Martin Hielscher - Adorno and Aesthetic Theory
Martin Hielscher. "Adorno and Aesthetic Theory." in: European Graduate School Lecture. 2009. (English).
The liberation from Fascizm an Stalinism has not, in their understanding, really led to a more free or safer world. There is a totalitarian quality in the way life is organised and lived in the modern, in the administrative, industrial societies. With their tendency to shape and control the world through the ever the same products, formats, lifestyles, terms, and phrases, and activities, which create a kind of technological vail and ideological language web which completely cover up a true world aproach. The standardised forms of experience, selling standart entertainment products, the loss of cultural differences of languages, of lifeforms and traditions, can simply be observed and analysed, described and intepreted. Loss of the life qualities, civilisatory breakdown, industrially organised and performed mass killings of millions of humans in a century in which the advanced development of technology and the means of production would have allowed for global peace and supply for the distribution of wealth and the abolishment of hunger, starvation, depravation on a global scale. Exactly that was one of the expectations of the euphoria for technological and administrative progress and global economy in th IXth century. But in the heart of one of the technologically advanced countries in the world a barbaric ideology of total racist identification created a mythical and apocalyptic system of selection and extinction, of total superiority and domination that led to an exes of destruction and anniliation. On the other hand, neither the potential for industrial racist killings and genocides have actually disappeared or decreased, nor has mankind, nor have the global powers really given up their means for total anniliation. Their arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. Eventually the path of self destruction has never been left, that the very industrial revolution that gave mankind tremendous powers to create global wealth has dispatched. There is something obsessive in the way we continue to work for our own self destruction, if you think about of the ruthless exportation of the worlds resources. And the fact that we know this, that we can talk about it, that we can address it, on one hand, seems to prove that there is difference, criticism, enlightenment, possible action, awarness etc. But also, maybe, that on the other hand, all of this seems to have no effect at all. There seems to be a deep irrationality in what people do, a hidden agenda in what goverments, institutions, corporations claim to strive for. Strikingly, this is all pretty obvious, openly done, anounced and discussed. The german nazis just the same, openly anounced their plans for the extinction of the european jews which they then put methodically to practice. Uncanny aspect of this irrationality becomes evident. But what is so disturbing is that this kind of cultural criticism has, in a certain form, become part of the public discourse itself and is, thus, just as ideological as the claim the we actually live in a free, liberated world. It assumes by its very language, by the very gesture of knowledge and understanding of analytical power and detachment, that the agent of this kind of criticism is beyond the sphere of errors and blindness, that his specific insights and able him to pose himself outside of the system and its uniformity, this kind of discourse participates in the power structures it claims to attack by its very language, patterns and invulnerability.
Adorno theory of aesthetics implies that there is a primacy of experience, of an opaque, somatic, blind quality, that exists before the philosophical thought, before discoresive language, that that sets everything in motion, something that is innovated in the sudden shader, in love, in a momentary appreciation of natural beauty, in bliss, and in the epyphanies of art, and lost at the same time when we try to identify it, which infracts any conceptual aproach and at the same time calls for it. That it suspends concepts, if one remains true to it in the sense that each theory can be falsified by what it points at.
Adorno's philosophy is vulnerable. It speaks of the wounds societies inflicts upon the subjects, it speaks of the wounds exploited their systems inflict upon nature, it speaks of the wounds subjects inflict upon each other, it speaks of the wounds humans inflict upon their own bodies and minds and the process of civilization to become modern, functional, enlighten beings in control of themselfs, it speaks of the wounds any kind of philosophical system inflicts upon its own topics and objects by the very language and terminology, the force of identifying matter, things, notions, perceptions, and the certain concepts, and it speaks of the impossibility to take the easy way out.
The western form of conceptual systems that have shaped the global world pattern, we call technological world, and that has become utterly and unquestionably self evident. As much as there is no solution ouside of the technological process, but within it there is no escape outside of the present form of world construction, but only within the dense web of metaphysics, through what critical theory called second reflection. Only the analytic reflection of the concepts that sets forth the kind of world view our societies present is strong enough to question this world view, in the realm of thinking only conceptual discourse can question the violence of conceptual discourse. Any other language here becomes ideological in the sense that it either claimed to be beyond the traces of metaphysics, or to be able to open a different, immediate access to the "other", the unmediated experience of what would be utterly different from what it is given and suffocates us.
Adorno's aesthetics theory is aethetic, not only in regard to what it talks about and deals with - natural and art beauty, and the form, the truth content of the artwork -, but also in its own form.
Adorno's quote from 1944 from one of his unpublished notebooks:
"I don't know what will remain of what i have written, and I don't have any control of this, but there is one thing I feel I'm entitled to, that I understand the language of music just as the heroes in the fairy-tales understand the language of the birds."
The anti-systematic impulse and everything Adorno reflects upon links any seemingly marginal essay, or comment to what one would call his major philosophical works, like Negative Dialectics and The Aesthetic Theory. Everything on sentence Adorno put down in the dialectical form of his style, expresses his philosophical gesture to give with a description of the particulars, the concrete detail and notion of its meaning for the whole, and its place within the whole, and at the same time eplain, by the whole, may also damage the particular, prevent it from being itself. His dialectical style speaks of the history of this relation, of its necessity and of the failure of reconciliation, and the process of history. This stylistic figure of Adorno also creates the form, the configuration of his great, composed philosophical works, the relation of the parts, and chapters, and the central idea they express.
Adorno quote:
"The book must, so to speak, be written and equally weighted paratactical parts, that are arranged around the midpoint, that they express through their constellation. This points at what is aethetic in the form of aesthetic theory."
Adorno's atheism, the anti-systematic philosophical impulse, the paratactical style even of his major works stand for the idea of the "non identical". What all his thinking aims at, and what is lost in conventional, metaphysical, identifying discourse can be grasped only in an aproach like this: in an atheistic fragmented text, through the destruction of the cage of the philosophical tradition and everyday ideology as well. The Non Identical is what it is all about, and what cannot be said at the same time. It is the opaque, hermetic, dark center around which constellation of Adorno concepts circles, and which only three forms of experience can come close to, while the non identical is the very essence of these forms of experience. Philosophical contemplation, which remains traped in conceptual language, and the experience of the natural beauty, and that of art beauty which remain hermetic if they are not interpreted through philosophy and conceptual language.
Adorno writes that the truth of psychoanalasys found in its exaggerations and that accounts for him just as well.
There is a famous and often quoted line from his philosophy, saying, that there is no true life possible in a false world. After the passionate reception of critical theory from the end of the sixties, until the mid eighties, one seem to be through with this sentence, but it is still true. The critical concept of cultural industry and the universality of blindness, through the ideology of consumerism may be even more revelant today, because the rise and domination of global capitalism has rendered even more power and meaning to the entertainment industry, because nothing else seems to be left after the loss of any uthopian horizon, atleast from the time being. Any more relaxed, happy, affirmative, "cool" theory, of a mild, progressive, cultural subversion appears weak and conformist in the face of global political and economical power structures, and their effect upon the daily life in our societies.
The primacy of the object in Adorno's thinking, the materialistic, organic, somatic, corporeal aspect of it, one one hand, is related to the meaning of the natural beauty in his aesthetic theory where the experience of natural beauty is held in the highest esteem.
There is no understanding of art beauty in Adorno, without understanding of natural beauty, which, again, is only possible through reflection, of how much any direct, naive experience of natures blocked and ideological, how mediated and historical any kind of experience of natural beauty will be.
Quote:
"Just how bound up natural beauty is with art beauty is confirmed by the experience of the former. For it, nature, is exclusively appearance. Never the stuff of labour and of the reproduction of life, let alone, the substratum of sience. Like the experience of art, the aesthetic experience of nature is that of images. Nature, as appearing beauty, is not percieved as an object of action, the slowing off of the aims of self preservation, which is emphatic in art, is caried out to the same degree in aesthetic experience of nature. To this extent, the difference between the two forms of beauty is hardly evident. Mediation is no less to be inferred from the relation of art to nature, than from the inverse; art is not nature, a belief that idealism hoped to inculcate, but art does want to keep natures promise. It is capable of this only by breaking that promise by taking it back in to itself. Art is inspired by the negativity, specifically by the deficiency of natural beauty, in the sense that so long as nature is defined only through its antithesis to society, it is not yet what it appears to be. What nature strifes for in vain, artworks fulfil; they open their eyes. Once it no longer serves as an object of action, appearing nature itself imparts expression, whether that of melancholy, peace, or something else. Art stands in for nature, through its abolition in effigy. All naturalistic art is only deceptively close to nature, because analogous to industry, it relegates nature to raw material."
"He alone would understand music who hears it with all the alienist of the unmusical, familiarity with the language of birds."
What Adorno refers to is not the elitist, privileged access of someone who knows the secret code, but, on the contrary, someone who is kept in touch with primary experience and perception, the impressions and passions of childhood, which are also perceptions and notions of both individual and collective archaic stages. There is a constant dialectics of the archaic and the contemprorary of the mythic stage in Adorno's works. The uthopia of sexual bliss and of the archaic of metaphysics are closely linked to the sphere of the archaic, the body, the animal.
There is a passage in aesthetic theory about this:
"In its clownishness art condolingly recollects prehistory, and the primordial world of animals. The collusion of children with clowns is a collusion with art which adults drive out of them, just as they drive out their collusion with animals. Human beings has not succeeded in so thoroughly repressing their likeness to animals that they are unable in a instant to recapture it and be flooded with joy. The language of little children and animals seems to be the same. But again, listening to a bird song which would be an essential experience of natural beauty, is, at the same time, deeply ambiguous which tells something about the necessity of art beauty as a corrective measure for the deficiency of natural beauty in Adorno's philosophy and for the need for the mediation, respectively, the rejection of immediacy."
"The enemiasis of freedom and natural beauty deceives, because it seeks freedom in the old and freedom. Natural beauty is myth transposed to the imagination and, thus, perhaps requited. The some of birds is found to be beautiful by everyone. No feeling person in whom something of the european traditions survives, fails to be moved by the sound of a robin after a rainshower. Yet something frightening lurks in the sound of birds precisely because it is not a song, but obeys the spell in which it is enmeshed. The fight appears as well in the threat of migratory flocks which bespeak ancient divinations, forever presaging misfortune."
"With regard to its content, the ambiguity of natural beauty has its origin in mythical ambiguity. This is why genius, once it has become aware of itself is no longer satisfied with natural beauty. As its prose character intensifies, art extricates itself completely from myth and, thus, from the spell of nature, which nevertheless continues and the subjective domination of nature. Only what had escaped nature as faith, what helped nature to its restitution. The more that art is throughly organised as an object by the subject, and divested of the subject's intentions, the more articulately does it speak according to the model of a non-conceptual, non-rigidifies, significitive language. This would be perhaps the same language that it is inscribed in what the sentimental age gave the beautiful name, the book of nature."
He who can understand the language of the birds will be able to read the book of nature, that only through the contemplation of art, while advanced art, the kind of art aesthetic theory tries to understand, art itself has become incomprehensible. So in the relation of the artwork it deals with the main question of aesthetic theory is:
Why has art become difficult?
The task of aesthetics is not to comprehend artworks as hermeneutical objects. In the contemprorary situation it is the incomprehensibility that needs to be comprehended. It needs interpretaion, calls for a philosophical response. This interpretation often speaks of suffering of the false life, of the how the administrative world people are constantly betrayed by what is sold to them as product, as entertainment, as language, as easily accessible cultural event or object.
A critical response to the universal web of blindness is possible because some of us can see the world like someone can understand the language of the birds, who can see the constellation of success even in disfigurement.
Adorno's philosopy can be understood, the heart of its experience, even if the construction, the dialectical logic, the specific concepts, his reading of the philosophical tradition are, sometimes, hard to follow, because the heart of its experience, what it is all about, is collective, material, so to say, pre-individual, and, in the sense, physical, and still needs all the mediation and interpretaion to become itself. The evidence and durability of both his smaller essays, but also the great illustrative passages of Aesthetic Theory and Negative Dialecticts have to do with the close contact to experience, with the preciseness in which Adorno's writing witnesses those life world motives in which happiness and suffering, uthopia and failure are solubily interwoven and speak of the state of domination of nature, we inflict upon both the outside world and ourselfs. No true work of art, as he says, is without longing. Like in those crystalline music pieces with their strong tensions, this process can be detected in Adorno's language, in his sentences, that attemp to destroy the armor around our forgotten experiences and strive for this slight displacement in order to say what it was all about and what have we known all the time. Only slightly displaced.
How we gain experience of the other without betraying it? It must be, to any philosophy, that takes the standardization of language, lifestyles, and lifeworlds, cultural and entertainment industry, with the explotation of all natural resources, seriously! The question is, how do we have any experience at all that is not already pure ideology?
The totality of "friendly" domination in our industrially and media controlled societiess is so thorough, that we need a strong antidote to catch breath at all. The process of art becoming autonomous and more and more inaccessible, reflects the extent to which such a radical response has become necessary. The artwork is both, rationality, in the sense of form, construction, structure, which is self, again, historical and needs to be reflected in order not to fall back to the naiveté, and the artwork is opaque, blind, immediate, matter, limited, liaise, as Adorno calls it, content, in a sense that it reacts to an impulse, the primacy of an object before construction, but it will show itself trough construction, the relationship between mimesis, content, and construction, form, is again dialectical and historical, and speaks of subject, object relations in social and historical reality, while also transcending them. The idea that tells us of the artwork is to establish precarious resolution and reconciliation that can stand for what, in reality, does not exist yet. Adorno's understanding of creative process is not that the subject expresses itself in art, but the subject is able itself to throw away for the sake of the logic, of the material itself and, thus, can experience a liberation from itself - a slight "displacement".
The idea of self expression would leave the subject in the prison of a antipolecentric, narcissistic mirror stadium in which an encounter with the other is just not possible. But only a strong, educated subject, being aware of itself, can give itself up to the demands of the material and the tendencies of the artwork itself. This would be a subject-object relationship where the subject is not dominating anymore, but the iner-ratio of the object which, again, needs the subject to be formed. Since our subjectivity is a product and an agent of the present situation and its ideology, the bliss of the experience of art, either by producing art, or by encountering it demands, breaking up the conventional subject and the reefied relations of the subject with the inner and outer world. One aspect that is always discussed in the context of Adorno's aesthetic theory is the problem of accessibility and elitism. Both categories basically aim at the fatc that this theory rejects anything light, popular, commercial, easily understandable, applicable in art, that it highlights difficult, complicated, hermetic, rather inaccessible, problematic, supposedly negative art. From the point of view of the subject and the possibility of experience anything that something leaves us as we are, and affirms how we see the world and ourselfs, betrays what art can be. It is for the sake of what subjects could be, what experience that deserves the name could be like, it is for the sake of being able to take the chance of getting rid of oneself, it is for the sake of encountering the other in form of the artwork that is freed from any instrumental views and may it be self expression.
With human means, art wants to realize the language of what is not human. The pure expression of artworks freed from everything like interference, even from everything, so called, natural, converges with nature, just as in vibrance most authentic works, the pure tone to which they are reduced by the strange of the subjective sensibility, reverses dialectically into a natural sound. That of an eloquent nature. Certainly its language, not the portrayal of a part of nature. The total subjective elaboration of art, as a non conceptual language is the only figure at the contemporary stage of rationality in which something, like the language of divine creation is reflected, qualified by the paradox that what is blocked.
Instead of being elitist, aesthetic theory remains true to what a strong sensible subjectivity could be like, and does not want to affirm the damaged selfs, that the people in the administrative world necessarily, and sadly, become. The more enigmatic and difficult artworks are, then the more they may hold and stalk for future readings and interpretations.
In recent aesthetic debates, especially in the fine arts, the concept of éthique has become revelant which approximates scrolled writing. Like a search light, this category of modern art illumines the art of the past. All artworks are writing, not that those just that are obviously such. They are hieroglypphs for which the code has been lost. A lost that plays to their content. Artworks are language only as writing. If no artwork are never a judgement, each artwork contains elements of derived from judgement, and bears an aspect of being correct and incorrect, true and false. Yet, the silent and determinate answers of artwork does not reveal itself to interpretation with the single stroke as a new immediacy, but only by way of all mediations; those of the works discipline as well, as those of thought and philosophy. The enigmaticalness outlives the interpretation that arrives at the answer.
Another eternal point of criticism is the question of action.
When Adorno died after hiking in the mountains which he had been asked not to do because of his weak heart, he had been heavily attacked by his own students, students he had strongly influenced and who became active in the student movement and student rebelion he sympathized with, because they claimed that all his theory elected a concrete recipe and call for action. But for critical theory the whole concept of action, which its Pavlov-like stimulation and reaction pattern, is part of the ideology of instrumentality and domination that has got us here in the first place. Action will simply reify the activists as they are and, thus, strive away what they are longing for, or aiming at. To encounter the other what demanded more of a suspension of conventional action.
Another aspect of this issue is the misunderstanding of thinking and contemplation, studying texts and interpreting them as something not active.
Actually to displace the striktures of conventional thinking by studying complicated philosophical texts, in itself, is already hard work and goes beyond the vicous instrumental circle of learning and then applying. Adorno's whole notion of happiness, besides, having a distinct relation to physical, erotic, corporeal experience which are never considered inferior, only because they are ephemeral, is not the idea of wild activity and self fulfilment, or self expression, but rather a peaceful letting go of things, a more humble, and observing, and floating among the things that will offer as much more, once we don't want to use them anymore for any purpose.
Adorno's philosophy including his Aesthetic Theory is often labed as being to negative. Negativity is indeed one of his terms. Simply a category that comes from dialectics, but also, in a certain way, characteristic of the temperament of his approach to present reality. But the degree to which he speaks of alienation and reunification of betrayal and domination, besides, being a simply a true description of political and social realities, and experiences people had to endure, not only in his lifetime, has to do with the inherent longing for liberation and reconciliaion for which there are models, and his personal and intellectual experience, one of them the crucial one being the experience of art.
In the descriptions and interpretations of art you can find not only in the aesthetic theory, you will discover a passion, a beauty of language, a sensitivity of thought that comes from a deep affection, a desire and inability for happiness.
But because for art uthopia the yet to exist is draped and black, it remains in all its mediations recollection, recollection of the possible in opposition to the actual that suppresses it, it is the imaginary reparation of the catastrophe of world history. It is freedom which under the spell of necessity did not, may not ever come to pass. Aesthetic experience is that of something that spirit may find neither in the world, nor in itself. It is possibility promised by its impossibility. Art is the everbroken promise of happiness. In order to step out of the suffocating realm of the given and to actually prepare oneself for the encounter with the other one must know that this other will not appear without a dislocation of the self. This can only be a momentary, transient experience that cannot be taken home as a consumerist ideology. It is about apparition, about suddenness, epiphanies, and there needs to be an object that can accept, and reflect the subject without fear where we can give up the structures of self control, and self preservation without being threatened. This is possible in art.
Adorno doesn't go along with a pure, pre-human nature, but rather a dialectical process which can either fail, and we would lose nature and, consequently, lose our own nature; because we are natural beings.
Why does it go wrong, although we all know it. Why we don't do anything? It is because this mere subjectivity, this mere agency of us that thinks, and speaks, and talks, is already part of this process itself: so, how do you get out?