146 : TEL 05

instance, moves Wit' hin° two paragraphs from a
discussion of the. limits i mposed on
philosophy by “the relatively
modest stage of develo mwhich the new form of
pgpdluetlfton qsessed” —- an'e
xplanation that ignores 161331;?more complex account ofGrundrﬁgli‘ra gig/2:110;n(t:::::tual and material production as crystalized in the
abstract nouns: “From WO
Iff wag -—— to the followmg
parade of reﬂexive verbs andand. more from Rationalis
m. But aiiiv:eeili:yEEliilgi:hi:rlil
r:nt
en:5 withdra' wing' itself mo
Eiggﬁsi: tlatlet:tr:lqspherereof Rationalism‘ in order tobreath’l’lgbrigagie'cihififcjduhlieps movement to the most abstract intellectual con
simultaneouslystrikingma ’ 'structs while;
.

- hav
tena
list poses: Wlll_emost readers, b

ADORNO’S “STRATEGY OF

efore too many pages

HIBERNATION”

by Tetsuo Kogawa. “All culture after Auschwitz,
includingus urgent critique, is garb
age. Whilerestoring itse lf afte r thethings tha t
happened without resistancein its own
countryside, culture has turned
entirely
Into the ideology it had been potentially. " 1— T. W. A domo

Pesplte Its Widespread reputa
tion, Adorno’s remark is unc
lear. What is ”garbage"
Is it a metaphor for ideology? He would not use sucha cheap metaphor. AsAdorno and Horkhetme' r had argued earlier - “Th- t. Produce.
tion
d a culture industry as a mecha

e develo m-

ent toward total Integranism of totap
litar ian administration.
2 In'

that generously subsidize them
. Today cultural control andadministration are much
more important than econom
ic Opel:ations. Indeed, econom
ic operations cannot
effectively function unless they
are preceded by cultural efforts.
The destruction of culture as an an
tonomous Sphere was not a sudden accident of
National Socialism, but the resu
lt of basrc tendencies in bourgeo
is" society that had
long been antagonistic even tow
ard i ts own literature. “The claimthat Hitler has
destroyed German culture is no mor
e than an advertising stunt of those who want to
I
l
p l

0

.

) ’

.

1

.

,

York, 1972), p. x.

_

O

—

I

.

’

Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New

L

h

-

I .

68. It is perhaps a measure of the chaos that reigns in the book that the bibliography gives thewrong citation for even this article! It appeared in Hegel—Studien 8 (1973), pp. 91-118.

‘

have passed, screaming ‘ Arr! Air!” themselves.

m“horror" that greets Lenin’s Machiavellianism had more to do with its later
consequences than with a repetition of the desire to get in a few more licks at Niccolo.
These surface annoyances aside —- after a ‘while one learns to cease relying on the
habitual expectation that punctuation in a book has something to do with its meaning,chuckling over typos provides needed relief from the wilder metaphors, and with astrong enough stomach one can make it through the nonsensical politics which infest
the diatribes —— the problem with the book basically comes down to Ripalda’s effort toturn a fairly responsible article on Hegel's indebtedness to the Enlightenment
philosopher Christian Garve in the formation of his early views about politics andculture 63 into'a book which proports to treat Hegel as “nothing but a small element in aprocess, of which the Enlightenment is only an episode: the process of Capitalism” (5).
Somewhere between these two poles -— Hegel and Carve and the March of Capitalism,
the more genuinely interestingpoint —— the fate of the concept of the “divided nation” —is lost. Hegel’s almost total failure to consider in his later philosophy the function which
nationality and nationalism (as opposed to the neutral state) could play in world history
has been duly noted by a number of authors. Ripalda’s tracing of the early discussion ofGarve's views on literature in Hegel's Stuttgart writings suggests an interesting tack totake on the question. By focusing on the role “nation” and “nationality” played in the
period before the fateful coupling of nation and state, and by trying to account for the ‘
indifference in which Hegelholds considerations such as commonlanguage or culture in 5
The German Constitution, Ripalda would have had a theme worth developing.
What we ﬁnd instead is an expansion of his earlier discussion of Garve and Hegel(15-70), which remains of interest in light of the enormous impact Garve -—- virtuallyignored in most discussions of Hegel’s early period —- had not only on Hegel, but also on
German Enlightenment thinking in general. Ripalda has also provided an extensive
bibliography that lists those books and journals that Hegel is believed to have read during the Stuttgart period. But once the discussion of Garve’s impact on Hegel
during the Stuttgart period is terminated, the book rapidly loses its focus, rushing .

147
through discussions of Hegel’s Berne, Fra
nkfurt, andjena period' s that contribute little
to the existing literature.
The linking of Hegel to capitalis r emarkably heavy handed, partaking of what
Raymond Williams has termed
the “epochal tendency incruder strains ofhistoriography. Economic periodoMachiavelli himself” (185) —- . surely a subtle point, one would have assumed the

NOTES AND COMMENTARY:“

comeuppance. Hence, Adam Ferguson is claimed to be “typically bourgeois” (are we.
then to assume that it was common for Scottish bourgeoisie to have ties linking them tothe clan organization of the highlands, ties that “typically” estranged them from thecommercial society of Edinburgh?), to have a “naive and elitist” mentality and to havebeen prevented by his “ethical mentality" from having followed up his penetrating
empirical insights with "a critique of capitalist society” (are we to assume that the
Edinburgh in 1766 had a capitalist society to criticize?). Hence he remained “ignorant of
the implacable mechanisms that he conjured up in the name of Spirit and Humanity” '(31) (are we to assume that Ripalda has somehow stumbled onto a lost Ferguson text
which includes terms like'Humanity and Spirit?). A few pages later Max Weber’s hands
are slapped for his “belief” in capitalist rationality by recalling how it led to theextermination of seven millionJews and the destruction of Vietnam (37). One looks invain for the slightest evidence that Weber's manifest ambivalence towards
rationalization has reached Ripalda. Conversely, “revolutionaries”_ get off easier.
Lenin’s “Concerning the National Pride of the Great-Russians” is hailed'as “a documentof a new revolutionary nationalism” tied to Renaissance and Enlightenment traditions.
“ . . . the horror of the Leninist Machiavellianism,” we are told in the completion of the -'analogy, “arises from a defamatory intention similar to that which persecuted

NOTESANDC‘OMME .-148 : TELOS

had long beenrebuild it. . . .- Such art and thought as were exterminated by Hitler
play the game
not
did
who
Anyone.
.
.
e.
existenc
hal
apocrypleading a severed andSome of
out.”
broke
Reich
Third
the
beforeyears
ion
emigratinner
intoforcedwasculture
the
of
force
ative
integrthethese “inner” emigrants sought to dismantlees,screnc
human
and
arts
re,
literatu
totedindustry, although they remained restricn of theeruptio
the
meant
ts
attempthese
re,literatuIns.
and did not extend to politic
concomitant rejection of theavant-garde’ at the beginning of the century with theding to jens, this revolution
Accor
tics.
fundamental categories of 19th century aesthe, character and languagt;
r,
autho
en
betwe
n
radically changed the basic relatio.I was lost; due to t e:ttzli:“Finally in 1901, ‘once’ and ‘now’ were separated and thethe character, an ta :5
mesof ‘Is,’ its power, the object is alienated; the thing determ
to be bound by t_ e
not
seems
realityr;
the ‘creation’ function away from the autho
.
n.”3
broke
is
unity
the
re;
conventional language anymo’until the late 19505, whilen
The real meaning of this revolution was not understoods linguistics and Husser sl
reS'aussu
new interpretations of Freud’s psychoanalysis, deen their. own theoretica
betwe
ns
relatioit
impliCphenomenology revealed explicit andsswnism, surrealism,(expre
works
art
l
menta
experiporaryinnovations and contem
Brecht). One:1of th:
and
rhold
formalism, Russian avant—garde, the theater of Meyebetween rea er annrelatio
The
r.
reade
most paradigmatic problems deals with theture. Contemporary
litera
an
Germ
ry
centu
literary work has radically changed in 20threader reads it, in
the
until
leted
comp
not
is
work
y
theory recognized that every literardreception shoul conform to thecontrast to the traditional assumption that the
emanc1pat1ng tlﬁkreader 1::
fromauthor’s vision during the creative process. Far
the author. K a, on the
to
r
reade
the
d
subject, this earlier position subordinate
ritarian situation by requiring tother hand, destroyed the psychological and authoInthe opening
reader to adopt a completely different attitude toward 'l'lls wprk.
in hand. The
sword
a
With
libertyofpassage of Kafka’s Amerika we read of a statue
atsword forofpart
Kafka’sontion
substitu
us
conscio
attentive reader will notice thisindication
the
also
but
humor,
Kafka’s
only
not
is
here
on
operatiIn
the actual torch.
cunning, mischievous andthat the narrator, far from being naive, is at oncer, as was the case in
unreliable. The reader cannot entirely depend upon the narrato
the conventional novel. Reading Kafka’s work, the reader

cannot remain passive, Le. ,actively partiCipate inhe must not seek to ﬁnd what Kafka really means, but must
been applied torarelyhas
chreconstructing the “incomplete” story.4 This approa
etation ofinterprtialistexistening
prevailstilltheKafka’s work because it contradicts
Kafka.S
presupposes that theThis shift in linguistic experience from the author to the readera “message . to theittransmtot
attempreader can bracket the author’s authoritarian.
the work With the
of
ng
meani
ﬁnal
the
leave
must
reader; conversely, the author
n between author andreader. This has profound consequences for the communicatio
become the readersing
reader and the truth of a literary work. Might not everythauthor, these doubts
theofntationfabrication? If language were an immediate represe
logical means,technobyed
mediatisnquestioingelanguawould be relevant, but thein Derrida).
(as
mice
namely langue, or more adequately, e’criture, not speech or.
p. 62.
.
n, 1957).
‘eschzc' hte (Pflinge'
teraturg'
3. Walter Jens. Statt emer
(1978)
Reading
of
Act
The
his
1974);
re,4. Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader (Baltimo.
.
.
.
literatureoftheoryrientedreader-oasdevelol
co 'ncin
Gesture to the Social
gic
Psycholo
the
“From
and
"
Vulgarly
Kafka
g"ReaIdin2‘.“ Cf.grliy
tation of Kafka. Both articles
Gesture.” There I have tried to overcome the existentialist interpre
1978), pp. 7-52, 91-128.
are now in my Changing the Subject (in Japanese -—- Tokyo,

any

Today, work (not only the literary work of authors, but also labor ingeneral)is totally
mediated by the production-market mechanism, and the worker (not only the author
as a creator of work but every laborer) is alienated from his work.” The contemporary

work has nothing to do with the worker’s specific character: the worker does notdecide the value of the work. Thus, it is the user, arranger, and mediator of the work
who decides its value. 6 Consequently, to shift the subject of language to the reader
constitutes resistance to the situation in which the whole value of work is decided byadministrators 'ust as the meanin of a litera work is determined b ubli
men and revieivers, not by eachgreader. TY
YPShers, ad
Saussure’s treatment of language as a system of signs and linguistics as a science ofthe life of linguistic signs within society, anticipated today’s language situation. The
relation between signifier and signified replaces concept and sound-image respectively
since, according to Saussure, the bond between the signiﬁer and signiﬁed is arbitrary.
“Whether we take the signifié or the sigmfz'ant, language has neither ideas nor sounds
that existed before the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonetic differencesthat have issued from the system. The idea or phonic substance that a sign contains isof less importance than the other signs that surround it; thus the value of a term may
be modiﬁed without either its meaning or its sound being affected, solely because aneighboring term has been modified.“7 Consequently, all linguistic values are
determined by the user of signs (the audience), who relates signs within a specificintersubjective context. This context can be referred to as the socio-cultural code orsystem. And law, custom, principle, mode, public sphere, order, regulation, andrationality can all be replaced by this code or system.
Hence semiotics casts light on the present situation of language: the same sign canmanifest itself both as artistic work and as advertisement. The meaning of the signdepends entirely on the code that the sign refers to.
Broadly speaking, one may distinguish three types of codes: major (or popular)code, minor (or alternative) code, and mass code. The major code belongs to themajority, like custom, and is originally the spontaneous legacy of a people. The minor
code is an alternative to the major code. The mass code, ﬁnally, is characteristic ofmodern cultural administration of mass communication and culture industry. Today,
the major code and mass code are hardly distinguishable, while former minor
codes become marginal, as in the case of vestigial folk traditions confronted with massculture. For example, despite the expansion of the cinema in the 19203, the Yiddish
theater was still a major cultural institution for the New York jewish population.
Besides the mass culture, the entertainment-oriented Yiddish theater addressed the
majority of the subculture while the‘artistic or political Yiddish theater (Yiddish Art
Theater and the ARTEF) were relevant to the intellectual minority. 3 In the wake of atransition to a fully administered culture, the function of the entErtainment-oriented
Yiddish theater has been totally replaced by television, film and Broadway. The
Yiddish theater in New York, despite a slight recent revival, is marginally isolated, and6. This situation does not invalidate Marx's analysis of the commodity but does demand theextraterritorialzkation of Marxist economics. Among the attempts to develop the implication ofMarx’s analysis toward the cultural approach, see Jean Baudrillard, Le Syste‘me des Objets: La
Consommation des Signes (Paris, 1968); and Pour and Critique de l’économie Politique du Signe(Paris, 1972). Also, see Dean MacCannell, The Tourist ~— A New Theory of the Leisure Class(New York, 1976).
7.

Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. W. Baskin and edited by C.

Bally, A. Sechehaye, and A. Riedlinger (New York, 1966), p. 120.
8. See David S. Lifson, The Yiddish Theater in America (New York and London, 1965).

150 : TELOS

no longer is an alternative to mass culture. Thus, in contrast to semiotics’ notion of an

inﬁnite diversity of codes, only two possibilities exist: mass code or margznal code.
This is the limit of semiotics whose radical potential seems to have been
over-estimated.

Benjamin attempted to describe the emancipatory possibility of switching the code,
specifically in his elaboration of the method of quotation as a response to thedominant culture situation. For Benjamin, quotation shifts the dominant andconventional code to a new one. Thus, his favorite form of criticism was, as he admits
in his letter, ‘the writing almost entirely of quotations. The craziest mosaic technique”that pe0ple can imagine.
In Its broadest sense, the technique of quotation is not limited to Benjamin but canbe found in almost all radical artists and theoreticians of the ﬁrst quarter of the 20th _century. Kafka created his new literary form by “quoting” the form of Yiddish
theater, 10 while Karl Kraus’ caricatures are based on citations, to say nothing of James

Joyce and Marcel Proust. Similarly in epic theater“ quotation has a crucial function.
Brecht wrote that “in the ﬁrst production of Die Mutter the stage” .was not supposed
to represent any real locality: it, as it were, took up an attitude itself towards theincidents shown; it quoted, narrated, prepared and recalled.” 11 Victor Shklovskij’3
critical technique of parody is a kind of quotation, and Sergei Eisenstein’s film
technique of montage depends, as he himself admits, on his synthetic understandingof quotation.
These similarities did not grow out of personal collaborations. The method of
quotation has, rather, been developed as a reaction against capitalist rationalization and its cultural consequences. In the age of mechanical reproduction, thelanguage of literature is always obsolete unless it is constantly related to a new code,that is, unless it is quoted. Therefore, in a letter to Gershom Scholem, Benjamin likens

his method to a “salvage” of “scraps”: “the philosophical salvage of surrealism — andtherefore its Aujhebung __ also the attempt to hold the image of history in the most
unattractive ﬁxations of being, so to speak, the scraps of being.” 13
Benjamin’s use of the term Abfdlle, or scraps, reminds us of Adorno’s Mall
(garbage). Apparently, Benjamin’s scraps and Adorno’s garbage indicate a reified
situation in which language (the essence of culture) becomes an arbitrary sign.
However, Adorno’s garbage implies the impossibility of salvage, while Benjamin’s
scraps seems to suggest a strategy. For Benjamin, scraps that are obsolete as signs
referring to old aesthetic values can still provide new value if they are related to somenew code, i.e., if they fall into a newly organized social group’s hands. Thus, hecompares John Heartﬁeld’s photomontage and Renger-Patsch’s picture: the former
transformed the advertising photography into a political instrument, while the latter“succeeded in turning into an object poverty itself, by handling it in a modish
technically perfect way, into an objeCt of enjoyment.” 14 Benjamin contends that the9. Walter Benjamin, Brzefe, Bd. 1, G. Scholem and T. Adorno, eds. (Frankfurt, 1966), p.
366. Cf. Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark ses (New York, 1968), p 202.
..10 See the work of Evelyn Torton Beck, Kafka and the Yiddish Theater (Madison, 1971).
11. Bertolt Brecht, “111 Direct Impact of the Epic Theater" in Brecht on Theater, John
Willett, ed. and trans. (New York, 1964), p. 57. Also see Walter Benjamin, Understanding-

Brecht, trans. Anna Bostock (London, 1973).
12. As for how “montage” decides the meaning of film, Bela Balazs tells an ironic story that’ “revolutionary” cinema, Battleship Potemkin, was converted to an anti~revolutionary
Eisensteinscinema by a Scandinavian distributor who shifted just one scene —-- “not a shot omitted, not a title
changed." See Theory of the Film, Edith Bone, trans. (London, 1952), pp. 119-120.
13. Walter Benjamin, Briefe, Bd. 2, 011.021., p. 685.
14. Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” in Understanding Brecht, p. 95.

NOTES AND COMMENTARY: 151

cultural situation can be radically changed only if an alternative social context, i.e,, a: . .i

new collectivity, appears. Only if the mass-oriented capitalist collectivity is switched tothe collectivity of a class conscious proletariat. Hence, he confronted “the fascist I
attempt to aestheticize politics” with the Communist politicization of art, uniting I
artistic activity with the workers’ movement.15 Adorno nowhere shares Benjamin’s
optimism. The new technological means hardly provide the possibility of new andactive collective reception of culture. Rather, the capitalist culture industry destroys
not only the traditional community but also the basis of almost all authentic
collectivity: collective memory or unconscious collectivity. Spontaneous collectivity is
increasingly impossible, and is replaced by the artiﬁcial organization of theentertainment business and bureaucratic administration: even religious ritual andtraditional feasts are no exception.16
In an apparent reply to Benjamin’s thesis, Adorno in his essay “On the Fetish
Character in Music and Regression in Listening,” in referring to the attitude of themusic listening audience insisted that “the new phase of the musical consciousness ofthe masses is deﬁned by displeasure in pleasure; it resembles the reaction to sport oradvertising. Contemporary culture, despite its seeming diversity, has been
fundamentally chained to the dominant code. When an audience receives a cultural

work (which should be originally free from any code before the association with therecipient), it has little choice in deciding what code it should be related to inaccordance with the interests of its own members. 17 In this sense, Adorno argues that“in spite of all the progress in reproduction techniques, in controls and the specialities,
and in spite of all the restless industry, the bread that the culture industry offers man isthe stone of the stereotype.” 13 That is why “all culture after Auschwitz, including its
urgent critique, is garbage.” At the same time, Adorno is fully aware that no matter
how reiﬁed culture becomes, it is not totally reified. It always refers back to living
subjects. Even in the context of extreme reiﬁcation, the subject who is conscious ofalienation survives, and this critical activity is the subject’s final barricade.
Thus Adorno’s statement regarding culture as garbage is not an epistemologicaldeﬁnition of culture but a strategic critical gesture within the context of the cultureindustry. His “pessimistic” and totally negative tone reﬂects this strategy. He is notpessimistic but performs this pessimistic gesture. The philosophical basis of thisperformance is put forth in Negative Dialectics: “In epistemology the inevitable result
is the false conclusion that the object is the subject. Traditional philosophy believes
that it knows the unlike by likening it to itself, while in so doing it really knows itself
only. The idea of a changed philosophy19would be to become aware of likeness by
deﬁning 1t as that which 15 unlike itself. ”19But this does not suggest that he acts as if
he is negative. He tries to be totally negative to the extent that the critical subject asessentially negative. If reiﬁcation constitutes the basic trend of culture, the only
possible response is neither a search for an alternative, given the present limited
situation, nor an objective description of the status quo, but a, strategic exaggerationof the negative element of the trend.20 Accordingly, Adorno ﬁnds in Kafka one of the
15. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” inIlluminations, Hannah Arendt, ed. (New York, 1969), p. 244.
16._ David Gross, “Culture and Negativity: Notes Toward a Theory of the Carnival,” 1nTelos. n. 36 (Summer 1978). pp. 127-132.
17. As for the semiological approach to this point, compare the works of jean Baudrillard
mentioned 1n note 7.
18. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, op.czt., p. 148.
19. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, op. cit., p. 150.
20. This strategic gesture, exaggeration may be closely related to Brechts alienation effect”
7II152 : TELOS

most successful examples of this strategy. Adorno writes in Prisms: “As was done
thousands of years ago, Kafka seeks salvation in the incorporation of the power of theadversary. The subject seeks to break the spell of reification by reifying itself. It
appears to complete the fate which befell it. . . . Immersion in the inner space ofindividuation, which culminates in such self-contemplation, stumbles upon theprinciple of individuation, the postulation of the self by the self, ofﬁcially sanctionedby philosophy, the mythic deﬁance. The subject seeks to make amends by abandoning
this defiance. Kafka does not glorify the world through subordination; he resists it
through non-violence. Faced by the latter, power must acknowledge itself as thatwhich it is, and it is on this fact alone that he counts. Myth is to succumb to its own

reﬂected image.”
A common line on Adorno is that Adomo’s “critical theory does not address any
social group, nor can it provide a socialization model translatable into practice.” '21
But as we have already shown, his “strategy of hibernation" was engendered by a sociocultural situation in a transitional period marked by the overthrow of traditional con~cepts: “theory,” “practice,” “individuality,” “collectivity,” “language,” and even“concept,” all of which need radically new interpretations —— the method of interpretation itself must be fundamentally revised. Given that advanced mass communication
and bureaucracy cripple bourgeois individuality and organic collectivity, Adorno’s
emancipatory strategy cannot count on any kind of conventional practice.22 Although
Habermas criticizes Adomo when he writes, “Adorno’s thesis can be proven with
examples from literature and music, only as long as they remain dependent on reproduction techniques that prescribe isolated reading and contemplative listening, i.e. , amode of reception that leads down the royal road to bourgeois individuation,”23
Adorno does not depend on bourgeois individualism but only utilizes it in order toovercome both conventional individualism and collectivism. In this sense, he upholds
the appearance of both a new individuality and collectivity, which are in turn never

N0 TES'AND COMMENTARY
while the individuals of the administered world are themselves so deePIYI(Vewfremdungseﬂekt), provided that this theater technique is not received dogmatically.
21. Axel Honneth, “Communication and Reconciliation." in Telos 39 (Spring 1979), n. 56.
22. However, can some existing practices implicitly anticipate Adorno‘s negative dialecucs?
Alan Wolfe proposes a strategy “to fulﬁll democratic dreams" — hoarding, which he borrows
from James O'Connor. Neither Wolfe nor O’Connor intends to trace their theoretical roots
directly to Adorno, but their strategy seems to have an afﬁnity to Adorno’s “strategy ofhibernation.” “Hoarding constitutes a ﬁrst step in the direction of a non-alienated politics, anegative refusal to have alienated power exercised over oneself." “There are degrees of politicalhoarding. Simple apathy toward the organized political process is one.” “Those who engage 1ncooperative enterprises -— such as neighborhood grocery cooperatives, daycare centers, and othersocial activities - are in a sense hoarding a certain amount of their power from the state, even If
their expressed motive is a non-political one. The same is true of those who withdraw into‘rural
areas to produce their own means of subsistence as much as they can. Even though such actltlESof the ‘counter—culture’ by themselves do not pose any direct threat against the existing order,
they are a form of hoarding insofar as they withdraw from the existing political system’s
deﬁnition of what constitutes the productive ‘obligations' of citizenshlp. When workers go on
strike, they hoard their labor poWer for themselves; an important strategy for political change
would involve a ‘citizens’ strike,’ in which people would refuse to participate in the organizedrituals that go under the name of politics in late capitalist society.” The Limits of Legitimacy.
'(New York, 1977), pp. 343—344.
23. jﬁrgen Habermas, “Consciousness-Raising or Redemptive Criticism ~— The Contemporaneity of Walter Benjamin," in New German Critique, n. 17 (Spring 1979), pp. 43-44.

ntegrate

the mass collectivity networks that their desultory reading patterns steadily affirni’established mass collect1v1ty. In this sense, Habermas was too optimistic when he".
" 'argued that “a noticeable development of arts witha collective mode ofreception. . .such as architecture, theater and painting, as well as
utilitarian popularliterature and music with their dependence on the electronic media,
points beyond
mere culture industry and does not a fortiori refute Benjamin’s hopefor a univer—salized secular illumination.”24 Unfortunately, since 1972, when

Haberrnas made thisclaim, such “a noticeable development of arts” has turned out not

to point beyond

culture industry, at least in the North American context,
and the socio-culturalcontext of West Germany is not much different. Despite Habermas' prediction,

Benjamin’s hepe cannot be realized unless it is preceded by Adorno’s strategy.

24. 1122's., p. 44.

SPARKS, INSANITY, AND FIREWORKS*
by Heiner Hofener“Illusion [Wahn] is the deception of regarding the mere
representation of a thing as equivalent to the thingitself. . . . N ow the consciousness of possessing a means tosome end or other (before one has availed oneself of thismeans) is the possession of the end in representation only;
hence to content oneself with the former, justas though it

separated. His preference for highbrow literature and music is not accidental, and is 'in fact preferable to -the extent that readership here is both too individualistic forbourgeois individuation and too spontaneous for the existing collectivity. Indeed, an
extremely conscious, “individualistic” readership may open up a new collectivity,

153:;-

could take the place of the latter, is a practical

illusion. . . .” 1-

The certiﬁed “psychograph” of Marx, Arnold Kilnzli,2 believe
d to have found in
Adorno’s philosoPhy a fruitful object for his own trade and adroitly
posed the pseudoSocratic rhetorical question, whether Adorno does not simply provide“the self-justiﬁcation of paranoia on a high philosophical level."3 The analysis —-—insofar as it can becalled an analysis — latches on to one particular quotati
on from Adorno thatapparently proves Ki’mzli’s point: “Dialectics cannot stop. . .atthe concepts of healthyand sick. Once it has recognized the prevailing universal. .
. as sick — in the literal
sense, as characterized by paranoia or pathological projection- it proceeds to take as

Indications of recovery only that which it itself treats as
sick,misguided, paranoid,orevei‘ir‘l‘sane’; thus today, as in the Middle Ages, only fools
tell their masters thetrut .”__ For Ki‘mzli, this quotation is conclusive evidenceof the “self-justification of*Translated by David J. Parent.
1. Immanuel Kant , Religio.
n within the _Limits of Reason Alone, trans. The odore
M. Gree eand Hoyt H. Hudson (Chicago and London, 1934), p. 156.
n
2. Arnold Kunzh: Karl Marx: Eine Psychogmphie(Vienna, Frankfurt. Zurich, 1966).
3.

Arnold Kﬁnzll, “Linker Irrationalismus. Zur
Kritischen Theorie der ‘Frankfurter

Schule,‘ ” in Auﬂtldrung and Dialektik. Politische Philoso

1971). p. 147.
4.

phie van Hobbes bis Adamo (Freiburg

Adamo, Minima Moralia, quoted in Kﬁnzli, ibid.,

p. 147.

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