In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, Camelia Raghinaru talks with Justin Neville Kaushall about his article “Natural Spontaneity, or Adorno’s Aesthetic Category of the Shudder,” from Telos 192 (Fall 2020). An excerpt of the article appears below. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Purchase a print copy of Telos 192 in our online store.
Natural Spontaneity, or Adorno’s Aesthetic Category of the Shudder
Justin Neville Kaushall
Theodor W. Adorno’s aesthetic category of the shudder is an enigmatic concept, and yet it is one that we return to repeatedly in attempts to describe aesthetic experience.[1] We shudder, for instance, before the spectacle of Beckett’s play Not I—a disembodied mouth that cuts through silence with speech. For Adorno, the shudder shocks the aesthetic subject, thus forcing her to encounter nonidentity: reason’s failure to comprehend materiality. Adorno however does not discuss the shudder’s genealogy. I argue here that the shudder may best be conceived as a modified version of Kantian spontaneity. In this way, the shudder demonstrates that we require a new concept of spontaneity that is sensitive to historical suffering and the nature within subjectivity. Thus, the Adornian shudder criticizes Kant’s dynamically sublime and reveals the historical sediment that accrues to the latter aesthetic category.
This article is divided into three parts. First, I discuss the central contradiction of the shudder: although the phenomenon of the shudder appears to be archaic and somatic, Adorno’s aesthetics requires the subject to be capable of comprehending objectivity critically through philosophical rationality. The shudder’s irrationality is potentially dangerous; however, it is also capable of cutting reason free from its static operation, which has become entrenched due to historical events. Second, I discuss the historical conditions that affect our reception of the Kantian sublime, and which Adorno responds to in his description of the aesthetic shudder. Third, I argue that the shudder responds to, and inherits, Kant’s theory of spontaneity in the sublime. I turn to the sublime because it demonstrates the traditional moment inherent in Adorno’s new category. The sublime calls for critical retrieval: its violent and repressive aspects need to be amended, although Kant’s concept of spontaneity may be retained if it is subject to historical negation. A new concept of spontaneity may help us to solve Adorno’s aporia: namely, the fact that the shudder seems to be an involuntary reaction, which conflicts with Adorno’s demand that aesthetic experience retain its cognitive and reflective ground in rationality.
The shudder appears to be a spontaneous or immediate reaction to nature. As such it does not involve conventional, Enlightenment rationality, although such spontaneity is a condition for rational, philosophical thought, which must involve a moment of involuntary and free receptivity before the unknown. Thus, the shudder is the first part of the two-stage process of the subject’s gradual awakening, through aesthetic experience, to nonidentity. The necessary second stage of such awakening involves philosophical reflection upon the receptivity of the shudder and its material content (repressed nature and history). The shudder is poised on a knife-edge between regression to immediacy (mimetic lostness in the whole) and the awareness of mediation (which involves critical cognition), which occurs in and through the shudder. Without the shudder, reason would have no impetus or motivation to question its own instrumental practices, and it would not experience the suffering or harm of objectivity. The shudder consequently has a dual role: it guards against abstract representation, and it guides reason through its own history of violence and the suffering of objects. We might compare the shudder to André Breton’s concept of automatic writing, which places the subject in an involuntary and trancelike state in order to reveal the damage inflicted by rationality and the inexhaustible nature of her unconscious.[2] In the same way, the shudder exposes the subject to the overflowing impulses of her nature, as well as its historical trajectory, and teaches her reason to carefully follow those impulses instead of blindly controlling them. Adorno writes:
Under patient contemplation artworks begin to move. To this extent they are truly afterimages of the primordial shudder in the age of reification; the terror of that age is recapitulated via reified objects. . . . Because the shudder is past and yet survives, artworks objectivate it as its afterimage. For if at one time human beings in their powerlessness against nature feared the shudder as something real, the fear is no less intense, no less justified, that the shudder will dissipate. All enlightenment is accompanied by the anxiety that what set enlightenment in motion in the first place and what enlightenment ever threatens to consume may disappear: truth.[3]
In this passage, Adorno describes the shudder as a “primordial” reaction: namely, the subject’s “terror” before uncontrollable nature.[4] Such terror is a pre-rational response to otherness: Adorno refers to a time, in prehistory, before reason was fully capable of dominating objects through discursive concepts and categories. The shudder names the experience of objectivity before the subject was capable of mastering nature. Yet since we may occasionally experience the shudder in modern art, it must be a force that breaks through, or undermines, instrumental rationality. Nevertheless, the shudder is also vulnerable: it is in danger of becoming reified, and thus disappearing, as reason abstracts from sensuousness. This is why Adorno argues that since artworks participate in Enlightenment, the shudder is an afterimage—that is, it is a historical phenomenon that appears ghostlike due to the repressive effects of instrumental rationality, which is why the shudder is “remembered” rather than present.[5] At the same time, however, the shudder reappears in the modern subject’s interaction with objectivity.
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1. Adorno uses two different German terms for “shudder”: Erschütterung and Schauer. The former term has various meanings: physical tremor or vibration (as in an earthquake), convulsion, traumatic breakdown, concussion, or shock (both physical and psychological). Hence the term Erschütterung is associated with both objective and subjective experience. The latter term, Schauer, might be translated as shudder, shiver, or thrill. Hence, it is associated with cold and with fear—with both physical and emotional experience. See Theodor W. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, ed. Rolf Tiedemann with Gretel Adorno, Susan Buck-Morss, and Klaus Schultz, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 7 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Verlag, 2003). In this article I will adhere to Robert Hullot-Kentor’s translation of Adorno’s work: Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London and New York: Continuum, 1997).
2. André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1972), pp. 36–37.
3. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 106.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
