“Thinking as Gesture from Adorno’s Essay as Form”

Helena Horgan

First published 05/05/11

Revised 15/01/2012

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000001. The antinomy of exaggeration and reason: thinking as gesture. There is an apparent

antinomy between exaggeration and reason at the basis of Adorno’s aesthetic theory. One could

say that a disposition towards overemphasis marks the constitution of his particular mode of

reasoning, through over-determination; through ‘carrying-on.’ There’s a sense in which his

consistent shooting beyond the point of adequate reason both frustrates thought and exemplifies

its very spirit. With Adorno we’re always at odds with regards resolution. His determined and

passionate excavation of the paradoxical relationship between rationality and discourse brings the

reader closer to the complexities at hand and further from any univocal answers. In the Essay as

Form (Adorno,1958) Adorno tells us we should not fall prey to the fear of thinking beyond what

has already been thought;

The essay becomes true in its progress, which drives it beyond itself…not in a

hoarding obsession with fundamentals1

Adorno’s refusal to elaborate on any system of thought is both signifier and invocation of the

matter at hand; the complex entanglement of rationality with myth; and with enlightenment’s wish

to liberate discourse from the enchantment of myths duplicitous logic. Because enlightenment

thinking is equally interlaced with myth it is driven by this antimony, determined by “a resistance”

against which it gives itself measure.

Because it is non-identical or at odds with itself, the relapse into ‘mythology’ can

only signify a tendency and, consequently an exaggeration...brought about by the

1 T.W Adorno The Essay as Form in New German Critique (Issue 32, Spring-Summer 1984) p161

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tension which drives myth and enlightenment apart...while also relating these

two homogenous and heterogeneous forces to each other.2

For Adorno and Horkheimer any aim towards disenchantment on behalf of enlightenment is a

futile attempt to escape this exaggeration. As the dialectic isn’t a schematic conversion one cannot

be done away with by the other; they are each implicated by the other while at the same time

enlightenment resists myth. Therefore it’s wrong to assume that all rational thinking will

ultimately result in a ‘dogmatic totalization’ or ‘hypostasization.’ The work of Adorno’s

exaggeration is to separate out enlightenment thinking which has fully “succumb to myth” from

that which has been “purified by communication theory.”3 Equally, to say that thinking is ‘in

essence’ exaggeration is necessarily unjustifiable, while to say that intuition and insight is

incapable of systemic thought is to somehow ‘renounce’ thinking. What Adorno is trying to keep

out of reach is the possibility of resting on thought as mere adequation. Quite bluntly, for Adorno

the function of thinking is thinking, deliberation maybe but not judgement.

An exaggeration which no longer measures itself against something given or

presupposed, something to which it could be reduced and which would account

for its intelligibility is neither an indication of truth nor a symptom of madness

and delusion, it is neither thinking nor its opposite, rather it is thinking as

gesture. 4

2 Alexander Garcia Duttman Thinking as Gesture: A Note on Dialectic of Enlightenment in New German

Critique (No 81, Autumn 2000) p146 3 Ibid p146

4 Ibid p149

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000002. The Dialectic of Enlightenment: a cautious new technology. In the opening to the

Dialectic of Enlightenment (Horkheimer, Adorno, 1947) Adorno and Horkheimer speak of the

emerging technology which they say defines “the essence” of scientific rationality; the desire

to find the “happy match” between human understanding and the nature of things.”5

Enlightenment thinking was fundamentally a search for origins and first principles which

would enable classification of like with like. All empirical matter was seen as quantifiable and

anything that resisted categorization was often viewed with suspicion. Adorno takes issue

with this resistance to particularity and the production of technologies driven by economic

efficiency which he feels suppressed the inventive spirit.

The spirit irretrievably modeled on the pattern of the control of nature and

material production forgoes…recollection of any surpassed phase that would

promise any other future and any transcendence vis-a-vis the frozen

relations of production.6

Enlightenments concerns with the matter of the world were for encyclopedic classification;

keeping accounts of the nature of unfolding cultural and scientific histories. Myth equally

wanted to honor historical and cultural beginnings and track their evolution, but also

“narrate, record, explain.” Adorno tells how “each ritual contains a representation of how

things happen and of a specific process which is to be influenced by magic.”7 The experience

of ‘magic’ is an experience of closeness and familiarity with true effective particularity.

5 Max Horkheimer and T. W. Adorno Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (Stanford

University Press, California, 2002) p2 6 T.W Adorno The Essay as Form in New German Critique (Issue 32, Spring-Summer 1984) p157

7 Max Horkheimer and T. W. Adorno Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (Stanford

University Press, California, 2002 p5

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At the magical stage dream and image were not regarded as mere signs of

things but were linked to them by resemblance or name. The relationship

was not one of intention but kinship. Magic like science is concerned with

ends, but it pursues them through mimesis, not through an increasing

distance from the object.8

The archival impulses of mythology weren’t simply a process of capturing an image of events,

but of paying tribute and empathetically engaging with various forms of life; a way of

uncovering specific characteristic patterns of behavior that became a method of

understanding in itself.

000003. Myth as perpetual ‘discourse’. Roland Barthes sees myth as a type of discourse not

defined by subject matter or content but by the logic behind its use. In Mythologies (Barthes,

1972) he says;

…myth is a type of speech, everything can be a myth provided it is conveyed

by a discourse. Myth is not defined by the object of its message, but by the

way in which it utters this message: there are formal limits to myth, there are

no ‘substantial’ ones.9

The speech of mythical discourse is a message caught in mediality. For Barthes all forms of

cultural representation are myth, “not only written discourse but also photography, cinema,

reporting, sport…all these can serve as support to mythical speech.” Myth as cultural vehicle

supports or bears the passage of time. Like Adorno, Barthes sees myth as stemming from a

8 Ibid p7

9 Roland Barthes Mythologies (The Noonday Press, New York, 1972) p109

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desire to exhibit the perceptual products of history, paying tribute to time without fully

enclosing or preserving it. There is a repetitive gesturing in every myth, in hitting on the

reprise of a likeness, but all myths at the same time are ultimately finite; “one can conceive of

very ancient myths, but there are no eternal ones; for it is human history which converts

reality into speech...myth is a type of speech chosen by history: it cannot possibly evolve from

the ‘nature’ of things.”10

As a semiologist Barthes’ concern with myth is with its linguistic form. His analysis of myth as

a sign system is the story of the birth of signification itself. There is an obvious antimony

between text and image in that they inhabit different spheres of perceptual reasoning, but

even pictures can be ‘read’ in a number of different ways, the point is we have left the

“theoretical mode of representation” with myth and are dealing with particulars. Barthes tells

us myth is made up of ‘ready-made’ material which presuppose a signifying consciousness,

which can be reasoned with without concerns for ‘substance.’ Pictures might “impose

meaning at one stroke” but “become a kind of writing as soon as they are meaningful: like

writing, they call for a lexis.”11

As the logic of mediality myth is somehow ungraspable in that it only shows itself through its

method of appropriation. As a process of separation from the ‘things-in-themselves’ it’s

regarded with suspicion by the rationally enlightened mind. Paradoxically it is equally

rationalities desire for classification that distances the particular from its origin. This aporetic

conflict between myth and logos isn’t merely a product of language but more immanent

within discourse itself. Adorno’s conception of mediation set out in the Essay as Form (Adorno,

10

Ibid p109 11

Roland Barthes Mythologies (The Noonday Press, New York, 1972) p110

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1958) describes how it is necessary to open thought to a third potentiality which is the

impossibility of closure;

The essay does not strive for closed, deductive or inductive, construction. It

revolts above all against doctrine....The delusion that the ordo idearum

(order of ideas) should be the ordo rerum (order of things) is based on the

insinuation that the mediated is unmediated. Just as little as a simple fact can

be thought without a concept, because to think it always already means to

conceptualize it, it is equally impossible to think the purest concept without

reference to the factual.12

000004. Necessary negativity. Part of the desire to capture the passage of time is an awareness

of the enigmatic nature of such a task. The ‘instant’ becomes reified. We wish to experience

each moment in its utmost singularity, but we are mediated beings. Our mode of discourse is a

reflection on time but it is not time itself, it’s an abstraction.

The…moment sense-certainty attempts to come out of itself and…indicate

(zeigen) what it means, it must necessarily realize that what it believed it

could immediately embrace in the gesture of demonstrating, is, in reality, a

process of mediation, or more properly, a true and proper dialectic that, as

such, always contains within itself a negation.13

12

T.W Adorno The Essay as Form in New German Critique (Issue 32, Spring-Summer 1984) p158 13

Giorgio Agamben Language and Death: The Place of Negativity (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis/London 1991) p11

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For Hegel “any attempt to express sense-certainty” is to “experience the impossibility of

saying what one means,”14not because language is incapable of expressing the unspeakable

but because truth lies in the universality of sense certainty itself. Regardless of where you

situate the origin of meaning there is a ‘becoming temporal’ in speech that results in a

negative transferral; a movement from the substantive conscience to indication and

expression. For Adorno this negative transferral is something not to overcome, but to succumb

to within the gesture of expression. The desire for meaning to coincide with the present

moment is a refusal to acknowledge the status of truth as temporal and in flux. In the Essay as

Form (Adorno, 1958) he explains;

The desire of the essay is not to seek and filter the eternal out of the

transitory; it wants, rather, to make the transitory eternal. Its weakness

testifies to the non-identity that it has to express, as well as to that excess of

intention over its object, and…points to that…which is blocked out by the

classification of the world into the eternal and the transitory. In the emphatic

essay, thought gets rid of the traditional idea of truth.15

In moving from identity to ‘non-identity’ the negative dialectic pays tribute to the becoming

temporal of the subject as deliberate and yet ‘functionless’ cognition, liberated from a

requirement for materiality. In the gesture of expression which takes temporality as its

substance it must find its own temporality and rhythm. In Language and Death (Agamben,

2006) Giorgio Agamben makes a distinction between verse and prose. Verse marks the

topology of memory and repetition as a poetic and finite act of turning and returning; of

reprise. Prose on the other hand is the straightforward march of rational discourse;

14

Ibid 15

T.W Adorno The Essay as Form in New German Critique (Issue 32, Spring-Summer 1984) p159

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philosophical progression and deliberation. Agamben gives an account of an experience of the

‘razo’ as a reversal of the poetry–life relationship in which gesture carries thought towards its

logical consequences. Its mode is exaggeration (from ad- "to, toward" and gerere "carry.")

That which for the troubadours was living of the razo…now becomes a

‘reasoning the life,’ a putting into words of biographical events…here the

lived is invented or “found” on the basis of the poetic and not vice versa. 16

000005. The search for non-identity: the extra-economic. In The Fate of Art (Bernstein, 1992)

J.M Bernstein calls Adorno’s philosophy a ‘heterology’; as a search for the non-identical (with

its concept) other. For Adorno ‘identity thinking,’ as the overcoming of idealism requires an

overcoming of the standpoint of the devouring subject. In Aesthetic Theory and The Essay as

Form Adorno rethinks the configuration of “form and content, spirit and mimesis, form and

expression.” 17 In attempting to devise a malleable link between the individual and the

universal he carries a dual interpretation of mimesis as on the one hand indexical, and on the

other, a primitive form of subjective empathy and compassion. The subject’s spirited

engagement with the world isn’t that of mere duplication. The creative impulse is such that

previously delineated concepts expand under his tactile engagement. Adorno’s thinking lies in

stark contrast to the traditional notion of aesthetics as conforming to ‘ideals’ of beauty and

harmony, where the role of art is to give shape to platonic form. The mimetic drive as a

gesture of sympathetic mediation infects concepts with dissonance. It replaces unity with

fragmentation and systematic thought with original ‘compositions.’

16

Giorgio Agamben Language and Death: The Place of Negativity (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis/London 1991) pg 69 17

Ibid p199

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Mimetic activity is always shaped by spirit....As mimesis re-inscribes

intuition, so spirit re-inscribes concept. If we consider conceptual articulation

as that in virtue of which what is not meaningful is rendered significant...The

Spirit of works of art is their plus or surplus - the fact that in the process of

appearing they become more than they are.18

There is an overabundance of significations caught within every “spiritual phenomenon” that

is hidden by objectification. The function of art isn’t to simply reproduce what is in existence

but to inhabit the workings of current ideologies and exhibit them in new light through the

logic of a revised lexis. This enables art to situate itself outside of pure economies of exchange

and production which have already distanced themselves from the true ‘function’ of praxis as

authentic labour. As Bernstein remarks;

…purpose has itself become purposeless, production for exchange without

end, while artistic practice itself still has the idea of the ‘work’…before it.

Art’s enigmatic quality is the modern equivalent of wonder ‘in the presence

of the other’. 19

000006. Autonomy or Sovereignty. Is Adorno’s project a task of carving out a space for

aesthetics as autonomous discourse, functioning on condition of its own making, or does he

think that art and aesthetics should be promoted as highest discourse, as ‘first philosophy’, in

that aesthetics should overcome non-aesthetic reason entirely? This question in itself

bypasses the complex nature of their relationship. “The very attempt to achieve autonomy is

18

Ibid p202 19

J.M Bernstein The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida to Adorno (Polity Press, Cambridge, 1992) p210

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to presuppose that there is an ‘essential nature’ to art’”20 that can be employed as a guardrail

to secure the division of myth and reason. In The Sovereignty of Art (Menke,1999) Christoph

Menke tries to define the ‘unresolved ambivalence’ of aesthetic experience. If taken as

autonomous art is seen as one domain of discourse among many; if sovereign it means art has

the potential to exceed the limits of reason of the ‘non-aesthetic.’ For Adorno clarification of

the tension between these two is the sole problem in contemporary aesthetics. How can we

resolve this antimony without subsuming one thesis under the other?

For aesthetic discourse to be one amongst a plurality aligns aesthetics with the Kantian notion

of ideal beauty. It somehow reifies and at the same time dilutes arts effects in that the

aesthetic realm has “no negating or affirming powers over the object of our non-aesthetic

experience.” 21 “The sovereignty model considers aesthetic experience a medium for

dissolution of the rule of non-aesthetic reason, the vehicle for an experientially enacted

critique of reason.” 22 It follows the trajectory of a romantic claim extending through the

surrealist avant-garde movements to present day, to promise that in art “the absolute is

present.” In this instance art does not take part as a form of reason among many but “rather

exceeds its bounds.” Autonomy “confers relative validity”...sovereignty “grants it absolute

validity” 23

The autonomous and sovereign models represent the tension between dialectical and

transcendental thought which Adorno attempts to resolve with the negative dialectic. This is

close to deconstructive theories where the logic behind either approach is employed against

itself to the point of self-evacuation, and it is forced to confront the proximity of its project

20

Ibid p191 21

Christoph Menk The Sovereignty of Art: Aesthetic Negativity in Adorno and Derrida (The MIT Press, Cambridge/Massachusetts/London 1991) pII 22

Ibid pIII 23

Ibid

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with what it maintains as its alterity. It is the fact that the aesthetic is always compulsively

impelled to over-bound reason that keeps the tension between the two as a necessary

productive force. But between Adorno and deconstruction we still end up with two

incongruent theses. Where for Adorno

…it turns out that the potential for aesthetic experience to provide a critique

of reason cannot be described as an implication of this experience, nor as

contents separable from it, but only as an effect of it.24

For deconstructive theories it’s the incessant effect and (functionless) signification of its

aporia that gives aesthetics the force necessary for a first philosophy.

Art is not sovereign in that it tears down the boundaries” between aesthetic

and non-aesthetic experience and overcomes reason “It is instead

sovereign…as a discourse of …particular validity it represents a crisis for our

functioning discourse.

Taken together these two claims outline an understanding of aesthetic

sovereignty - as an aesthetically generated critique of reason that…does not

violate the autonomy of the enactment of aesthetic experience, but is actually

premised upon it.25

24

Christoph Menk The Sovereignty of Art: Aesthetic Negativity in Adorno and Derrida (The MIT Press, Cambridge/Massachusetts/London 1991) pXIII 25

Ibid pXIII

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000007. Autonomous tics. In Notes on Gesture (Agamben, 2000) Giorgio Agamben begins by

detailing the discovery and transcription by neurologist Gilles de la Tourette of observed

pathologies in cases of familiar human gestures. These various ‘tics’ most memorably for

which we recognize his name; ‘Tourette Syndrome’ Gilles consigned to a book as the first

scientific analysis of the human gait. Agamben tells us within its pages was “the description of

an amazing proliferation of tics, spasmodic jerks, and mannerisms–a proliferation that cannot

be defined in any way other than as a generalized catastrophe of the sphere of gestures.” 26

The beauty with which de la Tourette attended to these pathologies was in his perception of

their oddly articulated mechanics, each peculiar to its bearer, purposeless, and yet

impulsively iterated, and seemingly working beyond the enclosure of the individuals will.

Agamben draws comparisons between Tourette’s obsession with the figure in formation and

the birth of early cinema. Both marked and drew inspiration from an epoch in which society

was to lose its natural attachment to gesture.

[the] silent movie traces the magic circle in which humanity tried for the last

time to evoke what was slipping through its fingers forever.27

For Agamben the essence of cinema is not image but gesture, and with him Varro28 remarks

“What is a gesture?” but a “valuable indication”. Varro locates the gesture in the sphere of

action but ensures its distance from ‘acting’ (agere) and ‘making’ (facere). The consequential

third stage of action is “on…account of the likeness between ‘agere’ (to act) and ‘gerere’ (to

carry, or carry on). A person can make something and not ‘act’, like the writer of a script in

26

Giorgio Agamben Means Without End: Notes on Politics (The MIT Press, Cambridge/Massachusetts/London 2000) p51 27

Ibid p54 28

Varro On the Latin Language trans. Roland G. Kent (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977) p245 in Giorgio Agamben Means Without End: Notes on Politics (The MIT Press, Cambridge/Massachusetts/London 2000) p56

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which the actor acts but does not make. “On the other hand, the general (imperator), in that he

is said to… ‘carry on’ affairs…neither facit ‘makes’ nor agit ‘acts’ but gerit ‘carries on,’ that is,

supports, a meaning transferred from those who gerunt ‘carry’ burdens, because they support

them.29 Agamben tells us that;

What characterizes gesture is that in it nothing is being produced or acted,

but rather something is being endured and supported”30 It is the sphere of

endless mediality itself because “gesture is essentially always a gesture of not

being able to figure something out in language.31

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

29

Giorgio Agamben Means Without End: Notes on Politics (The MIT Press, Cambridge/Massachusetts/London 2000) p57 30

Ibid 31

Ibid p59

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Bibliography

Adorno, T.W Aesthetic Theory (Continuum, London 2002)

Adorno, T.W Negative Dialectics (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London 1973)

Adorno, T.W The Essay as Form in New German Critique (Issue 32, Spring-Summer 1984)

Agamben, Giorgio Language and Death: The Place of Negativity (University of Minnesota Press,

Minneapolis/London 1991)

Agamben, Giorgio Means Without End: Notes on Politics (The MIT Press,

Cambridge/Massachusetts/London 2000)

Barthes, Roland Mythologies (The Noonday Press, New York, 1972)

Bernstein, J.M The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida to Adorno (Polity

Press, Cambridge, 1992)

Duttman, Alexander Garcia Thinking as Gesture: A Note on Dialectic of Enlightenment in New

German Critique (No 81, Autumn 2000)

Horkheimer, Max and Adorno, T. W. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments

(Stanford University Press, California, 2002)

16

Menk, Christoph The Sovereignty of Art: Aesthetic Negativity in Adorno and Derrida (The MIT

Press, Cambridge/Massachusetts/London 1991)

Weber Nicholson, Shierry Exact Imagination, Late Work: On Adorno’s Aesthetics (The MIT

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