Adorno on Writing

The brilliant and beautiful Reflection 51 of Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, carrying the heading “Memento”, is all about writing. Uncharacteristically for this famously difficult philosopher, it begins with reasonable observations and practical advice. Even more unexpectedly, they are quite familiar: kill your darlings, avoid cliché, revise revise revise, and so on.

But he swiftly moves into darker and more philosophical territory, where we realize that we’ve been in philosophical territory all along — it turns out that the entire piece is a focused meditation on a core position of his, namely that form is content, and therefore that style is an ethical choice. In this post I’ll analyze the whole thing.

Memento. — A first precaution for writers: in every text, every piece, every paragraph to check whether the central motif stands out clearly enough. Anyone wishing to express something is so carried away by it that he ceases to reflect on it. Too close to his intention, ‘in his thoughts’, he forgets to say what he wants to say.

This has pride of place at the beginning of the piece, almost like a foundation. A first precaution is a lot like a first principle, the axiom from which everything is spun out. As such, it rubs me the wrong way. Adorno presumably means his advice to apply to literary fiction, not just philosophy (more than pure philosophy and sociology, in his work he was concerned with art and aesthetics), but particularly in fiction I am very sceptical of the idea that one must always have in mind the theme. I prefer the creation of intricate glittering objects and wonder-making concepts, along with the playful exploration of the potential of language and form; together these are equal to the task of great literature, without any conscious expression of a theme. Exemplars are Nabokov, Calvino, Barth, and Borges. The very idea that a work of art ought to have a point or a message is to me utterly dismal.

We’re only at the beginning and already I disagree, and this is a philosopher I am usually in tune with. But it’s not that I’m surprised; I see that his opening point is in line with his views on art more generally. What’s happening here is that my postmodern taste in literature has a hard time dealing with Adorno’s super-serious High Modernism.

On the other hand, it is far too reductive to interpret Adorno’s “central motif” as referring to a conscious theme, message, or moral. Indeed, the motif could be one of the very things I held up as preferable: an exploration of form or an intricate and beautiful construction. I mentioned Nabokov, Calvino, and Borges, and while it might be correct to say they did not consciously deliver messages or develop themes, it is surely wrong to say that their stories had no central motifs. For example, the motif of Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler is the use of the act of reading itself as the subject-matter of the novel. That of Nabokov’s Lolita is the narrator’s manipulation of reality. It looks like I might not disagree with Adorno after all.

Even so, the question remains as to how conscious this motif is, or ought to be. Adorno seems to imply that it must be, but in my view great artists can follow or express a central idea without being aware of it. Think of the way a musical improviser can build a solo around the idea of tension and release or the breakdown of an organized structure leading to a new organized structure, etc., without having any intellectual awareness of it. An artist cannot always satisfactorily answer the question, “what were you trying to say.” Maybe writing, an intrinsically conceptual medium, is different.

No improvement is too small or trivial to be worthwhile. Of a hundred alterations each may seem trifling or pedantic by itself; together they can raise the text to a new level.

I like this, probably because it stamps a seal of approval on my fanatical drive to improve my own pieces of writing, which causes me (it feels more like an animal compulsion than a rational choice) to endlessly re-read and revise and edit and rewrite.

One should never begrudge deletions. The length of a work is irrelevant, and the fear that not enough is on paper, childish. Nothing should be thought worthy to exist simply because it exists, has been written down. When several sentences seem like variations on the same idea, they often only represent different attempts to grasp something the author has not yet mastered. Then the best formulation should be chosen and developed further. It is part of the technique of writing to be able to discard ideas, even fertile ones, if the construction demands it. Their richness and vigour will benefit others at present repressed.

This is kill your darlings, but argued persuasively with originality and depth. The point is that you have to ruthlessly delete whatever is not necessary, especially the things you are most fond of, whether they are whole paragraphs or chapters, characters, scenes, or sub-plots. The interesting point is that you have to discard not only the useless ideas but also the fruitful ones, after which they might still be productive. To discard them is therefore not to throw them in the trash but rather to keep them in reserve — or, less passively, it’s to redirect their energy into other ideas more relevant to the task at hand. An idea can be fertile and yet unsuitable.

Just as, at table, one ought not eat the last crumbs, drink the lees. Otherwise, one is suspected of poverty.

If you find you are using every idea you get, you don’t really have anything to say. You lack that foundational motif on which everything must be built. So if you are confident that you do have something to say, that you have this secure foundation, then you can afford to set some ideas aside, to suppress them and make room for better ones.

The desire to avoid clichés should not, on pain of falling into vulgar coquetry, be confined to single words. The great French prose of the nineteenth century was particularly sensitive to such vulgarity. A word is seldom banal on its own: in music too the single note is immune to triteness. The most abominable clichés are combinations of words, such as Karl Kraus skewered for inspection: utterly and completely, for better or for worse, implemented and effected. For in them the brackish stream of stale language swills aimlessly, instead of being dammed up, thrown into relief, by the precision of the writer’s expressions. This applies not only to combinations of words, but to the construction of whole forms. If a dialectician, for example, marked the turning-point of his advancing ideas by starting with a ‘But’ at each caesura, the literary scheme would give the lie to the unschematic intention of his thought.

In this paragraph, two worlds come together. Writing advice meets philosophical dialectics.

We can surely all get on the side of the “war against cliché,” in the words of Martin Amis. And for Adorno a cliché is sometimes one of form, not merely a worn-out phrase. I am guilty of one such formal cliché later on in this article, namely the idea that Adorno’s criticism of obscurity is itself obscure. I regard this as a cliché of form because the accusation of hypocrisy or of performative contradiction is such a common one in philosophy, and in this case it is little more than point-scoring. (The reason I haven’t edited it out will become clear).

The turning point of the paragraph is also the turning point of the whole piece:

If a dialectician, for example, marked the turning-point of his advancing ideas by starting with a ‘But’ at each caesura, the literary scheme would give the lie to the unschematic intention of his thought.

This represents the move towards more philosophical concerns. Superficially Adorno is offering dialectics (he means the Hegelian philosophical method, by the way) as a random example of literary form, but it feels more like he’s introducing the thing he really wants to talk about. This is because he believes in the unity of form and content, at least as an ideal, so even in what looks like ordinary writing advice, he is making points with philosophical import.

To make this clearer, and at the same time work out what Adorno means about the over-use of “But” in dialectics, we can look at the following line from Negative Dialectics:

Truth is objective and not plausible.

What this statement is actually saying is not the important thing here, but in a nutshell, the idea is that while what is true is independent of personal opinions and feelings, even so it is in a sense implausible, unacceptable or unreasonable from the point of view of the mainstream. He has in mind the difficult truths of social reality, e.g., exploitation and alienation, which can be hard to accept.

Be that as it may, here’s the point: the and makes the statement much more unnatural, and thereby arresting for the reader, than it would be with a but. And it’s not just an empty trick. It trips up the reader for a reason. Instead of setting up two opposites facing each other — what could be more plausible than objective truth? — in his choice of grammatical conjunction he emphasizes that the two are as one, intertwined, or two sides of the same coin. This is what Adorno is getting at when he says that repeatedly using “But” is to fail to do justice to the flexibility of dialectical thought.

The thicket is no sacred grove. There is a duty to clarify all difficulties that result merely from esoteric complacency. Between the desire for a compact style adequate to the depth of its subject matter, and the temptation to recondite and pretentious slovenliness, there is no obvious distinction: suspicious probing is always salutary. Precisely the writer most unwilling to make concessions to drab common sense must guard against draping ideas, in themselves banal, in the appurtenances of style. Locke’s platitudes are no justification for Hamann’s obscurities.

A fascinating passage, but something of a thicket itself. And this is precisely the issue. In his own prose Adorno tries to walk the narrow line between simplistic platitudes and unnecessary obscurity, but it’s his line. He is like the chef who refuses to allow diners to add their own salt: he imposes his own taste on others, ignoring natural variation. Adorno was by most accounts a genius, and a highly educated and cultured one at that, so what counts as the perfect path for him is likely to be far into the territory of the obscure, from the point of view of mere mortals.

Should the finished text, no matter of what length, arouse even the slightest misgivings, these should be taken inordinately seriously, to a degree out of all proportion to their apparent importance. Affective involvement in the text, and vanity, tend to diminish all scruples. What is let pass as a minute doubt may indicate the objective worthlessness of the whole.

Speaking of misgivings, I am not at all happy with the last paragraph I wrote, concerning Adorno’s thicket. Its problems are on two related levels: first, it contains clichés like “mere mortals,” and the facile characterization of a passage about obscurity as itself obscure; second, I think it’s probably wrong. The latter problem produces the first. The wrongness, which I felt while writing it, produced in me a lack of commitment with a concomitant falling back upon trite ideas and phrases.

My revised opinion is that a writer has no choice but to find that path between obscurity and simplistic “clarity” on their own, according to their own judgement. To accommodate less knowledgeable readers is to dumb down, which is a form of betrayal of one’s own ideas, or a form of dishonesty. We value great philosophers partly because they challenge us to meet them on their own turf.

He covers similar ground in Negative Dialectics:

The criterion of truth is not its immediate communicability to everyone.

at present, every step towards communication sells truth out and falsifies it

Disentanglement and clarification often — Adorno goes so far as to say always — amount to over-simplification, which is a species of falsification. In making the readers feel like they have understood, simplification turns difficult matters into digestible bite-size morsels which leave them satisfied and ready to move on to the next course. This has nothing to do with truth. Adorno wants readers to be uncomfortable, to remain with the conflicts and contradictions, to chew on what is indigestible. The writer ought to aim to keep things in play rather than using arguments and insights as mere stepping stones on a linear path to a conclusion. The truth lies in the process as much as in the result.

So much for philosophical argumentation. But it works for fiction too. In the spirit of Adorno’s dialectical thinking, I want to say that the most compelling fiction is simultaneously the least compelling. Page-turners are the easiest to abandon. Well-crafted airport thrillers are akin to social media, and frantically turning the pages to find out what happens next is the equivalent of doomscrolling: utterly compulsive, and yet we don’t feel the loss once we’ve broken out of it. It’s impossible to grieve for very long for having missed out on the final reveal of Angels and Demons by Dan Brown, and we never regret closing Instagram.

With page-turners and scrolling, little or nothing is kept in play. Especially with a thriller novel, all that matters is the plot, and lingering over the atmosphere or language or ideas in any particular chapter is unthinkable. It is a series of plot points leading to a conclusion, the value of the process merely instrumental.

Anyway, returning to this “misgivings” paragraph: we have to watch ourselves, because “affective involvement in the text, and vanity, tend to diminish all scruples.” The more our feelings are tied up in a text and the more engaged with it we are, the less we will be inclined to listen to our misgivings. But we must. Something artfully constructed might yet be “objectively worthless,” because, for example, it does not say what we meant to say.

The Echternach dancing procession is not the march of the World Spirit; limitation and reservation are no way to represent the dialectic. Rather, the dialectic advances by way of extremes, driving thoughts with the utmost consequentiality to the point where they turn back on themselves, instead of qualifying them. The prudence that restrains us from venturing too far ahead in a sentence, is usually only an agent of social control, and so of stupefaction.

The three steps forward, two steps back movement of the Echternach dance is too timid a progression for Adorno. Reading today’s analytic philosophy one is struck by how much its desire for clarity and precision results in tedious writing which is bogged down in dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s, in an effort to pre-empt the crititicisms of the author’s peers. Adorno thinks this kind of caution — this fear of putting a foot wrong or saying something insufficiently warranted — is crippling, and that we advance rather by way of bold thrusts into unknown territory. This brings to mind another thing he was fond of saying: “only exaggeration is true” (itself an exaggeration).

Scepticism is called for in the face of the frequently raised objection that a text, a formulation, are ‘too beautiful’. Respect for the matter expressed, or even for suffering, can easily rationalize mere resentment against a writer unable to bear the traces, in the reified form of language, of the degradation inflicted on humanity. The dream of an existence without shame, which the passion for language clings to even though forbidden to depict it as content, is to be maliciously strangled.

The objection that writing is too beautiful takes two forms that I can think of. First, there is the criticism of philosophical writing as sacrificing logical rigour and clarity for beauty in expression. I’ve often heard the complaint, from fans of British and American analytic philosophy, that so-called Continental philosophy is more like poetry than real philosophy. Secondly, there is Adorno’s mention of “a writer unable to bear the traces … of the degradation inflicted on humanity” which suggests he has a different kind of criticism in mind. The idea would be that given the horror of war and genocide, oppression and exploitation, beautiful language is inappropriate, even immoral.

I agree with Adorno that this must be faced with scepticism. But let’s have a look at his argument. The full sentence goes like this:

Respect for the matter expressed, or even for suffering, can easily rationalize mere resentment against a writer unable to bear the traces, in the reified form of language, of the degradation inflicted on humanity.

In other words, these critics disguise the mere resentment of better writers as respect for suffering and for the seriousness of the matter at hand. And crucially, the resentment is directed against those who refuse to bring their language down to Earth, to write plainly, soberly, and transparently. According to Adorno, such plain and sober writing is in fact degraded by the same social forces that produce suffering on a grand scale. It is essentially conformist, living up to the reader’s thoughtless expectations, and ticking the reader’s ideological boxes. Writing which is “clear” is writing that runs on existing rails, to familiar destinations. This kind of writing is the friend of the status quo.

He is of course referring to himself throughout this reflection. He is the one who is “unable to bear the traces, in the reified form of language, of the degradation inflicted on humanity.” He finds it unbearable, even immoral, to write “normally”.

But things are not so simple. If Adorno is famous for anything it’s for saying that “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”^[1], and “After Auschwitz no further poems are possible.”^[2] This seems to be an expression of the very position he is opposing here in Minima Moralia, namely the idea that beautiful writing is inappropriate in the face of an ugly reality.

The easy way here, i.e., the non-Adornian way, is to resolve this apparent contradiction by saying that he was logically inconsistent, and possibly therefore a bad philosopher. The more interesting path is that of hermeneutic charity: to make the effort to interpret the two positions as somehow consistent. To do so, we have to read on.

The writer ought not acknowledge any distinction between beautiful and adequate expression. He should neither suppose such a distinction in the solicitous mind of the critic, nor tolerate it in his own. If he succeeds in saying entirely what he means, it is beautiful. Beauty of expression for its own sake is not at all ‘too beautiful’, but ornamental, arty-crafty, ugly. But he who, on the pretext of unselfishly serving only the matter at hand, neglects purity of expression, always betrays the matter as well.

The parallel here is with modernist architecture, whose beauty is meant to be in its structural functionality, as opposed to Victorian architecture, where the structure is hidden away beneath decoration. If we substitute “architect” for “writer” and “structural construction” for “adequate expression,” we can see it clearly:

The architect ought not acknowledge any distinction between beautiful and structural construction.

So Adorno is not recommending a beauty unrelated to function, mere ornamentation, which pretends to be beautiful but which is actually ugly, as Victorian architecture can be ugly. For Adorno, beautiful language is saying exactly what you mean to say, and nothing more, just as a beautiful structural element is beautiful only insofar as it fulfils its structural function.

It now becomes clear that when Adorno said that poetry after Auschwitz was barbaric, he was equating poetry with mere ornament. This kind of beauty does indeed fail to respect the seriousness of genocide and exploitation.

And we should note that in Negative Dialectics he corrected himself:

Perennial suffering has as much right to express itself as the martyr has to scream; this is why it may have been wrong to say that poetry could not be written after Auschwitz.

So maybe suffering can be expressed in words of beauty which take that suffering seriously, facing up to it and expressing it truthfully, without prettification or the sentimental consolation of the lyrical-romantic turn of phrase, characteristic of pre-modern poetry.

Properly written texts are like spiders’ webs: tight, concentric, transparent, well-spun and firm.

It occurs to me that there are great books which do not satisfy these requirements. Don Quixote, Moby Dick, and any work by Thomas Pynchon you care to mention — these are far from tight and firm. And in philosophy, although Kant is the epitome of a well-spun spider’s web, he is anything but transparent. It could be that Adorno is describing an ideal. It certainly seems so in the next few lines:

They draw into themselves all the creatures of the air. Metaphors flitting hastily through them become their nourishing prey. Subject matter comes winging towards them. The soundness of a conception can be judged by whether it causes one quotation to summon another. Where thought has opened up one cell of reality, it should, without violence by the subject, penetrate the next. It proves its relation to the object as soon as other objects crystallize around it. In the light it casts on its chosen substance, others begin to glow.

The autobiographical element — never really absent in Minima Moralia — returns in the last paragraph:

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. He strokes them affectionately, wears them out, mixes them up, re-arranges, ruins them. 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 lumber. But now he lacks a store-room, and it is hard in any case to part from left-overs. So he pushes them along in front of him, in danger finally of filling his pages with them.

Don’t let anyone tell you that Adorno was a terrible writer. But the passage is quite disturbing. It begins with what I took to be a beautifully rendered coziness, featuring the caricature of the loveable scatterbrained writer. But it’s not that. It’s the recognition that if writing is your only home — when you are, like Adorno was when he wrote it, literally living in exile in a foreign land — you have nowhere to put the mental rubbish. In the end, one’s writing becomes an unlivable home, clogged with detritus.

He concludes:

The demand that one harden oneself against self-pity implies the technical necessity to counter any slackening of intellectual tension with the utmost alertness, and to eliminate anything that has begun to encrust the work or to drift along idly, which may at an earlier stage have served, as gossip, to generate the warm atmosphere conducive to growth, but is now left behind, flat and stale. In the end, the writer is not even allowed to live in his writing.

This is Adorno’s severity in full force. He is arguing against complacency. He, the exiled writer, cannot allow himself any comfort in his writing, any reliance on that which used to work, that which might still make him feel good or give him the illusion that he is in command of his materials. He must be ruthless and self-critical, always maintaining maximum intellectual tension.

To live in your writing is to surround yourself with conceptual furniture, and this is what Adorno is saying you cannot do, because once a concept becomes furniture it’s no good any more, despite the comfort it might bring. Tragically, you build your own house and you cannot even live in it in good conscience.

The Title

What about that title, Memento? The word is about more than fridge magnets. It is also a warning or a stern reminder, as in memento mori, literally “remember you will die”. Here, in reflection 51 from his own damaged life, Adorno is reminding himself, and anyone else who is listening, of his duties as a writer, and in doing so he demonstrates his total ethical seriousness.

It’s not in my nature to end on a downer or with a straight face, so I can’t resist including this photograph of Adorno having fun at a fancy dress party:

Notes

[1] “Culture Critique & Society,” 1949, in Prisms
[2] Aesthetic Theory, 1970

Links

Full text of “Memento”