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Leonhard Emmerling
“The more total society becomes, the more completely it contracts to a unanimous system, and all the more do the artworks in which this experience is sedimented become the other of this society. (…) Because the spell of external reality over its subjects and their reactions has become absolute, the artwork can only oppose this spell by assimilating itself to it. (…) This shabby, damaged world of images is the negative imprint of the administered world. (…) Just as art cannot be, and never was, a language of pure feeling, nor a language of affirmation of the soul, neither is it for art to pursue the results of ordinary knowledge, as for instance in the form of social documentaries that are to function as down payments on empirical research yet to be done. The space between discursive barbarism and poetic euphemism that remains to artworks is scarcely larger than the point of indifference into which Beckett burrowed.”[1]
I.
Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (published in 1970, one year after his death) begins with the statement: “It is self-evident that nothing concerning art is self-evident anymore.” (p. 1) Beyond that, his often meandering writing is motivated by the question, “whether art is still possible.” (p. 1) This question results not only from the shock that Auschwitz caused, and which provoked the often quoted and often misunderstood sentence, to write poetry after Auschwitz would be barbarian [2]; this question aims at a characteristic of the work of art itself, an intrinsic and indissoluble ambivalence. Adorno reveals this ambivalence by the use of mutually complementary notions.
Autonomy and heteronomy may be seen as the configuration on which others are based, with both spheres intricately and dialectically related. The work of art aims at autonomy; or, its status in the post-feudalistic world is dictated by the autonomy of the artist from commissioners and the limitations of social institutions like the church or the court. The artist is free to escape the demands of society by withdrawing into his own subjectivity. But the autonomy Adorno speaks of is the autonomy of the work of art from the empirical world. The empirical world is to be considered as the same as the sphere of heteronomy, in which no other law is valid than that of exchange. Thus, another pair can be added to the autonomy/heteronomy configuration: that of “being-for-others” (everything is subject to the law of exchange) and of “being-for-itself” (the work of art).
As the autonomy of the work of art guarantees its utopian potential, [3] it tends, exactly for that reason, towards an affirmation of the existing conditions, be it even involuntarily. [4] As the autonomous work of art constitutes itself by following exclusively its own “law of form” (Formgesetz), and so opposes any need to be useful, it is opposed to the empirical world. It is for itself instead of following social standards. “Art’s asociality is the determinate negation of a determinate society.“ (p.226) This asociality, however, is the reason for its ineffectiveness: “The society at which it shudders is left in the distance, undisturbed.“ (p. 226) “Neutralization is the social price of aesthetic autonomy.” (p. 228)
And thus, every work of art is characterized by an indissoluble ambivalence: Its autonomy does not erase its character as a “fait social”, and even if it is as far as possible removed from the “the crudely empirical” (p. 203), it will not lose its double character as “being socially determined in its autonomy and at the same time social.” (p. 210)
The aporia, to which the work of art is subjected, are not only to be found in this double character but are more deeply constituted by the aporia of what Adorno calls the “law of form”. On the one hand, this guarantees the distance of the work of art from the empirical, its being-for-itself, its autonomy and its utopian potential; but, on the other hand, the law of form itself is not free from the quality of violence. The process of submitting diverse elements to the dictate of unity and purity is modelled on the principle of heteronomy, which Adorno describes as the submission of the plurality of life to a totalitarian unity. For this, all beauty (as the purity in which the law of form is realized) has an affinity to death, in which all diversity and divergence expires (p. 52).
At the same time, however, Adorno describes the force that constitutes the work of art as a violence that respects that which it matches. And: “It is through this idea, that art is related to peace. Without perspective on peace, art would be as untrue as when it anticipates reconciliation. Beauty in art is the semblance of the truly peaceful. It is this toward which even the repressive violence of form tends in its unification of hostile and divergent elements.” (p. 258)
The restlessness of the dialectic process, which becomes evident here and finally threatens to end in absolute negativity, rarely comes to a stand still in Adorno’s writings. He seems to undermine every positive idea of art. For that reason, it is not surprising that he writes (using Beckett again) that every work of art wants to return to silence, because it is intertwined with what he calls the universal context of guilt. And, where it does not atone for its guilt, the work of art would be nothing but a desecration of silence (p. 134).
The absolute negativity of Adorno’s theory hardly leaves any way out. But there are some key notions in his theory which offer a more positive perspective. Apart from the notion of commotion, and an often surprisingly positive idea about nature’s beauty (das Naturschöne), it is especially the notion of reconciliation, which infuses the whole Aesthetic Theory and leads to ever new movements of thought. Questioned, doubted and reconsidered again and again, its central role and its importance regarding the work of art’s potential for humankind is never undermined.
The way in which the work of art could be a pre-appearance of reconciliation unfolds in the light of the notion of “correct consciousness”, which is itself dialectically folded. “(…), ever since freedom emerged as a potential, correct consciousness has meant the most progressive consciousness of antagonisms on the horizon of their possible reconciliation.” (p. 191) This means, first, that correct consciousness is historically determined and not absolute and invariant. It is not an un-historic or super-historic knowledge about the “real” character of things. Secondly, it, too, is characterised as a negativum, as the consciousness of antagonisms and not as the sum total of positive knowledge or convictions, all of which under suspicion of being ideological for Adorno. And, third, correct consciousness unfolds on the horizon of reconciliation as the unredeemed promise of the potential of freedom mentioned before.
Reconciliation in the work of art therefore happens in the form of a principal failure: “That is the melancholy of art. It achieves an unreal reconciliation at the price of real reconciliation. All that art can do is grieve for the sacrifice it makes, which, in its powerlessness, art itself is.” (p. 52) „Through the irreconcilable renunciation of the semblance of reconciliation, art holds fast to the promise of reconciliation in the midst of the unreconciled (...)” (p. 33)
Adorno’s ambivalent notion of reconciliation, which essentially constitutes the utopian potential of the work of art (and for which autonomy is an indispensable pre-condition) is related to his insistence on the character of the work of art as semblance. If the work of art is untruthful insofar as it stages reconciliation as realisable, and if its truth is precisely that, in renouncing reconciliation, as a symptom of suffering and disruption, it still recollects the possibility of reconciliation negatively. In a world, in which infatuation as the counterpart of real alienation has become total, it stages the semblance of its being-for-itself as the mask of truth (p. 227). What appears, but is not, promises to become by appearing. “The constellation of the existing and non-existing is the utopic figure of art.” (p. 233)
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