Adorno's 'Minima Moralia' in the 21st Century

Fascism, Work, and Ecology

Caren Irr, Caren Irr

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350198852
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Critical Theory

This interdisciplinary volume revisits Adorno's lesser-known work, Minima Moralia, and makes the case for its application to the most urgent concerns of the 21st century. Contributing authors situate Adorno at the heart of contemporary debates on the ecological crisis, the changing nature of work, the idea of utopia, and the rise of fascism. Exploring the role of critical pedagogy in shaping responses to fascistic regimes, alongside discussions of extractive economies and the need for leisure under increasingly precarious working conditions, this volume makes new connections between Minima Moralia and critical theory today. Another line of focus is the aphoristic style of Minima Moralia and its connection to Adorno's wider commitment to small and minor literary forms, which enable capitalist critique to be both subversive and poetic. This critique is further located in Adorno's discussion of a utopia that is reliant on complete rejection of the totalising system of capitalism. The distinctive feature of such a utopia for Adorno is dependent upon individual suffering and subsequent survival, an argument this book connects to the mutually constitutive relationship between ecological destruction and right-wing authoritarianism. These timely readings of Adorno's Minima Moralia teach us to adapt through our survival, and to pursue a utopia based on his central ideas. In the process, opening up theoretical spaces and collapsing the physical borders between us in the spirit of Adorno's lifelong project.

Part I

Thought after Fascism

1

Minima Moralia and the Contradictions of Postwar Pedagogy

Jakob Norberg

Written in the United States during the mid-to-late 1940s, Minima Moralia was published in West Germany in 1951, about two years after Adorno had returned to Frankfurt am Main in the Federal Republic, where he would spend the final two decades of his life—his late forties, fifties, and early sixties. The collection of extended aphorisms or dense essays was the first of Adorno’s full-length books to be released in postwar Germany; Minima Moralia was a kind of postwar debut. While its form was absolutely singular even within Adorno’s varied output, the collection nonetheless encapsulated the paradoxes and tensions of the many public and often political interventions that would follow until his passing in 1969. In this chapter, I sketch out Adorno’s self-appointed and urgently felt anti-fascist mission in West Germany, the complex character and purpose of his statements, and then, returning to Minima Moralia, indicate how this work embodied and prefigured the intellectual and pedagogical work that he would continue to carry out in the decades after its release.

This contribution thus seeks to situate Minima Moralia in Adorno’s broader project to repurpose pedagogical practices after the era of Nazi rule, world war, and genocide. As an increasingly prominent voice in postwar debates from 1949 to 1969, Adorno often stated his belief that postwar democracies, among them the Federal Republic, could only function authentically if its citizens achieved genuine autonomy, understood as the ability to make independent and informed decisions and judgments. As an intellectual with a public profile, Adorno professed his commitment to an ideal of civic personhood, and even emerged as a dedicated defender of the Enlightenment program as formulated by Immanuel Kant; he took pains to outline practical reforms required to educate and support independent subjects and responsible citizens. But in his philosophically informed sociological analyses of postwar Germany, Adorno noted how this society constituted a form of organized heteronomy, in which a gigantic complex of interlocking corporations, organizations, and state bureaucracies kept individuals in a state of dependency and fungibility. People were, Adorno believed, continually over-socialized, managed, coerced, and reminded of their own superfluity, and therefore also remained attracted to quasi-fascist promises of invulnerability and invincibility. In this way, Adorno’s pedagogical program seems flatly at odds with his sociological analysis; Adorno demanded the cultivation of autonomy, the possibility of which he denied in his critical sociology.

Published in the beginning of his postwar rise to prominence, Minima Moralia held these two apparently contradictory strands together, combining an insistence on personal autonomy with an admission of organized heteronomy; it explored the “richness, differentiation, and vigour” of the individual without ever denying that this figure was “enfeebled and undermined” by relentless forces of socialization and control.¹ This tension also structured the text at the level of its form. Adorno himself suggested that his collection was affiliated with the historical tradition of advice or the “teaching of the good life.”² Yet the very spirit of such wise counsel, defined as suggestions delivered to readers construed as agents ready to consider and implement programs of self-betterment, was hollowed out by the bleak depictions of totalizing sociocultural management exercised over modern individuals; the presuppositions of the genre were contradicted by the content of the aphorisms. By mimicking gestures of advice while repeatedly reminding the reader of the impossibility of efficacious individual action, Minima Moralia did not quite set out to facilitate autonomy but rather sought to provoke lucid encounters with unfreedom. In this way, Minima Moralia rendered the contradictions of late capitalism transparent by enacting them in the medium of genre and form, setting the stage for Adorno’s entire postwar pedagogy and nearly two decades of subsequent interventions.

Professor, Expert, Critic, Counselor: Adorno’s Public Roles

Over the first two decades of West Germany’s existence, Adorno would emerge as one of the country’s most prominent intellectuals, perhaps its most prominent. This is partly a simple claim about his media presence. He published articles in a number of culturally ambitious postwar journals and occasionally contributed to widely circulating newspapers; he published books with West Germany’s most prestigious high-brow publisher, the Frankfurt-based Suhrkamp; he appeared in televised roundtables and discussions; and, above all, he was a frequent guest on the radio, commenting on music, literature, and sociopolitical matters over a hundred times, especially on the regional Hessian station.

In all this, Adorno coupled media savvy with an impressive thematic range; he could discuss the high arts and especially music but also pronounce on popular culture; he was a contemporary bearer of the German philosophical tradition as well as an exponent of the modern discipline of sociology. In the 1950s, a decade not known for a frank discussion of the Nazi past, Adorno appeared as a practitioner of modern research methods with US experience, and once the silence about the past gave way to debate about Nazi Germany and the dangers of fascist recidivism in the early 1960s, he emerged as its most persistent and scrupulous voice, an expert on the psychological mechanisms behind authoritarianism and anti-Semitism—again, his interventions were guided by a deeply felt mission of cultural and emotional disarmament aimed to prevent a fascist resurgence. As the most prolific and public representative of the Frankfurt School, Adorno offered young progressives in the early Federal Republic an attractive politico-ethical habitus: radicalism without dogmatic Soviet communism, critique without militancy, moral seriousness without religion.³ He invented a manner of living somewhat peacefully with the Federal Republic of Germany, namely in the mode of constant, vigilant negativity, and even became a sort of father figure for aspiring intellectuals, but only by projecting an entirely un-fatherlike appearance;⁴ Adorno’s public demeanor, including his precise but non-commanding diction, displayed none of the authoritarian, patriarchal traits that had traditionally been associated with the paternal role in the German cultural context.

Adorno emerged as West Germany’s exemplary public intellectual and yet the phrase “public intellectual” does not quite capture the various roles he played or audiences he targeted and also leaves out many of his reflections on his own engagement with society. Adorno was, to begin with, a professor. Professorships were an explicit goal of Horkheimer and Adorno, for the status and stability it granted its occupants; scholars can lead precarious lives, especially if they belong to an historically marginalized minority, and both friends strove for “security.”⁵ For Adorno, the road to a full professorship was long—he was granted a tenured chair a decade after his arrival—but toward the end of his career, he would lecture in front of hundreds of students, direct the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research, and preside over the German Association of Sociologists. In other words, Adorno spoke from a well-established institutional position that he himself equated with a certain degree of power.⁶ Ironically, it was precisely as a professor, an embodiment of theoretical learning and academic hierarchy, that he became a target for the happening-like disruptions of a politicized phalanx of the largest student generation in the history of Germany, a generation he had at first inspired.⁷

As a professor, Adorno mostly taught philosophy, but he chose to identify himself with the rapidly rising discipline of sociology. In 1960, there were 13 chairs in sociology; 10 years later, the number was 200.⁸ The demand for Adorno was related to the demand for a new kind of expertise, largely rejected by the racially oriented Nazis but embraced in West Germany, where empirically based analysis and careful reform of the social system was part of the republic’s self-image. Adorno continuously contributed to the redefinition of Germany as a society of interacting individuals and institutions rather than a community of blood and race. And yet he also acknowledged sociology’s history of entanglement with a vision of a centralized and bureaucratic total administration, which became a significant target of his critical theorizing.

Adorno would probably not have achieved his ubiquity on the basis of a disciplinary specialization alone but also appeared as a polymathic and aesthetically sensitive critic of cultural artifacts and trends. His first books to appear in West Germany, apart from Minima Moralia, were collections of essays on culture and music such as Prismen (1955) and Dissonanzen (1956). This role, too, was a kind of retrospective resistance to fascist ideology—Adorno himself pointed to the Nazi hatred of supposedly corrosive criticism and helped re-introduce Jewish thinkers and modernist artists as parts of a cultural tradition suppressed under National Socialism.⁹ But as with the sociologist, Adorno saw the critic as an ambiguous figure. The semi-professional reviewer had appeared in bourgeois society to discriminate among its abundance of goods, but ultimately turned against the capitalist dynamic of commodification that required the development of connoisseurship in the first place. And yet even at his most critical and dismissive, Adorno continued to provide a kind of guidance in an economically booming and “americanized” West Germany a little overwhelmed by the proliferation of gadgets and stimuli.¹⁰ He rejected broadcasted soccer games, paperback books, simplistic music appreciation records, but by doing so still brought them into his work, publicly modeling an informed but ascetic stance toward consumer society.

But Adorno did not solely write about art; he addressed modes of living. In his writings, Adorno could discuss situations of domesticity, hospitality, and sociability under conditions of modernity, and emerged as something of a sage or counselor who dispensed advice on how to negotiate everyday situations and even lead a dignified life under difficult circumstances. Numerous letters from readers and radio listeners in the Adorno archive testify to his peculiar role as an authority on modern existence in the Federal Republic: quite a few people of different ages and from different walks of life wrote to Adorno for a helpful word or two about their dilemmas and difficulties.¹¹ And yet as Minima Moralia shows, Adorno did not simply adopt a tradition of bourgeois self-improvement or offer reassuring consolations. Instead, he entered the postwar literary scene in 1951 by delivering bleak statements on the unavailability of any simple, innocuous ethical position in a compromised world. Adorno was precisely not a success-oriented life coach, but rather used the format of advice to remind his readers of the stifling grip of a totally administered world.

Adorno, then, was not a free-floating intellectual, but a professor, expert, critic, and sometime counselor. He did not simply comment on postwar Germany, but spoke from and reflected upon his various positions within this society. He knew that he was embedded in hierarchies, attached to disciplinary programs, active on a cultural market, and that his interventions were both enabled and constrained by the particular functions and limits of a series of societal roles.

Indeed, Adorno’s interventions often took the form of critical performances of established scripts: he was a professorial authority who argued for dismantling authoritarian education, a sociologist who voiced skepticism on the discipline’s mission, a critic who indicted the commodification of art, and a wise counselor who refused to provide easily usable advice. This type of paradoxical performance was rooted in his critical analysis of society. Adorno’s unflinching detection of pervasive organized dependence under capitalism combined with his desperate wish to reform modern society led him to articulate a complex, even ostensibly contradictory program of practical enlightenment and education, simultaneously ambitious and despairing, which took the form of paradoxical, even self-subverting enactment of his multiple roles as a professor, expert, and counselor. This shaped many if not most of his public interventions in the 1950s and 1960s, but also Minima Moralia. His first work to reach the German literary market was a collection of counsels for individuals for whom autonomy had become an almost impossible project; it was a book of advice that openly declared its own impossibility, and aimed to bring this disheartening, even tortuous impossibility into the realm of individual’s experience. It was as such that Minima Moralia anticipated and prepared many of Adorno’s future interventions, although the demanding density of its style may have remained unsurpassed.

Autonomy and Postwar Enlightenment

In the postwar period, Adorno emerged as a proponent of an Enlightenment notion of individual autonomy. This aspect of his public interventions might surprise contemporary American readers of Adorno, who know him as a critic of the dialectic of Enlightenment, but his repeated commitment to a conception of freedom explicitly rooted in the Enlightenment is undeniable, at least at the level of public rhetoric. As an invited speaker at public events, discussant in radio conversations on current issues, and a writer for ambitious general-audience magazines in West Germany, Adorno consistently and without reservations called for a vigorous defense of Enlightenment principles, chief among them the idea of “maturity,” or Mündigkeit. In a 1956 address at the annual conference of German adult education programs, Adorno declared that the objective of adult education must be “Enlightenment,” defined as the struggle against entrenched irrationalities such as inculcated norms, unjustified principles, routinized and prejudiced assessments, traditionalist behaviors, and superstitions. In the same brief address, he approvingly invoked the liberal Prussian civil servant and linguistic researcher Wilhelm von Humboldt’s ideal of a personality capable of independently forming judgments, developing individual faculties, and resisting commands from external sources that lack any connection to inner motivations or reasons.

For Adorno, the conceptual core of his repeated appeal to Enlightenment could be precisely defined. Enlightenment was synonymous with the individual’s emergence from self-incurred immaturity, a definition that Immanuel Kant had delivered in his 1784 article entitled: “What Is Enlightenment?” In a series of three broadcasted conversations with Hellmut Becker, the Director of the Max-Planck Institute for Educational Research, held in 1966, 1968, and 1969, Adorno repeatedly returned to Kant’s dictum as the loadstar of all pedagogical efforts, especially in the final interview, held only six days before Adorno’s untimely death. The contemporary relevance of Kant’s rousing call to exit self-incurred immaturity lied, Adorno claimed, in its crucial significance for a well-functioning, authentic democracy. The democratic rule to which West Germany aspired of course meant the rule of the people. But if the individuals who constituted the citizenry willingly submitted to authorities rather than truly committed to make informed and independent judgments, especially during election time, the rule of the people would be devoid of substance. The political system of democracy in West Germany and elsewhere was premised on the genuine autonomy of its members. In the series of radio conversations with Becker, the theorist’s preoccupation with education dedicated to autonomy often took the f...