and “self-fulfillment.” All of these forms of psychical “understanding” result in the subsumption of the sick self into the status quo, as opposed to a recognition that standardized society itself is “sick” and must be radically overturned.

The entry called “Health unto Death,” a titular reversal of Kierkegaard's Die Krankheit zum Tode, expands upon this critique of American “soundness” (Gesundheit). Here Adorno lambastes the exuberant normality of those individuals whom he calls “Der regular guy” and “Das popular girl,” and the psychical processes that engendered their behavior. “No science,” he writes, “has yet explored the inferno in which were forged the deformations that later emerge to daylight as cheerfulness, openness, sociability, successful adaptation to the inevitable, an equable, practical frame of mind” (MM 36, 59 [69]). This infernal list of American behavioral idiosyncrasies amounts to a catalogue of neuroses, if not psychoses—symptoms that only reveal themselves through barely legible somatic “traces” or “tracks” (again Adorno uses the German term Spur[en]). “[T]he traces of illness,” claims Adorno, “give them away[.] [T]heir skin seems covered by a rash printed in regular patterns, like a camouflage of the inorganic” (MM 36, 58-9 [69]). The smiling faces of the putatively healthy-and-happy are thus, in essence, masks—as it were, mass-produced masks—a camouflage unable completely to cover over (as in the gleaming roads above) the tracks of sickness, tracks subject to disappearance.

Even such “healthy” Californian homes as his own—lots of airy rooms filled with sunshine—are viewed as symptomatic by the appropriately cranky Adorno:

Just as the old injustice⁴⁴ is not changed by a lavish display of light, air and hygiene, but is in fact concealed by the gleaming transparency of rationalized big business, the inner health of our time has been secured by blocking flight [or escape—Flucht] into illness without in the slightest altering its aetiology. The dark closets have been abolished as a troublesome waste of space, and incorporated into the bathroom. […] The brightest rooms are the secret domain of faeces.

(MM 36, 58-9 [69])

Here the trope of the virtually invisible mask (the “gleaming transparency” of “rationalized big business”) combines with the excrement metaphor: the brightest rooms, in effect, cover up or over the dirtiest of spaces. Houses are like bodies: no matter how “clean” they appear to be, they inevitably contain, and produce, filth. Yet, as “inner health” has been forced on the individual, any genuine way out for or purging of this filth—i.e. escape through mental illness—is blocked, unable to pass.

Adorno's culturally descriptive metaphors thus initially seem to conform to a “classically” architectural Marxian base/superstructure model; only here, the superstructure (der Überbau) infuses virtually all aspects of thought and feeling—so that the super-ego (das Über-ich) is itself viewed as a kind of societal policing device. The spatialization of ideology—it is, virtually, all over and over all (über Alles)—makes ostensibly “sound” people unable to recognize “the possible course their lives might be given by reason” (MM 36, 59 [70]). But how best to listen to “reason” when one can never, with the pace of things moving so quickly, locate its source?

Throughout Minima Moralia, Adorno addresses the speed of contemporary American existence—the speed, if you will, of “sound” life—and laments the (for him) coterminous diminution of individuals' ability to think rationally. There are thus frequent, almost always derisive, references to express trains, rocket ships, and especially, automobiles (particularly to General Motors' cars⁴⁵), all of which vehicles are symptomatic of what he calls “the runaway tempo of things” (… Tempo der losgelassenen Sachen—literally, the tempo of unleashed things) (MM 92, 141 [185]). At issue in this critique of speed is neither a wholesale rejection of technology per se nor merely a quest for intellectual quietude. (Indeed, little seems to annoy Adorno more than those “cultivated philistines”—a derisive term he borrows from Nietzsche—who recommend that he “relax and take it easy.”⁴⁶) Rather, it is the immediacy, and, hence, unintelligibility, of the speeding object that threatens to overwhelm rationality for the benefit of the total system, and which must be opposed.

Significantly, Adorno illustrates “the runaway tempo of things” by referring to “the mad race at the end of a film cartoon,” and it is precisely this sense of unleashed, irrepressible power that constitutes what is perhaps his essential objection to the cinematic form. Cinema demands attentiveness just as it dissolves attention: like a rocket bomb, it apparently “career(s) without a subject,” and with equally disastrous results. Adorno's well-known disagreement with Benjamin's optimistic view of the potentialities of radical cinema—absorbed in Benjamin's hesitant postscript to the “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility”⁴⁷—pivots around this question of acceleration. In Adorno's view, capitalist modern technology, which offers up ever-newer, ever-faster means of “transport” (conceived in the broadest sense), moves the subject of technology (viewer, reader, rider) further towards subjection, and more quickly too.

Our concern here, however, is neither Adorno's objection to the filmic medium per se, nor the so-called “culture industry” debate which has (reductively) come to define Adorno's position on America, but rather the emerging society of speeding, disciplinary spectacularity, and his exilic relation to it. This rhetoric allows him to describe, more than thirty years before Baudrillard's Simulations, how “men are reduced to walk-on parts in a monster documentary film which has no spectators, since the least of them has his bit to do on the screen” (MM 33, 55 [64]), and yet to portray his thinking self as somehow, at least temporarily, on the “other side” of this screen, in the role of spectator. To be sure, Adorno does not view his own position as exilically elect, beyond the sway of market forces—this much was made clear in the first entry of Minima Moralia, explored above. But the rigorously “uncommitted, suspended […] mode of conduct” that he recommends (MM 18, 39 [41])—in his view, the only position under which “genuine” art and thought can viably function—must strive to occupy this negative, non-identical “other side.” Consequently, it is the very slowness and difficulty of art and thought (the critical interrelatedness of the latter two bears emphasizing), that resists Verdinglichung and refuses to be subsumed into the faster, monstrous side of the screen. The vast majority of what passes for “American culture” cannot achieve such exalted negative status, and thereby becomes subsumed by the administered world, where things speed along, virtually unrecognizably and illegibly, like a single frame of a cartoon on a reel of moving film.

Perhaps no single social space more clearly exemplifies this dual tendency of late capitalism toward technological acceleration and subjective subsumption than the modern American office. Drawing on nigh-Kafkaesque caricatures, but adjusting and updating them to fit the context, Adorno frequently ridicules the bureau-mentality and its products. Here, bosses call each other by their nicknames (a genuine pet peeve of Adorno's—albeit again a theorized one⁴⁸), while secretaries attend to the phone, which itself becomes a kind of icon of the circulation of invisible capital among the “sound.” Yet it is not merely technocratic, alienated office labor that is the object of his critique, but also the very idea of the official work day as a discrete unit separated from leisure time. “Work while you work, play while you play—this is a basic rule of repressive self-discipline,” writes Adorno in the entry called “Timetable” (MM 84, 130 [169]⁴⁹). “But one could no more imagine Nietzsche sitting in an office, with a secretary minding the telephone in an anteroom, at his desk until five o'clock, than playing golf after the day's work was done” (MM 84, 130 [170]). The workaday world has no time for genuine thought or pleasure, while “no spark of reflection is allowed to fall into leisure time, since it might otherwise leap across to the workaday world and set it on fire” (MM 84, 130 [170]). Labor and amusement are, from this potentially pyrotechnic perspective, becoming dangerously alike, even though “they are at the same time being divided ever more rigorously by invisible demarcation lines” (MM 84, 130 [170]).

4. SAYING “I”

It is arguably the diminishing visibility and legibility of these “demarcation lines,” and their incursion into the realm of thought and subjectivity itself, that provides the central theme of Minima Moralia. Adorno's rhetoric of exile, as we have been exploring, relies upon similar imagined cultural demarcation lines—between inside and outside, national and extranational, selfhood and otherness—and for Adorno, the latter, weaker terms of these binaries must, in a sense, be defended, even though the effects of such divisions must be opposed. Thus while Part One of Minima Moralia begins with a recognition of the difficulty of authentically “independent” thinking—a motif that in Part Two leads to a consideration of how the “ego” has itself become a kind of “business manager”—Part Three, in contrast, chronically assumes a more “intimate” tone, in which the irreducible specificity of the individual qua individual is asserted. The word “intimate” belongs within quotation marks, because it is not clear how genuine these autobiographical sentiments are, or whether they are to be taken seriously as documents of personal memories. But they are startling, nonetheless, particularly as they represent some of the few such assertions in Adorno's philosophical oeuvre.

The entry called “The Bad Comrade” (“Der böse Kamerad”⁵⁰), for example, commences with the claim that, “In a real sense, I ought to be able to deduce Fascism from the memories of my childhood,” and proceeds with an analysis of one such set of recollections, deploying a colonial, martial simile: “As a conqueror dispatches envoys to the remotest provinces, Fascism had sent its advance guard there long before it marched in: my schoolfellows.” After a brief excursus on the proper names of these peers,⁵¹ which, to Adorno, themselves anticipate properties of fascism, he continues:

The outbreak of the Third Reich did, it is true, surprise my political judgement, but not my unconscious fear. So closely had all the motifs of permanent catastrophe brushed me, so deeply were the warning signs of the German awakening burned into me, that I recognized them all in the features of Hitler's dictatorship: and it often seemed to my foolish terror as if the total State had been invented expressly against me, to inflict on me after all those things from which, in my childhood, its primeval form, I had been temporarily dispensed.

(MM 123, 192 [255])

This striking passage, with its unexpectedly frank admission of personal psychical harm, contains, in distilled form, some of Adorno's essential theses on the philosophy of history. First, it exhibits the relation between rational judgment and the individual unconscious, expressed here in terms of its negative dispensation of “fear” (Angstbereitschaft—literally, “readiness for anxiety”). Second, it posits the idea of “permanent catastrophe,” which characterizes Adorno's entirely Benjaminian view of historical “development.” Third, the historical “inscription”—discrete memory—is conceived as brushed against (“gestreif[t]”) or burnt into (“eingebrannt”) each subject, data that can potentially be read forward or backward into time, as advance symptom or deferred action.

Although Adorno goes on to adumbrate why these particular memory-scenes conspired to form a legitimately suspicious, even paranoid view of the world—the entry chillingly describes the brutal and proleptically Nazi behavior of conformity-minded children who despise, and ridicule, their different or creative peers⁵²—what is perhaps most salient in the present context is that these moments are viewed as a kind of nightmarish precursor to his own inevitable exile. Writing of these obnoxious classmates, who became “officials and recruits,” Adorno concludes the entry:

Now that they […] have stepped visibly out of my dream and dispossessed me of my past life and my language, I no longer need to dream of them. In Fascism the nightmare of childhood has come true. [Im Faschismus ist der Alp der Kindheit zu sich selber gekommen—it has come into its own.]

(MM 123, 193 [256-57])

Not unlike Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses, Adorno (who would himself eventually experience a rather unlikely Nostos in Frankfurt) here laments the inexorable, nightmarish course of history. But for Adorno (who is, in any case, perhaps as reminiscent of the Jewish outcast Bloom as of the philosophizing Dedalus), fascism represents a realization or malignant outgrowth of childhood memories, which themselves contained the seeds of impending disaster.

There is, in fact (to shift back to a text to which Adorno himself refers—Proust's Recherche), a kind of negative or anti-madeleine memory-structure in place in the latter part of the text. Whereas the bedridden Marcel was, upon tasting a biscuit, flooded with “positive” mnemonic sensations, Adorno's exilic memory is here triggered by almost “opposite” physical stimuli. Indeed, it is curiously incongruous that, while residing in mid-1940s Southern California, he reflects, in one of his fragmentary “monograms,” upon how “[i]n early childhood [he] saw the first snow-shovellers in thin shabby clothes” (MM 122, 190 [253]). It is moreover a rather unlikely place for a “Regression” (his titular term) to music he heard as a child—Brahms's “Cradle Song” or Taubert's lullabies, for example. (Incidentally, Adorno and his wife, Margarethe “Gretel” Karplus—who served as his secretary and chauffeur and whose deep influence on his thinking remains almost entirely unexplored—themselves had no children.) Of course, personal memories are by no means determined by social space alone, but the way Los Angeles becomes a kind of filter for Adorno's impressions (secondary elaborations?) of Nazism and the holocaust is remarkable: he sees barbaric traces (Spuren) of “home” everywhere in the new world, the result being that while Germany and the U.S. are by no means identical, they are, through his lens, converging, like lanes on a highway.⁵³

And yet, it is imperative to recognize that Adorno's conception of the bad totality is no Orwellian global dystopia, just as Minima Moralia is no mere justification for “the existence of the distanced, lonely critic of society.”⁵⁴ To lodge Adorno in either of these philosophical “ruts”—representing, respectively, the universal and the particular—would be to misread how the concept of non-identity (or “freedom”) relates and responds to the sameness of massified society. In the celebrated “Finale” of Minima Moralia, Adorno, returning to a motif sounded throughout the text, writes that

[t]he only philosophy which can be justified [verantworten] in face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption: everything else exhausts itself in its reconstruction and remains mere technique [alles andere erschöpft sich in der Nachkonstruktion und bleibt ein Stück Technik]. Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light. To gain such perspectives without velleity or violence, entirely from felt contact with its objects—this alone is the task of thought [Darauf allein kommt es dem Denken an—this alone is what thought wants to know].

(MM 153, 247 [334])

This dual “task,” locating the standpoint of liberation and fashioning a displaced perspective out of objects themselves, is, for Adorno, both the “absolute simplest” and most utterly impossible thing: simplest because “consummate negativity, once squarely faced, delineates the mirror image of its opposite,” but impossible because negativity presupposes a position (ein “Standort”) removed or set apart from the sphere of existence (“Bannkreis des Daseins”), even if only by the most minuscule degree (“um ein Winziges”).

Thus we revisit the double bind of “placement” in Adorno: that which allows philosophy to “take place,” to ground itself, also threatens to undermine it and render it ineffectual. The standing place (Standort) from which to discern the imaginary standing point (Standpunkt) of redemption is highly unstable—indeed, on the verge of collapse. And Adorno, of course, recognizes the negative's shaky ground⁵⁵: “the more passionately thought denies its conditionality for the sake of the unconditional,” he writes, “the more unconsciously, and so calamitously, it is delivered up to the world. Even its own impossibility it must at last comprehend for the sake of the possible.” And yet, he concludes, in comparison with all of these demands placed on a self-conscious, socially-responsible philosophy,

the question of the reality or unreality of redemption itself is almost trivial [die Frage nach der Wirklichkeit oder Unwirklichkeit der Erlösung [ist] selber fast gleichgültig].

(MM 153, 247 [354])

The final word of Minima Moralia is, therefore, a repudiation of the very idea of a final word. The space of deliverance (Erlösung)—a Benjaminian, weak messianic inflection of Utopia⁵⁶—which he had just held out as the only viable point from which to view things-as-they-are, is revealed to be no “place” at all. The release promised by Erlösung may be real or unreal, but it is the tireless process of searching for its flickering light in the darkness of “despair” that, according to Adorno, itself constitutes philosophy's moral minimum.

5. CODA

My aim thus far has been to explore the “exilic” properties of Adorno's most despairingly exilic text, by asking both how exile takes place—which it does delicately and often self-contradictorily—and how Adorno fashions a critical (non) identity out of (a) place: the Los Angeles that would, initially at least, seem to represent a kind of literalization of his demand for an “estranged” philosophy. The question of exile in Adorno, as we have seen, can never be entirely divorced from that of (Marxian) alienation—in which the subject under capitalism is viewed as irretrievably separated from the products of his or her labor—but neither should exile be reduced to mere equivalency with Entfremdung. Indeed, by reading the broader question of the various positionalities and oppositionalities of exile in Adorno's critical thought against his personal, historically specific cultural relation to a place in time (or time in place), I have sought to work up and through the relation between criticism and labor, and thereby to expose aspects of Adorno's cultural and aesthetic theory that have received insufficient attention. For nothing could be further from Adorno's stand on exile than the smug European touristic notion, often mistakenly associated with him, that America (unlike yogurt, as the joke would have it) has no culture, or, conversely, that German exiles themselves “embody” culture.⁵⁷ To view Adorno as merely an apologist for European “high culture,” and hence enemy of the “popular,” would be to banalize his anything-but-implacable philosophy, which aims above all to account and make room for cultural difference, amid what he perceives to be the increasing sameness of disciplinary technological society.

Written in the shadow of a genocidal war that was, in Adorno's view, the inexorable, logical outgrowth of material, technological “progress” and techniques of ideological manipulation, both of which entailed the further reification, and nullification, of individuals, Minima Moralia seeks to expose the relationship between an increasingly global system and the diminishing power of the thinking, resistant subject. “For many people,” Adorno writes, “it is already an impertinence to say I” (Bei vielen Menschen ist es bereits eine Unverschämtheit, wenn sie Ich sagen) (MM 29, 50 [57]). In such a “climate,” and despite the evident complicity between “bourgeois subjectivity” and Auschwitz, it becomes all the more imperative for Adorno “to say” a certain kind of “I.” Minima Moralia presents Adorno saying it in the only way available to him: crankily, woefully, but in an exceedingly rigorous fashion.

Such was the nature of Adorno's “present” to Horkheimer. What that present has to offer the present climate of thought is open to question. Although one would hesitate to call Adorno, as Jameson has, somewhat contentiously, the philosopher of the 1990s,⁵⁸ the idea that Adorno could perhaps be perceived as “in vogue” or at least pertinent again is intriguing. It is a curious irony that one of the many complicated reasons that Adorno, who had become an internationally celebrated academic figure in the late 1960s, fell out of favor in the '70s involved, on the one hand, an enthusiasm for interrogations of identity, logos, and power (many of which he could be said to have anticipated), and, on the other, a short-lived optimism over liberation struggles in the developing world. If Adorno's fragmented, “subjective,” highly particular portrayal of a total system seems somehow more apt in this age of a “New World Order” in which the idea of a “non-aligned” third world seems to be disappearing along with the “socialist” second—while poverty remains, even spreads—if his thinking appears “fresher” (far fresher than that of, say, Sartre or Marcuse), this may have more to do with the durability of his pessimism than with the viability of his philosophical system.

In any case, while Adorno would almost certainly have no truck with contemporary theorizations of difference—say, postcoloniality⁵⁹ or queer theory,⁶⁰ both of which he addresses, negatively, in what might be called their nascent discursive forms—there may be reason to believe that his gnomic, autobiographical, untimely meditations have something decidedly “current” about them. And if the once nearly bereft Adorno, who always insisted on the temporary, interventionist role of critical theory, can regain his currency, it is perhaps because he poignantly articulates, from the often desperate site/non-site of exile, the necessity for philosophy to address and resist a shocking current: the one we, perhaps mistakenly, call culture.⁶¹

Notes

1. Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), 8.

2. Adorno, “Scientific Experiences of a European Scholar in America,” trans. Donald Fleming, Perspectives in American History 2 (1968): 370. Reprinted in Fleming and Bernard Bailyn, eds., The Intellectual Migration: Europe and America, 1930-1960 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1969), 370.

3. Martin Jay, in the concise biographical chapter in his book Adorno, notes the relation between the “symbolic patricide”—in which three female members of the student group “bared their breasts and ‘attacked’ [Adorno] with flowers and erotic caresses, […] mockingly proclaiming that ‘as an institution, Adorno is dead’”—and his actual death (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1984), 55. For a broader biographical picture, outlining Adorno's relation to other members of the Frankfurt School, see Jay's The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research 1923-1950 (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1973). See also Rolf Wiggershaus's thorough The Frankfurt School, trans. Michael Robertson (Cambridge, England: Polity Press, 1994).

4. “Scientific Experiences,” 347.

5. Susan Buck-Morss has in particular noted the concordance of Adorno's earliest work (the “inaugural lecture” of 1931) with that of Negative Dialectics, his last major complete work and most programmatic text. See her The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute (New York: Free Press, 1977).

6. “Scientific Experiences,” 369-70.

7. Recent efforts by, among others, Andreas Huyssen, Shierry Weber Nicholsen, Thomas Levin, Peter Uwe Hohendahl, and Harry Cooper have begun this important revaluation.

8. This is the avowed aim of Jameson's Late Marxism: Adorno, or, The Persistence of the Dialectic (London and New York: Verso, 1990), and the implicit project of Lambert Zuidervaart's Adorno's Aesthetic Theory: the Redemption of Illusion (Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT Press, 1991).

9. These latter include not only Dialectic of Enlightenment, Philosophy of Modern Music and the work on Wagner, but also a book on film music (written with Hanns Eisler), a study of the Los Angeles Times'; astrology column, and many essays on radio and television. He also originally wrote several of the pieces later collected in Prisms (on Spengler and on Veblen, for example) while in the U.S. For a more complete bibliography, see Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School.

10. Notes to Literature, vol. 1, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York, Columbia UP, 1991), 23.

11. The question of the difficulty of translating Adorno's notoriously sinuous German emerges at the very outset of any extended treatment of his work: even the titular adjective “beschädigten” could signify both “damaged” (as in “damaged goods”) and “mutilated,” as Jephcott later translates the word. Fredric Jameson has noted the wide range of quality of Adorno translations in the introduction to his Late Marxism. Jephcott's Minima Moralia is rightly regarded as one of the better renderings; nevertheless, I shall be reading Adorno's German “alongside” Jephcott's English, and adjusting the translations when appropriate. This may occasionally result in some obtrusive “bracketings”; but I feel that an elaboration of the multivalency of Adorno's prose is, for the purposes of this study, preferable to the brevity (and relative grace) of Jephcott's translation.

12. Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (New York and London: Verso, 1991), 16. Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben (Frankfurt a.M., Suhrkamp, 1991 [1951]). Further references to the work will appear in the body of the text, preceded by the initials MM, followed by entry number, and page numbers in the English, then, in brackets, German editions. For a deeply thoughtful consideration of problems of translating Adorno, see Samuel Weber's introduction to Prisms.

13. While dialectics—especially “negative” dialectics—is obviously the cornerstone to Adorno's thinking, and while Minima Moralia may indeed demonstrate that which Jameson calls the “persistence” of the dialectic, my aim here is not so much to read the dialectical text “dialectically” as to explore the rhetorical figures that undergird Adorno's “exilic” relation to the object of his critique. For a comparison of French post-structuralism and the German philosophical tradition see Peter Dews, Logics of Disintegration. For a provocative treatment of Derrida and Adorno, see Rainer Nägele, “The Scene of the Other,” in Boundary 2 11.1-2 (1982-3): 59-79.

14. See Rose's Melancholy Science, esp. 16-26, for a more detailed discussion of Adorno's essay technique. See also Tom Pepper's “Guilt By (Un) Free Association: Adorno on Romance et al,” Modern Language Notes 109.5 (1994): 913-37, for a discussion of Adorno's anxious appropriation of Hegelian dialectical analysis.

15. The first part of what was to become Minima Moralia was given as a fiftieth birthday present (and Valentine) to Horkheimer on February 14, 1945. Very little has been written about the Adorno-Horkheimer collaboration. Wiggershaus, in his The Frankfurt School, discusses some of the tensions (financial, emotional) between members of the Institute, but mentions friction in the Adorno-Horkheimer relationship only in passing. It must be remembered that Horkheimer was some nine years older than Adorno, and more academically established when they left Europe. While he certainly looked after Adorno's interests, he also took credit for much of the latter's work. On the title page of Dialectic of Enlightenment, for example, Horkheimer's name, alphabetically second, appears first.

16. Benjamin's profound influence on Adorno remains to be studied. Susan Buck-Morss, in her Origin of Negative Dialectics, and Richard Wolin, in Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption, have opened, but by no means exhausted, this area of inquiry. The passage above is from “The Image of Proust,” Illuminations, 203. Minima Moralia's aphoristic style also clearly draws on the work of Nietzsche, Karl Krauss, Ernst Bloch, and Horkheimer (especially the latter's Dämmerung), among others.

17. The verb mitmachen (literally “to do-with” or “to make-with”), which signifies to join in, take part in, follow, “play the game” or, as I prefer, owing to its musical significance, “play along”—is a recurrent expression in Adorno. In this sentence, it is juxtaposed with its opposite, “nicht mitmachen,” in an excellent example of the chiasmatic structure that characterizes Adorno's technique in Minima Moralia.

18. In fact, Adorno had drawn a stipend from the Rockefeller Foundation during the first few years of his American stay. As Rolf Wiggershaus puts it, in relation to Horkheimer's drawing of a similar stipend, it came from “the very institution which, by his own standards, was investing the merest fraction of the surplus from the oldest and largest capitalist conglomerates in the USA in the corruption of intellectual activity and culture.” Doubtless Adorno and Horkheimer recognized this double-bind. Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 281.

19. Adorno's tenuous relation to the Southern California German emigré community has received scant attention. I discuss this relation more fully below.

20. An avowed intention of Minima Moralia is to return to the “true field of philosophy[: …] the teaching of the good [or right] life ([des] richtige[s] Leben)” (MM Intro., 15 [7]).

21. Adorno combines the figure of vision with an elaborate nautical metaphor, in order to juxtapose the “esoteric gesture” with “the concept of austerity,” which he deems more proper to life in emigration. “If in Europe the esoteric gesture was often only a pretext for the blindest self-interest, the concept of austerity, though hardly ship-shape or watertight, still seems, in emigration, the most acceptable lifeboat.” He follows this, however, with a sober assessment of the viability of “austerity”: “Only a few, admittedly, have a seaworthy example at their disposal. To most boarders, it threatens starvation or madness” (MM 13, 34 [33-4]).

22. Since Heidegger also uses the term “dwell” (wohnen) in the famous 1951 essay “Building Dwelling Thinking” (Bauen Wohnen Denken)—an essay that he ends by addressing the then-current “housing shortage” in Germany—any easy distinction between Adorno's “materialist” view of houses and Heidegger's “existential” one might seem suspect. Nevertheless, while Adorno and Heidegger both indeed do attack modern homes and homelessness, they approach the idea of “housing” from entirely opposite positions: Heidegger's concluding question “What if man's homelessness consisted in this, that man still does not even think of the real plight of dwelling as the plight?” and his response that “As soon as man gives thought to his homelessness, it is a misery no longer” could not in fact be more “alien” to Adorno's thinking. Basic Writings, ed. David F. Krell (San Francisco: Harper, 1977), 339, italics in text. This is not to suggest that a broader analysis of Adorno's and Heidegger's positions on housing, dwelling, and thinking might not prove fruitful. For an important study of Heidegger's position on the house, the home, and violence, see Mark Wigley, “Heidegger's House: The Violence of the Domestic,” D: Columbia Documents in Architecture and Theory 1 (1992), 91-121. For an interesting attempt to explore the interface between the thought of Adorno and Heidegger, see Fred Dallmayr's Life World, Modernity and Critique (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 1991), 44-71. Dallmayr's analysis itself draws heavily upon Hermann Mörchen's appropriately subtitled Adorno und Heidegger: Untersuchung einer philosophischen Kommunikationsverweigerung (Examination of a Refused Philosophical Communication) (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1981).

23. Other entry titles reflecting these concerns include “Pro Domo Nostra,” “Addressee Unknown,” “Inside and Outside,” “Grassy Seat,” and “Hothouse Plant.”

24. Of these, he writes: “The traditional residences we grew up in have grown intolerable: each trait of comfort in them is paid for with a betrayal of knowledge, each vestige of shelter with the musty pact of family interests” (MM 18, 38 [40]).

25. This phrase represents a melancholic addendum to the “Gay” or “Joyful” Science of Nietzsche, who writes “Es gehört selbst zu meinen Glücke, kein Hausbesitzer zu sein” (I consider myself lucky not to be a homeowner).

26. As Marx studied England as it represented, in the nineteenth century, the most advanced capitalist society of his age, so did Adorno consider the U.S. economy and culture to be most “advanced,” and, indeed, the wave of the future. As Peter Uwe Hohendahl points out, Adorno never visited New England or the Southern states; but this did not detract from Adorno's conviction that what he was witnessing in Los Angeles was a cultural dominant. See Hohendahl's Prismatic Thought: Theodor W. Adorno (Lincoln, Nebraska and London: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1995), esp. 21-44, which offers a useful comparison of Adorno's work to that of American scholars of the late 1940s. For a consideration of the “idea” of California in German philosophical thought, see Laurence A. Rickels, The Case of California (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1991).

27. Cornelius Schnauber's guidebook for intellectually-inclined German-speaking tourists, Spaziergänge durch das Hollywood der Emigranten (Walking through the Hollywood of the Emigrants) incorrectly places Adorno at 316 North Kenter (Zürich: Arche, 1992), 103, and implies that Adorno possessed the entire house, whereas he had only half.

28. Wiggershaus's The Frankfurt School offers the most detailed biographical treatment of how the intellectual community began to coalesce around Horkheimer in 1941, but it is not particularly thorough on the links between the Horkheimer circle and the Hollywood community. Other published treatments of the emigré community include Anthony Heilbut's well researched Exiled in Paradise: German Refugee Artists and Intellectuals in America, from 1930 to the Present (New York, Viking, 1983), which treats Adorno's writing quite sympathetically, and Mike Davis's rather superficial City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Vintage, 1992), which does not. Davis, who derisively calls the Institute's meetings “soirées,” accuses “the exiles” of not being able to link their critique to such political actions as a local munitions factory strike in the mid-1940s. Other accounts that offer biographical information about Adorno during this period include Wiggerhaus's still-untranslated Theodor W. Adorno (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1987); Harvey Gross's “Adorno in Los Angeles: the Intellectual in Emigration,” Humanities in Society 2.3 (1979): 339-351; and Martin Jay's “Adorno in America,” New German Critique 31 (1984): 285-305. The latter focuses more on Adorno's reception in the North American academy than on the biography.

29. Schnauber, Spaziergänge, 92-112. See also Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 265 ff.

30. Though the mythical one thus surrounded them, the real, geographically correct Hollywood was in fact several miles to the east.

31. See Mann's Story of a Novel: The Genesis of Doctor Faustus, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Knopf, 1961). Playing on the title of Mann's novel, Jean-François Lyotard, in his (pre-Postmodern Condition) “Adorno as the Devil,” seeks to critique the idea of the negative (and, implicitly, of totality) in Adorno, and to substitute his concept of libidinal economy as a means of understanding “objectivity” in capital. Telos 19 (1974): 127-137. My reading of Adorno in these pages has been influenced by this short but provocative essay.

32. See the Saturday Review article of Nov. 13, 1948, in which Schoenberg adamantly distanced himself from the theories, and personality, of Leverkühn, the novel's protagonist. Excerpts of the letter are cited in Schnauber, Spaziergänge, 103.

33. The episode is recounted in Otto Friedrich, City of Nets: Hollywood in the 1940s (New York: Harper and Row, 1986). Friedrich notes that the tune is Beethoven's last piano sonata, Opus 111, and that the words or “poetic little illustrative phrases,” as Mann called them, are rendered in English as “Heaven's blue, lover's pain … meadow-land [Wiesengrund],” but does not question Mann's claim about having slipped the word into his novel as a way of “showing [his] gratitude” to his “teacher.” See 274 and 274 note. As I suggest below, however, others in the Los Angeles circle seemed in fact to ridicule this (deleted) name.

34. Adorno gets some of the details wrong, curiously calling the movie The Best Years of Our Life, and calling the actor—who must have been Harold Russell—the “leading man” (Hauptdarsteller) when in fact Fredric March was the lead. Moreover, Russell, who played a character ironically named “Homer” (resonating with Adorno's own treatment of the long-exiled figure in Dialectic of Enlightenment, here suffering a kind of symbolic castration before “coming home”) had lost not one but both of his hands. Russell won two Academy Awards: one for Best Supporting Actor and another for being an inspiration to handicapped veterans. In fact, the film itself involves several such “handshake” scenes. The Chaplin essay appears in Adorno's Gesammelte Schriften Bd 10.1 (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1977), 365 ff, and the incident is alluded to in Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, “Adornos Erschaudern: Variationen über den Händedruck,” in Vierzig Jahre Flaschenpost: Dialektik der Aufklärung, 1947-1987, ed. Willem van Reijen and Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (Frankfurt a.M: Fischer, 1987), 235-36. It has recently been translated, by John MacKay, as “Chaplin Times Two” in The Yale Journal of Criticism 9.1 (1996): 58-61. See also MacKay's brief but insightful introduction, 57-58.

35. In “Adornos Erschaudern: Variationen über den Händedruck,” Noerr points out the strangeness of Adorno's theory of handshakes, and links the Chaplin incident correctly but only briefly to Adorno's broader theses on mimesis. He also productively gauges Habermas's quite different memory of the story, which Adorno had recounted verbally to him. The question is particularly interesting because Habermas himself, slightly physically challenged, has a speech impediment, and may well be sensitive to such encounters. I thank Eva Geulen for mentioning the Chaplin anecdote to me.

36. Significantly, Adorno writes of the translation and domestication of the formerly “exotic” in the entry entitled “Mammoth”: “The fact that animals really suffer more in cages than in the open range […] reflects on the inescapability of imprisonment. It is a consequence of history. The zoological gardens in their authentic form are products of nineteenth century colonial imperialism. They flourished since the opening-up of wild regions of Africa and Central Asia, which paid symbolic tribute in the shape of animals. The value of tributes was measured by their exoticism, their inaccessibility. The development of technology has put an end to this and abolished the exotic” (MM 74, 116 [149-150]).

37. It is also surely significant that Adorno is in the position of “passenger” here, as he himself, according to information provided by the Adorno Archive in Frankfurt, was not able to drive.

38. Lukács reserves this nickname (Grand Hôtel Abgrund) explicitly for Adorno in the 1962 Preface to Theory of the Novel, but then-contemporary critics applied the term to Frankfurt School thought more generally. See the Introduction to Gunzelin Schmid Noerr and Willem van Reijen, eds., Grand Hotel Abgrund, Eine Photobiographie der Frankfurter Schule (Hamburg, Junius, 1988), 10-12, for a brief discussion of Lukács's deployment of the term “Abgrund.” Adorno's use, beginning in the mid-1930s, of his mother's Corsican maiden name (and shortening of the Jewish-sounding nom du père to “W”) may have provoked some ridicule among his colleagues. However professionally or politically viable the name change may have been, Adorno's disavowal of “Jewishness” is surely significant, especially in relation to his treatment, throughout the 1940s, of questions of anti-Semitism. I view these texts (namely the “Elements of Anti-Semitism” chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment and the Authoritarian Personality study also written in Los Angeles) as also curiously if tenuously “autobiographical.” In a forthcoming longer version of the present essay (a book project I am completing with Stanford University Press), I plan to pursue these questions in greater detail.

39. Late Marxism, 254, n. 4.

40. Like “regressive progress,” the expression “unenlightened enlightenment” (unaufgeklärte Aufklärung) expresses through simple negation the contradictions latent in a concept.

41. And he concludes, vituperatively: “The therapeutically much-lauded transference, the breaking of which is not for nothing the crux of analytic treatment, the artificially contrived situation where the subject performs, voluntarily and calamitously, the annulment of the self which was once brought about involuntarily and beneficially by erotic self-abandonment, is already the pattern of the reflex-dominated, follow-my-leader behavior which liquidates, together with all intellect, the analysts who have betrayed it” (MM 37, 61 [73]). Curiously, Adorno, who had studied in Vienna in the early 1920s, was, along with Frederick Pollock and Herbert Marcuse, one of the three members of the Institut für Sozialforschung who had not been analyzed. (Fromm, Löwenthal, and Horkheimer all had.) See Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 267.

42. The title of the entry, as translator Jephcott notes, is an inversion of “Nie davon reden, immer daran denken,” a pro-Anschluβ; slogan in pre-war Austria: in the American context, the “it” in question is sex.

43. The word Wunde takes on different resonances—in relation to lyric poetry, to anti-Semitism, and to language—in Adorno's later essay, “Heine the Wound,” Notes to Literature I, 80-85. The conclusion to the essay, in particular, bears witness to Adorno's own exile, and to his thoughts about its “universality”: “Now that the destiny which Heine sensed [i.e. homelessness] has been fulfilled literally […], the homelessness has become everyone's homelessness; all human beings have been as badly injured in their beings and their language as Heine the outcast was. His words stand in for their words: there is no longer any homeland other than a world in which no one would be cast out any more, the world of a genuinely emancipated humanity. The wound that is Heine will heal only in a society that has achieved reconciliation” (85).

44. “Das alte Unrecht.” Notice the similarity between this phrase and “die uralten Wunde,” above.

45. Despite his seemingly sarcastic comments about “knowledge of trade-union organizations or the automobile industry” in the entry called “Protection, Help and Counsel” (Entry 13), by Entry 77 (“Auction”), Adorno demonstrates a familiarity with fundamentals of Fordist production: “While a Cadillac undoubtedly excels a Chevrolet by the amount that it costs more, this superiority, unlike that of the old Rolls Royce, nevertheless proceeds from an overall plan which artfully equips the former with better, the latter with worse cylinders, bolts, accessories, without anything being altered in the basic pattern of the mass-produced article: only minor rearrangements in production would be needed to turn the Chevrolet into a Cadillac” (MM 77, 119-20 [154-55]). … For an elaboration on this idea of “interchangeable parts” as it applies to the realm of popular music, see Bernard Gendron, “Theodor Adorno Meets the Cadillacs,” in Tania Modleski, ed., Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1986), 18-36. Adorno, it ought to be noted somewhere, seems to be uncomfortable with the very word “automobile,” which, on the first page of the essay “Cultural Criticism and Society,” he compares to the similarly Greek-Latin blended term “Kulturkritik,” a word which, according to Adorno, has “an offensive ring.” See Prisms, 19.

46. Adorno scathingly refers to this “watchword” of the cultivated philistines as “a formula borrowed from the language of the nursing home” (MM 139, 217 [290]). Adorno often turns to the English original when deriding a specifically Anglo-Saxon concept; hence here the German text reads “Da muβ es nach den englischen Formeln relax und take it easy hergehen, die aus der Sprache der Krankenschwestern kommen” (291).

47. For a broader discussion of this context of this “debate,” see the essays collected in Aesthetics and Politics: Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, Georg Lukács, trans., ed. Ronald Taylor (London and New York: Verso, 1990). See also Thomas Levin's trenchant critique of reductive accounts of Adorno's position on technology, in Levin's “For the Record: Adorno on Music in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” October 55 (1990): 23-47.

48. Adorno's objection to nicknames inheres in the false sense of proximity that they seem to provide. In the “Culture Industry” chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment, he writes that “the bourgeois family name […] seems antiquated. It arouses a strange embarrassment in Americans. In order to hide the awkward distance between individuals, they call one another ‘Bob’ and ‘Harry,’ as interchangeable team members. This practice reduces relations between human beings to the good fellowship of the sporting community and is a defense against the true kind of relationship.” Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1991), 165. Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente (Frankfurt a.M., S. Fischer, 1991), 174. Elsewhere, he suggests that “perhaps names are no more than frozen laughter, as is evidenced nowadays in nicknames” (77 [85]).

49. The phrase is rendered in English within the German text (“Work while you work, play while you play—das zählt zu den Grundregeln der repressiven Selbstdisziplin” [169]), again suggesting the distinct “Americanness” of the concept.

50. As translator Jephcott notes, this title reverses that of a song, “Der gute Kamerad,” popular during the Nazi period.

51. “Children already equipped with Christian names like Horst and Jürgen and surnames like Bergenroth, Bojunga and Eckhardt enacted the dream [of a brutal national community] before the adults were historically ripe for its realization” (MM 123, 192 [255]). (One wonders what Habermas thinks of this passage!)

52. Adorno pointedly highlights how these fellow students criticized his youthful writing style: “They who could not put together a correct sentence but found all of mine too long—did they not abolish German literature and replace it by their ‘writ’?” (MM 123, 193 [256-57]). It is as if Adorno's “mature” writing style were thus itself a kind of “regression,” a maintenance of a link with a (lost) pre-war world.

53. Jameson delves into Adorno's position on so-called “convergence theory” in greater detail than I can offer here. See his Late Marxism, esp. 123-154. Lest the conflation of the U.S., Nazi Germany, and the “State Capitalist” USSR seem, in retrospect, strained or ludicrous, it is worth remembering that the U.S. would, within months of Adorno's completion of Minima Moralia, begin the House Un-American Activities Commission hearings on “the communist infiltration of the motion picture industry,” before which Eisler and Brecht would be called. Eisler was eventually de facto deported, while Brecht left for Switzerland the day after his testimony. On Adorno and Horkheimer's extreme (some would say inexcusable) caution in regards to HUAC—Adorno did not attach his name to a text on film music he wrote with Eisler until 1969—see Wiggershaus, 389-390 (Wiggershaus incorrectly refers to the hearings as performed by the “HCUA”).

54. Rolf Wiggershaus further views Adorno, in Minima Moralia, as an “advocate for the non-conformist intellectual.” The Frankfurt School, 394.

55. The metaphor is, in fact, consistent with Adornian terminology. In the epigraph to Part Three, quoting from Baudelaire, he asks “Avalanche, veux-tu m'emporter dans ta chute?”

56. Of theories of Utopia, generally associated in the Marxian tradition with Ernst Bloch (and, later, Marcuse), Adorno writes, in the entry called “Baby with the Bath Water”: “Since Utopia was set aside and the unity of theory and practice demanded, we have become all too practical” (MM 22, 44 [49]). Strangely enough, in one of the Authoritarian Personality essays he authored, Adorno castigates Americans for not being able to imagine Utopia, calling this tendency “an anti-Utopia complex.” See especially the section “There Will Be No Utopia,” in Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper Brothers, 1950), 695-698.

57. See the entry “Back to Culture,” where Adorno writes of the romanticization of pre-Nazi German culture: “This has led to fatal confusion. Hitler eradicated culture, Hitler drove Mr. X [in German: “Herr Ludwig”] into exile, therefore Mr. X is culture. He is indeed. A glance at the literary output of those emigrés who, by discipline and a sharp separation of spheres of influence, performed the feat of representing the German mind, shows what is to be expected of a happy reconstruction: the introduction of Broadway methods on the Kurfürstendamm [Berlin's theater district], which differed from the former in the Twenties only through its lesser means, not its better intentions” (MM 35, 56-57 [68]). Visitors to contemporary Berlin would, indeed, confirm the validity of this prediction.

58. Late Marxism, 251. See also Jameson's more general comments on Adorno and “post-modernism” on 246-252.

59. Although anti-colonial independence struggles were chronologically imminent—India and Pakistan would become nation-states in 1947, while China would declare itself a “people's republic” in 1949—Adorno did not look to “outer-realm” victims of European imperialism; indeed, his conception of liberation seems far removed from actual liberation struggles. About these he had, throughout his career, very little to say—save some rather scathing comments in Minima Moralia about the romanticization of “African students of political economy” and “Siamese at Oxford.” Under the heading “Savages are not more Noble,” he writes, quite presciently, that “There is some reason to fear that the involvement of non-Western peoples in the conflicts of industrial society, long overdue in itself, will be less to the benefit of the liberated peoples than to that of rationally improved production and communications, and a modestly raised standard of living. Instead of expecting miracles of the pre-capitalist peoples, older nations should be on their guard against their unimaginative, indolent taste for everything proven, and for the successes of the West” (MM 32, 52-3 [60-1]). Rather, his concern, along with that of Horkheimer and other members of the Frankfurt School, was clearly that repository of difference within the logic of the same. And the figure that most embodied that sense of difference—in Europe and America at least—was “the Jew.”

60. Throughout his work, Adorno points—problematically—to connections between fascism and latent homosexuality. See for example, the “Elements of Anti-Semitism” chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment, or the entry in Minima Moralia called “Tough Baby.” See also his comments about the conversion of Proust's work—which Adorno views as revolutionary—into that of a “prize winning homosexual” (MM 132, 207 [276]).

61. The author would like to thank the following people for their insight, advice, and/or editorial prowess: Jennifer Wicke, Samuel Weber, Sara Suleri-Goodyear, Thad Ziolkowski, Adam Green, Eric Schwab, Martin Harries, Joanna Spiro, and Jessica Morgan.