Chronopolitics and race, rag-time and symphonic time in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

African American Review, Fall, 2006 by Bruce Barnhart

In his lectures on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, Adorno sketches out the imbrication of the first two of these ideologemes, referring to them collectively as the "residual theory of truth," a reductive method in which "everything that can be regarded as ephemeral, transitory, deceptive, and illusory is left to one side, so that what remains is supposed to be indispensable, absolutely secure, something I can hold permanently in my hands" (25). Permeating Adorno's description is the logic of sublimation: one arrives at "residual truth" through an intellectual distillation that transmutes experience into thought by boiling away the inessential and the impure. The truth that results from this process is then conceived of as having a timeless quality that gives it an ease of applicability "to all future eventualities." An implicit assumption is that all possible forms of experience have at their core the same immutable and unchanging truths and thus, that while the process of arriving at truth takes place in time, the truth that arises out of it is not affected or shaped by time. Time serves to separate truth from experience, and once this process is accomplished, time becomes the motion by which new objects and experiences are fitted into already existing categories of thought. In other words, time, in its avoidance of the genuinely new or unexpected, becomes timeless. Adherence to this conception of time fuels both the patron's desire to "blot out" time and the narrator's aspiration to fix the improvisatory and collective musical practices he encounters in the South within the framework of a narrowly conceived classical form.

The conception of time and concomitant disparagement of experience that motivate the actions of the narrator and his patron are central organizing principles of the form of early 20th-century modernity and exchange society. Adorno writes that "this strange idea of the truth as something lasting and enduring somehow always appears where urban exchange ideas have developed" (26). (13 For him, the residual and timeless theory of truth that is distilled out of experience is, "in economic terms," "the profit that remains after deducting all the costs of production" (25). The timeless truth of Kant and of exchange society is modeled on the commodities that capitalism produces, and the aversion to the new is a function of the inability of exchange-thinking to imagine the emergence of anything that has not been paid for by the "proper" form of intellectual or economic labor. (14)

Exchange society mobilizes all the resources at its disposal to insure that the future is profitable and that this profit is distributed in a way that does not threaten the intellectual, material, or social conditions of its existence. In the interest of minimizing risk and the possibility of profitless activity, manual labor is separated from intellectual labor, a conceptual operation based on the analogy that compares social processes to the chemical process of sublimation. The profit deriving from manual labor flows away from the bodies responsible for this labor to the "higher" realm of those who practice intellectual labor. This division of labor shadows the narrator's assumption that he will win fame for his arrangement of the themes he gleans from his southern sojourn. The sublimating flow of time that he allows to shape his actions leads to a hierarchy in which his individual work on the themes he extracts are "worth" more than the work involved in generating these themes. (15)