Patterns of Withdrawal: Adorno and the Beats

Abstract

This essay explores the structural and historical parallels between Theodor W. Adorno’s theory of negative dialectics – the comprehensive critical-theoretical framework that underpins his analyses of culture, experience, and social integration – and the ethos of countercultural defiance embodied by the Beat Generation. Both emerged as radical responses to the social and ideological landscapes of post-World War II, united by a shared scepticism towards instrumental rationality and normative conformity in late capitalism. They are also linked by a mutual dedication to non-identity, dissonance, and withdrawal as modes of resistance. The paper argues that Adorno’s critique of late-capitalist reality and the Beats’ literary and performative rejection of bourgeois norms converge in a shared endeavour of critical disaffiliation, aimed at preserving experience from being subsumed under exchange relations and ideological closure. Through a meticulous examination of Adorno’s theoretical writings alongside pivotal interventions by Ginsberg and Kerouac, the essay constructs a comparative framework that elucidates how negation, refusal, and withdrawal function not as passive retreats but as active forms of critique against thoroughly administered, conformist societies.

‘Without regard, compassion or shame,

they built around me great high walls.

And I sit here now and despair.

No other thought: my fate eats me.

Because I had so many things to do outside.

Alas, when they were building the walls

how could I not pay attention?

But I never heard noise from the builders, not a sound.

Without my notice they closed me in from the world outside’

Constantine Cavafy – Walls

‘They say ev’ry man needs protection

They say ev’ry man must fall

Yet I swear I see my reflection

Some place so high above this wall

I see my light come shining

From the west unto the east

Any day now, any day now

I shall be released’

Bob Dylan – I shall be released

Eric Hobsbawm described the years 1945–1975 as the ‘golden age’ of the twentieth century: decades of prosperity, stability, and unprecedented scientific and technological advance. Yet this period also generated new forms of political, social, and cultural conformity, accompanied by an acute awareness of nuclear peril, ecological crisis, and the exhaustion of inherited moral vocabularies. It was in this contradictory climate that the writers later grouped under the name ‘Beat Generation’ – Herbert Huncke, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Lucien Carr, Jack Kerouac, among others – began to speak for what remained irreducible within the managed order of post-war life. Their work distrusted the belief that rationality, through the rigour of its logical structure, could encompass the whole of human experience. For the Beats, reason was as much a means of emancipation as a possible apology for domination. Their protagonists, often thinly veiled selves, fled a social environment that ‘beat them down’, cultivating instead a beatific openness to meanings unassimilated by the prevailing culture. At roughly the same historical moment, Theodor W. Adorno, writing in exile in the United States, was formulating a philosophical critique of late-capitalist culture no less suspicious of conformity. In Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), co-authored with Max Horkheimer, and Minima Moralia (1951), he diagnosed the ways in which the promises of Enlightenment rationality had turned to their opposite, producing a world where experience was impoverished and the individual absorbed into the apparatus of production and consumption. Adorno was no Beat – nor would the Beats, particularly given his withering judgement of jazz, have embraced him as one of their own – yet there is a striking proximity in their refusals.

This study does not advance a claim of historical affiliation between the Frankfurt School – Adorno in particular – and the Beat movement. Instead, it undertakes the construction of a conceptual bridge through a sustained comparative reading. Within this framework, Adorno’s (theory of) negative dialectics is understood not merely as the argument elaborated in the monograph bearing that title, but as expressive of his overall critical-theoretical orientation. Read in this expanded sense, it is brought into relation with the countercultural praxis of the Beats, such that each illuminates the other. Primary emphasis is accorded to Adorno’s earlier writings, which most closely correspond to the social, historical, and cultural conditions of the Beat movement’s formative moment. Later works and interventions by both Adorno and the Beats are approached as developments that exceed this initial configuration, yet remain analytically significant insofar as they sharpen points of divergence and convergence alike. The aim is not to dissolve their differences – Adorno’s abstract critique and the Beats’ lived experiment in disaffiliation occupy distinct registers – but to draw out their shared insistence that life cannot be lived rightly within a false reality. In an age when neo-conformism once again advances, ecological degradation accelerates, and armed conflict proliferates, the confrontation between these two traditions offers more than antiquarian interest. Both, in different idioms, defend a ‘logic of subtraction’, that is, a determinate withdrawal from forms of life that produce and reproduce conformity and instrumentality as second nature – a refusal of the merely given [die bloße Gegebenheit] in the name of what could be. Any comparison between Adorno and the Beat writers must, however, remain fundamentally asymmetrical. Adorno’s conception of negative dialectics unfolds as a philosophical and conceptual critique directed against identity thinking, instrumental rationality, and the reification of experience under conditions of late capitalism. The Beats, by contrast, register their refusal primarily through literary experiment, performative excess, and modes of lived disaffiliation, rather than through systematic theoretical elaboration. The proximity explored here does not rest upon shared metaphysical commitments or methodological procedures, but upon a parallel insistence on negation, withdrawal, and nonconformity as historically situated responses to post-war processes of social rationalisation. In the Beats’ restless quest and Adorno’s philosophical intransigence lies a common project: to preserve the possibility of an undiminished human experience against the forces that would standardise, commodify, and finally extinguish it.

A New Brave World…

The post-World War II sequence, from 1945 to the breakup of the Soviet Union, was a strange time. The defeat of Nazi Germany and the Axis powers brought about a reality steeped in hope, tormented by recollections of the most abject horror, and fraught with fears – at times warranted, at others paranoiac – of greater calamities still to come; all at the same time. This holds especially true for the first two decades following the end of the war, which is also the period when the Beats came of age and produced some of their most impactful material. As for Adorno, a seasoned scholar by that time, he witnessed the dawn of this new era while still in exile in the United States (he returned to Europe in 1949). The post-war world was riven into two camps led respectively by the United States and the Soviet Union, erstwhile allies turned arch-enemies in a joust for hegemony on the global scene. And yet, for all the bellicose postures and rhetoric that flourished during that period, this was, as an eminent historian remarks, a ‘reasonably stable’ situation that ‘remained so until the middle 1970s’. ¹ This by no means implies that there were no confrontations. That the two superpowers treated the Cold War as a Cold Peace – in that neither really wished for a reciprocally devastating head-on clash – did not preclude them from intervening whenever and wherever necessary to secure their interests, and from engaging, overtly or tacitly, in proxy conflicts. ² The magnitude and ferocity of these incidents – occurring while the wounds of a devastating war were still fresh – combined with the fact that, after 1949, the Soviet Union had acquired nuclear capability, soon to be followed by other powers, unfailingly summoned the spectre of atomic annihilation. This peril, whose ghastly implications had been seared into the collective consciousness by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, gave rise to a profound existential disquiet that enveloped humanity during that fraught era. ³

Another, more positive source of discontent during this period was the confluence of an economic upswing and an explosive expansion of technology. ⁴ The world was now smaller and moved faster, and sweeping social transformations felt less like the stuff of abstract yearning and more like a genuine process in motion. This period saw decisive strides toward gender equality, inspiring later feminist movements: de Beauvoir’s Le Deuxième Sexe and Stern’s ‘Women are Household Slaves’ appeared in 1949; the Mattachine Society and Daughters of Bilitis were founded in 1950 and 1955. Meanwhile, the American civil rights movement gained powerful momentum. One need only recall the impressive number of landmark victories over institutional/ised racial segregation, discrimination and disenfranchisement in that country from 1954 to 1968. Add to this the spread of higher education, which turned large segments of the population into sophisticated citizens and highly skilled professionals, the restructuring of capitalism with a stress on global trade, enhanced industrialisation and technological innovation, a social-political consensus against mass unemployment coupled with the rise of a thriving consumer society, which gave many people access to goods and services that had never before been within their reach, and the picture of an affluent reality – indeed, a ‘golden age’ – begins to take shape. But it was also a moment fraught with contradictions that will surface in the last quarter of the twentieth century, and mould the challenges posed in the early twenty-first; contradictions reflected in Adorno’s critical social theory as well as in the literary oeuvres of the Beats. ⁵

The sanguine mood of the period rested chiefly on two pillars: fear of a relapse into barbarism and an emphasis on conformity as its safeguard. These forces intertwined in divergent ways, producing two essential yet opposing visions of reality. One held that conformity, broadly conceived, offered the surest defence against barbarism. In a manner not far removed from present-day ‘solutionism’, this view treated human behaviour and social life as neutral, ahistorical objects, to be disciplined by strict methodological principles and rigorous analytical formulae, through which the post-war order might be rationally organised and its discontents effectively managed. To that end, the pre-war doctrines of ‘social automatism’ and ‘propaganda’ were reinterpreted in the light of the Second World War and redeployed as ‘social engineering’ and ‘public relations’. ⁶ Karl Popper – an avowed proponent of ‘scientism’ and admirer of Roscoe Pound, the founder of ‘legal social engineering’ and, controversially, a sympathiser of Nazi Germany, but also of Friedrich Hayek, whose The Road to Serfdom (1944) advanced the view that society should be organised as a system of ‘free markets’ governed by a minimalist, techno-instrumental logic later termed neoliberalism – captured, in The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), the prevailing Western temper of the age. ⁷ Popper argues there that the ‘metaphysics of history’ ought to be abandoned in favour of that most desirable of practices, namely, ‘the application of the piecemeal methods of science to the problems of social reform’. ⁸ As to what precisely is meant by ‘metaphysics of history’, Popper’s answer is straightforward: it is that ‘pernicious’ theoretical propensity to ‘look upon social institutions mainly from the point of view of their history, that is, their origin, their development, and their present and future significance’. ⁹ In the East too, conformity played a prominent part in social existence, albeit for qualitatively very different reasons. It was, at the same time, the means and the by-product of an effort to preserve a momentum of progressive social transformation at a moment when the objective conditions for it were dwindling. ¹⁰ Herbert Marcuse’s insights into the root causes of conformity in the East is very helpful here. The ‘absurdity of Soviet Marxism ha[d] an objective ground’, he states in Soviet Marxism (1958), and adds: ‘it reflect[ed] the absurdity of a historical situation in which the realization of the Marxian promises appeared – only to be delayed again – and in which the new productive forces [were] again used as instruments for productive repression’. ¹¹ As a result, Marcuse elaborates, people found themselves in a position in which, where reality did not tally with the truth content of Marxist theory, they had to hypostatise the latter by way of ‘ritual patterns’ to preserve its futurity, that is, they had to ‘do and feel and think as if their state were the reality of that reason, freedom, and justice which the ideology proclaims, and the ritual [was] to assure such behavior’. ¹²

On the other hand, many perceived barbarism not as the opposite but as the offspring of conformity. Evidence abounded: cultural-political episodes such as the Great Terror and McCarthyism; statutory or self-imposed edicts like the Soviet ‘Repertoire of Theatres and Measures for its Improvement’ or the American ‘Motion Picture Production Code’ (i.e. the infamous ‘Hays Code’); and social orders such as those enforced by the Jim Crow laws. Together, they illustrate how conformity, in the post-war years, could engender a reality impoverished in experience, if not overtly brutal. ¹³ Life had prevailed over the agents of death, owing to the efforts and sacrifices of the peoples of two major social-political blocs – the capitalist West and the communist East – that now regarded themselves as the rightful ideological heirs of the Enlightenment and the torchbearers of civilisation. Anxious to impose themselves precisely as such, and prove their adversary wrong, they were now constraining and threatening life in new (or renewed) ways by simply omitting to pursue the dialectic of enlightenment that would have underlined the antitheses that led to the disasters of the two world wars.

Adorno recognised this pattern, as the preface to Dialectic of Enlightenment, co-authored with Max Horkheimer, makes clear. ‘We have no doubt’, they write, ‘that freedom in society is inseparable from enlightenment thinking’. ¹⁴ Yet their historical moment – strikingly close to the present – revealed that ‘the very concept of that thinking […] already contains the germ of the regression which is taking place everywhere today’, a flaw embedded as much in its abstract idea as in the concrete institutions with which it is bound. ¹⁵ Adorno and Horkheimer then proceed to offer a brief sketch of their line of reasoning. ‘The increase in economic productivity which creates the conditions for a more just world’, the two theorists remark, ‘also affords the technical apparatus and the social groups controlling it a disproportionate advantage over the rest of the population’. ¹⁶ The more society envelops its members in a plenitude of material and intellectual commodities, the more they succumb to its gravitational pull, becoming malleable matter for social engineering rather than rational, critical, democratic agents – socialised objects instead of social subjects. Under these circumstances, Horkheimer and Adorno argue, individuals become ‘smarter and more stupid at once’, and ultimately ‘entirely nullified’, in the face of ‘the apparatus they serve’, not (or, not only) as its worn-out thralls, but as its complacent functionaries. ¹⁷ The conclusion the two thinkers come to is scathing, to say the least: in late modernity ‘the gifts of fortune themselves become elements of misfortune’ and ‘progress is reverting to regression’. ¹⁸ Many years after Dialectic of Enlightenment first appeared, Adorno and Horkheimer added a new preface, ostensibly to soften its sombre tone. The effect was anything but reassuring. ‘The development toward total integration […] has been interrupted but not terminated’, they wrote, adding that their forecast of a lapse from enlightenment into blind positivism – and ultimately into the identification of intelligence with hostility to mind – had been ‘overwhelmingly confirmed’. ¹⁹

Being ‘Beaten’

Shortly before the release of Dialectic of Enlightenment, a 20-year-old student at Columbia University, a budding poet, core member of the Beat Generation, and one of its most influential voices, raised some highly resonant concerns about late modern, post-war reality. Perhaps, one of the most pithy and trenchant articulations of these latter is contained in a review of W. H. Auden’s For the Time Being that appeared in Columbia Review in May 1946, and which bore the sobering title ‘… “This Is the Abomination”’ – its author: Allen Ginsberg. ²⁰ Nearly all the traits that gave Adorno’s critical-theoretical voice its distinctive hue are present in Ginsberg’s text: the Nietzschean abhorrence of ‘last men’, the non-fatalist quasi-Spenglerian revulsion over the disintegration of culture, the sense of bewilderment in the face of the confluence of the abiding eclipse of reason and the unabated progression of modes of mutually assured total annihilation, but also, a certain confidence in the transformative and restorative power of alternative forms of experience, not least those associated with artistic expression. It is towards what he regards as the ‘advanced stage of disintegration of public spirit’ that Ginsberg directs his eloquent critical vehemence. ²¹ The ‘concrete problem before us’, he explains, consists in figuring out ways ‘to prevent others from destroying us at any moment’. ²² The nihilistic tone of Ginsberg’s diagnosis is on a par with Adorno’s (and, indeed, Horkheimer’s) notion of the waning of the subject, and much like the latter, he attributes this decline to subjective hubris rather than to objective deficiency. ‘It is no less than a fact’, Ginsberg avers, ‘that the wretched contemporary individual is trying to solve external problems while his true problem is one of self-deception’. ²³ Much of what the young Beat poet writes about post-war, late modernity is reminiscent of some of the most earnest, most radical existentialist tractates, yet there are also some salient parallels with the critique of the culture industry and the attendant idea of the narrowing of experience that Adorno was committing to paper at about the same time. This is exemplified in Ginsberg’s portrayal of life as inherently perilous, a ceaseless – often brutal – struggle for physical and spiritual gain. Modern man, unable to confront his own existence, cloaks this incapacity in blind acquisitiveness, fear of instinct, and a ‘fortress of conveniences’, a ‘megalopolitan battlement of comforts’ encasing the soul. Such accoutrements, harmless as auxiliaries in life’s battles, reveal pathology when they replace action. Here, familiar Adornian motifs surface: the repression of human nature, the repudiation of abstract, stultifying idealism, and the critique of consumerism as an instrument of acquiescence. ²⁴

In fact, Adorno would echo Ginsberg’s assessment of late post-war modernity a few years later in much the same spirit. One need only turn to the dedication section – which also doubles as a preface – to Minima Moralia (1951) to realise this. The aphorisms contained in this important work were penned between 1944 and 1947; the dedication, however, coincides with the publication of this book and postdates the release of Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), and, indeed, Ginsberg’s ‘… “This Is the Abomination”’ (1946). There, Adorno casts his ‘melancholy science’ (i.e. his reflections on ‘damaged life’ in late-capitalist reality viewed as a whole, as a constellation of critical insights) as the swansong of a type of experience that was/is slowly but surely waning in a reality where instrumentality ranks highest: an undiminished experience vowed to the pursuit of the good life. ²⁵ No affirmative definition of ‘undiminished’ or ‘good’ life can encompass their true import; such life is apprehensible only in the negative. As Adorno observes, what the philosophers once conceived as life has withered into the narrow sphere of private existence and, more starkly, into mere consumption – an appendage to the machinery of material production, bereft of autonomy and intrinsic substance. To apprehend life in its immediacy, one must interrogate its estranged form and the objective powers that, even in its most secluded recesses, shape and determine individual existence. ²⁶

This negative approach vis-à-vis the problematics of the good life became the defining feature of Adorno’s critical social theory, and eventually received its full expression as the theory of negative dialectics. In Minima Moralia it manifests itself most succinctly in the form of aphoristic catch phrases: ‘…there is life no longer’ or ‘[t]he whole is the false’. ²⁷ Notwithstanding, the aphoristic or even autobiographical tone of this earlier work of Adorno’s belies a powerful critique of late, post-war capitalist reality. The amalgam of personal experience, idiosyncratic and anecdotal motifs, and apothegmatic asseverations that make up the bulk of Minima Moralia, and culminate in a riveting ἀναγνώρισις, is far from incidental. ²⁸ Adorno contends that late capitalism has subordinated life to the demands of production, inverting the rational order. A spurious objectivity, one aligned with the instrumental aims of capitalism, has seeped into and displaced subjectivity, endowing it with traits that sustain the world’s false, reified state: ‘the non-controversial aspect of things, their unquestioned impression, the façade made up of classified data’. ²⁹ In such conditions, only the ‘too subjective’ can hope to reach what remains untainted by regulated appearances. For Adorno, unalloyed particularity (collective or individual) alone can attain true objectivity, even if only in fragments, by ‘breaching the façade’, engaging specific experience, and replacing consensus with genuine attention to the object. ³⁰ Yet such a breach is never without cost.

It is no mere happenstance that Minima Moralia bears the subtitle ‘reflections on a damaged life’. In fact, Adorno may as well have written ‘reflections from a damaged life’, given the both intimate and acerbic nature of this book. Right from the outset, one is confronted with the Adornian conviction that, in late-capitalist reality, (critical) thought and spoilt life are inextricably bound together; that only an emphatic experience of ruin affords vistas into the truth(s) beyond the existing order of things, and by that very fact into the falsity of that order. This thesis is a logical segue to Adorno’s conception of late-capitalist society as a totality of modes of thinking and ways of doing – a habitus, to use Pierre Bourdieu’s very apposite term here – that adhere to what he so characteristically refers to as ‘the barter principle’. ³¹ The latter denotes those late-capitalist processes by which, as Adorno observes, ‘nonidentical individuals and performances become commensurable and identical’. ³² The hegemonic status afforded to the barter principle in late-capitalist society goes hand in hand with a reality in which human experience is stripped of its concrete contents, idiosyncrasies, peculiarities, etc., and schematised in such a way as to fit the requirements of a system of production/consumption geared towards the maximisation of profits at the expense of the satisfaction of human needs. So intense, so pervasive are these social processes of identification in and with (late) capitalist society, that emancipating oneself from it, Adorno argues, can only ever be a partial and even harmful affair. He contends that within a repressive society, emancipation is double-edged: it grants freedom yet deprives the individual of the very strength to exercise it.33

The ambiguity in Jack Kerouac’s framing of the term ‘beat’, the signature moniker of the generation he came to personify, says much about the contradiction highlighted by Adorno. To Kerouac, this was a generation of ‘crazy [albeit] illuminated hipsters suddenly rising and roaming America’, at the same time ‘serious, curious’ and ‘ragged’, ‘bumming and hitchhiking everywhere’, though always ‘beatific, beautiful in an ugly graceful new way’; a generation of beats, indeed, of those who are ‘down and out but full of intense conviction’. ³⁴ In Howl, Ginsberg offers an ‘ode’ to the Beats, portraying the generation’s brightest spirits – madmen, bums, and angels – as near-Christlike figures. ‘Speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame’, they bare their souls to the rhythm of thought. Clad ‘in the ghostly clothes of jazz’, they voice ‘the suffering of America’s naked mind’ in a saxophone cry reverberating ‘to the last radio’. ³⁵ This is the heart of life’s poem, torn from their bodies and offered as sustenance – ‘good to eat a thousand years’ – a vision at once sacred and visceral, capturing a generation’s consuming fire. ³⁶ The folly that overtook the Beats was neither unreasonable nor groundless. That much is made poignantly clear in part II of Howl, where Ginsberg conjures up the insidiously alienating, conformist, and ruinous monstrosity with which ‘the best minds of [his] generation’ grappled, yet to which they were ultimately sacrificed, that is, Moloch, or in a less mythological mode, late-capitalist reality:

Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!

[…]

Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs! ³⁷

In the wake of World War II’s horrors and amid the tensions of the Cold War, the Beats rejected discredited models, seeking an alternative sensibility and intellectual awareness. ³⁸ By turns resigned and life-affirming, yet always critically alert, their stance was a flight at a standstill: a ‘beatific indifference to things that are Caesar’s’ paired with the praxis of ‘endurance, kindness […] joy of heart’. ³⁹ It was not ‘tired old criticism’ but ‘spontaneous affirmation’, a pursuit of the ‘vibrations of sincerity’. ⁴⁰ However, the positive moment of the Beat disposition had little to do with any sort of ‘will to power’, since, as the latter and somewhat morose Kerouac put it, modern existence essentially equals ‘[a] lifelong struggle to avoid disaster’. ⁴¹

Not Being at Home in One’s Home

The summer of 1946 marked a singular moment for Harvard University. The Second World War had ended – indeed, had been won – and graduates and alumni assembled for the long-awaited Victory Commencement. The occasion was charged with symbolism, poised between the lived realities of war and the promises of peace, yet shadowed by the suspicion that the former might seep into the latter, tinting the future in the hues of the past. That Phi Beta Kappa selected Byron Price, wartime director of the US Office of Censorship, as keynote speaker spoke volumes about the tendencies at work in this new yet familiar order; the tone of his address blended Spenglerian cultural pessimism with unabashed national pride. ⁴² ‘We have lost valor at the very moment of our greatest need’, Price affirmed, ‘[t]welve months ago the tools were sharp and the blueprint fresh and intriguing. Now we have come to the end of a year of hope, and not enough of labor’. ⁴³ He contended that this reversal arose from a nexus of forces emblematic of conservative cultural critiques centred on decline: a nation mired in confusion, timidity, and resurgent bigotry; paralysed by legislative inertia; stifled by economic sabotage; tainted by illicit trade; beset by delinquency and welfare excess amid mass idleness; and guilty of waste in a world of scarcity – an ignoble descent from the valour of 1945. ⁴⁴ Price denounced intellectuals who, enriched by a booming publishing trade, produced works devoid of beauty or moral elevation, yet steeped in vice. Such books, he claims, urged readers to sneer at humanity, revelled in tales of criminals and harlots, and worshipped the flesh amid sordid scenes. ⁴⁵ His conclusion is a veritable plea for patriotic abnegation, inspired by the most pressing, although by then far obsolete, exigencies of the war. ‘We shall not find the way again’, Price proclaimed, ‘unless, as in other decisive hours long ago we, the people set our course resolutely again toward national greatness’. ⁴⁶

Byron Price was not the only guest on that day. The poet W. H. Auden had also been asked to take part in the ceremonies. Auden, author of For the Time Being – reviewed by Ginsberg in ‘… “This Is the Abomination”’ – composed ‘Under Which Lyre’ for the occasion, a spirited and perceptive poem that reads as a direct riposte to Price’s strictures. Unlike Price, Auden was not enthralled by the past, but sought to instil in his audience a sense of belonging to a hard-earned peaceful present:

Ares at last has quit the field,

The bloodstains on the bushes yield

To seeping showers,

And in their convalescent state

The fractured towns associate

With summer flowers. ⁴⁷

The days of war had passed, and the university now teemed with ‘[r]aw veterans’ recast as ‘freshman forces’, with tutors and their quips, and professors who traded back their ‘secret missions’ for their ‘proper eruditions’. ⁴⁸ However, just as Ares sunk into slumber, Auden alerted his audience, a whole new war had already broken out; not the Cold War, which would take a few more years to fully materialise, but a war far closer to home:

Let Ares doze, that other war

Is instantly declared once more

‘Twixt those who follow

Precocious Hermes all the way

And those who without qualms obey

Pompous Apollo. ⁴⁹

Auden then proceeds to describe the two rival factions. What ensued is a vivid insight into how the Beats – many of whom figured in his audience – would eventually come to see the world: a clash between order and liberty, conformity and disobedience, discursive reason and emphatic truth. While Auden confines this battle, for the most part, within the walls of the university, the Beats did not fail to take notice of its logical extrapolations to society writ large.

Apollo represents the established order of things. Hermes may as well have created the lyre, Apollo is the patron of ‘official art’; and while ‘precocious Hermes’, if he were to take the helm, would throw the world in a shambles, as a result of his sophomoric disposition, Apollo, who ‘loves to rule’, and ‘has always done so’, has for his part a penchant for ‘fasces and falcons’. ⁵⁰ Besides, Apollo and his followers replace ‘Truth’ by ‘Useful Knowledge’, and put their ‘common-sense’ at the service ‘of secret schemes to rule the heart’, setting high store by ‘Commercial Thought, Public Relations, Hygiene, Sport’. ⁵¹ The reality of the forties was Apollonian: a world of ‘over-Whitmanated’ ditties that heaped praise on ‘the doughnut and commend[ed] the Common Man’, of ‘court-house bards’, ‘dieticians’, and sanctimonious ‘existentialists’.52 As a counterpoise to this prevailing order, Auden’s ‘Hermetic Decalogue’ reads as an ironic manifesto of the Beat sensibility. It counsels resistance – ‘Thou shalt not do as the dean pleases’ – and rejects the bureaucratic rationality of the post-war settlement: no worship of projects, no bowing to administration, no compliance with questionnaires, tests, or the pretensions of ‘social science’. ⁵³ It urges a break from bourgeois propriety, scorning advertising men, those who read the Bible merely as literature, and ‘above all […] those who wash too much’. ⁵⁴ Spurning thrift and ascetic restraint – ‘Thou shalt not live within thy means/Nor on plain water and raw greens’ – it celebrates risk, idiosyncrasy, and cultivated nonchalance: ‘If thou must choose… choose the odd; read The New Yorker, trust in God; and take short views’. ⁵⁵

At about that same time, Adorno was busy pursuing parallel meditations of his own. In a remarkably prescient section of a set of notes on philosophical anthropology drafted in 1942, he paints a fairly accurate picture of the reality that many beats would eventually find themselves in. A new type of human being is emerging in the post-war, late-capitalist society, Adorno writes in ‘Notizen zur Neuen Anthropologie [Notes on a new anthropology]’. ⁵⁶ This evolution, he argues, is due in large part to the fact that, in this new scheme of things, the younger generations face a reality that is at one and the same time more prosperous and more impoverished than that of their forebears. To be sure, the spectacular increase in productive capabilities during this period led progressively to the emergence of a society of affluence. ⁵⁷ As Adorno intimates, this plenitude was purchased at the cost of a distortion of human needs, and thus of life itself. It rested on the exploitation of labour in the Global South, the colonial extraction of resources, and the attendant spoliation of nature – forces that persist to this day. Even in the West, the chief beneficiary of this order, a new form of poverty emerged. Adorno observes that the young bourgeois [junge Bürger] increasingly recognise their inability to accumulate wealth, the tradition-forming power of property now dissolved. What once marked the proletariat now defines all: nothing remains to cherish or bequeath, and in the age of mass production, nothing is worth preserving. ⁵⁸

Ultimately, this condition yields a bleak impasse: the very abundance that allows one to imagine the end of want becomes, through its scale and profit-driven logic, the barrier to any qualitative advance, perpetuating needs in ever more insistent forms. For Adorno, this aporia is also the root of the moral dilemma of late capitalism: how can one aspire to the good life when that hope is all but subsumed by the bad? For Adorno, and the other members of the first generation of the Frankfurt School, the answer to this riddle resides in the feat of resisting adherence to reality as it exists, the ‘Great Refusal’, the practice of nicht mitzumachen. ⁵⁹ The latter is indeed a theme that preoccupied Adorno a great deal, and to which he devoted a fair share of his theoretical oeuvre. The idea of nicht mitzumachen appears in precisely the form considered here in Minima Moralia. Early in the book, in an aphorism headlined ‘shelter for the homeless’, Adorno puts forward two of his most striking catchphrases. On the one hand, he argues that in late-capitalist reality ‘it is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home’, and in the same breath he explains why: ‘wrong life cannot be lived rightly’. ⁶⁰ Adorno’s double moral insight mirrors his earlier critique of a new human type: in an age of standardisation and proliferating goods, plenitude sheds its emancipatory promise, dissolving into consumerism. In the West especially, ubiquity erodes singular value; all becomes reproducible, interchangeable. Yet awareness does not abolish necessity: certain possessions remain vital to avoid the dependence that sustains property relations (such as, for instance, owning a home to escape rent). ⁶¹ The result is an antinomical condition: a ‘loveless disregard for things’, and thus for those who produce and use them, coexists with a compulsion to hold and accumulate possessions – not from need, but as instruments in an unceasing antagonism of all against all. ⁶² For Adorno, this condition was false and corrosive to the good life; for the Beats, it vindicated the renunciations in Auden’s Decalogue, a rejection of settled possessiveness in favour of the itinerancy, hazard, and open horizons that the open road promised. Despite these structural affinities, it is essential to register a decisive divergence between Adorno and the Beats. Adorno’s critique remains resolutely committed to the negative preservation of conceptual thought, even as it insists upon the non-identity between concept and object. ⁶³ The Beats, by contrast, frequently relinquished conceptual mediation altogether, privileging immediacy, spontaneity, and lived intensity. Whereas Adorno seeks to preserve the possibility of truth through determinate negation, the Beats often bracket such philosophical ambitions, staging refusal as an existential and aesthetic gesture rather than as a systematic critique of society.

Off the Beaten Track, or the Perks and Pitfalls of Dissonance

At the centre of Adorno’s reading of post-war late capitalism lies a searing critique of the burgeoning ‘culture industry’. ⁶⁴ A trained musician and original composer, he devoted particular attention to the increasingly monotone and instrumentalised relation between the production and reception of music. Profit-driven imperatives, he argued, subjected music – and the arts more broadly – to a logic of commodification, fostering formulaic, predictable, and thus easily controlled modes of composition, performance, and listening. ⁶⁵ Jazz, for Adorno, epitomised this tendency, a judgement that placed him in sharp opposition to the Beats. The scope of his stance on jazz is too vast for detailed treatment here; it will suffice to present a few representative passages from both camps and to mark the principal tensions, as well as the more unexpected points of convergence.

Ginsberg is not coy about the impact of jazz music on the Beats and the social-historical reality that gave them birth. ‘There was a slightly apocalyptic element at the time’, he reminisced in the late seventies, ‘in all this breakthrough of new sound, new music, new rhythms…’. ⁶⁶ Indeed, the advent of this ‘new music’ was so powerful that Ginsberg felt he could only do it justice by framing it as the negative image of Plato’s warning against all innovation in music and poetry, lest the voiceless be heard and the walls of the polis crumble as a result. ⁶⁷ Kerouac was of the same mind. Jazz – or more specifically Bebop – he wrote in 1959, employing terms highly evocative of Adorno’s thought, is the music of the part with no part: ‘…the placing of the note in the middle of the harmony to an outer more precarious position where also its sense of not belonging was enhanced by the general atonality produced with everyone exterioriz[es] the tune’s harmony…’ ⁶⁸ A few lines later, Kerouac transposes this insight to the social field. The parallel between the precarious note and the wo/man of Jazz is hard to miss:

he’s real bent and he’s down and he has a twisted face, he works, he wails, he bops, he bangs, this man who was sent, stoned and stabbed is now down, bent and stretched-out – he is home at last, his music is here to stay, his history has washed over us, his imperialistic kingdoms are coming. ⁶⁹

The wo/man of Jazz is the Beat par excellence, the pariah of a totality that tolerates no outside: exploited workers, struggling artists, precarious bohemians, drug addicts, lost veterans… At this particular social-historical juncture, one specific social group came to embody Jazz in its most progressive, emancipatory forms: African Americans. ⁷⁰ As Kerouac writes, Bebop is ‘the language from America’s inevitable Africa’. ⁷¹ In fact, it is a ‘fellaheen language’, Ginsberg clarifies, ‘so it [speaks] for the most oppressed’. ⁷² It features ‘African body rhythms’ that transfix ‘the mechano-civilized world, setting up a vibration in the human body that made people dance together again’. ⁷³ Suffice it to reflect on how Jazz, but also Blues and Rock’n’Roll, all shaped by the experiences of Black America, made up the soundscape of one of the most explosive sequences of rebellious emancipation in the post-World War II era – from the beginning of the civil rights movement to the Long May ‘68 – to realise just how right the Beats were about the new music. But not everyone shared their view.

Somewhat provocatively, it could be said that Adorno sided with Plato when it came to all things Jazz: his critique stopped just short of a total ban on it. Nonetheless, Adorno’s scathing treatment of the genre was not intended to rescue the polis – that is, the status quo – from it, but was carried out for precisely the opposite reason: the fact that Jazz posed an obstacle to the polis’ radical transformation. In On Jazz (1936), Adorno contends that jazz’s formal elements are wholly pre-shaped by capitalism’s demand for exchangeability. Its improvisational immediacy, he argues, merely seeks to flee the fetishised commodity world without altering it, thereby sinking further into its snare. ⁷⁴ Crucially, Adorno does not limit his critique of Jazz to its defining compositional features, but also extends it to the modes in which it is received. What results from this is essentially the reverse image of all those traits that Ginsberg and Kerouac attributed to Jazz as it most singular and progressive aspects. With ironic gusto, Adorno claims jazz mirrors the gentleman’s evening dress: an emblem of social authority, recast as something primal and ‘natural’. The lower classes, he notes, often identify with the upper through jazz, finding it ‘urbane’. Thus the white-collar worker, seated with his companion in a beer hall, may feel superior, though in truth only the ‘primitive’ aspects, the danceable pulse of its basic rhythm, are only ever grasped. ⁷⁵ The amalgamation of the urbane with the natural and primitive in Jazz is, for Adorno, the mark of a false, calculated freedom dispensed from above – the culture industry – not an emancipation achieved from below. As such, Adorno pursues, Jazz may be ‘defined in terms of a rigid system of tricks’ that renders it ‘pseudo-democratic […] deceptive when it comes down to class differences’, to the extent that it pretends to have achieved, through the medium of aesthetic experience, an egalitarian form of being in the world. ⁷⁶ Adorno’s critique of jazz shifts in force depending on how the term is defined. If it denotes the big-band dance music of the thirties and forties – the equivalent of today’s pop or Schlager – his observations remain as compelling now as then. Yet, when the most standardised, formulaic forms of jazz are conflated with its most avant-garde styles, which, from their inception challenged audiences and resisted commercialisation (e.g. bebop or later modal and free jazz), his position appears markedly partial. ⁷⁷ Adorno’s later writings on aesthetics would, however, provide a further and more differentiated framework for analysing the ambivalent status of art under late capitalism, particularly through their insistence on the simultaneous autonomy and social embeddedness of artistic production. ⁷⁸ Such considerations exceed the limits of the present discussion, which remains focused on the earlier constellation of problems surrounding commodification, standardisation, and damaged experience. Nevertheless, the affinities traced here between the orientation of negative dialectics and the Beat practices of refusal/withdrawal may be read as anticipatory of concerns that Adorno would later elaborate more fully in Aesthetic Theory, especially with respect to the tensions among aesthetic autonomy, social critique, and the persistence of nonidentical experience. ⁷⁹

The Beats’ own resistance to the commodification of the music they cherished, and more broadly of art itself, underscores the limits of Adorno’s view. It reveals both his surprising inelasticity toward jazz and his inability to acknowledge the capacities for critical self-reflection among its creators and listeners. ⁸⁰ Kerouac’s stance on the evolution of the movement he eventually came to personify, and its cooptation by the culture industry, is a perfect example of how one could – or perhaps, should – be beat and practice that essential Critical Theoretical idea of nicht mitzumachen, all the while striving for dem ganz Anderen [the wholly other]. In 1957, about a decade after Kerouac came up with the term ‘Beat Generation’ during a conversation with John Clellon Holmes, he wrote a piece titled ‘About the Beat Generation’, which was published a year later as ‘Aftermath: The Philosophy of the Beat Generation’ in Esquire. Kerouac recalled that only a handful of ‘real hip swinging cats’ embodied the Beat spirit – believing, inspired, and free of bourgeois-bohemian materialism. Yet this small group of people was swiftly undone during and after the Korean War, as a ‘sinister new kind of efficiency’ in America drove them into prisons and asylums, or shamed them into silent conformity. ⁸¹ Then, in the wake of this vanishment, as if ‘by some miracle of metamorphosis’, a new generation ‘emerged cool and beat’, bearing themselves like those old hip swinging cats, boasting their ‘“twisted” slouchy look’, listening to their music and using their words, and so ‘the Beat Generation, though dead, was suddenly resurrected and justified’. ⁸² For all that, Kerouac sensed that something was not quite right this time around, as can be witnessed by the horror [sic.] he experienced at the fact that by the late fifties the word Beat had been ‘taken up by everybody, press and TV and Hollywood borscht circuit […] and they began to call that Beat, that beatific…’. ⁸³ Far from succumbing to the unreflective consumerism Adorno ascribed to the Beats, Kerouac perceived how swiftly dissent could be domesticated. What had begun as a challenge to convention was, in his view, already being repackaged as harmless spectacle: television skits reducing the Beat figure to a costume of black dresses, denim, and juvenile menace, soon replaced by sanitised, designer-clad imitations. In this translation from subculture to commodity, rebellion risked dissolving into a mere variation in manners, a transient fashion that the establishment could absorb without discomfort. Kerouac imagined a future in which the Beat style might furnish even the highest offices of state, shorn of its oppositional force, offering only fresh ornaments for a culture skilled at turning critique into novelty, and novelty into yet another rationale for rivalry, virtue, and pardon. ⁸⁴

A decade later, the tone is decidedly more downbeat. In a newspaper article published near and soon after the end of his life, and bearing the foreboding title ‘After Me, the Deluge’, Kerouac voices his sense of disillusionment in the face of the social-political and cultural landscape of the late sixties. A ‘Bippie-in-the-Middle’, he found himself compelled to recalibrate his take on life – once more in terms of a disaffiliation – as a result of a now false albeit hegemonic dichotomy between money-grabbing plutocrats [sic.] and polished but hollow politicos, on the one hand, and disillusioned radicals whose fervour has faded, offering no real alternative, on the other; two opposing camps mirroring each other’s emptiness, neither deserving his allegiance. ⁸⁵ What stands out is not Kerouac’s predictable misgivings about the ‘upper echelons’ of late capitalism, but his caustic view of the ‘alienated radicals, war protestors, dropouts, hippies and even “beats”’ who accepted him as an intellectual forebear. To them, perhaps mindful of Adorno’s dictum that the good life cannot be lived in a false one, he offered a pointed warning: ‘No cede malis’ – cede not to misfortune. ⁸⁶

A Beat Theory of Negative Dialectics?

‘Do not give in to the false’ – here is another way of reading Kerouac’s injunction. It shares the same valency with the Frankfurt School’s nicht mitzumachen. In both cases, this axiom is to be interpreted both in terms of spirit (i.e. consciousness) – indeed perhaps primarily so – and practically. On the spiritual level, it reflects the pressing need for a whole other type of intellectual experience, one that diverges from the narratives and norms that underpin the false social-historical reality of late capitalism. However, this new theoretical stance towards reality cannot occur apart from a material situation that is concomitant with it, if not its very origin. In this regard, the Beats were to some extent more consistent than the members of the Frankfurt School. While the latter enjoyed, even in exile, a standard of material existence that could rightly be qualified as bourgeois, the former experienced, and, in some cases, even sought out and embraced a precarious life in nearly every sense. ⁸⁷ Both agreed on one point: beneath ‘the New Capitalism, the People’s Capitalism and Prosperity Unlimited […] lies the ugly fact of an economy geared to war production, a design, not for living, but for death’. ⁸⁸ Yet, it was the Beats alone who dared to stage a real, material rupture, a radical disavowal of the prevailing order, the ‘cult of Moneytheism’, the ‘neon wilderness’. ⁸⁹ This ‘great refusal’ – to recall Marcuse’s well-known watchword – manifested through a deliberate act of voluntary disaffiliation and an embrace of self-imposed poverty, a conscious renunciation of the entrapments of late-capitalist conformity. As Lawrence Lipton observes, ‘[t]he New Poverty is the disaffiliate’s answer to the New Prosperity. It is important to make a living, but it is even more important to make a life’. This poverty, he insists, is neither indigence nor failure, but the condition of one whose goods and services command little value in a society fixated on profit and wealth. It is not the bitterness of those spurned by the ‘bitch goddess Success’, but a deliberate, self-sustaining choice: an independent, voluntary poverty. ⁹⁰ The Beats, knowingly or not, embodied a commitment to Critical Theory, weaving its insights into their radical disaffiliation from late-capitalist structures. Marcuse, for instance, argued that in advanced industrial society – where political independence is blocked by concentrated power – mental independence demands withdrawal, wilful isolation, even intellectual ‘elitism’, alongside the cultivation of methods and concepts capable of transcending the limits imposed by established facts and values. ⁹¹ Marcuse also held that alternative modes of life could be conceived only in negative terms, as the negation of prevailing ones: economic freedom as release from the economy and its compulsions; political freedom as liberation from politics beyond one’s control; intellectual freedom as the recovery of thought from mass communication and indoctrination, entailing the abolition of ‘public opinion’ along with its manufacturers. ⁹² The Beat ethos, both in thought and action, evinced a profound affinity with Adorno’s philosophical reflections too, particularly his assertion that ‘[i]n the end hope, wrested from reality by negating it, is the only form in which truth appears’. ⁹³

The asceticism adopted by the Beats was not one of mere abstract, spiritualised beatitude but more a condition imbued with actual, material significance. The Bukowskian Beat factotum is far from an empty vessel; rather, he or she is a figure of quiet yet resolute dissent, a revolutionary of the everyday, embodying a radical alternative to the prevailing reality. This figure stands in defiant contrast to ‘the absurdity that real want is continuing in a society whose state of production no longer admits the plea that there are not enough goods to go around’. ⁹⁴ Such a mode of poverty is, in truth, no poverty at all but instead ‘an art, and like all arts it has to be learned. It has its techniques, its tricks and short cuts, its know-how’. ⁹⁵ Thus, a writer may be poor but ‘has his basic library, the composer his piano, the painter his canvases and tools’. ⁹⁶ The guiding principle underlying the Beat vision of life was not resignation, but the unyielding, unvarnished search for ‘it’ – for a ‘taste of skinless light’. ⁹⁷ The temptation to read this as a sort of unalloyed idealism is, by and large, misguided – albeit not entirely unfounded. The idealism of the Beats was not, as is so often and disingenuously portrayed, a form of naïve optimism; it was never concerned with the affirmation of some pre-ordained principle of authenticity or truth. Whatever authenticity or truth came to be associated with the Beat ‘way of life’ was not an archē but a consequence, the by-product of negation. It was what remained once complacent acquiescence to a false state of affairs had been shattered – once the subtraction from the theoretical and material structures that nourished the illusions and delusions of happiness, satiety, and propriety had been effected. ⁹⁸

Marcuse and Benjamin – figures whose respective emphases on the ‘Great Refusal’ and the redemption of the everyday disclose particularly fertile points of contact – invite a broader investigation into how the Beats might be read not simply alongside, but within the wider horizon of Critical Theory. Such an inquiry would move beyond isolated thematic resonances to consider the shared structures of thought, strategies of negation, and aesthetic practices through which both camps sought to unsettle the given order. In Benjamin’s montage of the fragmentary and ephemeral, one might glimpse a proto-Beat poetics of attention; in Marcuse’s vision of liberation as the negation of existing needs and institutions, the outlines of a Beat praxis of voluntary poverty and disaffiliation. These convergences point toward an underexplored intellectual kinship, one not of direct influence but of parallel response to the conditions of late capitalism. Adorno, for his part, would appear at first to stand at the furthest remove from the Beats, given his suspicion of their musical touchstones and his philosophical distance from their vernacular exuberance. Yet the shared conviction that ‘wrong life cannot be lived rightly’, the refusal to grant legitimacy to the merely existing, and the hope wrested from reality by negating it, form a deep consonance. For both, the open road – whether traversed in thought or in flesh – remains less a route to a fixed destination than the emblem of a life unshackled from predetermined ends, a movement towards what Critical Theory names Das ganz Andere and what the Beats, in their own idiom, simply called ‘it’.