ND Reading Guide

ND Guide Pages 67-136

False Need 99-100
Material needs ought to be taken seriously even in their topsy-turvy form, caused by overproduction. Even the ontological need has its real moment in a condition in which human beings do not have the capacity to rationally – meaningfully – know or recognize the necessity which alone rules their behavior. The false consciousness of needs aims at something which self-aware subjects would not need, and compromises thereby every possible fulfillment. To false consciousness can be added, that it passes off what is unattainable as attainable, complementarily to the possible attainment of needs, which it is forbidden. At the same time these sorts of inverted needs intellectually demonstrate the suffering unaware of itself in material privation. It must push for its abolition, as much as the need by itself fails to do so. The thought without need, which wants nothing, would be nugatory; but thinking out of the need becomes confused, if the need is conceived merely subjectively. Needs are a conglomerate of the true and the false; the true thought would be the one, which wished for what is right. If there is any truth to the doctrine which says needs are to be read not as any natural condition but against the so-called cultural standard, then what also hides in this are the relations of social production along with its bad irrationality. This latter is to be relentlessly criticized against intellectual needs, the ersatz for everything which has been withheld. Modern ontology is an ersatz in itself: what promises to be beyond the approach of idealism remains latent idealism and prevents its incisive critique. Not only the primitive wish-fulfillments, which the culture-industry feeds the masses without the latter ever quite believing in them, are generally ersatz. Deception has no borders there, where the official cultural canon places its goods, in the presumed sublime of philosophy. The most urgent of its needs today seems to be that for something solid. It inspires the ontologies; it is what they take the measure of. It has its right in this, that one wishes to have security, to not be buried by a historical dynamic against which one feels powerless. That which is immovable would like to conserve that which is condemned as old. The more hopelessly the existing social forms block this longing, the more irresistibly does despairing self-preservation strike a philosophy, which is supposed to be both in one, despairing and self-preservation. The invariant structures are created in the spitting image of omnipresent terror, the vertigo of a society threatened by total destruction. If the threat vanished, then its positive inversion would most likely disappear along with it, itself nothing other than its abstract negative.

The subtitle of this entire section is "the ontological need" and there's a sense in which Adorno is taking especial care not to fall into the trap which most critics of Heidegger and the fundamental ontologies fall into: equating ontology overhastily with Fascism. Rather, the rise of the ontologies corresponded to a genuine social and political constellation, that of the grinding scarcity of interwar and Depression-era Europe, which Adorno wants to emphasize and stress. The ontologies, in other words, have a paradoxical truth-content, to the extent that they serve as an indispensable index of falsity. Adorno also specifically ties the ontologies to the rise of mass culture, going so far as to suggest that both phenomena are substitutes for genuine social needs, not always directly expressible or communicable by subjects, due to the baleful spell or bane of the totality, which disfigures and distorts all subjectivity, forcing human beings to conform to the needs of the market forces, however insane or violent these latter might be, instead of the other way around. Note that Adorno's initial term for this bane, a concept he will explore in greater depth in Part II of ND, is "context of deception", which could also be translated as "context of delusion", though "deception" sort of fits more with Adorno's local emphasis here on the culture-industry and the consumer culture of monopoly capitalism, as the swindling or defrauding of subjects. Though this may sound harsh to our ears, which are attuned to a dynamic, complex and in many respects progressive media culture, you have to remember that Adorno is talking about the consumer culture of the 1940s and 1950s; the few examples of old newsreels or wartime films which we see today don't really do justice to the idiocy and crudity of the thing - generally speaking, only the most interesting and creative stuff is rebroadcast today. But many of the cultural works of that era were really atrocious, brimming with the most appalling racism, sexism and xenophobia, and we would react to them exactly as Adorno did.

Expression of the Inexpressible 114-116
Justice would at any rate be done to the concept of being only if the genuine experience which its instauration realizes is understood: the philosophic spur to express the inexpressible. The more anxiously philosophy blocks itself from that spur, its peculiarity, the greater the temptation to directly go after the inexpressible, without the labor of Sisyphus, which would not be the worst definition of philosophy, and which is the source of so much mockery of it. Philosophy itself, as a form of the Spirit, contains a moment with a deep affinity to that which is suspended, as in Heidegger's assumption of what is be meditated over, which also prevents the meditation. For philosophy is far more specifically a form, than the history of its concept would have one presume, in which it seldom incorporates in reflection, aside from a layer of Hegel, its qualitative difference from science, the doctrine of science, and logic, with which it is nonetheless intertwined. Philosophy consists neither of vérités de raison [French: truths of reason] nor of vérités de fait [French: truths in fact]. Nothing which it says bows to the tangible criteria of a case of being; its theses on what is conceptual are so little the logical matter-at-hand than those on what is factical are empirical research. It is fragile also because of its distance. It cannot be nailed down. Its history is one of permanent failure, to the extent that it abandoned itself over and over, terrorized by science, to what is tangible. It earned its positivistic critique by the appeal to scientificity, which science reproaches it for; that critique errs, in that it confronts philosophy with a criterion, which is not its own, wherever it may have followed its own idea. It does not however renounce the truth, but illuminates the scientific one as limited. What is suspended in it is determined by this, that in its distance from the verifying cognition it is not non-committal [unverbindlich], but leads its own life of stringency. It seeks this in what it is not itself, what opposes it, and in the reflection on what positive cognition views with bad naivete as committal [verbindlich]. Philosophy is neither scientific procedure nor the thought-poetry to which positivism, with a ludicrous oxymoron, would like to degrade it, but is a form just as mediated by what it is divergent from as by what it sublates. What is suspended is nothing other than the expression of the inexpressible in itself. Therein it is truly the sibling of music. That which is suspended is scarcely capable of being put into words; this may have caused the philosophers, with the partial exception of Nietzsche, to gloss over it. It is more the prerequisite for the comprehension of philosophic texts than its definitive characteristic. It originated historically and may yet fall silent, just as music threatens to do.

Leave it to Adorno to punctuate a devastating and unanswerable critique of Heidegger with this beauteous meditation on the role of expression and expressibility in theory. The invocation of Sisyphus is meant to foreground what Adorno calls the "labor of the negative", the effort or toil involved in thinking through the existent, wrestling with its material forms, antinomies and contradictions. Many of the aspects Adorno describes in terms of philosophy - its free-floating nature, its refusal to be tied to a single problematic, period of method, and its non-identity with the methods of the natural sciences, with which it nevertheless can have a fruitful dialogue, as long as the semi-autonomous position of both forms of theory are respected - are applicable to theory more generally. Not only that, but theory cannot be thought without a momentary reflection on its own historical preconditions, i.e. what makes it theory, as opposed to a mundane world-view, a passing ideology or a fashionable trend. This is located in the realm of form, in the difference between the theoretical cognition and what is being cognized, just as much as what it sublates or annuls, i.e. the false or, more precisely, limited or restricted cognition, which always presupposes a better, more rounded, fuller cognition in its place. The parallel Adorno draws with music is something applicable to other art-forms; just think of how the Hong Kong films went from a narrowly specialized feature of the Chinese-American diaspora - most notably, the immigrant communities of West Coast America - to staple late night TV fare, and finally to cinematic fortune and critical success; then think of how this spiral of success also acted reciprocally on the Hong Kong films themselves, transforming the action genre into increasingly sophisticated epics, and finally into the John Woo blockbusters and Wong Kar-wai romances, as Hong Kong directors and audiences became state-of-the-art, cosmopolitan consumers well-versed in the language of global cinema, and therefore capable of pushing that language in new and innovative directions.

Volte [French: sudden about-face] 121-123
The dialectic of being and the existent – that no being can be thought without the existent and no existent without mediation – is suppressed by Heidegger: the moments, which are not, without one being mediated by the other, are to him immediately the One, and this one is positive being. But the sum does not check. The debtor-relationship of the categories is put on trial. Driven out by the pitchfork, the existent returns; the being which is purified from the existent is an Ur-phenomenon only for so long as it nevertheless has the existent in itself, which it excludes. Heidegger deals with this with a master-stroke; it is the matrix of his thought in its entirety. His philosophy lays hands on the well-nigh indissoluble moment of the existent with the terminus ontological difference.

"Being" (Sein) is Heidegger's signature concept, a kind of slogan, catchword and analytical term all in one, wrapped up in a language-mysticism which denigrates the ordinary, the mundane and the day-to-day for the sake of the heroic, decisive moment. The ideology at work here is that being, as an abstraction, says absolutely nothing about the social reality of German society circa 1933; instead, Heidegger uses the nebulous term "Dasein" (being-there, or existence). You're not supposed to analyze the society around you; you're just there. Instead of carrying out the mediation, Heidegger's concept of being violently abolishes it, arrogating absolute control over existence, and compensating for this act of violence via a bogus language-mysticism, wherein arcane concepts and usages of being are cobbled together into a pseudo-populistic jargon, which is superficially accessible to non-academic German readers. In a way, this is the philosophical equivalent of the great Riefenstahl films of the 1930s, with their mythic panoramas and state-party rituals, or the deeply authoritarian fictions of Celine and Lewis, which accessed the most modern narrative forms and techniques of the mass media of film and radio, while broadcasting a gruesomely reactionary, archaic content. Adorno's conclusion is unsettling but irrefutable: ontology isn't some product unique to Fascism, which ended with the overthrow of the Axis powers, but is rooted deep in monopoly capitalism itself, in objective social tendencies which have the potential of erupting into violence, if they aren't combated.