language as not a re-presentation of some precedent standard-setting reality, but rather a tool, or even a weapon, a survival adaptation, like the claws and fangs of the tiger.
(Adorno would of course find Nietzsche's imagery disagreeably fierce; likewise he might think the figuration of "weapon" and "tool" too suggestive of instrumentality.)
Like Hegel, like Lacan, Adorno finds in the slippage or "nonidentity" between reality and language--what "The Essay as Form" calls "the non-identity of presentation and subject matter" in the first epigraph above--the space where desire and will, and critique, and art, make their case and their campaign against "what is." Such motifs in Adorno as "dialectic," "concept," and "negation" are functions of that performative agon language incites between conflicting human interests and indeed between human interests and material circumstance itself. When Adorno writes that "dialectics means intransigence towards all reification" (Prisms 31), it is clear that "dialectics" operates in language and in thought--or I'd better say, in language-and-thought, because I can't see any sense in which Adorno separates the two: indeed, their correlation is not only everywhere assumed in the Adorno force-field, but virtually named in the Hegelian category of "the concept." When Adorno alludes to "the kinetic force of [the] concept" (Philosophy of Modern Music 26), he is evoking the power of "the concept" to unfreeze, unfix, set back into kinesis, the congealed and hardened petrifications of ideology-- to enact, in other words, what Hegel memorably calls "the power of the negative."
"Negation" is the alternative to, indeed the critique of, /adequatio/: not the mind's deplorable failure to see things as they really are, but on the contrary, the mind's "dialectical" dissonance ("non-identity") with what is, in which is coiled the critical potential of affect and critique.
To this extent, "the power of the negative" is convertible with the power of "dialectic" itself--and this is a kind of power activated in semiosis: in language and in thinking: in /making/ meaning, not in more or less accurately (or "adequately") /discovering/ (and then "representing") it. Like Hegel, Adorno puts "negation" in the place where "representation" used to be--and if that way of putting it risks exaggeration, I'll hope to find my license in Adorno's maxim that in matters like these "only exaggeration is true."
Steven Helmling
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