Adorno’s Dilemma: On Difficult Writing and Sophistication in Anthropology Today1

Writing in 1966, in an essay entitled “Difficulties,” Theodor Adorno saw modern music as, “faced with an alternative,” “that between the fetishism of the material and the process, on the one hand, and unfettered chance [in the form of aleatory music] on the other” (2002:660). In other words, after the collapse of tonality in the early twentieth century, composers could choose either to ignore this fact and compose music that could make no claims to being autonomous art, or face complete isolation from musical expressivity. This paper uses Adorno’s dilemma as a starting point and central organizing device for exploring the political, ethical, and aesthetic dimensions of debates on “difficult writing” in anthropology. More specifically, for heuristic purposes, it draws a connection between the “crisis of musical meaning” in the early to mid-twentieth century, and the so-called “crisis of representation” in anthropology in the 1980s and 1990s in order to think of the problem of difficulty as a particular response to objective historical conditions. In particular, I argue that the shift to textuality in anthropology created a bifurcation between the epistemological and political dimensions of representation, and introduced sophistication as the key diacritic of critical engagement and inquiry. Because the notion of sophistication implies both technical refinement and deception, I show how criticisms of difficulty in writing imply already a specific notion of failed or inauthentic public address. In the last section of this paper, I consider how anthropology might meet the challenge of difficult writing by creating new conditions for consumption, circulation, and publicity that maintains the first condition of sophistication (technical refinement) while jettisoning the second (deception).