The critics are restless today. They are striving to reconstruct a theory worthy of that name. They are proceeding systematically, albeit feverishly, and they will soon discover that they have succeeded. Yet, at the very moment the critics will announce their victory, they will find out that they have been surrounded by the critics.

Critical thought can survive only to the extent that its proponents do not succumb to the otherwise understandable drive to resolve their contradictory social position on the level of theory. Every attempt to proceed systematically is bound to succeed in the short run. Those with some talent can without great difficulty concoct a couple of volumes that will pass as consistent for a couple of years. This is hardly problematic, however. The tragicomic character of positive theory parading in the negative garb of critical thought becomes apparent as soon as the unfortunate author becomes compelled to defend his concoction from his critics. The author is almost instantaneously exposed as a clown.

Positive and negative thought must be pitted against each other consciously, that is, they must be kept distinct in order for their struggle to be productive. They must provide the material for each other at all levels. This is not an impossible task even from the point of view of an individual thinker. The solution is quite obvious. It is clear that the positive drive cannot and must not be resisted in view of the requirements of political action. Nevertheless, one must be fully aware that in such situations one is operating in a different mode, where critical thought may serve as a pilot, but where the pilot must be repelled most of the time. Only if this is perfectly clear will one be able to return to the results of one’s own labor with understanding, hoping that a sentence or two will survive.

The critics are very restless today. They are sick and tired of the gutter. They would like to see the results of their labors materialized. They would like to teach and lead. They feel it is time to take sides and positions. The critics are crawling to the pedestal until recently adorned by their idol. Once the old monument collapsed under their own weight, they have been compelled to replace it. They are still pointing in all directions and laughing at each other, but sooner or later they will reconstruct the old monument and start dancing around it.

Addendum I (March 15, 1980)

Adorno’s words from Negative Dialectics may serve as an illustration to those who still require a proof:

The less definitive and all-encompassing a theory is claimed to be, the less of an object will it become to the thinker. As the compulsion of the system evaporates, he will be free to rely more frankly on his own consciousness and experience than was permitted by the pathos-filled conception of a subjectivity whose abstract triumph would exact the price of renouncing its specific substance. This price was in line with the emancipation of individuality that occurred between the great age of idealism and the present, and whose achievements—despite, and because of, the present pressure of collective regression—are theoretically as irrevocable as the impulse of the dialectics of 1800. Nineteenth Century individualism has indeed weakened the objectivity power of the mind, its capacity for insight into objectivity and for its construction; but it has also equipped the mind with a discriminating sense that strengthened its experience of the object.[1]

However:

In sharp contrast to the usual ideal of science, the objectivity of dialectical cognition needs not less subjectivity, but more. Philosophical experience withers otherwise. But our positivistic zeitgeist is allergic to this need. It holds that not all men are capable of such experience; that it is the prerogative of individuals destined for it by their disposition and life story; that calling for it as a premise of cognition is elitist and undemocratic.[2]

Therefore:

If a stroke of undeserved good luck has kept the mental composition of some individuals not quite adjusted to the prevailing norms—a stroke of luck they have often enough to pay for in their relations with their environment—it is up to those individuals to make the moral and, as it were, representative effort to say what most of those for whom they say it cannot see or, to do justice to reality, will not allow themselves to see. Direct communicability to everyone is not a criterion of truth. We must resist the all but universal compulsion to confuse the communication of knowledge with knowledge itself, and to rate it higher, if possible—whereas at present each communicative step is falsifying truth and selling it out. Meanwhile, whatever has to do with language suffers of this paradoxicality.[3]

Whoever addresses the masses today is bound to reproduce the masses, and thus contribute to the collective regression. An idiosyncratic fragment is likely to be much more salutary than a couple of volumes that cannot but enslave not only the thinker, but thought as well. The boundary that separates philosophy from literature, and thus also from language, will be dissolved only by those who trust their own experiences sufficiently to record them frankly.

Addendum II (February 14, 1993)

Before leaving Yugoslavia for the second and last time, I was quite active in the Man and System Group—a “scholarly” organization that survived the Praxis journal and movement. The best and the brightest in the Marxian opposition would congregate every month in a castle close to Zagreb to discuss a wide range of philosophical and sociological topics. Rudi Supek was the coordinator of the group; Branko Horvat was one of its leading lights; the Belgrade Eight, professors of philosophy who were kicked out of the university after the student unrest in 1968, were fully represented—Zagorka Pešić-Golubović, Ljubomir Tadić, Svetozar Stojanović, Mihajlo Marković, Nebojša Popov, etc. The names of most of the regular participants escape me now, and especially the names of the Young Turks, like myself. At any rate, it was clear to me that many of these people—the critics and critical critics—would sooner or later end up in the political arena. Although I do not follow the developments in Yugoslavia carefully enough to account for the careers of my erstwhile colleagues from the Man and System Group, some of them have become so prominent that it is difficult not to remember them. Mihajlo Marković, for example, has become Slobodan Milošević’s chief adviser on questions of ideology!

Addendum III (March 22, 1994)

Vesna Pusić, a close friend at the time, occasionally gave me a ride from Ljubljana to the place where the Man and System Group met near Zagreb. In fact, I think it was Vesna who brought me to these meetings in the first place. Her father, Eugen Pusić, was one of the prominent members of the group. On one such occasion Vesna and I had a car accident very close to our destination. The whole experience was so fascinating that I mention it quite often. I wonder why I have not recorded it earlier. Anyhow, we were chatting as she was driving. When she came off the highway, she was moving quite fast as she was entering an intersection with traffic lights. When we were in the middle of this intersection, we both noticed that another car was coming toward us at such a speed that neither Vesna nor the man driving the other car would be able to avoid colliding with each other. I do not remember whose fault it really was, but I think it was the other driver’s.

Now, it is just stunning to experience the stretching of time in a situation like this. From the moment we knew we would collide with the other car—and this we knew with cold certainty—to the end of this event there must have been at most five or six seconds, but we both experienced the collision as something that took an enormous amount of time. So much had happened that we imagined it could not have happened in the amount of time in which it actually had to have happened. We were calm and composed throughout the event. I remember how the expressionless face of the man in the other car was coming closer and closer to us until it finally stopped moving almost within our reach; I remember the other car becoming larger and larger until it started to merge with and fold into our car; I remember the deafening silence after the crash; I remember one of the front wheels of our car spinning for ever on the mangled chassis; I remember staring at the other driver for what appeared to be minutes before Vesna and the man started wiping blood from their eyes and we slowly got out of the two steaming wrecks; I remember looking through the folded metal for one lens that fell out of my dark glasses, which were otherwise in perfect order.

A strong memory like this brings in its wake a host of small memories bound with it. This is reminiscent of exposure in a photographic process—a burst of light sears in a strong memory and it also captures millions of details associated with the event. A strong memory is always sudden, but not necessarily as sudden as a car crash. An orgasm experienced under unprecedented circumstances provides a good example of a strong memory that can serve to collect a myriad of wonderful details about the circumstances surrounding the orgasm. A strong pain is another example of this mechanism.

A corollary of this proposition is that strong memories stretch out our lives. The greater the number of strong memories per unit of time, the larger the number of small memories that can be brought back, as well. Returning to the parallel with photography—the more and better pictures taken, the more there is to look at and reflect about. By themselves, small memories collapse into a void—into a life not lived.

Going back to Vesna, her car had to be scrapped, as was the case with the other car involved in the accident. Miraculously, no-one got hurt. The facial wounds of both drivers turned out to be minor and easily taken care of with the first aid kits in the wrecked cars. The wide band-aid across Vesna’s forehead made her look vaguely heroic at the meeting of our group later that afternoon.

Footnotes

1. Adorno, T.W., Negative Dialectics, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973 (first published in 1966), p. 42.

2. Op. cit., p. 40.

3. Op. cit., p. 41.