Adorno and Pessoa: The Antinomies of Tragedy
In his Spengler essay, admired by radicals and reactionaries alike, Theodor Adorno explained what he saw as the fatal flaw in the arch-conservative’s worldview,
In a world of brutal and oppressed life, decadence becomes the refuge of a potentially better life by renouncing its allegiance to this one and to its culture, its crudeness, and its sublimity. The powerless, who at Spengler’s command are to be thrown aside and annihilated by history, are the negative embodiment within the negativity of this culture of everything which promises, however feebly, to break the dictatorship of culture and put an end to the horror of prehistory. In their protest lies the only hope that fate and power will not have the last word. What can oppose the decline of the west is not a resurrected culture but the utopia that is silently contained in the image of its decline.
Because throughout his career, it was that hope which kept Adorno tied, if not to the fate of Humanity, but to the fate of actually existing humans (and other animals, especially wombats). It is his hope which made him the unsurpassed participant-observer: acutely empathetic and inevitably, always disappointed. Indeed one might fairly take from Adorno that it is a duty, a categorical imperative even, to be miserable. The reason another Marxist, György Lukács, spoke of the Institut für Sozialforschung’s alumni as having permanently checked-into the Grand Hotel Abyss. Lukács however, for all the usefulness of his concepts, remains helplessly optimistic (a key distinction and one we shall return to), and therefore unworthy.
It is here we encounter the second of my heroes. Adorno rejected the assumption, buried deep with Western thought, that the ascendency of Reason would alone solve the problems which have eternally plagued us. As did the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa, who during one agonised moment wrote,
The generation I belong to was born into a world where those with a brain as well as a heart couldn’t find any support. The destructive work of previous generations left us a world that offered no security in the religious sphere, no guidance in the moral sphere, and no tranquillity in the political sphere. We were born into the midst of metaphysical anguish, moral anxiety and political disquiet. Inebriated with objective formulas, with the mere methods of reason and science, the generations that preceded us did away with the foundations of the Christian faith, for their biblical criticism – progressing from textual to mythological criticism – reduced the gospels and the earlier scriptures of the Jews to a doubtful heap of myths, legends and mere literature, while their scientific criticism gradually revealed the mistakes and ingenuous notions of the gospels’ primitive ‘science’. At the same time, the spirit of free inquiry brought all metaphysical problems out into the open, and with them all the religious problems that had to do with metaphysics. Drunk with a hazy notion they called ‘positivism’, these generations criticised all morality and scrutinised all rules of life, and all that remained from the clash of doctrines was the certainty of none of them and the grief over there being no certainty.
The Book of Disquiet
The antithesis of Lukács’ prognosis in other words. For both Adorno and Pessoa adopted the basic philosophical perspective articulated by Schopenhauer (“We’re in a tremendous mess”), and later enriched by Nietzsche (“We’re in a tremendous mess!”). We are spit out upon a trash heap, given a set of commitments we did not choose and no one in their right mind ever would. But it is denying that base reality which would be true folly. Although pessimists are frequently accused of hating the world, the truth is very much worse: we consider it tragic.
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Before proceeding, a note on tragedy. This has to be emphasised, because more and more are taking the false conflation of pessimism with nihilism as given. Although not mutually exclusive, one need not imply the other. What separates the tragically pessimistic view, from the void of nihilism, is that the former is full of feeling, genuine concern and often despair at our current state and its course. It is an acknowledgment that things ought to be better, but on a variable scale likely will not or certainly cannot. No one with capacity could read Adorno on the Shoah or Pessoa on loneliness without being moved. Their efforts to convey suffering are not based in indifference, nor is there a hint of perverse enjoyment. So let’s dispense with these attempts to needlessly debase the word.
Their shared sense of tragedy does not see our two guides take the same path, however. As Pessoa explained, the type of rationality he saw as fruitful is an echo of the past, hardly a gift of the Enlightenment (which remains the basic Marxian claim). It is Giacomo Leopardi’s idea of small-r reason, embedded and corresponding to the fluctuations of nature. It is conservative.
Seeking a clear encapsulation of Pessoa’s politics would be futile. More multitude than man he (they) is far too interesting to be boxed into our crude typologies of party politics - he had seventy fully-fledged personas.
A society so undisciplined in its cultural foundations could obviously not help but be a victim, politically, of its own chaos, and so we woke up to a world eager for social innovations, a world that gleefully pursued a freedom it didn’t grasp and a progress it had never defined.
In the face of the gathering storm of Progress, one could conceivably see Pessoa favouring some version of the “monastic option”. Not unlike what was done to keep the flicker of learning alive in the aftermath of Roman rule, this endeavour would seek to save what is most worthy about Western civilisation: its incomparable literary achievements. Upon some fortified hill, amongst the tomes, fine liquor and cut glass, he would be seated, outwardly content. As the terminal ruckus erupted outside, he would day-dream.
I’ve never aspired to be more than a dreamer. I paid no attention to those who spoke to me of living. I’ve always belonged to what isn’t where I am and to what I could never be. Whatever isn’t mine, no matter how base, has always had poetry for me. The only thing I’ve loved is nothing at all. The only thing I’ve desired is what I couldn’t even imagine. All I asked of life is that it go on by without my feeling it. All I demanded of love is that it never stop being a distant dream. In my own inner landscapes, all of them unreal, I’ve always been attracted to what’s in the distance, and the hazy aqueducts – almost out of sight in my dreamed landscapes – had a dreamy sweetness in relation to the rest of the landscape, a sweetness that enabled me to love them.
Whereas others might see the need to build up the object of their love: loving a woman by engaging in mutual development; a garden through obsessive cultivation; the love of nation by seeking to radically “improve” it. Love for Pessoa is tragic as it is the recognition of something entirely other, out there and best kept there. (The rationale against every impulse to uproot concrete blooms.) To seek and change it/her/him/them/the world, even by intermingling with this Other, reveals an urge to possess. The genuine lover knows better. To love is to crave from afar: empathetic, unsympathetic, forever unconsummated. Nature is parts without a whole. He likely died a virgin.
It is worth recalling the Portuguese word translated as “disquiet” in the title of his magnum opus also means restlessness, and if we could identify one permanency through all of the transitions it is this. A grey figure who enjoyed his own company exactly because there was so much there. Somewhat surprisingly, for one brimming with creative agitation and overflowing with imaginaries, he hardly left Lisbon while an adult. From his room he saw the whole of the Moon, and discovered the planetary consciousness reflected was not easily appreciated. At least not in his lifetime, nor by the eyes of new nature.
That primal nature of ancient man, and of the savage and uncivilised peoples, is no longer our nature; but habituation and reason have created in us a different nature; which we have, and will have forever, in the place of the first. It was not in the beginning natural for man to procure death voluntarily: but nor was it natural to desire it. Today both things are natural; that is, in conformity with our new nature.
Leopardi
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Pessoa was an exile in his own home, Adorno was one forced out by modernity’s take on barbarism. The following was written as the Nazi war-machine raged,
In the most general sense of progressive thought, the Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant.
First-time readers of Dialectic of Enlightenment, his co-authored masterpiece, could be mistaken for thinking it is a skillful attempt to make reactionary arguments palatable to a leftist audience. From the get-go Adorno and Horkheimer unload such a relentless assault on the 20th century that one may indeed conclude the old guard had the truth of it. But it would be an error to assume their criticism results from nostalgia. Where Pessoa was politically quietist, Adorno was revolutionary pessimist. For all the despair, there is hope.
Optimism, surely the worst pose of modernity, is in fundamental opposition to hope. As a category it may be understood as inextricably tied to Christianity - Christ’s raison d’etre - but hope today is active, speculative, while optimism is faith-based. If we are to depend on Christian analogues, optimism brings to mind institutional Catholicism after it had been whipped into submission by the emerging nation state. There, cowering and weighed down by gold, it sat waiting patiently for the Second Coming, the ushering in of a new age where things would be made right; so right they may regain some agency. Only, in the modern mind, it is vague appeals to technology or “human ingenuity” which justify passivity. Just hold on there, gadgets or nebulous Genius will see us through. “Do not for a moment go using that mind of yours to conjure up new political arrangements; however, that would be entirely counterproductive… and, do you know what? All this talk of empowering people suggests you may be in possession of the Woke Mind Virus. Please submit yourself to re-education by social media algorithm.”
Anti-political to its core, optimism preemptively rejects escape routes or altering course because nothing is structurally wrong, and besides, things can only get better. This is not Adorno. Hardly a conventional Marxist (he is quoted as saying the old man dreamt of turning the world into an enormous workhouse), Adorno’s politics remain undeniably radical. He understood better than most, including the majority of contemporary leftists, the dangers of totality – of an “administered world”.
It can not be said that any particular humans call the shots, the overarching determining factor is a mechanistic, instrumental reason. A way of thinking which de-contextualizes and subordinates whatever, be it conscious or inert, to the immediate demands of self-preservation: something that has become a way to not think. The logic of machines is the determining factor and society begins to resemble one; meaning even dissent follows prescription. (Curiously the conclusions of the Frankfurt School found themselves echoed in the otherwise very different Lewis Mumford, coiner of Megamachine.)
In a strange way the difficult to categorise, occasionally sinister Alain de Benoist, with his emphasis on plurality and the needs of the unorthodox, is a better student of Adorno than the dullards marching toward World Revolution (a long old march, thankfully).
A thoroughgoing critic of the Temple of Reason: The world is not just mad. It is mad and rational as well. Adorno nonetheless emphasised that a new type of self-doubting rationality was needed to see civilisation through the present conjuncture. The prospects of this critical theory catching on was another story.
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It is seldom acknowledged by leftist readers just how dark this bourgeois thinker can himself be. Because integral to his analysis is the near-inescapability of some of our determining contradictions. We lack the most basic moral heuristics. The modern world is too complicated to rely on a simplistic consequentialism, moderns either too delusional or too stricken by overwhelming complexity to know what might be “right”. And in a world which so masterfully cloaks its unfreedom, how can people today possibly conceive of genuine liberty? The tyrannies of earlier centuries at least had the decency to make a show of the iron fist, and being manifest one could play act its opposite. Today the public is bombarded with positivity and quick-fixes, and lulled into a manic stupor have given up on imagining a future. How would one even go about shaking them out of it, when so many have been trained to believe fluorescently-lit aisles chock-full of baby vomit colours and dada sloganeering is what is meant by freedom?
Adorno’s most useful insight into the culture industry was that its function is not escapism. Rather than fantastic new worlds, full of imaginative possibilities, it reinforces the broken and sick values of the status quo. Limiting the horizon, it comforts (and chides) with an unspoken, “it is what it is”.
So while Adorno argues illusion has put up a barrier to the future, Pessoa asks with his cacophony of voices, “why not recruit illusion into the service of the reality’s discontents?” With the stories and dreamscapes and the music beloved by both.
On the road halfway between faith and criticism stands the inn of reason. Reason is faith in what can be understood without faith, but it’s still a faith, since to understand presupposes that there’s something understandable.
All these dreams, with all their layers, what’s one more? One which, unlike imposed ideologies, you may have conscious mastery over. (Perhaps social constructivism is the one constant in the human arsenal.) Damaged, splinter in eye, Adorno stuck to looking horror straight in its increasingly aloof face. He held out, undoubtedly influenced by his friend Walter Benjamin, seeking a break in Historical Time where whips were laid aside and limbs could be reattached. Guilt surely tinged these reflections.
It is no surprise that both men turned to aphoristic writing, particularly when at their most personal. It reflected the transience all conscious beings sometimes feel, but has come to define the human condition in the age of anxiety.
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We see with the “progress” under interrogation mass disillusionment. Of course, as we have also seen, the vacuum is promptly filled in with new fantasies: of democracy as the be-all-and-end-all, indistinguishable from unfettered commercialism and the bourgeois “sovereign individual” understood as birthright. Not the most life-enriching thoughts to ever grace primate brains. Key influences on both men – Adorno’s life-long collaborator Horkheimer, and Leopardi respectively – were highly cognizant of the myths which helped sustain peoples of the ancient world. Accordingly, the societies of premodernity had an objective conception of the universe (think more pragmatic than analytic). Their members had a logos, a purpose – life in the bios sense – and were bound to the many threads of communal and animal life, to say nothing of the seasons, the gods, the very mountains.
It was not perfect, after all most moved on. But something those ancient communities could provide, and conversely the modern world has resolutely failed to, is the illusion of control. All moderns feel that bodily unease, that sinking feeling that all is “up in the air”. Of being a mere, trembling particle subject to the gales of progress. Even implied in progressive sermonising is the law of inevitability.
Try though the designers of pedestrian crossing buttons might, beneath the comforting lies of the culture industry, we all know we have no control. The amorphous bond markets determine finance, administration fulfils “politics” (the idea of universal participation, even as a rhetorical trick, has lost all power), and They – whoever they are – are responsible for our acquired wisdom.
We are atoms, constituted by ever more pitiful atoms, there is no escaping it. But more successful collectivities were able to obscure this reality. On the small scale of village life, right up to that of city states, one was likely to encounter the full breadth of life. Those one would grow up with would become a fixture, and in that time together one would exchange, engage in shared projects and rituals, earn both grudges and loyalties. In a whole array of ways one was able see the fruits of their labours. Full of contingency, unacknowledged forces and subject to an overactive capacity for pattern recognition, there was nevertheless a convincing charade. It was possible for many millions to believe the actions of individual humans to have a lasting impact.*
Capitalism has often been identified as the cause of the fall, at least in left-leaning spaces. But it now occurs to me, following Adorno and Pessoa, that we are dealing with perplexities which come part-and-parcel of complex societies. Could anyone seriously maintain that formerly Communist states avoided what, in one real sense, is alienation? (You may counter, “but they were state capitalist”, and that would simply bolster my position. If every modern attempt to escape capitalism was unable to shed the capitalist form are we not facing something ingrained?) A “society” so vast, so full, so dependent on machines and machine-thinking, would surely - whatever the particular mode of exchange - be one disillusioned in the worst way. Fantasy should not receive blanket condemnation, a good rule-of-thumb assumes the wisest are identified by how necessary their illusions are.
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The question we are left with is what are we to do? Jointly opposed to Now, one of our guides stared (touch ironically) into the tumult ahead while the other, side on and with a wry smile, gazed upon past dreams. Given what we know of both men’s biographies, neither led the perfect life, not that we would even know how to identify it. Both, however, saw this “reality situation” for the shoddy production it is. And should you decide Adorno’s uncompromising view or Pessoa’s self-conscious hallucinations your best bet on the trail ahead: if properly applied you’ll at least be interesting. Expecting much else from tragedy would be unsustainably fantastic. But hope is ever an option, as Pessoa himself permitted, with the final use of his pen: I know not what tomorrow will bring. I’m glad he, at least, was not disappointed.
*A far too extensive footnote. This is perhaps somewhat deceiving. Periods of annihilating war and plague obviously left even the most powerful quite adrift, if indeed not more so. A key difference now however, is prior to the present era one might move. Space is today a disappearing commodity, and one must acknowledge this is the new ground on which we tread. There was always the option for escape in the pre-administered world. With this physicality severely limited one’s capacity for a freedom of mind has also closed.
Because the most consequential difference between modern societies, and those called traditional, is in the rigidity of today’s reigning categories. The allegiances of indigenous peoples were flexible, and what we call freedom of movement was a given. You are an artist and dislike your patron lord? Go to another! It is for them, privileged though they must be, to woo you. Your tribe has decided to make a sacrifice of the firstborns, in order to placate the spirits? You have friends across the delta and they find such practices abhorrent. A flexibility in social roles joined this anti-stasis. Your cousin suddenly was not the moment warpaint was daubed, and an enemy captive may one day become your brother. More concretely, premodern India saw a blending of not only religious practices, but also gender identities – even the idea of the sacred was ambivalent, as it was once in the West. During Europe’s “wars of religion” a peasant could replace allegiances more frequently than undergarments. Whereas in administered societies where class or caste is formalised, made the law of the land, such a blurring of identities is denied to all but the Heavens-touched (or sufficiently detached).
Fluidity was also present at the level of the group. Oftentimes tribes underwent seasonal transformations, meaning it was not some terrible leap into the unknown to shift to another mode of production should circumstances demand it. This sort of dynamism is alien at the present. As has been endlessly commented upon, we cannot imagine even the slightest reform to capitalism, let alone the radical return to planning demanded by the Anthropocene. Even that would be late-in-the-game mitigation – what of restoration? Pah!
The political right insist their given, and supremely contingent, categories are inalterable, lest we risk all-out nihilism. But what if, it must be asked, such solidified worldviews are the outliers? What if taking a realist approach to the world, as opposed to attempting to contort it to some ideal (in this conservatives are fantasists), was what has served human groups well enough for long enough? Should you take exception to that word: is it possible being adaptable, context-specific and suspicious of moral assertion, would be a better approach to life -- or Life as you have it?
In addition, what if your dreaded nihilism is indeed a threat, and it is one already firmly ensconced within our walls? What would you say to the notion that our unquestioned adherence to dead ideas (and dead gods), our robotic fetishisation of work, and an inability to properly engage in concert with equals was nihilism? If not something worse, something our staid tongues have yet to identify.
