Footnote form drives Adorno’s dialectical method by constraining speculation
Evidence
The footnote in this context may indeed be thought of as a small but autonomous form, with its own inner laws and conventions and its own determinate relationship to the larger form which governs it—something on the order of the moral of a fable or the various types of digressions which flourished within the nineteenth-century novel. In the present instance, the footnote as a lyrical form allows Adorno a momentary release from the inexorable logic of the material under study in the main text, permitting him to shift to other dimensions, to the infrastructure as well as to the wider horizons of historical speculation. The very limits of the footnote (it must be short, it must be complete) allow the release of intellectual energies, in that they serve as a check on a speculative tendency that might otherwise run wild, on what we will later describe as the proliferation of “theories of history.” The footnote as such, therefore, designates a moment in which systematic philosophizing and the empirical study of concrete phenomena are both false in themselves; in which living thought, squeezed out from between them, pursues its fitful existence in the small print at the bottom of the page. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 125
Categorization
- QUESTION: Jameson treats formal properties (the footnote’s brevity) as causally generative of philosophical content - a strong mediational claim worth unpacking.
- XREF: Echoes the reader’s ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ interest in form as carrier of content, and later totalization-of-content-as-form methods in Adorno. — connects to: For Adorno, dialectical thinking requires self-consciousness be inscribed in the sentence structure itself — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 115; Form and content are mutually translatable terms in dialectical criticism — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 769
Broader Connections
- Form and content are mutually translatable terms in dialectical criticism
#expands(0.75) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 769