REFLECTIONS FROM A DAMAGED

DISCIPLINE: ADORNO, RELIGIOUS

RADIO, AND THE CRITIQUE OF
HISTORICAL REASON
M.WaggonerDepartment of Philosophy and ReligionAlbertus Magnus Collegemswaggoner@yahoo.com
Matt Waggoner
The Psychological Techniques of Martin Luther Thomas Radio Addresses (Adorno,
2000) echoes Adornos analogous critique of the culture industry by detecting an
ideological effect, prior to any given content, intrinsic to the form of radio religion.
Notwithstanding the texts narrowness, I argue that Adornos analysis of Thomas fait
accompli techniquepresenting claims as previously established certaintieswas
both typical of his work and insightful for issues in cultural criticism. First, it refused
subjectivist reductions of sociological effects to false consciousness. Second, it warned
that historicism runs the risk of repeating the fait accompli when it treats what exists
empirically as the only possible reality, or when it treats empirical givens as represen-
tatives of a future redemption. I argue that Adornos dismissal of religious radio was
consistent with his critique of positivism, and that the Thomas study models an
historicist methodology that refuses, against its own logic, to reduce otherness to its
own categories.
KEYWORDS Adorno; religion; radio; historicism; culture; politics
In Mourning and Melancholia Freud observed paradoxical attachment to
a things absence, an unnished and unnishable mourning (1989, 586). One of
the purposes of this essay is to show that Theodor Adorno, who described his
work as a melancholy science (Adorno 1974, 15), did not consider an objects
absence inimical to its science; exactly the opposite. Only that a science was
worth considering which took seriously the bottomlessness of its enterprise.
23
Culture and Religion Vol. 5, No 1, 2004
ISSN 0143-8301 print/1475-5629 online /04/1/00023-18
2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd DOI: 10.1080/0143830042000200346
24 MATT WAGGONER
These reections on a damaged discipline will examine the pardox of objectless-
ness nowhere more famously observed than in the remark that there is no data
for religion. Religion is solely the creation of the scholars study (Smith 1982, xi).
I agree with Theodor Adorno (and with Smith) that the aporia represented
by the absence of the thing in question is a kind of damage that critical sciences
cannot do without. That aporia (a sciences attachment to the absence of its
object) does not lead, to a happy science but to a melancholy science, one
without guarantees. It also leads me to the problem of formalism. Historical
studies of religion have in common the critique of a category, religion, which
was considered by phenomenological comparativism to be sufciently formal to
constitute a universal. However, the post-Eliade anti-universal polemic, operating
as it did within an Enlightenment tradition, did not do away with and only
reinstated another kind of universal, that of reason rather than religion. What I
want to draw attention to is not only the persistence of older and it seems to me
no longer tenable Enlightenment assumptions, like universal rationality and
what Nietzsche called the ground oor of reductive sciences (1974, 335). It is
also what I perceive to be a lack of reection about the commensurability, or lack
of it, between the premises of historicist and formalist critique, and, moreover,
about the plausibility of post-historicist/formalist alternatives. I want to suggest
that we have assumed far to easy answers to Derridas ironic question at the
opening of Faith and Knowledge (1996, 1): Should one save oneself by
abstraction or save oneself from abstraction?.
When Derrida imagined that perhaps one must take ones chances in
resorting to the most concrete and most accessible, but also the most barren
and desert-like, of all abstractions (1996, 1), he signalled the complication of
otherwise discrete Kant/Hegel positions on abstract and concrete universals that
was later discussed in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Dialogues on the Left
(Butler et al. 2000). There, Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Zizek con-
fronted major disagreements that differentiate genealogical (Focuaultian) from
psychoanalytic (Lacanian) responses to the questions of sexual difference and
political identity. Historically, Lacanians argue that sexual difference is a formal
category; it is at once objectively real and without content. There is no getting
around sexual difference in this view because it is an eternal, sexually and
linguistically constituted problem. Foucaultians have on the other hand relent-
lessly historicised sex and gender as inessential, culturally and politically derived
sets of performative, not constative, determinations. The virtue of this volume
was that each of its participants, while respectively representing partisan opin-
ions on these issues (with, I suppose, Laclau as a kind of middle term between
them), dialogued about the limits of rigid formalisms and historicisms.
Contingency, Hegemony, Universality suggests a line of questioning implicit
but unexplored in religious studies theory. Unlike those sexual difference de-
bates where the lines in the sand are pretty clear and where the task is now to
bring disparate positions into conversation, the situation in Religious Studies is
one where formal premises are invoked in support of historicist conclusions and
REFLECTIONS FROM A DAMAGED DISCIPLINE 25
vice versa, even when formalism per se continues to remain anathema because
of the history of its phenomenological employments. Without implying that
some new or old debate be kindled, I draw attention in what follows to the way
current historicist trends in the cultural and historical study of religion continue
to be not historical enough; they rely on an Enlightenment metaphysics of
rationality or essence and appearance as the rm ground from which to wage
their tug-of-war with the religious. On the other hand, I argue that historicism
without a concept of alterity has the deleterious effect of a positivist thinking.
Finally, I show that the implications of those deleterious effects are double; they
are methodological as well as ethical and political.
The goal of what follows will be to unpack from a very uncharacteristic and
easily misunderstood text of Adorno a movement that I think was nevertheless
intimately connected to the major strands of his critical philosophy. I examine
The Psychological Techniques of Martin Luther Thomas Radio Addresses (Adorno
2000), drawing attention to the imperatives to more thoroughly historicize the
demystied thing and, on the other hand, to oppose that which exists empiri-
cally with the unrepresentable (and therefore we shall see, ambiguously
historical) gure of non-identity. In the second half of the paper I extend these
examinations and their implications for methodological as well as ethical issues
by commenting on what is to my knowledge the only extensive analysis of the
Thomas study to date, Paul Apostolidis Stations of the Cross: Adorno and
Christian Right Radio (2000).
Martin Luther Thomas
Thomas was an evangelical radio preacher whose sermons and program-
ming were representative of an early-to-mid-twentieth-century initiative within
conservative Christianity to appropriate new media (print, radio, television).
There may be any number of reasons why someone could not take Adornos
(2000) book seriously. For example, its history is specious. It is unclear to me
whether Thomas sermons indicate Protestant fundamentalism as Adorno
assumed, or another movement ourishing at that time, American Pentecostal-
ism. Both extended their ministries into radio and eventually television during
this period, but Adorno seems not to know of Pentecostalism, and Apostolidis
(2000) omits discussion as Adorno did about contrasts between the rhetoric and
technique of these two new movements. From what has been excerpted in
Adornos text, the stripe of new American Protestantism represented there is
simply unclear, even if one wanted to argue that a few of Thomas remarks
suggest he could in fact have identied with Pentecostalism. Adorno makes
reference to Thomas habit of speaking in tongues (2000, 7885), for example
a practice central to Pentecostals but loathed by fundamentalists. So one
reason to ignore the book might be the same as the reason why many dismiss
Michel Foucault: bad history. I am, however, as unconvinced by the
relevance of that charge in the case of Adornos Thomas study as I am in the
26 MATT WAGGONER
case of Foucaults work, because in both cases the authors had philosophical and
critical concerns that outweighed expectations of delity to someones opinions
about what actually happened, about the timing or the conceptuality of histori-
cal breaks, and so on. Still, something in the text begs consideration, something
more than just the difcult task of trying to reconcile it with the rest of Adornos
work. But the rst thing one must admit is that Adorno trod unfamiliar waters
when he wrote about conservative Christianity in America. He wrote experimen-
tally, never authorised its publication, and his arguments require nuance
strategies of reading.
The Thomas study was produced alongside other similar studies under-
taken by the Frankfurt School (during the 1940s and 1950s) as part of their
efforts to document and expose anti-Semitism, fascist leadership, and cultures of
Rightist extremism in the United States. Written, ironically, in propagandistic
style, the texts salient mechanism was its laundry list of gimmicks employed by
Thomas in the persuasion and manipulation of listeners: the lone wolf trick,
taken from the arsenal of Hitler, displaced popular mistrust of political leaders
away from Thomas himself through identication with meagre, even martyred
beginnings (Adorno 2000, 4); the emotional release device simulated sponta-
neity and individuality so that listeners, imitating the loss of inhibitions, were
more easily subjected to Thomas will (2000, 67); the persecuted innocence
device avoided reference to legitimate qualications for leadership through
vague assertions about personal integrity, rendering the speaker a contentless
container for the fantasies and imaginations of listeners who are willing to
follow him the more blindly, the less exactly they know who he is and what he
stands for (2000, 1011); through the indefatigability device Thomas presented
his efforts as a relentless labour of love, modelling for listeners the injunction
that they too must proceed disciplined, aggressive, and tireless (2000, 13); the
messenger device reected both the fascist leader type and the theological
armory [e.g.] the role of St John the Baptist, and it mirrored the blurring of
the lines between the fascist politician and propagandist, which in turn mirrored
the blurring of the line in present society between advertising and reality (2000,
1516). These comprised only the rst of four sections that closely resembled
it.
In spite of what one might infer from a section titled The Religious
Medium, the Thomas study offered no sustained reection on the very thing
that presumably incited alarmthe coincidence of conservative rhetoric, tech-
nology, and mass communication, which for Jewish-German e migre s at that time
smacked of Nazi propagandism. If the radio form signalled their initial interest,
media questions were surpassed by less specic attention to the ambiguous
spontaneity (not uncommonly religious) of unpoliticised massesa perennial
Marxist problem, we might add. Thomas revivalism concerned and confounded
Leftists, not because it opposed but because it mirrored revolutionary agitations
among non-literate, peasant and working-class populations. Adorno saw that
Thomas, like all fascists, reckons with followers who are deeply discontented and
REFLECTIONS FROM A DAMAGED DISCIPLINE 27
also even destitute. Their objective situation might possibly convert them into
radical revolutionaries. One of the main tasks of the fascist is to prevent this and
to divert revolutionary trends into their own line of thought, for their own
purposes. In order to achieve this aim, the fascist agitator steals, as it were, the
concept of revolution (2000, 66).
Not, primarily, about the specicity of the relationship between religion
and media, the text examines sociological conditions for the spread of fascism
in US political and religious cultures, especially among backward populations. It
assumes gullibility on their parts, as well as the burden on the ideological critic
to reveal to other intellectuals as well as to the masses (this study was intended
for popular audiences) that behind the facade of Christian commitment, fascism
was taking root in the United States, and it was doing so mediated by the
discourses of patriotism and religious revival.
Its historical precision uncertain, its conventionally modernist attitudes
evidentwhat if anything might one say about the value of this text to
contemporary cultural theory? To be clear I have no intention to save the book,
which is not the place to look for Adornos best treatment of religion, nor is it
straightforwardly representative of his philosophy in general. It does, however,
contain a version of Adornos critique of reied consciousnessthe social
production of subjectivity. Adornos melancholy science (mentioned earlier and
alluded to in the title of this essay) mourned rst the loss of a determinate
possibility, what philosophy calls the good life, and in doing so cautioned that
to know the truth of subjective experience one must now scrutinize its es-
tranged form, the objective powers that determine individual existence even in
its most hidden recesses (Adorno 1974, 15). In the critique of reied conscious-
ness Adorno theorised an ambiguity that I am arguing should constitute the
more broadly historicist approach to the cultural study of religion, between a
need to more thoroughly historicize, and, on the other hand, to bar historicisms
reduction of otherness to its own categories. Reied consciousness was for
Adorno irreducible to false consciousness, because subjectivity is nothing if it is
not mediated objectively and therefore irreducible to psychologistic terms. But
if reied consciousness does not merely describe unfortunate dupes but con-
sciousness per se, what justied Adornos unsympathetic treatment of Martin
Luther Thomas radio addresses? I suggest one possible explanation is implicit in
Adornos analysis of Thomas fait accompli technique.
Fait Accompli: Two Million Customers Cannot Be Wrong!
The device of the accomplished fact amounted to the band-wagon effect,
that of psychologically transferring the idea of established authority to ones
own racket; not unlike when it is claimed commercially that two million
customers cannot be wrong! (Adorno 2000, 42). Presenting his ideas as previ-
ously established certainties, Thomas sermons projected a situation where
belief that the causes have already been decided tends to render any resistance
28 MATT WAGGONER
psychologically a hopeless undertaking (Adorno 2000, 43). But in contrast to
what already appears to conform to traditional ideological critique, the fait
accompli may also be read as Adornos habit not to psychologise social and
subjective problems. To psychologise the effects of Thomas sermons would
have meant to identify the problem with listeners failures to see through the
devices; they were either uneducated or unconsciously compelled to think and
act in ways clearly (to rational observers) contrary to what was the case and to
their best interests. But Adorno consistently opposed the reduction of social
problems to psychological ones, as he did in this case, so of course, the fait
accompli technique could hardly work unless it had some basis in reality
(2000, 43).
One has always, according to this argument, to be able to point to the
historical conditions for subjective effects; if Thomas listeners treated his claims
as beyond critique, something to which they had no choice but to surrender
their thoughts, this was because the present organisation of society actually
tends to make people to a very large extent objects of processes which they
often fail to understand and which are utterly beyond their control [their
lives] appear to most people as something that happens to them rather than as
something which they determine by their own free will. To most people their life
actually is decided in advance (Adorno 2000, 43). There is in other words a
distinction that Adorno would like to insist upon in the use of the term false
consciousness (a term he never abandoned). He would like not to say that ones
consciousness may never be judged falseindeed it mightbut that the
falseness of ones consciousness may represent the truth of a false situation. This
marks an ambiguous and misunderstood realm in Adornos theory, because
while he rejected unproblematic notions of subjective autonomy, he did retain
the language of autonomy to describe a special case of reied consciousness,
one that is aware of its reied condition and has entered into a critical
engagement with it. Adorno in other words criticised the unencumbered
reication of consciousness. Why, we should then ask, did Adorno think these
sermons were more prone and less resistant to reication than other cultural
phenomena?
It seems that Thomas radio addresses were for Adorno uncanny. Their use
of media technologies to tranquilise the masses recalled the techniques of
Hitlers Germany. He observed that the result of the fait accompli was like a
hypnotic effect; those caught under the spell of the device were transformed
into willing and apathetic automatons. The fait accompli technique touches
upon one of the central mechanisms of the mass psychology of fascism: the
transformation of the feeling of ones impotence into a feeling of strength
(Adorno 2000, 44); by relinquishing oneself to the agent of the accomplished fact
listeners mentally joined the already-winning side. But one has misunderstood
the argument if it is thought that Adorno isolated and indicted a particular social
form, religion or media, as structurally culpable. Instead, these and other forms
signalled the colonisation of social, aesthetic, and political relations by the logic
REFLECTIONS FROM A DAMAGED DISCIPLINE 29
of exchange value at a specic time in the history of US capitalism. When art,
religion, and political communities came under the heading of collective utility
(represented equally for Adorno by capitalism and fascism) they foreclosed the
possibility of that which has no other purpose than to be an end in itself
(non-instrumental). For this reason Adorno remained notoriously suspicious of
the assimilation of cultural phenomena into mechanical forms of mass culture
and consumption, and this is exactly what was happening to popular American
Protestantism.
In the same paragraph that he indicted Thomas sermons for instrumental-
ising religion and turning adherents into docile drones, Adorno linked the effects
of radio religion to another infamous target of derision. The manipulation of this
whole mechanism, by the way, is by no means limited to fascist propaganda, but
is set in motion throughout modern mass culture, particularly in the cinema
(2000, 44; emphasis added). On this issue Adorno disagreed with Walter Ben-
jamin (1968), maintaining that cinema could not facilitate politically autonomous
(Leftist) signicance, because its technical structurethe mechanisation of still
photographsmechanised the spectator. Adornos unpopular case against cin-
ema was abbreviated in the Thomas study in support of his analogous claim
about religious radio: like Thomas, even the apparently most harmless movie
comedian may unconsciously serve the most sinister purposes of domination
(Adorno 2000, 44).
This argument is best known as Adornos critique of the culture industry,
where his dismay was already evident in the title of the essay The Culture
Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception (Adorno and Horkheimer 1944,
120167). I agree with Frederic Jameson (1990, 144) that what we have in
the culture industry essay is not a theory of culture per se. Unlike what emerged
later, especially in New Left Marxism (with Birmingham School scholars like
E.P. Thompson, Raymond Williams, and Stuart Hall), Adornos early critique of
the culture industry did not re-describe culture as a political category counter-
posed to a rigid and actually eurocentric base/superstructure model. Adornos
critique coincided with those claims, and maintained against economistic ver-
sions of Marxism that arts purposelessness eluded and resisted the tendency of
modern market societies to reduce things to exchange values. Adornos dis-
missiveness had less to do with culture in general than with the conformity of
culture to the commodity form, which he witnessed at an acute stage of
EuropeanAmerican capitalism. Commodity meant exchange value, and Adorno
understood exchange value to be diametrically opposed to the role of art in
society.
As such, his attitude toward the commodication of culture was one of
melancholy, not elitism. True, he criticised cultures consent to the commodity
form, but he did not think even modernism escaped instrumentality. In Aesthetic
Theory Adorno described its submission to the logic of exchange as arts
necessity to take up some content, some materiality; without a medium, without
mediation, art is nothing. But modernism, he continued, made explicit and
30 MATT WAGGONER
visible the contradiction between its materiality and its attempt on the other
hand to reject the empirically existent. Art turned against its own concept (The
revolt of art has become a revolt against art; Adorno 1970, 3) when it tried
to embody contentlessness; while art cannot come into being except through
reication, modernisms concept was to oppose the reicatory process that
enabled its existence. Under those conditions, just as it is meaningless to speak
of an autonomous (non-reied) consciousness, it is meaningless to speak of an
autonomous artwork, which is why Adorno lamented very early on in Aesthetic
Theory that nothing remains of the autonomy of art other than the fetish
character of the commodity (Adorno 1970, 17).
Nevertheless, it is true that Adorno privileged art and cultural phenomena
that he considered autonomous. Moreover, this autonomy was implicitly the
standard against which he dismissed Thomas speeches as little more than mass
deception. How should Adornos reader reconcile his claim that nothing remains
of the autonomy of art, on the one hand, with his critique of mass art for its lack
of autonomy? In the rst case (no autonomy) we have one of many formulations
of reied consciousnesssubjectivity passes through objectivity, and is consti-
tuted by it (Adorno 1998, 245258). In the second case (autonomy in special
cases) we have something that can only be understood within the terms of
Adornos argument. The sort of autonomy that Adorno judged present in some
cultural forms but not others was not due to pre-discursivity or non-discursivity,
but to consciousness of the loss of autonomy and a certain kind of engagement
with that loss. While it can never claim autonomy, art that revolts against itself
by expressing the irreconcilability between its promise of autonomy and the
impossibility of that promise (a formulation to which I return in the second half
of this essay) thwarts its easy assimilation into the logic of exchange. This
thwarting, furthermore, makes its appearance in Adornos thought not as an
insurgent act, but according to the model of contemplation. Thought, itself
reied, objects to its reication when it remains thought and does not capitulate
to the demand that it become actualised in the act (Adorno 1998a, 292293).
Adorno put forward two indirectly stated theses in the Thomas study, both
contained within the logic of the fait accompli. These theses correspond, I suggest,
to the two moments of historical critique that structure this essay, namely, a more
thorough historicism on the one hand, and anti-positivism on the other.
First, in these instances of radio religion Adorno saw an attenuated
example of the unprotested reication of popular consciousnesses, evident in
the effectiveness of an appeal (the fait accompli) that solicited listeners to
respond to their historically justied experiences of impotence and alienation by
cathartically identifying with the idealised claims of a radio preacher. If we are to
think seriously about the concern for total reication of this sort, we are required
to entertain the possibility of historical objectlessness. To repeat Jamesons
argument (1991, 17), Adornos anxieties about total reication of the self, of art,
and of religion in this case were historical and historically prescient (It would
therefore begin to seem, Jameson thought, that Adornos prophetic diagnosis
REFLECTIONS FROM A DAMAGED DISCIPLINE 31
has been realized). If postmodernity names the purication of capitalisms
reifying effects, to the point that no outside of the logic of commodity exists, for
Adorno as for postmodernism what corresponds to the condition of radical
reication is radical contentlessnesspure semblance. Postmodernism for mod-
ern Marxism reects material changes in the economic and cultural formation of
late capitalism; the preponderance of semblance in its expressions mirrors the
increasing superuity of capital, the purication of its ctitious form. I see little
need to say more about postmodernism, and instead choose to illustrate
Adornos conceptually similar case for the historicity of objectlessness in the
context of his critique of Sren Kierkegaard.
Adorno considered Kierkegaardian interiority consistent with the ideology
of the nineteenth-century bourgeois individual, noting the proliferation of em-
blematic metaphors throughout Kierkegaards texts: bell-ropes, red plush arm
chairs, gas-lighting, parlours, living rooms, the accoutrements of the modern
apartment. His critique of spieswindow mirrorsis illustrative. Small mirrors,
attached to an extending apparatus that permitted one to reect into the living
room a view of the row of apartments from outside ones window, spies
reected exterior semblance into the isolated interior of the bourgeois living
space. Adorno suggested that Kierkegaards melancholic inwardness reected an
exteriority without meaning and substance, a contentless world literally and
guratively out there. The window mirror, he added, testies to objectless-
nessit casts into the apartment only the semblance of things Mirror and
mourning belong together (Adorno 1989, 41). But if images of interiors were at
the centre of Kierkegaards philosophical constructions, they were also, Adorno
continued, an image in whichagainst Kierkegaards intentionsocial and
historical material is sedimented Kierkegaards philosophical intention en-
counters, without any effort on his part, objective, historical contents in those of
the interieur the force of the material goes beyond the intention of a
metaphor (Adorno 1989, 42).
Kierkegaards inward objectlessness was the truth of a condition of exterior
objectlessness in bourgeois society. My point is that Adornos critique of reied
consciousness did not psychologise or idealise this emptiness in the form of
some merely subjective process. Instead, Adorno responded to the discovery of
underlying objectlessness by historicising the conditions of social reality that
produced objectlessness as the expression of their internal contradictions. Sub-
ject, he also wrote in an essay to which I turn later, is semblance and at the
same time something historically exceedingly real (Adorno 1998a, 256). Reied
consciousness is the truth of reied social conditions; this, the historicists
contribution, requires the cultural and historical study of religion to think more
historically than it currently does.
The second feature implicit in the critique of Thomas fait accompli, in
addition to the historicity of reied consciousness, concerns what Adorno called
the cult of the existent, to which I now turn in the remainder of the essay.
32 MATT WAGGONER
Historicism at its Othermost: Adornos Critique of the Cult
of the Existent
Involved in [the fait accompli] there seems to be an element
which pertains to the widespread tendency of present society
to accept and even to adore the existentthat which is anyway.
The processes of enlightenment, the spirit of positivism in its
broadest sense, have destroyed the magical and supernatural
ideas by confrontation with empirical reality, with that which
exists. In America in particular the conviction prevails that truth
is only that which can be veried by referring to the facts One
may go so far as to say that religion largely and unconsciously
has been replaced by a very abstract yet tremendously powerful
cult of the existent. (Adorno 2000, 4445).
Adornos anti-positivist polemic targeted not just religion, but philosophy,
science, and culture in general. In this way we can begin to see the fait accompli
operating for Adorno as a general sociological term that demarcates the social
disposition of what may be called philosophical Darwinism [:] that something
exists is taken as proof that it is stronger than that which does not exist, and that
therefore it is better (Adorno 2000, 45). Of interest to me is that Adornos
critique of the fait accomplis complicity with a cult of the existent yielded a
slightly different implication than the one I observed in the rst section of the
essay. There, I observed Adornos tendency to more thoroughly historicize the
demystied thing in order to expose the contingent rather than ontological
character of the objectlessness underlying the reifying process. Nowin slight
contrast to the logic of an uninching historicismAdornos critique of a cult of
the existent calls into question concomitant tendencies throughout culture to
reduce reality to what is already given in a particular historical situation.
Adornos historicism (and ours) stands to be reconciled with his anti-positivism,
which is also his vigilance for the non-identical.
As much as anything else, the concept of non-identity was for Adorno the
nal telos of his philosophy; this is especially evident in its centrality to the text
of Negative Dialectics (1973). But a potential for confusion exists in thinking that
non-identity for Adorno celebrated the resilience of the particular against the
tyranny of the whole (the individual by fascism, the artwork by the commodity
form). On this reading, one would have to wonder how Adorno justied a
dismissive attitude toward any cultural phenomenon, any historically existent
object that presumably contains dialectical tensions that include regressive as
well as progressive elements. Every cultural object would, according to this logic,
contain a utopian potential of sorts, at least implicitly, and would preclude its
determination as hopelessly reactionary. Indeed, something of historical dialecti-
cism is contained within this interpretation, and it is one that accords with a
desire to elevate conventionally dismissed cultural forms to the status of subter-
ranean resistance. But this reading is not true of Adornos dialecticism and,
REFLECTIONS FROM A DAMAGED DISCIPLINE 33
more importantly it leads to exactly what Adorno criticised under the heading of
the cult of the existent. Notwithstanding what is valuable in it, Paul Apostolidis
Stations of the Cross: Adorno and Christian Right Radio (2000) abets this con-
fusion.
Stations of the Cross consists of an empirical examination of James Dob-
sons conservative syndicated radio programme, Focus on the Family. It closely
analyses the rhetoric and content of numerous episodes of the show and draws
conclusions about the not-so-implicit political goals evident in its discourse. It
repeats the form and something of the goal of Adornos Thomas study, and
appropriately makes that connection explicit in three of its chapters (chapters 1,
2 and 6). But Stations of the Cross differs in one dramatic way from the Thomas
study. It argues, as Adorno did not, that Focus on the Family contains progressive
energies that the Left would do well to ally with (Apostolidis 2000, 1921). The
argument is not without complexity and necessarily so since it has rst and
formidably to situate Adornos dissimilar conclusions within the context of his
wider theoretical programme, then to demonstrate that Adornos Thomas study
was inconsistent with the rest of his work or, at least, with a particular expression
of it upon which Apostolidis heavily relied. Apostolidis reads Adorno against
Adorno (2000, 4650), but I suggest, the necessity to do so owes, to a misunder-
standing.
We could arrange the constellation of difculties in Apostolidis argument
into two categories: theoretical issues and their practical, which is to say
methodological and political, implications. The confusions of the former, more-
over, lend themselves to those of the latter. Parenthetically, it will become
evident that Stations of the Cross did not need to misread Adorno to make what
one eventually recognises as its primary case; it only needed to say that it
disagreed. Instead, Stations of the Cross argued that Adornos approach was
theoretically like its own, but due to internal inconsistencies failed to arrive at
the conclusions logically implied by its concepts. This conclusion, (that Adorno
was inconsistent, revealing a tragic aw, a sort of ight from the strength and
audacity of his own convictions owes to misrepresentation of key philosophical
discussions in Adornos work).
Readers are alerted early in the introduction that in contrast to general
tendencies not just in Adorno but throughout contemporary cultural theory (i.e.,
Gramscian and Foucaultian theories), Apostolidis will prefer to emphasise the
abiding autonomy of cultural phenomena from social power relations, and will
treat cultural objects not only as thoroughly enmeshed in disciplinary and
hegemonic contestations but also as different and apart from these power
dynamics (2000, 1112; original emphases). Apostolidis needs only to say that
Adorno was wrong to write so unsympathetically about Martin Luther Thomas,
and to condemn the political pessimism in Adornos critique of religious radio.
Instead its tactic was circuitous, and in lieu of an otherwise straightforward
disagreement Apostoldis case results in two obfuscations: myopic readings and
conation of terms.
34 MATT WAGGONER
First, unsatised with the ndings of the Thomas study, Apostolidis se-
lected and privileged one of Adornos attempts to render programmatically the
method of dialectical, or imminent, critique. In Cultural Criticism and Society,
Adorno (1967) contrasted imminent and transcendent approaches to critique,
summarising to a large extent Hegels characterisation of imminent critique as a
dialectical method of analysis, one that does not approach its object from an
exterior vantage point, but according to the internal logic of the thing in
question. Imminent critique attends to an objects internal contradictions, mo-
ments in the dialectical process of a thing that from the perspective of a static
exteriority would fail to appear. Adorno, like Hegel, considered these moments
of contradiction the truth of a thing because they represent what is implicit but
not yet realised within it. According to the logic of imminent critique, nowhere
so formulaic as it is in the cultural criticism essay, an objects contradictions are
also the anticipation of their overcoming.
Adornos Hegelianism was especially visible in this essay, which means that
Cultural Criticism exhibits a foundational and irrevocable aspect of his theory.
On the other hand, when treated as representative of Adornos philosophy this
essay can mislead, because unlike the overwhelming majority of Adornos work
it does not at the same time resist Hegel. Like Marxism in general, Adorno agreed
with Hegel that the subject/object split was in the history of the metaphysical
tradition (all the way up to Kant) overstated, and misleadingly so. It was rather
the case that subject and object co-constituted one another, and this also meant
for Hegel that one could only talk about the rational or universal in terms of the
real and particular through which it is realised (see, for example, Hegel 1975).
Hegel historicised reason in this way, and Adorno like others in the Frankfurt
tradition (notably Marcuse [1941] in Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of
Social Theory) was of the opinion that Marxs critique of Hegel probably bor-
rowed as much as it corrected; what it borrowed was Hegels treatment of
history as the theatre of spirit, not the other way around.
But this is only half of the story for Adorno, who spent an equal amount
of time refusing the movement in Hegels philosophy toward identity between
subject and object. Absent in the cultural criticism essay (whose primary con-
cern, it seems, was pedagogic and methodological rather than theoretical) was
what shows up as strong resistance to the idea that criticisms role is to
anticipate reconciliation. True, contradictions point to failure, and implicit in
failure is the idea of a successful version of what has otherwise failed. But
Adorno rejected that moment in Hegels philosophy that looked beyond failures
to the fullment of identity. By ignoring Adornos anti-Hegelianism Apostolidis
misrepresents Adornos approach to cultural criticism as an empirical strategy,
because imminent critique, he suggests, amounts to starting with actually
existing cultural objects rather than with theoretical frames; data, then theory.
Second, he wrongly concludes that Adornos interest in cultural autonomy
privileged an objects ability to point beyond itself to its reconciliation, by way
of contradictions. This failure to address Adornos critique of Hegel leads to
REFLECTIONS FROM A DAMAGED DISCIPLINE 35
conclusions that turn out to be exactly what Adorno criticised. In Stations of the
Cross, Apostolidis points to (and suggests Adorno should have as well) historical
givens as representatives of an anticipated redemption, of the future identity
between what exist in the present as unrealised, contradictory conditions.
The result is that Apostolidis claims more than that the cultural object may
momentarily transcend its entanglement in social power relations (2000, 12). He
claims that by virtue of its particularity the cultural object acquires autonomy
from those relations. Once again Apostolidis is not unaware that his own project
is not only in disagreement with, but actually in the cross-hairs of Adornos
anti-positivism: Had Adorno attempted to render historical conditions in an
exact and precisely qualied manner he would have risked subverting the
logic of his own critique of positivism (Apostolidis 2000, 5051). But Adornos
refusal to do so was irreducible to a lack of empirical thickness, and was instead
the result of Adornos anti-Hegelian rejection of the notion that some empirically
given object can or should represent the universal. The rst terminological
conation occurs here with the concept of autonomy because, as Adorno made
explicit on one occasion (1977: 159) he employs the language of autonomy in
the context of aesthetics differently than what it suggests in a classical philo-
sophical sense. In philosophy, autonomy referred to what Adorno would not
concede to, that an object could persist somehow different and apart from
social power relations (Apostolidis, 2000, 12). Although Adorno did reserve
attributions of autonomy to cultural phenomena in special cases (as we have
seen), he did not do so merely by virtue of a things particularity; that is, by virtue
of the simple fact that it exists as a thing to be contended with. He did so
according to the nature of a things critical engagement with its own thing-hood.
Difculties in Apostolidis uses of the term autonomy are intimately linked
to his uses of the term object, because he has further confused a concept of
the autonomy of the cultural object with what Adorno on several occasions
called the preponderance of the object. It would have been more prudent, were
he going to rely so heavily on just one essay, to do so not with Cultural Criticism
and Society but with On Subject and Object (Adorno 1998), which contained
Adornos most sustained discussion of the preponderance of the object. What is
eminently clear in the latter is that the primacy of the object has nothing to do
with a positive or empirical concept of the object (e.g. the primacy of the given,
or the primacy of the particular), but instead with the reication of consciousness
(i.e. the primacy of objectivity to subjectivity). In short, the preponderance of the
object rejects idealisms privilege of the subject by arguing that object is not
so thoroughly dependent upon subject as subject is dependent upon objectivity
(Adorno 1998, 250). Implicit in its concept was a critique of reductionism,
because against reductive tendencies (in Hume, for example) to dismantle
objective claims down to psychological or impressionistic grounds of subjective
knowledge, Adorno wanted (with Kant) to argue that even what is regarded to
be most intimately subjective is also objective. In Adornos hands the claim that
subjectivity was objectively constituted was like Kants argument about the
36 MATT WAGGONER
forms of intuition, but it was also unlike Kant in that Adorno insisted upon a
social interpretation of objectivity rather than an abstractly universal (rationalist)
one. This permitted Adorno to say things like critique of society is critique of
knowledge, the a priori and society interpenetrate, and Kants Copernican turn
precisely expresses the objectication of the subject, the reality of reication
(1998, 250255).
Apostolidis is therefore wrong to say that the preponderance of the object
sanctions the autonomy of cultural objects. If anything, the objects primacy
speaks to Adornos rejection of the idea that subjective creations like art and
culture, or like religion, can be considered autonomous; they ought instead to be
historicised as expressions of objective contradictions in society. The claim to
autonomy that Apostolidis would like to make for religious radio has less to do
with the preponderance of the object (which actually expresses Adornos harsh-
est criticism of the concept of autonomy) and much more to do with
non-identity. For it is in the context of Adornos speculative reections on the
possibility that a cultural form could resist identity that Apostolidis might have
been able to make a case, if that case exists, that Adornoin theoryshould
have recognised the implicit progressivism of conservative Christian radio pro-
gramming. I suggest, however, that Apostolidis misreadings of autonomy and
the object as empirical concepts, against the logic of Adornos Kantian turn and
his severe anti-positivism, inform one nal misunderstanding surrounding the
concept of non-identity: the non-identical for Adorno remains as such only when
it is unrepresentable.
I submit that the question of whether or not reconciliation can be
represented in the here and now is what is quietly at issue throughout both
Adornos critique of Martin Luther Thomas and Apostolidis odd attempt to
hermeneutically subvert Adorno in support of a nostalgic politics of the mass
movement. The issue is in other words not just a methodological one about the
empirical sensibilities of the right kind of dialectical thought versus Adornos
creeping formalism (2000, 33). The question has also to do with how one is
going to treat what empirically is in the context of a critique of society, in the
context of wanting to change it, or in the context of trying to think that change.
Apostolidis attempt to recover the neglected empiricism of Adornos dialecti-
cism fails ultimately because Adorno, like aesthetic modernism, revolted against
the empirical. The real complaint of Stations of the Cross is not that Adorno gives
up on Thomas progressive potential, but that Adorno seems to give up entirely
on the possibility of critical thought and autonomous culture (Apostolidis 2000,
5051). Problematic is that Apostolidis did not differentiate Adornos critique of
the relationship between these two things; that is, critical thought on the one
hand and autonomous culture on the other. If what Apostolidis means by
autonomous culture is cultural forms that anticipate reconciliation, as he
suggests Focus on the Family does through its desire to see and facilitate the
religious salvation of Americans (2000, 1819), then to be sure this is exactly
what Adorno opposed when he argued that criticisms role is to side with
contradiction rather than reconciliation.
REFLECTIONS FROM A DAMAGED DISCIPLINE 37
Adorno could only have agreed with Apostolidis position that the Thomas
study fails to carry dialectics through (Apostolidis 2000, 75). This was its virtue,
that it foreclosed dialectical completion as the realisation of universal aims in the
historical present. Although I am reluctant to list The Psychological Techniques of
Martin Luther Thomas Radio Addresses among Adornos better books, I risk
saying that signicant elements of its critique of Christian fundamentalism still
stand, as long as the Religious Right (including Focus on the Family) thinks that
its understandings of scriptural truths, Christian morality, and increasingly of
public policy and foreign affairs, are supposed to have not just ecclesial out-
comes, but universal ones; that is, a Christian civil society. I see no intelligibility
in the claim that rightist extremism is an ally of the Left, not because it does not
want wholeness and [sic] integrality (Apostolidis 2000, 89)what totalitarian-
ism does not? What makes Christian fundamentalism incommensurable with the
Left is its representation of particular values as universal ones and its dedication
to the immanent realisation of those values as state law. Arguably, the common
thread of the various articulations of Left politics today, if such a thread exists,
is opposition to claims, radical or conservative, to embody the end of history or
some new international.
Through these analyses I see historicism operating on at least two regis-
ters, political and methodological; the question remains whether or to what
degree they are independent of each other. For Apostolidis the stakes of an
unrelenting historicism (his cult of the cultural object) codies an attachment to
the politics of praxis and intolerance of critical resignation. Close, empirical, and
sympathetic analyses of given cultural phenomena reect aspirations of broad-
based political activism that Apostolidis in no uncertain terms opposes to the
micro-politics of Michel Foucault and to the hegemonic articulations of Grams-
cian cultural politics (2000, 1318). I think Adornos position, on the other hand,
is best understood as translating a Kierkegaardian vocabulary; the distinction
between contradiction and reconciliation is analogous to the distinction be-
tween resignation and faith. Perhaps alluding to Kierkegaards allegory of the
knights of innite resignation and of faith in Fear and Trembling, Adorno thought
radical thinking identied with resignation, not faith; critical thought rests with
impossibility, with essential contradiction, and does not proceed further like the
knight of faith into afrmation of the possibility of reconciliation. Informed
Adornos controversial politics, which criticised the reduction of the cultural or
critical form that invests in realisable redemption, or worse, that claims to
represent the conduit of that redemption, contributes to a false and violent
closure, a totality that it is the role of the non-identical to defer, since so easily
does the subordination of theory to praxis invert into renewed oppression
(Adorno 1998a, 290).
For Religious Studies scholars, on the other hand, current versions of
historicism (which I have argued often fail to historicise enough) contain an idea
expressed nowhere more baldly than in the contributions to the recently
reprinted volume, Rationality and the Study of Religion (Jensen and Martin 2003).
38 MATT WAGGONER
They largely codify the persistence of a claim, which is also an academic fantasy,
that the Enlightenments promise of universal rationality holds true, that it
continues to adequately account for the way humans constitute their worlds, as
well as the conditions of possibility for credible and public knowledge pro-
duction. The premise of an unexamined historicism, which Adorno argued
harbours an ethical claim as well, is that what is real is rational and that what is
real is therefore ideal. Like the knight of resignation I do not have the requisite
faith to believe this, and instead, as Kierkegaard would say, go no further than
the science without guarantees, which suggests that what is human eludes
attempts to conceptually contain it, not because of a spiritual residue or
trans-cultural substance called Human, but because there persists a constitutive
alterity, an undeconstructible difference that will not permit the collapse of the
other into my own self-referential claim. Just as the hope for social or political
reconciliation should escape attempts to positively represent it (this Bible, these
values, this party, this nation, this liberalism), methodological historicism names
a paradoxical project that on the one hand makes visible the contingent social
realities that support the production of something like religion as a non-empiri-
cal but nevertheless historical phenomenon. On the other hand, a historicism
that will not ontologise its claims has to supplement its reliance on the logic of
what exists (history, humanity, culture) with an insistence on the partial and
incomplete nature of those claims.
Adorno and J. Z. Smith
Coming to terms with the enigmatic consequences of Smiths (1982, xi)
there is no data for religion statement led me to Adorno for two reasons.
Adornos critical thought resisted existentialist philosophies and theologies in his
time, notably under the inuence of Martin Heidegger. Adorno argued that
Heidegger regressed to a classical ontology of Being that was both untenable
and insidious, and Adornos response, a predominantly Marxist one, was that a
philosophy unaccountable to its own historical situation probably wanted to
dominate it (see The Jargon of Authenticity; Adorno 1973). In contrast to this
essentially historicist response to Martin Heidegger, Adorno also opposed ten-
dencies within orthodox Marxism and the social and human sciences to treat
history as a transcendental fact, as though what exists somehow does so
because it is also true, because it should exist. This, Adornos anti-positivist
polemic, led him to express philosophical and political convictions that made
him infamous (for example, his critique of praxis in places like Negative Dialectics
[Adorno 1973, cf. 3], and the essays Resignation and Critique [Adorno 1998]),
but which also get repeated by contemporary philosophers like Jacques Derrida,
whose messianicity without messiah (1994, 8991) parallels Adornos analogous
ban on graven images (Adorno 1973, 207), imageless image of possibility
(Adorno 2001b, 151), and fruitless waiting (Adorno 2001a, 139).
REFLECTIONS FROM A DAMAGED DISCIPLINE 39
Adornos work pressed against two fronts that I think Smiths has, in not
altogether different ways, pressed against as well. Smith is perhaps best under-
stood when he is criticising phenomenological methods, methods that share
something essential with an earlier existentialism. His reception is on the other
hand, I think (and through the fault of his readers alone), not as resilient when
he is criticising sciences temptation to overstate its claims; that is, to mistake
maps for territories. Not unlike Adorno, we might say that Smith opposes a
theory of Being (theology, existentialism, phenomenology) on the one hand and
a theory of identity (positivism) on the other. The comparison has limitations and
it will not do to exaggerate their afnities, but through the preceding look at one
of Adornos texts I in part wanted to show that these afnities do exist.
I close these reections on historicism, its methodological and its ethical
implications for the study of religion by recalling an image offered by J. Z. Smith
as an analogy to the task of the historical study of religion. Its selection from
among the many images that Smith has employed over the years is due to the
way it holds together historicisms need to revolt against its concept by con-
fronting, not containing, otherness. In the same introductory note that argued
there is no data for religion, Smith borrowed from Victor Shklovsky the term
defamiliarization (Smith 1982) to suggest that the work of the historian is not
to show that what is different is really the same as comparisons tend to do, but
to make the familiar strange, thus also destabilising and reconstituting the
familiar. I cannot agree with Smith that the consequence of defamiliarisation is
that there is no other (1982, xiii); its consequence would appear to be that
there is never nothing but the self and that the self has to somehow be othered.
I think the non-familiar in Smith shares something with the non-identical in
Adorno, and I think the re-constellation of the self that Smith implied at that
juncture also shares something with attempting to write the self at its other-
most (Spivak 2003, 91).
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Thanks to Russell T. McCutcheon for insightful comments on an early version
of this paper. The arguments themselves and remaining errors are mine, not
his.
40 MATT WAGGONER
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Matt Waggoner (author to whom correspondence should be addressed),
Department of Philosophy and Religion, Albertus Magnus College, New
Haven, CT, USA. E-mail: mwaggoner@cc.albertus.edu