ment, to escape the identifying, totalitarian aspect of thought. This is also why
Adorno registers a protest against Wittgenstein’s celebrated statement that one
should be silent about that which one cannot speak: “Wittgenstein’s formulation
closes its own horizon against expressing mediately, in a complex manner, and in
constellations, what cannot be expressed clearly and immediately.”^52 It is Adorno’s
view, moreover, that there is a close kinship between the principle behind identity
thinking and the exchange principle that in the guise of the commodity structure
dominates the social system: both principles in their own way set up a form of equiv-
alence and exchange, thus suppressing the heterogeneity and particularity of indi-
vidual phenomena that are nonidentical and nonexchangeable:
The exchange principle, the reduction of human labor to the abstract
universal concept of average working hours, is fundamentally akin to
the principle of identification. Exchange is the social model of the prin-
ciple of identification, and without the latter there would be no ex-
change; it is through exchange that nonidentical individuals and
transactions become commensurable and identical. The spread of the
principle of identification imposes on the whole world an obligation to
become identical, to become total.^53For Adorno, criticism of identical thought ipso facto also implies a criticism of the ex-
change principle and vice versa.
Adorno’s concept of language has a profound impact on the style in which his
essays are written. He declares his preference for the essay as form.^54 The essay is
concerned with analyzing something that is concrete and particular; the fact that it is
fragmentary and incomplete makes it the ideal instrument for “reading” the frag-
mented reality. But even Adorno’s longer texts still preserve an essay-like character:
the text consists of blocks of twenty or thirty pages without any interim headings or
separate sections. There is no concession to make his readers’ task easier by pro-
viding a clear, didactic division into chapters and paragraphs.^55
This antisystematic working method is the correlative of the call to revolt
against the identity principle, which asks for a clear and systematic form. The result
is that for a reader who comes to them unprepared, Adorno’s texts are often very re-
calcitrant. They do not conform to the requirements of a clearly constructed dis-
course that develops a sequence of arguments starting with a clearly stated point of
departure and ending with a logical conclusion. His texts are “composed” rather than
logically constructed, so that contradictions and ambivalences must be viewed as ba-
sic ingredients of their composition.
4
Architecture as Critique of Modernity