In Normativity and Metaphysics in Adorno and Hegel James Gordon Finlayson highlights the significance of 'the shudder' in Adorno's work. In the Dialectic of Enlightenment Adorno appears to be making an historical and anthropological claim that the shudder lies at the origins of human rationality in the practices of magic.

Finlayson says that the first point that needs to be made is the centrality of what Adorno calls the shudder, [Schauder/Schauer] a term which occurs both in Dialectic of Enlightenment and Aesthetic Theory. In the crucial opening section of the former work Adorno, drawing heavily on studies in the history of religion and anthropology, develops a conception of enlightenment thinking from a reconstructed prehistory of rationality.
Roughly speaking Adorno divides human development into five stages, although the division is more implied than explicitly drawn.

1. The first is a pre-animistic stage in which the world is governed by a principle of mana which is primary and undifferentiated. He does not say much about the structure of preanimistic society, apart from the fact that every member participated in the process of altering nature. He does say, that mana is born from the shudder [Schauder] in the face of the unknown, and that it contains the lineaments of the division between subject and object, because things are not experience directly as what they are but as the seat of something else, mana.
2. In the second, animistic stage human beings begin to populate the world with named deities. Through language and the mimetic power of magic they attempt to gain control of their environment. ‘The cry of fear, with which the unfamiliar is experienced becomes its name. It fixes the transcendence of the unknown over against the known, and thereby fixes the shudder as something sacred.’ (DA 17)
Primitive forms of thought thus distance the knower from the known and provide the first doubling of nature into appearance (or illusion) and essence which provides the incipient basis of myth and natural science. In so doing language and magic give the class of priests and magicians privileged access to the supernatural powers, and create a social hierarchy which from now on begins to entwine itself around the relation of human beings to the world.

3. In the third stage myth, story-telling and collective memory emerge as a kind of inchoate form of rationality. Myths attempt to subdue the unknown external world by imposing a kind of natural order upon its infinite variety and unpredictability. However, the ‘repetition of nature’ which mythical symbols represent always turn out to be ‘the represented permanence of social coercion. (DE 20 & 27: DA 23 & 28)
4. In the fourth stage metaphysics replaces myth as the best means of coming to understand and exert control over external nature. The difference is that metaphysics uses universal concepts rather than stories and images. Nonetheless these universals were just as much concealed forms of domination as their precursors. (DE 22: DA 23) But metaphysics retains a vestige of its social origins also in so far as it still aims at discovering a truth that transcends existent reality.
5. Finally, even metaphysics is overcome as enlightenment triumphs in the form of an all encompassing instrumental rationality which is totally in thrall to the status quo epistemically and politically. Adorno’s favorite examples are the natural sciences and the logical positivism of the Vienna School. But almost any kind of formal system of reasoning from mathematics to logic, or any kind of technological application of scientific knowledge counts as an instance of enlightenment. (DE 27) Their sole aim, according to Adorno, is to describe existent reality and not to criticize it. Thus they end up slavishly subservient both to external nature and to extant socio-economic relations. Ultimately enlightenment gives up its quest for universal truths and lapses into a quietistic form of nominalism: it recognizes only the existence of names, of conceptually identified objects. (DA 24)

He says:

On the one hand the impulsive response of taking flight is a negative response to an unknown and potentially hostile other. It is the origin of purposive rationality, of what Horkheimer calls instrumental reason and Adorno later calls identity-thinking. The distancing operation of conceptual, reflective thought is the means by which the subject attempts to subdue and tame the experience of shudder by controlling and mastering what provoked it. On the other hand the shudder is, epistemically speaking, a positive experience that is true to what is there prior to conceptual identification - the amorphous, the undifferentiated, the strange. It is an impulsive somatic experience that momentarily registers the presence of what occasions it. It thus stands in a more intimate relation to its other (to the non-identical) than do concepts and categories.

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Posted by: Pierce Leary | November 4, 2010 1:01 AM