Peter Gordon’s A Precarious Happiness

Peter Gordon’s A Precarious Happiness: Adorno and the Sources of Normativity, is assuredly one of the best books on Adorno and Critical Theory to have been written in the last decades. The book is comprehensive but detailed, focused but expansive. It is about Adorno’s concept of happiness and the flouring life, but it is also what makes a critical theory of society, critical and normative. The question is : how can we “justify” our claims of the social order or for another. Thus, the book exemplifies immanent critique in the highest form. It also argues that there can only be a “transcendence from within” to use that most apropos expression by Habermas. Gordon’s writing is also lexically powerful and rich. The book has a host of generative expressions, such as “normative surplus,” which imply “normative deficit,” and “normative failure,” which in recent work by Frankfurters and Berliners call “regression.” It should not go unnoted that Gordon’s knowledge of Adorno’s corpus is staggering. When I was writing my notes, I wrote “punctilious.” The book is indeed very carefully argued and carefully documented with reference to Adorno’s Gesamtausgabe. Thus, Gordon’s book is not only the best book on Adorno, but also a contribution to Frankfurt School inflected Critical Theory. In what follows, I want to raise not criticisms, but notes of nuance.

First, I have been reading and teaching Adorno for decades and I did so under the banner of what Gordon calls the “negativist” reading of Adorno. Adorno as the consummate Hegelian critic: the real is not rational, and the whole is the untrue. I thus took it that Adorno’s maxim was: “against happiness.” I was deeply impacted by Gillian Rose’s The Melancholy Science, which argues, perhaps, the opposite of Gordon. Adorno’s work is full of melancholy, for those moments when we get a glimpse of a rightly lived life illuminated in our otherwise alienated lives. Under the influence of Rose, I think of Adorno as thinker of nostalgia. Still, I am impressed by Gordon’s argument that these moments of nostalgia are meant to point us in the direction of happiness. Many years ago, under the constellations of Benjamin, Adorno and Horkheimer, I read the book by Eric G. Wilson, Against Happiness: in Praise of Melancholy. If we read sections 107 and 108 of Minima Moralia, where Adorno writes on “negative Anthropology” and then paraphrasing Nietzsche’s saying about not owing a home, that today “it is part of morality not to be at home in one’s own home.” (p.39) One could be justified in arguing for a form of “negative happiness” to match a “negative anthropology” and that is part of “morality not to be happy in one’s alleged happiness.” Do not be happy with your happiness; it is assuredly both ideological and ersatz. Happiness is its worst enemy.

Second, Gordon argues that, according to Adorno, there is a correlation between “flourishing and happiness.” Arguably, by flourishing we may be happy, and being happy is a sign of flourishing. I want to dispute this putative correlation. Most, or a lot of people, flourish but they are not happy, and their happiness may inoculate them to the challenge of flourishing. The question here is the order of dependence between flourishing and happiness, i.e. must we be happy to flourish, or conversely, to flourish may lead to the elusive happiness? In other words, can we flourish and not be happy, and be happy but not flourishing.  I have been asked by people who should be unnamed whether I am happy. My response is: with what? My job, my children, my relationships, my lifestyle, my work? Happiness and Flourishing are very metaphysical concepts and they are nebulous like the summer clouds that drift in an otherwise blue sky.

Third. The last chapter of Gordon’s book deals with Adorno’s aesthetics, as it should be. For Adorno, I take it that the work of art is an embodiment of what he refers to as the promesse de bonheur, quoting Stendhal. All works of art are figurations and illuminations of what possible and perhaps reachable happiness may be. But it is only a promise, a prefiguration. I have read and studied Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory many times and I must acknowledge that this is one of Adorno’s best works, albeit posthumous at it was. In this book, edited by his wife, Adorno argues that every work of art is a “social fact,” or a “social event.” As such every work of art projects a constellation, while being part of that constellation. Adorno argues that every work of art depends on four elements: the technological and material elements that enable and facilitate the creation of unique works; second, a social condition that enables the presentation of such works; third, the institutions of appreciation of works or art that, then fourth, light up the constellation. If I remember correctly, Adorno says that every work of art is a monad, as in Leibniz’s monadology, but which is in relationship to other monads. Every work of art illuminates every other work. Every work of art teaches us to see differently and to feel differently.

I want to close these brief remarks by praising Gordon for taking on the question of whither critical theory? There has been a Kantian turn in recent Frankfurt School critical theory where the dominant keyword is “justification.” Gordon is absolutely right when he wants to argue that to “justify” something requires some normative ground. For him, it is this quest for both flourishing and happiness. Adorno’s negative ethics, to use Schopenhauer’s expression, is what I would call an ethics of affectivity and corporeality. In his Lectures on Problems of Moral Philosophy, Adorno refers to and quotes one of the Nazi officers who was sentenced to death as a co-conspirator in the attempt to assassinate Hitler.  In this officer’s testimony he says something to the effect that “he just could not do what he was ordered to do. It was against his being.” Adorno goes on to argue that ethics must be based on our bodily reactions, on our senses of shame, sorrow, and regret. If philosophy is the attempt to make sense of the gaze of the other, it is also a quest to make sense of our visceral reactions.