364 Part IV: Thinking the Unconditional
rationality as self-reflection is the corrective to ends–means rationality.
This is what Adorno had in mind when he proposed that ‘the devasta-
tion wrought by progress can be made good again, if at all, only by
its own forces.’^205 For this reason he warned against Ludditism. On the
one hand, he pointed out that the critique of progress is not to be
confused with the critique of technology. On the other, not every tech-
nical innovation can claim to be advanced or progressive. He illustrated
this with reference to the mastery of materials in art. While ‘a quartet
by Mozart is not simply better made than a symphony of the Mannheim
school... it also ranks higher in an emphatic sense’, it is questionable
‘whether thanks to the development of perspective the painting of
the High Renaissance truly surpassed so-called primitive painting.’^206
And in philosophy the idea of constant improvement is dubious in the
extreme: ‘To assume there has been progress from Hegel to the logical
positivists... is no more than a joke.’^207
Adorno formulated his own idea of intellectual progress seemingly
by the way, but emphatically. ‘Good is what wrenches itself free, finds
a language, opens its eyes. As it struggles to free itself, it is interwoven
in history which, without being organized unequivocally so as to lead
to reconciliation, in the course of its movement allows the possibility of
redemption to appear in a flash.’^208 What did Adorno wish to say with
this cryptic statement about ‘what finds a language’ and ‘what wrenches
itself free’? Two ideas became increasingly important for his thinking
at around this time. On the one hand, he wanted as a social theorist
to emphasize the basic social and cultural conditions of progress. This
consists in the ability of individuals to recognize one another mutually
in their difference and to have the capacity to develop: the degree of
progress attained can be discerned not from the unity and coherence of
society or from the extent of social integration, but from the possibility
of experienced difference and human individuation. On the other hand,
Adorno wished to be as specific as possible and to name the sphere in
which individuation could take place and flourish: the sphere of lan-
guage. Language for him was not just a means of communication and as
such a language deformed by commerce.^209 Rather, language had an
outstanding significance because Adorno assigned it a dual characteris-
tic: through language human subjects become part of the universal, and
at the same time they can assure themselves of their own individuality;
language is ‘the collective force that produces spiritual individualization
in the first place.’^210
If Adorno was able to develop this emphatic concept of language as
opposed to communication, he did so by appealing to a concept that he
had tried to develop in his discussions of Kafka, Beckett and Hölderlin.
He envisaged a language that was not restricted to its instrumental
function but that would enable the particular, the non-identical, to ex-
press itself. In the book he planned on aesthetics he intended to explain
how it would be possible to achieve with art something that was denied