Context
All That You Know Not to Be Is Utterly Real, Part II
Curtis White
[In Part I of this essay (Context #7), I entered the Great Books debate by critiquing Harold Bloom’s How to Read and Why, and providing an alternative aesthetic through the work of Viktor Shklovsky.] Viktor
Shklovsky is not the only means available to us in order to reach these
conclusions. Very similar results regarding art’s social consequences
could be revealed through an examination of other theorists who have
tried to think through the relationship of tradition to innovation. We
could, for example, look at Walter Benjamin’s notion of "aura" ("The
Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,") or Frank Kermode’s
use of "peripeteia" (The Sense of an Ending), or Paul Ricoeur’s fascinating understanding of "three-fold mimesis" as developed in Time and Narrative, Vol. 1.
But by far the deepest and most thorough thinking-through of the
aesthetic and social consequences of innovation in art is Theodor
Adorno’s neglected Aesthetic Theory. Any attempt to
provide a summary of this great, difficult and diffuse work is a
betrayal of its own explicit determination not to unfold as a formal
argument. (Astute theorist of form that he was, Adorno was careful not
to create a work that could be found guilty by its own ideas.) Aesthetic Theory has its own "uncanny" knack for allowing its thinking to flow and
mutate. Nonetheless, Adorno does return again and again to the
fundamental premise that the human and social purposiveness of the
experimental or innovative in art is to create freedom in the context
of unfreedom. Art is a response to repression, which functions in the
larger culture as the administration of all aspects of life, and in the
art world through the imposition of the law of genre. Thus, art’s
essence is ineluctably social. As Adorno wrote, "Art perceived strictly
aesthetically is art aesthetically misperceived." It is
interesting to note, however, that as committed as Adorno was to art’s
social significance, he probably shared Harold Bloom’s conviction that
art is not about the display of social virtue. In a passage that sounds
as if it were intended for our current controversy, Adorno writes, in
response to artistic certificates of "correct political opinion," "what
is social in art is its immanent movement against society, not its
manifest opinions." And, Of course, Adorno was just as hostile to the notion of Great
Books ideologically construed. For Adorno, a canon of Great Works is a
version of what he called the neutralizing "museum of cultural
commodities," or "Sunday institutions that provide solace." And the
canonical "immortality" after which Bloom longs so plangently is the
"illusion of duration." This expression of transcendence is most often found in what
Adorno calls the "shudder" of the new which refers back to a primordial
magical experience of an "apparition, a heavenly vision" (here Adorno
echoes Shklovsky’s use of the word "vision" and reproduces Walter
Benjamin’s idea of the "aura"). This experience is what Harold Bloom
wrongly and tritely calls "originality." It is also that quality in art
that Bloom tries and fails to capture in his notion of the "uncanny."
But for Adorno, unlike Bloom, this experience has the most profound
capacity for "social explosiveness" because it reveals the social
status quo as unnecessary, limiting and undesirable. It reveals the
status quo as a betrayal of the idea of humanity, an idea whose
development over the centuries is substantially the result of art’s
work. The great and disturbing puzzle in Adorno’s logic is the
appearance that the modernist aesthetic of fragmentation and dissonance
tends to make the great "consonant" works of the past seem strangely
culpable, complicit and unusable. In fact Adorno did think that, for
example, Beethoven’s aesthetic strategies were, in Adorno’s words,
"used-up." (The resemblance, here, of Adorno’s thought to John Barth’s
in his well-known essay "The Literature of Exhaustion" is remarkable.)
They are used-up in the sense that they can no longer help the art of
the present realize its "concept": autonomy. This is so because the
artwork and the effects of the past, however great and "autonomous"
they may have been in their own moment, have been utterly neutralized
and institutionalized in the present. Beethoven was a truculent and
revolutionary genius, but in our time he is one "culture hero" among
many, and the effect of his art is managed by corporate philanthropy
and university courses in appreciation. From Adorno’s perspective,
Beethoven is most dead for us when he is most "appreciated," because
the "enjoyment" Beethoven creates has nothing to do with the social or
aesthetic function of his music. The aesthetics of hedonism, which
Adorno batters with great satiric brio, makes art both ephemeral and
irrelevant. To his credit, Adorno did not abandon the art of
the past and never saw it as altogether co-opted by the administered
culture museums of the present. What Adorno tried to articulate was a
relationship to that art, especially with his favorites such as
Shakespeare, Beethoven and Mahler, that would allow for a renewal of
our understanding of what made them great in their own moment and what
continues to speak to us about what it means to be a complete human
being in the present. Here, Harold Bloom is quite right to say that one
of Shakespeare’s great and inalienable gifts to the future was his deep
intuition about what it means to be human. Properly understood (that
is, understood as something more than culture hero and object of
reverential summer theater festivals), Shakespeare can still be part of
Adorno’s fight against "bad Enlightenment" as instrumental reason and
the total administration of our life world. As Adorno wrote, Adorno also introduced the concept of the "wet" in art. The "wet"
is the erotic or sensual aspect of art, and corresponds to the call for
the libidinization of life in Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization.
For Adorno, sensual interests "make art works more than empty
patterns." But how does modernist fragmentation and dissonance respond
to the human need for the "wet"? According to Adorno, it is simply that
dissonance "gives access to the alluringly sensuous by transfiguring it
into its antithesis, pain." Unless one is to imagine an audience of
masochists, Adorno is not at his most persuasive here. Of course, Adorno’s version of dialectic was a negative dialectic, which meant for him that although we might hold a model of
social wholeness as a utopic ideal, the process of philosophy must
always find the concrete realization of this ideal hopelessly
compromised and internally contradicted. Art’s emancipatory possibility
is dependent on its impossibility. As Frederic Jameson observed in his
astute essay "T. W. Adorno; or, Historical Tropes," The overarching problem is that there seems to be a radical
disconnect between Adorno’s understanding of the present potential of
the arts of the past (in spite of all efforts to neutralize them) and
the strategies and consequences of the art of the present. If the art
of the past may still speak to us about the desirability of a
constructed subjectivity, why is the art of the present forbidden to do
so? If it is the total administration of life and the demise of the
project of the autonomous individual that Adorno most mourns and most
holds as a grievance against the modern state, why is it necessarily
beyond the reach of a resourceful art of the present? Why must the
modern artist, in Jameson’s words, renounce "his own voice" and
abdicate "personal style"? If the project of subjectivity has been
co-opted by the state, why can’t artists find ways to reclaim it? In
fact there are modernist artists who did just this, although they are
not the artists in whom Adorno is most interested. Which leads me to my
final suggestion. I would suggest that the most desirable aesthetic
strategy for the present is one which continues to see the necessity
for strategies of "enstrangement," of distancing from the universality
of the "law of genre," as well as distancing from the administration of
the "everyday," but which also finds ways, nonetheless, of maintaining
an allegiance and a faithfulness with "good Enlighten-ment," that is,
with the historical project of creating the self in its relationship to
the social. Perhaps, from this perspective, our champion of modernism
ought to be Shostakovich rather than Schoenberg. Shostakovich was as
dissonant as he needed to be in order to create an opportunity to
reclaim our shared humanity, "written in the heart’s blood," as he
said. Of course, Shostakovich was more willing to work within the
western structure of keys, but he nonetheless represented a
considerable departure from the Romantic tradition inaugurated by
Beethoven and concluded by Mahler. For he was not merely "complicated,"
to return to my earlier distinction, he was "difficult" in that he
deliberately employed the destruction of key through dissonance. But,
unlike Schoenberg, it was a dissonance that was internal to the drama
of the work, and it was a dissonance that in Shostakovich’s work was
always threatening to take the upper hand and banish the tonic and
along with it a certain sense of the human. One can’t help but wonder
what this amazing music sounded like during the period in which Stalin
was constructing the gulag system and using it to intimidate, punish
and murder people precisely like Shostakovich. Adorno’s concern
with my suggestion would very likely have been that such an art would
be indistinguishable from the bourgeois arts of consolation which only
strengthen the spell of the status quo and make it yet more difficult
for art to free itself. Nonetheless, certain though I am that Adorno’s
perspective is capable of a retort, my proposal helps to explain why it
is that something about Adorno’s aesthetic has always stuck in one’s
throat. The only pleasure of modern art is the negative pleasure of a
co-opted pleasure transmuted as pain? The only happiness is the sudden
escape from the enforced happiness of a universal and unanimous assent
to the status quo? The options within modern art are to have one’s
sensorium seared by the Schoenbergian refusal or fall, quite guiltily,
into the mitts of the Culture Cops? This monolithic opposition is
nearly as absolute as the opposition between Workers and Titans of
Industry figured within Social Realism, a simplistic opposition Adorno
worked hard to correct. But the Culture Industry is not as seamless, or
devoid of contradictions, useful glitches, and opportunities for
dissent and detournement as Adorno would lead us to believe. If
the social status quo has obliged the commodity function to mediate all
human activities (what Antonio Negri has called the "sociality of
money"), our ultimate response shouldn’t be to abandon the utopic
desire for pleasure, happiness, and freedom. Rather, we need to look to
the art of the past (held for ransom though it may be in the West’s
culture museums) for the material with which to give content to our own
impulses and intuitions about an art for the present. This
significant alteration in Adorno’s thought has the advantage of giving
new life to Hegel’s idea that the dialectical process always carries
with it part of what it has submerged in the past. The question is
always, what part of that past is deserving of being carried forward?
The tendency towards ever-broader rationality or the tendency toward
more subtle and creative notions of what it means to be a full human
being? Employing Adorno’s thought and Shostakovich’s work as exemplars,
I would argue for an art of the new that includes an aesthetic of
renewal, through which the greatest works of the past remain, in the
final instance, resistant to all efforts to neutralize their force.
Those works with this enduring force are our truest canon, they are our
Greatest Books and our Greatest Works. Through them, all that we have
learned not to be—greatness, humanity, and even beauty—are made again
utterly real.
By crystallizing in itself as something unique to itself,
rather than complying with existing social norms and qualifying as
"socially useful," it [art] criticizes society by merely existing, for
which puritans of all stripes condemn it.
Or, most pointedly, "Rather no art than socialist realism." Art
participates in the moral, but not "through the pronouncement of moral
theses."
Obviously the duration to which artworks aspire is modeled on
fixed, inheritable possession; the spiritual should, like material,
become property, an outrage ineluctably committed by spirit against
itself. As soon as artworks make a fetish of their hope of duration,
they begin to suffer from their sickness unto death: The veneer of
inalienability that they draw over themselves at the same time
suffocates them.
Unlike Bloom’s version of the artist as aspiring culture-climber,
in Adorno’s view artists are at one with the pathologies of the culture
they are a part of (perhaps including the compulsion to fame). "Those
who produce important artworks are not demigods but fallible, often
neurotic and damaged individuals." What they intuitively understand,
however, is that the work of art is both a declaration of independence
from the society in which they first found themselves, along with
others, damaged, and it is an implicit critique of that society insofar
as the artwork expresses itself as free from it.
Authentic art of the past that for the time must remain veiled
is not thereby sentenced. Great works wait. While their metaphysical
meaning dissolves, something of their truth content, however little it
can be pinned down, does not; it is that whereby they remain eloquent.
A liberated humanity would be able to inherit its historical legacy
free of guilt.
There is an equally thorny problem in relation to the subversive
work of the New. The problem here is that the modernist strategy of
dissonance does much to respond to the need for artistic autonomy, but
it’s unclear how well it responds to the larger social problem, the key
social problem for Adorno, that human society is becoming ever less
human. One wants to ask, "Does dissonance help make us more human? Does
it help to maintain the enlightenment project of humanity?" According
to Adorno, "art is the ever broken promise of happiness." But what
happiness is it that Beckett, Schoenberg and the modernist aesthetic
proffer? Only the happiness of "having suddenly escaped"? This
perplexity is rather like the situation with punk music in the 1980s.
You could appreciate that punk dramatized social alienation during the
Reagan/Thatcher years, but it was never a music, or in Kathy Acker’s
hands a literature, which effectively invited people to come live in
its world. (Punk had truth content, but it was not seductive.)
the contradictions of the age reenter the microcosm of the work
of art and condemn it to ultimate failure also. Thus the system of
Schoenberg, the product of an inhumanly systematized society, becomes
itself a kind of straitjacket, a constraint rather than a liberating
convention.
The tragic irony here for an artist like Schoenberg was that the
only way to realize art’s concept, autonomy, meant that he had to
indirectly affirm the system he was fleeing. Again, Jameson argued that
modernist aesthetics as represented by Schoenberg "are as distant from
nature as the postindustrial universe itself, their matter as preformed
and as lacking in any genuine internal logic as plastic." Or, as Adorno
himself expressed it, speaking of Beckett, "this shabby, damaged world
of images is the negative imprint of the administered world."
