Theodor W. Adorno’s Minima Moralia, composed in the United States between 1944 and 1947, entered the West German book market in 1951 and quickly became something of a phenomenon. The volume was reviewed in the major newspapers and on the radio, and, more surprising, it achieved a degree of commercial success.1 It did so in part, I would argue, because it offered advice—advice on how to negotiate a range of everyday situations or, more generally, advice on how to live.2 Adorno’s volume reflected on but also participated in established formats of social communication that made it recognizable as a book of advice, a feature of the text that has been noted (Bernard 17) but far from fully explored. The reflections deal with questions such as the proper choice of gifts, whether to reciprocate or decline conversational invitations on mass transit, and how to live as part of a married couple. These recurring comments on situations of hospitality, sociability, and domesticity claim as much space as the discussions of aesthetics and philosophy, and the attention to the details of daily life is inseparable from morally inflected statements (Jaeggi 115–16). Adorno seems almost to propose a code of behavior in the spheres of privacy and social intercourse with the assured voice of an authority on the overlap- ping but not coinciding realms of etiquette, civility, and everyday moral issues (Pippin 225). His blocks of text repeatedly culminate in claims about “the only responsible course” (“das Einzige, was sich verantworten läßt” [26; 29]), which appeal to the prudence and moral consciousness of the reader.3 And at times he even opens a paragraph with a piece of advice directed to a particular segment of the readership: “Advice to intellectuals: let no-one represent you” (“Rat an Intellektuelle: laß dich nicht vertreten” [128; 146]). Consider the following question, dealt with in the pages of Minima Moralia. How much of what you hear about people should you report to them? You may want to warn friends and acquaintances about resentments that surround them, to give them a better sense of whom to trust, and yet you must proceed with caution. In these situations, you are not simply passing on information; you risk participating in the spread of poison rather than containing its effects. Perhaps you are even attracted by the opportunity to expose a rival and portray yourself as the more reliable friend. Or maybe you too are drawn to the meanness, and something in you wants to get a taste of the maliciousness without having to bear responsibility for it. So what should you do, or when should you tell? “One ought to transmit denigratory remarks only when they relate directly and transparently to shared decisions, to the assessment of people on whom one has to rely, for example in working with them” (“Abfällige Bemerkungen sollte man wiedergeben nur, wenn es unmittelbar und durchsichtig um gemeinsame Entscheidun- gen, die Beurteilung von Menschen geht, auf die man sich zu verlassen, mit denen man etwa zu arbeiten hat” [179, 203]). This is good advice, ethically sensitive and pragmatically oriented; it is Adorno’s advice. Adorno, then, offered advice, and he was not the only one doing so in West Germany in the 1950s; in fact, Minima Moralia was part of a national publishing boom in the genre of advice literature. In Horst-Volker Krumrey’s quantitative study of trends in conduct literature, broadly defined, from 1870 to 1970, the decade stands out as a period of increased activity.4 The craving for books that offered guidance on social interaction, demeanor, and moral issues is understandable against the background of the economic and political shifts in West Germany around that time, such as the flattening of class distinctions due to increasing prosperity and to longterm collaboration between capital and labor, as well as the desire to overcome or at least cover over the protocols of the Nazi period (Schildt 302). The combination of economic resurgence and attempted cultural restoration resulted in a widespread wish to master forming models of social intercourse and a consequent turn to books that promised to relieve insecurity without reintroducing demands for absolute loyalty or structures of command. East Germany, by contrast, saw no comparable upswing in advice literature, perhaps because of that country’s deliberate construction of a nonbourgeois sociopolitical order (Krumrey 25). After the publication of his reflections in 1951, Adorno remained interested in the character of advice. During a stay in the United States in 1952–53, he analyzed the Los Angeles Times astrology column. The completed study, entitled The Stars down to Earth, is primarily an investigation of irrational elements in a supposedly rational society but includes numerous reflections on the practice of “tendering advice” and its link to questions of authority (48). While the newspaper’s astrological counselor derives forecasts from the study of heavenly constellations, Adorno claims that this obviously irrational premise is kept in the background: the “distinctly magical . . . authority” of the astrologer is presented as rationally transparent expertise (24). At the same time, the figure of the expert has, in an increasingly complex society reliant on specialized knowledge, morphed into its apparent opposite: “the expert has gradually grown into the magus” (102). The columns address a readership that “seek[s] some advice” (36), which implies that “everyone has to make up his mind” rather than follow oracular pronouncements (28), and yet the position of quasimagical authority assumed but downplayed by the counselor hollows out advising as a transaction among autonomous persons. Given Adorno’s persistent interest in adv ice and authority throughout the forties and fifties, it is no surprise that Minima Moralia features theoretical remarks on the societal work performed by counseling. In some passages, Adorno indicates that he offers his views on how to approach common situations, conventions, and dilemmas in full awareness of the historically specific presuppositions of advice. The practice of giving and receiving advice, he argues, possesses a distinct class character: “Those who won’t take advice can’t be helped, the bourgeois used to say, hoping, with advice that costs nothing, to buy themselves out of the obligation to help, and at the same time to gain power over the helpless person who had turned to them” (“Wem nicht zu raten ist, ist nicht zu helfen, sagten die Bürger, die mit dem Rat, der nichts kostet, von der Hilfe sich loskaufen und zugleich Macht über den Erledigten gewinnen wollten, der zu ihnen kam” [136; 154]). If one cannot raise oneself up by acting on sound advice and continuing on the path of self-improvement, so Adorno’s bourgeois figure reasons, then any other kind of support is a waste. Paradoxically, the need for more external assistance than a word or two disqualifies a person from receiving substantial help. The “Bürger” never feels compelled to invest private resources in others without the promise of profit and prefers to withdraw into the less costly role of “catalyst” (Robbins 13). And, one could add, with the self-help books and manuals that make up modern “bibliotherapy” or “minimal contact psychotherapy,” advice has been successfully commodified and generates revenue (Bergsma 350, 347). But Adorno also recognizes the genuine ethical import of (bourgeois) advice: in the act of counseling others on an issue instead of dominating them in the name of protection, one discerns an “appeal to reason” and a faith in the capacity of fellow individuals (“Appell an die Vernunft” [Minima 136; 154]). The adviser seeks to facilitate accomplishments and decisions in a way that testifies to people’s need of the greater experience of others but does not negate their individual initiative. What separates the adviser and the advisee is not a permanent hierarchy of ability or talent but a redeemable lack of crucial information. The recipient may lack experience, knowledge, or material assets but still possess good judgment, and advice is meant to close the gap across which it travels. Ideally, then, advice involves the acknowledgment of interdependence in a way that does not undermine the possibility of self-determination. This makes the practice of advice giving a significant mechanism of knowledge distribution and influence in bourgeois society: the flow of advice makes information, experience, and patterns of reasoning available across boundaries of various kinds without eroding the notion of autonomy on which the self-definition of bourgeois society rests.5 In this way, acts of giving advice project and preserve an egalitarian community of independent individuals. Adorno, however, does not believe in the viability of advice. Whatever good suggestions the reader may find in Minima Moralia, it is framed by repeated, even obsessive, announcements of the end of the bourgeois era as well as of the demise of the self-determining subject, the projected recipient of advice. This message is first delivered in the opening paragraph of Adorno’s introduction, which states that the ostensibly private domain of the individual subject no longer possesses a reliable integrity but is completely determined by societal forces alien to it. It is doubtful whether the specific vocabulary of personal experience based on everyday interactions can illuminate the greater systemic logic that ultimately shapes and constrains it (Bernstein, Adorno 116–17; Helmstetter 148, 153), and, in any case, this logic nullifies any attempt by the subject to regain a measure of control. Minima Moralia’s concern for the reader’s moral orientation and everyday competence, which is implied in the ongoing presentation of advice, is not grounded in a continued belief in t he means of t he individual subject. The text speaks to issues that appear in the individual’s frame of attention and comprehension and yet consistently disputes that this is a meaningful realm of action. This contradiction may explain the volume’s taxing effect on the reader but also points to the character of Adorno’s intervention. Adorno packs a social-theoretical diagnosis into a generic form that is undermined by this very diagnosis. The volume inhabits and violates the conventions of textually mediated advice in order to draw attention to or, better, to organize the experience of the discrepancy between society’s logic and the individual’s cognitive and pragmatic resources. And it performs this operation in the field of a particular genre for a clearly outlined reason: to deliver a critique of classical liberalism as well as of the totally administered world. The Critique of Liberal Social Theory The problem w it h Hegel’s social theory, Adorno contends in his introduction to Minima Moralia, is that it is stuck in liberal thought. The specifically liberal notion to which Adorno refers is that of a society as a harmonious whole paradoxically arising out of fierce competition among self-interested individuals. If political theorists in the preliberal age tended to equate conflict with disintegration and therefore promote a thick tissue of shared sociomoral commitments, liberals pay attention to the benefits of multiple conflicts and rivalries (Bobbio 22). Without expecting or trying to achieve it, individual agents further the interest of society when they devote themselves to egoistic projects (Bull 35–36). Society does not fall apart because seemingly asocial passions and vices drive individuals; the fissiparous tendencies do not ruin society but instead ensure its development on an aggregate level, at least if one concentrates on economic prosperity (Hirschman 130). This liberal insight into the unintended benefits of competition and strife is famously captured in Adam Smith’s notion of the invisible hand, but according to Adorno Hegel too tracked the tendency toward integration and mutual advantage that exceeded the limited purposes of the parties (Pfau 86; Vogl 45; Rosen 120–28): “Certainly [Hegel] perceives, with classical economics, that the totality produces and reproduces itself precisely from the interconnection of the antagonistic interests of its members” (“Wohl gewahrt er, mit der klassischen Ökonomik, daß die To- talität selbst aus dem Zusammenhang der antagonistischen Interessen ihrer Mitglieder sich produziert und reproduziert” [Minima 17; 15–16]). Operating in a liberal paradigm, Hegel reconstructed how manifold agents who pursue their own ends still produce and compound a complex system of socioeconomic interdependencies without necessarily willing or perceiving it (340; Riedel 89–90, 93). His commitment to liberal thought, then, does not necessarily entail much respect for the horizon of the individual. Liberalism installs individuals as the irreducible elements of society and seeks to remove external constraints to their actions, and yet the model of collectivity that liberal theory propounds is still indifferent to individual subjects’ capacity to comprehend their global context. Adorno presents a twofold objection to Hegel’s liberal model of society. On the one hand.. ..Read the full article here: heathwoodpress/adornos-advice-minima-moralia-critique-liberalism/
Posted on: Wed, 28 Aug 2013 21:43:58 +0000
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