ND Guide Pages 15-66

Argument and Experience 39-42 Immersion into the particular, dialectical immanence raised to an extreme, requires as one of its moments the freedom to also step out of the object, the freedom which the claim of identity cuts off. Hegel would have abjured this; he relied upon the complete mediation in objects. In the praxis of cognition, the resolution of the irresolvable, the moment of such transcendence of thought comes to light in that solely as a micrology does it employ macrological means. The demand for committalness [Verbindlichkeit] without system is that for thought-models. These are not of a merely monadological sort. The model strikes the specific and more than the specific, without dissolving it into its more general master-concept. To think philosophically is so much as to think in models; negative dialectics is an ensemble of model-analyses.

The micrology is one of the basic themes of Adorno's work: the notion that the royal road to the macrology, the totality, the largest of all possible things, is through the smallest of all things, the micrology. Theory has to do more than just work its way through the social reality it wishes to analyze, it has to do so in a respectful manner, doing justice to what it's analyzing; if it doesn't, then it turns into precisely what it criticizes, i.e. an instrumental ideology, no better than a ruthless Microsoft marketing scheme or an IMF report outlining yet another dose of cruel, vicious neoliberal orthodoxy to be inflicted on the long-suffering Third World. But simply rejecting these latter won't do the trick, either - theory has to think through the system stringently enough to do justice to it, by identifying the sources of resistance which lie buried in it. The "model" is Adorno's name for the micropolitics of the concept; it's a provisional thing, subject to change, designed to be hooked up with other models, and thereby very gradually assemble an ensemble of models around the thing being investigated. It's worth noting that Adorno's notion of the ensemble comes mighty close to Sartre's notion of a radicalized or revolutionary seriality in the late 1960s, where some social event transpires and unites previously divided groups around some new project or utopian vision (e.g. May 1968 or Prague Spring, where the students, citizens and workers of Paris and Prague rose up in rebellion against their respective Cold War elites). You could argue that Adorno ingeniously pushes Sartre's notion towards its theoretical content.

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Substantiality and Method 57-58 Objectively, however, the whole which is expressed by theory is contained within the particular to be analyzed, not first through the cognizing subject. The mediation of both is itself substantive, that through the social totality. It is however also formal due to the abstract nomothetism [Gesetzmaessigkeit] of the totality itself, that of exchange. Idealism, which distilled its absolute Spirit out of this, encrypted something true at the same time, that this mediation encounters phenomena as a compulsory mechanism; this lurks behind the so-called constitution-problem. Philosophical experience does not have this universal immediately, as appearance, but as abstractly as it objectively is. It is constrained towards the exit of the particular, without forgetting what it does not have, but knows. Its path is doubled, similar to the Heraclitean one, the upwards and the downwards. While it assures itself of the real determination of the phenomena through its concept, it cannot profess this ontologically, as what is true in itself. It is fused with what is untrue, with the repressive principle, and this lessens even its epistemological dignity. It forms no positive telos in which cognition would halt. The negativity of the universal solidifies for its part the cognition into the particular as that which is to be rescued. "The only thoughts which are true are those which do not understand themselves." [Adorno quotes himself, from Minima Moralia] In their inalienably general elements, all philosophy, even those with the intention of freedom, carries along the unfreedom in which that of society is prolonged. It has the compulsion in itself; however this latter alone protects it from regression into caprice. Thinking is capable of critically cognizing the compulsory character immanent to it; its own inner compulsion is the medium of its emancipation.

This amazing passage borrows extensively from Adorno's contemporary, Jean-Paul Sartre, and specifically what Sartre called the progressive-regressive method, the notion that you can trace the development of a given historical object, work of art, event or what have you back to its roots (say, the way the American children's cartoons of the 1950-1970s innovated the basic visual forms which the Nintendo videogames of the 1980s would turn into a multinational content) or forwards to the future (say, the way that the function of harmony in big band jazz went into structural decline during the era of bebop, thanks to the triumph of the instrumental soloist). Again, note the importance Adorno gives to thinking through the totality: because everything in market societies, the kind we currently live in, is so heavily saturated by capital (whether as advertising, money, the need to earn a living, etc. - Adorno brackets this as "nomothetism", which refers to the rule of abstract legal definitions and equivalences), theory has to look that totality straight in the eye, to track down the mediations of the marketplace, to ask what they're doing, why they're doing it, and who benefits (as well as who doesn't). Theory has the power to grapple with the total system, but only by acknowledging that this system exists, that theory doesn't have all the answers in a ready-made box, but has to be willing to get its hands dirty, and directly grapple with the products, commodities and appearances of that system.

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Thing, Language, History 61-63 How to think otherwise than this has its distant and shadowy Ur-model in languages, in the names which do not categorically overreach the thing, admittedly at the price of their cognitive function. Undiminished cognition wishes that which one has been already drilled to renounce, and what the names which are too close to such obscure; resignation and deception complete one another ideologically. Idiosyncratic exactness in the choice of words, as if they should name the thing, is not the least of the reasons that portrayal [Darstellung] is essential to philosophy. The cognitive grounds for such insistence of expression before tode ti [Greek: individual thing, this-here] is its own dialectic, its conceptual mediation in itself; it is the point of attack for comprehending what is nonconceptual in it. For the mediation in the midst of what is non-conceptual is no remainder of a complete subtraction, nor is it something which would refer to the bad infinity of such procedures. On the contrary, the mediation is the hyle [Greek: primary matter] of its implicit history.

Here, Adorno is defining the importance of cognition (or what we call nowadays theorization). To say anything worthwhile, cognition, a.k.a. theory, always has to reach beyond itself, into what isn't cognized, what is unknown or not yet theorized, and it has to use mediations to accomplish this, to unlock the historical potential or material bound up in the object in question. That object could be almost anything, from the meaning of a political event, the significance of an artwork, the role of a theoretical concept. Note further that you can't simply impose the mediations on the object; rather, one must be sensitive to what the materials are trying to tell us. It's the object which speaks, in whatever language or medium is at hand, and we have to attune our sensors to its particular codes.

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Thing, Language, History 61-63 What negative dialectics drives through its hardened objects is the possibility which their reality has betrayed, and yet which gleams from each one of these. Yet even in the most extreme efforts to express the history congealed in the things in language, the words used for this remain concepts. Their precision is a surrogate of the selfness of the thing, never wholly present; a gap yawns between it and what it wants to conjure. Thus the dregs of caprice and relativity in the choice of words as well as in portrayal [Darstellung] generally. Even in Benjamin concepts have a tendency of hiding their conceptuality in an authoritarian manner. Only concepts can fulfill what the concept hinders. Cognition is a trôsas iasęta [Greek: wounded healing]. The determinate failure of all concepts necessitates the citation of others; therein originate those constellations, into which alone something of the hope of the Name has passed.

This passage links theory, which has to cognize whatever history is bound up in its objects, with aesthetics and aesthetic cognition. The utopian realm of aesthetics is in this sense the crucial corrective on the stories the objects are telling us; those stories are limited, in the sense that they explain why something happened and how. But they can't tell us what might happen in the future, nor what possibilities are lurking in the objects all around us. Put another way, the progression named by the title of this section, from the thing, to its specialized code or language, and finally to its history, has to be precisely matched, step for step, by a general aesthetics of the thing, a much more specialized aesthetics of the code or language, and finally a super-specialized aesthetics of the historical particularity or constellation. Where things seem most general, theory must think specifically, and where things seem most specific, theory must think generally.

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