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出處:Lingua Franca 22 West 38th Street New
York, NY 10018
web@linguafranca.com
Phone: 212 302 0336
Fax: 212 302 0847
Volume 9, No. 9 - December/January 2000
IS BAD WRITING NECESSARY?
George Orwell, Theodor Adorno, and the Politics of Literature
BY JAMES MILLER
These are trying times for the left in America, which may be
one reason why a bitter debate has erupted
among avowedly left-wing academics and intellectuals over a venerable topic--"Politics
and the English
Language," to borrow the title of George Orwell's famous 1946 essay. Must
one write clearly, as Orwell
argued, or are thinkers who are truly radical and subversive compelled to write
radically and
subversively--or even opaquely, as if through a glass darkly? That is the question.
On one side stand academic luminaries like University of California
at Berkeley rhetorician Judith Butler
and University of Pittsburgh English professor Jonathan Arac, who take their
inspiration from critical
theorists like Michel Foucault and Theodor Adorno. Arguing that their work has
been misunderstood by
journalists on the left, these radical professors distrust the demand for "linguistic
transparency,"
charging that it cripples one's ability "to think the world more radically."
On the other side are ranged a variety of public intellectuals
and journalists like UCLA historian Russell
Jacoby, feminist writer Katha Pollitt, and NYU physicist Alan Sokal. Intolerant
of bewildering jargon, they
cannot see how deliberately difficult prose can possibly help change the world.
As their patron saint, they
often nominate George Orwell, the very image of a man who spoke truth to power
and spoke it plainly.
One thing the plain talkers on the left share is relatively
greater access to a wider public. In part, this
is because they know how to write with "linguistic transparency."
But as Pollitt has ruefully pointed out,
the proponents of plain talk have also doubtless benefited from the long-standing
anti-intellectualism of
the American mass media. Keen to simplify and wary of sustained argument, those
who oversee the media are
generally impatient with abstraction and complexity as well as the qualifications
and nuances that might
slow down the majority of readers. They want facts reported and explanations
and arguments conveyed as
painlessly as possible. As a result, writers on the left who can handle complex
topics with terseness,
clarity, and brio exercise an apparent influence on the wider culture out of
all proportion to their
standing, if any, in the academy.
This situation not only excites the envy of some left academics;
it also fuels their suspicion that plain
talk is politically perfidious--reinforcing, rather than radically challenging,
the cultural status quo.
Indeed, last year, the academic organizers of a conference at the University
of California at Santa Cruz
made exactly this case, trying to pin the pejorative label "left conservatism"
onto some of their most
widely read critics.
If Orwell perfectly exemplifies the party of clarity, it might
be said that the German philosopher Theodor
Adorno has come to represent the party of opacity. Consider the most recent
episode in this internecine
Kulturkampf, which occurred this spring after the editors of Philosophy and
Literature bestowed their
annual Bad Writing award on Judith Butler. Stung into action, Butler defended
herself--in an Op-Ed piece of
defiant lucidity--in the columns of The New York Times. And she cited Adorno
to do so. But this was not the
end of it. A few months later, when the literary critic Terry Eagleton complained
in the London Review of
Books about the labored style of Gayatri Spivak, the prominent postcolonial
theorist, Butler weighed in to
defend Spivak and denounce Eagleton. And, once again, Adorno served as her witness.
"Surely," Butler proclaimed in a letter to the editors,
"neither the LRB nor Eagleton believes that
theorists should confine themselves to writing introductory primers such as
those that he has chosen to
provide." Precisely because pathbreaking thinkers like Butler and Spivak
are in pursuit of something bigger
and better than a primer--Butler calls it "critical theory"--they
refuse the "truisms which, now fully
commodified as 'radical theory,' pass as critical thinking." If their prose
is sometimes hard to read, that
is because they, unlike Eagleton, are performing true critical thinking: "Adorno
surely had it right,"
asserts Butler, "when he wrote--in Minima Moralia--about those who recirculate
received opinion: 'only what
they do not need first to understand, they consider understandable; only the
word coined by commerce, and
really alienated, touches them as familiar.'"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
What is going on here? And how have Orwell and Adorno, two
long-dead figures, come to represent the poles
of this debate? It was a half century ago that Orwell warned of the totalitarian
use value of the evasive
euphemism, the deliberately misleading oxymoron, and the proliferation of obfuscating
abstraction in
political prose, not least among academics on the left (a prime target of "Politics
and the English
Language" was Harold Laski, a leading light of the Labour Party). For a
quarter century, Orwell's aesthetic
convictions carried the day, at least on the anti-Stalinist left. In The Sociological
Imagination (1959),
the radical sociologist C. Wright Mills approvingly cited Orwell's example in
contrasting the "confidence
of the individual craftsman in his own ability to know reality" with the
"bureaucratization of reason." Ten
years later, Noam Chomsky used Orwell to throw darts at a different target,
those segments of the academic
left avowedly uninterested in practical politics: "George Orwell once remarked
that political thought,
especially on the left, is a sort of masturbation fantasy in which the world
of fact hardly matters. That's
true, unfortunately, and it's part of the reason that our society lacks a genuine,
responsible, serious
left-wing movement."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Previously in LF
The Sorrows of Young Walter: Cultural studies gets back to basics with Benjamin.
J'Accuse!: Talking left conservatism at a fractious Santa Cruz seminar.
The Radosh File: A historian refights the Spanish Civil War.
Book Review: John Plotz considers essays on Hannah Arendt.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Web Special
In Their Own Words:
A gallery of quotations from Theodor Adorno and George Orwell on language and
writing.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From bn.com
+ John Rodden's The Politics of Literary Reputation: The Making
and Claiming of "St George" Orwell
+ Just published: Adorno and Benjamin's Complete Correspond-
ence, 1928-1940
Find other academic and scholarly books at bn.com
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
However plausible the position of Orwell and Mills and Chomsky, one cannot help
but notice that Adorno's
formidable Minima Moralia--the work cited in self-defense by Butler--was written
at roughly the same time
as Orwell's pioneering essay and commands a similar following among left-wing
intellectuals.
Orwell and Adorno, both born in 1903, were early and outspoken foes of fascism
and Stalinism. Both,
deservedly, are icons of the independent left. And their worldviews overlapped
in other ways as well. They
each regarded the postwar world in the most dire terms: Adorno saw both Western
Europe and the Soviet Union
as entirely "administered" societies where the prospects for genuine
freedom were few; Orwell defined
political speech as the "defense of the indefensible," adding that
contemporary politics could be summed up
by its "evasions, folly, hatred, schizophrenia." Both men also saw
a close relation between the corruption
of language and the corruption of politics. Orwell protested that "orthodoxy,
of whatever color, seems to
demand a lifeless, imitative style." Adorno wrote, "Where there is
something that needs to be said,
indifference to literary form always indicates dogmatization of content."
Both were appalled by the
replacement of evocative words with prefabricated, ready-made phrases. When
Adorno asserted that "defiance
of society includes defiance of its language," Orwell would have agreed.
And yet when it came to assessing the need for clear language
in social criticism, they parted ways
dramatically. In "Politics and the English Language," Orwell asserts
that to write and think "clearly is a
necessary first step toward political regeneration." In his 1956 essay
"Punctuation Marks," Adorno asserts,
just as boldly, that "lucidity, objectivity, and concise precision"
are merely "ideologies" that have been
"invented" by "editors and then writers" for "their
own accommodation."
So whose views on language--Orwell's or Adorno's--seem most
cogent in retrospect? And why did these two
estimable authors come to such drastically different conclusions about the morality
of style?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
First published in German in 1951, Adorno's Minima Moralia
is one of the most intransigent pieces of
cultural criticism in this century. The book was written in the 1940s, while
Adorno was an unhappy exile in
America. Divided into three parts--"1944," "1945," and "1946--1947"--the
text consists of 153 numbered
entries with deadpan titles ("They, the people," "Tough baby,"
and so on). Fragmentary and nonsequential,
solemn and simultaneously offhand, each fragment circles briefly around a theme.
Some of the book's most
celebrated formulations are defiantly paradoxical: "In psychoanalysis,
nothing is true except the
exaggerations." Others issue in wild generalizations: "Normality is
death." Still other passages combine a
knowing allusiveness (for example, to Hegel's famous dictum that Napoleon was
the world spirit on
horseback) with a simple image ("Hitler's robot bombs," the pilotless
V-1 and V-2 missiles that killed
thousands of people in London) to insinuate, in a few elliptical words, a considered
view about abstract
philosophical matters: "'I have seen the world spirit,' not on horseback,
but on wings and without a head,
and that refutes, at the same stroke, Hegel's philosophy of history." A
topic that is provocatively
formulated in one passage often reappears in another with a completely different,
and sometimes inverted,
emphasis. Adorno compared this way of writing to "spiders' webs."
He hoped to snare readers in a tightly
woven net of metaphors and ideas.
The distinctive features of Adorno's style owe a great deal
to his rarefied upbringing. Born in Frankfurt
am Main, Adorno inherited, and helped to renew, many of the most demanding currents
in German high culture.
Trained to become a classical pianist, he also studied sociology and philosophy
before moving to Vienna in
1925 to study with the atonal composer Alban Berg. Discouraged from pursuing
a career in music, he returned
to Frankfurt and completed a dissertation on Kierkegaard.
Fluent in the specialized vocabularies refined by German philosophers
from Kant and Hegel to Husserl and
Heidegger, Adorno in these years also absorbed the key idea of reification from
Marx and the Hungarian
communist philosopher Georg Luk?cs. Capitalism, according to Marx, had produced
a "topsy-turvy world" in
which inanimate objects of every sort--from stocks and bonds to paintings and
poems--were treated like
fetishes with magical powers, while human beings were manipulated like inanimate
objects, as if a laborer
earning a salary was a mere tool with no independent mind or power. Adorno at
the same time acquired a
taste, which will seem rebarbative to most Anglophones, for dramatizing the
wages of reification by
attributing agency to impersonal nouns. (One example: "Topsy-turviness
perpetuates itself: domination is
propagated by the dominated.")
For a quarter-century, Orwell's aesthetic convictions carried the day, at least on the anti-Stalinist left.
In 1938, old Frankfurt friends, led by Max Horkheimer, helped
Adorno escape from Europe to join in research
projects being organized in America by Horkheimer's transplanted Institute of
Social Research (a.k.a. the
Frankfurt School), based in New York City. At first he earned a living working
for the Princeton Radio
Research Project, commuting daily from Manhattan to Newark, New Jersey, the
site of the project's
headquarters. "When I traveled there through the tunnel under the Hudson,"
he wrote years later, summing up
his sense of displacement, "I felt a little as if I were in Kafka's Nature
Theater of Oklahoma." Compared
with a great many less fortunate ?migr? academics, Adorno had a good war. In
1941, after Horkheimer had
moved to Southern California for health reasons, he offered Adorno another job,
this time conducting
research into "the authoritarian personality." So, once again, Adorno
joined his German mentor, this time
in the land of palm trees, balmy breezes, and movie stars.
He hated it.
Although Southern California in the 1940s was teeming with
illustrious European exiles, including Arnold
Schoenberg, Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, and Igor Stravinsky, Adorno disappeared
into his writing and
research, repelled by the vainglory and vulgarity of the people he was expected
to get along with amiably,
in the American style. Outside the ?migr? community, Adorno's painstakingly
acquired storehouse of
knowledge--about modern opera, German philosophy, and the evils of the cash
nexus and the commodity
form--impressed no one.
"In America, I was liberated from a certain naive belief
in culture," he confessed shortly before his death
in 1969. In Europe, he had simply taken for granted "the fundamental importance
of the mind-- 'Geist.'...
The fact that this was not a foregone conclusion, I learned in America, where
no reverential silence in the
presence of everything intellectual prevailed."
Or, as he more tartly summed up the same sad experience in
Minima Moralia, "Anyone who, in conversation,
talks over the head of even one person, is tactless. For the sake of humanity
talk is restricted to the
most obvious, dullest, and tritest matters."
American anti-intellectualism has rarely had a more vicious
critic. After completing a long collaborative
essay with Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno set to work with
a vengeance, organizing his
thoughts about the wretchedness of his ?migr? experience. Composed in bits and
pieces throughout his time
in Southern California, Minima Moralia is, in part, the effort of a sensitive
introvert, feeling lost and
bereft of proper recognition, to conjure a cocoon of "reverential silence"
around the words he has
obsessively strung together, as if a perfectly taut sentence could be a talisman
and helpmate, like the
rosary beads of a pious Catholic.
He had no expectation whatsoever that the man in the street
would have the faintest clue what he was up to.
He didn't care. On the contrary: "For the intellectual, inviolable isolation
is now the only way of showing
some measure of solidarity"--and this isolation is to be assured through
the rarefied quality of one's
prose.
Since Adorno obviously did not suppose that plumbers and soda
jerks would be disturbing their dogmatic
slumbers by laboring through his prose, what kind of reader was Minima Moralia
meant to reach? Certainly
someone who could pick up, and perhaps even find pleasure in, his many allusions
(starting with the title,
a play on Magna Moralia, a digest of maxims and ethical arguments attributed
in antiquity to Aristotle),
and probably, too, a reader who shared something of his overwhelming disgust
for modern-day popular
culture.
But there are also hints that Adorno was appealing to a still-higher
court of judgment. In a fragment on
intellectual history, after surveying the damage done to Nietzsche's reputation
by his posthumous
popularity among neofascist bands of "Noble Human Beings and other riff-raff,"
Adorno concludes that "even
at that time the hope of leaving behind messages in bottles on the flood of
barbarism bursting on Europe
was an amiable illusion." The great solitary thinker, who had "wondered
whether anyone was listening when
he sang to himself in 'a secret bacarole,'" had suffered a fate worse than
death: His work had become the
plaything of ignoble fools. "Who, in the end, is to take it amiss if even
the freest of free spirits no
longer write for an imaginary posterity...but only for the dead God?"
Adorno complained that in America, "for the sake of humanity
talk is restricted to the most obvious,
dullest, and tritest matters."
Adorno's hidden premise seems to be this: Any serious piece
of writing, like any serious work of art, will
be produced from the standpoint (in a mystical image borrowed from Walter Benjamin)
of "the messianic
light." Like Benjamin, Adorno wants "to contemplate all things as
they would present themselves from the
standpoint of redemption"--an emancipated point of view, beyond the despair
of living under the rules of
capitalism. Insofar as such a work succeeds in single-mindedly addressing its
proper audience, it may well
be understood properly by no one--save the Messiah (who, of course, may never
appear).
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It is in this frankly eschatological context, weirdly conjoined
with what J?rgen Habermas once
characterized as "self-affirmation gone wild," that Adorno most eloquently
sums up his views on rhetoric in
the fragment that Butler cites. It is titled "Morality and style."
"It avails nothing ascetically to avoid all technical
expressions, all allusions to spheres of culture that
no longer exist," Adorno declares. "The logic of the day, which makes
so much of its clarity, has naively
adopted this perverted notion of everyday speech." (One can see here the
roots of his postwar antipathy to
the ordinary-language philosophy of Wittgenstein and J.L. Austin.) "Rigorous
formulation" requires of a
reader "conceptual effort," which Americans, with their dim-witted
commitment to a superficial pragmatism
(another one of Adorno's b?tes noires), will "violently resist." He
adds: "Only what they do not need first
to understand, they consider understandable; only the word coined by commerce,
and really alienated,
touches them as familiar. Few things contribute so much to the demoralization
of intellectuals. Those who
would escape it must recognize the advocates of communicability as traitors
to what they communicate."
Since Adorno made no bones about his lack of interest in defining
his terms or presenting a sequential
argument ("In the emphatic essay thought divests itself of the traditional
idea of truth"), it is worth
pausing over three claims that can be distinguished in this remarkable fragment.
1. "It avails nothing ascetically to avoid all technical
expressions." Serious writing sometimes requires
jargon: the sorts of terms that circulate in any highly evolved science. It
would be absurd to demand of a
physicist like Einstein or Bohr that he write in prose intelligible to the layman.
In Adorno's eyes, German
philosophy has some claim to the title of science, and it certainly has evolved
its own glossary of
technical terms. Just because a bunch of American yahoos have never read Kant
and Hegel is no reason to
abandon an exacting vocabulary.
2. "It avails nothing ascetically to avoid...all allusions
to spheres of culture that no longer exist."
Seriously artful writing sometimes requires a license to range freely, drawing
without inhibition on a rich
store of cultural references, no matter how esoteric. It would be absurd to
demand of a poet like Rilke or
T.S. Eliot that he write lines that any old reader can appreciate. Adorno is
a highly cultivated
individual, a cosmopolitan, a musician of the mind. Just because a bunch of
American yahoos have never read
Goethe or listened to Alban Berg is no reason to give up referring to works
by such artists, both classical
and modern. Indeed, anyone aware of what modernism has wrought in the fine arts
will feel further
emboldened to reject, in a typically modernist declaration of independence,
"conventional surface
coherence, the appearance of harmony, the order corroborated merely by replication."
3. "Only what they do not need first to understand, they
consider understandable; only the word coined by
commerce, and really alienated, touches them as familiar." Under capitalist
relations of production, human
beings exist in a state of alienation. Much of what they think they know must
pass through a process of
exchange, in which writers working for large corporations premasticate ideas,
arguments, and the events of
the day, and then deliver this information in measured portions to a starved
and stunted public desperate
for distraction and indifferent as to whether it is devouring thin gruel or
a real meal. Pari passu, under
current social conditions, as these are regulated by capitalism and the commodity
form, truly unpopular
writing willy-nilly becomes a locus of resistance to the powers that be: "He
who offers for sale something
unique that no-one wants to buy, represents, even against his will, freedom
from exchange."
Under these circumstances, the ideal of "universal communicability"
is a sinister "liberal fiction," one
that surreptitiously assumes the desirability of a "complete conformism."
When even educated souls have
internalized the "detritus" of a "barbarous culture--half-learning,
slackness, heavy familiarity,
coarseness"--the "desire to be understood by others" can only
reinforce the "downward urge of the
intellect." "Retention of strangeness is the only antidote to estrangement."
Q.E.D.: The most radical critic of alienation will be the most
exquisitely aloof thinker, incomprehensible
and unpopular by design, as if enraptured by his unswerving address to an ideal
audience of one: a God who
may not exist.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It is not too hard to guess what Orwell would have made of
Minima Moralia had he been able to read it. The
scathing social criticism and the longing for a truly independent movement for
social change, Orwell would,
of course, have recognized and welcomed. But the style of Adorno's work would
have offended all of Orwell's
deepest literary instincts.
"Good prose is like a window pane," he once declared.
True to this motto, he never stopped looking for the
right frame for the right kinds of concrete images and turns of phrase, artfully
enough rendered to conjure
an illusion of perfect transparency.
That he was staggeringly successful in reaching the largest
possible public, in a way that very few
twentieth-century writers have been, is indicated by a few simple facts. As
Paul Berman has summed them up
in one long sentence: "The writer who coined 'Hate Week,' 'Thought crime,'
'Thought Police,' 'vaporize,'
'Newspeak,' 'doublespeak,' 'Some are more equal than others,' and 'Big Brother
is Watching You' has sold,
between Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, more than 40 million books in
sixty languages which is,
according to John Rodden, 'more than any pair of books by a serious or popular
postwar author.'"
Orwell's views on politics and language were deeply shaped
by his experience as the son of a British
official in the Indian civil service. Christened Eric Arthur Blair, the boy
was groomed to follow in his
father's imperial footsteps. By the mid-1920s, while Adorno was in Vienna studying
music with Berg, Blair
was in Burma working for the police. In 1927, the year Adorno began his graduate
studies in philosophy,
Blair, renouncing his father's colonialism and resigning his police post, began
to tramp around France and
England, washing dishes in a Paris hotel, harvesting hops in Kent, and observing
coal mining in the north
of England. While keeping a diary of the injustices he witnessed, Blair discovered
his vocation.
He would be a man of letters. He would "make political
writing into an art." And he would make the world
listen.
Diffident in private, Blair so feared failure in the literary
marketplace that he invented a pseudonym for
the book he wrote based on his diaries, Down and Out in Paris and London. Criticism
would be directed at
George Orwell, not Eric Blair. But since the book, when published in 1933, was
a literary success, Eric
Blair became George Orwell.
If the key experience behind Adorno's critique of mass society
was his miserable exile in Southern
California, Orwell's political epiphany could not have been more different.
It happened in 1937 in Spain,
where Orwell went to fight on the Republican side in the civil war against the
fascists and to file reports
for The New Leader. Enlisted in a Catalan militia organized by POUM (the Workers'
Party of Marxist
Unification), he was seriously wounded at the front and sent back to Barcelona
to recover. There, Orwell
was witness to a murderous power struggle between the Spanish communists and
the independent left, which in
Catalonia consisted largely of anarchists and Trotskyists (who dominated POUM).
In the course of this struggle, the communists falsely accused
the Trotskyists of plotting with Franco.
Determined to expose the lie, Orwell gathered documents and took notes for his
great book on the civil war,
Homage to Catalonia (1938). The experience left him with an admiration for the
independent left and a
hatred of the communists. A decade later, he claimed: "Every line of serious
work that I have written since
1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for
democratic socialism, as I
understand it."
Orwell's literary and political convictions only deepened with
the passage of time. A political pariah by
the time World War II broke out, Orwell tried to join the British army but was
declared medically unfit (he
seems to have suffered from tuberculosis, the likely cause of his premature
death in 1950). Still anxious
to lend his talents to the war effort, he took a position at the British Broadcasting
Corporation in 1941,
producing radio talks for the Indian section of the BBC Eastern Service, submitting
himself to government
censorship in order to make a contribution to the battle against fascism, writing
news scripts, and
broadcasting his sophisticated blend of political commentary and Allied propaganda.
During the war he also
served as a literary editor and columnist for the Tribune, a weekly newspaper
with an editorial board
headed by Aneurin Bevan, the Labour Party leftist who would become a chief architect
of Britain's National
Health Service after the war.
At the core of Orwell's writing is his obsessive concern with
factual truth. "Good prose is like a window
pane," he once declared.
As the war went on and he developed a firsthand understanding
of the difficulty in conveying facts and
political ideals to the largest possible audience, his views hardened on the
question of what Adorno had
called "morality and style." For his wartime work, Orwell knew full
well that critics would accuse him "of
being an intellectual snob who wants to 'talk down to' the masses" or suspect
him of "plotting to establish
an English Gestapo." But he felt certain that he was on the right path,
helping to establish the linguistic
preconditions for a deeper democracy. "Some day we may have a genuine democratic
government," he wrote in
1944, "a government which will want to tell people what is happening, and
what must be done next, and what
sacrifices are necessary, and why. It will need the mechanisms for doing so,
of which the first are the
right words, the right tone of voice."
In 1946, Orwell summed up his views in a short essay titled
"Why I Write." In a passage of
characteristically disarming bluntness, he listed four major reasons: (1) "sheer
egoism," the wish to be
noticed; (2) "aesthetic enthusiasm," the pure pleasure in arranging
words in finely formed sentences; (3)
"historical impulse," the desire to bear witness to events and "to
find out true facts and store them up
for the use of posterity"; and (4) "political purpose," the drive
to "push the world in a certain
direction."
To satisfy these ambitions, Orwell needed readers, the more
the better. "My initial concern is to get a
hearing," he wrote. Neither his egoism nor his sense of political purpose
could be gratified in any other
way. What provoked his greatest works, from Homage to Catalonia in 1938 to Animal
Farm in 1945 and Nineteen
Eighty-Four in 1949, was his sense of moral outrage: at the mendaciousness of
the communists; at the
barbarism of the Nazis; at the politically motivated obfuscation produced by
the liars in every party. The
bigger the audience he could reach, the more lies he could expose, the deeper
his political impact would
be.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
At the core of Orwell's writing was his obsessive concern for
factual truth, which, he could see, was an
infinitely fragile thing, forever susceptible to the kinds of lies favored by
those in power. Orwell's
fixation may seem self-explanatory to anyone raised within the conventions of
Anglo-American philosophy.
But to a great many Continental philosophers, the empiricist assumption that
there exists a pre-theoretical
world of facts just waiting to be described seems hopelessly naive. For the
past two centuries, almost all
of Germany's most eminent philosophers have subscribed to some version of the
Kantian view that--in Hannah
Arendt's formulation--"truth is neither given to nor disclosed to but produced
by the human mind."
The philosophical issues at stake here are too complex to summarize
briefly. Suffice it to say that Arendt
herself was virtually unique, among German thinkers of her generation, in her
refusal to give up the
meaning of truth "in the sense in which men commonly understand it"--that
is, as factual truth. Indeed,
Arendt was, if anything, even more alarmed than Orwell about the fate of this
form of truth: "The chances
of factual truth surviving the onslaught of power are very slim indeed; it is
always in danger of being
maneuvered out of the world not only for a time but, potentially, forever."
Orwell, for his part, felt that his obligation to factual truth
trumped even his unrelenting preoccupation
with the style of his prose--or, for that matter, his loyalty to any particular
political cause. In one of
the longest chapters in Homage to Catalonia, he marshaled his evidence of communist
treachery with the
painstaking thoroughness of a prosecutor at the bar of justice, knowing, as
he later conceded, that he ran
a risk of turning an otherwise lyrical piece of writing into a tedious exercise
in topical journalism. "I
could not have done otherwise," he explained: "I happened to know,
what very few people in England had been
allowed to know, that innocent men were being falsely accused. If I had not
been angry about that I should
never have written the book."
His erstwhile allies on the British left did not share Orwell's
anger, arguing that the only hope for a
Republican victory was a unified alliance under communist control. And potential
allies elsewhere did not
always share Orwell's fierce commitment to the direct statement of factual truths.
Indeed, members of the
Frankfurt School were horrified by the "fetishization" of facts that
they saw in the logical positivism of
the Vienna circle, the value-free social science of the American university,
and the "tell it like it is"
school of newspaper journalism. The problem was not only that a narrow emphasis
on external facts sometimes
obscured the mind's role in framing concepts (as Adorno protested, "something
merely factual cannot be
conceived without a concept, because to think it is always already to conceive
it"); it was also that it
obstructed the task of social criticism. In Minima Moralia, Adorno charged that
the effort, so
characteristic of Anglo-American investigative reporting, to give readers "the
facts full in the face"
succumbed to "the form and timbre of the command issued under Fascism by
the dumb to the silent." For those
who wished to achieve a measure of "comprehensibility to the most stupid"
(as Adorno sarcastically put it),
the critical theorist-- in this respect indistinguishable from a Prussian autocrat--expressed
nothing but
contempt.
The contrast with Orwell could not be more stark. Whereas Adorno
deployed a sophisticated philosophical
framework, Orwell stressed brute facts. Whereas Adorno strove for modernist
complexity, Orwell aimed at
demotic simplicity. And even as Adorno was abjuring any effort to address a
large audience of ordinary
people, Orwell had bet his political and literary life on doing just that.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Many intellectuals on the left today regard both Orwell and
Adorno as hopelessly compromised figures,
whatever their views on the politics of language and the morality of style.
Orwell's political sins were manifold: He disapproved of birth
control, he was a Blimpish sort of British
patriot, and (as one Web site put it in a warning against taking "Politics
and the English Language" too
seriously), he collaborated "with the B.B.C. against fascists in India
in World War II, and wrote...in part
to justify the work his journalism had done--for the Empire." Last year,
controversy flared again over the
fact that Orwell, shortly before his death, jotted down a list of people he
regarded as politically
compromised by their sympathy for Stalin and had it conveyed to the Information
Research Department of the
Foreign Office.
Adorno's case is almost equally vexed. There are some pretty
strange lines in Minima Moralia--for example,
"Totalitarianism and homosexuality belong together." In recent years,
proponents of cultural studies have
ridiculed Adorno's uninformed ranting about the evils of jazz and popular music.
And then there is the
matter of the great man's truly awe-inspiring capacity for contemplative passivity.
This is someone (unlike
his fellow critical theorist Herbert Marcuse) who steadfastly refused to be
drawn into taking concrete
positions on matters of pressing political importance. One of his oldest friends
from Frankfurt, Leo
Lowenthal (who ended up as a professor of sociology at the University of California
at Berkeley), has said
that Adorno had a simple motto: "Don't participate."
Members of the Frankfurt School were horrified by the fetishization
of facts. Adorno compared investigative
journalism to Fascism.
Orwell's political errors may well comfort academic critics
of "left conservatism." But what about Adorno?
For all his sins, can Adorno nonetheless be enlisted in the defense of the contemporary
university?
Let us examine the arguments presented in Butler's letter to
the London Review of Books, by taking in turn
the three claims that are implicit in Adorno's fragment on "Morality and
style."
1. In the matter of "technical expressions," a sympathetic
reader must give Butler the benefit of the
doubt. Like Adorno, today's critical theorists have steeped themselves in the
vocabulary of German
philosophy, from Kant and Hegel to Husserl and Heidegger, augmented by an infusion
of terms from more
recent French philosophers, especially Foucault. Jargon that is intolerable
to a general reader is not only
a source of power; it is also a convenient shorthand for conveying the results
of inquiry in most academic
disciplines, from physics to sociology, and not excepting feminist theory, literary
criticism, and cultural
studies.
At the same time, an unsympathetic reader is liable to feel
put upon, if not bamboozled, by the constant
barrage of technical terms found in the work of Butler and other contemporary
theorists, such as Homi
Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak. Quite often, one cannot help but suspect that this
is a deliberate ploy,
allowing the writer to accuse any critic of uncomprehending idiocy. Adorno himself
once observed that "the
thicket is no sacred grove. There is a duty to clarify all difficulties that
result merely from esoteric
complacency." Referring to Heidegger's prose, he complained that "he
lays around himself the taboo that any
understanding would simultaneously be falsification."
2. Adorno's staunch defense of the writer's right to deploy
a dense network of cultural references that is
liable to be appreciated by a relatively small number of people seems, on the
whole, both reasonable and
just. Anyone who has labored in the mass media knows that there is relentless
pressure to dumb down every
word of every sentence. Adorno's defiant display of erudition, by contrast,
is a bracing rebuke to the
ignorance and sharply diminished attention span of a great many ordinary readers
and pundits, not to
mention the blinkered narrowness of a great many university professors.
However, few writers, be they poets, scholars, or journalists,
possess a mind as well furnished as that of
Adorno. Certainly few contemporary exponents of radical theory, Butler included,
share his devotion to
European high culture. His allusiveness is so pure, and so rooted in a specifically
European sensibility,
that it has been successfully emulated by only a handful of Americans--Susan
Sontag, in her best essays of
the 1960s and early 1970s, comes to mind, as does T.J. Clark, in his recent
book, Farewell to an Idea:
Episodes From a History of Modernism.
3. Adorno's last claim--that a style of writing comprehensible
to only a few readers stands the best chance
of evading the alienation of being turned into a mass-market commodity under
conditions of capitalist
production--is both the most radical and the hardest to know how to apply in
practice. Apart from
demonstrable inaccessibility, coupled with a lack of popularity, it is not clear
how one is supposed to
judge success, or failure, in this paradoxical venture. It is also not entirely
clear from her references
to Adorno whether Butler fully agrees with his position, at least in its most
radical articulation in
Minima Moralia. On the one hand, she agrees that resistance to capitalism requires
the refusal of received
opinions cheerfully expressed in smugly measured periods. On the other hand,
she holds out greater hope
than Adorno does for the possibility of constructive social activism.
In her letter to the London Review, before quoting Minima Moralia,
Butler praises Spivak in terms Adorno
would recognize--as a brave voice in the cultural wilderness. But in the same
letter, she marvels at the
sheer size of Spivak's readership and even claims that the "wide-ranging
audience for Spivak's work proves
that spoon-feeding is less appreciated than forms of activist thinking and writing."
Adorno himself once observed that "the thicket is no sacred
grove. There is a duty to clarify all
difficulties that result merely from esoteric complacency."
While Butler may hope by endorsing Adorno's position to justify
her style of writing, and that of countless
other left academics, she cannot have it both ways. Either a key criterion of
a truly radical theory is its
austere indifference to being widely "appreciated," or it is not.
If the criterion of a truly radical
theory is its inaccessibility and consequent evasion of the cash nexus (Adorno's
basic position in Minima
Moralia), then a theory advertised as radical that nevertheless reaches a "wide-ranging
audience" under
conditions of commodity production must, ipso facto, not be truly radical.
Or consider another paradox of Adorno's position: If (in a
typically exaggerated formulation) a literary
"retention of strangeness is the only antidote to estrangement," then
when the language becomes familiar,
the antidote must lose its potency. (An overdose, even of critical theory, may
prove fatal for the free
spirit.)
Does this mean that Adorno's and Butler's most challenging
ideas, precisely because of their relative
popularity among a not-insignificant number of left-leaning intellectuals, have
lost their antithetical use
value and, by the infernal logic of exchange, been alienated and perhaps even
dialectically
transformed--turned into something hackneyed and predictable? If one accepts
Adorno's position in Minima
Moralia, there is no escaping the conclusion.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Three years ago, Katha Pollitt summed up the problem with esoteric
writing as a radical gesture in a world
without real radical alternatives. When intellectuals on the left write in a
way that excludes "all but the
initiated few," she remarked, what almost inevitably results is "a
pseudo-politics, in which everything is
claimed in the name of revolution and democracy and equality and anti-authoritarianism,
and nothing is
risked, nothing, except maybe a bit of harmless cross-dressing, is even expected
to happen outside the
classroom."
Adorno himself was characteristically unapologetic about the
apolitical consequences of his ultraradical
critical theory: "Concrete and positive suggestions for change merely strengthen
[the power of the status
quo], either as ways of administering the unadministratable, or by calling down
repression from the
monstrous totality itself."
Orwell, by contrast, had little anxiety about making political
suggestions, the more concretely put the
better. "If you simplify your [language]," he wrote in 1946, "you
are freed from the worst follies of
orthodoxy"--even the orthodoxies of a purer-than-pure critical theory.
"You cannot speak any of the
necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be
obvious, even to yourself."
Of course, it is dispiriting, particularly for anyone on the
left, to be reminded that some things,
including this debate, never change. But the next time one of our latter-day
critical theorists attacks the
desire for plain talk as a Trojan horse for "left conservatism," I
suggest a thought experiment. Imagine
poor old Adorno rolling over in his grave, still waiting for a messiah who may
never come. And then picture
Orwell, the "Maggot of the Month," as the communists used to call
him, doubled over in laughter and
delighted to discover a brand-new oxymoron being deployed as a rhetorical weapon
of perfectly Orwellian
proportions.
James Miller is professor of political science and director of liberal studies
at the Graduate Faculty of
the New School. His books include Democracy Is in the Streets, The Passion of
Michel Foucault, and, most
recently, Flowers in the Dustbin: The Rise of Rock and Roll, 1947-77 (Simon
& Schuster).
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