[FRA:] Adorno's constellation

[Ralph Dumain]

I was unable to decipher the part of Adorno's key 1931 essay "The Actuality 
of Philosophy" on the method of constellation.

I then turned to Adorno's next pivotal philosophical essay:

Adorno, Theodor W. "The Idea of Natural History," TELOS, No. 60, summer 
1984, pp. 111-124.

... along with an introduction:

Hullot-Kentor, Bob. 'Introduction to Adorno's "Idea of a Natural History", 
TELOS, No. 60, summer 1984, pp. 97-110.

While there is much contextualizing information in it, I found 
Hullot-Kentor more difficult to read than Adorno.

I next turned to Susan Buck-Morss' THE ORIGIN OF NEGATIVE DIALECTICS.  It's 
remarkable what a good read this is, given the difficulty of reading 
Adorno.  Buck-Morss writes very clearly, however, and the book is a real 
page-turner.  "The Actuality of Philosophy" gets treated first of all in 
chapter 2, but its explication is scattered throughout the book.  One has 
to read much farther on to get a sense of what constellation is all 
about.  Chapter 3 explicates "The Idea of Natural History" with some 
clarity.  This essay, too, becomes a recurrent theme in the book.

One sees the intertwining of the development of Adorno's method with both 
music and abstract philosophy as objects of study.  Finally, in chapter 6, 
we get an explication of Adorno's method of constructing 
constellations.  The method, if that's what it is, seems highly intuitive, 
and it's difficult to pin it down, for me anyway.  I'm unqualified to judge 
Adorno's analysis of Wagner, but everything Adorno has to say about jazz is 
utter rubbish and entirely arbitrary.  Buck-Morss, surprisingly, defends 
Adorno's method here.

One looks in vain in chapter 6 for a hint of how the constellational 
approach could be applied to philosophy.  The answer is forthcoming in 
chapter 7.  Here he picks up where he left off in chapter 2.  Adorno's 
program is the liquidation of idealism through "riddle-solving", which 
often focuses on minute textual details that give away  hidden social 
meaning.  Adorno applies this approach in his 1933 book on Kierkegaard.  I 
haven't yet read this book, but from the description, this appears to be a 
brilliant book and in my opinion likely represents not only a unique 
intervention but in some respects a turning point in 20th century 
philosophy.  As with his critique of Heidegger (1932) and Husserl, Adorno 
targets the persistence of a metaphysical denial of concrete history and 
social organization and the relation of the individual to both.  The logic 
of this critique is compelling to me, but what has constellation to do with 
it?  Adorno applies this method to the analysis of the bourgeois interieur 
as the indicator of bourgeois society and Kierkegaard's flight into 
inwardness.  (See esp. p. 117, 119.)  Adorno charges that Kierkegaard makes 
a false exit from Hegel.  While the logic of the overall argument makes 
sense to me, I don't know what to make of Adorno's singling out of the 
bourgeois interieur as symptoimatic and his analysis of it.  I can't get a 
fix on this method or make much sense of what a non-arbitrary construction 
of a constellation would look like.

I'm now mid-way through chapter 9, on Adorno's differences with 
Benjamin.  The material is very arcane, but the book is as clear on most of 
these topics as it can be.  The content is rich.