SPIEGEL: Professor Adorno, two weeks ago, the world still seemed in order. . .
ADORNO: Not to me.
SP: You said that your relations with the students were not strained. In your courses, you said, discussions were fruitful, sober, and untainted by personal disturbances. But now you have cancelled your lecture.
A: I did not cancel my lecture for the entire semester, but only until further notice. I hope to start up again in a few weeks. All colleagues do this when their lectures are so massively disrupted.
SP: Were you subjected to violence?
A: Not physical violence, but so much noise was made that my lecture would have been drowned by it. That was obviously the plan.
SP: Are you repulsed only by the manner in which students today take action against you—students who once were on your side—or did their political goals also disturb you? After all, it is fair to say that there used to be agreement between you and the rebels.
A: That is not the dimension in which our differences play themselves out. Recently I said in a television interview that, even though I had established a theoretical model, I could not have foreseen that people would try to implement it with Molotov cocktails. This sentence has been cited numerous times, but it requires substantial interpretation.
SP: How would you interpret it today?
A: In my writings, I have never offered a model for any kind of action or for some specific campaign. I am a theoretical human being who views theoretical thinking as lying extraordinarily close to his artistic intentions. It is not as if I had turned away from praxis only recently; my thinking always has stood in a rather indirect relationship to praxis. My thinking has perhaps had practical consequences in that some of its motifs have entered consciousness, but I have never said anything that was immediately aimed at practical actions. Ever since the first bedlam was organized against me in 1967 in Berlin, certain student groups have time and again attempted to force me into solidarity, demanding practical actions of me. I have refused.
SP: But Critical Theory does not wish to keep conditions as they are. The SDS students learned this from you. You, Professor Adorno, now refuse practical action. Are you not cultivating a mere “liturgy of critique,” as Dahrendorf claims?
A: In the case of Dahrendorf, a tone of fresh and cheerful conviction reigns supreme: If only you change little things here and there, then perhaps everything will be better. I cannot accept this presupposition. But among the APO, I always encounter the compulsive pressure to deliver oneself, to join in; this is something I have resisted since my earliest youth. And in that area nothing has changed in me. I attempt to put into words what I see and what I think. But I cannot predicate this on what will be done with it or what will become of it.
SP: Scholarship in the ivory tower, then?
A: I am not at all afraid of the term “ivory tower.” This term has certainly seen better days, as when Baudelaire employed it. But since you bring up the ivory tower: I believe that a theory is much more capable of having practical consequences owing to the strength of its own objectivity than if it had subjected itself to praxis from the start. Today’s unfortunate relationship between theory and praxis consists precisely in the fact that theory is subjected to a practical pre-censorship. For instance, people wish to forbid me to put into words simple things that show the illusionary character of many of the political goals that certain students have.
SP: But these students apparently have a large following.
A: A small group of students succeeds time and again in enforcing loyalty, something which the vast majority of leftist students may not fully resist. But I wish to emphasize again the following: They simply cannot refer to models of action that I allegedly gave them in order then to place me at odds with these models. There are no such models.
SP: Yet it is the case that students refer, at times very directly, at other times indirectly, to your critique of society. Without your theories, the student protest movement might not even have developed.
A: I do not wish to deny that. Nevertheless, it is difficult for me to assess this connection fully. I would like to believe, for instance, that a critique of the manipulation of public opinion—which I consider legitimate even in its demonstrative form—would not have been possible without the chapter on the culture industry in the Dialectic of Enlightenment by Horkheimer and myself. But I think that one often conceives the connection between theory and praxis too reductively. If one has taught and published for twenty years with the intensity that I have, it does enter into general consciousness.
SP: And thus also into praxis?
A: Possibly, but not necessarily so. In our writings, the value of so-called individual actions is delimited by an emphasis on societal totality.
SP: But how would one go about changing societal totality without individual action?
A: This is asking too much of me. In response to the question “What is to be done?” I usually can only answer “I do not know.” I can only analyze relentlessly what is. In the process, I am reproached in the following manner: “If you criticize, you have to say how to do better.” But I consider this a bourgeois prejudice. Historically, there have been countless instances in which precisely those works that pursued purely theoretical intentions altered consciousness and, by extension, societal reality.
SP: But in your writings you have set Critical Theory apart from other kinds of theory. It should not merely describe reality empirically, but also should consider [mit bedenken] the proper organization of society.
A: Here, I was concerned with a critique of positivism. Note that I said also consider [mit bedenken]. In no way does this sentence suggest that I would be so presumptuous as to tell people how to act.
SP: You once said, however, that Critical Theory should “lift the rock under which barbarism breeds.” If the students are now throwing this rock—is this so incomprehensible?
A: Certainly not incomprehensible. I believe that their actionism [Aktionismus] can essentially be traced back to despair, because people sense how little power they actually have to change society. But I am equally convinced that these individual actions are predestined to fail; this also proved to be the case during the May revolt in France.
SP: So if individual actions are pointless, is not the “critical impotence,” of which the SDS has accused you, the only thing that remains?
A: There is a sentence by Grabbe that reads: “For nothing but despair can save us.” This is provocative, but not at all dumb. I cannot fault someone living in our world today for feeling despairing, pessimistic, and negative. Those who compulsively shout down their objective despair with the noisy optimism of immediate action in order to lighten their psychological burden are much more deluded.
SP: Your colleague Jürgen Habermas, also a proponent of Critical Theory, has now conceded in an essay that the students have developed an “imaginative provocationism” and have really managed to change some things.
A: I would agree with Habermas on this point. I believe that the university reform, of which we incidentally do not yet know the outcome, would never have been set into motion without the students. I believe that the general attention to processes of dumbing down, which are prevalent in our present society, would never have crystallized without the student movement. And furthermore, to mention something very concrete, I believe that it was only through the investigation, led by Berlin students, of the murder of Ohnesorg that this horrifying story penetrated public consciousness at all. With this I wish to say that I in no way close myself off to practical consequences as long as they are transparent to me.
SP: And when have they been transparent to you?
A: I participated in demonstrations against Emergency Laws [Notstandsgesetze] , and I have done what I could in the area of criminal law reform. But there is a decisive difference between doing something like that and taking part in the half-crazed activity of throwing rocks at university institutes.
SP: How would you determine whether or not an action is worthwhile?
A: For one thing, this decision depends in large measure on the concrete situation. For another, I have the strongest reservations against any use of violence. I would have to disown my entire life—my experiences under Hitler and what I have observed of Stalinism—if I did not refuse to participate in the eternal circle of using violence to fight violence. The only meaningfully transformative praxis that I could imagine would be a non-violent one.
SP: Even under a Fascist dictatorship?
A: There certainly may be situations in which things would look different. To a real Fascism, one can only react with violence. I am anything but rigid on this point. But I refuse to follow those who, after the murder of countless millions in the totalitarian states, still preach violence today. That is the decisive threshold.
SP: Did students cross that threshold when they attempted to prevent the delivery of Springer newspapers through sit-down strikes?
A: I consider this sit-down strike legitimate.
SP: Was this threshold crossed when students disrupted your lectures with noise and sexual theatrics?
A: To think that they did this to me, of all people, someone who has always opposed any kind of erotic repression and sexual taboo! To mock me and to loose three girls dressed up as hippies on me! I found that repulsive. The comic effect achieved by this was nothing more than the reaction of a philistine (Spießbürger) who giggles “he-he!” (der Hihi! kichert) at the sight of a girl with naked breasts. This nonsense was naturally planned in advance.
SP: Was this unusual act perhaps intended to ruffle your theory?
A: It seems to me that these actions against me have little to do with the content of my lectures; what is more important to the extreme wing is the publicity. They suffer from the fear of being forgotten. In this way they become slaves of their own publicity. A lecture such as mine, which is attended by about 1000 people, is obviously a magnificent forum for activist propaganda.
SP: Can this deed not also be interpreted as an act of despair? Perhaps the students felt left in the lurch by a theory that they had considered at least capable of being translated into societal praxis?
A: The students did not even attempt to have a discussion with me. What makes my dealings with students so much more difficult today is the prioritization of tactics. My friends and I have the feeling that we have been reduced to mere objects in precisely calculated plans. The idea of minority rights, which after all is constitutive of freedom, no longer plays any role whatsoever. One blinds oneself to the objectivity of the matter [Objektivität der Sache].
SP: And in the face of such abuses you make do without a defensive strategy?
A: My interests are turning increasingly toward philosophical theory. If I were to give practical advice, as Herbert Marcuse has done to a certain degree, it would detract from my productivity. Much can be said against the division of labor; but even Marx, who in his youth attacked it vehemently, later on conceded that we cannot do without the division of labor after all.
SP: You have chosen for yourself the theoretical part, then, leaving the practical part to others; indeed, they are already working on it. Would it not be preferable if theory simultaneously reflected praxis? And, by extension, also the present actions?
A: There are situations in which I would do this. At the moment, however, it seems much more important to me to think through the anatomy of actionism.
SP: So, mere theory again?
A: I value theory more highly at this point. I dealt with these issues—especially in my Negative Dialectic—long before the current conflict erupted.
SP: In Negative Dialectic, we find the following resigned observation: “Philosophy, which once seemed passé, remains alive because the moment of its realization was missed.” All conflicts aside, does such a philosophy not become “foolishness”? A question that you have asked yourself.
A: I still believe that one should hold on to theory, precisely under the general coercion toward praxis in a functional and pragmatized world. And I will not permit even the most recent events to dissuade me from what I have written.
SP: So far, as your friend Habermas once put it, your dialectic has, at its “blackest spots” of resignation, surrendered to “the destructive pull of the death drive.”
A: I would rather say that the compulsive clinging to what is positive stems from the death drive.
SP: Then, would it be the virtue of philosophy to look the negative in the eye but not to change it?
A: Philosophy cannot in and of itself recommend immediate measures or changes. It effects change precisely by remaining theory. I think that for once the question should be asked whether it is not also a form of resistance when a human being thinks and writes things the way I write them. Is theory not also a genuine form of praxis?
SP: Are there not situations, for example in Greece, in which you endorse action that goes beyond critical reflection?
A: It goes without saying that in Greece I would approve of any kind of action. The situation that prevails there is totally different. But for someone who is ensconced in safety to advise others to start a revolution is so ridiculous that one ought to be ashamed of oneself.
SP: So, you continue to view the advancement of an analysis of societal conditions as the most meaningful and necessary aspect of your activities in the Federal Republic?
A: Yes, and to immerse myself in very specific individual phenomena. I am not in the least ashamed to say very publicly that I am working on a major book on aesthetics.
SP: Professor Adorno, we thank you for this conversation.
Credits: This interview has been excerpted from a longer piece published by cominsitu in March 2016.
