[FRA:] Adorno on pedagogy

[Ralph Dumain]

Tyson Lewis. (2006). From Aesthetics to Pedagogy 
and Back: Rethinking the Works of
Theodor Adorno. InterActions: UCLA Journal of 
Education and Information Studies. Vol. 2,
Issue 1, Article 5.
http://repositories.cdlib.org/gseis/interactions/vol2/iss1/art5

Abstract
In this article I argue that Theodor Adorno’s 
most timely and important contributions to
contemporary politics are captured in his 
writings on pedagogy, education, and school reform.
His work on education cannot be read separately 
from an engagement with either his philosophy
or his aesthetics but rather as the nodal point 
through which the latter two become socially
transformative. Here I chart the internal 
relations among philosophy, aesthetics, and education
through their shared rejection of fascist 
resentment. While Adorno’s aesthetics map out the
psychology of fascism as the antagonist of 
democratic virtues, it is through pedagogy that
fascist social violence, amnesia, and racism are to be combated.

Keywords: critical pedagogy, critical theory, aesthetics

---------------------------------

Lewis claims that Fred Jameson's LATE MARXISM 
misses the mark. For me, it completely missed 
intelligibility. But I digress. Jameson correctly 
saw the importance of the philistine and his 
propensity for scapegoating, e.g. via anti-Semitism.

Lewis promises to "bridge the gap between 
Adorno’s aesthetic theory and his critical 
pedagogy, suggesting that his educational 
writings (though less voluminous) actually solve 
a central problematic posed by aesthetic theory: 
the question of fascist resentment as it 
manifests itself in social violence against the 
individual, racist projection, and historical 
amnesia. Ending fascist resentment is a new 
pedagogical and ethical mandate precisely because 
fascism is the psychological logic of late 
capitalism whose most gruesome and barbaric manifestation is genocide."

A little farther down:

"Although Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory posits the 
philistine as an antagonist, the text offers no 
solution to addressing this politically dangerous 
figure. Rather, the book merely negates the 
position. Adorno’s pedagogy, on the other hand, 
makes a critical intervention. If his aesthetics 
remain austere (strategically addressed to those 
who have cultivated a set of shared experiences 
and as such are already educationally conditioned 
to enter the text), Adorno’s pedagogical program 
is geared at combating the spread of philistinism 
throughout the cultural and political spheres 
from the ground up. Stated differently, if as 
Adorno (2002) argues, “[A]rt becomes social by 
its opposition to society, and occupies this 
position only as autonomous art” (2002, p. 225), 
then perhaps we could argue the inverse: that pedagogy is oppositional to
society because it engages directly in the 
everyday life-world of social relations. As such, 
Adorno’s aesthetic theory cannot be read without 
also including the gesture towards his pedagogy. 
In other words, Adorno’s aesthetics set up a 
problem that can only be solved in relation to pedagogy and school reform."

Earlier, Lewis mentioned Aesthetic Theory, but 
now he plans to delve into The Dialectic of 
Enlightenment and Minima Moralia. He also relates 
education to Adorno's worries about praxis (cf. 
“Marginalia to Theory and Praxis”).

"Considering his reflections on praxis, it might 
be rather shocking to hear Adorno (1998) argue 
“school today, its moral import, is that in the 
midst of the status quo it alone has the ability, 
if it is conscious of it, to work directly toward 
the debarbarization of humanity” and thus strive 
for a democratic praxis (1998, p. 190). Here, 
Adorno’s insistence on the very practical 
intervention of education to halt (or at least 
stave off) the arrival of a universal 
philistinism begins to stand out as an unusual 
intervention that is unparalleled in Adorno’s 
other works. As we will explore below, pedagogy 
becomes a moment not of the synthesis of theory 
and practice, but rather a praxis that lives 
within the contradictions of the moment in order 
to articulate them in its very form. The 
“solution” that pedagogy offers against barbarism 
is thus not an immediate fix but rather an 
opening up to thinking negatively, and thus in 
the end, a movement away from fascism towards the 
possibility of aesthetic experience as a field 
wherein social suffering is thrown into relief 
and the broken promise of happiness is animated beyond fascist
resentment. Stated differently, the contradiction 
between practice and theory is the precise place 
of the pedagogical imagination, which acts as a 
symptom of the fractured life world and a 
possible moment of productive intervention."

Lewis outlines Adorno's skepticism about received 
methods of educating about genocide, in his quest 
to counter a possible reoccurrence of Auschwitz, 
or more precisely, to counter the fascistic 
proclivities built into late capitalism. How does 
one prevent the perpetuation of coldness in a 
loveless, fully administered society, which also 
encompasses the arena of schooling?  Adorno 
speaks of the school as Foucault did of prisons. 
“The image of the teacher repeats, no matter how 
dimly, the extremely affect-laden image of the 
executioner”. Adorno was also mindful of the 
violent bullying he experienced in school, or as 
Adorno chillingly puts it, "in fascism the 
nightmare of childhood has come true”.  Can you dig it?

Lewis sees this dynamic (which involves 
philistine resentment) at work in the pervasive 
school violence today, which now has a tendency to turn lethal.

Adorno was also concerned about historical 
amnesia, in his case, about the Nazi regime. 
Lewis does not fail to see a parallel with the 
USA today. The requisite, then, is  . . .

". . . that education must confront its ignoble 
and somewhat questionable genealogical past and 
thus break its unconsciously sustained relation 
to violence. A democratic pedagogy must take into 
account its own complicity with genocide and thus 
transform itself on the level of form rather than 
ameliorative content. In the classroom, teachers 
cannot endorse the coldness and hardness of 
hyper-fascism and must instead explore the social 
anxieties arising from contemporary social 
relations in late capitalism. As Adorno (1998) 
writes, “education must take seriously an idea in 
no ways unfamiliar to philosophy: that anxiety 
must not be repressed” (p. 198). In this case, 
emotional distress will not return in a series of 
symptoms (for example, resentment, amnesia, and 
projection)—which are negative reactions to the 
warning provided by anxiety—but rather as a 
productive index of social contradiction."

While this is hardly a specific recommendation, I 
can see in general how this applies, given that 
public education, which can barely hold itself 
together in impoverished areas, really is about 
holding things together and not encouraging 
students to examine critically the horror of the situation.

Lewis adds:

"In this sense, education and aesthetics begin to 
meet once again. If education is able to pierce 
the crusted psyche of hardness and coldness 
inherent in our commodified world of late 
capitalism, then it adequately produces the 
preconditions for aesthetic experience. According 
to Adorno, aesthetics enable us to reflect on 
social suffering that is prohibited from expression by fascist."

This is a good idea, but I wonder if it's even possible to put into practice.

"Here Adorno would agree with Freud’s (SE XXIII) 
seemingly pessimistic assessment that teaching is 
one of the “impossible professions” (p. 248), but 
for radically different reasons. For Freud, there 
are three impossible professions: governing, 
educating, and analyzing. In each case, it is 
impossible to touch the truth, which is located 
in psychoanalysis on the edge between what can be 
said (the domain of knowledge) and what cannot be 
said (the domain of the absent or lost object 
cause of our desire). For Adorno, this absent 
cause that refuses to be articulated in the 
pedagogical moment is itself the historical 
totality of social relations (the ungraspable 
density of class struggle as it toils ceaselessly 
through the historical strata of human time), 
which the student must ultimately confront in 
terms of its resultant contradictions within the
field of knowledge, or as the case might be, in 
the un-teachability of our postmodern, global world."

Among Lewis's conclusions:

"First, Adorno grounds pedagogy in a 
psychoanalytic understanding of the unconscious 
and in terms of Marxian analysis of the mode of 
production. Only when subjectivity is related to 
material relations (and thus the objectivity of 
thought comprehended) can education hope
to foster the preconditions for a world without 
genocide. Key here is the cautious endorsement of 
democratic education as a “precondition” rather 
than a solution. To take capitalism into account, 
education must incorporate material 
contradictions into its very form (e.g., the very 
fracture between practice and theory that 
pedagogy attempts to reconcile). Thus education 
cannot be a viable praxis precisely because the 
distinction it attempts to overcome is the very 
source of the pedagogical imagination in the 
first place. Education here is not a solution
but rather a space for exploring these 
contradictions in knowledge and in the emotional 
anxieties that they inevitably produce."

OK, I get it. But really, al of this adds up to a 
few basic abstract points. The article's 
conclusion should really be a point of departure. 
How this orientation can be put into practice is 
really what needs to be thought through.