Thinking as Gesture from Adornos Essay as Form

Helena Horgan
First published 05/05/11
Revised 15/01/2012

000001. The antinomy of exaggeration and reason: thinking as gesture. There is an apparent
antinomy between exaggeration and reason at the basis of Adornos aesthetic theory. One could
say that a disposition towards overemphasis marks the constitution of his particular mode of
reasoning, through over-determination; through carrying-on. Theres a sense in which his
consistent shooting beyond the point of adequate reason both frustrates thought and exemplifies
its very spirit. With Adorno were always at odds with regards resolution. His determined and
passionate excavation of the paradoxical relationship between rationality and discourse brings the
reader closer to the complexities at hand and further from any univocal answers. In the Essay as
Form (Adorno,1958) Adorno tells us we should not fall prey to the fear of thinking beyond what
has already been thought;

The essay becomes true in its progress, which drives it beyond itselfnot in a
hoarding obsession with fundamentals1

Adornos refusal to elaborate on any system of thought is both signifier and invocation of the
matter at hand; the complex entanglement of rationality with myth; and with enlightenments wish
to liberate discourse from the enchantment of myths duplicitous logic. Because enlightenment
thinking is equally interlaced with myth it is driven by this antimony, determined by a resistance
against which it gives itself measure.

Because it is non-identical or at odds with itself, the relapse into mythology can
only signify a tendency and, consequently an exaggeration...brought about by the

T.W Adorno The Essay as Form in New German Critique (Issue 32, Spring-Summer 1984) p161

tension which drives myth and enlightenment apart...while also relating these
two homogenous and heterogeneous forces to each other.2

For Adorno and Horkheimer any aim towards disenchantment on behalf of enlightenment is a
futile attempt to escape this exaggeration. As the dialectic isnt a schematic conversion one cannot
be done away with by the other; they are each implicated by the other while at the same time
enlightenment resists myth. Therefore its wrong to assume that all rational thinking will
ultimately result in a dogmatic totalization or hypostasization. The work of Adornos
exaggeration is to separate out enlightenment thinking which has fully succumb to myth from
that which has been purified by communication theory.3 Equally, to say that thinking is in
essence exaggeration is necessarily unjustifiable, while to say that intuition and insight is
incapable of systemic thought is to somehow renounce thinking. What Adorno is trying to keep
out of reach is the possibility of resting on thought as mere adequation. Quite bluntly, for Adorno
the function of thinking is thinking, deliberation maybe but not judgement.

An exaggeration which no longer measures itself against something given or

presupposed, something to which it could be reduced and which would account
for its intelligibility is neither an indication of truth nor a symptom of madness
and delusion, it is neither thinking nor its opposite, rather it is thinking as
gesture. 4

Alexander Garcia Duttman Thinking as Gesture: A Note on Dialectic of Enlightenment in New German
Critique (No 81, Autumn 2000) p146
3
Ibid p146
4
Ibid p149

000002. The Dialectic of Enlightenment: a cautious new technology. In the opening to the
Dialectic of Enlightenment (Horkheimer, Adorno, 1947) Adorno and Horkheimer speak of the
emerging technology which they say defines the essence of scientific rationality; the desire
to find the happy match between human understanding and the nature of things. 5
Enlightenment thinking was fundamentally a search for origins and first principles which
would enable classification of like with like. All empirical matter was seen as quantifiable and
anything that resisted categorization was often viewed with suspicion. Adorno takes issue
with this resistance to particularity and the production of technologies driven by economic
efficiency which he feels suppressed the inventive spirit.

The spirit irretrievably modeled on the pattern of the control of nature and
material production forgoesrecollection of any surpassed phase that would
promise any other future and any transcendence vis-a-vis the frozen
relations of production.6

Enlightenments concerns with the matter of the world were for encyclopedic classification;
keeping accounts of the nature of unfolding cultural and scientific histories. Myth equally
wanted to honor historical and cultural beginnings and track their evolution, but also
narrate, record, explain. Adorno tells how each ritual contains a representation of how
things happen and of a specific process which is to be influenced by magic. 7 The experience
of magic is an experience of closeness and familiarity with true effective particularity.

Max Horkheimer and T. W. Adorno Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (Stanford

University Press, California, 2002) p2
6
T.W Adorno The Essay as Form in New German Critique (Issue 32, Spring-Summer 1984) p157
7
Max Horkheimer and T. W. Adorno Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (Stanford
University Press, California, 2002 p5

At the magical stage dream and image were not regarded as mere signs of
things but were linked to them by resemblance or name. The relationship
was not one of intention but kinship. Magic like science is concerned with
ends, but it pursues them through mimesis, not through an increasing
distance from the object.8

The archival impulses of mythology werent simply a process of capturing an image of events,
but of paying tribute and empathetically engaging with various forms of life; a way of
uncovering specific characteristic patterns of behavior that became a method of
understanding in itself.

000003. Myth as perpetual discourse. Roland Barthes sees myth as a type of discourse not
defined by subject matter or content but by the logic behind its use. In Mythologies (Barthes,
1972) he says;

myth is a type of speech, everything can be a myth provided it is conveyed

by a discourse. Myth is not defined by the object of its message, but by the
way in which it utters this message: there are formal limits to myth, there are
no substantial ones.9

The speech of mythical discourse is a message caught in mediality. For Barthes all forms of
cultural representation are myth, not only written discourse but also photography, cinema,
reporting, sportall these can serve as support to mythical speech. Myth as cultural vehicle
supports or bears the passage of time. Like Adorno, Barthes sees myth as stemming from a

8
9

Ibid p7
Roland Barthes Mythologies (The Noonday Press, New York, 1972) p109

desire to exhibit the perceptual products of history, paying tribute to time without fully
enclosing or preserving it. There is a repetitive gesturing in every myth, in hitting on the
reprise of a likeness, but all myths at the same time are ultimately finite; one can conceive of
very ancient myths, but there are no eternal ones; for it is human history which converts
reality into speech...myth is a type of speech chosen by history: it cannot possibly evolve from
the nature of things.10

As a semiologist Barthes concern with myth is with its linguistic form. His analysis of myth as
a sign system is the story of the birth of signification itself. There is an obvious antimony
between text and image in that they inhabit different spheres of perceptual reasoning, but
even pictures can be read in a number of different ways, the point is we have left the
theoretical mode of representation with myth and are dealing with particulars. Barthes tells
us myth is made up of ready-made material which presuppose a signifying consciousness,
which can be reasoned with without concerns for substance. Pictures might impose
meaning at one stroke but become a kind of writing as soon as they are meaningful: like
writing, they call for a lexis.11

As the logic of mediality myth is somehow ungraspable in that it only shows itself through its
method of appropriation. As a process of separation from the things-in-themselves its
regarded with suspicion by the rationally enlightened mind. Paradoxically it is equally
rationalities desire for classification that distances the particular from its origin. This aporetic
conflict between myth and logos isnt merely a product of language but more immanent
within discourse itself. Adornos conception of mediation set out in the Essay as Form (Adorno,

10
11

Ibid p109
Roland Barthes Mythologies (The Noonday Press, New York, 1972) p110

1958) describes how it is necessary to open thought to a third potentiality which is the
impossibility of closure;

The essay does not strive for closed, deductive or inductive, construction. It
revolts above all against doctrine....The delusion that the ordo idearum
(order of ideas) should be the ordo rerum (order of things) is based on the
insinuation that the mediated is unmediated. Just as little as a simple fact can
be thought without a concept, because to think it always already means to
conceptualize it, it is equally impossible to think the purest concept without
reference to the factual.12

000004. Necessary negativity. Part of the desire to capture the passage of time is an awareness
of the enigmatic nature of such a task. The instant becomes reified. We wish to experience
each moment in its utmost singularity, but we are mediated beings. Our mode of discourse is a
reflection on time but it is not time itself, its an abstraction.

Themoment sense-certainty attempts to come out of itself andindicate

(zeigen) what it means, it must necessarily realize that what it believed it
could immediately embrace in the gesture of demonstrating, is, in reality, a
process of mediation, or more properly, a true and proper dialectic that, as
such, always contains within itself a negation.13

12

T.W Adorno The Essay as Form in New German Critique (Issue 32, Spring-Summer 1984) p158
Giorgio Agamben Language and Death: The Place of Negativity (University of Minnesota Press,
Minneapolis/London 1991) p11
13

For Hegel any attempt to express sense-certainty is to experience the impossibility of

saying what one means,14not because language is incapable of expressing the unspeakable
but because truth lies in the universality of sense certainty itself. Regardless of where you
situate the origin of meaning there is a becoming temporal in speech that results in a
negative transferral; a movement from the substantive conscience to indication and
expression. For Adorno this negative transferral is something not to overcome, but to succumb
to within the gesture of expression. The desire for meaning to coincide with the present
moment is a refusal to acknowledge the status of truth as temporal and in flux. In the Essay as
Form (Adorno, 1958) he explains;

The desire of the essay is not to seek and filter the eternal out of the
transitory; it wants, rather, to make the transitory eternal. Its weakness
testifies to the non-identity that it has to express, as well as to that excess of
intention over its object, andpoints to thatwhich is blocked out by the
classification of the world into the eternal and the transitory. In the emphatic
essay, thought gets rid of the traditional idea of truth.15

In moving from identity to non-identity the negative dialectic pays tribute to the becoming
temporal of the subject as deliberate and yet functionless cognition, liberated from a
requirement for materiality. In the gesture of expression which takes temporality as its
substance it must find its own temporality and rhythm. In Language and Death (Agamben,
2006) Giorgio Agamben makes a distinction between verse and prose. Verse marks the
topology of memory and repetition as a poetic and finite act of turning and returning; of
reprise. Prose on the other hand is the straightforward march of rational discourse;

14
15

Ibid
T.W Adorno The Essay as Form in New German Critique (Issue 32, Spring-Summer 1984) p159

philosophical progression and deliberation. Agamben gives an account of an experience of the

razo as a reversal of the poetrylife relationship in which gesture carries thought towards its
logical consequences. Its mode is exaggeration (from ad- "to, toward" and gerere "carry.")

That which for the troubadours was living of the razonow becomes a
reasoning the life, a putting into words of biographical eventshere the
lived is invented or found on the basis of the poetic and not vice versa. 16

000005. The search for non-identity: the extra-economic. In The Fate of Art (Bernstein, 1992)
J.M Bernstein calls Adornos philosophy a heterology; as a search for the non-identical (with
its concept) other. For Adorno identity thinking, as the overcoming of idealism requires an
overcoming of the standpoint of the devouring subject. In Aesthetic Theory and The Essay as
Form Adorno rethinks the configuration of form and content, spirit and mimesis, form and
expression. 17 In attempting to devise a malleable link between the individual and the
universal he carries a dual interpretation of mimesis as on the one hand indexical, and on the
other, a primitive form of subjective empathy and compassion. The subjects spirited
engagement with the world isnt that of mere duplication. The creative impulse is such that
previously delineated concepts expand under his tactile engagement. Adornos thinking lies in
stark contrast to the traditional notion of aesthetics as conforming to ideals of beauty and
harmony, where the role of art is to give shape to platonic form. The mimetic drive as a
gesture of sympathetic mediation infects concepts with dissonance. It replaces unity with
fragmentation and systematic thought with original compositions.

16

Giorgio Agamben Language and Death: The Place of Negativity (University of Minnesota Press,
Minneapolis/London 1991) pg 69
17
Ibid p199

Mimetic activity is always shaped by spirit....As mimesis re-inscribes

intuition, so spirit re-inscribes concept. If we consider conceptual articulation
as that in virtue of which what is not meaningful is rendered significant...The
Spirit of works of art is their plus or surplus - the fact that in the process of
appearing they become more than they are.18

There is an overabundance of significations caught within every spiritual phenomenon that

is hidden by objectification. The function of art isnt to simply reproduce what is in existence
but to inhabit the workings of current ideologies and exhibit them in new light through the
logic of a revised lexis. This enables art to situate itself outside of pure economies of exchange
and production which have already distanced themselves from the true function of praxis as
authentic labour. As Bernstein remarks;

purpose has itself become purposeless, production for exchange without

end, while artistic practice itself still has the idea of the workbefore it.
Arts enigmatic quality is the modern equivalent of wonder in the presence
of the other. 19

000006. Autonomy or Sovereignty. Is Adornos project a task of carving out a space for
aesthetics as autonomous discourse, functioning on condition of its own making, or does he
think that art and aesthetics should be promoted as highest discourse, as first philosophy, in
that aesthetics should overcome non-aesthetic reason entirely? This question in itself
bypasses the complex nature of their relationship. The very attempt to achieve autonomy is

18

Ibid p202
J.M Bernstein The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida to Adorno (Polity Press,
Cambridge, 1992) p210
19

10

to presuppose that there is an essential nature to art20 that can be employed as a guardrail
to secure the division of myth and reason. In The Sovereignty of Art (Menke,1999) Christoph
Menke tries to define the unresolved ambivalence of aesthetic experience. If taken as
autonomous art is seen as one domain of discourse among many; if sovereign it means art has
the potential to exceed the limits of reason of the non-aesthetic. For Adorno clarification of
the tension between these two is the sole problem in contemporary aesthetics. How can we
resolve this antimony without subsuming one thesis under the other?

For aesthetic discourse to be one amongst a plurality aligns aesthetics with the Kantian notion
of ideal beauty. It somehow reifies and at the same time dilutes arts effects in that the
aesthetic realm has no negating or affirming powers over the object of our non-aesthetic
experience. 21 The sovereignty model considers aesthetic experience a medium for
dissolution of the rule of non-aesthetic reason, the vehicle for an experientially enacted
critique of reason. 22 It follows the trajectory of a romantic claim extending through the
surrealist avant-garde movements to present day, to promise that in art the absolute is
present. In this instance art does not take part as a form of reason among many but rather
exceeds its bounds. Autonomy confers relative validity...sovereignty grants it absolute
validity 23

The autonomous and sovereign models represent the tension between dialectical and
transcendental thought which Adorno attempts to resolve with the negative dialectic. This is
close to deconstructive theories where the logic behind either approach is employed against
itself to the point of self-evacuation, and it is forced to confront the proximity of its project
20

Ibid p191
Christoph Menk The Sovereignty of Art: Aesthetic Negativity in Adorno and Derrida (The MIT Press,
Cambridge/Massachusetts/London 1991) pII
22
Ibid pIII
23
Ibid
21

11

with what it maintains as its alterity. It is the fact that the aesthetic is always compulsively
impelled to over-bound reason that keeps the tension between the two as a necessary
productive force. But between Adorno and deconstruction we still end up with two
incongruent theses. Where for Adorno

it turns out that the potential for aesthetic experience to provide a critique
of reason cannot be described as an implication of this experience, nor as
contents separable from it, but only as an effect of it.24

For deconstructive theories its the incessant effect and (functionless) signification of its
aporia that gives aesthetics the force necessary for a first philosophy.

Art is not sovereign in that it tears down the boundaries between aesthetic
and non-aesthetic experience and overcomes reason It is instead
sovereignas a discourse of particular validity it represents a crisis for our
functioning discourse.

Taken together these two claims outline an understanding of aesthetic

sovereignty - as an aesthetically generated critique of reason thatdoes not
violate the autonomy of the enactment of aesthetic experience, but is actually
premised upon it.25

24

Christoph Menk The Sovereignty of Art: Aesthetic Negativity in Adorno and Derrida (The MIT Press,
Cambridge/Massachusetts/London 1991) pXIII
25
Ibid pXIII

12

000007. Autonomous tics. In Notes on Gesture (Agamben, 2000) Giorgio Agamben begins by
detailing the discovery and transcription by neurologist Gilles de la Tourette of observed
pathologies in cases of familiar human gestures. These various tics most memorably for
which we recognize his name; Tourette Syndrome Gilles consigned to a book as the first
scientific analysis of the human gait. Agamben tells us within its pages was the description of
an amazing proliferation of tics, spasmodic jerks, and mannerismsa proliferation that cannot
be defined in any way other than as a generalized catastrophe of the sphere of gestures. 26
The beauty with which de la Tourette attended to these pathologies was in his perception of
their oddly articulated mechanics, each peculiar to its bearer, purposeless, and yet
impulsively iterated, and seemingly working beyond the enclosure of the individuals will.
Agamben draws comparisons between Tourettes obsession with the figure in formation and
the birth of early cinema. Both marked and drew inspiration from an epoch in which society
was to lose its natural attachment to gesture.

[the] silent movie traces the magic circle in which humanity tried for the last
time to evoke what was slipping through its fingers forever.27

For Agamben the essence of cinema is not image but gesture, and with him Varro28 remarks
What is a gesture? but a valuable indication. Varro locates the gesture in the sphere of
action but ensures its distance from acting (agere) and making (facere). The consequential
third stage of action is onaccount of the likeness between agere (to act) and gerere (to
carry, or carry on). A person can make something and not act, like the writer of a script in

26

Giorgio Agamben Means Without End: Notes on Politics (The MIT Press,
Cambridge/Massachusetts/London 2000) p51
27
Ibid p54
28
Varro On the Latin Language trans. Roland G. Kent (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977) p245 in
Giorgio Agamben Means Without End: Notes on Politics (The MIT Press, Cambridge/Massachusetts/London
2000) p56

13

which the actor acts but does not make. On the other hand, the general (imperator), in that he
is said to carry on affairsneither facit makes nor agit acts but gerit carries on, that is,
supports, a meaning transferred from those who gerunt carry burdens, because they support
them.29 Agamben tells us that;

What characterizes gesture is that in it nothing is being produced or acted,

but rather something is being endured and supported30 It is the sphere of
endless mediality itself because gesture is essentially always a gesture of not
being able to figure something out in language.31

29

Giorgio Agamben Means Without End: Notes on Politics (The MIT Press,
Cambridge/Massachusetts/London 2000) p57
30
Ibid
31
Ibid p59

14

Bibliography

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Adorno, T.W Negative Dialectics (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London 1973)

Adorno, T.W The Essay as Form in New German Critique (Issue 32, Spring-Summer 1984)

Agamben, Giorgio Language and Death: The Place of Negativity (University of Minnesota Press,
Minneapolis/London 1991)

Agamben, Giorgio Means Without End: Notes on Politics (The MIT Press,
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Barthes, Roland Mythologies (The Noonday Press, New York, 1972)

Bernstein, J.M The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida to Adorno (Polity
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Duttman, Alexander Garcia Thinking as Gesture: A Note on Dialectic of Enlightenment in New

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(Stanford University Press, California, 2002)

15

Menk, Christoph The Sovereignty of Art: Aesthetic Negativity in Adorno and Derrida (The MIT
Press, Cambridge/Massachusetts/London 1991)

Weber Nicholson, Shierry Exact Imagination, Late Work: On Adornos Aesthetics (The MIT
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16