Communication and Expression: Adorno's Philosophy of Language (Founding Critical Theory) - Softcover

Hogh, Philip

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1783487283 ISBN 13: 9781783487288

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016

Synopsis

The linguistic turn in critical theory has been routinely justified with the claim that Adorno’s philosophy is trapped within the limits of consciousness philosophy. Yet Adorno’s own philosophy of language has not yet been fully and systematically examined in its own right. Philip Hogh argues that it was in fact the linguistic turn in critical theory that prevented a thorough analysis of Adorno's philosophy of language. Here he reconstructs Adorno’s philosophy of language and presents it as a coherent theory that demands to be understood as an important contribution to contemporary linguistic philosophy. By analysing all the key concepts in Adorno’s thought (subjectivity, epistemology, social theory and aesthetics), and comparing them to Robert Brandom’s material inferentialism, John McDowell’s theory of conceptual experience and Jürgen Habermas’ theory of communicative action, this book presents Adorno’s theory as an important contribution to contemporary philosophy of language in its own right.

About this title

About the Author

Philip Hogh teaches philosophy at the Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg, Germany, where he is also a member of the Adorno Research Centre.

Antonia Hofstätter,the translator, is a graduate student in philosophy at the University of Brighton, UK.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Communication and Expression

Adorno's Philosophy of Language

By Philip Hogh, Antonia Hofstatter

Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.

Copyright © 2017 Philip Hogh and Antonia Hofstätter
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78348-728-8

Contents

Preface, 
1 Introduction, 
2 A Natural History of Language as Second Nature, 
The Concept of Natural History, 
Human Beings, Animals, and Language, 
Lorenzer's Specifications, 
Anthropological Theories of the Origin of Language, 
Language Genesis, 
Language as Second Nature, 
Society as Second Nature, 
Language, Society, and Freedom, 
3 A Theory of the Name, 
The Hope of the Name, 
Cunning and the Spell of the Name, 
Proper Names, 
Prohibitions, 
In Search of Music, 
4 Outlines of a Theory of Meaning, 
Logic, 
The Outset of a Theory of Meaning, 
The Surplus of the Concept, 
Thinking and Speaking, Identifying, and Judging, 
Analytic and Synthetic Judgements, 
Language and World (I), 
Habit and Determinacy, 
Synthesis and Copula, 
Language and World (II), 
Two Types of Normativity, 
Semantic Constellations, 
Objective Constellations, 
Constellatory Speaking, 
Scientific Language, 
Ordinary Language, 
Philosophical Language, 
Linguistic Meaning in Art, 
The Speaking of Language and the Speaking of the Subject, 
5 Communication, 
The Sign System of Language, 
Signs, Langue, and Parole in Saussure, 
Reified Language, 
Impoverished Experience and Suffering, 
Between Subject and Object, 
Between Subjects, 
The Priority of the Object in Communication, 
The Categorical Imperative in Communication, 
Aesthetic Critique of Communication, 
A Conversation Worthy of Human Beings, 
Communication as Reconciliation?, 
6 Adorno's Philosophy of Language Today, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 
About the Author, 

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

'Actually, philosophy that is not philosophy of language cannot even be conceived of today.' What might surprise philosophically minded readers about this sentence is not so much its content as its author: Theodor W. Adorno. More than fifty years after this sentence was uttered, the power of philosophies influenced by the linguistic turn, which presumed that all the problems of philosophy could be solved by linguistic analysis, has significantly declined. This is indicated not least by the fact that the linguistic turn was followed by several other turns. Language, however, is still one of the most important fields of philosophy. Whilst not all the problems of philosophy can be solved entirely through reflections on language, one cannot solve philosophical problems fully without reflecting on language. Adorno's utterance is thus not to be understood as a completely dated expression, one of times long past, but rather as an indicator of a philosophical sensitivity to language that has not yet received the attention it deserves.

The irritation sparked by the association of the citation with its author is primarily caused by the fact that Adorno's philosophy has been interpreted in many different ways — for instance, as dialectical negativism (Theunissen), as Freudian-Marxian materialism (Schmidt), as an outdated philosophy of consciousness (Habermas), or even as theory-turned-aesthetics (Bubner) — but never as a novel and original contribution to the philosophy of language. The interest in Adorno's philosophy of language has heightened significantly in recent years, particularly so in the English-speaking world; yet neither there nor in the German-speaking world, where there has been only sporadic publications on Adorno since the 1980s — or elsewhere in the philosophical world — has there emerged a differentiated and interpretatively diverse field of research.

One of the motivations to engage with Adorno's philosophy of language has been to refute — or at least limit — Habermas's claim about the exhaustion of the paradigm of philosophy of consciousness within Adorno's philosophy, which served as a justification for the linguistic and pragmatic turn in critical theory. Almost every text begins with a presentation and a critique of the consequences that Habermas's critique had for the reception of Adorno's philosophy of language. This move is hard to criticise. After all, it is doubtless correct that the model of critical theory that Habermas develops in his Theory of Communicative Action, which is essentially a language and action-theoretical account, has somewhat obstructed the view on Adorno's work on the philosophy of language. Since its publication, Habermas's work has set the direction for critical theorists who want to engage with language. The one exception concerns the sphere of aesthetics and philosophy of art, where Adorno's work on language has long been regarded as an important point of reference. Habermas's diagnosis of the differentiation of Adorno's work into theoretical philosophy regressed into mere exercise, into a practical philosophy that could not ground its normative foundations without lapsing into performative contradictions, and into aesthetics which attributes cognition (Erkenntnischarakter) to art, has become a template for the reception of the latter's work. Adorno's philosophy of language, which, from Habermas's standpoint, is conducted in terms of a philosophy of consciousness, falls between the cracks if it is regarded as paradigmatically different to Adorno's philosophy as a whole.

Hence, a temporary bracketing of Habermas's judgement seems appropriate if one is to approach Adorno's philosophy of language properly today. Habermas's theory should not conversely be rejected altogether, thereby concealing the existing accordance between Adorno and Habermas. The point is simply that in giving a coherent representation of Adorno's philosophy of language, Habermas's criticisms of Adorno must also be put to the test. To date, however, the move to analyse Adorno's philosophy of language outside of the Habermasian lens has paradoxically led almost exclusively to varying collections of different motifs and aspects of the former.

In this book, I have made productive the certainly undeniable difficulties which a mediation of these existing moments into a coherent theory involves. Indeed, Adorno's extant work on language has a fragmentary character, and he forwent entirely any prolonged, systematic philosophical study of language. On the other hand, one finds in every area of Adorno's philosophy a central place for reflections of the philosophy of language, which makes it possible to see how these reflections relate to each other.

It is here that the question of Adorno's 'philosophy of language' suggests itself. Initiated by Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, the linguistic turn set out to solve problems confronting the philosophical tradition after the decline of the persuasive force of metaphysics, by means of analyses of linguistic forms. In Wittgenstein's words, the primary aim was to dissolve the bewitchment of our understanding by the resources of our language, which drove it to metaphysical speculations. The aim was thus to help reason understand that words were not simply names for objects. For instance, the meaning of a predicate of a sentence must not be equated with the object that the nominalisation of the predicate denotes. The critique of metaphysics by early analytic philosophy did not confront the metaphysical tradition on its own grounds, but tried to show, by means of logical analyses, the senselessness of metaphysical statements, or to expose the latter as pseudo-statements. According to Carnap, pseudo-statements appear in two different forms: 'either they contain a word which is erroneously believed to have meaning, or the constituent words are meaningful, yet are put together in a counter-syntactical way, so that they do not yield a meaningful statement.'

Philosophy of language, in this sense, is not a singular philosophical region amongst others, such as social philosophy or epistemology, but determines the method with which philosophical problems should be solved, as a matter of principle. Since non-linguistic reality appears to be approachable only through linguistic means that stand independently of it, it is the primary task of philosophy that seeks to assess the truth of reality to focus on analyses of linguistic forms, in and through which such knowledge is gained. According to Wolfgang Detel, analytic philosophy is about how linguistic statements from a certain field are constituted and how they can be distinguished from the statements of other fields. It thus differs from Hegelian philosophy, for instance, where the goal is to conceptually grasp the whole of linguistic and non-linguistic reality.

One of the consequences of this early analytic approach was to determine language as an autonomous form and to separate it through philosophical analysis from non-linguistic reality. Whilst linguistic statements thus refer to non-linguistic reality, concrete non-linguistic reality does not have to be part of linguistic analysis to answer questions as to why linguistic statements have meaning and how the constitution of such meaning is to be determined. In this, however, analytic philosophy, which initially started as a critique of metaphysics, experienced a return to metaphysics: the linguistic form becomes radically independent of the world and of the linguistic practices of human beings if the identity of all of its elements is understood as being constituted purely immanent to language. As Georg Bertram, David Lauer, Jasper Liptow, and Martin Seel have shown, early analytic philosophy meets at this point, with the early linguistic structuralism of Saussure and others. In structuralism, language, understood as the system 'langue', is separated from the linguistic practice 'parole'. Differentially constituted linguistic values are never determined by something outside language. Yet they are applied in linguistic practices, which take place in space and time. In this way, language becomes a closed, self-constitutive system, the validity of which is presupposed by the utterances of the speaker.

It becomes apparent, however, that Adorno does not share this approach to language: 'Language is crucial to philosophy. Philosophical problems are largely problems of its language and the abstraction of language from its matter — as one finds it in the so called positivist sciences — does not apply in the same way to philosophy.' In understanding philosophy as language criticism, Adorno's philosophical approach shares some common ground with the analytic tradition. Yet we can determine at least two points where they can be distinguished from one another. Whilst Adorno claims that 'all philosophical critique is today possible as the critique of language,' this idea is based on a notion of language as a historical practice in which the real life of human beings is sedimented. It is not understood as an autonomous form that would remain untouched by life: 'Through language history wins a share in truth. Words are never merely signs of what is thought under them, but rather history erupts into words.'

If philosophy, as the citation at the beginning of this text suggests, is only possible as philosophy of language, and if critique is only possible as language criticism, philosophy of language or language criticism cannot be construed as a methodological principle that could be applied to just any object. If it is the task of language to 'raise objects to the level of experience,' language is not outside objects, but is itself part of the historical sphere that it raises to experience. For Adorno, doing philosophy of language means interpretatively investigating the socio-historical state of subjectivity with reference to the linguistic expressions of this subjectivity. This enables him to determine the inadequacy of ordinary language practice as well as its non-realised possibilities: 'I believe that one of the crucial points on which the theory I advocate ... differs from the currently prevalent one is my view that the historical-philosophical fate of language, is at the same time the historical-philosophical fate of the subject matter to which it refers.'

It follows from this historical and dynamic conception of language that the criteria of Adorno's language criticism differ from those of analytic philosophers. Adorno does not reject metaphysical statements and linguistic utterances, in general, because they prove senseless or because they are mere 'expression of an attitude towards life' without theoretical bases. Even the most senseless statement contains traces of socio-historical sedimentation. Even sentences that Carnap regards as senseless let one experience something about the social conditions of which they are a part. This is why Adorno understands language as a socio-historical product, even in its theoretical guise as an autonomous form or as a system of signs. From Adorno's perspective, the reduction of language to a system of signs ordering the linguistic practice of human beings and, thus, to something that is merely applied by them, constitutes a language-theoretical reflection of the state of capitalist society that is not even transparent to itself. The formalisation of language to a system of signs that would be independent of historical dynamics and non-linguistic reality is a language-philosophical expression of an overautonomous society. What presents itself as a system of signs only exists because it is constituted by the linguistic practices of its speakers; what presents itself as natural — capitalist society — only exists because it is constituted by the labour of its members. At the same time, the formalisation of language into a system of signs covers up its socio-historical base. Formalised, de-historicised, and de-socialised language thus presents itself as nature.

The task of an Adornian philosophy of language is to dissolve the appearance of autonomy maintained by a conception of language as a system of signs, by way of re-integrating language into the socio-historical life of human beings. 'Should philosophy as scientific semantics desire to translate speech into logic, then it is left to it as speculative philosophy to bring logic to speech.' For Adorno, translating language into logic is characteristic of analytic philosophy and of the work of Husserl, and it is thus that they become the focus of his language criticism. Here, linguistic expressions are investigated to find out whether they are used in accordance with logical forms. In this process, the socio-historical sphere, which Adorno conceives as the content of language, disappears. Accordingly, the translation of language into logic has to be understood in terms of a reduction. Claiming that the remaining task of speculative philosophy is to give voice to logic, Adorno thus critiques the disappearance of the socio-historical sphere within language, as conceptualised by formalistic language theories. His critique does not present language as a system of signs but as a force field in which socio-historical life has become sedimented: 'The real life process of society is not something sociologically smuggled into philosophy through associates. It is rather the core of the contents of logic itself.'

From an Adornian perspective, one could argue that although early analytic philosophy of language identifies the bewitchment of intelligence (Verstand) by means of language, analytic philosophy itself has become bewitched by means of society furnishing the latter with the appearance of autonomy, thus de-socialising and de-historicising it into second nature. With reference to this problem, Hermann Schweppenhäuser claims that

this is reflected in Wittgenstein's famous definition which states that the use of a word within language was its meaning. However, the meaning of the use itself, its translinguistic sense and purpose, is not taken into consideration but is fended off by an immanent attempt to arrest a concept of language.

Whilst it is questionable as to whether Schweppenhäuser's critique of Wittgenstein is accurate, given that the Philosophical Investigations present language as socially embedded — a fact that Schweppenhäuser omits to mention — his claim that linguistic meaning can be adequately understood only if it is developed not merely 'immanently' but rather out of a tension between linguistic immanence and linguistic transcendence, expresses the core of Adorno's philosophy of language: 'Whilst we cannot but speak through language, that is, cannot but speak in a way that is mediated by language, language itself, as a phenomenon amongst others, is part of the whole of reality. Language constitutes a moment of reality and must not be hypostatised with regards to it.'

Against the backdrop of Bertram et al.'s understanding of twentieth-century philosophy of language, Adorno's language-philosophical approach becomes more comprehensible. Language's gaining of autonomy with regard to the world, as developed by both early analytic philosophy and the early linguistic structuralism espoused by Bertram et al., has led to problems on the latter accounts. It is impossible to say how an autonomous form can impact on and be valid for empirical reality, if it is not, at the same time, part of that world. This notion of language has been exposed to criticism in debates surrounding the abovementioned philosophical positions. These positions, which Bertram et al. regard as formalistic, represent from Adorno's perspective a reified understanding of language as a system of signs. The critique of formalism, which, according to Bertram et al., is shared by a range of different theorists, such as (the late) Wittgenstein, Davidson, McDowell, Derrida, and Merleau-Ponty, has as its aim a revived understanding of language as part of the world and not in unmoving opposition to it. This is where the critique of formalism meets Adorno's philosophy of language. Bertram et al. coin the term 'postformalism' to refer to the critique of formalism as conducted by the above-mentioned theorists.

Hence, Adorno's critique of language as an autonomous form, that is, as a system of signs, by no means represents an isolated perspective; rather, it contains themes that can be found in similar and divergent forms in other contemporary philosophical approaches. In contrast to the postformalist positions discussed by Bertram et al., Adorno's philosophy of language stands out on the basis of its emphasis on the historical dimension of language and its social critical conception of language criticism. I do not understand the Adornian project of letting reified language speak again, that is, of transforming it back into a medium proper to human beings in and through which they can express and communicate their experiences,as a marginal part of his philosophy. Rather, if language is understood as a medium in which socio-historical life is sedimented in different ways, a philosophy of language, true to this insight, would have to thematise all significant areas of such a life. The latter point is of particular importance, since a closer look at Adorno's writing reveals that language plays a crucial role in every part of his work, reflecting the role of language within socio-historical life.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1783487283
• ISBN 13: 9781783487288
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 298