[CRIT 12.

3 (2011) 372-395] Critical Horizons (print) ISSN 1440-9917

doi:10.1558/crit.v12i3.372 Critical Horizons (online) ISSN 1568-5160
Equinox Publishing Ltd 2012, Unit S3, Kelham House, 3 Lancaster Street, Shefeld, S3 8AF.
Undignifed Toughts After Nature:
Adornos Aesthetic Teory
Harriet Johnson
Department of Philosophy, University of Sydney, Australia
hjoh7979@uni.sydney.edu.au
Abstract: Tis paper seeks to redress the marginalization of Adorno in
environmental philosophical discourse. Kate Soper describes two oppos-
ing ways of conceiving nature. Tere is the redemptive nature-endorsing
paradigm that lays claim to the intrinsic value or otherness of nature.
Conversely, the nature-sceptical approach denies that we can access origi-
nary, untouched nature. Tis paper argues that the signifcance of Adornos
treatment of natural beauty lies in how he brings these approaches together.
In writings that resonate with the dual connotations of Sebalds phrase
after nature, Adorno both afrms the skeptical point that we cannot tran-
scend a human history alienated from nature as well as retaining redemp-
tive hope wherein art after nature seeks creative possibilities from out of
the very ruins of history marked by natures destruction.
Keywords: Adorno; natural beauty; natural history; Sebald; the constel-
lation; the ruin.
Teres no more nature. Tis becomes a bald statement of fact in the
wasted terrain of Becketts Endgame.
HAMM: Did your seeds come up?
CLOV: No.
HAMM: Did you scratch round them to see if they had sprouted?
CLOV: Tey havent sprouted.
HAMM: Perhaps its still too early.
CLOV: If they were going to sprout they would have sprouted. [vio-
lently] Teyll never sprout!
1
1. T. W. Adorno, Notes to Literature, Volume 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991),
245.
UNDIGNIFIED THOUGHTS AFTER NATURE 373
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According to Adorno, the catastrophic event caused by human beings in
which nature has been wiped out is not merely left unnamed by Beckett
because the act of bringing it to words would render it comprehensible
and thereby mitigate its terror.
2
Its name is omitted, he suggests, because
it would be wrong to consider it an exceptional event, a one-off calam-
ity. Instead, this is an additional disaster, perhaps the final straw.
Becketts end-of-days catastrophe is continuous with the sad and ongo-
ing story of human domination over the earth. Today, while we have not
yet reached the Endgame phase of the complete reifcation of all natural
entities, there is very little left unafected by human artifce. Our seeds might
still sprout but they germinate in an earth threatened by unprecedented cli-
mate disaster and may very well themselves be products of GM technologies.
Beings of nature, humans pit ourselves against it with such devastation that
we are after nature.
What might Adorno think it means to be after nature? Te phrase itself
is not his; I have drawn it from the title of W. G. Sebalds posthumously
published prose poem Nach der Natur (1988) where nach means both
after nature and according to it. For Sebald, after nature does not signify an
utterly wasted earth quite yet. As Beckett demonstrates, there would really be
nothing more to say in a world with no more nature. Rather, Sebald explores
the dual meanings of the phrase. We are after nature as bearers of a human his-
tory of domination over nature that has alienated us from it and from which
there is no going back. But his nach also suggests the question of what it
might be to accord to, rather than dominate nature? Te tradition of art after
or drawn from nature is seen as an attempt to listen to the muted secrets of
a not-entirely repressed nature. Te two meanings strain against one another.
In Sopers terms he shifts between a natural-skeptical and nature-endorsing
account.
3
Te frst emphasizes the ineluctable intertwining of nature and
human histories of domination while in the second nature itself portends a
dim hope for the emancipatory unwinding of this oppressive process.
Just as Sebald is want to read historical and intellectual fgures against
the grain so as to reveal surprising new insights, when looking into Adornos
aesthetics of nature I am aware that his name is not typically associated with
environmental philosophical discourse. I attribute this neglect in large part to
the way that he unfinchingly draws out the uncomfortable tensions suggested
by the Sebaldian nach. In the frst section of this paper I will argue that, for
Adorno, we are after nature because our quest for subsumptive knowledge
2. Adorno, Notes to Literature, 245.
3. K. Soper, What Is Nature?: Culture, Politics and the Non-human (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell,
1995), 34.
374 HARRIET JOHNSON
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has disenchanted it for us. In even the most mundane acts of thought that
consider nature at a remove, we have sought to remove ourselves from it and
bend it to our wills. In asking how to ward of the Beckettian catastrophe,
I turn to Adornos treatment of natural beauty and the attempt to combat
disenchantment with an alternate (aesthetic) mode of relating to nature.
Terein lies the second permutation of Sebalds phrase: art drawn from,
according to nature. Adorno thinks that art can negatively redeem a
promise that natural beauty holds out but cannot articulate. Tis is the
promise of all that nature stands for in Adorno: the indeterminate, the non-
identical, that sufering thing which somehow retains traces of the resis-
tant non-subsumable.
This is a troubling somehow. The idea of a moment of resistance
within nature, repressed yet unchanging, implies the comforting nature-
endorsing idyll that some kind of originary nature might be re-enchanted
for us. Adorno drops his usual guard against the false comforts ofered by
foundations. But rather than utterly repudiating the implications of the
re-enchanting promise of nature, Adorno places this suspect hope along-
side a concept of natural history that debunks any notion of nature as the
invariant eternal. By examining that structural principle of Adornoian
philosophy, the constellation, I show that, for him, the catastrophe will
be countered not by defending the putative integrity of one theory but
by actively exposing the strains within conceptual thought itself. My own
strategy, which traces the contrasting dimensions of the motif after nature
as they emerge out of Aesthetic Teory, itself seeks to throw light upon
Adornos mirror-hall of at once complementary and clashing refections
upon nature.
Te Disenchantment of Nature
Describing, classifying, drawing, flling little bags with dried seeds, Georg
Wilhelm Steller botanist and explorer on the Bering expedition, paid hom-
age to the shapes of the fauna/and fora of the distant region where East
and West and North/converge .
4
Sebalds poem chronicles how Stellers
zoological masterpiece is hijacked for the purposes of pelt hunters, while
he himself is hounded to death by an Imperial power intent on punishing
his interventions on behalf of the indigenous people. Seeking to know
every creeping thing of nature,

he is returned to it, left to lie in the snow/
4. W. G. Sebald, After Nature (New York: Random House, 2002), 44.
UNDIGNIFIED THOUGHTS AFTER NATURE 375
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like a fox beaten to death, himself nothing more than a piece of sufer-
ing nature.
5
Sebalds version of Stellers life story contains in nuce the concept of natures
disenchantment of which Adorno had written. Te naturalists attempt to
name and classify the proliferation of kinds is itself a conceptual domination
of nature fundamentally akin to the logic of colonialist exploitation. Stellers
participation in a voyage of discovery to open up trade routes is no mere
accident of historical opportunity. Adorno would say that it manifests the
secret complicity between the man of sciences will to reduce all diference to
known, and therefore exchangeable, quantities and the reifying principle of
exchange. Steller is the agent of imperial control, both literally, as he was sent
by the St Petersburg Academy and as the bearer of the Enlightenment project
to gain increased knowledge of nature intent on enhancing our capacity to
predict and thereby infuence the behaviour of natural things. Stellers brutal
fate stands testimony to a point also underscored by Adorno: the agents of
domination, themselves all-too-natural, fall victim to it.
Tis equation of Stellers apparently innocuous brand of botanical inves-
tigations with the base logic of imperial expansion seems to elide the very
real diferences between them. Yet this is a conscious strategy of Adornos
critical theory, laying bare the rotten core of even apparently benign civi-
lizatory practices. In Adorno and Horkheimers Dialectic of Enlightenment
the whole history of humankind is a continuum of the steadily advancing
domination over nature. In the pre-animistic phase, all of nature is felt to
be imbued with mana, an impersonal spiritual force resistant to human
understanding.
6
Ten follows animism where that which is animate is sun-
dered from the inanimate, certain sites and objects of nature are rarefed as
occupied by local deities and demons at the expense of the excluded rem-
nant, the inanimate, which is disenchanted.
7
National mythologies, typi-
fed by the Ancient Greeks, go on to reject the pseudo-deities of animism
in favour of a pantheon of divinities who now embody nature as a universal
power.
8
Tis belief in anthropomorphic gods is subsequently discarded by a
metaphysics that deems nature to be the plenipotentiary of overarching uni-
versals, forces or substances. Steller, the godless Lutheran from Germany
stands for the fnal stage of science.
9
In place of appeals to divine or occult
5. Sebald, After Nature, 78.
6. M. Horkheimer and T. W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 2002), 10.
7. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 11.
8. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 12.
9. Sebald, After Nature, 77.
376 HARRIET JOHNSON
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mystery, the phenomena of the material world are explained in terms of
mathematical structures and relations. Yet the pretensions to objectivity of
the positivist are ultimately more metaphysical than metaphysics.
10
Te
supposed impartiality of scientifc language also proves to be an imposi-
tion of human understandings onto the physical world. From mythical to
enlightened thought, each episode renders nature an instantiation of human
meanings and purposes. Exhausted, we arrive at an end-state of complete
reifcation of natural beings after nature.
To orient ourselves within this sweeping history of domination it is useful
to recall four key terms from Dialectic of Enlightenment, mindful, of course,
of Adornos own aversion to reductive classifcation and defnition. Firstly,
nature in Adorno itself signifes both the material, environing world of
external nature, and internal nature, that somatic, material, organic aspect
of humans ourselves. For much of this paper, I will, for reasons of brevity,
concentrate on external nature. Secondly, disenchantment signifes that
nature has been stripped of its appearance as an innately meaningful uni-
verse. Under the rinsing light of reason, nature, a source of darkness and
dread no more, is instrumentalized by us. Nature becomes comprehensible,
utilizable and no longer mysterious. Tirdly, second nature refers to the
reifcation of the social realm itself, the sedimentation of human actions
and conventions into inert infrastructures. Once animism spiritualized the
object, whereas [now] industrialism objectifes the spirits of men.
11
Second
nature disenchants the mysterious source of human spontaneity and free-
dom by enforcing an ideology of the naturalness of the status quo. Finally,
as Alison Stone points out, Adornos concept of domination essentially
follows the Frankfurt School line typifed by Marcuse.
12
Here, domination
described as the internal logic of the development of civilization is thought
to be in efect whenever the individual is prescribed goals and purposes and
means of striving for and attaining them that diverge from those which
the being would otherwise adopt.
13
Marcuses defnition of domination as
interfering with a beings ownmost spontaneity, does seem strange when it
is applied, as Adorno does, to nature (including the inanimate). When he
writes of a potential non-dominating practice that assist[s] nature on this
sad earth, help it to attain what it wants, Adorno does appear to endorse
10. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 17.
11. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 28.
12. A. Stone, Adorno and the Disenchantment of Nature, Philosophy & Social Criticism 32
(2006): 233.
13. H. Marcuse, Five Lectures: Psychoanalysis Politics and Utopia (London: Allen Lane, 1970), 1,
11.
UNDIGNIFIED THOUGHTS AFTER NATURE 377
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a picture of natures quasi-intentionality, wherein domination suggests the
thwarting of its pre-dispositions.
14
Te burning question is how Adorno envizages relieving nature of its
sufering. Or otherwise put, how to resist in theory, in art, in political
practice our seemingly inevitable slide towards the Beckettian catastrophe,
an endgame of nature no more? Given that disenchantment proceeds by
rejecting the anthropomorphic intuition that nature is beseelt (ensouled),
Adornos portrayal of nature denied what it wants might seem a move
aimed at reinstating to nature some of its former mystery. Yet the option that
Adorno most decidedly rejects is the fight back to a re-enchanted nature.
Te attraction of this fight is understandable:
So long as progress, deformed by utilitarianism, does violence to the
surface of the earth, it will be impossible in spite of all proof to the
contrary to completely counter the perception that what antedates
this trend is in its backwardness better and more humane.
15
Yet the rational re-enchantment of nature is a contradiction in terms; we
cannot reason nor will ourselves back to a mysterious universe. In Aesthetic
Teory, Adorno dismisses this as a fanciful Rousseauian retournons. Te
idea, which he assigns to the manifold irrationalists who blossomed in the
Weimar Republic, that we might attain a direct, intuitive access to nature
beyond language and rational concepts, is absurd. Even that nature that
has not been pacifed by human cultivation, nature over which no human
hand has passed alpine moraines and taluses resembles those industrial
mountains of debris from which the socially lauded aesthetic need for nature
fees.
16
While his example is ill-chosen (are heaps of industrial waste really
superimposed upon our visions of craggy mountain peaks?), Adornos essen-
tial point stands. Tere can be no originary experience of nature outside
of socially conditioned, disenchanted ways of relating to it. Whats more,
Adorno thinks the motif of re-enchantment often serves as an alibi for the
naturalization of social mores and conventions. Te atomized individuals of
modern society experience it as unalterable, necessary for self-preservation.
Social rules stifen into seemingly natural laws, for instance gender roles.
Individuals then begin to perceive natural phenomena as enchanted, the
mysterious font of the social relations they are thought to bring about. Tis
efect of enlightened society recalls Adornos metaphor of the bulls eye
14. T. W. Adorno, Aesthetic Teory (London & New York: Continuum, 2004), 58.
15. Adorno, Aesthetic Teory, 64.
16. Adorno, Aesthetic Teory, 68.
378 HARRIET JOHNSON
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lantern, which can be closed to conceal the source of its light.
17
In my dis-
cussion of Stellers fate, I alluded to Adornos thought that those who seek to
enslave nature fnd themselves captured by it; the apparatus of domination
they helped to engender is turned back upon them, the lantern they hold
up to the worlds dark places itself darkens and turns opaque. It is the sub-
jects powerlessness in a society petrifed into a second nature [that] becomes
the motor of the fight into a purportedly frst nature.
18
Te injustice [to
nature] is passed along the chain, while at the same time [that which had
been originally], oppressed, poisoned, limps along further.
19
Natural Beauty and Art After Nature
Te way back is barred; frst nature becomes a screen for second nature,
masking the contingency of social conventions with the appearance that
they are necessary to continue life, disguising mediateness in immediacy.
20

Instead, Adorno champions another aspect of nature, one which he thinks
sloughs of the aims of self-preservation. Tis is nature as appearing beauty.
Adorno criticizes a post-Kantian tradition that has neglected the aesthetic
treatment of nature.
21
It is precisely the indeterminateness which Kant
ascribed to natural beauty on the grounds that the faculty of aesthetic
judgement can only be addressed to objects without a determinate concept
which prompts the Idealist devaluation of nature and, needless to say,
Adornos praise of it. He and Kant difer, however, in that, for Kant, the
indeterminacy of natural beauty is treated with the possibility of its cogni-
tion in mind, whereas indeterminacy suggests to Adorno less a potential
conceptualization than an outright challenge to the rigidity of the concept.
If natures disenchantment was a sad tale of converting all diferences to
exchangeable sames, the indeterminateness of natural beauty is the trace of
the nonidentical in things under the spell of universal identity.
22
On frst blush, Adorno seems to contradict himself by stating that [w]ith
regards to its content, the ambiguity of natural beauty has its origin in
17. Adorno, Aesthetic Teory, 96.
18. Adorno, Aesthetic Teory, 65.
19. T. W. Adorno, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (European Perspectives; New
York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 149.
20. Adorno, Aesthetic Teory, 68.
21. R. Gasch, Te Teory of Natural Beauty and Its Evil Star: Kant, Hegel, Adorno, Research
in Phenomenology 32 (2002): 103122.
22. Adorno, Aesthetic Teory, 73.
UNDIGNIFIED THOUGHTS AFTER NATURE 379
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mythical ambiguity.
23
Myth, after all, colludes in the conceptual domi-
nation of nature, expelling all those traces of non-identity which natural
beauty is said to promise. To pardon him of this apparent inconsistency,
the provisio with regards to its content is crucial. Natural beauty, like frst
nature, is liable to be appropriated to ideological purposes wherein the inde-
terminate character of natural beauty is harnessed to conceptual schemes
and content forced upon it. Adorno decries, for instance, attempts to see in
the amorphousness of natural beauty the anamnesis of freedom and thereby
seek freedom in the old unfreedom.
24
By confating indeterminancy with
ambiguity or uncertainty, myth sees an opportunity to inscribe its own
contents onto the supposed tabula rasa of natural beauty. But, for Adorno,
the indeterminacy of natural beauty is not uncertain at all; it is a site of the
promise of critical resistance.
Te resistant indeterminacy of natural beauty congeals in that aspect in
which human domination has its limits and that calls to mind the power-
lessness of the human bustle.
25
Natural beauty evokes the limits of all that
is human-made. Adorno foreshadows the Levinasian ethics of alterity by
suggesting that the beauty of nature is an other to which we can have no
certain epistemological access yet whose call cannot be entirely suppressed.
26

Even here, Adorno faces the danger that he himself might transform natu-
ral beauty into myth by plying its indeterminacy with his own contents.
He hopes to circumvent this problem by siding with Hegel in so far that
natures muteness needs to be sublated in art. Hegel insisted on this because
he thought that the indeterminacy of natural beauty makes it an inferior
expression of reasons burgeoning self-consciousness, unable to exercise the
freedom of being-for-itself. For Adorno however, it is discursive thought
itself that is defcient. In his declaration that natural beauty is close to the
truth but veils itself at the moment of greatest proximity he means that
the truth of non-identity is veiled to reasoning caught within the regime
of identity-thinking.
27
As the limit-concept of reason, natural beauty can
only be grasped by discursive thought when it is framed within art. But, of
course, not just any art will do.
Just as the re-enchantment of nature collapses into ideology, and the
attempt to imbue natural beauty with conceptual content downgrades it to
myth, natural beautys aesthetic sublation is prey to a terrible danger. Art
23. Adorno, Aesthetic Teory, 66.
24. Adorno, Aesthetic Teory, 66.
25. Adorno, Aesthetic Teory, 70.
26. Adorno, Aesthetic Teory, 74.
27. Adorno, Aesthetic Teory, 7374.
380 HARRIET JOHNSON
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that seeks to copy natural beauty is tarred with the same brush as the cul-
ture industrys principle of meticulously duplicating appearance.
28
Adorno
mocks shabbily painted hotel-lobby vistas and the green forests of German
impressionism alike as cultural kitsch. Natural beauty is but a caricature of
itself in art that depicts it as the healing antithesis of society both because
its objectifcation eliminates that indeterminacy which makes it beautiful,
29

and because it is bought and sold as a therapeutic commodity, an artistic
corollary to the tourist industry. For Adorno, the proposition that natu-
ral beauty is the antithesis to society ought be taken in deadly earnest.
30

Adorno opposes Hegels teaching that a negation of the negation results in
an afrmative. Authentic art ofers a determinant negation of natural beauty
for as long as society is antithetical to nature, art must be too. If natural
beauty cannot remain locked in itself because its indeterminate character
resists conceptualization, it is rescued only through that consciousness set
in opposition to it.
31
Te domination of material nature is more efectively
captured by arts domination of its own material form than in any direct plea
for Edens restoration. Adorno endorses the negativity implied in the French
phrase for still life: nature morte. Te truth of natures disenchantment is
revealed by art that represents the scars of its wrenching displacement. For
Adorno, authentic art is an organized emptiness which in its pleasure in
the repressed, [] takes into itself the disaster, the principle of repression
rather than merely protesting hopelessly against it.
32
An artwork that has internalized the disaster is the subject matter of the
frst section of Sebalds After Nature. Mathias Grnewalds Isenheim alter-
piece bespeaks an anxious apprehension of imminent catastrophe drawn
from his particular historical context; the sickening away of the world wit-
nessed in the 1502 solar eclipse, the spread of plague, St. Anthonys fre and
violent anti-jewish pogroms.
Here in an evil state of erosion
And desolation the heritage of the ruining
Of life that in the end will consume
Even the stones has been depicted.
33
28. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 122.
29. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 119.
30. Of course, as I will go on to discuss, Adorno recognizes that this antithesis between natural
beauty and society only goes so far. Te very idea of natural beauty or landscape is a historical
efect of a bourgeois leisured class no longer working the land but luxuriating in it.
31. Adorno, Aesthetic Teory, 75.
32. Adorno, Aesthetic Teory, 19.
33. Sebald, After Nature, 31.
UNDIGNIFIED THOUGHTS AFTER NATURE 381
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Like Becketts no more nature, the plight of nature is starkly captured in
the almost complete dearth of it in Grnewalds art, its abolition in efgy.
34

Crucially, for Adorno, art in the model of or after nature does not imitate
nature, not even individual instances of natural beauty but natural beauty as
such.
35
By this he means that authentic art stands in mimetic likeness not
to natures raw beauty but to those traces of the non-identical suggested by
it. For this reason, it is the modern compositions that organize dissonance,
the great modernist works that perform languages collapse beyond signi-
fying meaning, which approach nearest the ungraspable indeterminacy of
muted nature. Tey ofer an after-image of the silence through which
nature speaks.
36
Natures Promise
When authentic art ventriloquizes nature it promises to enunciate the
unspeakable: utopia.
37
Following Adorno along the via negativa, the
sequence goes thus: authentic art negates natural beauty, itself the antith-
esis of society to reveal utopia, and, utopia turns out to be the negation
of what exists. Adorno looks to the Stendhalian promesse de bonheur, in
which we might overcome the subject/object divide and achieve a non-
dominating reconciliation with nature such as has never previously exist-
ed.
38
Te promise of this radical overhaul is said to come to us from two
opposite temporal directions the far-distant past and a possible future.
It is a fash of light between the poles of something long past, something
grown all but unrecognizable and that which some day might come to
be.
39
I will frst examine his account of the promise of that which might
come to be. Tis is a completely speculative foreshadowing of immediacy,
a glimpse of a diferent possibility rather than a fulflled achievement. He
thinks that the silence of natural beauty gestures towards this prospect in
so far that its own insufciency as the cipher of the non-identical demands
that there be something more.
34. Adorno, Aesthetic Teory, 66.
35. Adorno, Aesthetic Teory, 72.
36. Adorno, Aesthetic Teory, 74.
37. Adorno, Aesthetic Teory, 32.
38. Adorno, Aesthetic Teory, 17.
39. A. Morgan, Adornos Concept of Life (London: Continuum, 2007), 71.
382 HARRIET JOHNSON
Equinox Publishing Ltd 2012.
Nature, as it stirs mortally and tenderly in its beauty, does not yet exist.
Te shame felt in the face of natural beauty stems from the damage
implicitly done to what does not yet exist by taking it for existence.
Te dignity of nature is that of the not-yet-existing.
40
It is useful here to recall Adornos concept of domination, wherein he
ascribed to nature the sufering of an entity whose spontaneous wants had
been thwarted. Nature sufers because it does not yet exist for-itself. We
know that it might come to exist for-itself because its beauty contains traces
of non-identity, the not-existing-for-an-other that stir us painfully. Adorno
suggests that the sufering of frst and second nature refer to one another:
over long periods the feeling of natural beauty intensifed with the sufer-
ing of the subject thrown back on himself in a mangled and administered
world.
41
Sufering demands a transformative praxis that would resolve the
antagonisms manifested by it. Adorno connects hope for the future and
the experience of present-day sufering, Weh spricht: vergeh. Each and every
empirical moment of sufering:
belies all the identitarian philosophy that would talk us out of sufering
[it] tells our knowledge that sufering ought not to be, that things
should be diferent.
42
It is both natures sufering as the not-yet-existing-for-itself and our own
sufering as natural organisms living the wrong life that propel us to scan
the horizon for a promise beyond the ossifed present, ever unsure where
it will come from.
43
Te promise of natural beauty that authentic art reveals in its negation
of the wrong state of things is a relation of non-dominating immediacy
between humans in their own naturalness and their environing natural
world. But what of that other pole long past and scarcely recognizable from
which this promise is said to arise? As became apparent in his critique of any
fight towards re-enchanted nature, the nature-skeptical Adorno is quick
to expose the ideological workings of the nature-endorsing idea that we
ever existed in a state of complete reconciliation with nature. Recall also that
myth is said to conscript natural beauty so as to profess as if the experience
40. Adorno, Aesthetic Teory, 74.
41. Adorno, Aesthetic Teory, 63.
42. T. W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), 203.
43. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 8.
UNDIGNIFIED THOUGHTS AFTER NATURE 383
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were at one with the primordial origin.
44
Adorno concedes that the fantasy
of a harmonious origin has its strengths it instills in the collective memory
a hazy notion of another possibility. But it still has an undermining weak-
ness. Te remembrance of what never really was is so amorphous that it can
be bent and moulded to suit all kinds of dominating practices. Faced with a
culture caught in the strangle-hold of near total reifcation, Adorno cannot
aford to entirely dismiss dim recollections of some lost union of subjectivity
with nature, so he walks a very fne line sourcing redemptive promise from
this imagined past whilst pointing to its ideological traits. Most thought
and by implication Adornos own is said to preserve a mimetic aspect:
In the total process of enlightenment this element gradually crumbles.
But it cannot vanish completely if the process is not to annul itself.
Even in the conception of rational knowledge devoid of all afnity,
there survives a groping for that concordance [non-hierarchical sub-
ject-object relations] which the magical delusion used to place beyond
doubt.
45
His own drift of thought often assumes a shared exposure to the Romantic
dream that we once inhabited a playground of unmediated natural beauty.
For how could authentic art meaningfully express the absence of nature-
existing-for-itself if the viewer did not have some preconception of what
its presence might look like? He advises that aesthetic comportment may
require familiarity with natural beauty in childhood [and, I suggest, the
idea of the childhood of man] and the later abandonment of its ideologi-
cal aspect.
46
Emancipatory promise residing in a possible future and that hailing from
the distant past are not as disconnected as it frst seems; they intersect in the
fgure of sufering. Nature sufers because its ownmost impulses have been
repressed by the mechanisms of domination. As I have shown, this repres-
sion points forward to the necessity for radical change but it also directs us
back. Something must survive as a trace from an earlier stage of not-quite-
so-complete domination, so that we know that repression has taken place
at all. Given that Adorno thinks the sufering of frst and second nature
refer to one another, an analogy between nature and the account he gives of
the survival of resistant traces revealed in human sufering seems appropri-
ate. To explain human sufering, Adorno turns to Freudian psychoanalysis,
44. Adorno, Aesthetic Teory, 66.
45. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 45.
46. Adorno Aesthetic Teory, 69.
384 HARRIET JOHNSON
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detailing the disowning of instinct in favour of a drive for self-preservation
in civilizations development.
47
Tat which remains is registered as the loss
of ego a de-subjectifcation that doesnt result in the merging of subject
and object but is felt as an aching lack i.e. the shame felt upon viewing
natural beauty. Te concept of anamnesis suggests that originally repressed
impulses (like sexual instincts) do somehow live on in the subject.
Adorno insists that we can have no knowledge of an originary moment
of nature existing for-itself wherein resistance to the hurtling progress of
disenchantment could be said to lodge. Yet how else can Adorno account for
the nachleben of a mimetic element or trace? Te theory of repression taken
over from Freud assumes that the impulse or drive is unafected historically.
If somatic impulses are one such lingering residue of a former approach to
objectivity then they must be thought of, frst, as given to experience (and
pre-refective) but suppressed by identity thinking, and second, as able to
return in those recuperative experiences which disrupt our customary instru-
mental relation to things. Te problem is how to make sense of the latent
presence of an impulse, prior to modern subjectivity, living on within the
subject without indulging in moot speculation about some foundational
ground. Te motif of sufering cannot do the conceptual work that Adornos
theory demands of it. Our own somatic experience (and by analogy, natures)
can suggest cause to revolt against the hegemony of identity-thinking, yet it
cannot ground hopes for a liberated future in any precedent that we could
now have any knowledge of. His theory begins to resemble his own dispar-
aging metaphor of the bulls eye lantern that implies a source of light which
it then conceals, denying that a frst spark ever existed. It remains unclear
where exactly art after nature is supposed to source the promise of utopian
non-identity that it voices.
If ambiguous talk of promise courts myth, then the urge to pin down
promise would destroy those very moments of non-identity it seeks. Yet to
go without means we are abandoned to no promise at all. Without promise,
authentic art cannot negate the existent but merely confrm its inevitable
worsening. Becketts Endgame will emerge as a waiting game for a society
with no chance of escaping the catastrophe. Negative dialectics requires the
promesse de bonheur, even if its origins are murky and susceptible to mythical
re-enchantment. So preceding with caution, Adorno continues to tread his
47. Te time-lag between consciousness and the unconscious is itself the stigma of the contradic-
tory development of society. Everything that got left behind is sedimented in the unconscious
and has to foot the bill for progress and enlightenment. T.W. Adorno, Sociology and Psy-
chology, in Modern Critical Tought: An Anthology of Teorists Writing on Teorists, D. Milne
(ed.) (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 65.
UNDIGNIFIED THOUGHTS AFTER NATURE 385
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fne line. He draws upon the anamnesis of not-yet-existent nature to restock
a depleted critical imaginary yet consciously places this idyll in tension with
a vigilant awareness of the ideological and historical conditions upon which
all images of the natural are staked.
Natural History, a Constellation
We are at once before nature as the pristine non-identical and after it as an
always already historical entity. When asking how Adorno sustains these
two apparently contradictory concepts of nature, in Sopers terms nature-
endorsing and skeptical, we enquire into a fundamental strategy of his
philosophy. It is the same productive tension that besets Adornos use of
critical thinking to expose the mechanisms of domination inhering in every
operation of critical thought. He simultaneously holds that the domina-
tion of nature, far from distorting the principles of our rationality, actu-
ally unmasks them, whilst maintaining that reason might, self-refectively,
come to serve new purposes that bit by bit transform its ministry to the
aims of self-preservation. Because conceptual thought reduces its objects to
exemplifcations of types of things and relations of identity, it is genetically
incapable of conceiving the other moments embedded within them. Tis
motivates thought to formulate ever-new concepts to capture those aspects
overlooked by the foregoing one. Each act of conceptualization founders
upon the full reality of the object of thought say, nature forming a series
of incomplete insights, a constellation. Although a single concept within
the constellation cannot grasp the object in its non-identical uniqueness,
the relations between successive, or simultaneously held but difering, con-
cepts might come to shed light upon it no longer an abstraction but in its
very fabric. Non-identity emerges not as some generalized alterity but as a
relational and therefore historical term pointing to an otherness that both
resists every will-to-identity even as it provokes them. Te phenomenologi-
cal specifcity of objects necessarily includes the marks of damage done by
the various acts of conceptual domination and the tensions between them.
To shy away from conceptual tensions would be to ignore the sedimentation
of history within the objects of thought.
As the object of Adornos thought of concern to me, the concept of nature
must be examined in the light of its historical sedimentations. Adorno thinks
that second nature that estranged world of petrifed meanings signifying
the reifcation of human histories into immutable facts of life needs
to be awakened. He thinks second natures constituent parts, human his-
386 HARRIET JOHNSON
Equinox Publishing Ltd 2012.
tory and nature, must be realized as a constellation of mutually illuminat-
ing semi-contradictions: natural history. Tis is no simple reiteration of
Marxs ambition of naturalizing human beings and humanizing nature. For
Adorno, humanity is already natural, all too natural and nature subject to a
history that is human, all too human. Civilized humanity dominates its
world in a manner akin to the beast of prey and nature has been reifed by
humans to the extent that it is after us. Te novelty of Adornos constellation
around natural history resides rather in its suggestion that history and nature
coincide in the moment of transience that attends them both. In order for
the meaning of the reifed to be extracted, Adorno turns to Benjamins call
for the resurrection of second nature out of the infnite distance into infnite
closeness.
48
As a charnel-house [Schdelsttte] of long-dead interiorities,
Lukacs second nature is infnitely distant to us because it repulses human
spontaneity. To see the charnel house from the angle of infnite closeness
requires us to pick among the bones and reveal their susceptibility to a tran-
sience that cannot become thing-like.
Natural history is anchored in a process of decay rather than (post-)
Enlightenment categories of freedom and teleology. Its face, Adorno says, is
not illuminated by the light of redemption but resembles the Hippocratic
countenance wasting in cachexia. Adorno contests the idealistic dichotomy
between history and necessity, human freedom and nature. Whenever a
new historical element appears it refers back to the natural element that
passes away within it. Tese elements are not invariants to be defned but
gather around a concrete historical facticity that, in its own precise context,
is unique. Te assertion of historical contingency that Adorno in his habili-
tation on Kierkegaard called the irreversible and irreducible singularity of
the historical fact debunks the idea that a rational spiritual development
courses through particular events.
49
Sebald ends his After Nature with a similar allegorical juxtaposition of
nature and history. In the third and fnal section, the poet persona revisits
a schoolroom picture of Alexander the Great in battle. What strikes him is
not the majestic deeds of men but the overlooked history of the landscape,
the incomprehensible/Beauty of nature that vaults over the historical play-
ers.
50
Sebalds prose and Adornos theory alike map the contours of nature
and human action, which overlap but are not reducible to one another. Like
48. R. Hullot-Kentor, Tings Beyond Resemblance: Collected Essays on Teodor W. Adorno (New
York: Chichester: Columbia University Press, 2006), 262.
49. B. Hanssen, Walter Benjamins Other History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,
1998), 9.
50. Sebald, After Nature, 112.
UNDIGNIFIED THOUGHTS AFTER NATURE 387
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Adornos natural history, the poets natural history of destruction posits
itself as an archaeology of missing parts, a sifting through rubble. Sebald
coins this term to express the suppressed history of the retaliatory bomb-
ing of German cities in the Second World War and the peoples fragile,
creaturely response to this devastation. He criticizes the post-war cultural
response to this trauma, namely the internal emigrates tendency to resort to
vague notions of freedom and the humanist inheritance of the west in end-
less and prolix abstractions.
51
Natural history is promoted as an alternative
to these abstractions not because it yields a ready-made synthesis of nature,
taken as archaic-ontological substance, and history, taken as intention-
laden human innovation. Natural history is no totalizing amalgam of these
abstract domains but proceeds instead from their discontinuity. From an
aerial vantage point, Sebald describes the survivors of the bombings crawling
around in the wreckage of their cities and setting fres. We are left uncer-
tain whether this scene shows the resurgence of the old modes of behaviour
appropriate to the history of human autonomy or rather another episode
in the organic cycle of life, ever decomposing and then regenerating itself.
Natural history exposes the historical implications of naturalized myths and
begins to unwind the natural, archaic fber of historical development.
52
Natural history is integral to the coherence of that tension-ridden con-
ceptual constellation that Adorno devises in his plea to assist nature on this
sad earth. Te danger myth had posed to attempts to re-enchant nature had
been its propensity to disguise the conventions of second nature as static
invariants by equating them with frst nature. Natural history scores a blow
against this hypostatization of frst nature: only what had escaped nature
as fate would help nature to its restitution.
53
Natural history challenges the
belief that nature was that which has always been there, that which as a fate-
fully organized, pre-given being bears human history.
54
Adorno wants to
resist the static quality accorded to the concept of nature as a function of the
dynamic concept of reason and thereby arrest the usurpation of the realm of
the non-identical to the ends of identity-thinking. By investing nature with
a dynamism that thought usually deprives it, Adorno inveighs against those
nature-endorsing theories that hold nature to be a primeval arche-principle or
a historical origin.
55
While this does not ease niggling reservations that his own
51. W. G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction (New York: Random House, 2003), 9.
52. F. R. Dallmayr, Phenomenology and Critical Teory: Adorno, Philosophy & Social Criticism
3 (1976): 409.
53. Adorno, Aesthetic Teory, 67.
54. Hanssen, Walter Benjamins Other History, 14.
55. Hanssen, Walter Benjamins Other History, 1416.
388 HARRIET JOHNSON
Equinox Publishing Ltd 2012.
concept of anamnesis still cannot account for the existence of residues with-
out itself implying some static point of origin, it is nonetheless plausible that
Adorno wants the idea of natural history to work in a constellation with that
of anamnesis as a corrective to its tendency to re-enchant nature. By attacking
myths fondness for origins steeped in mystery, natural history undermines the
use of natures touted promise to sanctify dominations return of the same.
Meanwhile, natural historys dynamic nature and contingent history eman-
cipated from their respective bondage to eternity and teleological progress
derive indeterminate hope from the recollection of another relation between
humans and nature. Of course, natural history and the promise of natural
beauty do not exist in a synthesizing dialectic. Rather, Adorno lays them side-
by-side to create a conceptual force feld that reveals the prospect of nature
being-for-itself to be a truly historical struggle.
While this theme fnds programmatic expression in the 1932 paper Te
Idea of Natural History, it is ultimately in Aesthetic Teory that the multiple
facets of Adornos refections on nature refect back on each other. True to his
thought that authentic arts organization of its material form could articulate
the buried truths of natural beauty, Adornos paratactical form seeks to reveal
truths illuminated by the constellation. An instantiation of Adornos constel-
lation of natural beauty and natural history emerges in his celebration of the
Kulturlandschaft, which resembles a ruin even when the houses still stand.
56

Such Benjaminian pictograms of passing are to be found in Hlderlins
poem Winkel von Hardt, which portrays a stand of trees as all the more
beautiful for bearing the mark of a past event. Te motif of ruins is used to
summon those remnants of a repressed past supposed to unleash the untold
promise of non-identity. Meanwhile such comments gesturing towards reve-
latory sufering are slotted next to historicizing, skeptical refections refuting
the ideology that there has ever been an untouched nature which sufering
could reveal. Even the idea of landscape, he reminds us, is a historical efect
of the division of labour and a leisured class no longer working the land but
relaxing in it as appearing beauty. In his refections on the cultural landscape,
Adorno revels in the tangled complications of the proposition that natural
beauty is the antithesis to society. If the society to which he refers is bourgeois
society, then society itself is rather the pre-requisite for our appreciation of
the landscape as beautiful. In this reminder of the temporal specifcity of
nature as it appears to us, we take a lesson from natural history. Yet Adorno
still thinks that natural beauty possesses an indeterminacy antithetical to
society, which might assist history to shake of the pre-determined course of
56. Adorno, Aesthetic Teory, 65.
UNDIGNIFIED THOUGHTS AFTER NATURE 389
Equinox Publishing Ltd 2012.
a naturalised second nature. Te ways things simply have to be could, in
fact, be otherwise: this is the promise of natural beauty.
By responding to a historical landscape bearing the marks of its own
domination, Adorno thinks authentic art taps a profound force of resis-
tance stored in the cultural landscape.
57
He had once criticized the rever-
sion to a lost joyful childhood by noting that its temporal unattainability
for us now implies the unattainability of joy itself.
58
By instead making the
quintessential landscape after nature a site of the possibility of resistance,
he suggests we need only to look around us in this sad earth to see in its very
attainability signs of the attainability of resistance.
59
Sebald: One Who Recovers A Little
If Adorno invests our sufering alongside that of nature with anticipative
promise, Sebald responds quite diferently to the question of whether
the poetic-philosophical examination of ruins suggests hope for a non-
dominating relation of human and natural histories. Written more than
a decade after Adornos late work Aesthetic Teory, Sebalds After Nature
bears witness to the eighties heightened awareness of the scale of ecological
destruction as well as the despondent view that the forces that have driven
us to the brink of cataclysm have unstoppable momentum.
60
Te countrys on fre already and everywhere
the forests are ablaze, theres a crackling
of fre in the fanned leaves
And the African drought plains
are expanding. Still
perhaps on your travels
youll see a golden coast of land veneered with rain or
a schoolboy on his way home over a beautiful meadow.
Ten another joy will have been lived,
thinks one who recovers a little.
61
57. Adorno, Aesthetic Teory, 64.
58. T. W. Adorno, Essays on Music (Berkeley, CA; London: University of California Press, 2002),
304.
59. Insofar as possible, I want here to strip resistance of its naively triumphalist connotations. For
Adorno, it is signs and only signs, cryptograms pointing to another mode of being according
to nature, that natural beauty after nature can give us.
60. Te text makes allusion to Rachel Carssons Silent Spring which was one of the frst texts to
raise the alarm about the imminent danger resulting from the environmental pollution.
61. Sebald, After Nature, 103.
390 HARRIET JOHNSON
Equinox Publishing Ltd 2012.
In a world on fre already and everywhere rare moments of crisp beauty in
which nature appears re-enchanted partake neither in the Romantic fantasy
of paradisiacal restoration nor in anamnesis of the repressed non-identical.
Sebald detects in natures remaining beauty only small joys to break up lives
already resigned to disaster. Rather than pitching for a happy reconciliation
of humanity and environment, Sebalds natural history is one of destruction
precisely because it envisages nature as the fnal victor of a violent and ongo-
ing struggle. Colin Riodan points out that Sebalds After Nature inverts the
traditional problem of environmental ethics: at issue here is not so much
the extent to which we value nature but the reverse: that nature has no need
whatever to value us.
62
In Adorno, the foremost scenario for environmental
destruction appeared to be Beckets wasteland where human life, in some
form, lives on. By contrast, Sebald sees our ingrained practices of ecologi-
cal exploitation as having their terminus only in the collapse of the organic
conditions for human life, with nature, in some form, living on.
If it appears a foregone conclusion that natural and human histories are
coordinated in their destruction, the question arises of what role poetry
itself takes, how it engages with the disaster? Sebalds natural history of
destruction has been accused of indulging in a leftist melancholy, of tying
itself too closely to the apocalyptic philosophy of history so prominent in
the German tradition, of retreat to the aesthetic sphere.
63
While writing
Aesthetic Teory, Adorno was also accused of political irresponsibility and
of maintaining a theoretical distance above the fray of 1968 protest culture.
Sebalds response to these charges as well as his points of intersection with
Adorno begin to come clear once his work is located within debates around
the role of literature in Germany in the 1990s. Despite a pessimism beyond
even Adornos, Sebald will adopt a similar stance to the philosopher on the
need for intellectual and artistic works to ofer a practical engagement that
resists serving as instrument to political ends. Te literary strategy that he
undertakes leads him to complicate Adornos own aesthetics of the ruin.
Te responsibility of public thinkers and artists towards a national com-
munity was famously confronted in Tomas Mann in his critique of the
German tradition of cultural pessimism both in the essay Deutschland
und die Deutschen and in the novel Doktor Faustus, in which the com-
poser Adrian Leverkhns story is a cautionary tale of how supposedly aloof
apolitical art is all too prone to fall into step with the barbaric elements
62. C. Riordan, Ecocentrism in Sebalds After Nature, in W. G. Sebald: A Critical Companion,
A. Whitehead and J. J. Long (ed.) (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2004), 50.
63. A. Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Palo-Alto, CA: Stan-
ford University Press, 2003), 156.
UNDIGNIFIED THOUGHTS AFTER NATURE 391
Equinox Publishing Ltd 2012.
of its time. In the late eighties and nineties, a time when Sebald was begin-
ning his own literary career, the role of the author again came under attack
in the Literaturstreit that condensed around a number of feuilleton reviews
of Christa Wolf s Was Bleibt. Tis was an era self-described as one of new
beginnings that hoped to slough of the post-war demand for moral(izing)
engagement and resurrect the modernist claims to aesthetic autonomy, for
art judged as art and nothing else. Sebalds natural history frustrates the
reductive alternatives ofered by the entrenched positions of the Literatur-
streit. His critique of cultural responses to the Luftkrieg targets inner emigra-
tion yet it also refuses the suggestion that literature is thereby committed to
teleological and normative obligations.
Simon Ward argues that Sebalds mode is not to write a critical history
with an emancipatory intention but to compose a literature whose aesthetic
purity is disrupted through the interplay of fctional invention and historical
detail, intertextuality and quotation.
64
His is a literature that agitates for
a new comportment to our environment and to each other not by making
direct appeals for change but by composing narratives that challenge our
everyday relations to things. In an essay titled Nach der Natur, published a
year before Sebalds poem of the same name, Karl-Heinz Bohrer argued that
the mourning for alienated nature typifed by Hlderlins poetry or the lost
promise of happiness, especially the writing of Gottfried Benn, is anachro-
nistic.
65
Tis mode of modernist, and romantic, art is no longer relevant as
it ofers a depiction of natural history as ruins directly representable by us.
A decade earlier, Adorno had himself sought the lost promise of happiness
within the damage done to natural beauty and had applauded Hlderlins
poetry for depicting a Kulturlandschaft with a profound source of resis-
tance welled up in its scarred surface. For Bohrer, what is now needed is a
literature of mourning (Trauer) scanning a landscape where even ruins are
present only as feeting traces. He calls for a literature that scours the rubble
of the past whilst remaining diligently aware that this means that its own
form and language must pose as artifcially constructed ruins.
Sebalds writings give form to this other, self-negating aesthetic of the
ruin. Sebald hopes to reclaim the endangered semantic potential of frag-
ments of the past, be they photographs, letters, testimony, yet he never serves
these up as ruins ready for consumption. His play with memory is always
mediated; it is the writing of someone elses memories, of broken narration,
64. S. Ward, Responsible Ruins? W. G. Sebald and the Responsibility of the German Writer,
Forum for Modern Language Studies 42 (2006): 192.
65. K.-H. Bohrer, Nach Der Natur. Ansicht einer Moderne jenseits der Utopie, Merkur 41:8
(1987): 63145.
392 HARRIET JOHNSON
Equinox Publishing Ltd 2012.
of a passive voice that refuses to name and simply accord blame to the active
agent of destruction. It is quite a feat to go one step further in negation than
Adorno but the natural history of destruction does just this. It negates the
lingering motif of natures resistance to human domination, the ruin, with
writing itself in ruination. Yet while this is a poetics of mourning it is not
one of resignation. As Ward puts it, Sebalds response to pessimism is to be
found in the production of an art that understands itself as part of nature,
but only partially, and thus is able to ofer a form of resistance to overrid-
ing narratives through its conscious process of symbiotic construction and
ruination.
66
Sebalds writing, like Adornos, is after nature because it serves
as provocation to a readership made active in the work of memory. We are
not handed over memories complete. We are rather accompanied in the dis-
jointed process of recollecting nature and historys imbricated suferings.
Tere is a danger in aestheticizing a political programme and rendering
the intertwined fates of nature and history into yet another hotel lobby
landscape. Tey may difer in their diagnosis of the environmental crisis
and the extent that art should claim to represent the ruins of natural his-
tory but on this Sebald and Adorno fundamentally agree. In a 1969 Spiegel
interview Adorno, like Sebald, claims to a thinking that stands in a rather
indirect relationship to praxis.
67
A critical account, one that locates the
kernel of natures ongoing sufering in the instrumental attitude with which
we approach it, must be wary of itself being turned into a convenient instru-
ment of political change. For Sebald, engagement with his 1990s context is
pursued with a radical faith in the literary utterances own power to move
its audience. Adorno, too, thinks theory is much more capable of having
practical consequences owing to the strength of its own objectivity.
68
In
Aesthetic Teory, Adorno suggests that happiness would be above all praxis.
Given that the promesse du bonheur referred to the prospect of a non-dom-
inating relation between subject and natural object, the association of hap-
piness and praxis would suggest that one may only aspire to a successful
praxis, in his sense of the term, when action is undertaken as non-coercive
activity engaged in for its own sake.
69
It is for this reason that Martin Seel
characterizes Adornos praxis as a contemplative ethics, a project that seeks
out a many-sided receptiveness and purpose-free connections to the world.
70

66. Ward, Responsible Ruins, 196.
67. Appendix: Whos Afraid of the Ivory Tower?, in G. Richter, Language Without Soil: Adorno
and Late Philosophical Modernity (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 233.
68. Richter, Appendix, 234.
69. Adorno, Aesthetic Teory, 12.
70. M. Seel, Adornos Contemplative Ethics, in Contemporary Perspectives in Critical and Social
Philosophy, J. F. Rundell et al. (eds) (Boston, MA: Brill, 2004), 263.
UNDIGNIFIED THOUGHTS AFTER NATURE 393
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Tis contemplative, non-possessive relation to nature emerges in aphorism
54 of Minima Moralia:
Te pure unrefective act is violation projected on to the starry sky
above. But in the long, contemplative look that fully discloses people
and things, the urge toward the object is always broken, refected.
Contemplation without violence, the source of all the joy of truth,
presupposes that he who contemplates does not absorb the object into
himself: a distanced nearness.
71
Once again the motif of distanced nearness that Benjamin had prescribed
as crucial to the resurrection of second nature reappears in Adornos work.
Not only does it characterize a constellation that seeks to unlock the for-
gotten history of the natural world and reifed social structures but also
an ethics of contemplative thinking, purposive if only in its refusal of any
singular purpose.
Conclusion
Today disaster looms but not in the shape of Becketts one-of cataclysm
of earth scorching atomic warfare. Rather it is unsustainable day-to-day
lives that threaten catastrophe; the unchecked use of wasteful technologies,
billions of decisions and acts of domination made every second by power
elites and the multitude of individuals. Adornos radical thesis that disaster
inheres in the way we think has come home to roost. Te mechanisms of
thought tame and progressively eliminate the nature internal and external
to us. Despite this, Adorno has been but a marginal presence in environ-
mental philosophical discourse. To many, his dual critique of reason and
the romantic re-enchantment of nature seems to confrm Lukacs charge of
a mandarin intellectualism residing in hotel abyss, maintaining a digni-
fed distance from the tensions that result from any real engagement with
the disaster. In his defence we might note that in Aesthetic Teory dignity
has a telling usage: it is systematically associated with the absence of nature,
its defeat at the hands of human domination. Post-Kantian aesthetics had
dismissed natural beauty in the name of exulting human dignity. We are
then told that the only dignity that nature itself possesses is the uncertain
good of not-yet-existing. So as to open up the possibility of a new history
71. T. W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Refections on a Damaged Life (London: Verso, 2005), 8990.
394 HARRIET JOHNSON
Equinox Publishing Ltd 2012.
of natures presence for itself, Adornos critical theory is prepared to embrace
indignitys nitty-gritty.
Te object of Adornos thought is to reveal that in nature which is not
reducible to being the object of thought. He doesnt expect to get at nature
precisely because it has already been completely got at. So, he piles up
layer upon layer of mutually undermining but partially illuminating
moments of undignifed thought. He pays visit to that a-historical font of
nature re-enchanted, all the time declaring himself an unbeliever. Despite
aligning the very logic of technology with the mass murder of the death
camps, the attempt to expunge human nature itself, he will go so far as to
admit that under transformed relations of production technology might
even assist nature.
72
Otherwise put, far from aloof, Adornos theory mimeti-
cally responds to the grubby history of the conceptual domination of nature.
It too is prepared to enlist aspects of both post-modern skepticism and re-
enchanting romanticism in the hope that the questioning self-refection
and ethical contemplation that this forces on them might yield a benefcial
transition to praxis. How this transition may occur is a question that both
Sebald and Adorno think beyond the purview of their work, but it is only by
sorting through the imbricated ways that we are, in the poets words, after
nature, that Adorno thinks we might ever put ourselves without places to
hide before it.
Harriet Johnson is currently completing a PhD at the University of Sydney, Australia.
Her research interests include social philosophy, political philosophy, critical theory
and phenomenology.
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