Adorno’s dense style is a deliberate intransigence against cheap readability
Evidence
It can be admitted that it does not conform to the canons of clear and fluid journalistic writing taught in the schools. But what if those ideals of clarity and simplicity have come to serve a very different ideological purpose, in our present context, from the one Descartes had in mind? What if, in this period of the overproduction of printed matter and the proliferation of methods of quick reading, they were intended to speed the reader across a sentence in such a way that he can salute a readymade idea effortlessly in passing, without suspecting that real thought demands a descent into the materiality of language and a consent to time itself in the form of the sentence? In the language of Adorno—perhaps the finest dialectical intelligence, the finest stylist, of them all—density is itself a conduct of intransigence: the bristling mass of abstractions and cross-references is precisely intended to be read in situation, against the cheap facility of what surrounds it, as a warning to the reader of the price he has to pay for genuine thinking. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 18
Categorization
- XREF: This is the strongest single statement of the Adorno stylistic doctrine that Jameson will deploy throughout his own career — connects directly to Adorno’s ‘The Essay as Form’ and to Jameson’s reading of Adorno in the late chapter of this very book. — connects to: Dialectical thinking is thought to the second power inscribed in the sentence itself — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 115; Dialectical style requires self-awareness inscribed in the sentence; Style as a dominant category is historically contingent, not universal in literature (+4 more)
- SEED: An essay could be built comparing the ideology of ‘clear writing culture’ (Zinsser, Strunk-White) against the Frankfurt insistence that difficulty is itself a political conduct.
- recurring: this claim recurs 2 times within its source
Broader Connections
- For Adorno, dialectical thinking requires self-consciousness be inscribed in the sentence structure itself
#expands(0.85) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 115