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Theory and the Object: Making

Sense of Adorno’s Concept of
Mediation
a
Margherita Tonon
a
Catholic University of Leuven , Belgium
Published online: 30 Apr 2013.

To cite this article: Margherita Tonon (2013) Theory and the Object: Making Sense of
Adorno’s Concept of Mediation, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 21:2,
184-203, DOI: 10.1080/09672559.2012.727013

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09672559.2012.727013

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 International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 2013
Vol. 21, No. 2, 184–203, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09672559.2012.727013

Theory and the Object: Making

Sense of Adorno’s Concept of
Mediation
Margherita Tonon
Abstract
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This article examines Adorno’s use of the notion of mediation, which at

first glance appears to be problematic and aporetic. While the emergence
of such a concept marks Adorno’s renewed interest in Hegelian philoso-
phy, and a distancing from Walter Benjamin’s thought, the understanding
of mediation should not be reduced to the Hegelian model. This article
will argue that Adorno introduces such a concept to explain theory’s neces-
sity and verifiability, as well as the experience of the object. Only by taking
these two issues (the mediation between concepts and between subject and
object) in their interconnection is it possible to explain the role of media-
tion in Adorno. I will argue that the idea of ‘constellations’ put forward in
the Dialectics furnishes us with a model of mediation that goes beyond its
original Hegelian formulation.
Keywords: dialectics; mediation; objectivity; constellations; theory;
materialism

Introduction
Far too little has been written about one of the most central and prob-
lematic concepts in Adorno’s philosophy, namely, the concept of media-
tion. Even though scholarly articles on related topics1 have, to a certain
extent, addressed this problem or have included it in the treatment of
connected issues, I nonetheless believe that it is necessary to examine
Adorno’s concept of mediation on its own terms. Only by doing so, is it
possible to clarify Adorno’s use of such a concept, while at the same
time highlighting some of the problems and shortcomings it contains.
The use of the concept of mediation in Adorno is inherently problem-
atic because, despite its evident Hegelian derivation, it cannot be simply
understood in this sense, insofar as it distinctively parts ways with the ide-
alistic formulation of such a concept. In addition, when such a concept is
taken in a strictly Hegelian sense, as if it were simply an instrument bor-
rowed from the Hegelian toolbox, it ends up challenging the overall coher-
ency and consistency of Adorno’s thought.2 Adorno is partly responsible

Ó 2013 Taylor & Francis

 THEORY AND THE OBJECT

for a similar interpretation, in that he did not expend much energy

explaining and defending his own methodology. Nevertheless, mediation
appears to play a crucial role in his thought, insofar as it seemingly
contributes to clarifying a range of different problems, from the relation
between subject and object, to the stringency of Adorno’s theory. Bearing
this in mind, Adorno’s reader is confronted with an unpalatable alterna-
tive between either taking up this somewhat opaque concept in an uncriti-
cal manner, trusting the author that ‘it does the job’, or, in light of an
Hegelian understanding of such a concept, acknowledging its lack of
consistency and, hence, denouncing its ineffectiveness (and, in some cases,
the overall failure of the Adornian project). Only a few scholars have
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acknowledged the problems with Adorno’s use of such a notion3 and only
a few have attempted to make sense of it on its own terms.4
The purpose of this article is to elucidate the role and function that the
notion of mediation plays in the development of the thought of Theodor
W. Adorno, as well as acknowledging the difficulties that it encounters. I
will assess to what extent such a concept is dependent on its original
Hegelian formulation and in what way Adorno offers a novel interpreta-
tion of it. I submit that in order to fully understand such a notion, it is not
sufficient to address such a problem from the point of view of the media-
tion between subject and object. This approach is insufficient to provide
the theoretical justification for the use of such a concept due to the non-
identical residue that characterises this relation. For this reason, it is nec-
essary to complement it by taking into account the operation of the media-
tion between concepts, that is to say, the problem of theory.
Hence, I will place to the forefront of the present discussion two main
issues, namely, the question of theory and the problem of the object.
The question of theory emerges in the context of Adorno’s confrontation
with Walter Benjamin, while the problem of the object is developed in
relation to his reception of Hegelian dialectic. I will argue that the diffi-
culties Adorno’s model of mediation runs into can only be made sense
of when these two issues – the issue of theory and objective mediation –
are taken in their interconnection. What is at stake is the possibility of
giving a coherent and binding account of experience through and beyond
the concept. This can be accomplished only when objective mediation
and mediation between concepts are taken as complementary. To this
end, I will consider the notion of constellation as the original model of
mediation that Adorno proposes, which furnishes a non-Hegelian answer
to the problem of objectivity. I will begin my inquiry with an historical
reconstruction of the historical genesis of such problem, before address-
ing Adorno’s reception of the Hegelian legacy.

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1. Mediation as the Core-element of Adorno’s New Method

In order to retrace the central role that the notion of mediation plays in
Adorno’s philosophy, it is fitting to begin from what at first sight might
appear as a document of mere biographical interest, i.e. the Benjamin–
Adorno correspondence. This is because it is in the course of the 1935–
38 correspondence that the theoretical and methodological differences
between the two philosophers comes to be defined and revolves around
the reception of Hegel’s thought and the notion of mediation. The sub-
ject of the disagreement between the two authors centres on the notion
of dialectical images: Adorno challenges both its Benjaminian formula-
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tion and the interpretative possibilities of such a notion. Through his

confrontation with the work of Benjamin, Adorno was in search of more
rigorously dialectical position, attempting to define a method which is
attentive to the complexity of the real, yet at the same time methodolog-
ically well-grounded. Such a complexity, according to Adorno, was not
grasped through the dialectical image, a method that appeared to him as
insufficiently discursive, and needed to be expanded in a theory. In order
to develop such a theory, Adorno engaged more intensively with
Hegelian philosophy,5 putting the category of mediation to the forefront
of his concerns.
According to Rolf Tiedemann, the interpretative method based upon
the analysis of ‘dialectical images’ was developed in conversations and
letters exchanged between Benjamin, Adorno and Horkheimer through-
out the late 1920s and 1930s.6 Adorno made use of it as an interpretative
tool to decode the ‘riddle of the real’ in his early authorship, such as
Kierkegaard – Construction of the Aesthetic, published in 1933, where
Adorno refers to it as having been elaborated by Walter Benjamin.7
However, it is in Adorno’s 1931 inaugural lecture The Actuality of Phi-
losophy that we can find the clearest definition of this method:

Interpretation of the unintentional through a juxtaposition of the

analytically isolated elements and illumination of the real by the
power of such interpretation is the program of every authentic
materialist knowledge…8

As Susan Buck-Morss explains, such an interpretation is a question of

breaking down into their minimal components what for Adorno were
‘“codes” or “ciphers” of social reality, which contained the bourgeois
social and psychological structure in monadological abbreviation, but
which needed philosophical interpretation’.9 The phenomena in question
were images that needed to be unlocked by ‘regrouping’ in different con-
stellations their constitutive elements.10 From this there could arise a

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new ‘historical image’, which would make visible a new interpretation of

the real.
Nonetheless, in the ensuing years Adorno became increasingly doubt-
ful about the possibilities of interpretation offered by the dialectical or
historical image.11 In his view, it was necessary to supplant this method
with a more dialectically understood notion of ‘theory’. Adorno’s reac-
tion to Benjamin’s draft of the Baudelaire essay, which he reviewed for
publication in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung12 is especially telling.
The central contention of Adorno’s dissatisfaction with the work was its
montage character, that is, the fact that it merely amounted to a juxtapo-
sition of unrelated and distinct elements, and lacked something that
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could bind them together and discursively relate them to each other.13
Adorno openly criticized the method of the montage because of its lack
of theoretical explanation, which left things silent and closed to interpre-
tation. His critical distance from Benjamin’s ideas finds expression in
Adorno’s fairly abrupt comment on the work of Benjamin: ‘Let me
express myself in as simple and Hegelian a manner as possible. Unless I
am very much mistaken, your dialectic is lacking one thing: mediation.’14
Mediation therefore becomes the guarantor of a theory which could
highlight the critical/objective focus of Benjamin’s work on the nine-
teenth century, distinguishing it from a mere depiction of social charac-
ters. The materials and images presented by Benjamin (the arcades, the
inte´rieur, the flâneur, the ragpicker, the collector, the gambler) remain
opaque and impenetrable if they are not mediated, i.e. accompanied by
a theory that would break the spell of their mere immediacy. Adorno
explains this as follows: ‘The “mediation” which I miss and I find
obscured by materialistic-historiographical evocation, is simply the the-
ory which your study has omitted. But the omission of theory affects the
empirical material itself.’15
One may well wonder whether Adorno’s interpretation of Benjamin’s
method as lacking mediation is accurate or not. Peter Osborne, for
instance, argues that there is a form of mediation at work in Benjamin’s
thought, which is not of the Hegelian kind. Namely, Osborne argues that
mediation in Benjamin takes the form of ‘a switch between circuits’,16 i.e.
between the seemingly closed temporal dimensions of the past and the
present, enabling a true historical experience, rather than the eternal pres-
ent of Hegel’s Logic. Osborne maintains that Adorno is wrong in accusing
Benjamin of lacking mediation altogether because he reduces the notion
of mediation to what he regards as ‘its narrow Hegelian form’.17
While it is true that Adorno fails to appreciate the Benjaminian
understanding of mediation, described by Osborne as interaction
between two temporal dimensions, it is debatable whether the mediation
that Adorno embraces is purely a ‘narrow form’ of Hegelian conceptual
mediation. One could agree with Osborne’s interpretation that Adorno’s
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notion of ‘theory’, as it emerges in this correspondence, seems to be in

line with the Hegelian understanding of mediation, insofar as it invokes
a ‘shared conceptual space’,18 where meaning emerges out of the inter-
connection of individual separated moments. Having said this, however,
we will see that Adorno’s use of the notion of mediation, as it emerges
in his later work, is not simply aiming at the formation of a rational
sharable knowledge (theory), which takes place in immanence. What is
at stake in Adorno’s method is something different from ‘conceptual
resolution in the self-identity of some higher stage’.19
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2. What Kind of Mediation? Hegel and Adorno

If we look at how Adorno deals with the concept of mediation in his sub-
sequent texts, especially the Negative Dialectics, we soon realise that it
extends beyond offering a solution to the theoretical impasse reached by
the dialectical image. That is to say, the question of the conceptual justifi-
cation of an analysis of experience is inscribed in a much more all-encom-
passing philosophical problem, namely, that of the relation between
subject and object.20 At this point we can say that the epistemological
problem intersects with a metaphysical one, which concerns the modern
problem of the relationship between subject and object and the overcom-
ing of their dualism.21 Specifically, mediation attempts to offer an account
of the relation between subject and object, which aims to show that these
two moments can only be understood in their co-dependence. According
to Adorno, this would support the outlining of a more truthful and con-
crete notion of experience, one that is characterized by reciprocity rather
than by the subject’s domination over the object.

A. Hegel: Mediation within the System

To this extent, mediation still seems to be inscribed within an Hege-
lian paradigm, because it is precisely the modern problem of the abstract
separation of objectivity and subjectivity to which Hegel intended to
offer a solution. However, it needs to be stated that mediation in Hegel
is not a strictly defined concept, but more of a working concept that
incorporates, or is used in relation to, different key ideas in Hegel’s
thought, such as, for instance, the idea of Aufhebung, or that movement
which, by way of opposition, overcomes a certain concept, elevating it
and preserving it in a higher one.
Hegel places the moment of mediation at the core of every knowl-
edge-generating process. In the opening section of his Encyclopaedia
Logic, for instance, Hegel states that philosophy takes its start from the
dialectical relation of sensibility and thinking, both needing each other
not to fall into unbundled manifoldness or abstract formalism, and thus

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giving way to concrete, yet scientifically warranted, knowledge.22 By

thinking the original co-belonging of immediacy and mediation, reason
avoids the difficulty that the understanding encounters when it has to
reunite again the objective and the subjective side of experience. Hence,
knowledge that stands firmly on its own foundations recognises
mediation, understood as the togetherness of immediacy and mediation,
as its centrepiece. This kind of knowledge, ‘which proceeds neither in
one-sided immediacy nor in one-sided mediation’,23 is for Hegel the
logic. Knowledge of this kind is the only type of knowledge that can
grant universality and necessity, not by taking its object in its abstract-
ness, but by placing it in the context of its mediations, i.e. showing its
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interconnectedness with other positions. It is not difficult to see that,

understood in these terms, the structure of mediation coincides with that
of the Aufhebung, that movement of thought and reality which denies
the unilateral nature of abstraction, showing all one-sided determinations
in their dependence on their opposites.24 By way of mediations, knowl-
edge attains increasing concreteness and determination, producing in
such a way a coherent system, where thought and reality, subject and
object, are at one. Ultimately, it is precisely from the point of view of
such a true and accomplished totality that philosophy can provide a ret-
rospective look, which legitimises each individual moment within such a
system.

B. Adorno’s Hegelianism: ‘Everything is Mediated’

Adorno, too, embraces the Hegelian idea of the all-encompassing nat-
ure of mediation. In fact, in Hegel: Three Studies, while comparing com-
peting accounts of experience, Adorno takes up the Hegelian criticism
of certain philosophical positions that take immediacy as something
more primary and ultimately superior to what is merely derived. More
significantly, Adorno remarks:

According to Hegel, there is nothing between heaven and heart

that is not ‘vermittelt’ [mediated], nothing, therefore, that does not
contain, merely by being defined as something that exists the reflec-
tion of its mere existence, a spiritual moment: Immediacy itself is
essentially mediated.25

It is evident that Adorno also embraces such a position, which is particu-

larly relevant in relation to the problem of the relatedness of subject and
object, which he intends to defend and demonstrate. In fact, Adorno
refers to Hegel as the one who truly understood the reciprocal implica-
tion of subject and object and firmly rejected their analytic separation,
which would make the object the residue after subjective factors have
been eliminated. To this, according to Adorno, Hegel does not oppose
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‘an irrational unit of subject and object’ but rather ‘preserves the distinct
moments of subjective and objective while grasping them as mediated by
one another’.26 Despite this admitted proximity, we should not overlook
their remarkable differences, which ultimately falsify any reduction of
the Adornian notion of mediation to an Hegelian model.
C. The Asymmetrical Mediation of Subject and Object
In particular, if Adorno seems to be at ease with the epistemological
claim concerning the conditions of truthful experience (the relatedness
of knowledge); what he questions instead is the metaphysical claim of
the logical nature of the real, based upon the identity of subject and
object. That is to say, Adorno questions the identity and symmetry of
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such a mediation, introducing the issue of the ‘preponderance of the

object’.27 This position is in line with the materialist orientation of his
philosophy. Adorno takes exception to the fact that in Hegel’s philoso-
phy the idea of an original identity between subject and object is
constantly at work28 in his otherwise rich account of experience. While
on the one hand, this allows Hegel to think the object as already struc-
tured, overcoming the dichotomy between meaning-conferring conscious-
ness and inert material, on the other hand, however, it lays the
foundation for his absolute idealism.29 That is to say, by asserting the
absolute transparency of the concept in capturing the object, Hegel ulti-
mately conflates the object into the subject. Hegel’s lack of awareness of
the fundamental asymmetry that characterizes the relation between sub-
ject and object gives way to a totalitarian tendency and to systematic
violence,30 which forcefully identifies the two dialectical poles. In fact,
the idea that informs the whole project of the Negative Dialectics is that
philosophy has failed to be at one with reality,31 as Hegel would have
wanted, from which it follows that concepts are not to be taken as the
ultimate reality, but constantly point beyond themselves to non-concep-
tualities.32 According to Adorno, behind the presumed disinterestedness
and impartiality of the concept, there lies an intention to dominate: ‘…
concepts, on their part are moments of the reality that requires their for-
mation, primarily for the control of nature’.33 This means that concepts
are not the primary material of reality, as an idealist approach would
have it, but that they are constructed in response to a specific need, that
of the mastery of reality and nature. Realizing this amounts to realizing
that concepts always refer beyond themselves, towards that ‘unbundled
reality’ that they capture and systematize. It also amounts to escaping
from the ‘fetishistic view of the concept’34 into which the idealist
position had fallen.
Yet how does Adorno argue for the primacy of the objective moment?
The priority of the object over the subject becomes evident, for Adorno,
if one reflects on the notion of mediation itself. Once again, Hegel is the
starting point of his argument: ‘There is nothing that is not mediated,
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 THEORY AND THE OBJECT

and yet, as Hegel emphasized, this mediation must always refer to some-
thing which is mediated, without which it would not be in its turn.’35
However, differently from Hegel, Adorno maintains that the object can
very well subsist without being mediated and he explains that ‘immedi-
acy does not involve being mediated in the same way in which mediation
involves something immediate that would be mediated’.36 Mediation,
even if universal, is by no means symmetrical: the existence of something
mediated, i.e. concepts, necessarily implies what they mediate, i.e. the
immediate, but this does not hold for the object. This is precisely
because, without that immediacy which is the object, there would be no
subjective mediation. Adorno puts this problem in the following terms:
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Due to the inequality inherent in the concept of mediation, the

subject enters into the object altogether differently from the way
the object enters into the subject. An object can be conceived only
by a subject but always remains something other than the subject,
whereas a subject by its very nature is from the outset an object as
well. Not even as an idea can we conceive a subject that is not an
object; but we can conceive an object that is not a subject. To be
an object also is part of the meaning of subjectivity; but it is not
equally part of the meaning of objectivity to be a subject.37

Adorno’s argument follows the same lines as the previous one: the
object necessitates the subject only with regard to the possibility of its
definition, but it preserves its constitution independently of this. On the
other hand, the subject, in order to subsist, must first of all be an object,
and this is already implicit in the Latin origin of the term subiectum,
which means that which lies beneath, that is, in technical philosophical
terms, what is referred to as ‘objective’.38
Thus we can say that Adorno reverses the terms of the argument: the
activity of mediation is not primarily a subjective moment (a premise
which is implicit in Hegel’s identity claim) but an objective one: ‘What
transmits the facts is not so much the subjective mechanism of their pre-
formation and comprehension as it is the objectivity heteronymous to
the subject, the objectivity behind that which the subject can
experience.’39
However, the uncoupling of the epistemological claim from the meta-
physical claim concerning the logical structure of the real, which in
Hegel are one and the same, causes Adorno to run into some difficulties
concerning his methodology:40 (1) with regard to explaining how our
concepts are indebted to an objective substratum; and (2) with regard to
the ultimate justification of the theory afforded by our concepts.

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3. The Problem of Objective Mediation

Adorno’s account of the mediation between subject and object reverses
the Hegelian paradigm and constitutes the theoretical core of his materi-
alism. What is at stake now is no longer rendering the object adequate
to the subject, but rather coming to terms with subjectivity’s own medi-
atedness through the object: ‘it is now subjectivity rather than objectivity
that is mediated, and this sort of mediation is more in need of analysis
than the traditional one’.41 What kind of analysis, then, does Adorno
offer? How does he explain the manner in which the object has an
impact on subjectivity? Given that the object constitutes the substratum
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out of which concepts are generated, it is impossible not to ask ourselves

how such mediation actually takes place.
Little of the available literature attempts to clarify what is meant by
objective mediation, 42 while at the same time pointing to the inherent
problematicity of such an issue.43 It is perhaps Deborah Cook, in her
article ‘Adorno’s Critical Materialism’, who offers some of the most
interesting clues concerning what is meant by the priority of the object
in our concept formation, by pointing to the role of material nature in
human history.44 Cook explains: ‘On Adorno’s view, this material life-
process, which is impelled by the drive for self-preservation, has condi-
tioned all our relations to the external (organic and inorganic) nature.’45
Thus the natural drive for self-preservation has hardened into concepts,
which, far from being lofty and spiritual, are derived from our very
materiality and natural aspect. Yet, having forgotten their origin, they
now oppose and dominate nature.
Such a genealogy is only hinted at in the Dialectic of Enlightenment,
where the origin of language and conceptuality is traced back to a
response to the terror in front of nature.46 However, to this genealogy
there does not correspond a deduction of the modalities of the depen-
dency of concepts upon their natural objective origin. As Michael Rosen
remarks, mediation does not really explain how concepts and the object,
i.e. ‘the two poles, of the labour process – meaning conferring activity
and raw material – are related …’ and the connection between the two
remains blurry, indicating at best a ‘non-causal relatedness’.47 Hence, we
can agree that it is not possible to account for the objective moment in
subjective concepts. Objective mediation remains opaque.
Brian O’Connor, in his ‘The Concept of Mediation in Hegel and
Adorno’,48 puts the problem in terms of the failure of mediation to real-
ize that reciprocity which it purports to express. In fact, the object
always presents itself in conceptual form: because of its priority, it is
clear that the object cannot be understood simply as raw material to be
apprehended by concepts – it is then to be understood as something con-
ceptually independent (here Adorno’s metaphor of ‘sedimented history’

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is especially telling) to which consciousness must adjust. At this point,

however, according to O’Connor, one no longer sees the need to invoke
materialism, as Adorno can simply stay within a form of conceptualism.
That is to say, referring to mediation through the object does not help to
clarify the process of subjective mediation (or mediation amongst
concepts), and vice versa. In short,

… the respective processes of object mediation and subject media-

tion do not amount to reciprocity. Furthermore, both could exist
without reference to the other. Mediation therefore remains funda-
mentally equivocal in that it is a cover term for two different
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operations corresponding to two different relationships.49

Consequently, we can say that the cause of this unfulfilled reciprocity

lies not so much – or not only – in the fact that the object can only be
presented to us in terms of sedimented history, i.e. conceptually. Rather,
it lies in the fact that the steps by which nature becomes a conceptual
given independent of the subject are not themselves transparent and
hence remain consigned to a distant and hypothetical genealogy. The
best possible analogy that illustrates the objective derivation of our con-
cept formation can be found in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory with regard
to the distinction between the form and content of an artwork: the medi-
ation of the two elements consists in the fact that aesthetic form is made
up of sedimented content.50 Art’s form here plays the role of the con-
ceptual, while content – the world from which works of art are only
apparently isolated – would stand for the object. However, even in the
case of art, the deduction of each single step that brought about such a
transition from content to form cannot be transparently performed but
only tentatively indicated.51
Hence, because of the opaque origin of our conceptual world, Adorno
rejects any Hegelian idea of total mediation, or better, of a mediated
totality, that would provide us with the justification for the use of our
concepts in virtue of their reciprocal connection and belonging to a true
entirety. However, this causes Adorno some further problems, especially
if we consider that his initial appeal to the concept of mediation was for
the sake of offering a justified interpretation of reality. Is it then the case
that, despite his best intentions, Adorno’s new understanding of the con-
cept of mediation gets him into trouble with regard to the much sought-
after legitimization of his theoretical interpretations? Or better, is it the
case that dropping the Hegelian metaphysical claim concerning the logi-
cal nature of reality affects also the epistemological claims which
concern the grounding of true knowledge?
On the one hand, concepts cannot claim their truth by showing their
fidelity to the object: it is too far removed and there is no actual causal
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connection that can be demonstrated. On the other, because of the

underlying presence of a non-conceptual substratum, a self-enclosed
conceptual system, where each moment finds its justification from the
point of view of the whole, as Hegel would have wanted, becomes
impossible. Can Adorno’s theory find a way out of the impasse between
a justification based on the correspondence between objects and
concepts (which would lead to a new dualism) and a justification based
on the all-encompassing nature of conceptuality (which would remain
entangled in Hegel’s idealism)? Responding to this question allows us to
highlight the elements of originality in Adorno’s solution and to assess
the extent to which it parts ways with Hegel.
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4. Adorno’s Solution: Conceptual Constellations

I submit that Adorno’s attempt at a way out, which would save theory
from its foundering, places the emphasis on the clarifying power of con-
ceptual mediation (the relationality of knowledge), but at the same time
it does not dismiss altogether the idea of an objective correspondence,
even if this is not thought in terms of identity. While for Hegel these
moments match each other (the logical is the element of the real), for
Adorno they are not fully uncoupled, yet a space is nonetheless kept
between the two. Adorno works out such a solution in his theory of con-
stellations. In bringing into focus the notion of conceptual constellations,
I contend that interpretation is for Adorno a more complex matter than
the mere correspondence or lack thereof between subject and object.
Certainly, as Nicholas Joll has emphasised, casting light on the mismedi-
ations between particular and universals serves the critical purpose of
showing just how irreconciled the reality in which we live is.52 However,
according to my reading, such an indispensible operation merely puts its
finger on the contradiction, rather than teasing out a more complex anal-
ysis of its genesis and interaction with other societal phenomena, i.e.
what goes by the name of theory, and which the operation of conceptual
constellations precisely fulfils.
Adorno’s appeal to the idea of constellations might appear as a return
to Benjamin’s inspired methodology from which Adorno wanted to
disengage himself. This is mainly because it was in ‘The Actuality of Phi-
losophy’ that Adorno put forward the notion of constellations as a form
of interpretation based on the visibility offered by images, while the
concept merely performed the analytic work of breaking down the
cipher, which needed to be interpreted, into its components.53 However,
in the later version of Adorno’s theory of constellations, expressed in
the Negative Dialectics, the conceptual had the predominant function,

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the interpretative power being awarded not to new images, but to new
conceptual formations.
Adorno’s challenge at this point is not to give way to a new form of
Idealism, which abandons the requirement of totality and absoluteness,
but which nonetheless still restricts experience, albeit finite, to the con-
ceptual. Adorno, in fact, does not abandon his original materialistic
orientation and conceives the arrangement of conceptual constellations
as what enables us to philosophize ‘out of the object’.54 In such a way,
thought can ‘ strive, by way of the concept, to transcend the concept’,55
thus recalling ‘the affinity which objects have for each other’56 or ‘what
objects communicate in’.57 Adorno maintains that it is by examining the
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modalities through which concepts mediate with each other that we can,
on the one hand, understand the necessity of the interpretations they
afford, while on the other, experience the objectivity that underlies
them.
I would like to suggest that in this respect the Hegelian notion of
determinate negation is a fundamental instrument to account for the
relatedness amongst concepts, justifying, on the one hand, the necessity
of their interpretations and, on the other, their communication with the
object. Concepts relate to each other on the basis of their inherent lack
and on the basis of their need to fulfil this lack in order to adequately
express the objective reality they seek to grasp. As Adorno puts it: ‘The
determinable flaw in every concept makes it necessary to cite others
…’58 Because of their limitedness, concepts attract new ones until they
dispose themselves in patterns out of which a binding interpretation of
the real can emerge. According to Adorno, the gaps and fissures of one
concept entail the other until they form a web in which the history of
the object is concealed. This means that if we want the object to emerge
we have to allow ourselves to be led by the concept’s own insufficiency.
In such a way, Adorno sees himself as drawing the consequences of a
tendency that was already anticipated in Hegelian dialectics.59 Hegel
himself, according to Adorno, criticizes the autarky (isolation) of the
concept and stresses its necessary interrelatedness with other concepts.
Yet Adorno intended to correct what he saw as fundamental flaws in
Hegel’s position, i.e. its progressive quality which culminates in an all-
encompassing system where the object is reduced to the subject.
This methodological difference strikes us when we consider Adorno’s
observations in his 1958 ‘The Essay as Form’. In the essay concepts are
taken as they are, in their linguistic and historical specificity, hence they
are not examined and purified in advance. This would initially strike us
as arbitrary; however, their justification is to be found in their manner of
presentation within the essay, which appeals to the binding connection
of the concepts it utilizes in order to display the legitimacy of how it
handles its subject matter:
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All its concepts are to be presented in such a way that they support
one another, that each becomes articulated through its configura-
tion with the others. In the essay discreet elements set off against
one another come together to form a readable context; the essay
erects no scaffolding and no structure. But the elements crystallize
as a configuration through their motion. The constellation is a force
field, just as every intellectual structure is necessarily transformed
into a force field under the essay’s gaze.60

For Adorno, then, each concept is connected to another in such a way

that it is the network created by these connections that legitimizes their
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use. A perspicuous analogy with the kind of binding conceptual arrange-

ment described in the above quoted ‘Essay as Form’ again emerges from
the Aesthetic Theory: the autonomy and freedom of artworks, instanti-
ated in their ‘law of form’, according to which each of their elements
relates to the other in a binding manner, refers back to empirical objec-
tive reality. The complex tensions present in the artworks’ problem of
form reflect the antagonism present in reality.61 Hence, we could say
that it is the subjective mediation of the artwork’s elements that makes
it objective, reflecting the mediation of its material substratum, society
itself.62
Returning to the modalities of the mediation amongst concepts, it is
important to stress that, differently from Hegel, within constellations
determinate negation does not operate vertically, or progressively, from
the most abstract concept to the most determinate, as in the Science of
Logic, so that it is possible to foresee what new determinations will fol-
low, but horizontally,63 gathering concepts around a ‘center of gravity’.
I maintain that this idea of an horizontal mediation introduces some
important elements that distinguish it from the Hegelian method and
that have important implications for Adorno’s overall project: it means
that Adorno’s theory is constantly open to the appearance of the unex-
pected, which is brought forth by the disposing of concepts in always
changing formations. The ‘unexpected’ thus springs out of concepts yet
transcends them at the same time: this is the way in which Adorno
accounts for the relation of concepts with respect to objectivity. Adorno,
returning to some metaphors from the ‘Actuality of Philosophy’,64 uses
the image of ‘cracking the code’ of a lock:

As constellation theoretical thought circles the concept it would

like to unseal, hoping that it may fly open like the lock of a well-
guarded safe-deposit box: in response not to a single key or a single
number but to a combination of numbers.65

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The notion of ‘centre of gravity’ that Adorno calls Kraft-Feld, or ‘force-

field’,66 captures the idea of the correspondence with the object. If, on
the one hand, the object is hinted at in the awareness of the insufficiency
of the concept, on the other, with the notion of Kraft-Feld, Adorno
introduces a mimetic moment according to which concepts dispose them-
selves around the shape and contours of the object so as to restitute its
shape. Such a notion furnishes us with the materialistic explanation of
the formation of constellations, as if the concepts were drawn to it by an
irresistible attraction, as if the object constituted a centre of gravity that
draws concepts around it. Certainly, this does not amount to a discursive
justification (or deduction) of the correspondence between subjective
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ways of knowing and its objective counterpart. It rather evokes the idea
of an affinity between conceptual formations and the object, which
ultimately signifies the impossibility of an exhaustive mediation.
However, according to Adorno, it is precisely because of the catalyz-
ing work of this bottom layer of objectivity that the operation of deter-
minate negation does not remain closed within a system of idealism that
reiterates the existent, but opens up to the unexpected, to non-reified
interpretations that, rather than confirming the existent, call into ques-
tion the status quo. For this reason, Adorno writes: ‘The essay’s object
… is the new in its newness, not as something which can be translated
back into the old existing forms.’67
I am here arguing that Adorno’s emphasis on constellations draws
attention to the fact that contradiction, born out of the unfulfilled media-
tion between subject and object, while prompting a legitimate critique of
the real, is an insufficient ground in order to outline the unheard of pos-
sibilities that constitute utopia.68 Such a task can be fulfilled by concep-
tuality insofar as concepts follow the logic of their internal
communication, which far from isolating them from the object, attain it
in a more truthful way than when they confront it directly.69

Conclusion: Mediation and the Unexpected

What, in the final reckoning, is the status of mediation in Adorno’s
work? Looking at its role in conceptual constellations shows us that its
operation is complex and multilayered. Yet, we should certainly recog-
nize the indebtedness of Adorno’s use of mediation to its original Hege-
lian formulation. This is evident, in the first place, in Adorno’s stated
intentions and, secondly, in the way he understands mediation amongst
concepts, which fulfils its demand for verifiability and rationality, making
use of Hegel’s notion of determinate negation, i.e. the negation of every
isolated or insufficient concept. However, Adorno parts ways with the
Hegelian method by introducing the notion of an asymmetry in media-

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tion, oriented towards an objective preponderance. The consequence of

this is a disjunction between two types of mediation: the mediation
between concepts (theory) and the mediation between subject and
object, which in Hegel are thought together as one and the same. This
entails some relevant changes with regard to the model of experience
outlined by Adorno; in particular, it becomes clear that the underlying
presence of an objective substratum, which cannot be exhaustively
grasped by our concepts, precludes any idea of an all-encompassing sys-
tem of mediation. It also entails some difficulties, which are not always
convincingly dealt with by Adorno, for example, with regard to the
modalities of objective mediation in concepts.
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I have argued that these two moments, theory and the problem of the
object, should be taken as the guiding questions of Adorno’s philosophi-
cal inquiry surrounding the problem of mediation. These questions are
brought together in the idea of conceptual constellations: while not dis-
missing the demands for rational verifiability, mediation structures itself
as the experience of the unexpected, i.e. as the experience of what can-
not be called forth by a merely subjective use of concepts, and thus
attests to the underlying presence of the object. In this we can see that,
while availing of a more solid rational method, such as Hegel’s determi-
nate negation, mediation also remains true to the revolutionary side of
Benjamin’s method, to the idea of bringing forth the new.
In a word, Adorno’s reappraisal of an old Hegelian concept does not
amount to a mere settling for the Hegelian model, nor does its ‘unfaith-
fulness’ to the original formulation, and some of the problems and
inconsistencies he runs into, debilitate the use of such a concept, but in
fact, in its openness to the new, it offers a more progressive and for-
ward-looking version of mediation. Forward-looking mediation does not
involve the same notion of progress that is at work in Hegel and Marx,
based upon an idea of rational totality. It rather means, with Benjamin
(but not only with Benjamin) that mediation possesses the revolutionary
power to present new interpretations and configurations. Ultimately, it is
only thanks to the unexpected that philosophy retains its interpretative
power, which is not just a retrospective look, but the ‘unlocking’ of a
reality which is no longer held captive by the reification of subjective
experience.

Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium

Notes
1 Deborah Cook, ‘Adorno’s Critical Materialism’, Philosophy and Social Criti-
cism, 32(6) (2006), pp. 719–37.

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2 An example of such a reading is offered by Michael Rosen in Hegel’s

Dialectic and its Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982),
pp. 153–78. The author writes: ‘Mediation answers Adorno’s need to give
conceptual expression to the relationship between transcendental and empiri-
cal phenomena: meaning processes and their material substrata’ (p. 175).
However, according to Rosen, Adorno is not justified in his appropriation of
the notion of mediation from Hegel, in that such a notion can legitimately
work only in the context of Hegelian philosophy (pp. 176–7). That is to say,
mediation is to be understood, in its connection with immediacy, as a part of
the structure of the Idea, where the oppositions of the understanding no
longer hold valid. More specifically, according to Rosen, three crucial require-
ments must be met: (i) that the true is the whole, (ii) that determinate nega-
tion has a positive result, and (iii) that the content of thought develops
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independently (pp. 89–90). It is evident that Adorno does not hold the same
requirements as valid; thus, his concept of mediation fails to conceptually
express the connection between subjectively generated concepts and the
object. Another example of a reading which takes Adorno’s understanding of
mediation in a purely Hegelian sense is that of Peter Osborne in The Politics
of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (London: Verso, 1995). In defending
Benjamin’s notion of mediation from Adorno’s criticisms, Osborne denounces
its narrow Hegelian understanding, writing: ‘It is almost a cliché of Benjamin
criticism to say, following Adorno, that Benjamin’s dialectical images lack
mediation. But Adorno is surely right insofar as what he means is that they
lack the kind of immanent conceptual mediation expounded by Hegel as the
structure of dialectical logic. He is wrong, however, to suggest that they lack
mediation altogether; wrong to reduce the concept of mediation to a narrowly
Hegelian form’ (p. 151).
3 See Rosen, Hegel’s Dialectic and its Criticism, pp. 153–78.
4 See Brian O’Connor, ‘The Concept of Mediation in Hegel and Adorno’, Bul-
letin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain, 39/40 (1999), pp. 84–96; Brian
O’Connor, ‘Adorno and the Problem of Givenness’, Revue Internationale De
Philosophie, 63(227) (2004), pp. 85–99; Nicholas Joll, ‘Adorno’s Negative
Dialectic: Theme, Point, and Methodological Status’, International Journal of
Philosophical Studies, 17(2), 2009, pp. 235–53. Joll provides the reader with a
very clear and insightful characterization of the features of mediation in
Adorno. He does not interrogate the legitimacy of the use of such a concept
(whether it can be imported from the Hegelian context into a philosophical
project which does not share the same presuppositions) but rather places the
accent on its failure, the so-called mismediation, in which the moment of non-
identity emerges.
5 In a letter from September 1936 Adorno states: ‘I have also undertaken a
renewed and fruitful study of Hegel.’ Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin,
The Complete Correspondence 1928–1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1994), p. 147.
6 See Rolf Tiedemeann, ‘Concept, Image, Name’, in T. Huhn and L. Zuidervaart
(eds) The Semblance of Subjectivity (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1997), p.
133.
7 Theodor W. Adorno, Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen, Gesam-
melte Schriften, Band 2 (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1962), p. 80/Kier-
kegaard. Construction of the Aesthetic, trans. and ed. R. Hullot-Kentor
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 54.

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8 Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophische Frühschriften, Gesammelte Schriften,

Band 1 (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1973), p. 336/‘The Actuality of Phi-
losophy’, Telos, 31 (1977), p. 126. Here, however, the ‘dialectical images’ are
referred to as ‘historical images’: Ibid., p. 338/p.128.
9 Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectic (New York: Free Press,
1977), p. 97.
10 Ibid., p. 96.
11 As late as 1964, in his Portrait of Walter Beniamin, Adorno expresses simi-
lar reservations with regard to the possibilities of Benjamin’s method: ‘His
philosophy of fragmentation remained itself fragmentary, the victim,
perhaps, of a method, the feasibility of which, in the medium of thought,
must remain an open question.’ If, on the one hand, this statement
expresses the regret at the project’s unfortunate lack of completion, on the
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other hand, it makes clear that philosophical thinking requires more than
images, for instance theory and mediation: Theodor W. Adorno, Kulturkri-
tik und Gesellschaft I/II, Gesammelte Schriften, Band 10 (Frankfurt/M:
Suhrkamp Verlag, 1977), p. 250/Prisms, trans. S. and S. Weber (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1981), p. 239.
12 According to Stefan Müller-Doohm’s biography of Adorno, at the Institute
for Social Research Adorno was in charge of negotiating Benjamin’s contri-
butions to the Zeitschrift, which were considered especially problematic by
Horkheimer. See Stefan Müller-Doohm, Adorno – A Biography (Cambridge,
UK: Polity Press, 2005), p. 257.
13 Adorno writes: ‘Motives are assembled but they are not elaborated. In your
covering letter to Max you presented this as your express intention, and I am
well aware of the ascetic discipline you have imposed on yourself by omitting
everywhere the conclusive theoretical answers to questions involved, and
indeed only reveal these questions to the already initiated. But I wonder
whether such asceticism can be sustained in the face of such a subject and in
a context which makes such powerful inner demands … Panorama and
“traces”, the flâneur and the arcades, modernity and the ever-same, all this
without theoretical interpretation – can such material as this patiently await
interpretation without being consumed in its own aura?’ Theodor W. Adorno,
Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence 1928–1940 (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 281.
14 Ibid., p. 282.
15 Ibid., p. 283.
16 Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time, p. 151.
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid.
20 Nicholas Joll interprets mediation as addressing the problem of the relation
between universals and particulars (Joll, ‘Adorno’s Negative Dialectic’, p.
234). Such an interpretative line of inquiry offers a different entry point into
what I hereby outline as the problem of the mediation between subject and
object, emphasising the meaning-constitutive or classifying function of the
subjective pole, which apprehends the object in the same way that a universal
apprehends a particular: Ibid., p. 236.
21 We could agree here with Brian O’Connor’s analysis, which suggests that, for
Adorno, mediation purports to offer ‘a solution to every problem of modern
philosophy.’ See Brian O’Connor, ‘The Concept of Mediation in Hegel and
Adorno’, p. 91.

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22 G. W. F. Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic, trans. T. F. Geraets, W. A. Such-

ting and H. S. Harris (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett, 1991), pp. 35–6.
23 Ibid., p. 122.
24 To put it in Hegel’s own words: ‘ß) the dialectical moment is the self-subla-
tion of theses finite determinations on their own part and their passing into
their opposites’ (Ibid., p. 128).
25 Theodor W. Adorno, Drei Studien zu Hegel, Gesammelte Schriften, Band
5 (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970), p. 259/Hegel: Three Studies, trans.
S. Weber-Nicholson (Cambridge, MA, & London, England: The MIT
Press), p. 7.
26 Ibid., p. 257/p. 7.
27 Adorno, Negative Dialektik, Gesammelte Schriften, Band 6 (Frankfurt/M:
Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970), p. 188/Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New
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York & London: Continuum, 2007), p. 183.

28 Theodor W. Adorno, Drei Studien zu Hegel, p. 252/Hegel: Three Studies,
trans. Weber Nicholson, p. 3.
29 Ibid., p. 255/p. 5.
30 Ibid., pp. 273–4/p. 27.
31 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik, p. 15/Negative Dialectics, trans.
Ashton, p. 3.
32 Ibid. p. 23/p. 11.
33 Ibid.
34 Ibid.
35 Ibid., p. 173/p. 172. Translation modified.
36 Ibid. Translation modified.
37 Ibid., pp. 184–5/p. 183.
38 Ibid., p. 185/p. 184.
39 Ibid., p. 172/p. 170.
40 As I have already pointed out in the introduction, Michael Rosen’s work has
the great merit of acknowledging the methodological difficulties that Ador-
no’s concept of mediation encounters when it abandons the conceptual
framework of Hegelian philosophy. Rosen writes: ‘Mediation … has its place
with immediacy as part of the unintuitable, apparently paradoxical ontologi-
cal structure of the Idea, developed and justified in the Logic. Adorno,
however, in taking the concept over as part of philosophical ordinary lan-
guage, removes it from the context in which the experience of Thought might
give its only rigorous justification’ (Rosen, Hegel’s Dialectic and its Criticism,
pp. 176–7).
41 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik, p. 172/Negative Dialectics, trans.
Ashton, p. 171. Translation modified.
42 Nicholas Joll, for instance, gives a provisional definition of objective media-
tion as consisting ‘simply in subjective mediation having some object’ (Joll,
‘Adorno’s Negative Dialectic’, p. 236). That said, the author does draw
important attention to the normative aspect of objective mediation, i.e. to the
fact that a particular can also fail to fulfil its concept (and not only to the fact
that the concept can fail to do justice to the particular): Ibid., p. 236. This
happens when the notion of ‘rational identity’ is at stake, i.e. the identity
between an ‘emphatic’ concept and a particular which does not yet fulfil the
qualities that such a concept predicates: Ibid., p. 243. An example of this
would be the particular instantiations of freedom failing to fulfil the concept
of real freedom (Ibid.).

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43 The problematic nature of ‘objective mediation’ is especially addressed by

Brian O’Connor, in ‘The Concept of Mediation in Hegel and Adorno’.
44 Deborah Cook, ‘Adorno’s Critical Materialism’, p. 721.
45 Ibid.
46 In the Dialectic of Enlightenment Adorno and Horkheimer explain that the
primitive experience does not consist in the opposition between material and
spiritual but between the ‘intricacy of the natural’ and the individual. The
first act of naming comes out of the gasp of surprise in front of the unusual.
The expression of human fear soon becomes its explanation, crystallizing into
the word and concept for the sake of controlling the unknown. Theodor W.
Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklärung, Gesammelte
Schriften, Band 3 (Frankfurt a/M: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1981), p. 31/Dialectic of
Enlightenment (London & New York: Verso, 1997), p. 15.
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47 Rosen, Hegel’s Dialectic and its Criticism, pp. 175–6.

48 O’Connor, ‘The Concept of Mediation in Hegel and Adorno’.
49 Ibid., p. 93.
50 Theodor W. Adorno, Ästetische Theorie, Gesammelte Schriften, Band 7
(Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970), p. 15/Aesthetic Theory, trans. R.
Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 5.
51 Ibid. However, despite the obscurity of the form-content correspondence, the
analogy of the concepts-object mediation with the mediation at stake in the
artwork also enables us to shed some light on the operations of conceptual
mediation, as we will see in the case of constellations.
52 Joll, ‘Adorno’s Negative Dialectic’, pp. 244–5.
53 Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectic, pp. 101–2.
54 Adorno, Negative Dialektik, p. 44/Negative Dialectics, trans. Ashton, p. 33.
55 Ibid., p. 27/p. 15.
56 Ibid., p. 36/p. 25.
57 Ibid.
58 Ibid., p. 63/p. 53.
59 In this respect, Adorno writes: ‘Hegel taught that the meanings of concepts
are both to be pinned down, more scientifico, so that they can remain con-
cepts, and also to be “set in motion,” altered according to the dictates of the
object, in order not to distort it’ (Adorno, Drei Studien zu Hegel, pp. 309–10/
Hegel: Three Studies, trans. Weber Nicholson, p. 70).
60 Theodor W. Adorno, Noten zur Literatur, Gesammelte Schriften, Band 11
(Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974), pp. 21–2/Notes to Literature, vol. 1,
ed. R. Tiedeman, trans. S. Weber Nicholson (Columbia University Press:
New York, 1991), p. 13.
61 Theodor W. Adorno, Ästetische Theorie, p. 16/Aesthetic Theory, trans. Hul-
lot-Kentor, p. 6.
62 Ibid., p. 252/p. 168.
63 In this respect, Adorno writes: ‘But the Essay does not develop its ideas in
accordance with discursive logic. It neither makes deductions from a principle
nor draws conclusions from coherent individual observations. It coordinates
elements instead of subordinating them, and only the essence of its content,
and not the manner in which it is presented, is commensurable with logical
criteria’ (Adorno, Noten zur Literatur, p. 32/Notes to Literature, vol. 1, ed.
Tiedeman, trans. Weber Nicholson, p. 22).
64 Adorno here writes: ‘Just as riddle solving is constituted, in that the singular
and dispersed elements of the question are brought into various grouping
long enough for them to close together in a figure out of which the solution

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springs forth, while the question disappears – so philosophy has to bring its
elements, which it receives from the sciences, into changing constellations …
into changing trial-combinations, until they fall into a figure which can be
read as an answer, while at the same time the question disappears’ (Adorno,
Philosophische Frühschriften, p. 335/‘The Actuality of Philosophy’, p. 127).
65 Adorno, Negative Dialektik, p. 166/Negative Dialectics, trans. Ashton, p. 163.
66 Adorno, Noten zur Literatur, p. 22/Notes to Literature, vol. 1, ed. Tiedeman,
trans. Weber Nicholson, p. 13.
67 Ibid., p. 31/p. 21.
68 My interpretation here differs from Nicholas Joll’s reading, according to
which negative dialectic, by identifying the absence of reconciliation, might
foster the possibility of a better situation, or might even attempt ‘to deter-
mine the reconciliation … that such non-identity intimates’ (Joll, ‘Adorno’s
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Negative Dialectic’, pp. 244–5.

69 In this respect, it would be interesting to compare the workings of conceptu-
ality in constellations, as governed by an immanent internal logic that binds
concepts together, and the workings of the ‘law of form’ in the artwork, as it
is characterized in the Aesthetic Theory. In both cases, they are organised
according to internal laws, i.e. the binding nexus of concepts or the ‘inner
consistency’ of a work of art, yet, despite such autonomy, their truth ulti-
mately refers back to objectivity. What is relevant here is the fact that the
primacy of the object necessarily passes through the subject.

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