ABSTRACT
The stifled cry inscribed on the memorial at Yad Vashem for the martyred six million Jews of the Nazi Behemoth does not serve the truth - to reveal, not simply to document. In out own administered society, there is a tendency to immolate truth to short and pithy programmatic statements. We must stand vigil against the seduction of adulterating the integrity of truth by vitiating its contents for the abstract form of the computer printout. This tendentiousness leads us to autocratism wherever concrete arguments are debased to the pseudo-concrete. The pseudo-concrete begets non-events where words in ‘texts’ receive ‘special treatment’ to reduce them to mere signs which remind one of the infamous sign over the entrance to Auschwitz: ‘Labor liberates’. Lest we all be Jews taken unaware, I refer the readers of this volume to Fredric Jameson’s caveat on the ‘form’ to which truth must aspire:
Nowhere is the hostility of the Anglo-American tradition toward the dialectical more apparent, however, than in the widespread notion that the style of these works is obscure and cumbersome, indigestible, abstract - or, to sum it all up in a convenient catchword, Germanic. It can be admitted that it does not conform to the canons of clear and fluid journalistic writing taught in the schools. But what if those ideals of clarity and simplicity have come to serve a very different ideological purpose, in our present context, from the one Descartes had in mind? What if, in this period of overproduction of printed matter and the proliferation of methods of quick reading, they were intended to speed the reader across a sentence in such a way that he can salute a readymade idea effortlessly in passing, without suspecting that real thought demands a descent into the materiality of language and a consent to time itself in the form of the sentence? In the language of Adorno - perhaps the finest dialectical intelligence, the finest stylist, of them all - density is itself a conduct of intransigence: the bristling mass of abstractions and cross-references is precisely intended to be read in situation, against the cheap facility of what surrounds it, as a warning to the reader of the price he has to pay for genuine thinking. The resolute abstractness of this style stands as an imperative to pass beyond the individual, empirical phenomenon to its meaning: abstract terminology clings to its object as a sign of the latter’s incompleteness in itself, of its need to be replaced in the context of the totality. I cannot imagine anyone with the slightest feeling for the dialectical nature of reality remaining insensible to the purely formal pleasure of such sentences, in which the shifting of the world’s gears and the unexpected contact between apparently unrelated and distant categories and objects find sudden and dramatic formulation. It is not, I would like to emphasize, a question of taste, any more than the validity of dialectical thinking is a question of opinion; but it is also true that there can be no reply to anyone choosing to discuss the matter in those terms.
(1971, pp. xiii–xiv)