Reading Adorno by the Pool; or, Critical Theory in a Postcritical Era

Abstract

Reading Adorno by the Pool; or, Critical Theory in a Postcritical Era Robert T. Tally Jr. (bio) As a contributor to this special section on "Selling Out Theory," I hope that the title of this article won't be viewed as false advertising. However, I suspect that those hoping for a detailed discussion of the work of Adorno may be a bit disappointed; those who hope to learn anything about swimming pools will definitely be disappointed. So maybe it would be best to begin by explaining that title. I take the image from Fredric Jameson's 1990 study of the Frankfurt School philosopher, Late Marxism: Adorno, or, the Persistence of the Dialectic. Those familiar with this book will recall Jameson's extraordinary thesis, which was that Adorno of all theorists, in Jameson's words, may turn out to have been the analyst of our own period, which he did not live to see, and in which late capitalism has all but succeeded in eliminating the final loopholes of nature and the Unconscious, of subversion and the aesthetic, of individual and collective praxis alike, and, with a final fillip, in eliminating any memory trace of what thereby no longer existed in the henceforth postmodern landscape. (Jameson 1990, 5) Jameson, here indulging in the decade-ification of modern history that he had analyzed previously in "Periodizing the Sixties" (among other places), had just observed that "Adorno was surely not the philosopher of the thirties (who has to be identified in retrospect, I'm afraid, as Heidegger)," nor was the thinker of the forties and fifties, or the sixties ("those are called Sartre and Marcuse, respectively"); and, as Jameson concedes, the seventies "were essentially French," at least in the United States. But with the arrival of the 1980s and at the threshold of the 1990s, at the advent of a postmodern condition and a post-Cold War era of globalization in which "Adorno's prophecies of the 'total system' finally came true, in wholly unexpected forms," Jameson suggests, and the whole book will be his argument in favor of this hypothesis, "Adorno's Marxism, which was no great help in the previous periods, may turn out to be just what we need today" (Jameson 1990, 5). Although Jameson wrote this nearly 30 years ago, a good case can be made to support [End Page 281] the enduring truth of this proposition, because what might be called the "late postmodernism" of our twenty-first-century condition has, if anything, only exacerbated and extended the "total system" to which Jameson refers (Wegner 2009, 5-6).1 But my title comes from the conclusion to Jameson's study, where Jameson most explicitly looks at the relationship between Adorno's critical theory and the postmodern condition. There he notes that Adorno's polemics may hold the key to uncovering the theorist's special relevance, and "the persistence of the dialectic" more generally, as Jameson's subtitle would have it, in the then-present situation. Specifically, Jameson compares Adorno's critique of positivism to our own era's (i.e., 1990's) critique of postmodernism. Jameson underscores what he calls the momentous shift that this transcoding of positivism onto postmodernism must entail, pointing out that it would have to involve the ways that, as he puts it in his inimitable Jamesonian manner, a stuffy petty-bourgeois republican nineteenth-century philosophy of science emerges from the cocoon of its time capsule as the iridescent sheen of consumerist daily life in the Indian summer of the superstate and multinational capitalism. From truth to state-of-the-art merchandise, from bourgeois respectability and "distinction" to the superhighways and the beaches, from the old-fashioned authoritarian families and bearded professors to permissiveness and loss of respect for authority (which, however, still governs). (Jameson 1990, 248) Jameson concludes that paragraph with a reference to Adorno's famous (or infamous) assertion that there can be poetry after Auschwitz: "The question about poetry after Auschwitz has been replaced with that of whether you could bear to read Adorno and Horkheimer next to the pool" (248). Hence, my title. Reading Adorno today may be a bit like this. True, in 2019 we are no longer basking...