Abstract
This essay traces how experiences of childhood and exile attain systematic meaning in Adorno’s critical theory of language. Adorno is shown to model the child’s understanding of language after Proust’s novel Á la recherche du temps perdus. Both focus on the names of places the child takes to be saturated with particular experiences and attributes a promise of renewed happiness. For Adorno, such an idea of language poses a challenge to the current rule of abstract conceptuality, unable to grasp such experiences. While just like Proust, he considers it retrospectively, Adorno writes in exile, that is, in a situation of the loss of his own language. Such loss must be interpreted not just in life-historical but in systematic terms as well: Firstly, in terms of a theory of language, insofar as the child’s understanding does not comply with the demands of conceptual thinking. Secondly, in terms of social theory, insofar as an emphatic reference to names has become problematic in the face of processes of economic standardisation and political abuse. And yet, Adorno’s Proustian reflections amount to a linguistic effort to recover with conceptual resources the experiences the names promise the child.
1 Introduction
In a 1962 interview with the magazine of the German postal union, Adorno was posed the following question: ‘Why did you return?’ A good decade had passed since his American emigration had come to an end, and Adorno goes on the record, explaining, ‘without much ado that I belong to Europe and Germany’, and that further, what belonging there means: ‘I am relegated to the language that I can write as my own, while in the long years of emigration I learned to write English at best like the others’. 1 This is the first part of Adorno’s answer. In it, the ‘own’ of language stands for the ‘continuity of his spiritual existence’. 2 Such continuity has a double interpretation, a sharpened sense for the anchoring of one’s own thinking within a tradition – in this case, the German language tradition of philosophy, literature and music. On the other hand, talk of the continuity of spiritual existence has a life-historical meaning in addition to this philosophical, intellectual and cultural-historical meaning. A sense of continuity is also the basis for a ‘fidelity to one’s own origins’ which Adorno locates where ‘one’s own experience has its centre’. 3 And then falls the decisive sentence, which concretises this centre of experience and contains the second part of his answer to the question: ‘I simply wanted to go back to where I had my childhood, in the end out of a feeling that what one realises in life is little other than the attempt to transformatively recover childhood’. 4
The following essay will trace the systematic meaning Adorno gives to the connection between one’s own language and one’s own childhood. In the first part, I draw out how, in the child’s understanding of language, the names of places stand for the experience of something particular. I demonstrate the extent to which this constellation is inspired by an artwork, or to be more precise, by an aesthetic model of experience developed in Marcel Proust’s novel Á la recherche du temps perdus. Decisive here is that Adorno thematises the constellation of language and childhood retrospectively. This occurs out of exile, that is, out of a situation of the loss of ‘one’s own language’. It is from here that, in the second part, I will discuss the extent to which the language of childhood is a lost one. I will demonstrate that this is true not only in a life-historical sense, conditioned by expulsion, flight and exile, but also in a systematic sense: firstly, in terms of a theory of language, insofar as the child’s understanding of language does not comply with the demands of conceptually reflective thinking; secondly, in terms of social theory, insofar as an emphatic reference to names has become problematic as a result of historical developments. The third part is dedicated to Adorno’s treatment of loss, interpreted as an effort to regain what has been lost: as a linguistic practice that attempts to recover with conceptual resources the experiences such names promise the child.
2 Names and places, or childhood language
In his answer to the question about the reason for his return, Adorno connects the reference to one’s own language with that to one’s own childhood. If childhood, with the places in which it is lived, is declared to be the formative space of experience, the language that ‘I can write as my own’ also emerges therefrom. It differs in quality from the English of exile, which one learned to speak and write through practice ‘at best like the others’. One might assume that this is about the easily comprehensible difference between primary and secondary language acquisition. There is a difference between growing up and being socialized in a language or whether one has to pick up and acquire a language, especially at a later age and under conditions of forced exile.
But Adorno’s distinction between one’s own language and another language is about more than this. As is so often the case, he takes particular experiences as the starting point for philosophical reflections that aim at universally meaningful knowledge. The connection between language and childhood thus leads to the heart of Adorno’s critical theory of language. This theory of language can be considered critical insofar as it transforms this distinction into a systematic one: on the one hand, there is a use of language saturated with experience and therefore with expression. On the other hand, there is an instrumental use of language based on the correct application of the rules of language for arbitrary purposes. As both Roger Foster and Philip Hogh have aptly demonstrated, Adorno’s critical theory of language is very much focused on the dialectical tension between the functions of expression and communication. 5
This distinction stands at the centre of what can be called Adorno’s critique of concepts. 6 It is directed at a linguistic practice in which concepts merely serve as instruments of knowledge and as means of exchanging information. Here, concepts are reduced to logical units that determine the properties of objects. This means that a concept comes to function in a judgement as an abstract unit under which concrete situations and circumstances are subsumed as special cases of a universal. What constitutes much of our ordinary conceptual practices becomes problematic when it is taken to be the only legitimate way of employing concepts. If one follows Adorno, this is the case not just within the framework of scientific knowledge. Rather, the claim of exclusive validity of this conceptual practice, coined ‘the principle of identity’ by Adorno, implicates society as a whole as it corresponds with the social dominance of the economic form he calls ‘the principle of exchange’. 7 This is to be understood with recourse to Marx’s analyses of the commodity form: what is different in quality (has concrete use-value) is reduced to function as the bearer of an abstract, quantitative entity (the exchange-value of a commodity).
Just as the economic, the conceptual ‘principle’ is constituted and upheld by processes of abstraction and identification. If objects, situations or even persons are identified with previously established and defined categories, then everything about these objects that does not fit into the logical subsumption falls through the filter of knowledge. Adorno calls that which is not grasped in things by such an identification ‘the non-identical’, which finds no expression in such linguistic practice. 8 Only able to communicate the general properties of objects, this linguistic practice cannot express the particular experiences we have in dealing with objects and their particularities. For Adorno, it eludes that which is decisive in knowledge: the unregimented experience of a particular thing, which is not determined by anything in advance. Consequently, his critique of concepts and language asks how could such experience, the non-identical, be recovered by language?
The question leads Adorno to names. In Negative Dialectics, he contrasts the use of names with the practice of predicative identification with concepts: ‘How to think otherwise than this has its distant and shadowy Ur-model in languages, in the names which do not categorically overreach the thing’. 9 The name appears here as the counter-image of identificatory thinking and speaking. To call something by its own name stands for the expression of the thing in its particularity. Directly, without overreaching it categorically and subsuming it under universal terms, the name is supposed to be able to say what something is. Names thus appear at first glance as language forms that are saturated with the expression of experience. Adorno concretises this in the names of places in the Odenwald, an idyllic low mountain range close to his Frankfurt home where he spent the holidays of his own childhood, such as Otterbrunn, Watterbach, Reuenthal and Monbrunn, but above all, Amorbach. 10 And yet, at stake here is not only the epistemological problem of experience as such, but its ethical implications as well. With these resounding and often allusive place names, Adorno claims his childhood self, identifying not just any experience, but the experience of happiness – which they therefore still ‘promise’ for the adult self. 11 The names thus reveal a mode of experience based as much on the memory of past instances as on the anticipation of new experiences in an ethically charged sense.
Let us first consider the moment of memory. Adorno models it on Marcel Proust, whose Recherche, at once an ‘artwork and a metaphysics of art’, unfolds memory literarily while some of its more theoretical sections reflect upon it. 12 Inspired by Henri Bergson’s philosophical concepts, Proust introduces the mode of remembering experience, the mémoire involontaire, by distinguishing it from voluntary memory, the mémoire volontaire. In a retrospective commentary on the first volume of his Recherche, Proust characterises the voluntary as ‘above all a memory of the intellect and the eyes’. 13 Like the intellect, or in Kantian terms the understanding, as a whole, it operates through identification, by subsuming past events under universal concepts and arranges memory images into a linear temporal order. This is why, according to Proust, it ‘gives us only facets of the past that have no truth’. 14 Voluntary memory inevitably fails to conjure up the concrete and particular experiences we once had and thereby to ‘reawaken the past in us’. 15
Mémoire involontaire is different. This experiential mode of remembering is at the heart of Proust’s project of a search of lost time. Mémoire involontaire arises involuntarily, ‘drawn by the resemblance of some identical moment’.
16
Unlike wilful attempts to remember instances of the past, which operate with concepts, it knows not only spiritual but also sensual dimensions of experience. That which ‘draws’ past experiences may possess visual, olfactory or auditory affinities; or with regard to taste, as in probably the most prominent of the many cases in Proust’s novel, the Madeleine from Du côté de chez Swann.
17
Furthermore, the binding of this imagery to a concrete place is indispensable. The remembered experiences are thus crystallised in the names of these places. In the case of Proust’s narrator, these are, first and foremost, the places of the summers of his childhood and youth, such as the small town of Combray, his family’s country estate, and Balbec, the fashionable Norman coastal town. In the second volume In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, the narrator exemplifies how in memory certain names are saturated with a variety of sensual impressions. He mentions two villages in the vicinity of Combray called Roussainville and Martinville, which, because I had heard them pronounced so often by my great--aunt at the table, in the dining room, had acquired a certain somber charm in which were blended perhaps extracts of the flavor of confitures, the smell of the log fire and of the pages of one of Bergotte’s books, the color of the sandstone front of the house opposite, and which, still today when they rise like a gaseous bubble from the depths of my memory, preserve their own specific virtue.
18
What Proust here calls ‘a certain somber charm’ of a name, for Adorno forms the ‘imagery of a childhood’ (Bilderwelt einer Kindheit), 19 in which the most diverse moments of remembered experience come together. In his case, such imagery in the broadest sense is time and again attached to the Franconian town Amorbach. These names assign a concrete place to the imagery of childhood, which nevertheless lies in a past time and is only accessible by (involuntary) memory.
The first volume of Proust’s Recherche, Du côté de chez Swann also brings the second function of place names into view. In the third part, entitled, ‘Place-Names: The Name’, the narrator Marcel reports how the names of places such as Balbec, Venice and Florence become promises of future experiences for his childhood self. What the names express here exceeds the lived or even possible experiences of the actual places:
20
But if their names permanently absorbed the image that I had formed of these towns, it was only by transforming that image, by subordinating its reappearance in me to their own special laws; and in consequence of this they made it more beautiful, but at the same time more different from anything that the towns of Normandy or Tuscany could in reality be, and, by increasing the arbitrary delights of my imagination, aggravated the future disappointment in my travels. They magnified the idea that I formed of certain places on the earth’s surface, making them more special, and in consequence more real. I did not then represent to myself towns, landscapes, monuments, as pictures more or less attractive, cut out here and there of a substance that was common to them all, but looked on each of them as on an unknown thing, essentially different from all the rest, a thing for which my soul thirsted and which it would benefit from knowing. How much more individual still was the character that they assumed from being designated by names, names that were only for themselves, names such as people have.
21
Through such proper names, the places appear to the childhood self ‘as individual, as unique as persons’ and demand to be treated like ‘individual people, who are not interchangeable’. 22 This is on the one hand due to the names having, as Proust’s narrator puts it, ‘absorbed’ the image the child has formed of them and are thus coloured by the concrete experiences he had in those places. On the other hand, the names resound of their anticipation of the places, as the child has transformed and ‘magnified’ their image so that they appear more special and even more real than to which any empirical encounter with them could ever to live up. Thus, the names promise more than what is licensed by the here and now. Both the experience as well as the anticipation, and this is crucial, are attached to the childlike insinuation that the places are ‘not interchangeable’ and ‘absolutely indissolubly individuated’, as Adorno notes in words similar to Proust’s. 23 Names stand for this quality in language. It is precisely through this individuality that names seem to recover and articulate the non-identical that is repressed in ordinary conceptual practice. Proust alludes to the latter as well, in order to contrast it to the use of names: ‘Words present to us a little image of things, clear and usual, like the pictures that are hung on the walls of schoolrooms to give children an illustration of what is meant by a carpenter’s bench, a bird, an anthill, things conceived as identical to all the others of the same sort’. 24
However, Proust’s adult narrator does not simply deem the concretion evoked by names as epistemologically superior to conceptual abstraction. Instead, he registers how the subjective conferral of names, which was driven by the yearning of the sickly child forced to stay in bed, turned those places it had not yet visited into objects of exaggerated projections. The real experience of these places could only fall short of the expectations raised by them. The Recherche will tell of such disappointments mentioned in the quotation above again and again. And in the very end, the narrator has gained the insight that those places ‘were not that which their name pictured to me and my imagination represented them’, and that the promise attached to them can never be fulfilled by ‘conscious memory or observation’. 25 In this respect, their promise is broken. It is only fulfilled in the rare and fleeting moments of involuntary memory, in which the happy encounter with the unexchangeable flares up only to at once disappear again.
The radically subjective quality of what names express also becomes clear at the moment of memory. They evoke the particular, here the imagery of a childhood, only to those who had these particular experiences in this particular place. From the standpoint of conceptual knowledge, the name represents the limit of a universal, discursive meaning. It only has significance as determined by a particular conferral. Only in the memory of an individual do the various sensual registers of past experience merge with the one linguistic expression. If they become approachable and retrievable for the individual in the name, then this complex significance cannot be communicated to others by uttering the name.
Following Adorno, the childlike understanding of language is consequently based on an error, which is, however, double-edged. On the one hand, it makes clear that if the child associates the name with the promise of making the particular immediately present and giving it linguistic expression, the adult must accept that the name will fail to deliver. The language of the child is therefore lost on the adult. This loss will be discussed in more detail in the second part. But on the other hand, this is not the final word on the matter. For with regard to the manner in which memory and anticipation interact in this error, it remains a wholly productive error. Formulated differently, the childish error points the way for the adult to regain the lost language. This will be given elaboration in the third part.
3 Language lost
When we speak of the lost language of childhood or a broken promise of the name, such expressions might to be understood on two levels distinguished for analytical purposes, but actually mediated through each other: first, on a systematic level, they hint at the inevitable philosophical insight of how naïve and unsustainable the child’s understanding of language and names actually is. On a second level, they regard the historical trajectory underlying such clarification and disenchantment, that is, the process of integration and standardisation of all areas of life in capitalism. For Adorno, the perception of such social processes and their damaging impact on language is again conditioned by his life-historical experiences of expulsion, flight and exile, which encompass the dispossession of his own language. What he experiences as a subjective loss amounts to the appropriation and political instrumentalisation by the Nazis and is interpreted as another kind of objective damage done to language, to its epistemological as well as its ethical potential. In the following, we will trace how the systematic, the socio-historical and the life-historical meanings of the ‘loss’ of language intertwine in Adorno’s reflections.
For Adorno’s philosophical critique of language, there is no doubt that the childlike understanding of language is rightly regarded as naïve by conceptually reflective thinking. Thus, Adorno emphasises again and again that there is no going back from the nominalist critique. He understands it as a linguistic-philosophical achievement of the Enlightenment. According to this critique, words only have meaning as universal concepts, not as names for particular objects. When words function as names, they are able to emphasise something particular, but forfeit their ‘knowledge function’ [Erkenntnisfunktion] with their meaning. 26 They say nothing determinate about what they name. This also holds true for places and the experiences made in them.
However, Adorno does not take this insight uncritically from the philosophical tradition. He asks about the historical-social conditions and consequences of such enlightened thinking. A problematic implication of the nominalist movement is the devaluation of the particular mentioned above: it appears conceptually thematic only as an instance of a pre-defined universal. Adorno develops this critique in immanent confrontation with formalist philosophies of language, among them the contemporary approaches of Rudolf Carnap and the early Ludwig Wittgenstein. Following his self-portrayal in the 1968 essay ‘Scientific Experiences of a European Scholar in America’ however, his exile experience acted as a catalyst for this critique. 27 In his short collection of aphorisms entitled ‘Amorbach’ (1966), Adorno elaborates: ‘When one arrives in America, all places look the same. The standardization, a product of technology and monopoly, is alarming. One supposes that the qualitative differences have disappeared from life just as genuinely as a progressive rationality of method eliminates them’. 28
While this comment could easily slip into a lament over ‘Americanization’, typical for a reactionary brand of European cultural critique, such regression is quickly prevented: ‘Once one is back in Europe, the places suddenly resemble one another too, even though they seemed so incomparable in childhood’. 29 In such aphorisms, an objective social process is read from subjective experience. The American experience has its epistemological value not least in its shock effect. Here, in the country that is one step ahead in the development of capitalism and its standardisation of all areas of life, a tendency appears to the emigrant as if under a magnifying glass, but one which has also long since taken hold of the familiar Europe. Adorno explicitly does not want to exclude his beloved Amorbach from this tendency. Names as well are seized by the economically driven standardisation that has befallen the very places they name. This corrodes their authority and ‘dignity’, as Adorno notes. 30 The name, representative of that which is particular, unique and unexchangeable, becomes a catchword, slogan or brand that undergoes countless repetition, reproduction and replication. This functionalisation takes its revenge on names. All that remains of the expression of a particular is a ‘bad trick’ that can be exploited: 31 a well-known title guarantees recognition and gives mass-produced commodities the appearance of uniqueness. Names themselves become commodified, ‘exchangeable by virtue of their inexchangeability’. 32 It is not devoid of irony that today the town of Amorbach advertises itself on its website with the slogan ‘schon immer einzigartig’ (unique from the beginning) and claims that Adorno considered it ‘seine Heimat’ (his home), while at the same time marketing such uniqueness approved by the Philosopher with an audio-visual app called ‘Adornos Amorbach’, which is said to enable visitors to see the town through Adorno’s very own eyes. 33
The distance, forced by exile, from the places of childhood disenchants them along with their names – whose promises are shown to be broken for the repatriate. Yet Adorno extols in the clarification of his ‘naïve belief in culture’, dragged along from the old world as a deprovincialisation of his thinking. 34 This loss of naivety is ambivalent insofar as it compels one to also question one’s ‘own language’. Such compulsion oscillates between, on the one hand, the legitimate impulse for language-critical self-reflection, that is, the question of how viable and accurate one’s own language still is in the face of new experiences. On the other hand, there is the naked pressure to conform, against which Adorno finds himself exposed. His speaking and writing contradict the conventions of his host country, especially the standards of its social sciences. To get an idea of the predicament, one might compare Adorno’s German writings with those he produced in English himself, which often appear much more straightforward and lack the intricate, composition-like character of his German prose, hardly grasped by any translation.
The comparison certainly illustrates the basic problem of intellectual exile mentioned at the outset, the compulsion to articulate oneself in a foreign language and within a different knowledge culture. Adorno effectively shares with many emigrants the perception of losing one’s own language. In the first part of this essay, Adorno’s reflections on his childhood experiences have been shown to be fairly similar to Proust’s. Yet, while both in their own particular literary and philosophical manner are inquiring into the lost time of childhood, a decisive historical difference is now to be accounted. While one generation earlier, Proust is writing against the backdrop of a relative continuity of bourgeois life, which in spite of all the personal losses and socio-political crises the Recherche absorbed, might even have made the whole narrative undertaking possible in the first place, Adorno’s retrospection is clearly coloured by the rupture of expulsion and the impressions of exile. It is only consistent then, that the traumatic flipside of the experience of happiness comes into view: ‘the nightmare of childhood’. 35
Adorno dedicated the aphorism ‘The bad comrade’ in his Minima Moralia to the recollection of those brutish classmates whom in hindsight appear as the ‘envoys’ and ‘advance guard’ Fascism had sent into his childhood. 36 Just as said village names appear to be saturated with the defining experiences of childhood happiness, the no less resounding names of those ‘schoolfellows’ seem to have absorbed the reverse image: ‘Christian names like Horst and Jürgen and surnames like Bergenroth, Bojunga and Eckhardt’ bespeak ‘the dream of a brutal national community’ (Traum der wüsten Volksgemeinschaft); their children bearers already ‘enacted’ in the classroom what was later realized by National Socialism on a grander scale. 37 Just as they harassed and assaulted the child deemed different or weak, their grown-up alter egos identified him as a Jew and expelled him from their national community. While the confrontation with the future Nazis marked for the child the moment from which onwards ‘all subsequent happiness seemed revocable, borrowed’, as Adorno tells us, the grown-up had to experience how his childhood nightmare came true, as the bullies turned government officials ‘dispossessed me of my past life and language’. 38 What Adorno is describing here as dispossession must be understood as the life-historical background of his philosophical talk of the loss of one’s own language; and the actual material revocation of his childhood happiness grounds the insight that the promise assigned to the names by the child has been broken. 39
Even when saved from the worst, for the emigrant the impression of having lost his own language persists over that of gaining a new one. This continues to feel as a loss because the ‘new’ language of the host country – and English was often entirely new to German-speaking emigrants at the time – cannot replace one’s own language as a medium of thought and expression. As Günter Anders has noted: ‘The moment we safely arrived in exile, we had already entered a new danger, the danger of sinking to a lowly level of speaking and becoming stutterers’. 40 From Adorno’s point of view, however, this is not determined solely by the situation of the emigrant. The subjective loss of language is compounded by an objective decay of language – a damage done to language that goes even further than the one produced by its integration and standardisation. On the one hand, such linguistic decay can be understood as a process of devaluation of traditional terminology. In the face of the Holocaust, extermination for extermination’s sake, moral-philosophical categories lose their explanatory power. 41 On the other hand, this linguistic decay can be understood as a damage done to language through its political abuse. While intellectuals like Adorno have been dispossessed of their native German, it has been appropriated and turned into an instrument of persecution and extermination by the Nazis. How such appropriation and abuse has harmed the German language has been registered by critics such as Karl Kraus, Victor Klemperer or George Steiner. 42
Contrary to the distorted image of Adorno as a pessimist, 43 the multifaceted experience of language loss and decay does not lead to resignation – for example, the assertion that all language can henceforth only be false and no longer express anything meaningful. In fact, the systematic consequences Adorno draws from the repeated loss of language aim at the opposite. In his 1962/63 lecture on philosophical terminology, Adorno defines philosophy as the ‘desperate effort to say what cannot actually be said’. 44 With a view towards his own language, Adorno does not abandon what has been lost. Rather, he undertakes the attempt to regain the lost language.
4 Language regained
The attempt at recovery must not be understood as a glorified, nostalgic retrospection or even as regression. If one can speak of a regained language, it is not in the sense of a reattained disposition for childlike language. Nor does it promise a return home to the mother tongue romanticised into an unshattered ‘house of Being’. 45 According to Adorno, such a misconception of ‘fidelity to one’s origins’ – which in Heidegger, for example, is supported by metaphorical references to the homeland (Heimat), or to blood and native soil – testifies to ‘haughtiness and obduracy’. 46 It negates significant historical experiences which, for Adorno, are as much connected to Europe’s catastrophe as they are to his American exile forced by it. The condition for the possibility of any recourse is the unequivocal recognition of the objective grounds for this loss of language. This is why Adorno speaks of the lifelong task of ‘transformatively recovering [verwandelnd einzuholen]’ one’s own childhood and with it one’s own language. With regard to names, so important for a child’s understanding of language, it is necessary to transformatively recover what they promised but were unable to retain for the adult. But how is this to be realised? A formulation from Negative Dialectics points the way: ‘To the child it is obvious that what delights it about its favourite little town is to be found there and only there, and nowhere else; it errs, but its error constitutes the model of experience, that of a concept, which ultimately would be that of the thing itself, not the poverty of that which is shorn away from things’. 47
The claim the child associates with the name of a place, that it expresses the unexchangeable, turns out to be an error. It is nevertheless right in that genuine experience is always attached to the unexchangeable. It follows that Adorno declares this error to be nothing less than a model for the success of what he coins ‘metaphysical experience’. 48 What the child falsely attributes to the name thus becomes the model of what an appropriate linguistic practice would have to provide – and with concepts. As Foster points out, holding on to conceptuality and rationality distinguishes Adorno from such thinkers that seek an entirely different form of cognition, such as ‘intuition’ in the case of Bergson. 49 But such a decidedly philosophical answer also distinguishes Adorno from Proust’s narrator, who in the end of the Recherche has gained the insight that it is in creating an artwork (a novel) alone that the experiences of childhood can be regained.
In need of explanation is why Adorno designates unregimented experience as ‘metaphysical’, as he instantly differentiates his use of the term from traditional, for instance religious, connotations. Although unable to be given full elaboration here, what can nevertheless be emphasised is the contrasting function of this determination. In his remarks ‘Scientific Experiences of a European Scholar in America’, Adorno praises the sobriety which accompanied the adoption of empirical methods in social research. 50 However, he did not want to give in to the ‘taboo of speculation’ established in America by a resolute empiricism, 51 and for methodological reasons: according to the empiricist rules of the game, only facts that can be classified as cases of universal concepts are considered experience. Thinking is thus fixed to facticity just as it eradicates all particularity from the concept of experience. It follows that the methods guided by this concept no longer find accord with actual experience. This is why Adorno is concerned with the ‘vindication of experience against its translation into empirical terms’, as championed for instance by the Neo-Positivism of the Vienna Circle. 52 Incidentally, he identifies this project as another reason for his return to Europe.
But to what extent does the error of the name stand as a model for such vindication of metaphysical experience and its corresponding linguistic practice? The answer lies in the interplay of memory and anticipation outlined above. For the child, names do not simply designate what is. They also call upon what was and what will be. In this respect, the name situates the particular being it names in the temporal horizon of lived experience. It also evokes possibilities of life yet to be redeemed. It is precisely here that the childish error meets the metaphysical claim, which for Adorno lies essentially in the speculative excess of what merely exists and of the conceptual generality of the sayable. In metaphysical experience, reflection does indeed take back the error. But this does not mean that what the childlike naivety is capable of illustrating is cancelled. In the naïve assumption of an inseparable connection between name, place and experience, that which identificatory conceptual practice has displaced shines through: the non-identical. Assuming the form of retrospection and anticipation, such an excess of the identical and the factual has epistemological as well as ethical implications.
In this process, names are not simply eliminated, but change their function. This can be concretised in Adorno’s own usage. He uses names as negative ‘ciphers’ for something historically real and yet elusive. Adorno employs this concept throughout his work for various symbolic forms that are not immediately legible and demand an effort of interpretation, among them artworks and names. 53 As ciphers, names embody retrospective knowledge: first of all the memory – the ‘remembrance’ as Adorno says with Benjaminian elocution – of what was lost and of suffering. 54 The most extreme example here is Adorno’s use of the name ‘Auschwitz’, which stands for a negative absolute or absolute evil. It thus represents something that cannot itself be said but is nevertheless something located in time and space. Absolute evil defies the sayable since no concept, category or name can adequately express the real suffering incurred. At the same time, however, there is an ethical obligation to remember. This leads to defying the critical epistemological argument of the unsayable and searching for forms of linguistic expression for suffering: aesthetic, but also conceptual. This same obligation to remember engenders an element of anticipation as its practical consequence for Adorno, lying in what he calls ‘a new categorical imperative’: to think and act so that ‘Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will ever happen’. 55 In Adorno’s philosophy, the expression ‘Auschwitz’ forms the extreme antithesis to the name ‘Amorbach’.
Here, a tension must be noted inhering the treatment of names as ciphers. On the one hand, they are to serve the remembrance of a concrete and singular historical experience. In the case of Auschwitz, that of the extermination of the European Jews by Nazi Germany. On the other hand, what happened is not only of particular significance. The fact alone that something as unspeakable as Auschwitz was possible in the course of modern history, both fundamentally calls into question the validity of historical categories such as progress and forces us to consider the possibility that something ‘similar’ might occur again. Elsewhere, Adorno explains what such anticipation means: As long as the social and material conditions out of which these events arose, as well as the psychic structure of the human subjects these conditions produced, are not fundamentally changed, there are no safe grounds for the assumption that something like that can never happen again. 56 At least in post-national-socialist German society, the danger for Adorno seemed very real. By the time he was weighing the chances of an ‘Education after Auschwitz’ (1967), Germany had neither confronted its recent past nor the afterlife of the eliminationist Anti-Semitism which had held it together as a society under National Socialism.
In consequence, Adorno formulates his categorical imperative, to change the conditions for all thinking and acting, thereby underscoring the universal significance of such a particular and singular event. That does however not license the latter’s retrospective reduction to a mere instance of an abstract and undifferentiated history of violence and suffering. After all, ‘similar’ does not mean ‘identical’. 57 Just as Auschwitz cannot adequately be understood along the lines of preceding events, history cannot and will not literally repeat itself. 58 With a rather typical rhetorical gesture, Adorno makes this clear by immediately qualifying the ‘shall not repeat itself’ as ‘nothing similar shall happen’.
This movement of thought from the remembrance of something particular to the anticipation of its universal implications, pertains to the case of ‘Amorbach’ as well: the childish error associated with the name is becoming a model as it awakens anticipation by referring to remembered experience. It too has both epistemological and ethical connotations. Firstly, it is the epistemological anticipation that it could be fulfilled by generally valid, conceptual means, which the name promises but cannot ultimately redeem – or only for an individual and only in their memory. But such a ‘promise’ of future fulfilment, to use Proust’s expression, 59 is also to be understood in an ethical sense. In this respect, in the error of the childlike conferral of names resides a ‘promise of happiness’ still for the adult. 60 This anticipation of fulfilment is even intended to transcend the subjectivism inherent in the error of the name.
In a recently published lecture titled ‘Ad Proust’ from 1954, Adorno calls what he deems the ‘central impulse’ and the truth content of Proust’s oeuvre the ‘universal authority of the most specific’ (Allgemeinverbindlichkeit des Allerspeziellsten). 61 The search for lost time spanning several thousand pages thus transcends the spleen of the artist, as he searches for what every child possess, but sooner or later will be exorcised by social pressure to conform, that is, the capability of ‘endlessly differentiated experience’. 62 It is precisely in being captivated by an ‘unexchangeable’, like the places of childhood happiness, that Adorno understands as such a universal moment of particular experience. But he goes much further as he ascribes to the Proustian obsession with the particular nothing short of a ‘promise of universality’. 63 If the memory of happiness experienced fuels the anticipation that it can be experienced once more, this is a promise to be fulfilled not only for individual, privileged bourgeois children and not only in their favourite little towns – but for everyone, everywhere. Thus, the idea of a true universal hibernates in the enthusiasm for the unexchangeable. This occurs, on the one hand, in a negative way, insofar as it protests against the world of the ‘ruling universal’. 64 This means the world of exchange society, which levels and standardises everything not least through the conceptual practice criticised above. On the other hand, such an objection implies the idea of a differently constituted universal. A corresponding social condition would be true, since the universal and particular would no longer stand unreconciled against each other. Such a reconciled situation promises happiness insofar as within it, the other, ‘the alien, remains, in the afforded proximity, distant and different, beyond the heterogeneous as well as beyond that which is one’s own’. 65
However, a reconciled condition also eludes linguistic expression since it is not and never was, and the reality of absolute evil has removed it even further from conceivability. And yet Adorno persists in his attempt to also recover that which eludes language through a transformed practice. Such linguistic practice alone cannot change social conditions. But with its resources, language can represent the falsehood of these conditions and thereby anticipate the possibility of change. It follows that philosophy is concerned with linguistic representation that is oriented towards the idea of social reconciliation. The condition of a ‘togetherness of the diverse’ functions as a model of true linguistic representation: 66 instead of hierarchical and logical unity, such practice is oriented towards a configurative ‘ensemble of the diverse’ alone able to do justice to unregimented experience and to redeem the broken promise of the name. 67 How Adorno imagines this in detail, and how he himself implements it, namely, as a rhetorical process of the constellation of concepts, cannot be given elaboration here. 68 But it does describe the realisation of what one may call the transformatively recovered, and in this sense regained language of childhood.
