Fidelity to systematic thought in a fragmented epoch requires deliberate unsystematicity

Evidence

PERHAPS the only way to keep faith with the Hegelian spirit of systematization in a fragmented universe is to be resolutely unsystematic. In this sense Adorno’s thought is profoundly Hegelian, thinking its motifs through in a genuinely Hegelian spirit, facing thereby its principal formal problem: How to write chapters of a phenomenology when there is no longer any possibility of a whole? How to analyze the part as a part when the whole is not only no longer visible but even inconceivable? How to continue to use the terms subject and object as opposites which presuppose, in order to be meaningful, some possible synthesis, when there is no synthesis even imaginable, let alone present anywhere in concrete experience? What language to use to describe an alienated language, to what systems of reference to appeal when all systems of reference have been assimilated into the dominant system itself? How to see phenomena in the light of history, when the very movement and direction that gave history its meaning seem to have been swallowed up in sand? — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 110

Categorization

• XREF: This is Jameson’s core characterization of Adorno’s method — connects directly to Adorno’s own ‘Essay as Form’ and the Frankfurt School lineage the reader is tracing. — connects to: Understanding thought-becoming-epoch requires more than intellectual history — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 22; Heterogeneity is a disposition against conceptual closure; Historical synthesis by a single mind reveals deep connections across eras — Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, 31 (+3 more)
• DEFINE: Defines Adorno’s negative dialectics as a formal problem: how to be Hegelian without the possibility of totality.
• DEEPTHINKING: The five rhetorical questions constitute the definitive statement of Adorno’s methodological predicament — dense, layered, and the fulcrum of Jameson’s Frankfurt-School account.

Broader Connections

• Understanding thought-becoming-epoch requires more than intellectual history #expands (0.85) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 22
• Thinking must hold dialectic and its opposite together at once #corroborates (0.85) — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 170
• Heterogeneity is a disposition against conceptual closure #expands (0.82)
• Adorno’s models test whether concept can reach the nonconceptual #expands (0.80) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2551
• Historical synthesis by a single mind reveals deep connections across eras #qualifies (0.75) — Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, 31