Originally published in: Zeitschrift für kritische Theorie, Heft 50-51, 2020, pp. 255–283. With kind approval Zeitschrift für kritische Theorie und des Meiner Verlags.

By no means a missed encounter

On Fred Moten’s engagement with Theodor W. Adorno

By Ruth Sonderegger


1. Intro

The fact that Fred Moten returns again and again to the writings of Theodor W. Adorno is all the more remarkable since earlier encounters between anticolonial thinking, postcolonial theory, and the Black Radical Tradition1 on the one hand and the critical theory of the Frankfurt School on the other were such huge failures.2 One legendary case in point involves the meetings arranged by Herbert Marcuse in New York in the 1940s between Adorno and C. L. R. James,3 the great sociologist and historian of the Haitian Revolution.4 These encounters can be said to have failed because they left not the slightest trace in either man’s writings—and this in spite of the many affinities between their ideas, including strongly concurring critiques of Western modernity.5
    Moten is a highly unusual reader of Adorno in that he follows him down the twisting path of his thoughts to the very remotest corner—before coming, in most cases, to entirely different conclusions. And doing so while acknowledging how much these conclusions nonetheless owe to Adorno. Coming from the Black Radical Tradition, Moten gives many of Adorno’s words such new meanings that one is baffled, feeling certain that Adorno never said or wrote the passages quoted by Moten. Until one checks and is proved wrong, obliged to accept, for example, that Adorno can also be understood as a source of ideas for Black resistance movements right up to Black Life Matters. Not the least surprising thing here is the stunningly affirmative way Moten kidnaps Adorno’s negative dialectics. Instead of lecturing him, Moten opens up Adorno’s thinking toward political struggles to which Adorno himself was deaf. This deep, unfathomable connection is likely due to their shared passion for the materiality of music—in all of the arts, but also in everyday practices—even if Moten’s thinking always starts from jazz while Adorno’s is always against it.
    The relationship between Moten and Adorno might be characterized as follows: whereas Moten, faced with and fully cognizant of perfect unfreedom, becomes an affirmative thinker of resistance, Adorno remains a negative theorist of withstanding. This is just as evident in their relationship to dialectics and in their political theories of the subject as it is in their aesthetics, although both do assume (Moten to a greater extent than Adorno) the existence of an intrinsic link between aesthetics and questions of subjection.
But my interest in Moten’s ideas is not due solely to his rare ability to shake Adorno’s readers out of their habitual readings, transforming seemingly intractable aporias into something different, something more fleeting (in the sense of fugitivity). His thinking interests me above all in terms of whether and how Adorno (and the Frankfurt School in general) can be rendered productive for de- and postcolonial criticism. Whereas this critical field is strangely divided into (not so many) theorists who think Adorno is very helpful for the anti- and decolonial agenda and those who take him more or less severely to task on de- and postcolonial grounds,6 Moten points to a path of critical affirmation—specifically in connection with colonial violence and in the spirit of resistance against that violence.

2. The resistance of the object

Although Adorno is barely mentioned in the theoretically crucial introductory chapter to Moten’s In the Break, he is nonetheless ever-present in the form of its title “Resistance of the Object,” a transposition of Adorno’s primacy of the object into a new key that is neither major nor minor. Moreover, Moten’s very first footnote deals with Asha Varadharajan’s assertion that Adorno’s Negative Dialectics helps us grasp not only the link between knowledge and power, but also the possibility of resistance on the object side of the relationship.7 Moten calls his remarks an “echo” of Varadharajan’s, but he immediately points out that his view of Adorno differs from hers.
    Adorno’s theory of the primacy of the object envisages an object that is always already unavailable on account of the categorical difference between concept and material thing. For Adorno, however, this does not mean that thinking necessarily fails to apprehend or even destroys what it thinks about. It is not unimportant how and how much is subsumed under a concept. Moreover, in Adorno’s view, it is only and specifically by means of the concept that the object can be approached, even if, in its unassailable primacy, the object remains a kind of liminal concept. Not for nothing did Adorno develop negative dialectics and, with reference to Walter Benjamin, thinking in constellations as a conscious, concept-critical approach to dealing with the primacy of the object.8 This also gives rise to an ethical-political standard, an imperative even, to get as close as possible to the singularity of the never entirely available object while nonetheless respecting its unapproachability.
    Moten’s view of the resistance of the object could be described as the exact opposite, taking not concept-based thinking but the object, or at least certain objects, as its starting point, as well as engaging with the “fetishism of the commodity” as discussed by Karl Marx.9 In the first volume of Capital, Marx contests the idea that commodities merit their value, that it inheres within them as “natural content.”10 This false image, he argues, obscures not only the fact that commodities only acquire their (exchange) value by being circulated, but also that this exchange-value is subject to continual, arbitrary fluctuations driven by the uncontrollable vagaries of market logic, thus differing from the use-value commodities may also possess. Because use-value is determined by those who use it. Whereas the logic of exchange value remains a secret. And Marx shows sympathy for the way people interested in use-value experience the monetary exchange-value they are obliged to pay as uncontrollable, but still treat this it as a natural property, fetishizing it, precisely because the logic of the erratically changing exchange value, and even more so its role in the capitalist mode of production, is irrational and eludes human control. In this way, the exchange-value of the commodity becomes something “mystical”11 which is nonetheless inescapable because one is confronted with it every day. In other words: a fetish.
    What Marx found far more problematic was the fact that even bourgeois economists had been fueling this fetishism, treating it as a scientific truth. To highlight their error, or rather to caricature it into plain sight, he begins with a thought experiment before equating the ideas on commodity-value in question with those of the bourgeois economists. Finally, two fool-like characters from Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing articulate the economist’s viewpoint in such crass terms that even the most unreasonable fetishist must see their error. Marx’s thought experiment begins like this:

“If commodities could speak, they would say this: our use-value may interest men, but it does not belong to us as objects. What does belong to us as objects, however, is our value. Our own intercourse as commodities proves it. We relate to each other merely as exchange-values.”

Then Marx speaks again, commenting:

“Now listen how those commodities speak through the mouth of the economist: ‘Value (i.e. exchange-value) is a property of things, riches (i.e. use-value) of man. Value, in this sense, necessarily implies exchanges, riches do not.’ ‘Riches (use-value) are the attribute of man, value is the attribute of commodities. A man or a community is rich, a pearl or a diamond is valuable…A pearl or a diamond is valuable as a pearl or diamond.’

So far no chemist has ever discovered exchange-value either in a pearl or a diamond. The economists who have discovered this chemical substance, and who lay special claim to critical acumen, nevertheless find that the use-value of material objects belongs to them independently of their material properties, while their value, on the other hand, forms a part of them as objects. What confirms them in this view is the peculiar circumstance that the use-value of a thing is realized without exchange, i.e. in the direct relation between the thing and man, while, inversely, its value is realized only in exchange, i.e. in a social process. Who would not call to mind at this point the advice given by the good Dogberry to the night-watchman Seacoal?:

‘To be a well-favoured man is the gift of fortune; but reading and writing comes by nature.’”12

Although the commodities that speak the language of bourgeois economists in this passage point out that they owe their exchange-value to their circulation on the market, they nonetheless believe that this exchange-value is something that “forms a part of them as objects,” with an objective status, whereas the use-value objects may possess for humans is merely subjective. As if, for example, the use-value of a drug for a specific patient were relative, while the price to be paid for that medicine—its exchange-value arising, as Marx would say, from all manner of vagaries such as share price fluctuations and pharma industry speculation—were a material, objective property of the drug.
    In an approach that will come as a big surprise to readers of Marx, Moten begins by questioning the use of the conjunctive in “if commodities could speak.” Moten challenges this,13 saying that speaking commodities do exist, namely the enslaved humans who were traded as goods, shipped, sold, and resold, during the trans-Atlantic slave trade, mainly as “cargo” or “chattel”; and that from the viewpoint of these speaking commodities, the relationship between exchange- and use-value does not match Marx’s view. According to Moten, these speaking commodities mess up not only Marx’s distinction between the viewpoints of the economists and of needy people, but also the capitalist exchange of commodities. Because they introduce a third factor alongside Marx’s (alienated) exchange-value and (authentic) use-value,14 a factor Moten calls social life, i.e., sociality and exchange beyond the community of possessive, bourgeois subjects. At the same time, the speaking commodities realize something that Marx can only imagine in the future, once private property has been abolished: the emancipation of all human senses from the one that overshadows all else in capitalism, the sense of having. And, as Marx writes, these emancipated senses come into their own as theorists: “The abolition of private property is therefore the complete emancipation of all human senses and qualities […] The senses have therefore become directly in their practice theoreticians.”15 ng1 RS2 How is such emancipation to come about in the heart of a commoditized world? And what does this have to do with Adorno?
    In his discussion of speaking commodities, Moten’s aim is not to remind us that enslaved people did of course speak, even though they were often forbidden to do so (especially while they worked), not to mention reading or writing, under the threat of draconian punishments. The kind of speech he means is one of resistance, a speech that highlights the resistance of an object, of a person turned into an object. Moten finds the kind of speaking that inspires his ideas in a scene described by Frederick Douglass in the first chapter of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. He refers to this scene as the “most terrible spectacle” that inducted him into slave subjectivity as a child: the flogging of his Aunt Hester.16 Moten reads Douglass’s account of his aunt’s screaming in response to the slaveholder’s whiplashes—“heart-rending shrieks form her, and horrid oaths from him”17—together with the slave songs mentioned by Douglass at various points in his autobiography, seeing a continuity between them. The songs appear right after the first chapter that centers on Aunt Hester:

“While on their way, they would make the dense old woods, for miles around, reverberate with their wild songs, revealing at once the highest joy and the deepest sadness. They would compose and sing as they went along, consulting neither time nor tune. […] This they would sing, as a chorus, words which to many would seem unmeaning jargon, but which, nevertheless, were full of meaning to themselves. […] they were tones loud, long, and deep; they breathed the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish. Every tone was a testimony against slavery. […] To those songs I trace my first glimmering conception of the dehumanizing character of slavery.”18

When lending his ear to the screaming and singing of the speaking commodities, Moten’s focus is not on ordinary speech. Instead he is thinking about a kind of utterance that can hardly be called speech at all. At the same time, especially in the case of Aunt Hester, it’s more than just noise—a directed, addressed speaking-screaming that resists and breaks through the violence of capitalist exploitation for which the system of plantation slavery is a catalyst. In Moten’s view, then, the speaking-screaming of Douglass’s Aunt Hester establishes a line of Black performance of materiality that is still ongoing today—be it in music, in imagery, in dance, or in language.

The refractory ripostes from Aunt Hester that provoke and answer her tormentor’s curses are acoustic amplifications and repetitions of the refractoriness that preceded the whipping. In Moten’s eyes, they are thus the one of the roots of the call-and-response structure that still characterizes Black music today. At the same time, however, the materiality of Aunt Hester’s screams takes them beyond mere communicative language, adding the resistance of a sensual dimension (especially in their timbre) not available to the communicative circulation of words and signs with its perpetual tendency to acquire and possess a message. According to Moten, this sensuality that resists, not only demanding but also realizing liberation—“[w]here shriek turns speech turns song”—has informed Black music up to the present. Aunt Hester’s scream-singing can be heard very directly, he claims, in “Protest” by Abbey Lincoln, Max Roach, and Oscar Brown Jr., but also in Albert Ayler’s “Ghosts” and James Brown’s “Cold Sweat.”19
Like Marx and Adorno, then, Moten envisages a debased, enslaved, despised being, as Marx puts it in his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.20 Not so much with a view to liberation, but with the greatest attentiveness to where and how such beings have resisted and—even if only for the length of a song—liberated themselves. Unlike Adorno’s, Moten’s version of a “primacy of the object” does not attempt to grant primacy to the material object from a position based on negative dialects, getting as close to it as possible, helping it to receive as much justice as possible and granting it a will of its own. Moten wants to develop an awareness for where and how the debased object itself resists, without the advocacy of the intellectual. He even speaks of a “priority of resistance and objection to subjection.”21 This doesn’t apply at all times and in all places, but very often in the tradition within which Moten positions himself: in the Black Radical Tradition.22 Since its beginnings with the European slave trade in the Americas, it has aimed for a sociality of resistance in which the sensual becomes theoretical and thinking becomes a sensual process, taking place not in cordoned-off specialized areas of society but in everyday life. And it is precisely here that the Black Radical Tradition overlaps with Marx’s vision of a society after the abolition of private property and the end of the limitation of the senses to the sense of having. In this spirit, Moten rhetorically asks in “The Case of Blackness”: What is “black social life” other than the “fugitive being of ‘infinite humanity,’ or […] that which Marx calls wealth?”23 He refers here to the passage from the Grundrisse where Marx distinguishes between truly socialized wealth and the financial wealth that is always available only to the few:

“In fact, however, when the limited bourgeois form is stripped away, what is wealth other than the universality of individual needs, capacities, pleasures, productive forces, etc., created through universal exchange? […] The absolute working-out of his ng3 RS4 ng5 creative potentialities, with no presupposition other than the previous historic development, which makes this totality of development, i.e. the development of all human powers as such the end in itself, not as measured on a predetermined yardstick? Where he does not reproduce himself in one specificity, but produces his totality? Strives not to remain something he has become, but is in the absolute movement of becoming?”24

Unlike in Marx, the state in which the senses and thinking have been so fully and radically realized as to be indistinguishable from one another—because screaming, smelling, or singing are also forms of thinking, and thought an everyday sensory practice—is localized by Moten not exclusively in the time after the abolition of bourgeois society (this aspect is central to the quote from the Grundrisse) or after the end of private property, as Marx writes in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Instead, Moten finds this state in miniature in the screaming-speaking-singing of Aunt Hester and Abbey Lincoln. Rather than opening up a future, their aesthetic resistance creates an infectious intensity of insubordination in the present that derives its force from a sociality and a shared quality in the sense of a commons. With Marx, one could also speak of a wealth beyond the exchange of commodities in whose place what remains, after the end of bourgeois society, is not atomized individual subjects but a space of “universal exchange,” as the above-quoted passage from the Grundrisse makes clear. Precisely this universal exchange, diametrically opposed to the exchange of commodities because it is neither mediated via a unifying medium nor based on the extraction of added value, depending instead on the relations within a social sphere that belongs to no one, is referred to by Moten as “exchange before exchange” or “anticipatory sociality and history.”25
    This is not just an objection to the postponement of radical alternatives until after the end of bourgeois society. Instead, it also sheds new light on the speaking commodities. When Marx says they have no intrinsic value, Moten argues, but only a value acquired via exchange and subject to perpetual random shifts beyond their control, he is only half right. Because yes: the speaking commodities are forcedly part of a trade involving themselves and all other commodities. But also no: the speaking commodities cannot be reduced to this trade. Rather, they have from the outset also built an exchange of sociality and care among themselves that remains untouched by the exchange of commodities. This is also a kind of sociality that is barely comprehensible from the viewpoint of the possessive, contractual subject of the Western world that is defined by being or wishing to be the sole owner of itself and other assets. In this context, Moten speaks of a “possessive subjectivity” that took shape as an aggression against and control mechanism over free relations in the sense of non-equalizing exchange.26 This recalls the theories of Silvia Federici, who understands capitalist violence in general as a reaction to practices of commonality in the sense of a commons.27
    In Moten’s eyes, the socio-sensual wealth of Douglass’s Aunt Hester or Abbey Lincoln finds its full expression not after the horror, as Marx claims, but alongside it, in the midst of the terror with which bourgeois, capitalist society responds to precisely this wealth and its spirit of resistance. With this theory or viewpoint, Moten does not follow Adorno in placing suffering and the experience of terror at the center of his thinking. He does not see himself as the voice of the debased and exploited, nor does he strive to obtain as much justice for them as is possible by means of representative language, an endeavor that is ultimately doomed to fail. Moten seeks to raise awareness of the resistance-based sensual commonwealth of a universal exchange operating obliquely and transversally with regard to the exchange of commodities. This is all the more important since the bourgeois-capitalist logic of exchange, as well as critiques of that logic, render such an awareness of the wealth of resistance almost impossible, always resorting to stereotypical images of the debased and the exploited.
    Applied to Adorno, this viewpoint has consequences both for aesthetics and for critical thinking; and especially for the question of whether and how they can be related to one another, and of whether they still intersect when there is no such awareness. Concerning this aim of thinking and writing inspired by aesthetics (more in the sense of sensuality than of art) Moten and Adorno are very close, with Adorno mainly approaching it in the form of the essay. When discussing Adorno’s ideas on both negative dialectics and aesthetics, however, Moten makes tiny shifts. The result in each case is, to use a favorite term of Adorno’s, eine Differenz ums Ganze, a total difference. In both fields, and not least in the places where they overlap and merge, this involves what Moten refers to in a footnote as the “affirmative force of ruthless negation.”28

3. The affirmative force of negative dialectics

Adorno’s negative dialectic has often been understood in terms of what he wrote in Aesthetic Theory about the mythological figure of Penelope; that she unraveled in the evening what she had woven during the day.29 Applied to thinking, this implies that any idea, taken to its logical conclusion, must criticize and take itself apart or—as a tradition often associated with negative dialectics terms it—deconstruct itself. Although Derridean deconstruction in particular emphasizes this wholly unhistorical direction (in the sense of a universal ethics of thought that must never be or become content with itself), Adorno himself never tires of pointing out that such a deconstruction is not always necessary to the same degree, called for only when and where thinking proves to be at odds with itself and reality in avoidable ways.
    Alex Demirović articulates this very clearly when he states that negative dialectics addresses not perpetual paradoxes but the contradictions of a specific form of society—bourgeois-capitalist society. One central aspect of this society is that it constantly evokes equality and freedom while systematically violating them, deliberately overriding them, or transferring them to extralegal spaces as we are currently seeing at Europe’s borders. As Demirović writes, it is and remains “a contradiction of bourgeois society that it is unable to conceive of itself as a racist, anti-Semitic, sexist, violent society. Wherever such viewpoints, attitudes, or practices do exist, they are framed as aberrations, errors, misunderstandings, deviations, and irrationalities of specific individuals.”30 It is “not just a matter of logical problems; these problems are objectively the result of a specific society.”31
    Where (and only where) such problems exist, negative dialectics is called for. Again and again, it explores that which escapes the totalization, homogenization, and closure of society in ways so fundamental and necessary that one cannot speak of a simple error. Instead, for example, the murderous violence of Europe’s outer borders is an integral part of Europe’s capitalist system. It is exactly what we want. According to Demirović, this view of negative dialectics is also far from resignatory.32 Instead, he argues, it addresses the reasons for these contradictions and the ways of reducing or overcoming them, “so that they no longer arise at all: a negation of the negation that remains negative? A reconciled humanity would be beyond dialectics.”33
    The affirmative element of Adorno’s negative dialectics thus consists in an analysis that works towards the disappearance of contradictions and of the violent society of which they are the expression. Viewed this way, Adorno’s refusal, when faced with particular elements of the right (or at least the less wrong), to insist that, as part of the still dominant wrong whole, they can only be half right at best, is not negative theology (which I would associate more with deconstruction), grouchiness, or resignation. It is quite simply a rejection of the willingness to content oneself with (too) little. One might also call it an unrelenting adherence to unlimited happiness.
    Moten’s understanding of the “affirmative force of ruthless negation” is barely distinguishable from this non-resigning view of negative dialectics—but at the same time it is totally different. Or, to put it another way: at this point, Moten adds one of his bafflingly minimal but radical twists to Adorno’s concept. Precisely in view of the terror that surrounds her, Moten seems to suggest, the resistance of Aunt Hester and many others is not just a proverbial drop in the ocean, or powerless in the face of all that she cannot prevent or change. Instead, it is a coherent critique and not least the expression of a successful form of social relations that both enables and underpins the resistance, not reduced or nullified by the fact that protest fails. Instead, it and its rightness remain.34 In this context, when Moten warns of the “dialectical snare of a freedom that exists only in unfreedom,”35 he seems to have the following in mind: the fact of a local or temporary rightness in an ocean of wrongness does not mean that the local or temporary is only half right, but that the problem is the ocean. The rightness—for all of its mostly known local or temporary limitations—makes this ocean of wrongness identifiable as wrong, but it doesn’t make what’s right wrong. For Adorno, by contrast, there can be no truly or completely right within the wrong.36
    Moten’s position could be summed up as follows: it is not about simply tallying up the few plus points (of the right) and incalculable minus points (of the wrong) and thus—in view of the prevailing conditions, in Aunt Hester’s times no less than today—failing to achieve a full score. Instead, it is about allowing both—the right and the wrong—to exist alongside one another, in a relationship based on critique and resistance. The sociality of an “exchange before exchange”—the backdrop and telos of Aunt Hester’s shriek-speech—remains right even if the terror against Black people continues to this day.
    Precisely this sociality is the enemy that is being targeted when, as so often in recent times, Black boys running away from the police are shot in the back. Which is why it makes sense when, in a discussion on the theme of “Do Black Lives Matter?”, Moten calls this sociality “Black life,”37 offering the following characterization with regard to the police murders of Michael Brown (August 9, 2014, in Ferguson, Missouri) and Eric Garner (July 17, 2014, in Staten Island, New York City):

“We need to understand what it actually is that the state is defending itself from and I think that in this respect, the particular instances of Michael Brown’s murder and Eric Garner’s murder are worth paying some attention to because what the drone, Darren Wilson [the police officer who shot Michael Brown], shot into that day was insurgent Black life walking down the street. I don’t think he meant to violate the individual personhood of Michael Brown, he was shooting at mobile Black sociality walking down the street in a way that he understood implicitly constituted a threat to the order he represents and that he is sworn to protect. Eric Garner on the everyday basis initiated a new alternative kind of market place, another mode of social life. That’s what they killed, ok? So when we say that Black lives matter I think what we do sometimes obscure is the fact that it’s in fact Black life that matters. That insurgent Black social life still constitutes a profound threat to the already existing order of things. And part of the reason that it constitutes such a profound threat is its openness, its unfixity, the fact that anybody can claim it, and the fact that it can claim anybody.”38

4. Understanding barbarity requires the most insane beauty

Even Adorno sometimes thinks in this direction, i.e., against tallying up the many minus points to arrive at not enough plus points. For example when addressing the concept of beauty in Plato’s Symposium and Phaidros in his lectures on aesthetics of 1958/59.39 Adorno’s remarks on Plato here can only be described as a clear rejection of a postponement or non-recognition of all that is right until the end of history. As well as defending a definition of beauty as inseparable from sensuality and happiness, Adorno is fascinated here above all by Plato’s suggestion that beauty might be conceived of neither as a quality nor as a property, but as a highly charged dynamic of striving and longing that brings pleasure and inflicts pain at the same time.40
    When applying this notion of beauty to artworks, Adorno finds it fascinating “that the artwork in fact gives happiness by successfully drawing one in, and that in doing so it defamiliarizes the alienated world in which we live, and through this alienation of the alienated it is able to reestablish direct experience or undamaged life itself.” In other words, it is about an experience of happiness that permits the extent of the surrounding damage to be grasped. Moreover, the resulting tension causes the experience of happiness to fan the flames of a desire for much more. Adorno seems to sense how much the experience of happiness is needed in order to perceive alienation as alienation, and not merely as normality. And in view of the charge of unnecessary negativism frequently levelled at Adorno (about which more below) it is especially important to stress that this happiness is not diminished merely because it is generated out of and in tension with alienation. It is more productive here to imagine the happiness evoked by Adorno as being at least as great as the alienation it defamiliarizes with the help of artworks, allowing that alienation to be perceived and recognized as such.
    This notion of happiness—twinned with truth by both Plato and Adorno—asserts a productive link between true happiness/happy truth and delusion, as true happiness defamiliarizes alienation to the point of becoming recognizable. This understanding also implies that the experience of happiness that brings the truth to light is no less happy or true for having revealed the alienation.
    Admittedly, a different understanding (which I consider problematic because unnecessarily negativist) is far more common in Adorno’s work. As when he writes in Aesthetic Theory:

“The semblance character of artworks, the illusion of their being-in-itself, refers back to the fact that in the totality of their subjective mediatedness they take part in the universal delusional context of reification, and, that, in Marxian terms, they need to reflect a relation of living labor as if it were a thing. The inner consistency through which artworks participate in truth also involves their untruth; in its most unguarded manifestations art has always revolted against this, and today this revolt has become art’s own law of movement.”41

Here, the truth of the artwork is no longer distinguishable from its untruth. The great untruth that surrounds the work sweeps the far more fragile truth along with it, raising doubts over its defamiliarizing ability to reveal truth. We have moved here from a moment of elucidatory distortion to one of indistinguishability or even overwhelming. This is also the way Adorno’s dictum that wrong life cannot be lived rightly  has been understood.42 Not the least of Moten’s contributions to a new understanding of Adorno is his highlighting of this difference between two versions of the link he makes between truth and untruth—and thus of the “dialectical snare” discussed above.

    Moten, too, claims that the terror of the tortured can only be understood where the resistance to it and the insane beauty of this resistance are recognized. It is no surprise, then, that Adorno’s remarks on Plato’s understanding of happiness and truth come very close to something Moten said in a discussion with Saidiya Hartmann. I do not mean to suggest, however, that the terror of the Shoah, that stands at the center of Adorno’s thinking, can be equated with terror of slavery, that forms the context for Moten’s writing. Not for nothing do Adorno and Moten both stress the irreducible singularity of barbarity that makes a mockery of any comparison. Here is the remark by Moten that I read as a comment on Adorno:

“anybody who thinks they can come even close to understanding how terrible the terror has been without understanding how beautiful the beauty has been against the grain of that terror, is wrong. There is no calculus of the terror that can make a proper calculation without reference to that which resists it. […] So this is the key thing to me.”43

    As I see it, then, the big difference between Adorno and Moten lies not in the fact that one tends more to negation and the other to affirmation. At least not once one has learned to see Adorno’s own ambivalences regarding the revelatory defamiliarizing role of an unconditionally affirmed happiness (as Moten might put it). And once one has stopped reading the close link between truth and untruth, or freedom and guilt, of which Adorno accuses art in many places, as a relationship overdetermined by the wrong—a relationship between affirmation and negation in which the latter must always have the final word.44
    One genuine and profound difference between Adorno and Moten is to be found in their theories of art, with Adorno clearly clinging to a notion of art’s autonomy that has been tightly bound up with capitalist division of labor and bourgeois profiteering from this set-up since its emergence in the eighteenth century.45 In spite of his constant analysis and criticism of the contradictions of this notion of art and its autonomy, Adorno won’t drop it, continuing to advocate a definition of art whose survival essentially depends on individual artworks perpetually criticizing this definition, developing in opposition to it, as seen especially in the history of the avant-gardes.
    Against this backdrop, Adorno does not bemoan the movements of the avant-gardes against autonomy as the downfall of art or its nth death. He defends them as plausible developments wherever art risks being downgraded to “a kind of National Park.”46 Once again, it is clear that Adorno is clinging here to a definition of art that is kept alive by the constant criticism it receives from the works it brings forth (or at least the successful ones). Artworks considered true by Adorno are thus those that tug at the threads that keep them alive, as if they were shackles, but nonetheless hold on to these shackles. In this view, the more autonomous the field of art becomes, the more anti-autonomous the individual artworks must be, and vice versa. Only in this way can it preserve its autonomy, an autonomy Adorno never really questions.
    The fact that Adorno puts these ongoing movements of modern art (in the West, a distinction he tellingly almost never makes) against itself at the center of the autonomous artwork highlights all the more starkly how little he is able to imagine any alternative, or even a parallel trajectory. In other words, for Adorno, art as defined by Western modernity beginning in the eighteenth century is synonymous with art as such and in general. Instead of focusing attention on non-Western or pre-capitalist concepts of art (which I by no means wish to cast as fundamentally unproblematic) Adorno can only imagine clinging to the bourgeois-capitalist definition of art, even if he does require this art to work tirelessly against all of its fundamental constants. And this art, that battles against itself just as vehemently as Adorno mistrusts it, is venerated by Adorno as the epitome of what is possible in terms of criticism and truth. This may also be why, as Moten says, Adorno manages to perceive important things about jazz while ultimately remaining utterly deaf. And Moten writes: “I’m interested, here, in the insight Adorno’s deafness carries.”47

6. More Specifically: On Jazz. A different aesthetics of modernity

Most defenders of jazz have displayed (often even great) understanding for Adorno’s criticism of its contribution to the bourgeois culture industry. As Moten and Okiji in particular have shown, however, this criticism is also a topos in the art of jazz itself (an art often falsely dismissed on the basis of such critiques), and no less in statements by jazz musicians. Okiji points, for example, to Charles Mingus’s composition “The Clown,” on the album of the same name, dealing with the fact that the part of the music by the musician degraded to clown status that is perceived “above underground” (i.e., in the culture industry) has nothing to do with the underground from which this music emerges, namely the sociality of the shrieking-singing that can be traced back among others, according to Moten, to Aunt Hester. “The clown has, according to Mingus, ‘all these wonderful things going on inside … all these greens and yellows, all these oranges.’ […] At the end of the piece, in desperation, the clown takes his own life, which is met with raucous laughter. The audience is unable to recognize his blackness/humanity even in this extreme act.”48
     What defenders of jazz like Moten do claim Adorno lacks, however, is the necessary openness to the laws of movement of this music itself, above all the ways it does and does not resemble European art music. And in this context, Adorno’s famously withering invectives against jazz play squarely and dizzyingly into Moten’s hands: Yes, Moten agrees, this music is about non-autonomous subjects, castrated men and women degraded to maidservants. Unfreedom runs through it like an organ drone; and for good reason. Because the enslaved men who developed this music were ceaselessly castrated in the sense that they were forced to watch for centuries as their daughters and wives were raped by their white owners. Not to sing about this would be to confirm the unfreedom once and for all. In response to Adorno’s remark in “On Jazz” that “psychologically, the primal structure of jazz (Ur-Jazz) may most closely suggest the spontaneous singing of servant-girls,”49 Moten again answers in the affirmative: Yes, that’s the way it is. Jazz was invented by women pressed into the most abject servitude. But then he refers again to the shrieking-singing of Aunt Hester, to whom the Black Radical Tradition in general and jazz in particular can, he argues, be traced back.50
    Moten returns to these servant girls in many texts,51 including one about Adorno’s engagement with phonograph records and phonographs52 in which he cites the following remark from Adorno’s essay “The Curves of the Needle”:

“Male voices can be reproduced better than female voices. The female voice easily sounds shrill – but not because the gramophone is incapable of conveying high tones, as is demonstrated by its adequate reproduction of the flute. Rather, in order to become unfettered, the female voice requires the physical appearance of the body that carries it. But it is just this body that the gramophone eliminates, thereby giving every female voice a sound that is needy and incomplete. Only there where the body itself resonates, where the self to which the gramophone refers is identical with its sound, only there does the gramophone have its legitimate realm of validity: thus Caruso’s uncontested dominance. Wherever sound […] requires the body as a complement – as is the case with the female voice – gramophonic reproduction becomes problematic.”53

Moten discusses this problem of female voices on gramophone records using the example of Schönberg’s Erwartung, or more precisely a recording on which Jessye Norman sings the lead, allegedly confounding Adorno’s theories in multiple ways.54 Moten once again cites Adorno’s assertion that jazz doesn’t portray unfreedom as much as willingly accept it;55 that it is an appeal to conform and submit, a compliant enforcer of barbarity. Moten is not convinced, objecting that Adorno cannot have had a problem with jazz discussing barbaric forms of unfreedom and withholding any false promise of its end. Adorno, Moten argues, was unmatched in his highlighting of unfreedom even within freedom, accusing activists who proclaimed freedom in the midst of unfreedom of being dangerously naïve. And this is precisely the spirit in which Adorno’s justified references to the myriad deprivations of liberty that are dealt with by jazz must be understood. Which in turn, Moten adds, means that Adorno’s real problem with jazz must lie somewhere other than in an aesthetic strategy he was prepared to offensively defend when discussing the work of Kafka or Beckett—an overdrawn self-identification with barbarity that mimics the dead and the alienated.56 This, he argues, is precisely the way jazz persuasively addresses nothing other than unfreedom.
    But jazz does more than this—and this brings Moten to the heart of Adorno’s rejection of jazz. Because, Moten explains, the spirit of resistance articulated by jazz is not easily legible for outsiders. More specifically, it is a kind of oppositional non- or anti-subjectivity, a deliberate self-objectification that Adorno—a wholehearted proponent of Western enlightenment and its bourgeois-possessive notion of autonomy—was unable to hear. It is precisely the same sociality of those degraded to commodity status that Marx, too, was unable to see or hear.57 As Moten explains, this form of sociality foregrounds and underpins any freedom that is possible beyond the model of the sovereign, autonomously self-possessing individual—the notion of autonomy that Adorno, too, fell for. The sociality Moten is talking about, on the other hand, allows and even encourages a subject (which can then no longer be a subject defined solely with reference to itself) to put itself at the mercy of others, commending itself to the support and care which, as experience shows, usually comes from those who find themselves in a comparable situation. A subject which, rather than triumphantly worshipping some heroic form of self-legislation, conceives of itself in terms of others, in terms of structures of mutual support, thus also rendering itself immune to subjugation. In Undercommons, their book on the sociality of subalterns and their inventive cultivation of a commons, Moten and Stefano Harney write: “It’s about allowing subjectivity to be unlawfully overcome by others, a radical passion and passivity such that one becomes unfit for subjection.”58 This social structure points to a lived utopia very different to Adorno’s, who on this point too remains very much committed to a heroically isolated, autonomous subject, conceived of as passive but self-sufficiently alone, as in this passage from Minima Moralia: “lying on the water and looking peacefully into the heavens, ‘being, nothing else, without any further determination and fulfillment’.”59
    According to Moten, the sociality he is talking about is articulated in the strong timbre and the physicality of jazz, at least since the servant girl Aunt Hester began to radically subvert her enforced servility. At the same time, he adds, it is also precisely the strident physicality of the female voice that Adorno claims the gramophone is unable to capture. Not only does this lead Moten to suspect Adorno of being afraid of this shrill female voice and of actually being glad that it is filtered out of phonographic recordings—Moten also finds the impossible female voice in recordings, as exemplified by Jessye Norman’s recording of Schönberg’s Erwartung. He writes:

“Someday I’d like to be able to make somebody see and hear the objectional and ontological sociality of the black voice, where being black is only being black in groups, where not only the group of blacks but the group as such is given as an object of a specifically politicized fear and loathing precisely because of their collective and disruptive seeing. Adorno’s problem is not so much with disenfranchised subjectivity as with the abandonment of a specifically individualized subjection, the sidestepping of the dialectical snare of a freedom that exists only in unfreedom. […] certainly jazz moves within the history of a resistant, however commodified, objecthood, the history of an aggressive audiovisual objection that constitutes nothing other than the black and animating absent presence of Erwartung, the black thing that Adorno wouldn’t understand, that Norman’s objectional audiovisuality animates or reproduces with each encounter.”60

We are dealing here, then, with a sociality that produces neither pure subjects nor objects, but what might be referred to as “sobjects” who, at least since the advent of the still ongoing primitive accumulation analyzed by Marx, are part of the world of commodities, and whose individual resistance to that world is only possible because they know themselves to be cared for and supported by other sobjects who uphold a different mode of co-existence and co-enablement. Okiji rightly points out that in some of his remarks having nothing to with jazz, Adorno himself called for such an almost-no-longer-being-a-subject, even declaring it the goal of a liberated humanity.61 The utopian horizon here is not a fully self-possessed, autonomous subject but one that has joyfully relinquished such possession and that can no longer be called a subject—and above all one that has become one element within a diversity, and that would no longer dream of drifting contentedly and all alone on the water.
    If one takes this alternative to the autonomous, (self-)possessing subject seriously, then it casts a peculiar light on Adorno’s defense of the autonomy of the artwork even in the face of his own objections. What is called for a critique or an abandonment of art as an autonomous domain cut off from the rest of society, replacing or at least accompanying the autonomous artwork with aesthetic practices that can be understood as modes (and modifications) of a shared sociality, as part of “social life.”62 Moten also writes of an “invocation of a necessarily social aesthetic, a black aesthetic and sociality,”63 referring among others to comments made by jazz pianist and composer Cecil Taylor in a conversation about Blackness with fellow musician Albert Ammons and the painters Piet Mondrian and Ad Reinhard, in which Taylor refers to his music as “a way of living” and says, among others:64

“western art is involved and has been involved with one perspective, one idea, one representation of one social-racial entity and aesthetic; and I’m saying that I must be aware of that, in what that has meant to black men or to the Indians. I have to be aware of the social dynamics of my society in order to function. I don’t only have a responsibility to myself, I have a responsibility to my community.”65

Framed in this way, the aesthetic theory of a sociality in which art is a commons does not ask whether and how art can intervene in society in its own self-possessed and self-possessing way, from the remotest possible position. Instead, it asks which social practices, that always have a sensual dimension, stand in opposition to which other practices. Which aesthetic forms dwelling in the communal can be marshalled against the no-less-quotidian aesthetics of barbarism and enforced conformity. In Moten’s view, just such an understanding of aesthetics can be used to explain jazz: “It is from and as a sensual commune, from and as an irruptive advent, at once focused and arrayed against the political aesthetics of enclosed common sense, that Taylor’s music […] emerges.”66 And almost like Adorno (if one thinks of his notion of aesthetic forms as sedimented content),67 but only almost, Moten then speaks, in connection with this sensual commune, of a “social life of forms.”68 Rather than solidifying out of societal content and taking on a life of their own, the forms here are part of the dynamic of an vibrant sociality. This sociality needs to be taken as the starting point for a post-Adorno aesthetic—an aesthetic that seeks to resist the promise of self-governing autonomy and autonomous self-possession that has been booming since the emergence of the bourgeois aesthetic and that still asserts itself as the only option on the global art market.69

Translated by Nicholas Grindell

1 Since his first book, In the Break. The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis und London: University of Minnesota Press, 2003) Moten has been committed to the Black Radical Tradition as reconstructed by Cederic Robinson on the basis of a long tradition of Black resistance. See Cederic Robinson, Black Marxism. The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).
2 The following remarks are part of a longer essay on the relationship between Adorno and postcolonial criticism.
3 See Enzo Traverso, Left-Wing Melancholia. Marxism, History and Memory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), especially the section “A Missed Dialogue,” 166-174.
4 C. L. R. James, Black Jacobins. Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1989).
5 There are, however, obvious theoretical differences between Adorno and James. As Traverso writes: “Differently from Adorno […] he [= James, RS] did not conceive the dialectic of Enlightenment only as unfolded domination but also as a process of conflicts and struggles. Confronted with the reality of fascist counter-Enlightenment, he defended a form of radical Enlightenment and radical cosmopolitanism … of ‘universalism from below’. We cannot ignore the different positions of Adorno and James at the moment of their missed dialogue, a difference that could be related to the crossroad of the opposed paths of the Jewish-German exile and the Black Atlantic.” Enzo Traverso, Left-Wing Melancholia, 173.
6 Post- and decolonial theorists with positive views on Adorno in spite of criticism include: Asha Varadharajan, Exotic Parodies: Subjectivity in Adorno, Said, and Spivak (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995); Antonio Y. Vázquez-Arroyo, “Universal history disavowed: on critical theory and postcolonialism,” in Postcolonial Studies, 11:4 (2008): 451-473; Keya Ganguly, “Adorno, authenticity, critique,” in Crystal Bartolovich, Neil Lazarus (eds.), Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 240-256; Namita Goswami, “The (M)other of All Posts: Postcolonial Melancholia in the Age of Global Warming,” in Critical Philosophy of Race 1, No 1 (2013): 104-120; Fumi Okiji, Jazz as Critique. Adorno and Black Expression Revisited (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018). Highly critical remarks on Adorno’s silence concerning colonialism and racism can be found, for example, in: Espen Hammer, Adorno and the Political (London: Routledge, 2006), 5; Fadi A. Bardawil, “Césaire with Adorno: Critical Theory and the Colonial Problem,” in The South Atlantic Quarterly 117, 4 (2018): 773–789.
7 See Moten, In the Break, 256; Varadharajan, Exotic Parodies.
8 The incompatibility of these two forms of critical thought is something I have discussed elsewhere: Ruth Sonderegger, “Essay und System,” in Richard Klein, Johann Kreuzer, Stefan Müller-Doohm (eds.), Adorno Handbuch. Leben – Werk – Wirkung (Stuttgart: Metzler 2011), 427-430.
9 Karl Marx, Capital. A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1990), 163-177.
10 Ibid., 176.
11 Ibid., 164.
12 Ibid., 176f.
13 This is also intended as a critique of Marx, who was obviously just as unable or unwilling to imagine speaking commodities as most readers of Marx to this day; and this in spite of the fact that Marx does mention slavery in various places, for example in his chapter on primitive accumulation in Capital. Had Marx wished to fully understand the capitalist mode of production, then, as Cedric Robinson argues in Black Marxism, he would have had to focus more attention on what he referred to as the Lumpenproletariat, on reproductive labor, and in particular on the system of slavery. Only then might have been able to develop a feel for the speaking commodities. For such a comprehensive understanding of capitalism as a mode of socialization and not just as a mode of production, see Sonja Buckel, Lukas Oberndorfer, “Dirty Capitalism,” in Krisis. Journal for Contemporary Philosophy, 2 (2018): https://krisis.eu/dirty-capitalism/
14 In this context, Moten also speaks of Marx’s obsession with the proper that he sees as being called into question by the sociality of the speaking commodities. Moten also links this proper and a subject model defined by property, to which we will return below. See Moten, In the Break, 12 f.
15 Karl Marx, “Private Property and Communism,” in Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (Moscow: Progress, 1959), quoted by Moten, In the Break, 11.
16 Frederick Douglass, “Narrative of the Live of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave,” in Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass & Incident in the Life of a Slave Girl. Written by Herself (New York: The Modern Library, 2000), 21.
17 Ibid., 22.
18 Ibid., 27f.
19 With this theory, Moten by no means denies that the historical and political contexts of these performances are different from that of scream-singing. Instead, he makes the link as a way of pointing to the ongoing and constantly evolving tradition of aesthetic sociality that has been evolved by Black artists beginning with Aunt Hester. Moten, In the Break, 22.
20 Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm. Adorno often makes reference to suffering beings.
21 Moten, In the Break, 12.
22 Cederic Robinson, who wrote the first book on this tradition (Black Marxism, see Footnote 1 above), sees the key difference between Western and Black Marxism in the way the latter has always been rooted in popular resistance in thought and action; he also claims that its major intellectual figures like C.L.R. James, W.E.B. Du Bois and Richard Wright also understood their positions in terms of this popular intellectuality and sociality.
23 Fred Moten, “The Case of Blackness,” in Criticism, Vol. 50, No. 2 (2008): 214.
24 Karl Marx, Grundrisse, quoted by Moten, “The Case of Blackness,” 214.
25 Moten, In the Break, 10.
26 Ibid., 12.
27 Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (New York: Autonomedia 2004).
28 “How does this field of convergence, this ensemble, work? By way of the affirmative force of ruthless negation, the out and rooted critical lyricism of screams, prayers, curses, gestures, steps (to and away) – the long, frenzied tumult of a nonexclusionary essay.” Footnote 1 in Moten, In the Break, 255.
29 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (London: Continuum, 2004), 245.
30 Alex Demirović, “Die Selbstreflexion des Marxismus. Fünfzig Jahre Negative Dialektik,” in Prokla 184 (2016): 469 (translation N. Grindell).
31 Ibid., 474.
32 See ibid., 471.
33 Ibid, 474.
34 On the importance of such sociality and why political defeats do not cause it to disappear, see Bini Adamczak, Beziehungsweise Revolution. 1917, 1968 und kommende (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2017).
35 Fred Moten, “The Phonographic Mise-En-Scène,” in Moten, Black and Blur. consent not to be a single being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 133.
36 See Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (London: Verso, 2005), 39.
37 The Black Lives Matter movement emerged in 2012 after the killer of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was acquitted. See “All #BlackLivesMatter. This is Not a Moment, but a Movement,” at: http://blacklivesmatter.com/about/ (accessed April 8, 2020).
38 “Do Black Lives Matter? Robin D.G. Kelley and Fred Moten in Conversation,” at: https://vimeo.com/116111740 (accessed April 8, 2020).
39 Theodor W. Adorno, Ästhetik (1958/59) (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2009) (translated by Nicholas Grindell).
40 Ibid., 161 f.
41 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 222.
42 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 39.
43 Fred Moten and Saidiya Hartmann, “To refuse that which has been refused to you,” in The Chimurenga Chronic, October 2018: https://chimurengachronic.co.za/to-refuse-that-which-has-been-refused-to-you-2/
44 It should be mentioned at this point that Moten has often affirmatively quoted the exact same passage from Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (222) that I quoted above as evidence of a wrong, totalizing/levelling negativism. (Okiji has done the same, with similar intent.)
45 I have written on this in more detail in: Ruth Sonderegger, “Kants Ästhetik im Kontext des kolonial gestützten Kapitalismus. Ein Fragment zur Entstehung der philosophischen Ästhetik als Sensibilisierungsprojekt,” in Burkard Liebsch (ed.), Sensibilität der Gegenwart. Wahrnehmung, Ethik und politische Sensibilisierung im Kontext westlicher Gewaltgeschichte (Hamburg: Meiner, 2018), 109-125.
46 Adorno, “What National Socialism Has Done to the Arts,” in Adorno, Essays on Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 386.
47 Moten, In the Break, 179.
48 Okiji, Jazz as Critique, 3. See also Kronfeld’s comments on the expectations of the white culture industry as a topic in practices of jazz: Maya Kronfeld, “The philosopher’s bass drum. Adorno’s jazz and the politics of rhythm,” in Radical Philosophy, Autumn 2019, 36: https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/rp205_kronfeld_jazz.pdf
49 Adorno, “On Jazz,” in Discourse, Vol. 12, No. 1 (1989-90): 53.
50 See Moten, In the Break, 180.
51 Extensively, for example, in an essay whose title Moten borrowed from Adorno, although here the focus is on Glenn Gould: “Sonata Quasi Una Fantasia,” in Fred Moten, Black and Blur, 40–65.
52 Moten, “The Phonographic Mise-En-Scène,” in: Moten, Black and Blur, 118-133.
53 Adorno, “The Curves of the Needle,” in October 55 (1990): 54.
54 Moten, “The Phonographic Mise-En-Scène,” 132. Here, Moten also deliberately blurs the boundary between the register to which Schönberg’s music is usually assigned and jazz. For him, the question is not whether an artwork is high or low art; nor is it a matter of assigning it to a specific genre. Instead, he focuses on the political question of what kind of sociality is attested to and underpinned by a given aesthetic production. This implies a departure from the aesthetic autonomy defended by Adorno throughout his life. For more detail, see Ruth Sonderegger, “Autonomy (and why we should move on from it),” in Valery Vinogradovs (Ed.), Aesthetic Literacy: A Book for Everyone, Vol. I (Melbourne: Mont, 2022), 218–223.
55 On this notion of Adorno’s, see for example the essay “Perennial Fashion – Jazz,” in which he argues “that everything unruly in it [jazz] was from the very beginning integrated into a strict scheme, that its rebellious gestures are accompanied by the tendency to blind obeisance, much like the sadomasochistic type described by analytic psychology, the person who chafes against the father-figure while secretly admiring him, who seeks to emulate him and in turn derives enjoyment from the subordination he overtly detests. […] The Negro spirituals, antecedents of the blues, were slave songs and as such combined the lament of unfreedom with its oppressed confirmation.” In Prisms (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1983), 121. Adorno had already made a similar argument in his essay “On Jazz”: “this much is in any case certain : the use value of jazz does not nullify (aufheben) alienation , but intensifies it.” In Discourse, Vol. 12, No. 1 (1989-90), 48.
56 See for example the remark at the beginning of Aesthetic Theory: “Art is modern art through mimesis of the hardened and alienated; [...] this is why art no longer tolerates the innocuous.” (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 28.)
57 As early as 1845, in the above-quoted passage from his autobiography, Frederick Douglass pointed out that Black music was not understood by outsiders, perceived instead as jargon: “This they would sing, as a chorus, words which to many would seem unmeaning jargon, but which, nevertheless, were full of meaning to themselves.”
58 Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons. Fugitive Planning & Black Study, Wivenhoe, New York, Port Watson: Minor Compositions 2013, S. 28.
59 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 157. For a related critique of Adorno’s heroic notion of an autonomous, solitary (intellectual) subject, see also Nigel Gibson, “Rethinking an Old Saw: Dialectical Negativity, Utopia, and Negative Dialectic in Adorno’s Hegelian Marxism,” in Nigel Gibson and Andrew Rubin (eds.), Adorno. A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 257-291, especially 282 ff.
60 Ibid., 133.
61 Okiji makes these remarks in the context of a discussion of Adorno’s theory that jazz lacks a critical subject. Against this critical, heroic subject, she marshals Adorno’s ethics that revolves around “humility or modesty and affection.” See Okiji, Jazz as Critique, 65.
62 Fred Moten, “The Case of Blackness,” in Criticism, Vol. 50, No.2 (2008): 188.
63 Ibid., 193.
64 Ibid., 195.
65 Ibid., 197.
66 Ibid., 199.
67 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 39.
68 Moten, “The Case of Blackness,” 199.
69 I have further elaborated on and defended a pragmatist-materialist aesthetic of such practices in: Ruth Sonderegger, “Für eine Episteme sinnlicher Praktiken jenseits der kunsttheoretischen Ästhetik,” in Judith Dellheim, Alex Demirovic, Katharina Pühl, Ingar Solty, Thomas Sablowski (eds.), Auf den Schultern von Marx (Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 2021), 325–341. See also bell hooks, “an aesthetic of blackness,” in bell hooks: yearning. race, gender, and cultural politics (New York: Routledge, 2015), 103–113; and Paul C. Taylor, Black is Beautiful. A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics (Malden MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2016).