Adorno experienced spoken language as inherently truthful.

Evidence

I have never experienced anything so intensely as the relationship to truth that lies, in a very specific way, in direct speech. It has always been difficult for me, and basically still is, to realize that a person who is speaking can be a villain, or can be lying. My sense of language’s claim to truth is so strong that it vanquishes all psychology and tends to give me a degree of credulousness towards the person speaking which forms a glaring contradiction to my experience, and is usually only overcome when I see something written by the person concerned and recognize precisely that he cannot speak. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2166

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A dense, paradoxical self-revelation: the theorist of the administered world confesses a near-mystical faith that direct speech cannot lie — written text is what reveals deception. This inversion of trust relationships is genuinely surprising and resists one-line summary.
• XREF: Connects to Benjamin’s cult value of the spoken word, and to the broader Frankfurt tradition of privileging orality/dialogue over reified written discourse. — connects to: Adorno held that humanity’s immaturity consists in its inability yet to speak — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2164
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2166