Owen Hulatt’s remarkable book deserves high praise and attentive study, for it aims to explicate Adorno’s notions of philosophical and aesthetic truth via what could be called rational reconstruction: at several junctures in his study Hulatt identifies lapses in clarity and missing or assumed steps in Adorno’s claims, and attempts to provide expansive support and justification for them.1 The result is a book not only of philosophical exegesis but also of philosophical practice in its own right. I applaud Hulatt’s approach, and it is in the same spirit that I here raise some questions regarding his interpretation of Adorno’s overall theory (roughly the first four chapters of his book), largely focused on passages from the early lecture “The Actuality of Philosophy” (hereafter AP), Dialectic of Enlightenment (hereafter DE), and Negative Dialectics (hereafter ND). A helpful companion to some of my thoughts will be Nietzsche, one of the thinkers inhabiting DE.

In chapter 1, “Models of Experience,” Hulatt patiently interprets a dense quote from DE, contrasting the model of “nonconceptual experience” for a “primitive consciousness” with the later development of conceptually mediated experience:

The split between animate and inanimate, the assigning of demons and deities to certain specific places, arises from [the] pre-animism [inculcated by man’s original terror]. Even the division of subject and object is prefigured in it. If the tree is addressed no longer as simply a tree but as evidence of something else, a location of mana, language expresses the contradiction that it is at the same time itself and something other than itself, identical and not identical. Through the deity speech is transformed from tautology into language. The concept, usually defined as the unity of the features of what it subsumes, was rather, from the first, a product of dialectical thinking, in which each thing is what it is only by becoming what it is not. This was the primal form of the objectifying definition, in which concept and thing became separate, the same definition which was already far advanced in the Homeric epic and trips over its own excesses in modern positive science. But this dialectic remains powerless as long as it emerges from the cry of terror, which is the doubling, the mere tautology of terror itself.2

In contrast to Kant’s transcendental arguments, Adorno asserts that nonconceptual experience is possible, but as a “threatening epistemic excess” and “menacing efflorescence of radically particular, uncontrollable objects and events” (7, 8; cf “experience of objects,” 21) such experience elicits a “cry of terror” and the emergence of conceptuality and predication as a pragmatic means to cognize and control one’s environment. Question 1: Can one speak of such experience as being of “objects and events,” which seem to presuppose those Kantian transcendental categories and forms which nonconceptual experience denies? Perhaps one can speak only of sensations, impressions, qualia; in a later passage DE speaks of “the world, as something chaotic, multiple and disparate.”3 This suggests a Nietzschean story of the “chaos of sensations,” upon which mind imposes order (what Nietzsche calls “erroneous articles of faith”) by treating what is similar as identical, flux as substance, etc., in order to assuage uncertainty and increase controllability of one’s environment.4

Note: Hulatt’s claims about concepts seem to suppose universal scope: all concepts for Hulatt’s Adorno have a theoretical element and an experiential element (this claim is necessary for Hulatt’s later understanding of how a philosophical text can “produce truth” in chapter 4). Question 2: While this claim seems plausible in the case of empirical concepts, what about abstract concepts that seem to lack any experiential dimension, for instance concepts like chiliagon, or infinity, or highest prime number? Do we want to claim that these concepts have a minimal cognitive phenomenology that distinguishes them from each other?

Returning to the large quote from DE, Hulatt provides a nuanced interpretation of the interrelatedness between language and emerging conceptuality. Before the advent of conceptuality (that is, predication and subsumption), concept and particular are “unified”: “For any available concept, its meaning would be wholly constituted by the simple specificity of a single object; and the expression of that concept would only to primitive kind of naming” (13). Language limited to such naming for Hulatt is in Adorno’s expression “tautological” because such language “has been stripped of the kind of modal and hermeneutic structure that we need in order to construct informative, defeasible, and truth-apt claims” (13). These are notoriously opaque thoughts in Benjamin and Adorno, and I invite Hulatt to consider them further. One way into the thicket is to ask, Question 3: Should we think of logically proper names / singular terms here in Russellian tradition (one-dimensional semantics, in which meaning is reference) or in the Fregean tradition (two-dimensional semantics, in which meaning is a combination of sense and reference)? Russellian names serve only to refer to individuals, whereas in addition to reference (Bedeutung), Fregean sense (Sinn) is defined as the “mode of presentation” (Art des Gegebenseins) of the individual. Hulatt speaks here of the “unity of concept and object” (12), which might be understood as the unique and singular relation of reference between each (logically proper) name and its referent: “it must in some sense merge with or reiterate the full specificity of the particular” (12), “the tautological concept is necessarily true, as it only functions to name (and perhaps evoke) the specific experienced object to which it is unified” (14). On the other hand, when Hulatt interprets “the unity of the tautological concept and thing,” he writes, “In this unity, the object’s specific particularity was experienced in full; as the mediating concept united itself to the full specificity of the object, the mediating concept thereby (one can infer) constituted the experience of that object such that no feature of the object’s specificity was occluded” (15), and this awareness of all an object’s features suggests a much richer epistemic or cognitive state than that of mere reference or reidentification (on some theories, the minimal requirement for concept possession); rather something like the various modes of presentation of an object seem to be invoked here. And this Fregean interpretation would fit well with what Hulatt says about constellations and constellative thought later: “a constellation of concepts—all responding to some limited feature of the object, none successfully grasping it entirely,” where each concept could be thought of as grasping one “mode of presentation” of the object, the aggregate ideal of which would approach the relation of naming discussed above: “The determinable flaw in every concept makes it necessary to cite others; this is the font of the only constellations which inherited some of the hope of the name” (ND, 53, quoted p. 93). In either case (Russellian or Fregean) the naming relation, singular terms as relata, and the relation of identity suffice “to construct informative, defeasible, and truth-apt claims” (13), as shown in Frege’s famous example of the evening star and the morning star, unless we stipulate that there can be no such cases of multiple names for the same referent in primitive consciousness (perhaps this is what “unity” is meant to exclude?).

Lastly, regarding the large quotation from DE, I’d like to note one feature of the passage that Hulatt does not address, but which might play a significant role in the story he tells. Like other interpreters he will describe identity thinking as an error theory because the thinker takes the predication “a is F” to exhaust the concept, thereby ignoring the other features of the object that are not-F and thereby allowing the global claim that every predication is false.5 But this seems to be a trivial mistake, perhaps as trivial as taking the “is” of predication to mean the “is” of identity. I think the passage suggests a slightly more complex story, in that even during the pre-animistic and animistic/magical phases of the genealogy of reason, before the advent of conceptuality understood as universal concepts and particular objects, Horkheimer and Adorno suggest that a basic mental operation of substitution is being performed, in sacrifice, in a tree “as evidence of something else” symbolizing a deity. This relation of standing-for-something-else (Stellvertretung) adumbrates the feature that Adorno and Horkheimer then emphasize about the emergence of language, that it “expresses the contradiction that it is at the same time itself and something other than itself, identical and not identical” (quoted p. 11). I want to suggest that it is this feature of substitution or exchangeability that is central to the account of identity thinking. Assume that both the claim “a is F” and the claim “b is F” are true: the error occurs when a and b are taken to be equivalent, intersubstitutable just because both are F. Being subsumed under the same concept is erroneously taken as rendering them equivalent, exchangeable tokens of the same type, something that might be called conceptual exchange value that, as Hulatt emphasizes, serves the drive of self-preservation by making the immediate environment more controllable.

In chapter 2, “The Interpenetration of Concepts and Society,” Hulatt moves from the claims of DE, which were about the individual, to the claims made in ND, which are universal in scope. He identifies Adorno’s core commitment: “problems and criticisms have universal validity . . . he takes it for granted that they come out as true and binding for all members of society, regardless of their position, culture, or class” (29). And so Hulatt concludes that a required task is to provide arguments that the demands of self-preservation obtain for everyone in the same way: the same concepts, and the same interrelations between concepts, within the same sociohistorical context. Because different kinds of universal validity obtain in Adorno’s theory, Hulatt introduces some conceptual scaffolding with which to discharge the task in stepwise fashion. He defines conceptual array as the “existence of a conceptual set [set of concepts] together with its specific internal problematic” (33), by which he means the relationships between concepts that can take on mutually antagonistic, contradictory character. Hulatt then argues for the following claims:

(i) All concepts are universally employed to serve self-preservation, and in modern society “the social totality manipulates the pragmatic context of all individuals such that self-preservation is an ever-present concern” (40).

(ii) Among concepts there is the basic set of concepts (roughly congruent with Kant’s transcendental categories) which is universal for all individuals due to self-preservation and the need for making continuous experience possible. Although such sets are multiply realizable, the embodiment of human animals serves as a pragmatic constraint ensuring the universality of the basic set (46).

(iii) Similarly, basic conceptual arrays (the relationships between basic concepts) are in principle multiply realizable, but the pragmatic necessity of intersubjective communication serves as a constraint ensuring the universality of the basic conceptual array (50–54).

(iv) The account for nonbasic or higher-level concepts and arrays is more complicated. Concept formation is determined jointly by the social structures enforcing self-preservation together with reification understood by Adorno as a distinctive epistemological error, “a propensity of the individual to accept concepts as exhaustively modeling their object . . . reification is for Adorno equivalent to what he calls ‘identity thinking’—the exclusion and forgetting of that which does not correspond to the concept” (62); because reification identifies an object with its concept “it is a vouchsafe of control over that object” that thereby serves self-preservation (see my comment about identity thinking above). Having argued that the way in which concepts are formed is universally uniform, Hulatt then argues that the phenomenal materials from which concepts are formed is also universally determined: “the social totality can be seen as having the ability to determine the exhibited regularities from which concepts are continually drawn and confirmed” (62) by what he calls “thin determination”: with expressions like “social substance,” “social law,” or most often “mediation,” Adorno claims that “social structures are capable of determining the phenomenal character of immediate experience” (69), hence can determine which regularities are exhibited and used to form, confirm and modify concepts. Taken together, these accounts yield the universal validity of conceptual array that Hulatt attributes to Adorno:

For basic conceptual sets and arrays, social universality is enforced in the first place by the universally obtaining pragmatic structures disclosed by the structure of the human body, and in the second place by the universal intersubjective mechanisms disclosed by object-relations theory. For nonbasic conceptual sets and arrays, the mechanism of conceptual formation is fixed by self-preservation. In addition, the phenomenal materials worked by this mechanism are also fixed to be the same for all individuals, by the thin determination that is applied by the social totality to objects. As a result, we can be confident that conceptual arrays will be formed in the same way, with the same structure, for everyone. Both the process and that which is subjected to the process are forced by society to be the same in every case. (69–70)

I’m unsure whether I fully understand the distinction between conceptual set and conceptual array. The latter appears to be comprised of interrelationships between the members of the conceptual set, presumably inferential relations, compatibility relations, and so on. Are application conditions also included? Some application conditions necessarily include noninferential recognitive capacities (“this is red”) but others might include, or be equivalent to, inferential relations (“this is an economic recession”). If so, how are the concepts in the conceptual set defined? For instance, conceptual or functional role semantics, inferentialism, etc., would hold that concepts just are their interrelationships and application conditions. Question 4: What is at stake in the distinction between conceptual set and conceptual array, and why should we adopt it tout court?

Hulatt’s impressive account is intended to answer a claim of universal validity that he finds in Adorno’s texts (29). But this claim seems implausible, on both exegetical and independent grounds. Alongside the claim of universal validity, Adorno’s texts also speak of critical individuals whose viewpoint (that is, whose concepts and conceptual array) is different such as to afford critical insight into the societal substance and mechanisms Hulatt describes. As Adorno writes, “Criticizing privilege becomes a privilege—the world’s course is as dialectical as that” (ND, 41).6 Independent of Adorno’s writings, it seems that the universal validity claim amounts to the stipulation of a single, universal set of concepts and conceptual arrays, and this seems implausible, especially in theoretical discourses including those in which Adorno is staging interventions (theoretical and practical philosophy, aesthetic theory, sociology, etc.), where Putnam’s “linguistic division of labor” would be operative, and where expertise involves essentially contested concepts. Question 5: If these reservations about the universal validity claim hold, might one not retreat to speaking of dominant discursive formations, in which central concepts (like Kant’s concept of freedom, or Hegel’s concept of progress, etc.) exhibit a high degree of uniformity across appropriately educated thinkers, and isn’t this sufficient uniformity for Adorno’s philosophical-critical practice?

Lastly, I’m curious about the role of “phenomenal character” in the account of universal formation of higher-level concepts, whereby “social structures are capable of determining the phenomenal character of immediate experience” (69), out of which regularities are recognized and corresponding concepts formed, if I understand the process correctly (step iv above). Hulatt correctly notes that for Adorno, unlike Kant, “there is no such transparently available empirical experience—the phenomena are distorted by their ‘cover concepts,’ which serve to prevent full empirical knowledge of their genuine phenomenal constitution” (39). This suggests that the social totality provides the concepts that mediate (what Hulatt calls “revelatory determination”) or distort (what he calls “delusive determination”) the phenomenal character from which regularities are recognized. These mediating concepts of phenomenal appearance cannot be basic concepts (similar to Kant’s transcendental categories), because those concepts are constrained principally (or exclusively) by human embodiment, not the social totality.7 Question 6: Does this observation constitute a problem of circularity for the account, or—for instance—can a distinction be made between the concepts mediating phenomenal experience “at the preintentional level . . . not removable by the operation of intentionally employed concepts” (85) on the one hand, and the concepts resulting from the phenomenal material being further worked upon in concept formation of higher-level concepts? A second worry here is that many higher-level concepts arguably do not seem to respond to regularities in phenomenal experience at all, e.g., abstract concepts for theoretical entities, which are formed by means of adjustments in theoretical discourses that then themselves perhaps (re)organize observed phenomenal regularities. Such an example might be Adorno’s immanent-critical exposition of Marx in the “Actuality of Philosophy,” where the upshot of analysis is the denial of the non-empirical, non-phenomenal property of exchange-value (AP, 128). Question 7: If it is the case that some higher-level, abstract concepts do not track phenomenal regularities, is an alternative account of their formation and universal validity required?

In chapter 3, “Negativism and Truth,” Hulatt considers the epistemological and alethic consequences of the first two chapters. For Adorno, “concepts always misconstrue their objects.” This claim of universal negativism follows from the fact that concepts are mediated by society, and the social totality’s internal agon (its internally self-contradictory constitution) communicates itself to concepts:

Concepts understand themselves to be autonomous—created and governed by their own internal principles. They are forced by the combination of thin determination, reification, and self-preservation into screening themselves off against genuine comprehension of the mediation that produces them. The social totality comprises mediating relations, which generate epistemological faculties, which are in turn incapable of comprehending those mediating relations. (89)

Hulatt’s discussion of the universal negativism claim is intriguing. If I understand it correctly, the argument runs something like this:

1. Supposed simple predications like “grass is green” are in fact false, because their logical form is the “is” of identity and “greenness does not exhaust the properties grass has.” (Minor question: isn’t it a rudimentary logical error to take the “is” of predication for the “is” of identity? If one does, isn’t every predication necessarily false except for cases—if any—of objects that have exactly one property only?)
2. Whereas the former argument is weak, it can be strengthened by considering a conjunction of such simple predications that could, on assumption, exhaust the properties of an object.8 (A Nietzschean or vitalist reader of Adorno would deny the premise that an object can be defined as a finite set of stable properties [or that the predication of a property could ever be true simpliciter], and there are passages in Adorno which emphasize the nonidentical nature of the object itself [“To comprehend a thing itself, not just to fit and register it in its system of reference, is nothing but to perceive the individual moment in its immanent connection to others”, ND, 25; “Experience shows that [objects] do not remain the same,” ND, 1549]. This would be one way of understanding Adorno’s “preponderance of the object.” And logician might note that if one allows negative properties, then no finite conjunction of predications could exhaust the epistemic content of an object.)
3. So it is conceded that simple predications are, taken atomistically, true, but then asserted that they are falsified by their holistic context. “[Adorno’s] epistemological holism entails that claims, and the concepts involved in these claims, must be seen in the full context of the totality that made them possible . . . a mediating whole that, taken as a whole, is completely untrue” (92).

This is Hulatt’s “holistic theory of falsity”: “individually true propositions are ultimately false due to their imbrication with and maintenance of a generally delusive epistemic whole” (94). If I understand correctly, Hulatt here concedes that simple predications are atomistically true (true in local contexts of use?), but false because parts of a false whole. Hence universal negativism is vindicated, but this seems to a demand a very high price. Question 8: What constitutes the falsity of the conceptual holism? Is it that most, or a statistical preponderance, of propositions (ex hypothesi, not simple predications) are false? Or that central, fundamental propositions or principles that are least susceptible to recalcitrant experience (Quine) are false? How are we to think of the (inferentially articulated?) relationships between the locally true simple predications and holistically false whole?

In chapter 4, “Texture, Performance, and Truth,” Hulatt presents his interpretation of truth and its elicitation in Adorno’s philosophical texts. Cognitively engaging with the “texture” of a philosophical text by Adorno, whereby one “performatively” enacts the failures of concepts in judgments to comprehend their objects, “can give rise to some momentary nonidentical experience that he identifies . . . with knowledge of the true” (106). This is a fascinating and intriguing account, and elucidates Adorno’s style and method with greater clarity and cogency than heretofore, and here, in conclusion, I would like to offer some brief thoughts in support of Hulatt’s general presentation.

A further way in which the rhetorical might be, as Adorno claims, included on the side of philosophical content rather than of form or style, could be seen in Adorno’s description of the essay: “It constructs the interwovenness of concepts in such a way that they can be imagined as themselves interwoven in the object” (quoted p. 116). The interwovenness of concepts rather than their deployment in predicative judgments combined with logical connectors (recall the earlier consideration of conjunctions) allows for the co-presence of conflicting or non-compossible predicates that might better capture the nonidentity of the object. Coincidentally Wittgenstein uses a similar metaphor—of different strands in a rope—to suggest the notion of family resemblance. Here both Adorno and Wittgenstein urge us not to replace qualitative resemblance with subsumptive identification.10 Second, we might consider Adorno’s invocation here of imagination rather than cogitation. Hulatt correctly emphasizes that the thinker’s experience of the conceptual movement of the text takes her beyond the realm of concepts as deployed in deduction and induction, avoiding the dilemma of irrationality and skepticism while providing what Hulatt claims is “a new form of justification” (123). This suggests a distinctive form or employment of the imagination that extends rationality beyond rules of deductive and inductive logic,11 and that perhaps can be connected to Adorno’s metaphor of riddle-character and riddle-solving, which he uses throughout his writings, from the very early “Actuality of Philosophy” to the posthumously published Aesthetic Theory. Riddle-solving is a distinctive activity of the imagination—neither irrational nor skeptical—providing a “flash of insight” that then allows for retrospective discursive reconstruction and justification. Question 9: Might the faculty of imagination, and the use of figures like the interweaving of concepts and the solving of riddles further attest to the philosophical content Adorno’s rhetoric vouchsafes, and provide fruitful paths for further research?

Thanks to Owen Hulatt’s penetrating study of Adorno’s theory of truth we have greater and more nuanced understanding of Adorno’s thought as well as incisive indications towards where it might lead our thinking today.

Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor W. “The Actuality of Philosophy.” Telos 31 (1977) 120–33.

———. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.

———. Negative Dialectics. Translated by E. B. Ashton. New York: Continuum, 1973.

———. Minima Moralia. Translated by E. F. N. Jephcott. London: Verso, 2005.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Edited by Bernard Williams. Translated by Josefine Nauckhoff. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

———. The Will to Power. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale and Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1968.

Owen Hulatt pursues an ambitious project in Adorno’s Theory of Philosophical and Aesthetic Truth: to identify a common structure uniting Adorno’s theories of the truth content of aesthetics and philosophy. He claims that, for Adorno, both philosophy and art are forms of knowledge, but each provides a different approach to the object (142), and that the truth content of philosophy and the truth content of art are commensurate with one another. Referencing both Adorno’s major works and his essays exploring literary criticism, Hulatt ably demonstrates that the truth content of both philosophy and art are arrived at through the performative engagement of the reader1 with a dense weave of constellated conceptual material. I use this phrase “the performative engagement of the reader” to cover (imperfectly) the experience of reading philosophy, listening to music, viewing the visual and performing arts, and reading works of literature. Hulatt employs the term “agent” instead, but given the complicated resonances of that term, I prefer something more specific to the activity itself. Against Adorno’s own claims that his philosophy resists systematicity through its practice of open-ended dialectical mediation, Hulatt reads Adorno’s oeuvre systematically. This is a risky wager, but it does allow Hulatt to definitively support many of his claims and thereby arrive at a point of clarity (or we might even say truth) regarding the truth content of art and philosophy.

But I wonder if we can subordinate all of Adorno’s philosophy to his epistemological claims in this fashion? Hulatt himself admits that his account will be partial; he is not attempting to provide an account of Adorno’s aesthetics. He is, instead, attempting here to “explicate a central feature of that aesthetic, namely, Adorno’s reliance on the notion that art can be true” (135) in order to support the claim that a unified system exists between Adorno’s negative and dialectical philosophy and his aesthetics. Through Hulatt’s book we get a rather direct and precise account of how Adorno understands the truth content of both the work of art and philosophy to be mediated by the social totality, and also what implications this has for interpretation and for the status of truth, but does this precision come with a cost? I harbor a sneaking suspicion that the clarity of Hulatt’s argument may, in fact, distort the general view of Adorno’s oeuvre. I wonder if, in the interests of presenting a tight argument, Hulatt’s treatment misses, at times, the dialectical richness, and the ambiguities, of the work of art.

Hulatt begins his analysis with a consideration of philosophy as an object of study, then moves on to discuss Adorno’s aesthetic theory. In the first two chapters, Hulatt connects the “cry of terror” that Adorno and Horkheimer describe in Dialectic of Enlightenment and the “shudder” as a component of the aesthetic experience as it is described in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (introduced in chapter 4, discussed in chapter 5) to the imperative of self-preservation. Adorno argues that the “cry of terror” erupts when primitive consciousness is faced with infinite reality. The generation of universals (that is, conceptual, discursive language) is occasioned by the cry of terror—which is the moment in which I recognize that I cannot produce a continuity of experience (a self) within a reality mediated by the one-to-one relationship between concept and particular thing that characterizes the primitive consciousness subject to magic. Mythic consciousness is capable of universalization because it develops cover concepts that allow for the comparison and classification of similar phenomena as they appear to consciousness over time. The cover concept facilitates the accumulation of continuous experience, which makes possible the creation and maintenance of a discrete self; this makes the discursive concept of philosophy a tool of self-preservation.

But, of course, Adorno is concerned that by adopting the universalizing concept, we lose access to the particular—that which is non-identical with the concept itself. This lack of access to the particular results in a logic of domination that formalizes social relations and limits freedom: this is reason stalled at the stage of identification, or, as Adorno has it, identity thinking. A key aspect of the argument in Dialectic of Enlightenment is the theory that in the shift from magic to myth we see a split between art as a mute experience of the particular and philosophy as the discursive representation of experience. Hulatt’s argument would be improved by giving more attention to this claim. I say this because the claim itself seems to indicate that for Adorno (or at least for Adorno and Horkheimer) both philosophy and art are impoverished in this split—that they remain partial in their access to their own truth content in this unreconciled state. But this narrative of a splitting would also seem to support Hulatt’s claims about the structure shared between art and philosophy without having to subordinate art to philosophy (appearing here as epistemology), which, upon my reading, ends up to be how Hulatt’s interpretation unfolds.

Lack of access to, and domination of, the particular are the linked motivations for Adorno’s reorientation of philosophy towards the aesthetic and the preponderance of the object as it is described in the opening pages of his Negative Dialectics. According to Hulatt, Adorno’s negativist and dialectical philosophy necessitates the development of complex dialectical conceptual arrays that enable philosophy to engage in critical self-reflection. This negative critique aims at uncovering the truth content of philosophy. This reading is clear and finds adequate support within Adorno’s own work, but what I find somewhat frustrating in Hulatt’s account is his tendency to assume that this development occurs first within philosophy and is then imported into Adorno’s aesthetic theory. For example, Hulatt cites Adorno’s claim that art bears a “likeness” to language (AT, 268) as evidence for his own thesis that art mimics philosophy (176). But both art and philosophy are fueled by mimesis: art mimics philosophy (by adopting the identity thinking that facilitates the domination of the particular), but it gains autonomy from philosophy and all that is likewise heteronomous to it by mimicking art. Philosophy mimics itself, and in doing so, it moves further away from the particular in its domination of it. But in adopting the complex conceptual arrays that Adorno calls constellations, philosophy also mimics art, and I contend (contra Hulatt) that it is the performative aspect of aesthetic experience that teaches us how to philosophize in this manner.

The problem at the heart of Adorno’s oeuvre, as Hulatt notes, is the question of how we come to know (or identify) the non-identical. In the experience of art and of philosophy, we have only our socially mediated conceptual array available to us; how are we to go beyond that array in order to identify what it excludes? Hulatt posits that we are capable of doing this through a “negative critique of the falsifying mediators of experience” (140), and that both art and dialectical philosophy serve this purpose. Hulatt gives a thorough account of the dialectical mediation of heteronomy and autonomy that constitutes the work of art and its truth content that I do not have space to detail here, but I will note that his discussion of the guilt context of the work of art, in which we find that the work is only able to stand counter to the logic of domination that constitutes the social totality by mimicking that very domination in the form of artistic technique, is absolutely thorough and spot on. This insight interestingly leads him to make the claim that art itself, like philosophy, is “a species of identity thinking” (159). While philosophy conveys meaning slightly more directly by means of its use and critique of concepts, art conveys meaning through its formal organization; the difference between art and philosophy, for Adorno, comes down to the organization of the conceptual material, which dictates how truth is revealed differently in each. The truth content of art is thereby accessed through reflection upon the work’s formal qualities, which obliquely and negatively indicate those conditions. Art is a species of identity thinking that incorporates within itself a trenchant self-critique because the aesthetic processes that create the unification of the aesthetic materials into a work are an “oblique reflection” (emphasis in the original) of the “epistemological totality” (160). Hulatt’s analysis, which works, in his words, “at a lower level . . . in order to make Adorno’s conceptually labile method possible” (135), provides us with a rigorous account of what Adorno means when he refers to aesthetic rationality; a structure that supplements, rather than contradicts, the conceptual logic we find in philosophy.

Hulatt cites Adorno’s claim that aesthetic form unfolds truth because the work of art is a “non-violent synthesis of the diffuse that nevertheless preserves it as what it is in its divergences and contradictions” (AT, 189), and while he observes that it is the blindness of the aesthetic materials in regards to the non-aesthetic—a blindness imposed upon these materials by the autonomy of art—that allows for this nonviolent synthesis, on my reading he doesn’t address specifically how this relates to the constellational form that Adorno takes up in Negative Dialectics. I contend that the point of inspiration for negative dialectics and the constellation of concepts it uses is, in fact, this special character of art as both an enactment of and a critique of identity thinking that accomplishes a preservation of the diffuse and the diverse. As I noted above, Hulatt begins with Adorno’s argument for the truth content of philosophy, and then moves on to consider Adorno’s account of the truth content of art. The structure of his argument prioritizes dialectical philosophy, as though it not only precedes, but also influences Adorno’s description of the truth content of the work of art. While it is true that Aesthetic Theory remained unfinished upon Adorno’s death, this doesn’t necessarily mean that his approach was first worked out in Negative Dialectics and then applied to the phenomenon of the work of art at a later point. The status of the work of art was a constant theme throughout Adorno’s philosophical output, and his development as a philosopher and social and cultural critic was proceeded by his exposure to music and was also contemporaneous with his training as a musician and composer. Hulatt seems to shy away from either supporting or directly countering the common claim that Adorno’s employment of the constellational form in his philosophy mimics the “nonviolent” organization of elements within the work of art, emphasizing instead art’s instantiation as a form of identity thinking.

It is striking that Hulatt resists either making or disputing this claim about Adorno’s “aestheticization” of philosophy even though he devotes much attention to a deep and insightful analysis of the status of reading as a performance: an enactment of philosophy central to dialectical thinking. It has always seemed to me that, even though Adorno is careful not to collapse the methods of philosophical analysis into something akin to an aesthetic practice, his particularly evocative account of the reader’s performance of philosophy is predicated upon his aesthetic experience as a composer and a performer of music. In this, I may be contradicting Hulatt’s argument about the structure of the relationships between art and philosophy and between Adorno’s epistemological and aesthetic theories, but at a deeper level, I think that this intuition of mine indicates that I am in agreement with Hulatt’s very convincing and well-supported claim that there is a deep structure linking the truth content of art and philosophy in Adorno’s thought.

Owen Hulatt’s book addresses some of the thorniest issues in the understanding of Adorno’s work, and does so in a detailed, thoughtful manner, offering some new and intriguing ways of responding to those issues. As is inevitable with respect to such difficult and contentious material, there is much to disagree about, but my admittedly pretty critical comments should not be taken as seeking to diminish the value of what he has attempted to do.

One way of suggesting why I have some difficulties with the approach Hulatt adopts is apparent in his book’s title. It can be argued that Adorno does not intend “a theory” of anything: the very ambiguity of his title Aesthetic Theory, which means both theory about aesthetics, and theory which involves aesthetic aspects, suggests that the book need not be seen as Adorno’s “theory of aesthetics.” Hulatt is evidently aware of this issue; indeed, his own book is to some extent about it, but his manner of dealing with it seems somewhat problematic. Bluntly, I find the approach too “philosophical” in relation to a thinker whose work can be considered as a radical challenge to many ways of doing philosophy. If we construct Adorno’s “theory of philosophical and aesthetic truth” from texts which, as Hulatt shows, fail fully to construct such a theory themselves, we may be trying to make up for a perceived deficit which is actually an expression of something other than a failure to achieve a philosophical goal.

What worries me is apparent in the following issue. The book is centrally concerned with the idea that concepts in Adornian terms “originate in a basic desire to control and limit the phenomena we experience” (8), and that their “use was necessary due to our pragmatic commitment to self-preservation and the control of our environment” (27). Concepts are “held to be working in service of heteronomous, pragmatic projects (self-preservation and its derivative projects), rather than in service of an autonomous drive toward truth” (28). The notion of an “autonomous drive” already seems somewhat alien to how Adorno sees truth (though he does, as did Nietzsche, generally accept a semantic notion of truth in everyday contexts). There is also nothing to say that because concepts arise through pragmatic projects they cannot articulate things that are true (Adorno himself seems not to appreciate this at times). In these terms an Adornian theory of philosophical and aesthetic truth, which presumably must involve an attempt to arrive at the right conceptual characterisations, would itself seem to involve a performative contradiction, in seeking to “control and limit the phenomena we experience” in Adorno. Hulatt is aware of problems in Adorno’s ideas about concepts, and offers some ways of trying to counter them, but his own project may still be caught in the problematic he explores. The important point is that the contradictions involved here may actually be more informative than the attempt to overcome them. If Hulatt succeeds in constructing the theory his title proposes, he would seem to do so at the expense of ignoring an ineliminable part of Adorno’s unraveling of attempts to come up with systematic philosophical accounts of major issues in the manner of what he terms “idealism.”

The critical aim of Adorno’s view of concepts is to reveal how they repress the “non-identical,” the individual particularity of things that is supposedly lost when they are subsumed under a general term. The issue of the non-identical must also presumably apply to conceptions of Adorno’s own thought, which in this respect could be said to resist being made into “a theory.” Hulatt uses Kant, who sees concepts as rules for the identification of objects, thus as “contracted judgements” that subsume particulars under universals, and he tends to presuppose this kind of identification as being the essential aspect of the concept. But there are other ways of construing concepts that lead in different directions. In Hegelian terms the “Begriff,” which Hulatt briefly mentions in relation to the idea of textual performance discussed below, is constituted in a dynamic pattern of inferences that arise from the engagement with an object in a historical context. A thing’s determinacy arises out of its relations and interactions with other things, and with the subjects who seek to understand the thing. While a philosophical account of the Begriff like this may itself also be prey to the issue of concepts’ repression of the non-identical, because it seeks to delineate the essential nature of “the concept” itself, the actual process Hegel is talking about need not, because things can continue to be re-characterised as new relations of the thing to other things emerge. The history of the notion of a concept itself testifies to this: there is no stable concept of “concept,” as the move from Kant to Hegel can suggest. From another angle, Rorty’s characterisation of a concept as just the “regular use of a mark or noise” does contain the useful warning that we should not, as Adorno sometimes does, inflate the notion of a concept into something inherently involving the notion of repressive identification. The simple fact is that a sign can be used in a whole variety of ways which cannot be reduced to being mere means of self-preservation or control, depending upon the kind of symbolic form in which the sign occurs, and on where and how it is used.

Hulatt, in line with a prevalent tendency in contemporary philosophy, tends to see such issues in an essentially epistemological form. His account of Adorno’s view of reification reflects this: “Adorno . . . understands reification to be an epistemological tendency of the agent. Reification, for Adorno, is the propensity of the individual to accept concepts as exhaustively modeling their object. In other words, reification is for Adorno equivalent to what he calls ‘identity thinking’—the exclusion and forgetting of that which does not correspond to the concept” (62), and it “is more generally an epistemological flaw in the concept that entails a neglect of the true nature of the object” (63). The problem with this is that it seems an implausible account of the actual nature of how people relate to the world. Hulatt sees this in terms of agents who “model” objects in certain ways that exclude what does not “correspond to the concept,” but he gives no extended analysis of examples of this (the book as a whole suffers from a quite frequent lack of empirical back-up for its theoretical claims). This means it is sometimes even hard to see why non-identity need be a problem, given that any relationship to an object will be inherently partial, depending on what an agent seeks to do with it. Adorno himself says as much when he refers to a sense of non-identity, in which “every single object that is subsumed under a class also has determinations which are not contained in the definition of that class” (T. W. Adorno (1963–64), “Fragen der Dialektik,” unpublished lectures, Adorno Archiv, Akademie der Künste, Berlin, 9053–54). He also suggests the case (he gives the example of freedom) where “it is . . . not only a question of the particular . . . being more than its concept . . . but also . . . the opposite, namely that the concept, the emphatic concept, is always more than the particular thing that is included under it” (ibid., 9054). How, then, is the notion of non-identity to be cashed out?

An obvious example where what is at issue with respect to non-identity would seem to have real substance is apparent in Marx’s theory of commodity. Here blindness to the exploitation-based provenance of the object one unthinkingly consumes seems precisely the kind of thing Adorno is referring to, and is an example anybody can concretely engage with to bring Adorno’s ideas into their responses to modern social life. Another example would be the subordination of nature to technological imperatives, leading to ecological crisis. Hulatt’s alternative (he rejects the Marx connection as not valid for Adorno) seems to me to derive in part from Adorno’s questionable attachment to Benjamin’s ideas about the “language of names,” the pre-lapsarian language which has an essential relation to what it designates. If one thinks, in contrast, in terms of the “as-structure of understanding” (Heidegger), in which there only ever is the object “as x,” rather than there being the object “x,” the whole notion of identifying “objects with their concepts” (63) becomes an untenable model of what happens in language, because there is no one way in which an object is identified by a concept. Seen this way, the Adorno presented by Hulatt seems to be basing claims about pathologies of the modern world on a questionable philosophical basis, which he too seldom relates to the kind of concrete historical phenomena that lead Adorno to his reflections.

One of the book’s main ideas is summarised as follows: “Art and philosophy share an identical, and demanding, task, namely, to undo the effects of delusive determination—to break through the self-preserving and reifying concept in order to make a form of experience possible in which the phenomenal object and its true mediation are made manifest” (76). Seeing art as having the potential to reveal things in ways that classifying conceptual determinations fail to, is evidently a vital consideration in considering modern pathologies of reason. However, excluding issues of reification and its relationship to commodification in favour of framing the issue epistemologically seems to repeat what I think is a basic misapprehension of the book, which frames too many issues in terms derived from the kind of contemporary epistemologically focused philosophy that Adorno’s work can put in question.

Adorno’s questioning of philosophy mean that, at his best, he draws on material from sociology, history, art, etc., in order to avoid prejudging issues by the adoption of a prior philosophical frame. Hulatt himself explicates a useful way of seeing how Adorno seeks to do this. He cites Adorno: “The crux is what happens in [thought], not a thesis or position—the texture [das Gewebe], not the deductive or inductive course of one-track minds” (87). I may be missing something here, but this idea seems hard to reconcile with the idea of constructing Adorno’s theory of philosophical and aesthetic truth from work which fails to provide such a theory. Hulatt explicates what he terms “performance” in Adorno’s thought: “The truth of the nonidentical is no longer identified with its textual expression. Rather, discursive expression (be it positive or negative) is necessary but not sufficient—it is only the material grounds for the agent’s performance” (103). The result is a sense that such truth has, as Adorno insists, a “temporal core,” illuminating a pressing social or other issue for a subject, even though, qua theoretical claim, it will turn out to be inadequate. In this sense, as Hulatt argues, theory therefore shares much with what happens in art, when it changes how we relate to an aspect of the world without this resulting in a final conceptual determination.

The challenge is to resist the objection that such an approach entails some kind of relativism, because it sees everything in terms of specific contexts, rather than seeking a decisive theoretical answer. The approach can be seen, though, as taking on board something bizarrely absent from so much analytical philosophy in particular, namely a meta-reflection on why that philosophy almost constitutively fails to achieve its notional goals. Theories are produced in great quantities in each domain of philosophy, which are frequently at odds with each other, and which may form the focus of philosophical attention before often quite abruptly disappearing off the radar, or being regarded as decisively refuted. Either this involves a nihilistic sense of the futility of philosophical inquiries, or one seeks to make what happens fit some kind of Hegelian story of the path to philosophical truth through refutation, or one seeks, as Adorno often does, to see how such theories and their failings are also sources of historical and social insight.

John Dewey put it like this: “The distinctive office, problems and subject-matter of philosophy grow out of stresses and strains in the community life in which a given form of philosophy arises, and . . . accordingly, its specific problems vary with the changes in human life that are always going on and that at times constitute a crisis and a turning point in human history.”1 In this sense Hulatt’s attention to “performance” in relation to texts does offer a way of making sense of what he terms Adorno’s “destructive phenomenology” (117), the practice of working through texts where the “performativity of the text derives from its performing, in its rhetorical ‘texture,’ the conceptual insufficiencies (antinomies, contradictions, and the like) that it refers to” (118). If these contradictions are construed in the manner Dewey suggests, conceptual insufficiencies can turn out to be a source of historical and philosophical insight, as Adorno’s readings of Kant show. There is, as Hulatt acknowledges, always a danger of reducing philosophy to sociology and history in such an approach (which Adorno’s approaches to Kant do not always avoid), but its validity resides in the degree to which it generates new illumination of issues that are obscured by dominant ways of thinking. There is no way that philosophy can set out criteria for this in advance, and, as Hulatt insists via Adorno, such illumination depends on “unreduced experience.”

Hulatt wants to take the formal and rhetorical construction of Adorno’s own published texts as enacting this kind of performativity, and parallels this with what happens in engagement with works of art. There is no space here to detail how he seeks to support this claim, but I think too much of what he says depends on the notion of agents as being possessors of concepts which necessarily falsify their object. This keeps the account still within an epistemological frame, and fails to deal with agents as expressive beings who make sense through a whole variety of symbolic forms and practices which cannot all be construed in conceptual terms, and so require a different critical apparatus if they are to be adequately evaluated. He also fails to consider the fact that essentially the same issues that are given a notionally “literary” form in Adorno’s published work appear in a more expository discursive, but also avowedly provisional form in Adorno’s lectures, and, frankly, often make a lot more sense as a consequence.2 Hulatt says that “Adorno quite rightly denies that dialectical philosophy, for example, has a method” (ND, 144–145/146) (218). His response is that “this might lead one to suspect that Adorno’s philosophy cannot be articulated in a settled fashion, and therefore any conspectus of the sort I offered is culpably programmatic” (ibid.). I’m not sure, however, how his defence of his conspectus squares with the following claim: “The philosophical critique of identity thinking hence can at no point be considered a settled matter, but must ever and again be reapplied to each emergent philosophical account or fresh domain of inquiry” (130). The tension between traditional aims of philosophy and the really radical critical aspects of Adorno’s work seems to me one of the reasons Adorno has come back into contemporary debate, but Hulatt’s stance sometimes fails to bring out what that tension reveals about how philosophy should be done.

With respect to art in Adorno’s thinking Hulatt claims: “The blind artistic processes of formation inadvertently constitute social critiques, just because the formal constitution of an aesthetic contradiction will, at the same time, bear socially germane meaning in the completed artwork for the recipient of the artwork” (178). A lot of Adorno’s claims about art tend to be predicated on something like this view, but the view is actually quite questionable. Adorno himself realised at the end of his life that without empirical support such views are problematic: “It is an open question, which can indeed only be answered empirically, whether, to what extent, in what dimensions the social implications revealed in musical content analysis are also grasped by the listeners.”3 I’m afraid I find Hulatt’s overall account of aesthetic truth overly abstract, and reliant on dense theoretical reflection on the basis of a limited number of basic concepts which—and this seems pretty problematic for something which is widely agreed to depend on its very particularity—rarely deals with actual works of art.

Towards the end of the book Hulatt does deal, at times very interestingly, with two major artists, Beethoven and Proust, but here there are also problems that result from the issues I have outlined above. Hulatt cites Adorno in a passage which backs up what he claims about how performance plays a dual role in philosophy and art: “Understanding specific artworks . . . requires an objective experiential reenactment from within in the same sense in which the interpretation of a musical work means its faithful performance” (cit. 186). When he deals with Adorno’s response to a specific artwork, Beethoven’s String Quartet Opus 59 Number 1 in F, in the notes to the never completed Beethoven book, however, there is a paradigmatic illustration of why I find Hulatt’s approach to Adorno questionable. Adorno discusses an interpolated passage in D-flat in the slow movement that, in terms of the conventional construction of the sonata form in which it occurs, has no essential reason for being there. Hulatt considers this passage via Adorno’s reflection on how the convention of sonata form is “violated” because the transition from development to recapitulation is interrupted by the extraneous D-flat passage. Hulatt sees this as “simultaneously a refusal of the epistemic premise of a seamless unity of concept and object” (193).

Even apart from the fact that sonata form even before Beethoven, in Mozart and others, is rarely as straightforwardly unified as seems to be suggested here—in fact quite rigid use of sonata form is more characteristic of Romantic music, like some of Schubert—what is striking is that Hulatt’s analysis is solely concerned with the formal construction of the piece and how the passage disrupts that form, based on the idea of an “epistemic premise.” But Hulatt says nothing about the real reason Adorno talks about this passage, namely that it is one of the most magical and moving passages in all of classical music (or any music, for that matter). Hulatt seems to me to reify the music in order to make a philosophical point, so missing the way in which the sudden glimpse of another world that the passage offers makes a kind of sense that hardly anything else in modern culture does. At his best, in the Mahler book and passages in the Beethoven notes, for example, Adorno is able to present a philosophical vision which does not privilege itself over the art that he is responding to, and so approaches an enacting of philosophical and aesthetic truth that challenges many received approaches to philosophy. Despite his laudable and at times successful aim of connecting Adorno’s view of philosophy and art, Hulatt too often wants to bring Adorno back into a philosophical fold where, in my view, he does not really belong.

Owen Hulatt’s new book, Adorno’s Theory of Philosophical and Aesthetic Truth, examines the relationship between Theodor W. Adorno’s two late works, Negative Dialectics (1966) and Aesthetic Theory (posth. 1970). In both works, Adorno begins with the premise that philosophy and art are no longer assured of their value or purpose in the modern era; their traditional roles as purveyors of truth and beauty are actively challenged by a world increasingly damaged by the events of the twentieth century. Furthermore, philosophy and art stand in an uneasy relationship to one another. Written simultaneously, the two books address the estranged halves of modernity: reason and sensation, knowledge and experience, concept and intuition. For J. M. Bernstein, this separation, beginning with Plato’s expulsion of the poets from the republic, is the basis for art’s alienation from truth.1

Indeed, the impossibility of thinking the union of philosophy and art—and yet the necessity of doing so—is Adorno’s aporetic demand upon thinking. Philosophy and art remain the last bastions of critical thought in a fragmented and alienated social world. Yet, the relationship between philosophy and art, and in turn, between Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory, has hardly been clear in the reception of Adorno’s work. In particular, how philosophy and art relate to one another is a thorny issue because it seems to require a standpoint invalidated by the advent of the linguistic turn and postmetaphysical thinking.2 Adorno’s demand to think the interdependence between art and philosophy has led critics to suggest that it results from an illegitimate premise described variously as the romantic desire to recuperate a lost harmony, a mystical notion of a future utopia in which these two halves would be reunited, or a metaphysics that transfers the traditional concerns of philosophy with the good and the true onto art.

This last reading in particular—art as handmaiden to philosophy—has led to new scholarship about the role of art in Adorno’s thinking, where art does not passively receive the concerns of philosophy but is its active critic, providing a new way to grapple with an alienated rationality.3 Hulatt’s work also begins with a similar stance toward the status of art in Adorno’s thought: What art “seeks to convey resists complete expression in our concepts, in our language—but this is because what it seeks to convey is a critique of and an attack on our concepts” (ix). In this respect, “Artworks are true—and their truth is aimed against the falsity of our way of thinking, and designed to elude capture by that way of thinking” (ix). Hulatt establishes the critical capacity of art within the more general aim of rethinking the relationship between philosophy and art, thus offering a new perspective on Adorno’s work.

Adorno scholarship tends to consist of monographs on either Adorno’s philosophy or his aesthetics. Even more so, the attention to the two poles of Adorno’s thinking has not always been symmetrical, with recent full-length studies of his aesthetics presenting a counterweight to the traditional attention to his philosophy.4 For Hulatt, however, Adorno’s claim that “artworks are true” (ix) or “a form of knowledge” (xvii) challenges the usual division between epistemology and aesthetics, where truth is the domain of epistemology and “mere aesthetic stimulation” (ix) the domain of art. Against this usual picture, Hulatt’s study showcases how both philosophy and art deliver truth to its recipients, albeit with their own peculiarities and characteristics. Furthermore, Hulatt argues that the capacity of philosophy and art to convey truth requires their interdependence. Thus Hulatt explores a neglected facet of Adorno’s thought—the relationship between his two late texts—and remedies a long-standing tendency in Adorno studies to focus on epistemological questions to the neglect of the aesthetic.

Hulatt’s pragmatic reconstruction bridges the gaps in Adorno’s thinking, offers argumentative force to many of Adorno’s assertions, and lends extraordinary clarity to Adorno’s writing. At the same time, Hulatt’s compelling picture of Adorno invites further elaboration. In particular, Hulatt takes up the general context that vexes the relationship between philosophy and art, what he calls Adorno’s “holistic theory of falsity” (94), which seems to push Adorno’s thought into either irrationalism or skepticism. Hulatt qualifies that for Adorno, all of our “assertions are embedded in a larger epistemic context that serves to occlude and obfuscate truth” (94). If this is the case, then the very possibility of critique, and the capacity of philosophy and art to convey truth, is threatened. Hulatt presents a solution to this problem that raises a number of questions.

Holistic falsity, for Hulatt, may create the conditions by which all of our conceptualizations are false, but he argues that it does not completely incapacitate us, or force us to accept a purely negativist or skeptical position with respect to knowledge. Hulatt turns to Adorno’s work to find the resources for a different form of criticism, a partial form of criticism focused on specific incidences of identity thinking rather than identity thinking as a whole (129). Indeed, it is Hulatt’s contention that the falsity of the whole does not paralyze the capacity of philosophy and art to reveal pragmatic truths about our everyday experiences. This approach raises questions about the kind of impact local critique can have on the broader context of falseness. We can turn to Hulatt’s analysis to broach this issue in more detail.

The first two chapters of Adorno’s Theory of Philosophical and Aesthetic Truth reconstruct Adorno’s claim that modern rationality is a form of identity thinking. Hulatt argues that identity thinking originates from a “pragmatic crisis” (25) early humans experience in relation to the natural world. The “primal ‘cry of terror’” (20) ushers humans from the immediate naming of particulars to a conceptual doubling that gives birth to our modern, dialectical notion of conceptuality. Modern rationality permits knowledge of the world beyond the immediate naming of particulars, but it also abstracts, controls, and delimits our knowledge of particulars. It produces identity thinking because it only admits those qualities of the object that do not conflict with the drive for self-preservation.

This is a contentious aspect of Adorno’s thinking since it seems to present a monolithic view of rationality that does not accede with either lived experience, in which we encounter multiple forms of rationality, or with cultures and societies that do not fit the model of enlightenment that Adorno describes. Hulatt also notes that while Adorno offers a compelling account of how basic concepts may have arisen from the drive for self-preservation, “stretching the account to have explanatory force when applied to all concepts . . . seems to entangle Adorno in a genetic fallacy of the first order” (25). Hulatt tackles this problem by reworking Adorno’s phylogenetic account, which extends the self-preservative use of concepts from “primitive man” to contemporary humans, into an ontogenetic account where “‘primitive consciousness’ ceases to refer to a historically fixed human being and instead refers to an early, undifferentiated form of consciousness present in the personal history of each human life” (35). Hulatt argues that child rearing inculcates a self-preservative mode of applying concepts in each individual.

Next, Hulatt must explain why, even if we are pressed into identity thinking in our early encounters with the world, we cannot simply decide to employ our concepts differently. Chapter 2 focuses on how this model of conceptuality at the individual level is compounded by the sociohistorical totality, which Marxist and post-Marxist analyses explain is bound by reification. Typically, the critique of reification posits a false totality such that any form of conceptualizing will always be beholden to identity thinking. Thus, the critique of identity thinking seems to require either an irrational position wholly outside of the reified whole, or a position of extreme negativism or skepticism that can only proceed via the critique of other philosophical positions.

Hulatt argues that Adorno’s theory of reification does not succumb to this problem because it diverges from the Marxist tradition. Marxism accords “rich determination” (59) to reification since it results from a wider social structure that impedes upon the everyday experiences of individuals. In contrast, Adorno’s “thin determination” (61) understands reification to be an epistemological problem, where concepts fail to cover their objects. On both accounts, each person’s life history unfolds within a certain sociohistorical condition that renders our conceptualizations false. But on Adorno’s account, this is not because social structures intervene in our everyday experiences; rather it is because the individual has a propensity for identity thinking that stems from self-preservation, and it is this propensity that acquires broader social force. This move positions Hulatt to show how Adorno’s “theory of holistic falsity” (93) escapes the charges of skepticism or irrationalism.

Indeed, Hulatt argues that we can derive a viable critique of identity thinking from Adorno’s philosophy if we limit its applicability to the pragmatic use of concepts rather than the large-scale context of delusion in which our everyday experiences unfold. For Hulatt, this approach is not inconsistent with Adorno’s own writing. While acknowledging Adorno’s “occasionally brash assertions” (130) about breaking with the falsity of the whole, Hulatt juxtaposes these claims to Adorno’s actual philosophical practice that he argues is relentlessly aimed at particular phenomena (130). Within a totality that is false, Hulatt argues that we can still have particular experiences that are true.

The question thus arises as to how the critique of the particular instances of identity thinking, these flashes of comprehension (99), connect to the falsity of the whole. Hulatt mentions that “the relentless application of his [Adorno’s] method to various domains of inquiry is in aid of a project of continually aiming blows at the fallacious appearance of adequacy in the relation between concept and object, in order to loosen the grip of this delusion” (130). The performative truth that artworks offer, for example, cannot “indict identity thinking in toto” (130), so the effort to undermine identity thinking must be continually renewed as an ongoing project. If the suggestion is that enough instances that reveal the failure of identity thinking at the local level would eventually weaken the capacity of the false whole to maintain itself, then the following questions seek to understand how this process would ensue.

First, in a sociohistorical totality that is false, can the flash experiences of truth be anything more than immediately revelatory? As noted above, Hulatt accords thin determination to Adorno’s reading of reification, which opens the space for critique since it does not view our everyday experiences to be completely mediated by the sociohistorical totality. Yet, Adorno notes in Dialectic of Enlightenment the consequences of a culture industry that prescribes a priori limitations on what we can know: the falsity of the whole severely limits the imaginative capacities of individuals living in a context of delusion. Thus, we can recognize instances of non-identity, but we cannot conceive of life otherwise; the context of delusion robs individuals of the capacity to formulate new regulative ideals. Put another way, the contextualist approach Hulatt endorses permits critique of how concepts govern our everyday practices, but does it allow for a questioning of the norms or ideals that sustain such conceptual practices? In other words, can the critique of local incidences of identity thinking connect with a transformation of the very conditions that produce identity thinking?

Second, can the issue of the false whole be tackled without thinking through the role of metaphysical truth in Adorno’s work? While Hulatt is clear that his inquiry is delimited by the parameters of Adorno’s epistemology, I wonder if the two strands of Adorno’s thinking can be so easily separated. Taking the example of utopia, Hulatt suggests, “it is only the fleeting experience of the nonidentical that is capable of disclosing a truly utopian moment, a moment in which all claims, structures, and entailments are revealed as revisable” (124). Hulatt then applies this epistemological understanding of utopia from Negative Dialectics to Aesthetic Theory. For Hulatt, artworks also employ dialectical constellations and reveal the insufficiency of the concepts they employ, which signifies their utopian moment. But Adorno also writes about utopia in other ways:

But because for art, utopia—the yet-to-exist—is draped in black, it remains in all its mediations recollection; recollection of the possible in opposition to the actual that suppresses it; it is the imaginary reparation of the catastrophe of world history; it is freedom, which under the spell of necessity did not—and may not ever—come to pass.5

The notion of utopia above suggests a capacity of art to reveal truth that is more than the insufficiency of our concepts; rather it is to enact an imaginative function that underwrites the necessity for critique. That is, would we engage in particular incidences of identity critique if we were not motivated by the possibility of something other than the false totality? And how can the thought of something other enter into Adorno’s epistemology without falling into one of the illegitimate standpoints mentioned earlier—mysticism, negative theology, and so forth?

Third, by thinking about philosophical and aesthetic truth in terms of their capacity for the partial criticism of local incidences of identity thinking, are art and aesthetics reduced to philosophy? Hulatt anticipates this criticism in a footnote, but I would like to consider why this might appear to be the case. Hulatt begins by developing Adorno’s epistemology and conceptually unpacks some of the important terms that will figure in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory; this delays the discussion of art to the final chapters. In chapters 5 and 6, Hulatt applies the epistemological account he derives from Dialectic of Enlightenment and Negative Dialectics to art, but the reciprocal role of aesthetics and art in the Dialectic of Enlightenment and Negative Dialectics is not discussed. For example, wouldn’t Odysseus’s encounter with the Sirens, which pertains precisely to the kind of knowledge that art possesses, contribute to our understanding of art’s irreducibility to philosophy? In other words, what role do art and aesthetics play in enabling the philosophical critique of rationality?

With these questions I invite further discussion about Hulatt’s invaluable addition to Adorno studies.