“The Colour of Adorno’s Thought: On Hito Steyerl’s Adorno’sGrey”A Talk for the Audain Art Gallery, Simon Fraser University6pm Wednesday, October 16th, 2013

Samir Gandesha

I would like to take this opportunity to thank Amy and

Melanie O’Brien for curating this fascinating work, for

bringing Hito Steyerl to Vancouver and also for inviting me

to speak tonight. My focus will more or less be the

relationship between theory and praxis that this work really

foregrounds.

In an essay written in 1914-15 and unpublished during his

lifetime, Walter Benjamin writes that “Where colour provides

the contour, objects are not reduced to things but are

constituted by an order consisting of an infinite range of

nuances.” Reflecting on this short essay, Howard Caygill

contends that Benjamin’s thought can be said to be unified

by this early understanding of colour. Colour, so conceived,

deconstructs the opposition between subject and object,

passive sensibility and active understanding. The

deconstruction of the opposition between subject and object

brings to the fore what Benjamin calls the “language of

things.” Such a language makes things legible as the site at

which nature and history converge. In his book on German

Trauerspiel, or play of lamentation, random natural occurrences

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such as the setting of the sun, for example are to be read,

allegorically, as historical events such as the death of the

tyrant.

This idea of the language of things, based on an

“infinite range of nuances,” provides us with a productive

point of departure for approaching Hito Steyerl’s “Grey

Adorno.” The placement of things in a specific constellation

or relation within one another makes those objects readable.

It both lets them speak and prompts us to listen. Commenting

on the implications for the “language of things” for the

documentary form, Steyerl claims in a 2006 essay:

…to engage in the language of things in the realm of the

documentary form is not equivalent to using realist forms in

representing them. It is not about representation at all,

but about actualising whatever the things have to say in the

present. And to do so is not a matter of realism, but rather

of relationalism – it is a matter of presencing and thus

transforming the social, historical and also material

relations, which determine things.

If the infinite nuances of colour bring into play the

language of things, then the language of things also, must,

draw out the colour of thought. Accordingly, the things

“Adorno’s Grey” places in specific relations with one: the

layers of paint and plaster of the lecture theatre, the

monochrome, the materiality of Negative Dialectics turned into a

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protest shield, draws out the other predominant colours of

Adorno’s thought: Adorno’s grey is framed by red, on the one

side, and black on the other.

1. “Grey: One Form of Life Grown Old”

“Only one word more concerning the desire to teach the world

what it ought to be. For such a purpose philosophy at least

always comes too late. Philosophy, as the thought of the

world, does not appear until reality has completed its

formative process, and made itself ready. History thus

corroborates the teaching of the conception that only in the

maturity of reality does the ideal appear as counterpart to

the real, apprehends the real world in its substance, and

shapes it into an intellectual kingdom. When philosophy

paints its grey in grey, one form of life has become old,

and by means of grey it cannot be rejuvenated, but only

known. The owl of Minerva, takes its flight only when the

shades of night are gathering.” (Slide)

In “Grey Adorno,” Peter Osborne refers to this passage

which comes from the Preface to the Hegel’s Philosophy of Right

as representing the colour of philosophy or theory as

opposed to the polychromatism of life as such. In it Hegel

suggests that philosophy cannot change the world, but can

only interpret it by removing itself from a life as it has

unfolded historically. As Hegel says elsewhere in this text,

philosophy must aim at grasping “The rational as the actual

and the actual as rational.” And it was over the meaning of

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precisely this passage that right- and left-wing followers

of Hegel battled it out.

The right contended that philosophy’s role was simply

to discern the historical ruse of reason always already

embedded in the institutions of the modern world, while left

Hegelians, including Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer, Max Striner

and, of course, Karl Marx, argued that reason had to be

actualized; philosophy had to be simultaneously negated as a

separate and alienated activity and realized in so far as

freedom as Idea would, finally, actual, that is, practiced

and not just thought. For the right, then, reason was a

historical fait acommpli, for left, a cri de coeur, a demand that

the actual world be made rational, which is to say,

philosophical.

Roughly 100 years later, Guy Debord took up the problem

with which the Hegelian left had grappled, though this time,

significantly, displacing reason by the two most influential

wings of the 20th century avant-garde in a way that

nevertheless laid bare their ultimate failure. According to

Debord, Dada negated art without realizing it; Surrrealism

realized art without negating it. In contrast, for Debord,

the project to negate and realize philosophy was a programme

the Situationist International sought to finally carry out

in May, 1968,

In the aftermath of the experiences of the 20th

century, Adorno challenges both the Hegelian Left, including

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Marx, and the avant-garde in the famous opening to Negative

Dialectics that “philosophy lives on after the moment to

realize freedom was missed.” Philosophy could only properly

continue to live on if it were supplemented by a form of art

that actively resisted the impulse it to return it “life.”

Hegel’s philosophy was a “timely” philosophy par

excellence: it painted its “grey on grey” precisely because

philosophy was its “own time grasped in concepts.” And for

Hegel, his time was time at which the Idea of Freedom had

taken shape in the Institutions of the modern world. The

colour of Adorno’s philosophy is grey not because of its

timeliness per se, but rather because it was untimely.

Hegel’s timeliness had outlived itself and became belated.

Adorno didn’t so much juxtaspose the greyness of philosophy

and the colour of life, but rather, through philosophy,

grasped life as itself grey, lifeless.

The greyness of life is well-captured in a section of

Minima Moralia entitled “Le bourgeois revenant” (or “The

bourgeois ghost”) that seems, as with much of this text, to

read as a direct rejoinder to Hegel whose fundamental

categories were Geist or Spirit and Buergerliche

Gesellschaft (translated as civil society): “Whatever was once

good and decent [civil] in bourgeois values…has been

corrupted utterly…Privacy has given way to the privation it

always was…The caring hand that even now tends the little

garden as if it had no long since become a ‘lot,’ but

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fearfully wards off the unknown intruder, is already that

which denies the political refugee asylum. Now objectively

threatened, the subjectivity of the rulers and their

hangers-on becomes totally inhuman. So the class realizes

itself, taking upon itself the destructive course of the

world.” What Adorno is suggesting is, then, is that the

forms of Spirit (Geist) such as bourgeois values and decency

had themselves in the condition of belatedness had turned

ghostly. As he goes on to suggest: “The bourgeois live on like

spectres threatening doom.” (MM, 34; emphasis added)

Grey is the colour, then, of a philosophy whose

negation and realization failed. Hegel’s sought to lay bare

the self-formative process whereby Spirit or Geist

externalized itself in the world, confronted the products of

its own conceptual labour as alien and then re-internalized

these products in the fullness of its own life. Negative

Dialectics is a philosophy written against Hegel appropriate to

a world in which life, itself, has drained away. “Life,” as

Adorno puts it in the epigram to Minima Moralia, “does not

live.” “Underlying the prevalent health,” Adorno writes, “is

death. All the movements of health resemble the reflex-

movements of beings whose hearts have stopped beating.” (MM,

59)

As he shows in his reading of Beckett’s Endgame and

elsewhere: Nature reverses into history insofar as it has no

right to exist outside of its ability to serve human

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purposes and needs, while history, itself, becomes

naturalized, a second nature, and therefore ever more locked

into the blind reproduction of the ever-same. “Panic breaks

once again,” Adorno argues, “after millennia of

enlightenment, over a humanity whose control of nature as

control of men far exceeds in horror anything men ever had

to fear from nature.” (MM, 239). And this involves a double

bind: as nature’s historicity or temporality is marked by

the spiraling of increasingly momentous “events” such as the

splitting of the atom, and, more recently, anthropogenic

climate change, the events of history become through the

reproduction of a dominating form of subjectivity ever more

reduced to a mere “second nature,” effectively bringing the

dialectic to a standstill. While for Hegel, history ends or

culminates in a vibrant, living rational freedom, in a

“Whole [that] is True,” for Adorno, in contrast, in late

capitalist society, it culminates in a life that had become

the ideology of its absence. That “the destructive

tendencies of the masses that explode in both varieties of

the totalitarian state are not so much death-wishes as

manifestations of what they have already become. They murder

so that whatever to them seems living, shall resemble

themselves.” (MM, 231)

2.Red Revolutionary Ambivalence

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As I have already suggested, then, Adorno positioned himself

critically both towards the Marxist tradition, on the one

hand, and the Avant-garde, on the other. Assuming such a

position of negativity towards both of these traditions was

bound to appear as a deliberate provocation to the

revolutionary students for whom political vanguardism and aesthetic

avant-gardism became, particularly as its militancy deepened,

ever more closely fused together in direct action. The so-

called Busenattentat or breast attack crystallizes elements

of both. In retrospect, it appears as a bizarre, absurd and

ultimately unseemly coda to Adorno’s academic and

intellectual life, it was symptomatic of something far more

sinister in the air in Germany at this time—the strange

afterlife of a fascism that was no longer fully alive but

also not quite yet dead.

Behind its inherent absurdity was a menacing aspect of

the Busenattentat that remains absent from the piece

although it is hinted at in the Timeline. In this lecture

course entitled “An Introduction to Dialectical thinking”

which had attracted growing numbers of students to it (close

to 1000), Adorno nonetheless sought to create conditions for

genuine dialogue (which is fitting as he, himself, drew

attention to the origins of dialectic in the dialogue form)

by allowing students to put questions to him at any time

during the course of the lectures—still quite unheard of

even today in the relatively hierarchical German University

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system. Far from creating the context for the meaningful

exercise of the public use of reason or Muendigkeit (the

ability to speak for oneself), however, this openness was

high-jacked by the students. On April 22nd, at the inaugural

lecture, members of the so-called “Leather Jacket Fraktion”

of the SDS demanded that Adorno engage in a self-criticism

for having called in the police to clear the Institute of

the student occupiers several months earlier. One of them

wrote on the blackboard, “If Adorno is left in peace,

capitalism will never cease.” Shortly afterwards, he was set

upon by the three young women and promptly fled the theatre.

In her off-camera commentary, Nina Power poses the question

as to whether this actually caused Adorno’s death as the

legend held. Whether this caused his biological death is,

indeed, an open question although its very openness seems to

suggest a kind of prudishness that never characterized this

public advocate for among other things, the repeal of anti-

sodomy laws. But one thing is clear: shortly after the

Busenattentat a pamphlet circulated amongst the students

with the slogan that “As an Institution, Adorno is dead.”

At this stage, this event, and in particular, the

statement on the blackboard may have appeared simply as an

idle threat, a mere suggestion of the Oedipal wishes of some

of the more hard-line students, yet with their progressive

radicalization and increasing propensity to use violence,

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the statement and the event takes on, retrospectively,

somewhat more sinister meaning.

Upon their return from exile in 1949, Adorno and

Horkheimer were an inspiration for the budding opposition.

Pirated copies of Dialectic of Enlightenment circulated at the

Institute for Social Research against the wishes of

Horkheimer in particular who was in the process of re-

establishing the Institute in the Federal Republic and who

felt that the resurfacing of the text might damage the

Institute’s reputation. Nevertheless, for the students,

Adorno’s (and Horkheimer’s) theses, which were disseminated

throughout the 1950’s and 1960’s via public and radio

addresses on such questions as “What Is German,” “The

Meaning of Working Through the Past,” etc. as well as

through philosophical and sociological seminars, were a

profound influence and inspiration. As was Adorno’s tireless

work of university reform, in particular the establishment

of sociology as a critical and reflective rather than simply

administrative discipline in the Federal Republic. Adorno’s

intellectual contributions, of course, concerned the

damaging impact of positivism on the humanities, the

intertwinement of enlightenment and myth, the persistence

authoritarian personality structures within late capitalism

and the way in which leisure time was merely an extension of

the crippling drudgery of work seemed to directly hit the

mark in a society in the throes of its so-called economic

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miracle (Wirtschaftwunder) that seemed to crystallize what

Joseph Schumpeter called the capitalism’s logic of “creative

destruction”. The fact that its industrial base had been

laid to waste during the war made it possible for West

Germany to create, with Japan, one of the most

technologically advanced and competitive economies of the

emerging global order.

What seemed to have been destroyed, as the students

were beginning to realize existentially, was not just the

obsolete fixed capital accumulated during the first, late

wave of German industrialization around the time of the

Franco-Prussian War, but also, as was pointed out by a

number of writers [Here I’m thinking about the Mitcherlichs’

book the Inability to Mourn and WG Sebald’s On the Natural History of

Destruction], the capacity for West German society to mourn

the victims of the catastrophe, to genuinely “work though

the past.” Moreover, it seemed that in 1967, especially,

that Adorno/Horkheimer’s thesis of the “totally administered

society” seemed to have exactly hit the mark with the

formation of the so-called Grosse Koalition or (Grand

Coalition) between the SDP and the CDU. One of the key

pieces of legislation passed by this government was the

Notstandgesetzt or the emergency law in 1968 that severely

curtailed civil liberties as a way of clamping down on the

growing disaffection among, and militancy of, the students.

It was painfully reminiscent of article 48 of the Weimar

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Constitution that made it possible for the Nazis to come to

power via democratic means (Abromeit, LP, 21). It was

against this set of developments that the APO

[Ausserparliamentarische Opposition or extra-parliamentary

opposition] was brought into being via a SDS (German

Socialist Students Union).

Yet, at the very moment that the students drew upon

Critical Theory to inform their political activities they

also came to call into question Adorno’s own avowed distance

from political praxis which was, in a sense, the condition

of Critical Theory in the first place. The Students’

impatience was compounded by two events in particular: the

first was the shooting of Benno Ohnesorg at a peaceful

protest against the Shah of Iran on June 2nd, 1967, which

the students were set upon by the police culminating in the

shooting death of the young student attending his very first

political rally. The second followed just a few months

later: the attempted assignation of the SDS/APO leader Rudi

Dutschke on April 11, 1968, by a right-wing extremist. The

students, with real justification, held the Cultural

Industry, notably the right-wing media (Springer press),

responsible for stirring up anti-student sentiment which

Adorno, himself, compared to the pogroms directed against

the Jews in the 1920’s and 30’s.

These events, therefore, seemed to demonstrate to the

students the authoritarian if not down-right fascistic

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character of the state that had not yet even posed the need

to “work through the past.” Indeed, many prominent former-

Nazi’s had achieved positions of power and influence in the

Federal Republic. And the frustration with Adorno came to a

head when the students occupied the Frankfurt University,

and the offices of the Institute for Social Research in

particular in December, 1968. Their aim was supposedly break

with what they considered to be an education oriented to

produce “integrated alibis of the authoritarian state.”

(Mueller-Doohm, 464). Despite the demands of the students to

“smash the academic machine (464), Adorno and his colleagues

such as Jurgen Habermas sought to keep dialogue open with

the students, but to no avail. Subsequently, Adorno even

sought to invite Marcuse to the University of Frankfurt in

the hope that Marcuse’s much less equivocal reputation

amongst the radicals would be able to mediate between both

parties. Despite these efforts to engage in on-going

discussion with the students, the most radical factions

among them continued to agitate, now for the expropriation

of Institution for Social Research’s “means of production”--

its furnishings and equipment. The students, under the

leadership of Adorno’s own doctoral student, Hans-Jurgen

Krahl, sought to carry out this action on January 31st. The

Directors of the Institute, with Adorno at its head, met

this threat directly and called in the police to protect the

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autonomy of the Institution. In the justification of their

actions, the Institute’s directors argued:

It is vital that precisely those who believe that

university reform is overdue and who wish to bring

about a democratic and social institution in harmony

with the Basic law, it is vital precisely for those who

identify wholeheartedly with this aim of the extra-

parliamentary opposition, that they should feel

obligated to resist their own criminalization: they

should resist all authoritarian tendencies and equally

all pseudo-anarchistic acts of violence on the part of

ostensibly left-wing activists as well as crypto-

fascist actions from groups on the extreme right.”

It is here that Adorno’s difficult relation to the

history of the Left crystallizes. Since the middle of the

19th century if not earlier, the Left had adopted the color

red as its own. It had come to signify praxis itself, in the

passionate, suffering bodies of the real men and women who

were the real subjects of the historical process, as Marx

states in the German Ideology. Red referred, moreover, to the

blood of the workers spilled by the reactionary forces in

cities throughout Europe, not least cities such as Frankfurt

am Main, itself, in which a significant historical battle

had raged to establish a genuinely representative

constituent assembly during the Revolutions of 1848. It was

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here that, as alluded to above, the Hegelian Left sought to

make the world philosophical by both realizing and negating

the philosophy in republican politics. Some fifty years

later, in Russia, revolutionary opposition to the Tsar was

divided between the Whites or the Mensheviks who tended to be

“gradualists” who believed that what was required was the

development of the productive forces to the point where

revolution would be possible, and the Reds or the Bolsheviks

who, with the example of the Paris Commune clearly in mind,

believed that the historical development in Russia could be

“telescoped” and, hence, power could be decisively taken in

the present rather than deferred to an infinitely open

future.1

Yet theoretically, Adorno, as suggested, remains very

much in the tradition of historical materialism. His

characterization of Marx’s Capital as the “phenomenology of

the anti-Spirit,” as what he called the “ontology of the

wrong state of things,” could be said to have characterized

the totality of his own writing. Adorno roots his

understanding of the violence done by identity-thinking to

the “non-identical” in the penetration of the exchange logic

into virtually every nook and cranny of the administered

world. Adorno argues that the violence done by the concept

or identity thinking was to ultimately rooted in the

domination of use by exchange value just as Nietzsche had

located the very structure of ascetic subjectivity itself in

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the capacity to remember debts. Social domination, for

Adorno, was inextricable from the domination of nature.

Philosophy manifested in abstract form the natural-

historical logic of devouring and being devoured; it was

belly turned mind.

So the ambivalence of the students towards Adorno was

reflected by his own ambivalence toward the demand that

theory and practice be unified in revolutionary political

action. Hans-Jurgen Krahl captures this tension perfectly

when he states:

when we were besieging the council of Frankfurt

University, the only professor who came to the students

sit-ins was Professor Adorno. He was overwhelmed with

ovations. He made straight for the microphone, and just

as he reached it, he ducked past and shot into the

philosophy seminar. In short, once again, on the

threshold of practice, he retreated into theory. (461).

In Adorno’s view, this demand that theory be unified with

praxis was in league with the now ubiquitous claim that what

does not in some way serve measurable social utility,

apparently in Canada now including basic natural scientific

research, has lost its existential right to exist. Yet, with

the increasing violence that the students saw directed

against them marked by the shootings of Ohnnesorg and

Dutschke, a faction of the movement became convinced that

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non-violent opposition had reached its very limits—that the

very generation that had orchestrated Auschwitz was never

going to be swayed by non-violent tactics. In a moment of

decision of what they, themselves, also described as a

moment of “madness” (to use Gudrun Enslinn’s words) they

proceeded to play out what Freud had called

Nachtraeglichkeit or deferred action--the armed resistance

of the militant wing of the students could be said to have

manifested the repressed resistance of their parents.

Paradoxically, it was by actualizing this deferred

resistance that the earlier generation had refused, that the

students established distance from their parents whom they

viewed as compromised as a generation. Nachtraeglichkeit

marked in this case, therefore, a generational caesura. Yet,

while it undoubtedly contained fascist elements within it,

the BDR could no more be characterized as a fascist state

than could Italy or Japan. And in this revolutionary

pantomime, the RAF mirrored the actions of their comrades in

the two other former Axis powers: the Japanese Red Army and

Brigate Rosse in Italy.

The Baader-Meinhof group began its campaign of seeking

to, as they said, “explode a bomb in the consciousness of

the people” by launching a frontal attack on consumer

culture by firebombing two Frankfurt department stores in

April of 1968 and this chain of events would include the

bombing of US bases in Heidelberg, the high-jacking of a

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Lufthansa flight in Somalia and culminated in the kidnapping

and assassination of the head of the German Business

Association President and former high-ranking Nazi

responsible for forced labour, Hanns-Martin Schleyer in

October, 1977. If Hegel had argued that philosophy could

only understand post-festum (after the feast or after the

event) reality’s formative process, with the RAF, philosophy

is almost completely displaced by action or praxis. “Hell,

yes, its all about Praxis” wrote an enthusiastic Andreas

Baader in a letter to his lover and comrade Enslinn.

It is perhaps a very beautiful historical irony that

Enslinn, herself, was the granddaughter of the granddaughter

of none other than the philosopher Hegel. In this, a certain

chapter in German intellectual and political history comes

to a close: from Hegel’s emphatic insistence, as we have

already seen, on the essentially interpretive vocation of

philosophy to his mid-20th century heir’s almost unthinking,

unreflective turn to unmediated direct action. Indeed, as many

of you will no doubt know, Hegel devoted an important

chapter of the Phenomenology to the “Absolute Freedom and the

Terror of the French Revolution,” arguing that it was the

precisely in the Jacobins’ lack of understanding of the need

for mediation or differentiation in their understanding of

politics that led the Revolution, Chronos-like, to devour

its own children.

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Of course, with the German students, the situation was

the exact inverse: here the children sought to devour their

own parents as a kind of totemic meal. But there is a

certain logic to this, if Marx drew attention to the

contradiction between the most advanced theory, on the one

hand, and socio-economic backwardness in the 18th and 19th

centuries—that unlike France, German had had revolutions

only in the mind--now we see a kind of reversal: a society

that was quickly becoming one of the most socio-economically

advanced nations in the world, seemed now to be able to

dispense with thought, and go immediately to action.

In their willingness to sacrifice all of the cause, to

put their bodies and, indeed, lives on the line for anti-

capitalist resistance, the members of the RAF undertook what

can only be seen as an essentially religious struggle. When

asked about the meaning of his daughter’s participation in

the bombing campaign, Enslinn’s father, who was a pastor,

said that he believed that it constituted a kind of “holy

self-realization.” Not only did this this simultaneous self-

assertion and self-subordination not challenge

authoritarianism it seemed at a deep psychological level, on

the contrary, to reproduce its very conditions. And the

authoritarianism of both was constituted, at least in part,

by a refusal and possibly a lack of capacity to engage in

the public use of reason.2

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Adorno’s critique of the violent tendencies of the

students was consistent with his understanding of the self-

destruction of the enlightenment: that in seeking to master

a terrifying nature outside of itself, the subject mirrors

and internalizes that very terror which it, then, practices

against itself. In a similar way, in its attempt to confront

fascism by using its own tools against it, the radical arm

of the students reproduced rather than worked towards

genuinely confronting and transcending it.

So, what I’ve tried to suggest so far is that Adorno’s

thought retains the colour grey, with the historical

failure of the “reds,” that is, the Bolsheviks and the

Sparticists, to “make the world philosophical” by

simultaneously negating and realizing philosophy. For Adorno

with the moment of this failure, praxis is not itself

abolished but rather displaced to the autonomous art work

whose colour had turned black.

III Black: The Resistance of the Eye

The historical failure of the moment to realize

philosophy, to make the actual rational, lends Adorno’s

thought a tone of lamentation or Trauer. In his dedication

of Minima Moralia, his reflection on the damaged life of the

intellectual émigré, to his close collaborator and friend,

Max Horkheimer, Adorno characterizes his thought as a

“melancholy science” (trauerige Wissenschaft) Such thought

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aspires to raise the world’s agony to a conceptual level in

such a way that would explode concepts an introverted

conceptual thinking.

If Adorno begins Negative Dialetics with the claim that

the moment to realize philosophy was missed and therefore

the way to realize philosophy was via an unremitting

negativity, then such negativity could only be manifested

via artworks that refuse to be made a functional part of the

existing order. Genuine art works manifested an internal

purposefulness relating the parts within the whole yet they

were ultimately purposeless in themselves, insofar as they

“stepped out of the means-ends relations of empirical

society” (AT, 139). If art could be said to embody a

purpose it lay precisely in its active disavowal of social

purposes. The function of art was to be dysfunctional and as

such constituted the “splinter in the eye” that served as

“the best magnifying glass,” (MM). Yet art in its very

expressiveness remained mute, unable to articulate its own

truth content and therefore stood in need of philosophical

or conceptual explication. Philosophy, in contrast, could

through concepts communicate contents, yet without art’s

expressiveness, would only subsume such sensuous content

through the logic of identity or the exchange logic of the

very society it wished to confront critically. Philosophy,

on the one side, and the artwork, on the other, crystallize

experience not in terms of overarching totalizing concepts,

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but in its micrological details. If the colour Red came to

signify in the post War period either a Communism that had

degenerated into Stalinism, on the one hand, or in the

various armed insurrectionary groups on the other such as

the Rote Armee Fraktion, the Japanese Red Army or the

Brigate Rossi, then what comes to supplant red as the genuine

site of negativity, a form of art whose colour was black. As

Ad Reinhardt stated in 1962, “black is interesting not as a

colour but as a non-color and as the absence of color.” In

other words, black manifested an indefatigable negativity.

On the face of it, it appears that Adorno in turning

from red to black, could not have been farther from the

students. After all, in a late essay dating from the time of

his composition of Aesthetic Theory entitled Subject and

Object, he allows himself the rare opportunity to speak of

what a reconciled condition would look like: a condition of

non-violence or peace between subject and object based on

genuinely communicative relations between them. Such a

relation would be based, though, on the paradoxical

strengthening of an ego that, in that very strength, stood

capable relinquishing itself and to genuinely open itself to

the other. Peace in a sense could only be brought about

dialectically, that is, by way of, as Adorno put it, the

very cold rationality without which Auschwitz would not have

been possible. Peace, in other words, required the very

rationality it, ultimately, sought to overcome.

22

But perhaps Adorno’s wasn’t quite as far from the most

radical faction of the students as at first might appear to

be the case. While Adorno supported the SDS against the

SDP’s adoption of the Emergency Law, he certainly never

approved of the violence as a means of political action.

Nonetheless perhaps we can think the relation between Adorno

and the radical wing of the students in the following terms:

What these students wanted to carry out directly was, as I

have already suggested, exploding reified consciousness by

way of brazen acts of political violence, Adorno saw as

possible only in a highly sublimated form via the autonomous

work of art and its criticism. In this sense, the black,

melancholy art work reflects back the colour, or, better,

the non-color, the negativity, of a world whose heart had

stopped beating. “In expression, Adorno argued, [works of

art] reveal themselves as the wounds of society (AT, 237).

Art was, therefore, as an “uncommitted crime,” one that

“becomes as enigmatic as the terror born of the primordial

world, which, though it metamorphoses, does not disappear;

all art remains a seismogram of that terror.” (AT, 127

emphasis added). “[Art objects] kill what they objectify by

tearing it away from the immediacy of its life.” “Without

this admixture of poison,” art virtually the negation of

life, Adorno argues, the opposition of art to civilizatory

repression would amount to nothing more than impotent

comfort.” (AT 133). What can be heard in even the “greatest

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works of aesthetic unity” is the “echo of social violence.”

(AT, 134).

So, Adorno’s notion of authentic works as preserving,

in mediated form, the experience of what he calls

“primordial shudder,” the terror of confronting a nature

that had not yet been brought under almost total human

control, was, in some ways, not that far removed from the

RAF’s idea of “exploding bombs in the consciousness of the

people.” However, while the students took this literally,

Adorno showed throughout his Aesthetic Theory the way in which

this explosive Dionysian impulse had to enter into the very

formal constitution of the art work which, itself, stood in

need of philosophical explication or, one could say, the

public use of reason in order to “express the

inexpressible.” As Adorno states, “The critique exercised a

priori by art is that of action as a cryptogram of

domination. According to its sheer form, praxis tends

towards that which, in terms of its own logic, it should

abolish; violence is maintained to it and is maintained in

its sublimations, whereas artworks, even the most

aggressive, stand for non-violence.” (AT, 241)

In a sense the sublimated force of the art-work that

has resisted all social functions, that has become in a

sense dysfunctional is brought to a head in the closing

moments of “Adorno’s Grey” in the image of the Book Bloc

activist who used Negative Dialectics—a philosophy whose

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necessary supplement, as I just suggested, was the art work—

to break out of the police line. Perhaps this can be read as

allegorizing Adorno’s fundamental philosophical intention in

Negative Dialectics: to use the very strength of rational

subjectivity to break out (Adorno calls this an Aus-bruch) of a

form of sacrificial subjectivity that subordinates external

nature and its own sensuous impulses, as well as other human

beings, to the reproduction of the false logic of the social

whole.

It would seem that the story that Adorno had his

lecture theatre painted grey is an urban legend, however,

what is clear is that Hito Steyerl takes up Adorno’s own

apochryphal stance and by, as it were, painting her grey on

white, lays bare the intertwinement of art and philosophy.

In so doing, she approximates the very blackness of an art

that aims at keeping alive, as Adorno states in Negative

Dialectics, a “resistance of the eye which doesn’t want the

colours of the world to fade.”

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1 Contrary to figures such as Ernst Bloch and Georg Lukacs,Adorno along with Horkheimer and Marcuse, refused to be brought intothe Communist fold. It is for this among other reasons that Lukacsaccuses Adorno of taking up residence in “Grand Hotel Abyss” in the1962 preface to Theory of the Novel (quote)—a text that had provensuch an inspiration for Adorno’s own thinking. Adorno, of course,returned the favour and attacked Lukacs’ conception of criticalrealism claiming in a way that bears directly on our own TRC that itregistered an “extorted” (erpresst) Reconciliation. Adorno claimedthat Lukacs’s ambitious 700-page geneaology of the inetellctual rootsof Natioanl Socialism entitled the destruction of Reason provednothing so much as the destruction of Lukacs’s own reason.

2 One finds this kind of analysis in the films of AlexanderKluge, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Margarethe von Trotta in thefilms that address this Bleierne Zeit or “heavy time” as well as inthe 2008 film The Baader-Meinhof Complex based on the book by StefanAust. This was also the analysis of Ulrike Menihof while in prisonshortly before her suicide. Gudrun Elslinn’s sister’s husband whostarted out as a radical poet, moved to the far right (Masche). Mosttellingly, perhaps, Horst Mahler, the lawyer who founded the RAF in1970 went on in the 1980s to deny the historical truth of theHolocaust and to this day remains in a leadership position in thefar-right neo-Nazi National Democratic Party.