Adorno’s Aesthetics as a Literary Theory of Art [1st ed.] 9783030452803, 9783030452810

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xix
Construction of “Aesthetics” as Construction of “the Aesthetic” (Mario Farina)....Pages 1-52
The Philosophy of Music and the Dissolution of the Aesthetic (Mario Farina)....Pages 53-91
Literature and the Reconstruction of the Aesthetic (Mario Farina)....Pages 93-141
Adorno’s Philosophy of Literature: A Theory of Literary Interpretation (Mario Farina)....Pages 143-187
Beyond Modernism: The American Postmodern Novel (Mario Farina)....Pages 189-229
Back Matter ....Pages 231-237

Citation preview

Adorno’s Aesthetics as a Literary Theory of Art m a r io fa r i n a

Adorno’s Aesthetics as a Literary Theory of Art

Mario Farina

Adorno’s Aesthetics as a Literary Theory of Art

Mario Farina Department of Letters and Philosophy University of Florence Firenze, Italy

ISBN 978-3-030-45280-3    ISBN 978-3-030-45281-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45281-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface

Generally deemed inadequate to account for the postmodern issues of the second half of the twentieth century, Adorno’s philosophical contributions, as Fredric Jameson acknowledged thirty years ago, have been met by two main groups of objections (Jameson 1996, p. 229). As to the first, with Jürgen Habermas at the head, Adorno’s philosophy is seen as being burdened by the Marxian orthodox idea of class struggle, and thereby as unable to understand contemporary society.1 The second strand of criticism, instead, looks more closely at Adorno’s aesthetics as at a typically modernist, and therefore non-postmodernist, explanation of art. This second set of objections can be traced back to Jean-Françoise Lyotard, and how he sees Adorno’s emancipatory idea of history as by-­ product of the modern hope in the integrity of subjectivity (Lyotard 1974, pp. 127–137). Along the same line can also be placed Peter Bürger’s approach and his idea of postmodernism as a peculiar and negative definition of what is simply a phase of modernity itself. In this regard, Bürger sees in Adorno’s aesthetics an obstinate reluctance in dealing with the fact that the contemporary condition of art includes both progression and  As Habermas writes, Adorno and Horkheimer “held fast to the basic assumptions of the theory of value as the core of their tacit orthodoxy, and in this way they blinded themselves to the realities of a developed capitalism based on the pacification of class conflict through welfare-state measures” (Habermas 1987, p. 334). 1

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regression as part of the same progressive and developmental movement (Bürger 1983, pp.  177–197). These paradigmatic and interconnected positions—Adorno as a too obstinate Marxist or as too modernist to have a clear understanding of late- or postmodernity—have defined the theoretical ground for large part of the criticism targeting Adorno’s understanding of philosophy of art, such as the wide skepticism with which even non-specialists judge his interpretation of Jazz music, as exemplified by Eric J. Hobsbawm’s words: “Adorno wrote some of the most stupid pages ever written about jazz” (Hobsbawm 1993, p. 300). Connected to the question of modernism is also the second mortal sin of Adorno’s aesthetics, namely its ban on aesthetic pleasure and enjoyment. As Espen Hammer shows, in fact, while vindicating the role of classical beauty, a new conservative cultural trend in authors such as Roger Scruton and Alexander Nehamas vehemently attacks one of the pillars of Adorno’s comprehension of art and also what supposedly qualifies it as a modernist aesthetic theory (Hammer 2015, pp.  247–249). Also because of its “modernist” connotation, the postmodern strand of Adorno’s detractors understands his rejection of aesthetic pleasure as the result of his miscomprehension and culturally elitist disgust for popular mass culture,2 as exemplified by the “perverse rant against popular music” that Jerrold Levinson (2015, p. 44) finds in his musicology. There is no doubt, in fact, that Adorno’s philosophy of art is permeated by tensions originating in how the subject relates to the enjoyment of the artistic object. “Aesthetic enjoyment”—writes Adorno in a personal note of 1955—“in the superficial sense of the enjoyment of the artistic object as if it were a piece of sensuous world, in general does not exist and any aesthetics that starts with that is dull. I have never enjoyed an artwork” (TWAA: 20688). This tension, as the scholarly literature has pointed out, also defines the historical turning point in the development of art, that Adorno calls “de-artification” of art, and that Richard Wolin describes as the “final dissolution of the essential aesthetic qualities which have until this century been inseparable from the concepts of art itself” (Wolin 2004, p. 11).  As Erica Weitzman (2008, p. 185) suggests, “Adorno has been vigorously and exhaustively criticized, by people from every point on the political spectrum, for being a pseudo-revolutionary kill joy, a narrow-minded elitist, a closet conservative, the fetishizer of his own (historically particular) miserabilism!”. 2

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According to this framework then, the difficulties Adorno objectively faces in the understanding of the most advanced tendencies of art in his time—Adorno is indeed infamous for rarely mentioning the most relevant post-avant-gardist phenomena—can be explained in terms of some sort of aesthetic conservatism and elitism that prevents his otherwise brilliant analysis of artistic products from applying to the art of the second half of the twentieth century. At variance with mainstream interpretations, what I intend to argue in this book is not only that the development of Adorno’s philosophy of art is inspired by a more complex constellation of elements than the sum of modernism and Marxist dogmas, but also that Adorno’s contributions suit particularly well the most advanced products of postmodernism. Adorno’s work in aesthetics can be ultimately seen as an attempt to react to the essential tensions exposed by contemporary art and which originate from a theoretical principle that I identify as “the dissolution of the aesthetic element”. In accordance with large part of the aesthetic debate of the second half of the past century, Adorno acknowledges an epochal turn in the qualification of art. This turn consists in the cancellation of the difference between art and everyday objects, or rather in the trend fostering the annulment of any aesthetic distinction among them. What should be remarked in this regard is the contrast between Adorno’s fear for the transformation of art into a common good and, for example, the satisfaction with which Arthur Danto welcomes this tendency. In Aesthetic Theory Adorno writes that “cut loose from its immanent claim to objectivity, art would be nothing but a more or less organized system of stimuli-conditioning reflexes […]. The result would be the negation of the difference between artworks and merely sensual qualities; it would be an empirical entity, nothing more than—in American argot—a battery of tests, and the adequate means for giving an account of art would be program analysis or surveys of average group reactions to artworks or genres” (ÄT: 394 [264]). In passages like this, Adorno focuses on the same set of problems standing behind the institutional theory of art and Danto’s idea of the end of art, eventually leading to the theory of the aesthetic indiscernibility of art and non-art. Although dealing with the same set of historical and philosophical questions, remarkable differences can be nevertheless detected in their respective reactions.

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What I suggest in this book is in particular to read Adorno’s reaction to what he perceives as the dissolution of the aesthetic element of art as laying the ground for the elaboration of a literary theory of art. I will argue, in fact, that the process of dissolution of the aesthetic is closely linked to what one can understand as the thing-like nature of the work of art. In Adorno’s definition of the aesthetic, in fact, the work—as thing, as objectual element—directly participates to the economic process in which things become the mediator of the social relationship between people, in other words it enters the logic of the capital.3 On the contrary, literature—as an artistic form—is not constituted by things, but by meaning-relationships that allude to things and to the way in which they relate to one another. My proposal—it should be made preliminarily clear—does not entail in any way the convergence of all the arts into literature, nor the effective dissolution of visual art in general. On the contrary, what I intend to show is the fact that in the effective historical development of art, literature can be seen as the one artistic form which is able to act as aesthetic guarantee of the existence of something like art in general. And this is so precisely because its aesthetic material, namely language, cannot be completely absorbed in the economic process of production. In this regard, supportive elements to the theoretical core of my position can be found, for example, in Eva Geulen’s acknowledgment of Adorno’s philosophy of art as a philosophy of language. She indeed observes that “the tension between universality and particularity is greatest in language, precisely because of the resistance mounted by its discursivity or semanticity. Artworks are said to be like language when they develop and sustain the tension that characterizes the literary artefact: to say the particular in a form that is generic” (Geulen 2006a, p. 58; see also Geulen 2006b, p. 92). My overall goal is therefore to show that Adorno’s aesthetic, far from being an old iron, a historical find to be placed in the museum of theories, actually provides a set of philosophical tools that can be fruitfully applied within the context of the contemporary theory of art, as

 According to Marx’s famous quotation, in fact, “capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons which is mediated through things” (Marx 1990, p. 932). 3

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exemplified also by other recent contributions to the critical debate.4 These tools are notably those of the aesthetics as a philosophy of literature. The last chapter of this book, in fact, is an attempt to pursue an interpretation of American postmodern novels within the conceptual framework of Adorno’s aesthetics as a philosophy of literature. Although I have no intention of jumping into the debate about postmodernism in general, about its being a part of modernity or an autonomous historical category, I believe that Adorno’s aesthetic elements are particularly suited to clarify the otherwise evasive literary nature of American postmodern novels. While pursuing this aim, I take American postmodern novels as an extant category in the contemporary literary debate and I refrain programmatically from assessing its consistency. My merely instrumental use of the category is meant to allow me to investigate whether the literary products it designates have something in common and possibly what it is. I have divided the book into five chapters. In the first, I will present the very first determination of the aesthetic in Adorno’s thought and thus introduce what I read as his construction of the aesthetics. In the second, I will focus on Adorno’s philosophy of music, and I will detect in it the principle of the dissolution of the aesthetic. In the third chapter, I will present the process of the literary reconstruction of the aesthetic, while turning to Adorno’s late aesthetic production, in particular to his Aesthetic Theory and the collection, Notes to Literature. In the fourth, I will point to what I see as the basic theoretical lines of Adorno’s philosophy of literature, namely a complete set of theoretical tools that can be applied to the most advanced results of literary production. Finally, in the fifth and last chapter, I will investigate and account for the formal issues of American postmodern novels in what I see as its morphological development from Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, through Wallace’s Infinite Jest, to DeLillo’s Underworld. Firenze, Italy

Mario Farina

 I refer to the book of Josh Robinson (2018), published under the title of Adorno’s Poetics of Form, where he shows the connection of Adorno’s literary aesthetic with the contemporary debate about historicism and formalism, and to which I will refer again in the following. 4

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References Bürger, Peter. 1983. Das Altern der Moderne. In Adorno-Konferenz 1983, ed. Ludwig von Friedeburg, and Jürgen Habermas, 177–197. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. Geulen, Eva. 2006a. Adorno and the Poetics of Genre. In Adorno and Literature, ed. David Cunningham, and Nigel Mapp, 53–66. London/New York: Continuum. Geulen, Eva. 2006b. The End of Art. Readings in a Rumor after Hegel. Trans. J. McFarland. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1987. The Theory of Communicative Action. Vol. 2. Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason. Trans. Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon Press. Hammer, Espen. 2015. Happiness and Pleasure in Adorno’s Aesthetics. In The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory, 90 (4): 247–259. Hobsbawm, Eric J. 1993. The Jazz Scene. New York: Pantheon Book. Jameson, Fredric. 1990. Late Marxism. Adorno, or the Persistence of the Dialectics. London: Verso. Levinson, Jerrold. 2015. Musical Concerns. Essay in Philosophy of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lyotard, Jean-Françoise. 1974. Adorno as the Devil. In Télos, 19: 127–137. Marx, Karl. 1990. The Capital. A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1. Trans. B. Fowkes. London/New York: Penguin. Robinson, Josh. 2018. Adorno’s Poetics of Form. Albany: SUNY. Weitzman, Erica. 2008. No “Fun”: Aporias of Pleasure in Adorno’s “Aesthetic Theory”. In The German Quarterly, 81 (2): 185–202. Wolin, Richard. 2004. The De-aestheticization of Art: On Adorno’s Aesthetische Theorie. In Theodor W. Adorno, ed. Gerard Delanty, vol. II: 5–30. London/ Thousand Oak/New Delhi: SAGE Publications.

Acknowledgments

For the institutional and material support during the conception and writing of this book, I am grateful to the Department of Letters and Philosophy (Dipartimento di Lettere e Filosofia  – DILEF) of the University of Florence; the Walter Benjamin Archive, Akademie der Künste Berlin; the School of Philosophy, University College, Dublin. This book has been developed within the context of the research project “Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno and the Idea of Natural History” (2017–2019), financially supported by the Department of Letters and Philosophy of the University of Florence, and under the scientific supervision of Professor Gianluca Garelli, to whom I offer my most sincere thanks for the precious advice and constant encouragement. I also extend my thanks to Professor Brian O’Connor for having welcomed me at his at the University College, Dublin  during my research period there. My research interest for Adorno has begun over fifteen years ago, during my B.A. dissertation at the University of Pavia (defended in 2005), and it would be impossible to acknowledge all the scholars, colleagues, and classmates who influenced my studies, the name of many of whom can be found in the index of this book. Nevertheless, I cannot help but remember the lively discussions with Professor Markus Ophälders, the formative experience during my PhD under the supervision of Professor xi

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Maurizio Pagano, and the always vivid human and intellectual example of Professor Flavio Cassinari. I sincerely thank Palgrave Macmillan for deciding to host this book in its collection. Among the people with whom I had the pleasure to work, I am especially thankful to April James, who first has shown interest in my research, and Lauriane Piette, who has brilliantly and carefully followed the development of this text. A special thanks goes to Dr. Tessa Marzotto, who with enviable patience has turned into real English the mumbling through which I tend to offend this beautiful language. Finally, my most sincere acknowledgment is devoted to Serena Feloj: both as Serena, with whom I decide to spend my life every day, and as Professor Feloj, the most brilliant discussant and the most stimulating mind one could hope for.

Contents

1 Construction of “Aesthetics” as Construction of “the Aesthetic”  1 1.1 Kierkegaard (i): The Autonomy of Art and the Historicity of “the Aesthetic”   3 1.2 Kierkegaard (ii): The Myth and the History  15 1.3 The Anti-Romantic Choice and Its Consequences: Art and Society  24 1.4 The Model of the Culture Industry  38 References 47 2 The Philosophy of Music and the Dissolution of the Aesthetic 53 2.1 A Philosophy of Art as Philosophy of New Music  54 2.2 The Failure of the Artwork  64 2.3 The Dissolution of the Aesthetic  79 References 88 3 Literature and the Reconstruction of the Aesthetic 93 3.1 Art, Its Right to Exist, and Aesthetic Conservatism  96 3.2 The Deaestheticization of Artistic Material 106 xiii

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3.3 The Literary Reconstruction of the Aesthetic (i): Three Examples115 3.4 The Literary Reconstruction of the Aesthetic (ii): The Form of Literature 124 3.5 The Literary Reconstruction of the Aesthetic (iii): The Reflection of the ‘I’ and the Literary Material 128 References137 4 Adorno’s Philosophy of Literature: A Theory of Literary Interpretation143 4.1 What Literature Is About: Reality, Truth, and Ontology 146 4.2 The Interpretation of Literature and Its Unity 156 4.3 The Form 161 4.4 The Content and the Author 169 4.5 Interpreting Literature: The Case of Franz Kafka 175 References183 5 Beyond Modernism: The American Postmodern Novel189 5.1 A Theory of the Novel as Literary Genre 192 5.2 The American Postmodern Novel as Literary Form 199 5.3 Conclusion: The Novel as Postmodernist Genre 223 References227 Index231

Abbreviations

Adorno’s Works In the following list the abbreviation “GS” refers to the edition of Adorno’s writings: Gesammelte Schriften, 20 Vols., ed. Rolf Tiedemann et  al. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1997. A AaS AdP ÄT AzK B B-L BW1 BW2 BW3

Amorbach. In Ohne Leitbild. Parva Aesthetica. In Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft I, GS, 10.1, pp. 302–309. Der Artist als Statthalter. In Noten zur Literatur, GS, 11, pp. 114–126. Die Aktualität der Philosophie. In Philosophische Frühschriften, GS, 1, pp. 325–344. Ästhetische Theorie, GS, 7. Aufzeichnungen zu Kafka. In Prismen. Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft. In Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft I, GS, 10.1, pp. 284–287. Beethoven. Philosophie der Musik, ed. R. Tiedemann. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1993. Balzac-Lektüre. In Noten zur Literatur, GS, 11, pp. 139–157. Th.W.  Adorno, W.  Benjamin. Briefwechsel 1928–1940, ed. Henri Lonitz. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1994. Th.W. Adorno, A. Berg. Briefwechsel 1925–1933, ed. Henri Lonitz. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1997. Th.W.  Adorno, T.  Mann. Briefwechsel 1943–1955, ed. Christoph Gödde, and T. Sprecher. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2002. xv

xvi Abbreviations

BW4 CWB DdA DSH E EaF EMS EV EzP FdK Fh IdN IKh JdE JdP K KPK KuG KuK MM ND OL P

Th.W. Adorno, M. Horkheimer. Briefwechsel 1927–1969, 4 Vols., ed. Christoph Gödde, and Henri Lonitz. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2003. Charakteristik Walter Benjamins. In Prismen. Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft. In Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft I, GS, 10.1, pp. 238–253. Dialektik der Aufklärung, GS, 3. Drei Studien zu Hegel, GS, 5. Engagement. In Noten zur Literatur, GS, 11, pp. 409–430. Der Essey als Form. In Noten zur Literatur, GS, 11, pp. 9–33. Einleitung in die Musiksoziologie. Zwölf theoretische Vorlesungen, GS, 14. Erpreßte Versöhnung. In Noten zur Literatur, GS, 11, pp. 251–280. Einleitung zum »Positivismusstreit in der deutschen Soziologie«. In Soziologische Schriften I, GS, 8, pp. 280–353. Die Funktion des Kontrapunkts in der neuen Musik. In Klangfiguren. In Musikalische Schriften I, GS, 16, pp. 145–169. Funktionalismus heute. In Ohne Leitbild. Parva Aesthetica. In Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft I, GS, 10.1, pp. 375–395. Die Idee der Naturgeschichte. In Philosophische Frühschriften, GS, 1, pp. 345–365. Ist die Kunst heiter?. In Noten zur Literatur, GS, 11, pp. 599–606. Jargon der Eigentlichkeit. Zur deutschen Ideologie, GS, 6. Im Jeu de Paume gekritzelt. In Ohne Leitbild. Parva Aesthetica. In Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft I, GS, 10.1, pp. 321–325. Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen, GS, 2. Kleine Proust-Kommentare. In Noten zur Literatur, GS, 11, pp. 203–215. Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft. In Prismen. Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft. In Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft I, GS, 10.1, pp. 11–30. Die Kunst und die Künste. In Ohne Leitbild. Parva Aesthetica. In Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft I, GS, 10.1, pp. 432–453. Minima Moralia. Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben, GS, 4. Negative Dialektik, GS, 6. Ohne Leitbild. In Ohne Leitbild. Parva Aesthetica. In Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft I, GS, 10.1, pp. 291–309. Parataxis. Zur späten Lyrik Hölderlins. In Noten zur Literatur, GS, 11, pp. 447–491.

 Abbreviations 

Pei

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Prefazione all’edizione italiana [Preface to the Italian Edition]. In Th.W.  Adorno. Kierkegaard. La costruzione dell’estetico. Trans. A. Burger Cori, pp. 9–13. Milano: Longanesi, 1962. PnM Philosophie der neuen Musik, GS, 12. RaS Rückblickend auf den Surrealismus. In Noten zur Literatur, GS, 11, pp. 101–105. RüK Résumé über Kulturindustrie. In Ohne Leitbild. Parva Aesthetica. In Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft I, GS, 10.1, pp. 337–345. RüL Rede über Lyrik und Gesellschaft. In Noten zur Literatur, GS, 11, pp. 49–68. RüR Rede über den‚ Raritätenladen‘von Charles Dickens. In Noten zur Literatur, GS, 11, pp. 515–522. SdE Standort des Erzählers im zeitgenössischen Roman. In Noten zur Literatur, GS, 11, pp. 41–48. TWAA Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno Archiv [with the abbreviation TS., I refer to the pages of the typescripts preserved in Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno Archive, Frankfurt a. M., and available in reproduction in Walter Benjamin Archive, Akademie der Künste, Berlin]. ÜeN Über epische Naivität, in Noten zur Literatur, I, GS, 11, pp. 34–40. ÜFM Über den Fetischcharakter in der Musik und die Regression des Hörens. In Dissonanzen. Musik in der verwalteten Welt, GS, 14, pp. 14–50. VA Valérys Abweichungen. In Noten zur Literatur, GS, 11, pp. 158–202. VH Verfremdetes Hauptwerk. Zur Missa Solemnis. In Moments musicaux. In Musikalische Schriften IV, GS, 17, pp. 145–161. VPM Valéry, Proust, Museum. In Prismen. Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft. In Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft I, GS, 10.1, pp. 181–194. VüW Versuch über Wagner. In Die musikalischen Monographien, GS, 13. VzU Vorschlag zur Ungüte. In Ohne Leitbild. Parva Aesthetica. In Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft I, GS, 10.1, pp. 330–336. WnK Warum ist die neue Kunst so schwer verständlich?. In Musikalische Schriften V, GS, 18, pp. 824–831. ZgL Zur gesellschaftlichen Lage der Musik. In Musikalische Schriften V, GS, 18, pp. 729–777. ZM Zeitlose Mode. Zum Jazz. In Prismen. Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft. In Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft I, GS, 10.1, pp. 123–137.

xviii Abbreviations

Translations AaA

Art and the Arts. In Can One Live After Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader. Trans R.  Livingstone, pp.  368–387. Stanford: Stanford University Press. AT Aesthetic Theory. Trans. R.  Hullot-Kentor. London-New York: Continuum, 1997. B Beethoven. The Philosophy of Music: Fragments and Texts. Trans. E. Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. CI The Culture Industry. Selected Essays in Mass Culture, ed. Jay Bernstein. London-New York: Routledge, 1991. Cor1 W.  Benjamin. The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin. 1910–1940. Trans. M.R.  Jacobson, and E.M.  Jacobson. Chicago-London: The University of Chicago Press, 1994. Cor2 Th.W.  Adorno, A.  Berg. Correspondence 1925–1935. Trans. W. Hoban. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2005. Cor3 Th.W.  Adorno, T.  Mann. Correspondence 1943–1955. Trans. N. Walker. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2006. DoE Dialectics of Enlightenment, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. Trans. E. Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. EoM Essays on Music. Trans. S.H. Gillespie. Berkeley-Los Angeles-­London: University of California Press, 2002. FT Functionalism Today. In Rethinking Architecture. A Reader in Cultural Theory, ed. Neil Leach, pp. 5–18. London-New York. Routledge, 1997. HTS Hegel. Three Studies. Trans. S.W.  Nicholsen. Cambridge (MA)London: MIT Press. INH The Idea of Natural History. Trans. R.  Hullot-Kentor. In Praxis International 4, N. 2: 111–124. IPD Introduction. In Th.W.  Adorno et  al., The Positivism Dispute in German Sociology. Trans. G. Adey, and D. Frisby, pp. 1–67. London: Heinemann, 1976. JoA Jargon of Authenticity. Trans. K.  Tarnowski, and F.  Will. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973. Ki Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic. Trans. R.  Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. MM Minima Moralia. Reflections on a Damaged Life. Trans. E.  Jephcott. London-New York: Verso, 2005.

 Abbreviations 

ND NtL1 NtL2 PNM Pr PRP SF SoW

xix

Negative Dialectics. Trans. E.B.  Ashton. London-New York: Routledge, 2004. Notes to Literature. Vol 1. Trans. S.W.  Nicholsen. New  York-­ Chichester: Columbia University Press, 1991. Notes to Literature. Vol 2. Trans. S.W.  Nicholsen. New  York-­ Chichester: Columbia University Press, 1991. Philosophy of New Music. Trans. R.  Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Prisms. Trans. S.  Weber, and S.W.  Nicholsen. Cambridge (MA): MIT Press. Present Relevance of Philosophy. Trans. D. Robertson. August 31, 2018 [https://shirtysleeves.blogspot.com/2018/08/a-translation-of-dieaktualitat-der.html]. Retrieved November 01, 2019. Sound Figures. Trans. R.  Livingstone. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. In Search of Wagner. Trans. R.  Livingstone. London-New York: Verso, 2005.

1 Construction of “Aesthetics” as Construction of “the Aesthetic”

In one of the most influential books for Adorno’s philosophical education, the Hungarian intellectual György Lukács defines what he understands as the “autonomy of the artwork” in terms of the result of a historical, and broadly speaking metaphysical, external pressure. “Art” writes Lukács in The Theory of the Novel (1920) “has thus become independent [selbständig]: it is no longer a copy, for all the models have gone; it is a created totality, for the natural unity of the metaphysical spheres has been destroyed forever” (Lukács 1971a, p. 37). It would be no exaggeration if one were to state that this very idea of the autonomy (in German, Selbständigkeit or Autonomie) of the artwork is one of the most seminal and most persisting ideas in the whole of Adorno’s aesthetic production. Already in a short piece written in the 1930s Adorno asks himself Why is the New Art so Hard to Understand?, and his answer calls into question precisely this idea of art’s autonomy, taken as the outcome of the historical development of capitalistic society. Adorno understands in fact “the reification of art as the result of a socio-economic development that transforms all goods into consumer goods”, and, accordingly, he states that “the autonomy of art, its quality of being a law onto itself, the impossibility of arranging it at will according to the dictates of use, is […] the © The Author(s) 2020 M. Farina, Adorno’s Aesthetics as a Literary Theory of Art, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45281-0_1

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expression of that reification” (WnK: 825–826, EoM: 128). To be fair, the actual theoretical guiding light in Adorno’s argument, however, is here not the early, Hegelian Lukács of The Theory of the Novel, but the late, already Marxist author of History and Class Consciousness (1923). As the scholarly literature has rightly noticed,1 Lukács’ pathbreaking work of 1923 has been decisive for Adorno. He even confided to Alban Berg that Lukács “has had a more profound intellectual influence on me more than almost anyone else” (BW2: 17, Cor2: 9). Proving its long-lasting effect, the concept of autonomy can be found also in Adorno’s latest and unfinished work, that is the Aesthetic Theory, for example where he writes that “art’s double character as both autonomous and fait social is incessantly reproduced on the level of its autonomy” (ÄT: 16, AT: 5).2 The aim of the first chapter of this volume is precisely to understand in which terms this very peculiar and paradoxical idea of the autonomy of art—an autonomy that comes about as the result of an external and social pressure—leaves a permanent mark on Adorno’s inquiries and the entire process required by the construction of his “aesthetics” (as philosophical discipline) by means of the construction of “the aesthetic” (as the qualifying element of that branch of knowledge). From a general point of view, the notion of autonomy determines the most basic and recurrent dynamics in Adorno’s philosophy of art, that is the tension between a normative dimension of the artwork and its incessant and necessary leaning toward the production of newness. The normative nature derives, in fact, from the bond between the artwork and the a-temporal notion of aesthetic model, whereas the orientation toward what is new builds the inalienable character that sets the artwork apart from the simple repetition of already existing things. In order to be defined as “art”, the product has to prove its own originality in relation to the context.3 The connection between  The relevance of Lukács for the young Adorno is out of discussion and widely accepted. See Susan Buck-Morss (1977, pp. 25–28), Hall (2006, pp. 155–157), and especially Adorno’s monumental biography written by Stefan Müller-Doohm, where the author specifies the relevance of History and Class Consciousness for the young Adorno (Müller-Doohm 2005, pp. 36, 94). 2  While recognizing the role of art as a concretization of aesthetic concepts, Shea Coulson (2007, pp. 109–121) risks to eliminate the double character of aesthetic products by intending art simply as a mirror. 3  The connection between autonomy and normativity is what Christoph Menke refers to as the antinomy of autonomy and sovereignty in modern aesthetics, namely as the idea that aesthetics 1

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art’s autonomy and the double character of the artistic product is finally what makes Adorno’s aesthetics an aesthetics of “the success of the artwork” (das Gelingen des Kunstwerks). According to Adorno, art critique’s task can be accomplished by assessing the work of art in terms of its success (or failure) in showing its autonomy and its capability to express social reality while simultaneously judging it. In this sense, a work of art “succeeds” when it expresses the unreconciled nature of late capitalistic society, by showing at the same time a way to artistically, that is gently and not violently, recompose social fractures. This chapter is devoted to the reconstruction of the origins of these aesthetic concepts in Adorno and to the screening of their outcomes in the first period of his production, that is, from the first writings (beginning of the 1930s) to the Dialectics of Enlightenment (1944). In these pages, I will address, therefore, the most relevant passages of Adorno’s construction of the aesthetic.

1.1 K  ierkegaard (i): The Autonomy of Art and the Historicity of “the Aesthetic” As is well known, the monographic study published under the title Kierkegaard. Construction of the Aesthetic is the reworking of Adorno’s Habilitationsschrift, that is the academic text required to obtain the title of freier Dozent, namely the go-ahead for teaching in a German university. Actually, with the Kierkegaard Adorno was at his second attempt to obtain the title, after his former tutor Hans Cornelius suggested he withdrew the first proposal.4 To my purposes, it is not necessary to provide a detailed account of Adorno’s arguments about Kierkegaard’s theoretical legacy, as developed in the 1933 revision of his Habilitationsschrift. seems to allude both to the autonomy of its products and to the fact that they exceed the bonds of plural reason by creating a different normativity. Menke sees Adorno as the author who has most clearly expressed this antinomy (see Menke 1999, vii–xiii). 4  Adorno tried to obtain the habilitation in 1927 with a study on The Concept of Unconscious in Transcendental Theory of Mind; but he succeeded only three years later with the Kierkegaard. The entire story of the habilitation is accurately retraced by Müller-Doohm (2005, pp.  98–109, 119–125).

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However, it is worth mentioning that the book’s aim is twofold: to overturn the canonic interpretation of Kierkegaard’s accounts about aesthetics; and to contribute, although heterodoxically, to the Kierkegaard renaissance, at the time very much in vogue in German universities. As to the first, Kierkegaard is renowned for having doomed the aesthetic stage of life to a significant downplaying, by arguing that it fundamentally fails to attain its true goals, that is to say, sensuous satisfaction (Hampson 2013, pp.  135–138). At variance with this well-established interpretation of the value of the aesthetic in Kierkegaard, Adorno tries to show in which sense it is precisely this kind of unattainable aesthetic satisfaction what can best illustrate Kierkegaard’s notion of existence as “the historical origin of objectless inwardness” (K: 55, Ki: 37). Moreover, hinging upon his intuition, Adorno comprehensively challenges the existentialist approach, that is to say, the mainstream of the Heideggerian ontological position, very popular at the time in the German academy. With the release of Time and Being (1927), in fact, Heidegger highlighted the existential and finite dimension of Kierkegaard’s subjectivity, in particular its role in the context of “being-toward-death”, as Adam Buben (2016, pp. 109–120) has recently emphasized. Adorno, to the opposite, sheds light on the equally present theological element, that is, on the idea of “leap” or salto mortale into faith (Kierkegaard 2009, pp.  85–90), namely what allows the ultimate resolution of the finite abyss of the “objectless inwardness”. By acknowledging this theological dimension, Adorno shows that in Kierkegaard, beyond his mystical turn, the only way to justify the religious leap into faith is not through the firm choice of ethical life, but in the light of the infinite and never reachable satisfaction of the aesthetic one.5 At variance with ontologist trends, the overall sense of the Kierkegaard-­ book for Adorno is, in a nutshell, that of a christening of his inquiries in aesthetics, here achieved by presenting “the aesthetic” element as the form of knowledge in which it is possible to express the social condition of the subject. In fact, the lack of integrity, the gap between subject and  For that reason, according to the interpretation of Robert Hullot-Kentor, Adorno’s book on Kierkegaard “intends to recuperate the sphere of the aesthetic from the dialectic experience” (Hullot-Kentor 2006, p. 79). 5

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objectivity, the late capitalistic oppression of the individual cannot be fully grasped, according to him, by means of the ontological affirmative statements about anguish and death, but should rather be investigated by the indefinite, indirect, and unsatisfied gaze of the aesthetics. In a dialectical argument worthy of Hegel, the way in which Kierkegaard highlights the deficiencies of the aesthetic life is taken precisely as what allows to achieve a clear and effective construction of the aesthetic element. Only in the leap into transcendence Kierkegaard sees the chance to justify the perfect self-knowledge of subjectivity, a chance that is denied to aesthetics, because of its continuous deferment of satisfaction; exactly in this intuition, Adorno recognizes the relevance of Kierkegaard’s aesthetic construction, namely the fact that its incomplete nature allows to express reality in the terms of its fragmented essence: “It is rather a totality of ruins, and in the depths of the chasms between them a dialectic surges that does not flow uninterruptedly from one to the other” (K: 130, Ki: 90). What Adorno criticizes in Kierkegaard is however the idea of the leap into faith, conceived as the attempt to give rise to an idealistic and “positive” (ideologically comforting) ontology that denies the fragmented (and realistic) representation of the world by means of the aesthetic. Kierkegaard, Adorno writes, “repudiates the aesthetic semblance without pursuing the course of the dialectics to its end, a course which the transcendence of semblance makes evident in its semblance itself ” (K: 194, Ki: 137). The “dialectic course” of the aesthetic, however, is visible, Adorno would claim, as soon as one radicalizes the theological element of Kierkegaard’s thought and leaves behind the purely ontological and existential level. What Adorno achieves in the study on Kierkegaard is something close to the finetuning of his aesthetics’ basic conceptual tools, as already deployed in his musicological short essays for the Musikblätter des Anbruchs and the Frankfurter Zeitung, well before their theoretical foundation had been made explicit. The concept of autonomy of art, the double character of the artwork, and the relation between art and society, all the concepts he has drawn from his early readings and family

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environment6 form the theoretical structure of Adorno’s interpretative method, and the study on Kierkegaard gives him the chance to make them explicit through the strenuous conceptual construction of a book, accustomed as he was to writing short essays. As Adorno clearly states, he takes the field of aesthetics as a form of knowledge that spurns the abstract laws of conceptuality without being at the same time arbitrary. In the first section of the Kierkegaard he considers the relation between philosophy—that is, the conceptual discipline par excellence—and art, by stating that “the more exclusively philosophical form is crystallized as such, the more firmly it excludes all metaphors that externally approximates it into art, so much the better is art able to survive as art by strength of its own law of form” (K: 23–24, Ki: 14). With these words, and following Hegel’s example, Adorno intends to criticize any attempt to conceive the artwork, or the aesthetic in general, as the sensible upholstery of a conceptual thought.7 The artwork, on the contrary, is a product in which the conceptual—that is universal—dimension and the element of particularity rise together. The aesthetic element is therefore the kind of feature of human knowledge which is able to identify a single, particular, element whose validity is that of being a model, without qualifying, though, as a criterion, a canon, or an abstract concept. As I will show in the next pages, this determination of the aesthetic corresponds, to an extent, to a reinterpretation of the most basic conceptual elements developed by Kant in his third critical work. With the last of his major works, namely the Critique of the Power of Judgement (1790), Kant lays the groundwork to an assessment of aesthetics as an autonomous discipline, the groundbraking contribution in this respect being Kant’s distinction between determining and reflecting judgment. It would be misleading to identify the third Critique as the answer to one single problem, or to one single author. The overall efforts  Maria Calvelli-Adorno della Piana, the mother of Theodor Wiesengrund, was a pretty well-known opera singer, and she passed on to her son a talent and passion for music. Besides family heritage, great relevance in Adorno’s aesthetic formation has been played by the friendship with Siegfried Kracauer and his art sociology, as Stefan Müller-Doohm (2005, pp. 44–45) underlines. Moreover, one should not forget the effect of Bloch’s expressionistic philosophy as outlined in The Spirit of the Utopia. 7  Hegel sharply criticizes the idea that art can be reduced to a simple sensible make-up of abstract concept. For Hegel’s critique of fabula docet in art, see: Hegel (1975, p. 50). 6

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showcased in the text can be seen, in fact, as the attempt to provide an answer to the problem of Kant’s age in general, that is to say, the problem of the normativity of what is non-normative at all. When the German philosopher, Odo Marquard, identifies the Enlightenment as the attempt to come to terms with the loss of a religious, and therefore normative, explanation of the world by means of what he sees as a set of compensation theories (Kompensationstheorien),8 he has in mind, most likely, the main questions Kant deals with in his third Critique. The reflecting judgment is Kant’s special tool, devised to account for the peculiar normativity of the aesthetic experience. Not the simple average of every single personal taste, as in the empiricist explanation; not the normative application of an inherited canon, as in the classicist one, the aesthetic taste is rather the result of a particular human power, that is, the power of the reflecting judgment (see Guyer 1997, p. 59). To the purposes of this inquiry, however, the key point lies here in the particular kind of normativity of the reflecting judgment.9 The essential difference between determining (or intellectual) judgments and reflecting ones consists, in fact, in how they respectively relate the universal dimension of the norm to the specific individuality of the single particular. As Kant puts it, the distinction between the two kinds of judgment is defined precisely on the basis of the relation to the universal or to the particular: If the universal (the rule, the principle, the law) is given, then the power of judgment, which subsumes the particular under it (even when, as a transcendental power of judgment, it provides the conditions a priori in accordance with which alone anything can be subsumed under that universal), is determining. If, however, only the particular is given, for which the  See for example what Marquard says in his essay “Indicted and Unburdened Man in Eighteenth-­ Century Philosophy”: “Perhaps it is permissible […] to move a late phenomenological concept forward into the 18th century and say that we are dealing here with philosophies that provide new definitions of man which attempt to compensate for a human loss of “life-world”, and a loss that is specific to the middle of the century” (Marquard 1989, p. 41). 9  The question of the normativity of Kant’s reflecting judgment is one of the most difficult problems concerning Kantian thought in general. Hannah Ginsborg has recently asserted the presence of a special kind of normative power in reflective judgment: “What I take Kant to be pointing to, in his connection between aesthetic judgement and the capacity for empirical conceptualization, is a kind of normativity involved in perceptual experience which is independent of the normativity typically associated with cognitive judgement” (Ginsborg 2015, p. 173). 8

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universal is to be found, then the power of judgment is merely reflecting. (Kant 2000, pp. 66–67)

According to the general theory I have here tried to merely sketch out, the aesthetic judgment is never based on an abstract concept of beauty owned by the judging subject, but rather on a subjective feeling that reveals the presence of beauty itself. As it clearly demolishes any direct normative perspective, the fortune of such theory determines a definitive break in aesthetics with any explicitly classicist theory of art. The reader might already have started to see the close connection between the above outlined mechanism behind the reflecting judgment and what in the opening lines of this chapter I have introduced as the double character of the artwork in Adorno, that is to say, its being a particular, individual, product whose existence alludes to an overall, and therefore general, meaning. In this respect, Adorno defines the work of art as “the minute precision and concreteness of a model” (K: 197, Ki: 138), and the model he has in mind is very close to the Kantian universality of the ideal of beauty. More precisely, the aesthetic model is the universal field to which every single artwork belongs, although, unlike intellectual concepts, a particular work could never be abstractly drawn from it. Given the concepts of “red” and “sphere”, we can infer what a “red sphere” is; on the contrary, the model of the aesthetic can only be recognized every time we consider an artwork, and it can never be acquired once and for all. Because of that, the work of art is always affected by the tension between the universal dimension of the exemplary element and the particularity of something new, a tension that Adorno defines by highlighting the necessary temporal dimension of the work: “What truly endures in artworks is not that from which time has been abstracted”, that is, the abstract concept of beauty; it is rather the case that “those motives assert themselves whose hidden eternity is most deeply embedded in the constellation of the temporal” (K: 34, Ki: 21). By means of a typically dialectical argument, Adorno detects the constant and durable element of artworks precisely in the fact that they constantly change without ceasing to be recognized as artwork, then without ceasing to relate directly to a universal model.

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Pupil of the neo-Kantian scholar Cornelius, and certainly fascinated by neo-Kantian ideas,10 Adorno tries in this way to move in the direction of a historicization of the Kantian theory of reflecting judgment. As is well known, in fact, the Kantian subjective universality of beauty is grounded upon the ideal of natural, not artistic, beauty. When Kant writes that “nature was beautiful, if at the same time it looked like art; and art can only be called beautiful if we are aware that it is art and yet it looks to us like nature” (Kant 2000, p. 179), he is not putting art and nature on an equal footing. The beauty of nature is what allows to recognize the beauty of art, although beautiful nature looks like art in the sense that it seems specially made to cause our pleasure.11 Precisely due to his assumptions concerning the natural origin of beauty, Kant’s transcendental determination of aesthetic taste does not imply any sort of historical determination. On the contrary, since Adorno takes aesthetics strictly speaking as pertaining to human-generated artworks, he has to take into account their historic dimension. Art is in fact, for Adorno, an exclusively human and historic product and it cannot be conceived of as if it were a natural and spontaneous phenomenon. This is why the tension between universal and particular established by Kant turns, in Adorno, into the tension between a temporal and a-temporal dimension of the artwork; this dialectical connection expresses, finally, the fact that the universal notion of “the art”—what I have defined as the field of “the aesthetic”— keeps changing historically, but it does not have the power to erase, or modify, the works of the past and their aesthetic ideal. The fact that nowadays Damien Hirst’s shark is an artwork and, say, a hypothetical painting in Leonardo’s style is simply kitsch, does not prevent the fact that La Gioconda is still an artwork exactly as much as Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans. The universal field in which artworks exist as works of art consists, then, in the historical existence and development of the aesthetic element.

 On Adorno’s youthful neo-Kantism, especially in his relationship with Hans Cornelius, see what Brandon Bloch (2017, p. 6) maintains: “The debate about the legacy of Kant that defined German philosophy during Adorno’s intellectually formative years, and in which Cornelius’s works intervened, centered on the capacity of the human subject to generate objective knowledge”. 11  See, for example, how Malcolm Budd (2002, pp. 43–46) describes the natural determination of the ideal of beauty in Kant. 10

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This transition toward the historicization of the Kantian judgment leads Adorno into the field of Hegel’s (and Marxian12) philosophy, and it ultimately explains why he resorted to the study of Kierkegaard—an anti-­ historical thinker par excellence—in order to define his own construction of a historical aesthetics. Rather than explicitly relying on Hegel’s philosophy, Adorno derives in fact his own historic aesthetics from an interpretation of Kierkegaard’s (non-historical) thought; this apparently counterintuitive path clearly defines Adorno’s approach to aesthetics through the construction of what he understands as “the aesthetic”, and can be first and foremost elucidated by taking into account the following passage: Kierkegaard, in contrast to Hegel, failed to achieve historical concretion— the only authentic concretion; he absorbed it into the blind self, volatilized it in the empty spheres: he thereby surrendered philosophy’s central claim to truth—the interpretation of reality—while calling on a theology from which his own philosophy extracted the pith. More emphatically than all previous philosophers, Hegel posited the question of concretion, but succumbed helplessly to it by believing that he had produced it […]. Both philosophers remain idealists (K: 133, Ki: 93).

In this passage Adorno sums up the overall problem of history in his definition of the aesthetic. On the one hand, Hegel has determined aesthetics from the strict point of view of its historical development, but he has grounded it on “the claim of ‘absolute’ spirit” (K: 134, Ki 93), that is on a metaphysical and eternal category, removing in this way any concreteness from it; on the other hand, Kierkegaard engages in the analysis of the concrete and particular subject, but he renounces to any kind of historic determination. Adorno’s move is therefore that of showing the presence of a historical determination (in Hegelian sense) precisely in Kierkegaard’s argument, despite the fact that it belongs to a project of construction of the aesthetic developed precisely with the intention of giving up history. Thus, this is Adorno’s idea, history can emerge without  Hullot-Kentor (2006, pp.  84–85) sees Adorno’s Kierkegaard book as the turning point that reveals Adorno as a Marxist thinker. 12

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being submitted to the metaphysical and idealistic determination of the totality of absolute spirit. The accomplishment of this task is attempted by means of the analysis of the key figure in the whole of the Kierkegaard book, that is to say, the notion of intérieur (inwardness). With this category, in fact, Adorno tries to come to terms with two main sources of his intellectual education: Lukács and Benjamin. Both, indeed, had developed a powerful and dramatic interpretation of inwardness. Lukács by stating that the “second nature” of objective spirit—that is, social disposition in general—corresponds to a “charnel-house of long-dead interiorities [Innerlichkeiten]” (Lukács 1971a, p. 63), and thus that human inwardness is by now empty and meaningless face to the disenchanted reality; Benjamin, instead, by means of an analysis of baroque melancholic interiority, in the Origin of German Tragic Drama, is taken as an allegory of expressionistic inward alienation.13 Likewise, the relevance of Kierkegaard’s theory of inwardness, according to Adorno, rests on the fact that it allows to show what at the beginning of this paragraph we have seen as “the historical origin of objectless inwardness” (K: 55, Ki: 37). To this aim, Adorno takes into account the core of Kierkegaard’s philosophical method, that is, the inner reasoning and pondering, and he tries to show that, rather than an existential conversation about anguish and fear, private speech can be seen as the highest manifestation of the historical condition, inasmuch as “reality finds expression only in the internally contradictory temporal course of the monologue, that is, as history”. Adorno recognizes therefore that Kierkegaard, as Hegel’s opponent, “developed no philosophy of history”. On the contrary, he decided “to use the category of ‘person’ and the person’s inner history to exclude external history”. Nevertheless, this exclusion of history cannot be seen as the definitive word about the external world, in fact “the inner history of the person is bound anthropologically to external history through the unity of the ‘species’” (K: 49, Ki: 32). This means that “even the objectless ‘I’ and its immanent history are bound to historical objectivity” (K: 51–52, Ki: 34). By following this line, Adorno considers Kierkegaard’s  On Adorno’s reception in the Kierkegaard book of Benjamin’s and Lukács problems of inwardness, see the interpretation of Bartholomew Ryan (2014, pp. 177–179). 13

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idea of intérieur in the light of the typical nineteenth-century figure of the flâneur—the bored and disenchanted dandy that strolled through the cities in the century of Baudelaire—who, even though “the world only appears to him reflected by pure inwardness”, actually best expresses the historic condition of his time with his “promenades in his room”. This context is deliberately chosen since “in the intérieur the historical dialectics and the eternal power of nature pose their peculiar puzzle” (K: 62, 69, Ki: 41, 46). What happens, in fact, is that “by denying the social question, Kierkegaard falls into the mercy of his own historical situation, that of the rentier in the first half of nineteenth century” (K: 70, Ki 47–48). The rentier, deriving his income from rents, interests, and other kinds of financial activities, is therefore the model of a private inward person, whose chance to rest in his own interiority, however, is granted to him by the general social labor and therefore by the historical condition. This is how history determines the alleged non-historical interiority, so that “the external world, which at least gives the person some prerogative, is for this very reason condemned in a general ‘external world’, and not as a specifically capitalist world” (K: 72, Ki: 49). What Adorno depicts is a scenery in which he combines both Lukács’ description of the objective world as a second nature (the “charnel-house of long-dead interiorities”), and Benjamin’s image of the melancholic interiority.14 In this scenario, the social world has lost any kind of significance and the meaningless objectivity, the loss of immediacy, imposes on the subject to escape into inwardness. In fact, the “pathos of entreaty”, that prevents Kierkegaard’s subjectivity from falling into complete isolation, “is valid only in a society of immediate human relations, from which Kierkegaard well knows that he is separated. Fleeing precisely from reification, he withdraws into ‘inwardness’. In this arena, however, he acts as if that immediacy still existed in the external world, whose ersatz is inwardness itself ” (K: 74–75, Ki: 50). It is, then, the reification of the  As Ferenc Feher notices (1985, pp. 126–128), Benjamin’s notion of deprived interiority has been influenced by Lukács’ Weber-inspired conception of world’s Godforsakenness, although he admits (130–134) the emerging of sharp contrast among them after Lukács’ abjuration of History and Class Consciousness. In their monumental biography of Benjamin, however, Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings do not recognize a great relevance to Lukács’ influence on Benjamin, by roughly limiting it to the effect of History and Class Consciousness during Benjamin’s Marxist turn (Eiland and Jennings 2014, pp. 205–206). 14

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social world, of the external and historical second nature, what pushes the subject into their own inwardness, whose internal constitution is increasingly different from that of the social world, especially the farther the latter becomes commodified. Now, after the assessment of his pivotal argument about inwardness, it should be easier to understand why, and in which sense, Adorno focuses on Kierkegaard’s construction of “the aesthetic” in order to establish the theoretical basis to his own “aesthetics”. The historical constitution of the non-historical inwardness corresponds in fact to the expression of what we have seen at the beginning of this chapter as the determining quality of art, that is its autonomy. As I have already remarked, in fact, “the autonomy of art, its quality of being a law onto itself, the impossibility of arranging it at will according to the dictates of use, is […] the expression of that reification” (WnK: 825–826, EoM: 128). Similarly to how the subject’s inwardness constitutes itself as a private and isolated space because of the pressure of the external world, the work of art has to be defined as autonomous in accordance to the increasing distance it takes from the petrified and reified world of the market and of social conventions. Whereas the beauty of Kantian aesthetics is the reflection of the subject’s feeling in front of the representation of the object, Adorno’s notion of artwork stands for the objective expression of the subject’s interiority, where the interiority is that of the creating subject. The autonomy of art, one of the most basic features of the artwork according to Adorno, closely matches the historicization of the aesthetics, or better the outcome of a historical movement that, starting from the transcendental and “natural” conception of Kantian aesthetics, goes in the direction of the Hegelian interpretation of the matter in terms of a philosophy of art. This is why the autonomy of art cannot be seen merely as a philosophical translation of the modernist motto l’art pour l’art,15 as the left oriented critique to Adorno in the 1970s did.16 On the contrary, claims about the autonomy of art aim to explain to what extent even the most elitist  By contrast, Thijs Lijster (2017, p.  48) sees the autonomy of art as art’s being free from the Church, public institutions, traditions, canons, and so on, that is, as the idea of art for art’s sake. 16  See how James Martin Harding (1997, pp. 11–15) reconstructs the rejection of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory immediately after its publication in 1970. 15

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supporters of “art for art’s sake”, of art as an Empyrean and pure activity, are determined by their own historical context. The two features of the artwork we have seen in the opening pages show finally a close inter-connection. Starting from Kierkegaard’s construction of “the aesthetic” as that sphere which is able to explain the fragmented and unsatisfied inwardness of late capitalism, Adorno can build his own “aesthetics” as the demonstration of the artistic quality of the artworks. Aesthetics corresponds then to the determination of the general field of the aesthetic products, or better to the critical demonstration of the qualities of the products that belong to that field, namely the works of art. Similar to the theoretical space in which the aesthetic has been constructed, that is Kierkegaard’s inwardness, the work of art is a product whose structural formal laws—and for Adorno artistic logic is always a formal one—rejects the laws of reification, of commodification, of the social world. As an autonomous reaction to social conditions, the artworks are therefore both an expression of society and a critical judgment on its objective configuration. The work of art, in fact, although it can no longer be reduced to the outdated category of beauty, still preserves the dimension of conciliation. Social contradictions, human suffering and pain, are subsumed in the aesthetic form of the artwork and, in this form, they are somehow pacified. The artwork can therefore be still regarded as “beautiful” in the same sense in which one can exclaim “beautiful!” in front of the most violent and disturbing exhibition of Hermann Nitsch. According to Adorno, that exclamation is the demonstration that the work succeeded in its own task, that of being an expression of and at the same time a critical judgment on society. This is possible, Adorno would add, in virtue of the autonomy of art’s formal law, which is forced notably by the heteronomy of social pressure.

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1.2 K  ierkegaard (ii): The Myth and the History Art, for Adorno, consists in the historic layout of what Hegel would call “the spirit (Geist)”, and that in the contemporary pragmatist-oriented interpretation of German Idealism becomes “the normative space of reasons” (Pinkard 2002, p. 251), within which the moves of each actor are justified based on commitments and entitlements to action. In these terms, one can also understand a given configuration of social life—in Adorno’s words—or a specific spiritual figure—in Hegel’s—close to one of Wittgenstein’s language games, whose viable moves are justified by a certain set of rules, here embodied in the aesthetic expression of the artworks. As soon as the specific “social game” expressed for example by Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass ceases to be normative, a subsequent set of rules expresses a new kind of aesthetic meaning, as conveyed for example by Klimt’s Judith.17 In this respect, Adorno clearly says that “aesthetics does not mean, as it did not mean in Kierkegaard, merely a theory of art, but rather, in Hegelian terms, a stance of thought toward objectivity” (Pei, p. 12); the “Hegelian sense” to which Adorno alludes is the idea that art corresponds to the “unfolding of the truth” (Hegel 1975, p. 1236), that is to the layout of the truth of the space of reasons, within which a particular work of art is justified as art and at the same time—and this is what differentiates Adorno’s position from the general field of pragmatism—judges the disposition of the space of reason itself; this is how “theological truth crashes down to human level as aesthetic truth and reveals itself to man as sign of hope” (K: p. 148, Ki: 104). It may then seem that, based on this explanatory framework, that of art is a solved problem, with nothing left to do but being better defined. This would be true if it wasn’t for the pivotal dilemma with which all post-Kantian aesthetics have tried to come to terms, that of the aesthetic creation, and to which Adorno attempts to provide an answer by means of the obscure and prima facie controversial notion of “myth”. Although the German debate on the question of myth proliferated again in the  This is basically the argument of Robert Pippin when he describes Hegel as “the theorist of modernism, malgré lui and avant la letter” (Pippin 2014, p. 38). 17

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second half of the 1920s, what Adorno subsumed under this concept has much more to do with a reworking of a traditional aesthetic problem than with the neo-Romantic, and pre-National Socialist, discussion.18 When in 1926 Thomas Mann—the already famous and celebrated author of The Magic Mountain, almost revered by Adorno19—released a short reportage on his trip to France, the neo-Romantic wave was already traveling at full speed and, as Thomas Mann noticed, it was already anti-­ parliamentarily oriented.20 A prominent scholar quoted by Mann is Alfred Baeumler, the future holder of the chair of political pedagogy in Hitler’s Berlin, one of those who tried to intellectually legitimize National Socialism by exploiting some obscure argument in Nietzsche’s late works. Also in 1926, however, Baeumler published an interesting selection of writings of the, at the time, almost forgotten late-Romantic author Johann Jakob Bachofen, by giving a new turn to the debate on myth. In the generous Introduction to the book, Baeumler lays the ground to an interpretation of mythology according to which myth, precisely as natural origin of culture, contains the truest essence of people. In his own words, this conception of myth leads to the idea that “the people [das Volk], the race, are always in an arcane relationship with the ‘original cliff’ on which they were sculpted, and they continue to live in the permanent communion of natural life with it” (Baeumler 1956, p. CLXXVI). This notion of the original unity of natural and cultural life—the core notion in Nazi Blut und Boden—clearly shows to what extent caution should be exerted while handling the notion of myth, but  For the purposes of my research, it can be helpful to refer to Peter Davies’ work about the debate on myth in German culture, especially where he provides an account of the reception of Johann J. Bachofen between the 1920s and the 1930s thanks to the debate involving Ludwig Klages, Alfred Baeumler, Carl Albrech Bernulli, Ernst Howald, and Thomas Mann (see, Davies 2012, pp.  285–309). As the Italian scholar Furio Jesi suggests, the twentieth-century debate can be divided in a far right-wing (even fascist) attitude that aims to “drink at the spring” of myth (authors like Baeumler, Klages, and Mircea Eliade), and in a leftist (or Marxist) orientation whose intention is that to explain the myth; to this latter orientation belongs Benjamin (Jesi 1973, pp. 69–75). 19  As he writes to Mann after they got to know each other in California, when he was eighteen years old (i.e. in 1921), during a holiday in Kampen, he met the writer and followed him just imagining a hypothetical conversation with him (BW3: 17, Cor3: 10). 20  Thomas Mann (1926, in particular pp. 59–61) explicitly connected the anti-democratic and anti-­ parliamentary feeling of both Germany and French to a full argument about the neo-Romantic interpretation and, according to him, misinterpretation of the late Nietzsche. 18

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at the same time it specifies how much Adorno borrowed from the debate of his time—it is also not a coincidence that Benjamin himself dedicated a study to Bachofen’s mythology, yet disdaining Baeumler by counting him among the “official exponents of German fascism”.21 The reader will pardon my decision to introduce the discussion on myth referencing Baeumler’s controversial account, rather than with other equally relevant but less contentious authors.22 My decision has been motivated by the wish to roughly, and thereby clearly, illustrate the basic structural lines accounting for the German discussion about this topic in the 1920s and 1930s, in other words the ambiguous braiding of culture and nature, and in this respect Baeumler’s reference provides a rough but clear introduction. This is the cultural landscape inspired by which, in the book on Kierkegaard, Adorno writes that “in the reified world itself, however, by its history, mythological nature is driven back into the inwardness of the individual”, and that “for the instant of the pause, where dialectic comes to a stop, is the same instant where nature, its mythical basis, reverberates in the depth of the sounding of the hour” (K: 89, 144; Ki: 60, 101). As previously anticipated, the reason why Adorno employs the notion of myth in this context has to be found in the typical aesthetic problem of artistic creation and, in addition, in the attempt to keep together Lukács’ Hegelian perspective and Benjamin’s Romantic heritage. I have also already pointed out some problematic aspects in the attempt to historicize the Kantian argument, in short the issues connected to the implementation of a notion of aesthetic value derived from a natural ideal of beauty to a non-natural but broadly speaking cultural product. The fundamental theoretical ground of Kant’s third Critique, in fact, is based on the “as if ” methodological presupposition.23 On this ground, we find  The quotation comes from Benjamin’s 1935 essay published under the title, “Johan Jackob Bachofen” (Benjamin 2006a, p. 19). 22  In the German philosophical debate, the question of Myth was at stake in several authors during the years of the Weimar Republic. One can mention, for example, Ernst Cassirer, Ludwig Klages, Ernst Jünger, Oswald Spengler, as well as Carl Schmitt; one should also add, Sigmund Freud, with his interpretation of the psychological meaning of myth, and Carl Gustav Jung. 23  This is one of the most relevant aspects of the Critique of the Power of Judgement, not only for the aesthetic part, but also, and a fortiori, for the teleological one. It would be difficult to isolate some exemplary passages, given the widespread dissemination of the as if argument in the text. For a 21

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nature attractive and beautiful because it seems to be designed precisely to that purpose, that is, as if it was conceived by a creating intellect. At the same time, we agree that we cannot know the project of that hypothetical designer, nor can we state the effective existence of that sort of intellect behind nature’s form. Nevertheless, we must observe that “nature is represented through this concept as if an understanding contained the ground of the unity of the manifold of its empirical laws” (Kant 2000, p. 68; emphasis mine). The dynamics of the reflecting judgment, in fact, is effective as long as we assume a free will, although it is clear that we can never intellectually demonstrate an object to be created according to a “purposiveness without an end” (Kant 2000, p. 111). This is what I have defined as the normativity of what is absolutely non-normative. But what happens when we apply this specific idea of aesthetic value to a product that, instead, is exactly designed in order to be aesthetically appreciated, as in the case of the artwork? Coming to the fore in the early stages of the reception of Kant’s work on aesthetics, it can be argued that this is, in fact, the basic problem of German aesthetics. As Schiller’s intellectual path clearly shows, in fact, conceiving artistic creation in terms of nature’s “purposiveness without an end” leads to the notion of ancient naïve genius, whose determination as an involuntary aesthetic creator makes nothing but shifting the unintentionality from nature to an idealized and non-historical origin of culture, that is to a mythical and imaged ancient Greece, as Schiller points out in the piece Über naïve und senthimentalische Dischtung (One Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, 1795–96). As nature creates beauty without having beauty as its proper aim, the artistic genius shapes the work of art according to some natural kind of spontaneity and inspiration, like a naïve child intent to freely play a purposeless game. However, as Peter Szondi (1972, pp. 174–206) recognizes in his essay “Das Naïve ist das Senthimentalische” (“The Naïve Is the Sentimental”), the possibility itself to recognize something as “naïve”, or “natural”, in this context, stems directly from the modern, sentimental and non-natural attitude. Therefore, for Schiller poets can be naïve or sentimental, “they will either general overview, see the way in which Christian Helmut Wenzel (2005, pp. 78–85) accounts for the Kantian argument.

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be nature, or they will seek the lost nature” (Schiller 1993, p. 196), but the excellence of naivety can be appreciated only by the one who is no longer naïve and natural.24 Exactly from this kind of tension in the definition of art’s creator, originates, roughly speaking, the sharpest, most distinguishing, and irreconcilable split in modern aesthetics, that is between the Romantic and the Hegelian explanation of art. Based on Schiller’s— but to some extent also Goethe’s—reception of the Kantian problem, one is inclined to see the Romantic, especially the early Romantic, and the Hegelian solutions as two alternative and competing strategies aimed at solving the same set of questions.25 While being aware of somehow oversimplifying things here, I take the most significant and representative notions of both early Romantic and Hegelian aesthetics as a reaction to the general debate on the role of will in art’s creation.26 Having Kant actually exposed the theoretical meaning of aesthetic value, and having defined it as a product whose natural disposition must only seem to be intentionally designed, artists find themselves in the paradoxical position of knowing exactly the thing they mustn’t know in order to naturally and spontaneously, that is, non-intentionally, do their job. In order to save the naturalness of artistic expression, the Jena Romantic circle developed the idea of a new kind of symbolic and sedimented meanings having the same value of the ancient ones. As Friedrich Schlegel writes in the Dialogue on Poetry: “We have no mythology. But, I add, we are close to obtaining one or, rather, it is time that we earnestly work together to create one” (Schlegel 1968, p. 81). According to Hegel, this

 As Frederick Beiser (2005, pp. 246–249) remarks, Schiller does not share the fanatic enthusiasm for the inspiration of genius typical of the period of Sturm und Drang. 25  This is a well-established description of aesthetics in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, to the point that it seems almost a cliché. But a quick look at the histories of aesthetics confirms that this cliché, in some way or another, comes in handy for a general presentation of the matter. This happens when Paul Guyer (2014, pp. 106–107) describes late modern aesthetics under the influence either of Hegel or Schopenhauer; Similarly, Jay Bernstein (2005, pp. vii–ix) presents the Hegelian and Romantic aesthetics as two alternative and opposed possibilities to approach the discipline. 26  Although the rightful restrictions connected to this inquiry force me to shorten some of the arguments on this topic, I refer the reader to my paper, “A Kantian Answer to the Romantics. Hegel’s Idea of Genius and the Unity of Nature and Freedom” (Farina 2019). 24

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amounts to a naïve and mystical understanding of art,27 whose sole contribution is that of making clear that art has by now lost its effectual value due exactly to an overabundant consciousness of its own tasks. As the self-proclaimed newborn Hegelian Arthur Danto recognizes, “the historical stage of art is done with when it is known what art is and means” (Danto 1984, p. 31). Rather than a new form of mythology, romantic art displays the end of any mythology all together. “In our day”, writes Hegel in his Lectures on Fine Art, “in the case of almost all peoples, criticism, the cultivation of reflection, and, in our German case, freedom of thought have mastered the artists too, and have made them, so to say, a tabula rasa in respect of the material and the form of their productions” (Hegel 1975, p. 605). This loss of substantiality is precisely what pushes art to its death. The way in which Adorno calls into question the notion of myth in the Kierkegaard book corresponds then to the manner in which he deals with the problem of the relationship between the I’s artistic creation and its historical determination on the path of the construction of his aesthetics. As Adorno says, “creation is reduced to spirit in the self in order to rescue the self from its fallenness”, and “the natural content of mere spirit, ‘historical’ in itself, may be called mythical”. The notion of myth, therefore, is called to purpose precisely in order to give something like a natural basis to the I’s existence and production, something to which the I has to react when it creates art, “for the mythical […] is not a free creation of the author” (K: 114,78, Ki: 78, 53). In this sense, Adorno sees what he takes as a “dialectic” that “transpires between nature and spirit, mythical content and consciousness, as qualitatively different, strictly contrary powers” (K: 86, Ki: 58). The myth, in this respect, especially to the extent that it is defined as “natural”, corresponds to the not-free element of history, to that quality and moment of historical development that seems to be completely independent from human free will and that gives the impression of overcoming human beings as an external pressure; “in the reified

 Ernst Behler as well, one of the most relevant scholars of German early Romantics, recognizes the mystical aspect of the new mythology: “This is the ‘mystical’ aspect of early Romanticism which is strictly abhorred and avoided by A. W. Schlegel. Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis liked to indulge in it, referring to it ironically as their attempt at founding a new religion. The best-known designation for this new tendency, however, is that of a ‘new mythology’” (Behler 1993, p. 158). 27

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world, however, by its history, mythical nature is driven back into inwardness of individual” (K: 89, Ki: 60). After having made natural beauty “historical”, Adorno’s reference to the notion of myth aims, ultimately, to the naturalization of history itself. The notion of myth is connected here to the same semantic field already prominent in the German debate on mythology. “Mythical” is in this respect any kind of social sedimented practice, whose fixity, while accounting for the non-intentional dimension of artistic production, appears as natural as any other steady element. In 1932, just about when work on the Kierkegaard was ongoing, Adorno held a conference under the title The Idea of Natural History. Also in this conference he deals with the problem of the relationship between history, nature, and mythology, and he declares that his goal is that to “comprehend historical being in its most extreme historical determinacy, where it is most historical, as natural being, or if it were possible to comprehend nature as an historical being where it seems to rest most deeply in itself as nature”, and he clarifies that “the concept of nature that is to be dissolved is one that, if I translated it into standard philosophical terminology, would come closest to the concept of myth” (IdN, 355, 345, INH: 117, 111). Aesthetics, as Adorno says in the conference, is the branch of human knowledge that is able to formulate this idea of natural history,28 that is to express the fact that history is bound to a non-intentional element, and this element corresponds to its myth. In order to back this interpretation, in his contribution, Adorno mentions and quotes two texts about aesthetics we have already mentioned: Lukács’ Theory of the Novel and Benjamin’s Origin of German Tragic Drama. To hold these perspectives together is then one of the aims of both the conference and the book on Kierkegaard. From Lukács’ Hegelian theory Adorno borrows the critical dimension of myth as a configuration of natural history. He closely echoes Lukács’ Hegel-inspired notion of “second nature”, as outlined, for instance, in the following statement: “This second nature is not dumb, sensuous and yet senseless like the first: it is a complex of senses—meanings—which has  That of 1932 is a particularly intricate conference, in which Adorno obscurely presents his idea of history and nature. Max Pensky (2004, p. 277) has defined it as “troubling”, and Susan Buck-­ Morss (1977, p. 53) as “obscure”. Recently, Tom Whyman (2016, pp. 452–472) tried to understand that of natural history as a therapeutic concept. 28

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become rigid and strange, and which no longer awakens interiority” (Lukács 1971a, p. 63). The mythical nature is, in this respect, the hidden (irreconciled) meaning that art brings to light and helps overcome; it corresponds to the double character of art, in terms of expression of mythical naturalness and judgment of its configuration. According to Hegel’s reasoning, in fact, art is a cultural production through which the hidden content of Geist becomes known and therefore ceases to be mythical. As some Italian scholars have remarked, Hegel presents art as somehow fluidifying the rigid, mythical, social meaning.29 In this respect Adorno’s idea of myth as unconscious, rigid, natural dimension of art seems to be a consistent, and critical, reinterpretation of that dynamics. In the Kierkegaard, however, one can find also a second, ambiguous, and obscure meaning of myth as nature, a meaning that derives from the other great influence in this text: Benjamin. The last chapter of the book, in fact, is devoted to the awaited Construction of the Aesthetic, and this is where Adorno mostly deals with Benjamin’s categories, such as that of melancholy and fragment. By nuancing the image of a rigid nature with that of natural (dynamic) decay, what Adorno notably attempts is to provide a viable solution to the impasse of a merely critical notion of myth. In this respect, Benjamin appears as the advocate of an allegorical strategy, allowing him to claim, for instance, that “everything about history that, from the very beginning, has been untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful, is expressed in a face – or rather in a dead’s head” (Benjamin 1998, p.  166). Along the same lines, Adorno tries to save the natural, fragmented elements by saying that “the origin of their luminosity is putrefaction” (K: 181, Ki: 127). This tactic, however, forces Adorno into a twofold interpretation of myth. As we have seen, in fact, the mythical nature is what art brings to light in order to make it known and solved, but now we are told that “the hope that inheres in the aesthetic is that of the transparence of decaying figures” (K: 187, Ki: 132), and the reason lies in the fact that “through fantasy, as recollection, genius continuously restores original creation – not  For example, this is how Dino Formaggio (1983, pp. 133–136), in the book published under the title La “morte dell’arte” e l’estetica (The “Death of Art” and the Aesthetics), presents his interpretation of Hegel’s idea of death of art in the terms of a rebirth of art itself. 29

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as the creator of its reality but by the reintegration of its given elements in an image. The moments of fantasy are the festivals of history” (K: 197, Ki 139). In order to hold together the critical dimension of myth and the significance of the disenchanted nature—in order, that is, to hold together Lukács and Benjamin—Adorno is forced to consider the activity of genius as an utter, immediate, and natural creation of meaning. Adorno’s idea is therefore that to conceive in the first place the mythical side of history as a rigid and fixed nature, by showing in the second place myth in the light of nature as decaying, that is in its transitory embodiment. “Natural” decay shows the necessary decay (the transience) of the natural and mythical side of history. In order to see this second aspect as “the hope that inheres in the aesthetic”, justified by the genius who would be able to “restore original creation”, Adorno is however forced to take art’s production as an immediate creation of an uncorrupted and reconciled meaning. This is how the book on Kierkegaard ultimately holds together two opposite reactions to the same aesthetic problem: that of the historicization of Kant’s reflecting judgment. On the one hand, a critical notion of myth is implicitly developed as what has to be dissolved by means of the construction of the aesthetic; on the other hand, still prominent is the idea of myth as the “pre-historical” and conciliated nature that the construction of the aesthetic is called to restore. In what follows, I will show first in which sense the path through which Adorno accomplishes the construction of his aesthetics corresponds to an effort to come to terms with this ambiguity, and finally how this leads to breaking up with some of Benjamin’s concepts and developing the notion of “Culture Industry”, as outlined in the Dialectics of the Enlightenment.

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1.3 T  he Anti-Romantic Choice and Its Consequences: Art and Society Among the various and heterogeneous influences that make up Adorno’s natural and mythical image of history—it would be about time to mention Max Weber’s theory of disenchanted and secularized modernity30— so far, I have neglected possibly the most relevant, if one is to believe the closing remarks to the conference on The Idea of Natural History: “it could be demonstrated that what has been said here is only an interpretation of certain fundamental elements of the materialist dialectics” (IdN: 365, INH: 124); this influence is obviously that of Karl Marx. In the German Ideology, Marx, in fact, provides a full account of history in terms of development. The main features of such a development’s movement represent a guiding thread for Adorno’s ideas on the natural-mythical determination of history. According to Marx’s account, one can point to the “source and theatre of all history”, against which people “become more and more enslaved under a power alien to them”, and this is “a pressure which they have conceived of as a dirty trick on the part of the so-called world spirit”, that they have intended “as ‘substance’ and ‘essence of man’”, and that “hovers over the earth like the fate of the ancients” (Marx 2004, pp.  57, 55, 59, 55). In the first book of The Capital, moreover, Marx takes into account the basic economic laws of said historical process, and he claims that they “appear to the political economists’ bourgeois consciousness to be as much a self-evident and nature-imposed necessity” (Marx 1990, p.  175). Here lie precisely the first seeds for Adorno’s idea of history as a natural-mythical development, seeds that clearly reject the Romantic conception of myth as the harmonic, conciliated, origin of history. The artwork, as a historical product, corresponds in this respect to the exhibition of this contradictory dynamics, but as an aesthetic product—that is, as a disposition of social contradictions in a successful aesthetic form—it corresponds also to the demonstration of the irreconciled character of society. The growing awareness of this  Weber, with the ideas of disenchantment of the world and secularization, was one of the most influential authors between the first and the second decade of the nineteenth century; for the relevance of Weber in Adorno’s youth, see Axel Honneth (2003, pp. 175–187). 30

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conceptual principle drives Adorno on the path of the resolution of the tension between a Romantic and a social-historical interpretation of myth, as shown by his writings on the sociology of music. In 1932, Adorno wrote a two-part essay for the first issues of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, the official journal of the Institute for Social Research—the institutional affiliation of the group that will eventually be renowned as Frankfurt School. The journal, strongly wanted by the director of the Institute, Max Horkheimer,31 was principally devoted to collect “factors, that are determining for the co-existence of human beings in present day” (Horkheimer 1932, p. i). Adorno contributed to the project with a piece On the Social Situation of Music, which also paves the way to the development of his overall sociology of music. As far as this research is concerned, the essay is of great relevance inasmuch as it establishes, ex negativo, the impossibility to hold together—or rather to mediate between—the Romantic and the Hegelian stance toward art. As Richard Leppert recognizes, the essay lays out a diagnosis of the process of commodification of music (and art in general) —of the absorption of music in the economic process of production and consumption— by isolating what Adorno takes as the real autonomous music, in other words music that “escapes complete commodification, but only to be exiled from a society that has no use for it” (Leppert 2002, pp.  332). Despite being constantly exposed to the socio-economic pressure of commodification, music has to preserve its own aesthetic quality in order to, according to Adorno’s Freudian lexicon (ZgL: 771, EoM: 427), “sublimate” social contradiction. The relation between art and society is therefore built upon a continuous process of mediation. Art is socially mediated in the sense that it exists only for the sake of social conflicts, and society itself is artistically mediated inasmuch as art allows knowledge of social conflicts from within, without being simultaneously projected beyond them. This is why art is granted the character of cognition, consequently demanded of “any music”, as of any form of art, “which today wishes to preserve its right to existence” (ZgL: 732, EoM: 393). The kind of conciliation that art can claim for itself is just the aesthetic and therefore  A reconstruction of the birth and of the early years of activity of the Frankfurt Institute under the direction of Horkheimer can be found in Müller-Doohm (2005, pp. 150–158). 31

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formal composition of social conflicts, achieved precisely by depositing those tensions in a successful aesthetic form; on the contrary, art cannot produce any effective social resolution of contradiction. Only in the light of real, effective, antinomies art appears conciliated; not in the light of an alleged image of social harmony. Having clarified this issue, it is now possible to explore how Adorno comes to terms with the seeds of his critique of the Romantics. While describing the attempt to build a form of autonomous music in the time of late expressionism, he writes that radical freedom from all objective norms imposed upon music from the exterior is coordinated with the most extreme rigidity of immanent structures, so that music by its own forces eliminates at least within itself alienation as a manner of subjective formation and objective material. […] To be sure, music overcomes inward alienation only through the perfected expression thereof on its exterior. And if one were to assume that the immanent overcoming of aporias of music were consistently possible, this would be nothing more than a romantic transfiguration of craftsmanship. (ZgL: 739, EoM: 399–400)

The “romantic transfiguration of craftsmanship” would be therefore the supposition that art—in this case, music—could somehow overcome its own time out of its own efforts and independently produce the conciliation of social antagonisms.32 What art can do, according to Adorno, is instead to reproduce contemporary social contradictions and—by showing their possible conciliation in the aesthetic element—express the necessity of their historical overcoming. What an artwork could never do is, conversely, to normatively indicate the solution of antagonisms. It would then fall under the same contradictions it wants to protest, inasmuch as it would (somehow) presuppose the existence (somewhere) of conciliation and the possibility to use it as its normative model. This is, in brief, the Romantic assumption on art, the presumption to own the image of conciliation and to be able to socially communicate it by means of artworks. As already recalled, Schlegel would claim that: “We have no mythology. But, I add, we are close to obtaining one or, rather, it is time that we earnestly work together to create one”. By contrast, Adorno says  The relationship between the autonomy and the social character of music in the essay of 1932 is defined in this way also by Max Paddison (1993, pp. 98–99). 32

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that “if the immanent development of music were established as an absolute – as the mere reflection of social process – the only result would be a sanction of the fetish character of music […]. On the other hand, it is clear that music is not to be measured in terms of the existing society of which it is the product and which, at the same time, keeps music in a state of isolation” (ZgL: 73, EoM: 393). Romantic, in a broad sense, is therefore any attempt to conceive art in the terms of an harmonic and conciliated model that can be opposed to social antagonism as a normative framework. From generic Marxian theory, one learns that, assuming that historical society presents an unreconciled and antagonistic structure, then the normative value of art entails necessarily crediting to the aesthetic an immediate value, the ability, that is, to evoke something like a pre-historical (or even post-historical, messianic) conciliated harmony. In this respect, Adorno talks about the “force of reification which constituted music as art” that “could not simply be reconverted to immediacy without returning art to the state in which it found itself before the division of labour” (ZgL: 730, EoM: 392). Although these words might not sound particularly familiar today, in the 1930s most people would have read the state “before the division of labour” as the conservative, fascist, ideology of corporative work, and as a regression to an idealized and mythical age before capitalistic division, in this sense very close to the romantic ideal of mythical harmonic origins, expressed for example by Novalis’ medieval provocative utopia of Christianity or Europe. As is well known, in fact, the Nazi movement took advantage of a mis-(or over-)interpretation of some Romantic, as well as Nietzschean, ambiguous theoretical elements33—basically, of the idea that the past corresponds to an idyllic age sheltered from modern division of labor—and this is the reason why any kind of past-oriented mythology always runs the risk of being accused of conservatism, obscurantism, or

 Christa Kamenetsky (1972, pp.  198–199) stresses for example the origin in Herder and in Romanticism of the idea of Volk as natural, organic, unity rooted in the past, although she underlines (pp. 203–206) the difference between the Romantic idea of community (Gemeinschaft) and the Nazi theory of race. Lawrence Birke (1999, pp.  34–35) shows in which terms the German Jewish writer Victor Klemperer conceived the Nazi idea of their boundless power as a heritage of the Romantic image of progressive universality. 33

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even fascism, as in the case of Tolkien’s novels.34 To the opposite, Adorno has always been attracted by Benjamin’s interpretation of Karl Kraus’ powerful line “origin is the goal [Ursprung is das Ziel]” (Kraus 1952–1964, vol. 7, p. 59),35 that fits well into the Marxian idea according to which conflicts and contradictions are endemic to society, rather than coming from outside, as external crisis factors (such as modernity, minorities, and migrants). Kraus’ quotation is therefore integrated as a stimulus to set the idea of harmonic origin not in a mythical past, but rather as a goal to be historically achieved. As a result, rather than being the real place of conciliation, myth corresponds to the ideological structure that covers up the endemic social antagonism by passing off its idealized and abstract image for something to be effectively achieved, and by diverting in this way the attention from the real social contradiction, which remains unsolved. Art, real radical art, is a critique precisely of this ideological dynamics. Having this idea in mind, Adorno outlines what he intends as the most radical opposition of modern music, that is to say, that among Arnold Schönberg and Igor Stravinsky, which also provides the ground material of the 1949 monograph The Philosophy of Modern Music, as I will show in the next chapter. For the time being, suffice it to say that Stravinsky’s objectivist classicism is equated to the attempt to restore an ancient and harmonic dimension of music, whereas Schönberg’s twelve-tone technique—in analogy with the striving toward the rough disenchantment of Kraus’, Freud’s, Kubin’s and Schiele’s “Great Vienna” —supports the idea that a fragmented and disharmonious form is the essence of the properly modern work of art. Diametrically opposite to Schönberg’s acknowledgement of the conflictual fragmentation of modernity, Stravinsky would try instead to heal social antagonism by means of a violent repackaging of ancient harmony. One may then conclude that Stravinsky is in music what fascism was in politics. As Adorno writes: “The estate-corporative organization of a highly industrial economic context is manifested, which  David Oberhelman (2006, pp. 410–411) sheds some light on the overview of Marxist critical readings of Tolkien’s narratives as a conservative set of ideology. 35  On Kraus’ quotation about the origin, see the analysis of Hent de Vries (2005, pp. 214–218). As Robert Hullot-Kentor shows the motto has an ambiguous sense, as, with seemingly conservative meaning, it alluded to the need to restore in the future the damaged origin (Hullot-Kentor 2006, pp. 5–7). 34

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in objectivist music appears as a conforming image: it appears that the sovereign composer stands in free control of the supposed musical organism, in much the same way that in fascism a ‘leadership elite’ [Führerelite] appears to be in control, while in truth power over social ‘organism’ lies in the hands of monopoly capitalism” (ZgL: 743–744, EoM: 404). As we have seen in the historical interpretation of reflecting judgment, according to Adorno, art as “model” should emerge directly from its being oriented toward particularity and historical newness, not as a normative stance that the author can somehow assume toward reality. Under these circumstances, it is possible to pinpoint a crucial consequence of Adorno’s anti-Romantic position in the essay “On the Social Situation of Music”, a consequence that goes in the direction of a critique of some developments of Benjamin’s aesthetics. What I have outlined as the core of Adorno’s critique of Romanticism—the idea that the author can aesthetically promote the resolution of social antagonism by somehow tracing the harmonious image of conciliation—paradoxically leads to take politically engaged art as internal to the broad field of the Romantic framework. I say “paradoxically” because Romanticism in nineteenth-­ century art is generally labeled as a conservative attitude, whereas political engagement is normally traced back to the field of progressive Marxism. The analogy between Romanticism and artistic political engagement is clearly laid out, though, when Adorno observes that engaged art shares some fundamental aspects with Wagner’s great Romantic project for a Zukunftsmusik (The Music of the Future). As much as the Romantic ideal is based on the assumption that immediate knowledge of the archaic model is possible, as well as on its mythological repackaging, engaged art—although opposed to any regressive position—supports the aesthetic enactment of political values which are able to establish social harmony. The name mentioned here by Adorno is that of Bertolt Brecht. What Adorno wishes to criticize in both the Romantic and the politically engaged understanding of art is nothing but their wrong attribution of meaning to aesthetic immediacy.36 Adorno’s essay on Wagner,  See Adorno about Kurt Weill’s and Brecht’s works Three Penny Opera and Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, where after a general appreciation of the spirit, Adorno recognizes two kind of ambiguities: “The misunderstanding of the audience which peacefully consumes the songs of the 36

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especially the parts written in the 1930s,37 notably develops the key elements of the critique of immediacy. Adorno, in fact, traces Wagner’s antisemitism back to a distorted understanding of the concept of immediacy. Needless to say, Wagner and his Zukunfstmusik represent for Adorno the point of convergence of Romantic and engaged art. Wagner’s music would, in this respect, try to solve social mediated antagonisms as if they qualified as biological immediate ones, since “if in the social process of life ‘ossified relationships’ form a second nature, then it is this second nature at which Wagner gazes transfixed, mistaking it for the first” (VüW: 22–23, SoW: 16). Immediacy is here the theoretical category that fosters a misunderstanding of the naturalness of history. As a result of such a misunderstanding, history would not appear as the ossification of social relationship, but as the immediate expression of an original, biological nature. Consequently, the subject’s sacrosanct intolerance for the pressure of social conflicts may even turn into antisemitism, that is a resentment against the race, ideologically conceived as an immediate natural feature in the sense of an original nature. According to an immediacy-based interpretation of its meaning, and against the confusion generated by the modern and cosmopolite melting pot, also myth as petrification of social relationships becomes the myth of a natural, harmonic, and pre-historical unity of race. In Hegelian terms, Adorno always understands immediacy as an abstract, partial, deficient way to understand reality, and the need for immediacy as the bare sign of a general cultural loss of wholeness and sense. In reference to what Hegel states in the Phenomenology of Spirit, immediacy for Adorno resembles “spirit [which] has shown itself to be so impoverished that it seems to yearn for its refreshment only in the meager feeling of divinity, very much like the wanderer in the desert who longs for a simple drink of water. That it now takes so little to satisfy spirit’s needs is the full measure of the magnitude of its loss” (Hegel 2018, pp. 7–8). Along this line of thinking takes place also Adorno’s departure from some theoretical assumptions in Benjamin’s thought. Obviously, it would be foolish to deny the huge, determining, and long-lasting Three Penny Opera as hit tunes” and the fact that “illusion blends into false positivity, destruction into communal art within the realm of status quo” (ZgL: 750, EoM: 409–410). 37  The entire book has been published in 1952, but the core of the text (chapters 1, 6, 9, and 10) was written during the 1930s and published in 1939 on the journal of the Frankfurter Institute.

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influence of Benjamin in all of Adorno’s works until his death.38 Benjamin’s ideas of constellation and allegory play a pivotal role in the entire development of Adorno’s philosophy. But whereas the Benjamin of The Origin of German Tragic Drama remains a guiding light, the same cannot be said of the essays written during the second half of the 1930s. In this period, we are witnesses to a heated epistolary exchange between the two authors, that culminates in the letters from November and December 1938 about Benjamin’s accounts on Baudelaire; as it has been suggested, “no other debate in Western Marxist aesthetics has received more commentary than that between Adorno and Benjamin in the 1930s” (Zuidervaart 1991, p. 29).39 It should be pointed out that, starting in 1934, Adorno ventured in a long process of emigration caused by the Nazi persecution of Jewish people, which brought him to Oxford, New  York, and finally to Los Angeles, whereas Benjamin preferred at first to stay in Europe, notably in Paris, only to try to find refuge in the USA at the end of 1939, meeting instead his death near the border between France and Spain in 1940. Against this historical backdrop, in the following, I will outline the theoretical reasons of Adorno’s critique of Benjamin. A key role in the discussion with Benjamin is played by Adorno’s general notion of the artwork, that is, by the pivotal outcome of what we have seen as his construction of the aesthetic. At this point, it may be helpful to sum up the state of the art. At the beginning of this chapter I have introduced the historicization of Kant’s reflecting judgment as the key aporia in Adorno’s aesthetics. Now, all the elements of Adorno’s strategy to overcome said aporia should be clear. How the aesthetic element can work as a model, that is to say, its universal and general dimension, can be grasped only in the light of its historical changing. What is universal in history is only the fact that it keeps changing; the historical changing, however, is comprehensible only because it appears in a figure, in a  Still in Negative Dialectics (1966), in fact, Benjamin’s is one of the most quoted names and Benjamin’s notion of constellation plays a pivotal role in the argument of the book. 39  The debate between Adorno and Benjamin has been summarized and analyzed several times by the scholars. The mentioned text of Zuidervaart (1991, pp. 28–28) contains a careful reconstruction of critical studies on the quarrel. For more recent sources one should also mention the works of Müller-Doohm (2005, pp. 214–226), that of Eiland and Jennings (2014, pp. 490–496), and that of Thijs Lijster (2017, pp. 71–107). 38

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rigid “petrified, primordial landscape” (Benjamin 1998, p. 166). The artwork represents then the objective structure in which the aesthetically successful form expresses the antinomic nature of society by showing it in a reconciled, aesthetically fully successful image, and simultaneously by judging its social non-conciliation. Furthermore, the work of art is always oriented in the direction of the resolution and disenchantment of what seems to be an original, mythical, dimension of society, but that is instead the determinate social product of capitalist production. Based on this idea of the artwork, Adorno engages in a discussion with Benjamin, a discussion that revolves entirely around the notions of archaic—in the sense of mythical—newness—in the sense of historical—and aesthetic immediacy. In January 1935, Benjamin writes a letter to Adorno in which he agrees with some of the remarks made by his friend about his essay on Kafka. He thanks Adorno for his accurate recognition of “where I went wrong”, and states that “this applies first of all to your observations on my inadequate mastery of the archaic; it thus perfectly applies to your reservations about the question of the eons and of forgetting” (BW1: 99, Cor1: 471). What tends to separate the two authors is, in fact, the interpretation of the relationship between the archaic notion of myth and that of historic newness. According to Adorno the mythological element is already per se and in itself a historical one; it represents the rigid dimension of development. Differently, archaic nature is better described by the category of appearance, in the same way Marx describes the objective character of commodity as an appearance.40 Precisely concerning the notion of archaic, along with its relationship with the natural-mythical ground, Adorno points to a dangerous ambiguity in Benjamin. Broadly speaking, he is afraid that Benjamin is unable to distance himself from the most regressive fringes in the debate on myth, especially given the fact that in 1935 he managed to finish his essay on Bachofen, a topic of investigation  As I will show in the following, Marx’s theory of exposing value of commodity plays a decisive role in Adorno’s conception of the artwork. For the moment, it will suffice to quote a well-known passage from The Capital: “The mysterious character of the commodity-form consists therefore simply in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men’s own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things” (Marx 1990, pp. 164–165). 40

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he shared with the by then fully aligned Nazi professor Baeumler. One of the distinctive qualities of the neo-Romantic notion of myth is its being separated from the historic development, or rather its super-historical nature, its existence beyond history; as Baeumler writes, “myth is absolutely non-historical. It has its own value and meaning just as testament of pre-historical spiritual conditions” (Baeumler 1956, p. XCI). It is precisely this separation between myth and history, judged by Adorno as false and abstract, what turns myth into a useful, manipulable tool, in an instrument that can be arbitrarily and ideologically modified, or rather in a vehicle of political propaganda, especially in reference to how the Third Reich employed the myth of the Aryan race to solidify and strengthen the frayed German society of the late Weimar Republic. To be fair, it is not the case that Adorno sees in Benjamin something close to a fascist penchant, but he somehow fears that his friend might make a too naïve and too imprudent use of a notion, that of myth, whose ambiguity makes it politically dangerous. The quarrel between the two officially opens with a letter from August 2, 1935, in which Adorno states some critical arguments against the exposé that Benjamin sent him to illustrate what should have been his masterpiece, that is the Passagen-Werk (Arcades Project).41 Of particular interest is Adorno’s underlying of some aspects of the notion of “dialectical image” —a sort of aesthetic figural crystallization of the age, theorized by Benjamin in his text—in particular of those that Adorno sees as undialectical elements; as he writes to his friend, he is not convinced by: “The view of the dialectical image as a content of consciousness, albeit a collective one; its linear and, I would almost say, ontogenetic dependence on the future as utopia; the conception of the ‘epoch’ as the pertinent,  The philosophical project to which Benjamin refers as the Passagen-Werk was supposed to be an enormous collection of quotations able, so to say, to form a constellation of modernity and, therefore, to resolve its enigmatic figure. This work has always attracted the critique’s attention precisely because of its enigmatic nature. Susan Buck-Morss (1989, p. X) was fascinated by its being “a ‘Copernican revolution’ in the practice of history writing”. Benjamin’s idea to reconstruct modern age through the collection of his fragment has influenced large part of twentieth-century philosophy, especially thanks to the mediation of Michel Foucault’s archeological method. Although Foucault scarcely quotes Benjamin (e.g. Foucault 1990, p.  12), the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben sees the whole project of biopolitics as an attempt to put together the affinities between Benjamin’s and Foucault’s ideas of life and bios (Agamben 1998, pp. 4–5). 41

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self-­contained subject of the content of consciousness” (BW1: 139, Cor1: 495). In a word, what Adorno detects as the critical point in Benjamin’s idea of dialectical image is its exclusively static character, which allows a utopian interpretation of its contents; as we have seen, in fact, it is precisely the image of the archaic as static that paves the way to the Wagnerian utopian art of the future, the romantic projection of a new mythology, the fascist use of myth, and the engaged art as a normative proposition of values. Through the concept of intérieur, as developed in the book about Kierkegaard (BW1: 140, Cor1: 496), Adorno aims moreover to indicate in which terms he understands the undialectical elements in Benjamin, that is as a direct and immediate concordance between the “epoch” and its “content of consciousness” in the dialectical image. The concept of intérieur, in fact, requires, as we have seen, a process of mediation between inwardness and society, being the former an outcome of the pressure of the latter. By analogy to this approach, Adorno explicitly stigmatizes what he perceives as Benjamin’s tendency to think the present in the terms of a decay from the wholeness of the past, in particular through “the mythic-­ archaic category of the ‘Golden Age’”, according to which, if its “crucial ‘ambiguity’ […] is suppressed, the commodity as the substance of the age […] is negated in a way that would in fact make the immediacy of the primal state appear as truth” (BW1: 142, Cor1: 497). In the same letter, moreover, Adorno writes that “the formulation that ‘the new is permeated by the old’ seems highly dubious to me, given my critique of the dialectical image as regression” and he proposes instead “the very important Hegelian concept of second nature […] adopted by Georg Lukács” (BW1: 145, Cor1: 499–500); it is then in the light of this kind of considerations that he can hold against Benjamin that “you construe the relationship of the oldest to the newest […] as one of utopian reference to the ‘classless society’. Thus the archaic becomes a complementary addition instead of itself being the ‘newest’—and is thus dedialecticized” (BW1: 141, Cor1: 496). The utopia of society without classes is nothing but the presupposition of an immediate aesthetic conciliation, whose normative value should be applied to society, and this dynamics, as Adorno shows, has much more in common with the mystical and ambiguous ideas of neoRomanticism, than with a materialistic dialectical approach that sees in

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what appears as archaic and mythical nothing but the newest product of historical development. This is why in his letter Adorno warns Benjamin of the risk of falling in both the conservative, obscure, position of Jung and Klages—despite the fact that it has been suggested that in his later production Adorno embraces some of Klages’ ideas42—and the utopic, engaged, conception of Brecht. What Adorno sees in Benjamin is ultimately the tendency to conceive the artwork as something that refers to a mythical and non-historical dimension, by statically and immediately opposing society, and not as an autonomous form, whose autonomy is the result of a continuous mediation of social reality.43 The reader will start to notice a certain elective affinity between the aesthetic form of art, as understood by Adorno, and the notion of commodity, especially in their activity of production of meaning. A real concern in Adorno is, however, how to radically pinpoint the concrete difference between these two forms, and his fear is that Benjamin, because of his penchant toward immediacy, risks mixing up the two levels. Romantic and engaged art, in fact, manage the aesthetic immediacy precisely in the same way capitalism presents the commodity as a peaceful and conciliated vehicle of meaning. In the epistolary exchange here taken into consideration, although focusing on Benjamin’s immense, and at the end unfinished, Arcades Project, Adorno starts to become conscious of the outcomes of his construction of the aesthetic. In 1937, instead of producing a final draft of the Arcades, Benjamin began to work on a book about Baudelaire, for which he envisaged publication in the Journal for Social Research (BW1: 360, Cor1: 576), at the time issued in America. Between September and October 1938, Benjamin concluded the second part of the Baudelaire and sent the text to the Institute. The following month, he received a long and very dense letter from Adorno, which has been the object of

 Wellmer (1991, p. 3) considers the Dialectic of Enlightenment as the attempt to merge two distinct philosophical traditions, namely the Hegel and Marxian tradition and that which leads from Schopenhauer, via Nietzsche, to Klages. See also Habermas 1982, pp. 13–30. 43  The legitimacy of Adorno’s critique has been recently recognized also by some of Benjamin’s scholars, for instance, by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Eiland and Jennings 2014, pp. 490–495). 42

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several historical and conceptual investigations and interpretations.44 This is a letter of the greatest relevance. Despite huge expectations for Benjamin’s essay, which Adorno declares having “literally devoured”, he admits, in fact, that the text “caused me a certain degree of disappointment” (BW1: 364–365, Cor1: 579–580). This very feeling of disappointment turns out to mark an important threshold in Adorno’s intellectual history, and therefore also in this research. In reaction to Benjamin’s attempt to elucidate his enigmatic Arcades Project through Baudelaire, Adorno formulates indeed a set of methodological questions that will contribute to increase his distance from Benjamin, but also to fully clarify the definitive outline of his determination of aesthetics. In his letter Adorno comes straight to the point. He refers in fact to the problematic dialectical connection established by Benjamin between some economic elements (e.g. the wine tax) and their aesthetic transposition in Baudelaire’s lyrics: “Let me express myself here in as simple and Hegelian manner as possible. If I am not mistaken, this dialectic lacks one thing: mediation. The primary tendency is always to relate the pragmatic content of Baudelaire’s work directly to proximate characteristics of the social history of his time, and preferably economic characteristics when possible” (BW1: 366–367, Cor1: 581). In one of the first and most prominent interpretations of this epistolary exchange, the Italian philosopher, Giorgio Agamben (1993, pp. 115–116), explains Adorno’s critique in reference to its conformity to Marxian orthodoxy. As he calls into question materialist dialectics, Adorno may well leave the reader with this impression. He writes, in fact, that he “consider[s] it methodologically unfortunate to give conspicuous individual characteristics from the realm of the superstructure a ‘materialistic’ twist by relating them to corresponding characteristics of the substructure in an unmediated and even causal manner. The materialistic determination of cultural characteristics is possible only when mediated by the total process” (BW1: 367, Cor1:  The epistolary exchange was published in Adorno’s and Scholem’s edition of Benjamin’s letters (1966). One of the first great interpretations is that of Agamben in the chapter The Prince and the Frog in Infancy and History (1978), where he tries to defend Benjamin from Adorno’s critique by opposing the alleged orthodox and Hegelian Marxism of the latter to the genuine interpretation of the former (Agamben 1993, pp. 107–124). In 1977, moreover, Fredric Jameson wrote the afterword to a collection under the title Aesthetics and Politics, where the epistolary exchange between Adorno and Benjamin forms one of the four chapters (see Jameson 1980, pp. 196–213). 44

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581–582). Adorno’s critique, however, is not aimed at reestablishing the dogmas of orthodox Marxism, as much as at correctly accounting for the relation between the single economic, or empirical, fact and its artistic, aesthetic, literary transposition. As the same letter clarifies, in fact, Adorno’s interest lies precisely in how economic and social reality becomes aesthetically signifying. In a passage that Agamben overlooks in his commentary, Adorno writes that “direct inference from the tax on wine to L’ame du vin ascribes to phenomena just that kind of spontaneity, tangibility, and density that they have relinquished in capitalism. There is a profoundly romantic element in this kind of unmediated and, I might almost repeat, anthropological materialism”. Accordingly, Adorno’s critique does not concern simply the general relation between structure and superstructure, as Agamben maintains, but rather that between the single economic element and the meaning it is given within artistic elaboration; it should also be added that the artistic meaning of the economic fact, according to Adorno, requires the conceptual mediation of the aesthetic critique in order to be understood, and precisely this is said to be missing in Benjamin’s account on Baudelaire: “The ‘mediation’ I miss”, Adorno writes, “and find obscured by materialistic and historiographic invocation is, however, nothing other than precisely the theory from which your work abstains. Bypassing theory affects the empirical evidence” (BW1: 368, Cor1: 582). The only way out for Benjamin, the only way to solve the problem of aesthetic meaning without exposing it to the mediation of the theory— this is the charge moved by Adorno—is, then, to presuppose the archaic dimension, the “spontaneity”, of the empirical elements, a spontaneity that the historical process has now seized from disenchanted phenomena. The presupposition of the immediate spontaneity of the empiric world corresponds, however, to an alignment with the mythical neo-Romantic approach which “settled the crossroads of magic and positivism” (BW1: 368, Cor1: 582). According to Adorno, there is in Benjamin a tendency toward the mysticism of materiality, that is, the inclination to conceive the material level as immediate vehicle of meaning: “you almost superstitiously ascribe to the enumeration of materials a power of illumination, but this power is never reserved for a pragmatic reference but only for theoretical construction” (BW1: 369, Cor1: 583).

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Thanks to his discussion with Walter Benjamin during the second half of the 1930s, Adorno manages to complete the process of construction of his aesthetic theory and, in particular, is able to solve the tensions still prominent in the book on Kierkegaard. The notion of myth, in fact, can now be understood in its critical potential, without being mistaken for a mystical call upon a Romantic idea of the origins. Myth, finally, is nothing but the way in which history appears to us as an oppressive, natural, force, similar to how the Greeks understood mythical fate. Under Adorno’s Marxist gaze, this oppressive, rigid, natural dimension of history matches closely the social contradictions of capitalistic society, which appears to men with the same inevitability of an ancient myth. Art, instead, is defined in opposition to the natural myth of history. Art, in fact, is that one human activity which is able to host social conflicts and to sublimate them in an aesthetic form, by making them object of fruition. Then, art criticizes society not because it qualifies as a normative model, but just on behalf of its bare aesthetic existence.

1.4 The Model of the Culture Industry After having described the path through which Adorno defined his own aesthetics, it is now time to outline the actual outcome of this determination. What I want to suggest in the last paragraph of this chapter is then to read one of the most prolific concepts in Adorno’s contributions—that of culture industry—as the direct, consistent, result of his work on the aesthetic, and, moreover, as the answer to Benjamin’s opposite argument laid out in the essay “The Artwork in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility”. In order to do this, I should first devote a few words to the question of the artwork in the light of its concrete relation with social production. The artwork, in fact, is not the only element able to aesthetically expose social contradictions. There is another typical capitalistic product that due to its perceptive, exterior form qualifies as receptacle of social conflicts. This product is the commodity. In the fourth paragraph of the first chapter of The Capital, Marx takes into account what he labels as The Fetishism of the Commodity, a notion that becomes pivotal in

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twentieth-­century Marxism, not least because of the influence of Freud’s accounts on psychological fetishism.45 “A commodity”, writes Marx, “appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing”, even though its investigation brings out that it is “a very strange thing”. A normal product of human labor, in fact, “as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness”; rather than standing with its feet on the ground, “it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will”. This is what Marx calls “the mysterious character of the commodity-form”, that is the fact that “the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men’s own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things”. Commodities become, therefore, “sensuous things”, that is, real objects of the world, “which are at the same time suprasensible or social”, in other words, able to sensibly communicate social reality. In this sense, “it is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the phantasmagorical form of a relation between things”.46 The fetishism of commodity, exactly as the fetishism of “the misty realm of religion”, amounts to mistakenly taking the social character of commodities for a natural, empirical, relation among things. As in the fetishism of religious phantasmagoria “the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race”, in the social fetishism of the phantasmagoria

 Adorno, along with great part of twentieth century’s Marxism, has been largely influenced by psychoanalysis, and he sees a close bond between Marx’s socio-economic notion of fetishism and Freud’s psychological one. For this reason, Donovan Mioyasaki (2002, 429–443) detected a sort of confusion, in both Adorno and Benjamin, between the two fields. Although Fredric Jameson (1990, p. 254) suggests that the critique has overstressed Adorno’s so-called Freudo-Marxism, he cannot deny the relevance of the psychoanalytic method in Adorno’s sociology. As Simon Jarvis (1998, pp. 81–82) stresses, Adorno’s skepticism toward psychoanalysis is clear, in particular within the framework of of his critique of Fromm’s social psychology and its American reception in authors like Karen Horney; finally, as he writes, “Adorno’s use of psychoanalytic categories raises as many problems as it solves” (Jarvis 1998, p. 84). 46  I have slightly modified the translation. I have namely  translated the word phantasmagorische “phantasmagoric”, rather than “fantastic”. 45

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of commodity, social conflict between labor and capital appears as a natural propriety of the products (Marx 1990, pp. 163–165).47 In the light of Adorno’s definition of aesthetics, one would claim then that, whereas commodities’ autonomy resembles religious projection, art’s autonomy is a historical quality of the product; whereas commodity immediately reproduces myth in a sensible object, art dissolves it in an aesthetic form; whereas commodity empirically covers social conflict by disguising it as a natural quality of things, art reveals it by aesthetically showing its unreconciled effectuality. This explains why the distinction between artistic and everyday objects requires a critique of immediacy and of mythical-archaic perspectives, along with the evaluation of theoretical mediation. As Adorno writes in his essay on Wagner, “the occultation of production by means of the outward appearance of the product […] is the formal law governing the works of Richard Wagner”, or in other words “Wagner’s operas tend towards magic delusion, […] in short towards phantasmagoria” (VüW: 82, SoW: 74). Consistently with this line of thinking, Adorno criticizes  also Benjamin’s aesthetics and sees in it the seed of a Romantic and neo-­ mythological idea of the artwork, from which he makes sure to take distance. According to a general aesthetic pattern, then, one can read Adorno’s notion of “culture industry” as a Hegelian reaction against the Romantic elements detected in Benjamin’s essay about technological reproduction. First outlined in the text, the notion of culture industry delineates the broader set of cultural products that belong to the entertainment industry and that shape the cultural frame of reference of what can be taken as the Western collective imagination, or as what Guy  This is one of the most vexed questions of Marxism in general, especially that of twentieth century, whose tendency to face the “super structural” problems not as a mere effect of structure’s motions brought the attention on all the most spectacular elements in the display of economy, hence on the phantasmagory of commodity too. One can mention, for instance, History and Class Consciousness, where Lukács writes that “It might be claimed […] that the chapter dealing with the fetish character of the commodity contains within itself the whole of historical materialism” (Lukács 1971b, p. 170), or Guy Debord’s notion of spectacle, or even Jacques Derrida, whose idea of “phantomalization of social bonds” calls into play precisely the process of phantasmagory of commodity (Derrida 1993, pp.  199–201). Among the most recent research, it is interesting to quote Aesthetic Marx, the collected volume edited by Samir Gandesha and Johan Hartle and in particular the essay of Sami Khatib (2017, p.  49–72) where the scholar analyzes the aesthetic dimension of commodity fetishism in the terms of formal and sensible exhibition of exchange value. 47

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Debord has called The Society of Spectacle. In this respect, Adorno broadcasts the deadly crisis of art against what he perceives as the threats of a neo-mythological project. In the already mentioned letter from 1935, Adorno criticizes Benjamin for a set of principles that will actually become increasingly prominent in his production. In reference to Benjamin’s accounts on photography and the technical backwardness of painting, for instance, he remarks that “your credulous acceptance of the Ur-appearance of technology seems to me to be connected to your overestimation of the archaic as such”. He notices moreover that, according to what both Adorno and Benjamin should agree, “myth is not the classless longing of the true society, but rather the objective character of the alienated commodity itself ” (BW1: 146, Cor1: 500). As made clear by Adorno’s quotation in the letter, the targeted passage from Benjamin’s exposé is here the following: “in the dream in which each epoch entertains images of its successor, the latter appears wedded to elements of primal history [Urgeschichte]  – that is, to elements of a classless society” (Benjamin 2006b, pp. 33–34). Adorno finds here a dangerous correlation between the classless society and the appearance of what is original in technique; as if the abolition of class struggle could be an effective reestablishing of humanity’s original condition in the technical newness. In this respect, he points precisely to the “mythologizing or archaicizing tendency of the précis” (BW1: 146, Cor1: 500). What Adorno detects in Benjamin’s aesthetics is the same danger detected in the Wagnerian theory of the music of the future, that is to say the aspiration to produce social conciliation by means of an immediate appearance of the archaic myth in the work of art itself. While Wagner, however, eludes Romantic positions in favor of ancient Germanic mythology, Benjamin tries to avoid the Romantic impasse by relying on a distinctive cultural form, one already mentioned here, namely political engagement. As Benjamin writes to Adorno while summing up his own recent intellectual development, in fact, “it was the end of rhapsodic naïveté. This romantic form had been surpassed in a raccourci of development, but I had no concept of another form at that time […]. My decisive meeting with Brecht followed, bringing with it the high point of all aporias relating to the project” (BW1: 118, cor1: 489). On these very premises develops the debate on what is maybe the most famous and influential essay by Benjamin. Two months after Adorno’s

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critical reaction, Benjamin announces in fact to Max Horkheimer his intention to begin a new project for the Journal for Social Research, and he does that in these terms: “Art’s fateful hour has struck for us and I have captured its signature in a series of preliminary reflections entitled Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit”, that is “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility”. Without fully retracing the contorted history of the essay,48 the text about “The Work of Art” is a compendium of everything Adorno warned Benjamin about. While being well aware of the wide appeal of Benjamin’s essay in contemporary aesthetics, new-media theory, sociology of art, and so on, I will limit myself to pointing to the most relevant arguments in the discussion with Adorno. Well known is Benjamin’s interpretation of the crisis of art between the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, not as a crisis of art’s intellectual consciousness, as Croce’s well-known interpretation of Hegel’s claims about the death of art would have it,49 but rather as the outcome of a revolution in the artistic means of production. The technological reproducibility of art, in fact, does not mean the ability to technologically reproduce an existing painting—as in the case of a picture of Leonardo’s Gioconda, that still presupposes the existence of the original artifact—it rather means the birth of forms of art whose products are essentially reproducible by means of technology, that is photography and cinema. And equally well known is the consequence of this argument that states the loss of originality in technological art—since there is no such a thing as the original of a photograph of a film—and the resulting loss of “aura” and of “authenticity”. The work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility corresponds therefore to a work of art that has lost its own unicity, and therefore its aura of authenticity, by  The first version of the text read by Adorno has been drafted between October and December 1935, immediately followed by a second and revisited version in 1936 that was sent to the journal. On the basis of this version, Benjamin translated the text in French with the help of Pierre Klossowski, and he mitigated its meaning by amending  the most radical references to Soviet Marxism. The last version (written in 1939 and published by Adorno in 1955) was entrusted to Georges Bataille before Benjamin ran away from Paris. On the vicissitudes of the text, see Eiland and Jennings 2014 (pp. 512–514, 520–522, 667–668). 49  See for example what writes Benedetto Croce (1922, p. 302) in his Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic: “The Aesthetic of Hegel is thus a funeral oration: he passes in review the successive forms of art, shows the progressive steps of internal consumption, and lays the whole in its grave, leaving Philosophy to write its epitaph”. 48

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obtaining in this way the status of a copy without original. The way in which the loss of authenticity becomes a form of liberation of some of the artwork’s potentiality is part of the antinomies ensuing from Benjamin’s theory on technological reproducibility, as Miriam Hansen (2012, pp. 73–83) has pointed out. As he writes to Horkheimer that “art’s fateful hour has struck for us”, it is pretty clear that Benjamin is thinking about the same phenomenon that the nineteenth century took as the crisis, or death, of art. But rather than giving rise to a nostalgic and pessimistic analysis, he tries to understand this crisis as a paradigmatic change in art’s structures of production. If art in the traditional sense finds itself now in a position of rearguard, then the artistic avant-garde has to be investigated in art’s changing dynamics. As Benjamin writes, “film has freed the physical shock effect – which Dadaism had kept wrapped, as it were, inside the moral shock effect – from this wrapping” and this is why “Dadaism attempted to produce with the means of painting (or literature) the effects which the public today seeks in film” (Benjamin 2008, pp. 39, 38). Technological art, therefore, achieves the goal of modern art, but in a non-artificial way. Without being moralistic, it shocks more than Dadaism, and literally makes the public physically run out the cinema when the train appears on the screen; it realistically reproduces objects in movement, or from all possible angles, as pictorial avant-garde was trying to do at the expenses of realistic expression, for example in the case of Boccioni’s Futurism and Picasso’s cubism. It is precisely this trait of technological art—that is to say, its ability to strike and shock the public, along with the loss of unicity of the authentic copy—what allows to take artistic communication as a vehicle of revolutionary political values. Needless to say, Benjamin was aware of the Nazi and Fascist propagandistic use of cinema. In fact, he declares that “such is the aestheticizing of politics, as practiced by fascism. Communism replies by politicizing art” (Benjamin 2008, p.  42). That of Benjamin, however, is not a mere description of art in his own time. It rather corresponds to some sort of Marxian-inspired prognosis of the function of art in the already transformed world, in the world beyond Fascist and capitalistic oppression (Benjamin 2008, p. 33). Moreover, what Benjamin sees in the collective “reception in distraction” of cinema (Benjamin 2008, p. 40) is the chance

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to build a political consciousness of the mass by means of a historically transformed perception (see S. Buck-Morss 1992, pp. 5–7). And this is precisely what Adorno defines as the “credulous acceptance of the Ur-appearance of technology” that is connected to “overestimation of the archaic as such”, and that according to him leads directly to a neo-­ mythological project with a terrifying Romantic outfit.50 Approaching technological innovation in terms of structural change in the artwork, assessing this mere empirical fact as the spontaneous creation of revolutionary aesthetic values, means, according to Adorno, taking the work of art as depository of an original and conciliated nature that can be normatively imposed to society. If artistic production is conceived in these terms, be it the Wagnerian project of a total work of art, or the engaged idea of a political one, then the idea of art is based on Romantic mythological and reconciled presuppositions, thus turning into an aesthetic phantasmagoria, namely in the aesthetic form of commodity.51 To sum up: as the Romantic, organic idea of a classless society as the mythical origin of history dialectically degenerates into the commodity’s ideological phantasmagoria, the same happens to the engaged presupposition of a normative harmonic paradigm to be applied to society. In order to criticize real society, art has to fulfill the double character ensuing from its autonomy, thus qualifying as reception of social conflict and non-violent (i.e. abstract), aesthetic conciliation of contradictions exposing their unreconciled nature in the social world. Whereas Benjamin maintains an ambiguous stance toward the notion of myth, according to Adorno art is a form of critique and a means for the dissolution of the mythical, natural, rigid side of society. While Benjamin counts Mickey Mouse among the “figures of collective dream” and describes Disney’s films as triggers of a “therapeutic release of unconscious energies”

 Although in his accurate reconstruction he tends to underestimate Benjamin’s Romantic heritage, Thijs Lijster (2017, pp. 71, 120–123) takes into account both Adorno’s and Benjamin’s positions concerning the question of the death of art. 51  These critiques, along with the charge of Romanticism, can be found in the letter written by Adorno to Benjamin on March 18, 1936, and sent from London, after having read the essay on technological reproducibility; see in particular the explicit correlation between Benjamin’s Brechtian idea of engagement and the mythological Romantic assumptions (BW1: 168–172). 50

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(Benjamin 2008, p. 38), Adorno spots there the mere reproduction of the old and rigid myth of late capitalism. Within this framework, it is possible then to understand the notion of “culture industry” outlined in the Dialectics of Enlightenment as an answer to the pivotal arguments of Benjamin’s essay on technological reproduction, as Thijs Lijster (2017, p. 98) has aptly recognized. Despite the fact that the book co-authored with Horkheimer was completed only in 1944 (and published in 1947), and despite the fact that the official answer to Benjamin’s argument is included instead in the essay “On the Fetish-­ Character in Music and the Regression of Listening (1938)”, where he criticizes the “romanticizing of particulars” (ÜFM: 28, EoM: 298), one can still argue that the relevance of the concept of culture industry, along with the obstacles that have been hampering and slowing down the writing of the book,52 makes the parallel much more stimulating and consistent. In line with the general anthropological idea that sees human subjective, instrumental reason as the generator of a dominion over nature that turns into a dominion over the subject (Habermas 1984, pp. 379–380),53 the central claim of the Dialectics of Enlightenment is the idea that any attempt to intellectually explain myths is bound to capsize and become, in turn, a new form of mythology. The “self-destruction of enlightenment” and “the germ of regression” of freedom in society (DdA: 13, DoE: xvi) are therefore connected to the leading question of the book: “why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism?” (DdA: 11, DoE: xiv). As Odysseus’ tricks against mythical powers turn into violence against nature itself, the moral exaltation of freedom reverts to the repression of instinct, and the liberation of the cultural market leads to the destruction of culture and the  As Müller-Doohm (2005, pp. 271–272) claims, Adorno and Horkheimer began to plan the book about dialectics already in 1940, and in 1941 the title Dialectics of Enlightenment appears for the first time in a letter. In the same year, however, Horkheimer and Adorno moved to Los Angeles and started new projects and collaborations. All these changes prevented a faster drafting of the text. 53  This pivotal argument of the Dialectics of Enlightenment makes the text a turning point of the so-called Frankfurt School, as it marks its departure from orthodox Marxism, as stated by Martin Jay (1973, p. 256) and Susan Buck-Morss (1977, p. 59). Martin Jay (1984, 37) suggests moreover that the arguments of the Dialectics of Enlightenment hark back as much to Nietzsche and Max Weber as to Marx. 52

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commodification of every artistic quality. In this respect, whereas the notion of culture industry agrees with Benjamin’s (and, broadly speaking, the Marxist) diagnosis of the late capitalistic cultural world, it disagrees as far as the prognosis is concerned. According to Horkheimer and Adorno, precisely the activity of technically reproducible products, along with the absent-minded reception they dictate, is what allows the construction of a new mythology that, however, instead of triggering the liberation of people’s potentiality, seems to reiterate a new embodiment of the rigid and oppressive side of history: “the sociological view that the loss of support from objective religion […], in conjunction with technical and social differentiation and specialization, have given rise to cultural chaos is refuted by daily experience. Culture today is infecting everything with sameness” (DdA: 141, DoE: 94). Far from being a way out from social constriction, what sensibly appears in technical products of culture reproduces to a higher level the principle of exchange value, being simply another phenomenon of the apparently incessant dialectics of enlightenment. Whereas Benjamin advocated the therapeutic value of Mickey Mouse, Adorno writes that “Donald Duck in the cartoons and the unfortunate victim in real life receive their beatings so that the spectators can accustom themselves to theirs” (DdA: 160, DoE: 110). In this sense, the culture industry corresponds to an element of that dynamics in which, instead of being the medium through which myth can be artistically dissolved and judged, the sensible and aesthetic element becomes vehicle of a new and oppressive mythology. Adorno’s argument, however, does not resort to the demonization of technique. Technique is just the quantitative increase and acceleration of a process already at work in historical society. “Culture industry” is therefore just the notion through which Adorno tries to answer that kind of questions that Benjamin is confronted with in his essay on technical reproducibility. The industrial production of culture corresponds ultimately to the process that bestows on cultural creations the same quality of industrial products, that of being an amusement able to distract people from their life and “amusement, free of all restraint, would be not only the opposite of art but its complementary extreme” (DdA: 164, DoE: 113). The products of the culture industry are therefore the contrary of art inasmuch as they turn into the

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phantasmagory of commodity, by concealing with amusement the contradictions of society. What the notion of culture industry describes is the risk art faces in the world of technical reproducibility of becoming a commodity among the others, and therefore ceasing to be art. Based on what I have shown in this chapter, the construction of the aesthetic in Adorno begins with the definition of the success of the artwork and culminates with a theory of its failure. The notion of cultural history, in fact, consists in the progressive definition of the inability of cultural and artistic products to be what they are meant to be, that is, the expression of social tensions and the critique of their unreconciled structure. This determination of the success of the artwork, hence, contains the seeds of its failure. The work of art, as cultural object, is defined through the mediation of its universal and normative element and its being a particular historical product, without submitting one to the other. As the culture industry shows, however, since society strongly denies any kind of autonomy to its products, the work of art increasingly runs the risk of falling in the “a priori of art” (ÄT: 131, AT: 84). As Adorno begins to show in the essay “On the Fetish-Character in Music”, the principle through which society threats the artwork is nothing but the sensible aesthetic element of music (ÜFM: 21–23, EoM: 294–295). What I will show in the next chapter is, then, the concretization of this process, namely the development through which Adorno’s aesthetics, consistently with its construction principles, in order to save art’s autonomy, dissolves the very sensible aesthetic element that defines art.

References Agamben, Giorgio. 1993. Infancy and History. The Destruction of Experience. Trans. L. Heron. London: Verso. ———. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-­ Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Baeumler, Alfred. 1956. Einleitung. In Der Mythus von Orient und Occident. Eine Methaphysik der alten Welt, aus den Werken von J.J. Bachofen, mit einer Einleitung von Alfred Baeumler, hrsg. Manfred Schröter, i-cxciv München: Beck.

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Behler, Ernst. 1993. German Romantic Literary Theory. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Beiser, Frederick. 2005. Schiller as Philosopher. A Re-Examination. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Benjamin, Walter. 1998. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Trans. J. Osborne. London/New York: Verso. ———. 2006a. Johan Jakob Bachofen. In W.  Benjamin. Selected Writings. Volume 3. 1935–1938, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, 11–24. Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press. ———. 2006b. Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century. In W. Benjamin. Selected Writings. Volume 3. 1935–1938, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, 32–49. Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press. ———. 2008. In The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin. Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press. Bernstein, Jay M. 2005. Introduction. In Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics, ed. Jay M. Bernstein, vii–xxxiii. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Birke, Lawrence. 1999. Prussianism, Nazism, and Romanticism in the Thought of Victor Klemperer. The German Quarterly 72 (1): 33–43. Bloch, Brandon. 2017. The Origins of Adorno Psycho-Social Dialectic: Psychoanalysis and Neo-Kantianism in the Young Adorno. Modern Intellectual History 16 (2): 1–29. Buben, Adam. 2016. Meaning and Morality in Heidegger and Kierkegaard. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Buck-Morss, Susan. 1977. The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute. Hassocks: Harvester. ———. 1989. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Projects. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ———. 1992. Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered. October 62: 3–41. Budd, Malcolm. 2002. The Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature. Essays on the Aesthetics of Nature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Coulson, Shea. 2007. Adorno’s Aesthetics of Critique. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Scholar Publishing. Croce, Benedetto. 1922. Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic. Trans. Douglas Ainslie. London: Macmillan. Danto, Arthur C. 1984. The End of Art. In Death of Art, ed. Berel Lang, 5–35. New York: Haven.

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Davies, Peter. 2012. Myth, Matriarchy and Modernity. Johann Jakob Bachofen on German culture. Berlin/New York: De Gruyter. de Vries, Hent. 2005. Minimal Theologies. Critique of Secular Reason in Adorno & Levinas. Trans. Geoffrey Hale. Baltimore/London: The John Hopkins University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1993. Specters of Marx. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. London/New York: Routledge. Eiland, Howard, and Michael W. Jennings. 2014. Walter Benjamin. A Critical Life. Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press. Farina, Mario. 2019. A Kantian Answer to the Romantics. Hegel’s Idea of Genius and the Unity of Nature and Freedom. In Natur und Freiheit. Akten des XII.  Internationalen Kant-Kongresses, ed. Violetta L Waibel, Margit Ruffing, and David Wagner, 3403–3410. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter. Feher, Ferenc. 1985. Lukács and Benjamin: Parallels and Contrasts. New German Critique 34: 125–138. Formaggio, Dino. 1983. La «morte dell’arte» e l’estetica. Bologna: il Mulino. Foucault, Michel. 1990. The Use of Pleasure. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books. Ginsborg, Hannah. 2015. The Normativity of Nature. Essays on Kant’s Critique of Judgement. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Guyer, Paul. 1997. Kant and the Claim of Taste. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2014. A History of Modern Aesthetics. Volume 2: The Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1982. The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment. New German Critique 26: 13–30. ———. 1984. The Theory of Communicative Action. Vol. 1. Reason and the Realization of Society. Trans. Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon Press. Hall, Timothy. 2006. Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory and Lukács Theory of the Novel. In Adorno and Literature, ed. David Cunningham and Nigel Mapp, 145–158. London/New York: Continuum. Hampson, Daphne. 2013. Kierkegaard. Exposition and Critique. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hansen, Miriam. 2012. Cinema and Experience. Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno. Berkeley: University of California Press. Harding, James M. 1997. Adorno and “A Writing of the Ruins”. Essays in Modern Aesthetics and Anglo-American Literature and Culture. Albany: SUNY.

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———. 1971b. History and Class Consciousness. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Mann, Thomas. 1926. Pariser Rechenschaft. Berlin: Fischer. Marquard, Odo. 1989. Indicted and Unburdened Man in Eighteenth-Century Philosophy. In Farewell to Matters of Principle: Philosophical Studies. Trans. R.M. Wallace, 38–63. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marx, Karl. 1990. The Capital. A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1. Trans. B. Fowkes. London/New York: Penguin. ———. 2004. The German Ideology. Part One, ed. Christopher John Arthur. New York: International Publishes. Menke, Christoph. 1999. The Sovereignty of Art. Aesthetic Negativity in Adorno and Derrida. Trans. N. Solomon. Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press. Mioyasaki, Donovan. 2002. The Confusion of Marxian and Freudian Fetishism in Adorno and Benjamin. Philosophy Today 46 (4): 429–443. Müller-Doohm, Stefan. 2005. Adorno. A Biography. Trans. R.  Livingstone. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Oberhelman, David D. 2006. Marxist Readings of Tolkien. In Tolkien Encyclopedia, ed. Michael D.C. Drout, 410–411. London: Routledge. Paddison, Max. 1993. Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Pensky, Max. 2004. Natural History: The Life and Afterlife of a Concept in Adorno. Critical Horizons 5 (1): 227–258. Pinkard, Terry. 2002. German Philosophy 1760–1860: The Legacy of Idealism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Pippin, Robert B. 2014. After the Beautiful. Hegel and the Philosophy of Pictorial Modernism. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Ryan, Bartholomew. 2014. Kierkegaard’s Indirect Politics. Interludes with Lukács, Schmitt, Benjamin and Adorno. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi. Schiller, Friedrich. 1993. On Naive and Sentimental Poetry. In F. Schiller, Essays, ed. Walter Hinderer, and Daniel O.  Dahlstrom, 179–260. New  York: Continuum. Schlegel, Friedrich. 1968. Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms. Trans. E.  Behler, and R.  Struc. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Szondi, Peter. 1972. Das Naive ist das Sentimentalische. Zur Begriffsdialektik in Schillers Abhandlung. Euphorion 66: 174–206. Wellmer, Albrecht. 1991. The Persistence of Modernity. Essay and Aesthetics, Ethics and Postmodernism. Trans. D. Midgley. Cambridge, UK: Polity.

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Wenzel, Christian Helmut. 2005. An Introduction to Kant’s Aesthetics: Core Concepts and Problems. Malden/Oxford/Victoria: Blackwell. Whyman, Tom. 2016. Understanding Adorno on ‘Natural-History’. International Journal of Philosophical Studies 24 (4): 452–472. Zuidervaart, Lambert. 1991. Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory. The Redemption of Illusion. Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press.

2 The Philosophy of Music and the Dissolution of the Aesthetic

“How can things which are ugly and disharmonious […] induce aesthetic delight?”, wonders Nietzsche, and his answer to this question heavily relies on the idea that “only as an aesthetic phenomenon do existence and the world appear justified” (Nietzsche 1999, p.  113). In The Birth of Tragedy, in fact, the true artistic activity, namely the aesthetic appearance of truth, is defined as the balance of the painful, pessimistic, passionate Dionysian impulse and the formal, clear, delightful Apollonian drive. The universal dimension of the abstract form, in other words the peaceful element of artistic pleasure is, according to Nietzsche, what allows the magmatic drive of will to aesthetically present itself in the appearance of an individual image. This relation between the two Nietzschean impulses is also the core of the model determining what we have seen as the “success of the artwork”, understood by Adorno in terms of an aesthetic reconciled exposition of social conflicts; nevertheless, a critical revision of some Nietzschean assumptions—in particular, his positive evaluation of the notion of myth—drives Adorno to a complete redefinition of the role of the sensible aesthetic element in the interpretation of the artwork. This chapter aims to pinpoint this kind of redefinition of the aesthetic in terms of its artistic dissolution. According to my argument, the text in © The Author(s) 2020 M. Farina, Adorno’s Aesthetics as a Literary Theory of Art, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45281-0_2

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which Adorno best elucidates this path of dissolution of the aesthetic is also the only monographic text on aesthetics he managed to publish during his life, that is Philosophy of New Music (1949). The Aesthetic Theory, in fact, is released only in 1970, that is after the death of the author (1969). In order to accomplish the above outlined task, in this chapter I will first present the basic guidelines of the Philosophy of Music and then I will point to what I see as the “failure of the artwork” in Adorno’s definition of new music. Finally, I will shed light on the forces at work in the dissolution of the aesthetic, in particular by focusing on the notions of naturalization or neutralization of the material, as well as on the liquidation of art as an autonomous form.

2.1 A  Philosophy of Art as Philosophy of New Music The clear Hegelian orientation of Adorno’s aesthetic thought is fully at work in the Philosophy of New Music, not only due to the three Hegelian epigraphs opening the three sections of the book—to which I will come back in the course of this chapter—but also due to the structural argument of the text. Arguably, Adorno presents here an Hegel-inspired attempt to come to terms with his own critique of Benjamin’s aesthetics by means of an intense discussion of Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy. On the one hand, in fact, the Philosophy of New Music lays out a dialectical diagnosis of the historical condition of music in particular—and of art in general—whose methodological toolbox is borrowed from Hegelian aesthetics, here qualifying as an example of objective philosophy of art interpreting the artwork based on the form-content relationship. On the other hand, however, Adorno’s attempt to isolate two musical principles—the first of which, exemplified by Schönberg’s atonal music, stands for the drive to a disharmonious expression of artistic content, whereas the second, typified by Stravinsky’s neoclassicism, attempts to recover the lost pure harmony of music—is strongly reminiscent of the Nietzschean notion of tragedy as an unstable, painful, and violent contrast among two impulses, that is a “pervasive stylistic opposition: language, colour,

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mobility, dynamics, all of these diverge into distinct, entirely separated spheres of expression, into the Dionysiac lyric of the chorus on the one hand and the Apolline dream-world of the stage on the other” (Nietzsche 1999, p. 46). Because of its dyadic and non-harmonizable dialectics, the Philosophy of New Music can be taken as a Nietzsche-inspired interpretation of Hegel’s objective aesthetics, or rather as a Hegelian attempt to rethink Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy.1 With regard to the general structure, the book is divided in two parts, each of which exposes one of the two above-mentioned principles of new (or modern) music:2 the “progress” of Schönberg’s twelve-tone technique and the “restoration” of Stravinsky’s neoclassicism. As one might already expect based on his biography, Adorno’s predilection is radically leaning toward Schönberg’s atonal music, whereas Stravinsky is harshly criticized as a byproduct of musical conservatism, a mere nostalgic and anti-­ progressive reaction against modernity. Adorno goes as far as comparing neoclassicism and Fascism,3 thereby causing the outraged reaction of Schönberg himself in defense of his alleged enemy. Schönberg’s statement is: “it is disgusting, by the way, how he treats Stravinsky”.4 The Philosophy of New Music, however, has to be considered primarily as a book of philosophy of art, that is as a philosophical investigation of the historical conditions of possibility of music as art, and not from the point of view of its particular musicological judgments, as Luciano Berio implicitly recognizes when he admits that Adorno’s philosophy of music provides  While none of Adorno’s scholars forgets to mention Hegel’s influence in Philosophy of New Music (see, among others, Blumenfeld 1991, p. 263; Paddison 1993, pp. 109–115; Witkin 1998, pp. 61–63; Chua 2006, p. 4), strangely enough the influence of the Nietzschean theory of impulses is generally underestimated. 2  It should be remarked that the German title of the book—Philosophie der neuen Musik—has no unequivocal translation. The English equivalent of the German expression neue Musik, in fact, is “modern Music”, and hence the first translation of the text (New York: Seabury, 1973) was titled Philosophy of Modern Music. Hullot-Kentor justifies, however, his translation choice as stressing the open value of the category of “new” against the historical and definite meaning of “modern” (Hullot-Kentor 2006, pp. 58–59). 3  E.g., “the saying attributed to Hitler – that one can only die for an idea that one does not understand – could be inscribed over the gateway of the neoclassical temple” (PnM: 189, PNM: 52). 4  Included in a letter from December 5, 1949, that Schönberg wrote to Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt and quoted by the addressee himself (Stuckenschmidt 1977, p. 508). See also Heinz-Klaus Metzger (1979, p. 9). 1

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brilliant instruments to read contemporary music, but at the cost of loss of musical sensibility (Berio 2006, p. 72). The two principles that make up the new music cannot be seen simply as different tendencies, trends, or even schools; they rather stand for a radical dialectical opposition, exemplifying the two irreconcilable extremes in which new music has to be divided. As Adorno sees it, this radical opposition is not the result of his own view, but rather it corresponds to the objective historical condition of music. Adorno originally drafted only the first part about Schönberg and progress, but “after the war […] it seems to him necessary”, writes Adorno about himself in third person, “to add to the section on Schönberg5 another on Stravinsky” and this because “only in the extremes does the essence of music take shape distinctively; only they permit knowledge of its truth content” (PnM: 10, 13, PNM: 4, 7). The extremes in which Adorno recognizes the true content of new music are, then, the twelve-tone atonality and what he sees as the harmonic regression of neoclassicism. As John Covach concisely puts it, “the ‘twelve-tone idea’ can be defined as a systematic circulation of all the twelve pitch classes (pcs) in which no pc is repeated before all twelve have been sounded” (Covach 2002, p. 604). Therefore, the composer has first to decide a specific row of all the twelve pitches (the seven notes and the five semitones), and then he has to combine it by expressing all the potential of musical material, especially by exploring dissonance. On the opposite corner, there is Stravinsky, whose “neo-classicism too can only be explained in the light of his pursuance of clarity and balance” (de Leeuw 2005, p. 23). As Adorno describes it, however, the twelve-tone technique does not arbitrarily create its own rules, but rather “they are configurations of historical constraint in the material. They are at the same time schemata of adaption to this constraint” (PnM: 65, PNM: 52); by contrast Stravinsky’s neoclassicism is horrified by the late capitalistic human condition, by the loss of significance of musical material, and tries to dominate it with the domination of material itself through the demand of a restoration of harmony, and this is “the authoritarian claim of Stravinsky’s music” (PnM:  Although the English translation opts for the spelling “Schoenberg”, I prefer to use the German one “Schönberg”. 5

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186, PNM: 149). Adorno’s account on the historical condition of new music consists, then, in a dialectical opposition between the impulse of adaptation to the constraint of the material, in order to expose it and therefore criticize it, and the authoritarian attitude to reproduce in the midst of late capitalism something as the harmony of the classical bourgeois era. It is fair to argue that, through the elaboration of the Philosophy of New Music, Adorno becomes master of the theoretical significance of the aesthetic tools he develops. His first monographic book produced, in fact, long-lasting and crucial results; it made display of a set of theoretical elements that had great influence on a significant part of twentieth-­ century philosophy of art.6 Therefore, rather than as Adorno’s final word about contemporary musicology, the opposition between Schönberg and Stravinsky should be understood in light of the basic elements of his aesthetics, which I suggest to identify with the three following determinations: (i) the philosophy of (art)history as a consequence of the cognitive value of art—that is, the definition of history as the content of art; (ii) the artistic form-content relationship as a formal sedimentation of historical content; (iii) the notion of aesthetic “material” as condition of possibility of the aesthetic process of formal sedimentation of historical content. (i) Adorno clearly suggests that “the forms of art register the history of humanity with more justice than do historical documents” (PnM: 47, PNM: 37); he strongly believes, then, that the work of art makes it possible to know historical reality. Far from being original, the idea that art registers the history of humanity, however, is a theoretical principle that may well be found in one of Lukács’ late texts—that Adorno considers trivial—or in any general Marxian research on art history or art critique of the twentieth century. On top of this statement, Adorno further characterizes his position as he points to the loss of history in contemporary music, especially when he describes new music as a “ahistorical stasis”, or as he defines “musical ahistoricity” as one of the pivotal features of contemporary art (PnM: 66, 81, PNM: 53, 65). These apparently contradictory positions—art as knowledge of history and music as ahistorical  For example, Peter Szondi, one of the pioneers of comparative literature, whose influence in literary critique and in the constitution of the comparative method is hard to overestimate, explicitly declares the foundational value of Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music for his method (see, Szondi 1987, pp. 4, 96). 6

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phenomenon—have to be taken both as a critique of a naïve interpretation of the cognitive value of art and as the consequence of the Hegelian interpretation of art as a historical deployment of truth, being the latter an undisputed tenet of Hegel’s philosophy of art.7 On the one hand, in fact, the statement concerning twelve-tone musical ahistoricity challenges naïve realism, which takes art as the direct expression of what history and society actually are, on the other hand the cognitive value of art has to be understood according to the general and Hegel-inspired idea of the relationship between a work of art and philosophical theory: “The idea of the artworks and their nexus is to be philosophically constructed even if this sometimes goes beyond what the work has immediately achieved” (PnM: 34, PNM: 24). The historical dimension of the artwork is therefore something to be philosophically determined beyond the work itself, beyond its direct connections. It is in this sense that music’s ahistoricity can be understood as a recording of human history. Based on the same paradox, the subject’s non-historical interiority, in Kierkegaard, was the sign of historical pressure, since “reality finds expression only in the internally contradictory temporal course of the monologue, that is, as history” (K: 49, PNM: 32). It is not a coincidence, in this respect, that in Philosophy of New Music Adorno calls into question the “social character of loneliness” in order to explain Schönberg’s attitude toward subjectivity (PnM: 48, PNM: 38, see also Witkin 1998, pp. 131–132). This also explains why the single work is not the place in which history realizes itself in a normative production of historical purposes. History is rather the condition of possibility of the work itself, it is the framework in which the work becomes knowable as such. By determining itself as work, by being philosophically reconstructed as such, the work of art brings into light history as its condition of possibility, even in modern art’s static ahistoricity. This set-up of the relationship between history and art is underlined by Hegel’s three epigraphs with which Adorno opens the sections of his  Even scholars who are hostile to Adorno’s interpretation of Hegel recognize this definition of Hegel’s philosophy of art. Paradigmatic is the position of Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert when she defines Hegel’s aesthetics as an “experience of historical truth”, since art consists in “presentation of the truth of what exists” (Gethmann-Siefert 1984a, p.  7). Gethmann-Siefert (1984a, pp.  259, 397–398) dismisses Adorno’s position as a non-historical, messianic, idea of reconciliation. 7

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book. The Introduction is preceded by Hegel’s quote from the Aesthetics according to which “in art we have to do, not with any agreeable or useful child’s play, but […] with an unfolding of the truth” (Hegel 1975, p. 1236). The section about Schönberg and progress, instead, is opened by words taken from the Phenomenology of Spirit, in which Hegel presents the movement under which empty intelligence obtains a content: “pure insight is at first without content; instead, it is the pure disappearance of content, but by its negative movement towards what is negative to it, it will realize itself and give itself a content” (Hegel 2018, p. 314). In so doing, what Adorno aims to highlight is the fact that the alleged intellectual, abstract character of which atonal music has been accused, along with its ahistorical loneliness, shows to be the historical content of serial music itself. Finally, before the beginning of the third section on Stravinsky, Adorno quotes again Hegel’s Aesthetics, and more precisely a passage where Hegel makes fun of the Romantics attempt to recover the ancient majesty of art by writing that “it is therefore no help to him to adopt again, as that substance, so to say, past world-views, i.e. to propose to root himself firmly in one of these ways of looking at things, e.g. to turn Roman Catholic as in recent times many have done for art’s sake” (Hegel 1975, p.  606). These three quotations explain more than any other explicit airing why a philosophy of music, as a philosophy of art, is possible only within the framework of a philosophy of history. History is in fact what works express in their connection, even when superficially they seem to express the absence of historical movement. This conception, by the way, is a sort of metacritique of Benjamin’s idea of intensive, and therefore non-historical, relation between the works of art. Following Adorno, in fact, the effective absence of history in the work is itself an achievement of history and, as historical, changeable.8 (ii) The second theoretical tool applied by Adorno’s aesthetics, that is the definition of the form-content relationship, has been clearly formulated for the first time by Peter Szondi in Theory of Modern Drama (1956).  As Benjamin writes in 1923 to Florens Christian Rang, “the attempt to place the work of art in the context of historical life does not open up perspectives that lead us to its innermost core”, as “the essential relationship among works of art remains intensive”, and therefore “the specific historicity of works of art is the kind that can be revealed not in ‘art history’ but only in interpretation” (Benjamin 1994, p. 224). 8

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In his brilliant dissertation, Szondi mentions the Philosophy of New Music as a theoretical source to his own dialectical notion of content-form relationship. In particular, the idea that “form could be conceived of as ‘precipitated’ content” (Szondi 1987, p. 4) seems to him to offer a clarification, or even revelation, of the real meaning of Hegel’s notion of artistic identity of form and content. To the alleged and abstract formulation of the identity of form and content that would demonstrate Hegel’s classicism in the Aesthetics (see Hegel 1975, p. 440), Szondi opposes “their turning over and into one another” testified by the Logic (Hegel 2010, § 133, p. 200, Szondi 1987, p. 4) as the first example of the expression of the historicization of form. His understanding of the crisis of modern drama is therefore a way to implement Hegel’s notion of form as communication of content, filtered by Adorno’s radical account pointing out that, for instance, “all forms of music, not just those of expressionism, are sedimented [niedergeschlagene, precipitated] contents” (PnM: 47, PNM: 37). This is the reason why one can only abstractly refer to form and content as two separated determinations. Form is such, in aesthetic sense, just to the extent that it is a crystallization, a fixation, a sedimentation of historical content, and history becomes an aesthetic content just as far as it sediments itself, or precipitates itself, in the form. As Szondi sees it, this would be Adorno’s consistent development of Hegelian aesthetics. Moreover, Adorno’s definition of artistic form as “sedimented content” resembles the Nietzschean idea of the successful relation between the two artistic impulses, laid out in particular where it is said that “the Apolline appearances in which Dionysos objectifies himself are no longer an ‘eternal sea, a changing weaving, a glowing life’, […] now the clarity and firmness of the epic shaping speak to him from the stage” (Nietzsche 1999, p. 46). Form is therefore the element in which the indeterminate content of art—according to Nietzsche, the Dionysian irrational impulse; for Adorno, the world’s configuration in the social-historic condition— fixes itself in an exterior configuration and individualizes its proper dynamic and elusive nature. Based on this kind of determination, one can finally fully grasp the seminal notion of the “success of the work of art” in Adorno, precisely as the success of the sedimentation of the content in an aesthetic form. As Adorno writes at the end of the Introduction to Philosophy of New Music, “the works themselves are successful to the

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extent that they shape the contradiction and in this shaping allow the contradiction to reappear in the marks of their own imperfection” (PnM: 34, PNM: 24). With Nietzsche and unlike Hegel, therefore, Adorno conceives the success of the artwork as the fragile balance in which a painful content (i.e. historical social contradictions) aesthetically appears without pacifying its conflictual nature; with Hegel and unlike Nietzsche, however, he does not think art as a reconstitution of myth itself, but rather as a fluidification of its mythical, that is, conflictual content, or better as the demonstration that social contradictions are unsolved in historical reality and, at the same time, as the promise that such contradictions could once be reconciled. (iii) Finally, in order to outline the third theoretical element that emerges in Philosophy of New Music, I will now take into account the role and definition of the notion of the aesthetic “material”. The very fact that Adorno defines the concept of material starting from the field of music, that is from a form of art that based on common understanding does not consist in a material expression of meaning, calls for a careful interpretation of the issue at stake. Although scholars such as Alfred Schmidt (1983, pp.  26–27) tend to minimize the influence of Marxian materialism,9 according to my analysis Adorno’s musical notion of “material” has much more to do exactly with Marx’s conception of historical materialism than with any kind of matter, substance, or stuff. As I will show, indeed, the fact that “the ‘material’ is itself sedimented spirit” is what allows to recognize that “society has migrated into the work” (PnM: 39, PNM: 32). As far as my goal is concerned, it can be helpful to quote a passage from the essay “The Function of Counterpoint in New Music”, published in 1958 in the journal Merkur, where Adorno defines the notion of material in the context of his monograph about new music: “The concept  Alfred Schmidt sees Adorno’s aesthetic materialism as a departure from Marx’s materialistic method because the latter requires “to develop from the actual, given relations of life the forms in which these have been apotheosized” (Marx 1990, p. 494n.), whereas in Adorno’s aesthetics “art works were for him in the strict sense ‘monadological’ formations; they mirror the social whole within themselves, but they do not mirror it externally” (Schmidt 1983, p. 16). This may be true. Still, the quotation from Marx refers to materialism as critique of what can be called “ideology”, whereas Adorno’s aesthetic materialism sees art precisely as a critique of ideology. 9

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of musical material in the Philosophy of New Music should not be used to refer to any naturally given material, to physical and technological possibility that can be displayed absolutely and at any point in time. Instead the thinking there was mediated through and through: every musical language contains the entire history of music and ultimately the whole of society” (FdK: 147–148, SF: 125). Adorno introduces here a distinction between natural elements of sounds and musical material by saying that the former is as different from the latter “as is language [Sprache] from the inventory of its sounds” (PnM: 38, PNM: 31).10 “Material” in music does not refer to natural and sensible qualities of the work, but rather to the structural correlation of those elements and how this structure comes out as historically justified. A clear indication of the process of de-­ substantializing of what is understood as material is included in statements about music such as: “All of its specific traits are marks of historical process” (PnM: 38,, PNM: 31). According to said de-substantializing we are on no account to attribute something as an ontological right to exist to the tonal material itself, inasmuch as “this is precisely what occurs in arguments that want to conclude, for instance […] that the triad is the necessary and universal condition for any possible musical understanding”, and “this argumentation […] is nothing but a superstructure for reactionary compositional propensities” (PnM: 39, PNM: 31–32). It will now be clear in what respect Adorno is keen to claim that “the ‘material’ is itself sedimented spirit”. This definition, in fact, does not amount to some sort of “spiritualization” of material stuff, but it rather refers to the same dynamics that Marx understands as the fetishism of commodity and through which the sensuous thing that commodity is becomes “suprasensible or social” (Marx 1990, p.  165). This does not mean that Adorno thinks art per se in terms of commodity. Nevertheless, the attribution of social characters to a sensuous thing follows the same materialist model already unveiled both in the spiritualization of artistic material and in the recognition of the suprasensible dimension of commodity. Based on the same model, a sensuous thing becomes expression  I have changed the translation, since Hullot-Kentor’s version says “speech”, and I prefer to underline the structural dimension of language instead of the practical element of speech. In some other passages, the translation is slightly modified. 10

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of the society’s material and historical conditions of production. This is the reason why traditional musical means, as for example the diminished seventh chord, sound trivial in the context of late capitalism, and not only because “these sounds [are] obsolete and unfashionable”, but inasmuch as “they are false” (PnM: 40, PNM: 32). The latter sentence should not be taken as some sort of normative prohibition of tonal chords, since “no chord is simply ‘in itself ’ false, because no chord exists in itself and because each chord bears in itself the whole, indeed the whole of history” (PnM: 42, PNM: 33).11 This leads to the justification of Adorno’s preference for atonal, serial, music. In such a historical modification of musical material, the composer cannot be considered a creator anymore. Whereas Beethoven, along with all classical composers, could still expect to dominate his material and to impress in it his own subjective personality, the present historical condition forces the author to follow the material—namely, historical— pressure over the subject and to express it. “The state of technique presents itself to him as a problem […]: In every measure technique as a whole demands of him that he do it justice and give the one right answer that technique in that moment permits. Compositions are nothing but such answer, nothing but the solution of technical puzzles” (PnM: 42, PNM: 33). The composer, however, is not the mere executor of the material tendencies of society. Music, in fact, needs the critical dimension of judgment in order to be defined as art and “for such obedience” to its material “the composer requires all possible disobedience, all independence and spontaneity: The movement of musical material is just that dialectical” (PnM: 42, PNM: 34). To the purposes of this inquiry, the three basic elements that I have identified in Philosophy of New Music are to be taken not as an abstract definition of what an artwork is, but rather in terms of the conceptual frameworks in which the conditions of possibility of any work of art are given. A work of art consists, hence, in the formal crystallization of a  This idea does not correspond, in fact, to a prohibition of tonal and traditional chords. Indeed, they are fully justified musical means within framework of particular contexts: “In Wozzeck as well in Lulu, the C-major triad occurs—in context that are otherwise remote from tonality—whenever the issue is money. The effect is that of both patent banality and obsolescence. The small-change C-major coin is denounced as counterfeit” (PnM: 60n., PNM: 179). 11

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historical content that, by means of its own material, sensibly expresses social reality and criticizes its unreconciled structure. What I intend to show in the following is that, precisely on the basis of this definition of art, Adorno—maybe inadvertently—ends up uncovering new music’s feeling to substantiate its own aesthetic drives in something that can be taken as a real work of art.

2.2 The Failure of the Artwork As we have already seen in the letter to Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, Schönberg himself did not appreciate the way in which Adorno addresses Stravinsky. Schönberg’s defense of his alleged musical antagonist, however, is not merely a matter of courtesy due to a worldwide esteemed colleague. In the same letter, in fact, he further clarifies his own misgivings about Adorno’s philosophy of new music. “So modern music has a philosophy—it would be enough if it had a philosopher”, writes the Viennese composer to his friend and musicologist, and he adds that “he” (the “philosopher” of new music) “attacks me quite vehemently in it” and finally observes that “now I know that he has clearly never liked my music” (Stuckenschmidt 1977, p. 508). According to the most representative twelve-tone composer, then, Adorno—that is, the person who is commonly regarded, also by opponents, as the great philosophical advocate of atonal serial music and of “his hero Arnold Schönberg” (Scruton 2018, p.  49)12—not only disrespectfully attacks Stravinsky, but even despises Schönberg’s own music, that is the object of his praise. The reasons of Schönberg’s surprising reaction could maybe be found in how the composer, due to his undisputed musical sense, understood the latent threat of collapse that in Adorno’s argument enwraps all the new music, that is to say, both Stravinsky’s regressive neoclassicism and the serial twelve-tone progress. Eventually, what emerges from Adorno’s account on new music, in fact, is nothing but the image of the crumbling of  The conservative philosopher Roger Scruton may be well regarded as one of the opponents of Adorno. See, for instance comments of his such as: “the least we might say is that his contributions to musicology are flawed by a narrow-minded obsession with ideas whose time has passed” (Scruton 2009, p. 205). 12

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music, or better the sinking of new music “beneath the a priori of art”, if one is to borrow from Adorno’s own prose (ÄT: 246, AT: 164–165). As a matter of fact, in a passage concerning the notion of “form” at the end of the chapter about Schönberg, Adorno observes that “these works are magnificent failures” (PnM: 96, PNM: 77). Peeved by this kind of prognostications about the failure of new music, Schönberg writes to Joseph Rufer stating his remonstrations against the musicologist judgments of somebody “who as I say needs an eternity to compose a song” and “naturally has no idea how quickly a real composer writes down what he hears in his imagination” (Stuckenschmidt 1977, p. 508). Nevertheless, there is an argumentative consistency in Adorno’s declaration of the failure of new music, a consistency that follows his own determination of aesthetic theoretical concepts. I therefore intend to investigate the reasons of the failure of new music as art by exposing beforehand the way in which it fails. As I have previously anticipated, Adorno infers the crumbling of the notion of artwork in new music with respect to three factors: (i) the historical failure of its unitary cohesion; (ii) the split in the form-­ content relationship; (iii) the impossibility, for the artwork, to fulfill its own double character in terms of historical progress. These three points, however, have to be understood as the negative counterparts of the three theoretical determinations of the artwork that I have outlined in the previous paragraph—namely, the cognitive value of art, the relationship of form and content, and the notion of artistic material—and they can be seen as an explication of why “it seems to him [Adorno] necessary to add to the section of Schönberg another on Stravinsky” (PnM: 10, PNM: 4), or better why it is necessary to deal with a regressive musical form in order to fully account for the new music. (i) As to the first point, the shredding of the unitary cohesion of the artwork ensues from the historical failure of the work as individual product. As we have already seen, since the particular or individual aspect of the work of art is always mediated through the universal dimension of form, the work of art can be regarded as a particular product in which the expression of society goes hand in hand with a critical judgment of it. In these terms, Adorno introduces the autonomy of the artwork as a result of the external pressure of society. Now, it is precisely this notion of autonomy what is challenged by the progressive side of new music. When

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he talks about the distortions of musical harmony in serial music, Adorno states for example that “real suffering left them behind in the artwork as a sign that it no longer recognizes its autonomy; their heteronomy defies the self-sufficient semblance of music” (PnM: 44–45, PNM: 35). Then, atonal music works find themselves in a very peculiar position toward the general artistic framework, inasmuch as they seem to dissolve the dialectical tension that defines art’s autonomy in general. On the one hand, in fact, “no works could demonstrate greater density and consistency in their formal structure than do Schönberg’s and Anton Webern’s briefest movements”; on the other hand, they are proof of “the deduction of the artwork from society” (PnM: 43, 32, PNM: 34, 23). Phrasing it this way, it seems that, according to Adorno, twelve-tone compositions effectively realize the image of the work of art as a monad, whose being a close, non-­ historical, and autonomous product precisely reflects, at the same time, the nature of society as static ahistorical present. If this was the case, however, Jean-François Lyotard (1989, pp. 181–195) would be right to argue that Adorno’s idea of the artworks presents nothing but a set of boundless objects without any mutual relation, and Adorno and Horkheimer would be wrong claiming that the culture industry is not a collection of arbitrary and autonomous products, but the expression of a historical ideology (DdA: 141–142, DoE: 94–95). History has not stopped, as postmodern theory states; on the contrary, the mythological side of history—the rigid and oppressive element, currently represented by the ideology of culture industry—still needs a historical artistic form able to unveil its hidden and mythological meaning. Only commodity is really pacified with its social origin; in an antagonistic world, on the contrary, art opposes itself to society. Based on Adorno’s account, the idea of atonal compositions as the final resolution of the artistic double character would be true only in the event that they were regarded as fulfilled, accomplished works of art. The starting point of this argument, however, should not be forgotten. Adorno clearly states in fact that “these works are magnificent failures” and he adds, namely, that “it is not the composer that fails in the work: history denies the work” (PnM: 96, PNM: 77). One is to conclude then that the representation of a world without history, the idea of an artwork as the final pacification of the relationship between autonomy and heteronomy,

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is justified only by the failure of the artwork as such. Progressive music then is no longer the ideal fulfillment of a work of art, but it is rather compelled to express itself by means of aesthetic failure, that is, through the lack of history.13 Consequently, based on the general framework within which Adorno conceives his philosophy of new music, the combination of historicity and progressive composition is not viable. The new musical pieces would be indeed proof to the fact that history rejects every progressive artwork, to the extent that “history denies the work”. For instance, it is clear that the mere description of serial atonality would eventually end up with the recognition of music as a static phenomenon devoid of history, that is devoid of its condition of possibility as art. This is why, in order to define an aesthetic philosophy of history from the point of view of progressive art and for the sake of progressive art itself, Adorno needs to join to twelve-tone technique the opposite movement, that is the regressive restoration. Without musical regression, it would be impossible to understand the progress. The connection between Schönberg and Stravinsky is therefore much closer than Adorno cares to admit. In a philosophy of new music Stravinsky’s restoration is in fact key to the identification of Schönberg’s progression as art. It may be possible that Adorno’s violent, and sometimes unmotivated, attacks on the author of the Histoire du soldat are aimed to emphasize the gap between Schönberg and Stravinsky. Their theoretical intimate connection would risk otherwise to present them as the two artistic sides of the same historical coin. In other circumstances, Adorno is certainly less keen on emphasizing distinctions, but here he intends to explicitly stress the affinity of neoclassicism and fascism—a parallelism that, to be fair, Stravinsky itself has somehow encouraged.14

 Günter Seubold (1997, pp. 118–124) integrates Adorno’s interpretation of serial music within the paradigm of the end of art, and not only in the case of Schönberg, but also in the continuation of the Viennese school in Boulez, Stockhausen, and Luigi Nono, as opposed to John Cage’s aleatoric music. 14  As Harvey Sachs (1988, p. 168) reported, Stravinsky declares to an Italian journalist: “I don’t believe that anyone venerates Mussolini more than I do”, and, after a private audience with the Duce, “I told him that I felt like a fascist myself ”. 13

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In order to fully understand why atonal music needs to be explained in the light of neoclassical regression, or better why art produces the phenomenon of regression in order to progressively explain the historical situation, one should clarify in which terms the neoclassical restoration (paradoxically) unleashes historical movement. As we have seen, in fact, progressive atonal music is described as an “ahistorical stasis”, “the end of the musical experience of time”, and as the image of a world that “no longer knows history” (PnM: 66, 68, 62, PNM: 53, 65, 50); but, upon closer inspection, such a description of a cultural product is not that of an artwork, but that of product of culture industry, or rather of a commodity, that is of a reproduction of social conflicts without any kind of judgment or opposition to them. In order to be regarded as art, music needs therefore to bring out history, to bring out the fact that social conflicts are historical, changeable, not natural, and therefore transitory. This task, paradoxically enough, is carried out exactly by musical restoration, that is by the neoclassical apparent denial of historical process. I have called this movement paradoxical, but it would be actually better to say “dialectical”, since Adorno sees Stravinsky as a Romantic getaway from historical process. As the Romantic movement attempted to find the truth in the past and through a conservative stance toward modernity, Stravinsky succumbs “to the temptation of using stylistic procedures to reinstill the binding quality in music” (PnM: 127, PNM: 105). However, it is precisely in this kind of escape from history that Adorno recognizes the emergence of history itself. The historical character of the artwork comes out as soon as Adorno delves deeper into the artistic trend that attempts to escape in an eternal and ahistorical style. While Schönberg’s loyalty to historical progress turns art into an ahistorical product, Stravinsky’s restoration conversely expresses history. As in the case of the non-historical inwardness of monologue that allows Kierkegaard to expose history, Stravinsky’s refusal to follow the progressive process shows itself as historically determined. Step by step, Adorno’s argument runs as follows. “The belief that the archaic lies immediately available to aesthetic control of the ego”—that is, the theoretical assumption of Stravinsky’s neoclassicism—“is superficial wish fulfillment”, namely a subjective attempt to recover a pre-­ historical state of art; but as Adorno contends, “the force of historical

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process, which crystallized the resilient ego, has been objectified in the individual, maintains his cohesion, and divides the ego from what is prehistorical in the individual” (PnM: 155, PNM: 125). As the reader can see, history is what compels an alleged pure ego to search for a non-­ historical past and nothing more than this attempt bears testimony to the power of the historical process. This leads to the necessity of Stravinsky’s regression in the framework of new music, that is to say, in order to release history in art. “There is no music”, writes Adorno, “that bears anything of the power of the historical hour that is not touched by the collapse of experience”, and what he understands as the “passing away of subjective time in music”, that is, the difficulty of the musical piece to subjectively express the historical process, can be complementarily observed at the extreme poles of composition. As Adorno states, in fact, “the expressionist miniature of the new Viennese school contracts the dimension of time […] and in the major twelve-tone constructions time is introduced by means of an integral procedure that therefore appears to be without any development because it tolerates nothing external to itself on which development could be tested” (PnM: 177, PNM: 142). Clearly, this external thing on which development could be tested is nothing but Stravinsky’s regression, that the philosopher places in with a view to complete new music’s partiality, inasmuch as “the idea of the artworks and their nexus is to be philosophically constructed even if this sometimes goes beyond what the work has immediately achieved” (PnM: 34, PNM: 24). In order to be recognized as work of art, therefore, the atonal progress has, so to say, to produce its own dialectical counterpart, the artistic neoclassical restoration. In this way, however, the work of art fails as single, individual, product. Its double character—its procedural, progressive, changing nature, that at the same time maintains a normative, universal, a-temporal dimension—cannot be fulfilled in a single, individual product. What I have introduced as the historicization of the Kantian reflecting judgment can no longer be realized except in the whole historical movement in general. Rather than in the single composition, music as form of art crystalizes itself in the whole historical movement of progress and restoration, while the work of art as single product inevitably fails.

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(ii) The second characteristic that defines the failure of the work of art is the split of form and content in the context of aesthetic disharmony. As previously mentioned, the conciliation and the success of the artwork are not connected to the harmonic form of the product. Adorno follows, indeed, Hegel—and also Nietzsche—in disengaging the success of the artwork from the aesthetic category of beauty. According to Hegel, the aesthetic category of beauty expresses the identity of form and content— that is, the successful work of art—only when the historical (or spiritual) content can be harmonically sedimented in the sensuous form, that is, when the spiritual development is so simple and so exterior to find its own adequate home in the sensuous artistic expression of meaning, namely at the age of classical Greece. After that period, after the collapse of the Greek naturalness and the resulting Christian development of interiority, after the historical relationship between family and state was completed by the mediation of civil society, and after modernity made life complicated and prosaic, the spiritual content can be sedimented and crystallized in exterior form only by means of a no longer harmonically beautiful superficial presentation. This is the explanation of the two apparently contradictory statements made by Hegel, according to which “nothing can be or become more beautiful” than classic art, but at the same time “we may well hope that art will always rise higher and come to perfection” (Hegel 1975, pp. 517, 103). Artistic progress is not a consequence of the production of beauty as harmony.15 It is only due to historical and cultural heritage that Hegel keeps using the category of beauty in order to identify the successful work of art; indeed, it is by one of his most orthodox scholars, namely Karl Rosenkranz, and as an application

 The question of the so-called negative aesthetic categories (such as that of ugly) has drawn the attention of Hegelian scholars especially in the last thirty years, in particular thanks to the general project of revision of Hegel’s traditional image as a conservative thinker. In this context, scholars attempted to reshape Hegel’s alleged classicism by highlighting his use of negative categories. See, for example, the argument of Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert (1984b, pp.  205–258). Morover, Francesca Iannelli (2007, pp. 52–57) stresses in which terms Hegel’s notion of “ideal” necessarily comprehends negative aesthetic categories. In one of the most referenced Italian studies on Hegel’s philosophy of art, Paolo D’Angelo (1989, in particular pp. 188–190) criticizes the image of a “classicist Hegel” by demonstrating the genetic role of the notion of symbol in Hegel’s determination of aesthetics. In the same direction, see also my argument in Farina 2015, pp. 11–16. 15

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of the Hegelian aesthetic pattern, that in 1853 the first example of an Aesthetics of Ugliness was published. This kind of Hegelian arguments, along with the Nietzschean notion of the Dionysian origin of tragedy, leads Adorno’s line of reasoning toward the ideas of dissonance and disharmony. As we have seen, art has to preserve social conflicts in order not to deny the real suffering, and every attempt to anesthetize human pain turns into an ideological form, that, especially as entertainment, serves to conceal social conflicts; this is the meaning of the vexed quotation whereby “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” (KuG: 30, Pr: 34) and of Adorno’s vehement protests against verses of joy written “only a few years closer to us than the time when Jews who had not been completely killed by the gas were thrown living into the fire, where they regained consciousness and screamed” (JdE: 429, JoA: 24).16 Disharmony, however, does not consist in any case in the feeling of disgust, conceived as the aesthetic sense of total repulsion;17 artistic disharmony is a kind of formal, or rather, aesthetic, sublation—in the sense of Hegel’s Aufhebung, or determinate negation18—of contradictions, namely an artistic conciliation that manages to maintain the reality of conflicts, while overcoming it. Given the previous theoretical account of aesthetic categories, and on the basis of what I have emphasized about serial music, it should be clear to what extent the principle of conciliation through dissonance and disharmony is suitably embodied by the twelve-tone technique. In this light  This is a quotation from the 1964 pamphlet, Jargon of Authenticity, where Adorno vehemently attacks a group of poets and philosophers (in this case, Werner Bergengruen), that he presents as part of the intellectual Heideggerian circle. 17  So Winfried Menninghaus understands the category of disgust, as he claims that “everything seems at risk in the experience of disgust. It is a state of alarm and emergency, an acute crisis of self-preservation in the face of an unassimilable otherness, a convulsive struggle, in which what is in question is, quite literally, whether ‘to be or not to be’” (Menninghaus 2003, p. 1). On this problem in Kant, see Feloj 2013, pp. 175–185. 18  “Sublation” is one of the most common English translations of the German technical Hegelian word Aufhebung (see, Pinkard 2018, p. xl). Hegel’s notion of Aufhebung corresponds to the determinate negation as opposed to abstract (or absolute) negation and it designates the movement according to which consciousness negates its own old theoretical stance toward the world, but it maintains nevertheless the memory of what it has negated without deleting its experience. See, for example, when Hegel rejects the abstract negative of the “merely clever argumentation”, that simply negates, and the speculative one, in which negation (as sublation) “is the determinate negative which emerges out of this movement and is likewise thereby a positive content” (Hegel 2018, p. 37). 16

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should also be read Adorno’s statement according to which “under the constraint of its own objective logic, music critically canceled the idea of the consummate [runden] artwork” (PnM: 36, PNM: 29). As we have seen, the critique of tonality of harmonic chords is not brought about by the subjective taste of the artist. The matter is not only that these sounds are obsolete and unfashionable, but rather that they are false. Moreover, as Adorno claims, “the sickness that has befallen the idea of the work may stem from a social condition that does not offer what would be binding and confirming enough to guarantee the harmony of the self-sufficient work” (PnM: 42–43, PNM: 34). It is according to such kind of arguments that, when it comes to new music, “twelve-tone technique is truly its fate” (PnM: 68, PNM: 54), or more prosaically the consistent product of its historical path. In this regard, Adorno writes that “dissonance, and its related categories of melodic composition based on ‘dissonant’ intervals, are the veritable bearers of depositional expression” (PnM: 62, PNM: 49), and therefore the harmonic element can be accepted only to show its falsity, as in the case of Alban Berg’s use of C-major triad whenever the issue is money in order to demonstrate its objective falsity (PnM: 60n., PNM: 179). This is nothing new. In fact, already the age of Baudelaire conceived the disturbing element of art as a reaction to the alienated condition of the subject, and Rosenkranz expressed the social origin of aesthetic ugliness connecting its own philosophical research to Fourier’s rubrics about the division of labor (Rosenkranz 2015, p. 26). What is groundbreaking in Adorno’s theory is the reframing of dissonance—and of all the negative aesthetic categories in general—as means to understanding the relationship between form and content. Dissonance, in fact, should not be seen as a divergence of form and content, as the previous aesthetic tradition would have it, but rather as the way in which the historical content formally sediments itself at the age of the universalization of social suffering; in Adorno’s words, “all forms of music”—that is to say, all the successful forms of music—“are sedimented contents. In them survives what is otherwise forgotten and is no longer capable of speaking directly” (PnM: 47, PNM: 37). It is precisely this definition of the form-content relationship what describes the necessary dissonance of new music as an aesthetic conciliation and conservation of social conflicts. Only through dissonance,

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in fact, one can accomplish that kind of aesthetic presentation of contradictions that characterizes the new art. It seems that Adorno takes the Hegelian idea of art as historical presentation of the ideal more seriously than Hegel himself. In this regard, the work of art always produces the identity of form and content—to the point that “form” is “sedimented content” and it is therefore impossible to separate them—despite the fact that sometimes—namely, in modernity—that sedimentation can be executed only by means of disharmony and dissonance, as the unreconciled world cannot be aesthetically sublimated through harmony. Just as in the case of the historical definition of the artwork (i), also in its formal determination we can see the emergence of a tension that leads to the failure of the work of art as individual product. If the atonal music is able to aesthetically conciliate a disharmonious form, “this is only successful at the price of its own freedom, and thus it fails”, as “the new order, twelve tone technique, virtually extinguishes the subject”. According to Adorno, in serial compositions—despite their being the “fate” of music—the tendency toward failure is always present, and, in all likelihood, this is why Schönberg states “that he [Adorno] has clearly never liked my music”. The tendency to failure, moreover, is clearly visible in the development of the most representative serial composer himself, as “what is great in the late Schönberg was won as much in opposition to twelve-tone technique as through it”, especially given that “the miscarriage of technical artwork, however, is not simply a failure with regard to its aesthetic ideal; rather, it is a failure in the technique itself. The radicalism with which technical artwork destroys aesthetic semblance ultimately consigns technical artwork to semblance” (PnM: 70, PNM: 56). The artwork itself, therefore, necessarily and individually fails right in the art form that represents its fate, and it fails as it destroys its own aesthetic dimension of semblance, namely the quality that makes the formal sedimentation of social conflicts “aesthetic”—and therefore conciliated. The twelve-tone technique of Arnold Schönberg, that is the progress, the future, and the fate of music, radically fails exactly in its being a work of

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art, namely a product whose semblance turns the documentation of historical contradictions into their critique.19 In order to be saved as art, a progressive artwork needs to be integrated with its regressive counterpart. The artistic restoration, however, is not relevant merely within an external comparison with progressive failure; it is rather the whole aesthetic determination of the artwork as such what causes the restoration itself. What in the historical determination condemns the work to the absence of history, in its formal definition turns the work into something arbitrary. In this case, the work would actually be a monad, something closed off to the world. But as we have seen, Adorno’s idea of autonomy is dialectical, and it depends on heteronomy. Otherwise, art would be part of the “anarchy of commodity production” of the culture industry (DdA: 230, DoE: 169). In other words, only the existence of Stravinsky’s attempt to restore harmony is able to justify musical disharmony as art. The Philosophy of New Music corresponds then to a philosophical construction that, based on Adorno’s standpoint, is supposed to account for the idea of the artworks and their nexus, even beyond what the single work has superficially achieved. In this respect, Stravinsky’s music is not simply a random example of a  modern attempt to write tonal music. As Robert Witkin (1998, pp. 146–148) suggests, Adorno picks Stravinsky, and not, for example, Sibelius, because of his being integrated into the historical process, because of his being “modern” insofar as he is regressive; in other words, because of the purity in which the regressive tendency of art is shown in his neoclassical compositions. As I have already suggested, according to Adorno, the trend detected in Stravinsky’s tonal music leads to the clear realization that new music is historically determined. On this ground atonal music can be acknowledged as art. The regression of Stravinsky, in fact, is able to express the integration of the subject in what Adorno conceives as social totality, namely the objective structure in which single phenomena, while  Although I suggest the failure of twelve-tone music in Adorno’s aesthetics, how Robert Witkin (1998, p. 139) speaks of Adorno’s “opposition to twelve-tone technique”, in terms of a “castigation of it”, or “attack” upon serial composition, seems to me an exaggeration. I find the judgment of the Italian scholar, Sara Zurletti (2006, pp. 140–142), more balanced, especially when she points to the sinking of new music beneath the proper concept of art in the Philosophy of New Music. 19

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appearing as arbitrary, discover themselves as determinate. Indeed, as Adorno writes, “the element of appeasing and harmonious, this element in art of the displacement of the dreaded, […] triumph as the herald of the iron age in Stravinsky’s scornful and cutting tone” (PnM: 156, PNM: 126–127). The category of totality—that Adorno inherited from Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness and on which he kept relying up to his debate with Popper in 1969, right before his death20—is a critical category and therefore fits neoclassical restoration, as what allows progressive music to appear as art. In a critical sense, totality alludes to the same Hegelian gaze to the whole dialectical connection, but without the positive and affirmative sense of conciliation stated by Hegel. Totality expresses, hence, the social oppressive conflicts and fragmentations that define the single subject, here conveyed by Stravinsky’s violent restoration. Stravinsky’s neoclassicism is thus the artistic movement through which ideology becomes evident. “The aesthetic discipline and order”, “the claim to authenticity”, that “is ceded to an authoritarian comportment”, the “unperturbed obedience”, proclaimed as “aesthetic principle of style”, “the negation of the negativity of the subject in this authoritarian attitude”, “its seductively anti-ideological quality, establishes itself as a new ideology” (PnM: 183, PNM: 146). Thereby, Adorno intends to emphasize the affinity of neoclassicism with two apparently opposed social (regressive) trends, namely the diffusion of the culture industry and the sinking into fascism. As to the first, Stravinsky is “a Wagner who has come fully into his own”, and just like Wagner he wants to “hammer the music into the head of the musically stupid”, that is into “the kind of listener for industrial cultural mass”; as to the second, Stravinsky is devoted to a regressive utopia “of a close society guilelessly oriented to a guild economy and the early manufacturing period” (PnM: 174, 184, PNM: 140, 148). The musical regression is then what is able to show the ideological framework that embraces together fascism and culture industry, and in  In 1969, Adorno wrote the introduction to a selection of writings that provided an overview of the debate between the dialectical and the positivist approach to sociology. In that context, he claims that “totality is not an affirmative but rather a critical category. […] There is nothing socially factual which would not have its place in that totality” (EzP: 192, IPD: 12). 20

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relation to which the dissonance stands out as a distinctively artistic feature; the relevance of the neoclassical restoration lies in that, unlike fullfledged fascism propaganda and culture industry, it is one of the extremes of the artistic overview. In this respect, dissonance is the fate of music only inasmuch as it produces a dialectical and harmonic counterpart, and inasmuch as it shapes in this manner what I have defined as the double character of art. The singularity—the dissonance and fragility—of twelvetone compositions is so individual that it does not have the strength to singularly elevate itself to the status of successful artwork; the universality—the conceptual harmony and violence—of neoclassicism suppresses any individual and conflictual element to the point that artistic expression escapes from its wide hands. Only inasmuch as one side is identified with the antagonist degeneration of the other, new music can be recognized as art; and this only at the price of the formal failure of any individual work from each side. (iii) After all, the work of art fails to fulfill its double character also as expression of historical progress, or even as dissolution of historical myth. Paul Valéry (1958, p. 52), one of Adorno’s most beloved poets, judges as “scholarly” the opposition of abstract thought and poetry. Artistic creation, in fact, cannot be fulfilled by the mere romantic cult of immediate inspiration, as it rather needs the interpenetration of aesthetic feeling and the formal activity of “organization”, so that the former could be “sized, fixed, and reshaped” (Valéry 1958, p. 63). As we have seen, according to Adorno the artwork possesses a double character exactly because of the presence of both a sensuous particular element and a universal conceptual dimension, of both the expression of social conflicts and their critique. This determination of the artwork is clearly expressed in the Introduction to Philosophy of New Music, where Adorno presents the methodological tools of his aesthetic research: “it is necessary to transform the strength of the universal concept into the self-unfolding of the concrete object and to revolve the social puzzle of its image by the powers of its own individuation. In this, the aim is to provide not social justification but a theory of society by virtue of explication of what is aesthetically right and wrong at the heart of the objects” (PnM: 33, PNM: 23). The philosophy of new music, therefore, requests from the artwork the same double character that Adorno defined in his early aesthetic reflections.

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Thus, the double character of aesthetic presentation remains the most basic and essential qualification of the artworks, and no wonder the lines of failure I have defined above tend to converge in the failure of the artwork as a double-character product. A work that gives up that antinomic structure, gives up at the same time its own artistic character, insofar as it either tends to pander to social development, becoming thereby a product of culture industry, or it abstractly opposes itself to society without showing its own social origin, becoming then a conceptual (non-­aesthetic) theoretical critique, namely an essay. As we have seen, this is why art corresponds to that social product able to critically interpret what in society appears as fixed, rigid, and natural, and therefore as mythical, namely the sedimentation of social conflicts. A form of art unable to dissolve the mythical meaning of society cannot be conceived as a progressive cultural element, but just as a mere standard repetition of society itself.21 The double character of art is, hence, the point of convergence of all the aesthetic tensions of art and the antinomies we have seen in this chapter reappear in this context in their most radical form. As cutting-edge outcome of progressive art, atonal music ought to be able to express the aesthetic tension that embodies the artistic double character. At the end of his study on Schönberg, in fact, Adorno reads the twelve-tone technique simply in reference to the aesthetic tension of universal and particular. Given the relevance of the problem, I will present his reasoning step by step. About art in general, reasserting what we have seen as distinctive in art’s structure, Adorno writes that “its depth is that of judgement on the bad. But that through which it  – as knowing  – judges is aesthetic form”. He then goes on to say that “in the act of knowing that art carries out, its form criticizes the contradiction by indicating  Although beyond the purpose of this research, it should be noticed that the standardization features Adorno recognizes in any popular or mass product are precisely what seems to hamper the use of Adorno’s aesthetic in the interpretation of pop culture. Among the several interpretations of Adorno’s theory of standardization, see the first chapter, Cultural nemesis, in Witkin 2003, pp. 1–15. More recently, though, against the “orthodox”, or rigid interpretation of his philosophy (see, Marino 2017, pp.  36–38), some attempts have been made to read popular music phenomena through the lenses of Adorno’s toolbox. In a previous Italian publication, Stefano Marino has pursued an “Adornian” interpretation of Frank Zappa in the book La filosofia di Frank Zappa: Un’interpretazione adorniana (The Philosophy of Frank Zappa: An Adornian Interpretation, Marino 2014). 21

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the possibility of its reconciliation and thus what is contingent, surmountable, and dependent in the contradiction”. This is the reason why art can be such a unique social product that is able to mirror and criticize society itself; and this is also the reason why “as the concretion of the possible, art has always repudiated the reality of the contradiction on which is based”, that is, inasmuch as it shows its possible (and necessary) resolution. Right after this description of what art should be, Adorno writes that “as knowledge, however, it [art] becomes radical in the moment in which it is no longer content with itself as such. This is the threshold of new art” (PnM: 119, PNM: 97). What is described in this passage is nothing but Adorno’s recognition of a structural change in new art—or rather, in new music—compared to the classical function of aesthetic products. New music, in fact, “is no longer content” with its aesthetic relation of particular and universal; it rather aspires to knowledge and therefore it forgoes its double character. With reference to new music, in fact, one reads that “it so deeply grasps its own contradictions, that they no longer permit solution” and even more clearly, “new art leaves the contradiction standing and exposes the barren bedrock of its categories of judgement, the form. It casts away the dignity of the judge and abdicates, stepping down to take the side of the plaintiff who can be reconciled only by reality. Only in the fragmentary work, renouncing itself, is the critical content liberated” (PnM: 119, PNM: 97). It is not a coincidence, then, that in the footnote to this passage Adorno calls into question Benjamin’s arguments about aura and technical reproducibility, that is, those arguments that according to Adorno present the artwork in the light of “the appearance of original in technique”. Only by accepting a Romantic evaluation of the sense-based particular, new music can appear as art, but according to its method of overall mediation, Adorno is forced to recognize new music structurally as “antipathy toward art”, along with its own activity of “liquidation of art” (PnM: 118, 120, PNM: 96, 97). New music rejects any relationship not only with the critical intention to philosophically interpret its structure, but also with the public, which is indeed unable to understand it as art. This kind of radical elitist character turns new music in what Adorno conceives as its “absolute oblivion”, as “it is the true message in a bottle”, that can be maybe useful for a future and liberated humanity, but not for

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the contemporary alienated society.22 This is how new music fails as art in the most radical way, that is to say, as expression and critical judgment of social conflicts. However, as we have seen for the other two misgivings of serial music, also in this case Stravinsky’s neoclassicism corresponds to a means of recognition of twelve-tone technique as art. Music, in fact, fails as individual product, both in Stravinsky and Schönberg, but since “all art stands opposed to mythology” (PnM: 126, PNM: 102), it must somehow succeed to produce its double character as dissolution of myth. And the way in which it succeeds, if not in the single work, comes about in the new age itself, as philosophically accounted for. The double character of the work is now to be found in the general movement of music, according to which, on the one hand, Schönberg so deeply expresses social contradictions that he cannot anymore oppose himself to them, and, on the other hand, Stravinsky reacts against those contradictions, he judges them, without being able to find a possible solution in this world and taking thereby refuge in the old classical style. This is why the story of new music is, according to Adorno, the story of the failure of the work of art as such, namely as individual, single, product. Only the gaze of the philosopher is able to see the artistic antinomic movement of universal and particular that determines art. As we have seen, in fact, is Stravinsky’s escape from modernity what shows the emergence of history, as “nothing perhaps demonstrates so clearly how in Stravinsky modernism and archaic are two sides of the same thing” (PnM: 146, PNM: 118). New atonal music as single work fails to such a degree that, in order to be thought as art, it needs a counterpart that negates any aesthetic presupposition of technical music, that is, the reactionary neoclassicism.

2.3 The Dissolution of the Aesthetic According to my account, in his work on music, Adorno defines his aesthetics as a philosophy of history and ends up presenting something like a Hegel-inspired diagnosis of the end of art. Although it would  According to James Hellings (2014, pp. 56–57), Adorno’s metaphor of the message in a bottle came from Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “Ms. Found in a Bottle”. 22

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be probably more accurate, though, to define Adorno’s account as a radical interpretation of Hegel’s thesis about the end of art23—like Hegel, Adorno would argue for the inability of art to express and fulfill human cultural needs. The work fails as individual product and it becomes an empty shell unable to autonomously sustain its own artisticity. This would be true if Adorno’s diagnosis of artistic crisis was supported by a metaphysical theory of the bond between art and history, like the one that has been detected by standard interpretations of the Hegelian idea of the death of art as based on the metaphysics of absolute consciousness. Differently, as I will argue in this paragraph, Adorno’s conclusion has nothing to do with an epochal verdict about an invariant, or absolute, idea of art, but it rather revolves around an aesthetic principle that I identify with the notion of the dissolution of the aesthetic element and that expresses the consistent conclusion of a materialistic interpretation of the artwork. Art, in fact, is not treated by Adorno as an ideal determination that can somehow disappear when its metaphysical value ceases to be significant—as still the young Lukács (1971, p. 37) seems to suggest; art is rather a human cultural function, a way in which humanity presents its social contradictions by judging their being oppressive, and therefore it cannot disappear until those conflicts are still real and urgent. As Adorno writes, “only for a pacified humanity would art come to an end” (PnM: 24, PNM: 16). What we have seen in the failure of new music corresponds therefore to how art reacts to a given historical change in the making and to a certain rearrangement of social relationships. In what follows, I will present the principle of the dissolution of the aesthetic as a  As we have seen, one of the classical interpretations, namely that of Benedetto Croce, suggests a radical reading of the end of art in Hegel’s aesthetics. Not only the Aesthetics of 1912, but also in his polemic against the English philosopher, Bernard Bosanquet, Croce asserts that in Hegel art dies and dissolves itself in philosophy (Croce 1934, pp. 425–434); this is the traditional explanation of Hegel’s idea of the end of art as it was supported for example by Edward von Hermann in his study about German Aesthetic from Kant (see especially, Hartmann 1886, pp. 124–125). In the second half of the twentieth century, the debate about the end of art has flared up again. In particular, scholars from the Hegel-Archiv in Bochum have supposed a new interpretation of the end of art, namely as a secondary problem in Hegelian aesthetics, as an exaggeration of the classicist interpretation, and as an attempt to overestimate the role of the philosophical system in Hegel by diminishing the value of the interpretation of concrete phenomena (for a general account of this position, see Gethmann-Siefert 2005, pp. 347–360). For a different take on this problem, see the lecture of Eva Geulen on Hegel’s end of art as a dialectical movement of birth and rebirth (Geulen 2006, pp. 19–40). 23

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variation of artistic conditions in the framework of a materialistic comprehension of art’s expression. In 1957, that is almost ten years after the Philosophy of New Music, Adorno writes an essay about Beethoven’s Missa solemnis. Composed in the last years of Beethoven’s life, Adorno considers this great mass as the “Alienated Magnum Opus” of his late style. The relevance of this essay— beside the fact that it represents one of the few visible results of Adorno’s forty-year effort to write a book about the composer of the Ninth Symphony24—lies in the fact that Beethoven’s late style forms the breaking point of traditional music, and therefore it is historically located right at the border of the artistic change that leads to the failure of modern music. This also explains why Adorno met some major difficulties writing about Beethoven. It seems indeed that the fragility he recognizes in Beethoven’s compositions reflects itself in his own difficulties to write a proper book about it, as he intended to already in the 1930s.25 Adorno, moreover, sees in Beethoven a sort of musical pendant of Hegelian philosophy, as if the dialectical notion of totality would find artistic expression in Beethoven’s non-abstract conciliation of tones in harmony.26 Of great relevance is how Adorno approaches Beethoven’s mass as a masterpiece, clearly a work in a traditional sense, but also a masterpiece which is about to become a new fragmented work. There is no doubt, in fact, that the Missa is a work of art in a traditional sense, and this is why Adorno describes it as an example of the artistic double character. More precisely, “the puzzle posed by the Missa Solemnis”, writes Adorno, “is the deadlock between an archaic procedure which implacably sacrifices Beethoven’s achieved techniques, and a human tone which seems to  The others are two short essays, both written in 1934. The first, “Beethoven’s Late Style”, has been published for the first time in 1937 (now, in GS, 17, pp.  13–17), the second, “Ludwig van Beethoven: Six Bagatelles for Piano, op. 126”, has been published for the first time in the edition of Adorno’s writings (GS, 18, pp. 185–188). 25  In 1993, Rolf Tiedemann edited a collection of Adorno’s writings under the title Beethoven. The Philosophy of New Music. The volume consists in a collection of fragments and notes that Adorno wrote along the years in order to figure out how to structure his Beethoven monograph. As the editor claims, Adorno planned to write a philosophical work on Beethoven since 1937 (Tiedemann 1998, p. vii). 26  The parallelism between Beethoven and Hegel has been largely investigated by the critique. See for example Michael Spitzer (2006, pp. 45–47) and Markus Ophälders (2001, p. 148). 24

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mock these archaic means”; and this “puzzle” that makes the Missa a real work of art consists in “the linking of the idea of humanity to a somber aversion to expression” (VH: 155, B: 148). The tension that typically identifies the work of art according to Adorno’s determination is particularly perceptible in Beethoven. The radical enigmatic nature of his work makes it a borderline case between traditional and new art. Although, clearly still art in a traditional sense, thanks to the fragility of its totality, Beethoven’s music already alludes to the fragmentation of new art, exactly as Hegel’s dialectical whole refers to negative and fragmented totality, as Adorno says in Hegel. Three Studies.27 It is furthermore to such comments in Adorno’s texts that one refers when pointing to Adorno’s secularization of Hegelian categories (Bozzetti 1996, pp. 9, 59–67). The openness of Beethoven’s late style is therefore said to ensue from the impossibility for the author to prevail over the objectivity and to master musical material. According to Adorno, “the Missa is a work of omission, of permanent renunciation” and it mirrors the “efforts of the later bourgeois, which no longer hoped to conceive and express the universally human in the concrete form of particular” (VH: 157, B: 151). In this sense, Beethoven’s Missa revels its being on the way to become new music and it shows “that the principle of musical development has run its course historically” (VH: 160, B: 153). In a pretty hidden passage of the essay from 1957, however, Adorno hints in passing at the aesthetic principle of failure concerning new music. Once become deaf, Adorno  writes, Beethoven “did not, as might be thought, follow the dictates of his inner ear”, but rather he “made masterful use of all the possibilities which had grown up during the history of his composing; suppression of the sensuous was only one of them” (VH: 149, B: 144). Already during Beethoven’s time, then, one of the possibilities of music as art was that of giving up the sensuous element, that is the element that has always been the decisive characteristic of the artistic  In the first of the Three Studies on Hegel, Adorno clearly states the distinction between the Hegelian notion of totality and its abstract development by Köhler’s theory of Gestalt: “He does not make the parts, as elements of the whole, autonomous in opposition to it; at the same time, as a critic of romanticism, he knows that the whole realizes itself only in and through the parts, only through discontinuity, alienation, and reflection-through, in short, everything that is anathema to Gestalt theory” (DSH: 253, HTS: 4). 27

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communication of meaning as aesthetics.28 Therefore, since aesthetics can no longer be defined as a sensuous communication of human truth, the entry of music into the realm of its failure as individual work corresponds to a determining change in the role of the sensuous (or sensory) as aesthetic principle. This is not the case for Beethoven, whose compositions draw the line between classical and new music, but rather that of contemporary music, taken as the expression of the late capitalistic decay of aesthetic sensibility. It seems, then, that art can do without its sensuously perceptible character, in other words what traditionally has ensured its being part of the realm of aesthetics by making it precisely artistic and not, for example, philosophical. This principle shows its effects precisely in the determination of new music. Adorno’s verdict about the failure of new music can be theoretically justified only from the point of view of its material constitution. In fact, the dimension of music that goes into crisis is its objective ability to autonomously communicate its meaning, namely its material element. Musical material, in fact, is not simply the sum of sounds available to the composer, but rather something that is as different from it “as language from the inventory of its sounds”. Musical material does not directly consist in the sounds, but it is rather the formal grammar through which sounds become meaningful, and this grammar historically changes, as in the material “all of its specific traits are marks of the historical process” (PnM: 38, PNM: 31). The split of new music into the two extremes of progress and regression results therefore from a paradigm shift in musical material, or rather in the artistic material in general. Progressive music, in fact, shows that artistic material turned into natural material, to the point that musical meaning is something to be “retrospectively” reconstructed,  Aesthetics, in fact, corresponds to the modern philosophical discipline (Ritter 1971, cols. 555–557) whose name has been used for the first time by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten as the title of his book from 1750 in order to define what he intended as “theory of liberal arts”, gnoseologia inferior, “science of sensory cognition” (Baumgarten 1986, p. 1). Even if one wants to follow the English-speaking tradition and backdate the proper beginning of the discipline with Addison’s essay “Pleasures of Imagination” (see Kivy 1989, p. 255), the question of sensuous knowledge is still pivotal, as Addison begins his text with the observation about aesthetics that “our sight is the most perfect and most delightful of all our senses” (Addison 1712, No. 411). Since the beginning, aesthetics has been conceived as the study of sense-based knowledge and this part of Baumgarten’s definition has never been denied to this day (Guyer 2014, vol. I, p. 6). 28

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as if one could apply Kantian natural teleology to the artwork (see Paddison 1993, p. 57). The traditional and tonal canon of music, that appeared solid and firm like it was natural, gave way to atonal music. The naturality of the canon turned out to be nothing but “an illusion originating in history”; thanks to atonal music, however, it has been demonstrated that “the material is reduced to mere nature, to the physical relation of tones, and it is above all this relapse that subjects twelve-tone music to the constraint of nature” (PnM: 20, 85, PNM: 13, 68). If the apparent naturality of the canon was a historical product, the historicity of atonal music is a relapse of historical artistic material into naturality. This process, however, is possible inasmuch as “the ‘material’” of art, as we have seen, “is itself sedimented spirit”, in the same sense in which for Marx commodity “theologically” reflects social relationships. What Adorno defines as the naturality of the material of new art consists, then, in the fact that social spirit, social Geist in the sense we have seen in the previous chapter, sediments in artistic material and, as if it was a natural force, it imposes its law on the author and forces him to obey its serial row. This dynamics is made possible thanks to the absorption of artistic material into the social production process. At the beginning of the Introduction to the Philosophy of New Music Adorno is pretty clear about it. “Modern painting’s departure from the object”, he  writes, “that in painting marks the same branch as does atonality in music, was an act of defense against mechanized art merchandise”, in fact “in its origins, radical musical reacted no differently to the commercial debasement of the traditional idioms. It was the antithesis of the spreading of the culture industry in its own domain” (PnM: 15, PNM: 9). According to what I have shown, the failure of new music, namely its incapacity to become a successful individual work, is a process that occurs in the material element of music, as the author can no longer find a form in which the spirit can be sedimented as a critique of its own conflicts; to the opposite, conflicts are directly transferred in artistic material itself as a commercial debasement of its traditional forms. Musical material, thus, is the element in which society sediments itself and absorbs the work in its own processes “at the cost of the passive perception of the sensual sound” (PnM: 21, PNM: 14). What characterizes art at the age of late capitalism is therefore a social absorption of material that “is called in

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concepts of art neutralization of the material”, and “the liquidation of art  – of the closed artwork  – becomes an aesthetic problem, and the increasing neutralization of the material brings with it the renunciation to the identity of content and appearance in which these traditional ideas of art come to terms” (PnM: 115, 120, PNM: 93, 97). The work of art, hence, fails as individual product inasmuch as its material has been neutralized, it has lost its own sensible qualification that would allow it to be a medium of aesthetic experience. As a result, the work of art is completely absorbed by conceptual mediation; it is conveyed entirely through philosophical reasoning and it loses its own aesthetic ability to autonomously reflect and criticize society. Finally, what defines the work as “aesthetic”, that is its ability to sensuously express society and to dissolve its mythical oppression, has been in turn dissolved and neutralized. Artistic and aesthetic material becomes then neutralized material that, in Marxian terms, is no longer expression of the artwork as “thing”, but rather of the conflicts of capitalistic society, as the “capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons which is mediated through things” (Marx 1990, p. 932). The aesthetic principle that defines the failure of new music as work of art is, then, the desensitization of the material, the fact that the sensuous quality of the work can no longer be the base on which art acquires its own aesthetic quality. This happens based on the same principle that I have called the dissolution of the aesthetic: the traditional sensible element of the work has lost all autonomous aesthetic meaning due to the absorption of art’s “thing” dimension in the social relation that capital is. Hence, following a Marxian argument, Adorno sets himself in the twentieth century’s discussion about the musealization of art and about its objective loss of any binding qualification in the sphere of perception. That art has lost its immediate sensuous qualification as art, in fact, is something that in twentieth century’s debates has been suggested by different theoretical lines, for example by Dickie’s institutional theory according to which “works of art are art as the result of the position they occupy within the institutional framework or context” and not as bearers of specific sensuous and perceptive qualities (Dickie 1989, p. 196); or by Danto’s idea that the dilemma of art’s discernibility “is going to be forever inescapable so long as we attempt to define art in terms of features that either compare or contrast with

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features of the real world” (Danto 1981, p.  30); or even by Giorgio Agamben’s statement that art has been definitely “consigned to the atemporal aesthetic dimension of the Museum Theatrum” where “it begins its second and interminable life, which, while it will keep increasing its metaphysical and monetary value, will also eventually dissolve the concrete space of the work” (Agamben 1999, p. 51). Something along these lines, that is something like the contemporary reshaping of the idea of the end of art, is suggested also by Adorno, when in the Philosophy of New Music he asserts that “its death, which now threatens, would be exclusively the triumph of bare existence over the consciousness that has the audacity to resist it” (PnM: 24, PNM: 16). Following my argument, however, what Adorno hypothetically suggests corresponds rather to his own effective diagnosis of the condition of music as a product that has lost all aesthetic qualification and whose artistic quality can only be “philosophically constructed […] beyond what the work has immediately achieved”. If that is the case, Adorno’s historical analysis of art has to be taken as part of the general postmodern idea of the end of any historical binding, of the triumph of arbitrariness in art’s creation, and of the identification of works, as things, with common objects. The statement about the death of art I have quoted above is indeed preceded by another pivotal observation: “Only for a pacified humanity would art come to an end”. Despite all the accounts of new music as a failed product, despite its loss of any critical dimension, Adorno continues to conceive art as the product of a non-pacified humanity, that is of humanity that struggles to dissolve its mythical and oppressive meaning. However, if one is to accept that the mythical element that art should critically present (and dissolve) is for humanity a second nature, that is to say,  a product of natural history, then  it is clear that it will never be dissolved by the  musical material, namely a material “reduced to mere nature”. The most radical and consistent conclusions of Adorno’s philosophy of new music—and this explains why musicology has always be disinclined to accept Adorno—is that twelve-tone technique is the fate of music, and this fate corresponds to the demonstration of the failure of music itself (Witkin 1998, pp. 132–138). As artistic material is not simply superficial materialities, but rather “what they have become in any particular instance” (Paddison

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1993, p. 65) music material has lost its “linguistic character” and it sinks into a mere physiologic phenomenon (see Seubold 1997, p. 123, Zurletti 2006, pp. 15, 37–41, 57). This loss of linguistic quality in artistic material corresponds, hence, to the dissolution of the aesthetic element. In this context, I say “artistic” and not merely “musical” because Adorno’s conclusions do not exclusively concern musical sensuous materiality, as if the latter was a special kind of material, but also the sensuous material dimension of art in general, as it is shown in various parallelisms between music and painting.29 In this sense, and thanks to their sensuous material dimension, music and painting undergo the same process of dissolution of the aesthetic element. The process of neutralization of the artistic material affects therefore all the artistic forms that have their ground in the aesthetic sensible side. The sensuous material element, the work as thing, becomes part of the process of social mediation that defines the production’s framework and it loses therefore its ability to fulfill its own task, namely that of reflecting and together criticizing social conflicts. As we have seen, however, “only for a pacified humanity would art come to an end”, and this means that art didn’t finish its historical purpose. It is not art in general what sinks beneath its own purpose, but rather the sensuous material, absorbed as it is in the capitalistic production of commodities. In order for art to fulfill its critical task, as according to Adorno it necessarily has to do, a form of art has to be identified whose formal and material dimension could resist the objective reification of the sensuous artistic element. This art can only be a form of art whose material sensuous side does not immediately corresponds to what makes it artistic. As I will show in what follows, this art corresponds to the literary paradigm of the work.

 As we have seen, Adorno uses the example of “modern painting’s departure from the object” to clarify the atonal renunciation of harmony, as if realistic representation would be the visual analogous of harmonic naturality. Testament to this is the fact that Adorno considers Picasso’s technique as a visual exemplification of atonal dynamics (PnM: 109–110, PNM: 89). See also how, under the threat of technology, “plastic art” reacts in a way that remembers the musical one (PnM: 175n., PNM: 191). 29

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References Addison, Joseph. 1712. Pleasures of Imagination. Spectator, Nos. 411–421. Agamben, Giorgio. 1999. The Man Without Content. Trans. G. Albert. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb. 1986. Aesthetica. Hildesheim/Zürich/New York: Olms. Benjamin, Walter. 1994. The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin. Trans. M.R.  Jacobson, and E.M.  Jacobson. Chicago/London: Chicago University Press. Berio, Luciano. 2006. Remembering the Future. Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press. Blumenfeld, Harold. 1991. Ad Vocem Adorno. Musical Quarterly 74 (4): 263–284. Bozzetti, Mauro. 1996. Hegel und Adorno. Die kritische Funktion des philosophischen Systems. Freiburg/München: Karl Alber. Chua, Daniel K.L. 2006. Drifting: The Dialectics of Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music. In Apparitions. New Perspectives on Adorno and Twentieth-Century Music, ed. Berthold Hoeckner, 1–17. London/New York: Routledge. Covach, John. 2002. Twelve-tone Theory. In The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, ed. Thomas Christensen, 603–627. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Croce, Benedetto. 1934. La “fine dell’arte” nel sistema hegeliano. La Critica 32: 425–434. D’Angelo, Paolo. 1989. Simbolo e arte in Hegel. Roma-Bari: Laterza. Danto, Arthur C. 1981. The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. de Leeuw, Ton. 2005. Music of the Twentieth Century. Study of Its Elements and Structure. Trans. S. Taylor. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Dickie, George. 1989. The New institutional Theory of Art. In Aesthetics: A Critical Anthology, ed. George Dickie, Richard Sclafani, and Donald Roblin, 196–205. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Farina, Mario. 2015. The Symbolic Role of Art in Hegel Versus the Absolute Function of Beauty. Hegel-Jahrbuch 2015: 6–11. Feloj, Serena. 2013. Is there a Negative Judgment on Taste? Disgust as the Real Ugliness in Kant’s Aesthetics. Lebenswelt 3: 175–185. Gethmann-Siefert, Annemarie. 1984a. Die Funktion der Kunst in der Geschichte. Bonn: Bouvier.

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———. 1984b. Hegels These vom Ende der Kunst und der “Klassizismus” der Ästhetik. Hegel-Studien 19: 205–258. ———. 2005. Einführung in Hegels Ästhetik. München: Fink. Geulen, Eva. 2006. The End of Art. Readings in a Rumor after Hegel. Trans. J. McFarland. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Guyer, Paul. 2014. A History of Modern Aesthetics. Volume 1: The Eighteenth Century. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Hartmann (von), Eduard. 1886. Die deutsche Aesthetik seit Kant. Leipzig: W. Friedrich. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1975. Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Art. Trans. T.M. Knox. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2010. Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline. Part I: Science of Logic. Trans. K.  Brinkmann, and D.O.  Dahlstrom. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2018. The Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. T. Pinkard. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Hellings, James. 2014. Adorno and Art. Aesthetic Theory Contra Critical Theory. London/New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hullot-Kentor, Robert. 2006. Things Beyond Resemblance: On Theodor W. Adorno. New York: Columbia University Press. Iannelli, Francesca. 2007. Das Siegel der Moderne. Hegels Bestimmung des Hässlichen in den Vorlesungen zur Ästhetik und die Rezeption bei den Hegelianern. München: Fink. Kivy, Peter. 1989. Recent Scholarship and the British Tradition: A Logic of Taste – The First Fifty Years. In Aesthetics: A Critical Anthology, ed. George Dickie, Richard Sclafani, and Donald Roblin, 254–268. New  York: St. Martin’s Press. Lukács, György. 1971. The Theory of the Novel. A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature. Trans. Anna Bostock. London: The Merlin Press. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1989. Philosophy and Painting in the Age of Their Experimentation: Contribution to an Idea of Postmodernity. In The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin, 181–195. Oxford/Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Marino, Stefano. 2017. Writing Songs After Auschwitz. Rethinking Adorno’s Concept of Commitment and Aesthetics of Popular Music. Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 62 (1): 25–40. Marx, Karl. 1990. The Capital. A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1. Trans. B. Fowkes. London/New York: Penguin.

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Menninghaus, Winfried. 2003. Disgust. Theory and History of a Strong Sensation. Trans. H. Eiland, and J. Golb. Albany: SUNY. Metzger, Heinz-Klaus. 1979. Adorno und die Geschichte der musikalischen Avantgarde. In Adorno und die Musik, ed. Otto Kolleritsch, vol. 12, 9–14. Graz: Studien zur Wertungsforschung. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1999. The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings. Trans. R. Speirs. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Ophälders, Markus. 2001. Der Weltgeist am Klavier. Adorno interpreta Beethoven. Note per una critica. Materiali diestetica 4: 147–165. Paddison, Max. 1993. Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Pinkard, Terry. 2018. Translator’s Note. In Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. The Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. T.  Pinkard. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Ritter, Joachim. 1971. Ästhetik. In Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, ed. Joachim Ritter, cols. 555–557. Basel/Stuttgart: Schwabe. Rosenkranz, Karl. 2015. Aesthetics of Ugliness. Trans. A. Pop, and M. Widrich. London/New York: Bloomsbury. Sachs, Harvey. 1988. Music in Fascist Italy. New York: Norton. Schmidt, Alfred. 1983. Begriff des Materialismus bei Adorno. In AdornoKonferenz 1983, ed. Ludvig von Friedeburg, and Jürgen Habermas, 14–34. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. Scruton, Roger. 2009. Understanding Music. Philosophy and Interpretation. London/New York: Continuum. ———. 2018. Music as Art. London: Bloomsbury Continuum. Seubold, Günter. 1997. Das Ende der Kunst und der Paradigmenwechsel in der Ästhetik. In Philosophische Untersuchungen zu Adorno, Heidegger und Gehlen in systematischer Absicht. Freiburg/München: Karl Alber. Spitzer, Michael. 2006. Music as Philosophy. Adorno and Beethoven’s Late Style. Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indianapolis University Press. Stuckenschmidt, Hans Heinz. 1977. Schoenberg: His Life, World and Work. Trans. H. Searle. London: Calder. Szondi, Peter. 1987. Theory of Modern Drama. Trans. M.  Hays. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Tiedemann, Rolf. 1998. Editor’s Preface. In Theodor W. Adorno. Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music. Trans. E. Jephcott. Cambridge, UK: Polity.

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Valéry, Paul. 1958. Poetry and Abstract Thought. In The Collected Works of Paul Valery, ed. Jackson Mathews, vol. 7, 52–81. Trans. D. Folliot. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Witkin, Robert W. 1998. Adorno on Music. London/New York: Routledge. ———. 2003. Adorno on Popular Culture. London/New York: Routledge. Zurletti, Sara. 2006. Il concetto di materiale musicale in Th.W. Adorno. Napoli: Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Storici.

3 Literature and the Reconstruction of the Aesthetic

In the light of the account provided so far, Adorno’s aesthetics expresses a harsh judgment, in general, on the chances of art to preserve its own artistic quality. What I have carved out as the principle of the “dissolution of the aesthetic” conveys in fact the idea of a somehow necessary material failure of the work of art as sensuous communication of social truth. This theoretical outcome—inferred from a close reading of Adorno’s philosophy of music—has never been openly acknowledged by Adorno himself, whose aesthetic remarks seem instead to perpetually swing between his complaining about art’s loss of unity and compactness and the penchant for a progressive attitude toward new art. His wobbling about in the interpretation of contemporary artistic developments might even justify the self-contradictory understanding of Adorno’s philosophy of art in the nineteenth-century debate about aesthetics. For example, the postmodern Marxist scholar, Pierre Bourdieu (1984, p. 386), describes Adorno’s aesthetics as a nostalgic and conservative example of art criticism, while Marx-inspired criticism of postmodernism generally considers Adorno as one of the main sources of the postmodern attitude itself (McLaren and Farahmandpur 2002, p. 43). These contradictory interpretations ensue notably from the fact that the principle of the dissolution of the aesthetic © The Author(s) 2020 M. Farina, Adorno’s Aesthetics as a Literary Theory of Art, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45281-0_3

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structurally determines Adorno’s aesthetics without being ever explicitly thematized, to the point that his philosophy of art can be seen both as a nostalgic longing for traditional art and as an apologia of modern artistic fragmentation. Against the first interpretation speak the many statements through which Adorno supports radical new art, along with his sharp dismissal of any aesthetic conservatism; against the second, however, speaks his critique of what Adorno intends as “aesthetic nominalism”, that is, the theoretical origin of modern aesthetic relativism. In several passages of his aesthetic production, Adorno attacks what he takes as a dull, philistine, petty bourgeois, in one-word conservative approach to new art, as for instance in a short piece titled “Vorschlag zur Ungüte” (“Proposal for a Disagreement”), published for the first time in 1959 and subsequently collected in the 1967 volume, Ohne Leitbild. Parva Aesthetica.1 At the same time, however, the opposition toward any kind of relativism and nominalism is equally clear. By borrowing the lexicon developed by the medieval debate on the problem of universals, Adorno takes aesthetic nominalism to be the theory that asserts the inconsistency of artistic genres—namely, the universal concepts that abstractly define single works, such as that of “tragedy”, “epos”, or “lyric”—or rather their being mere flatus vocis. In modern times, this line of thinking has found an eminent supporter in the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce.2 According to Adorno, this approach leads to a relativistic vision of art, corresponding to the full removal of any kind of universal dimension. As universal and static forms of art, artistic genres shall be critically looked at, but not abstractly and absolutely removed (Geulen 2006a, pp. 56–57). By following this tension, the aim of this chapter is to show in which terms Adorno’s aesthetics actually outlines an alternative to the regressive deprecation of new art and to the relativistic loss of all judgment, namely a dialectical alternative to both the nostalgia for the ancient tradition and the excitement for the transformation of art in everyday life, which, for  The title “Vorschlag zur Ungüte” is a play on words with the idiomatic German sentence Vorschlag zur Güte: “proposal of an agreement”. The Italian translator chooses Proposta di non conciliazione, “proposal of non-conciliation”. 2  See for example his Breviary of Aesthetics (Croce 2007, p. 38). 1

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example Danto seems to embrace.3 In order to accomplish this task, however, some preliminary explanation is due, notably, on the steps to undertake in order to trace a principle of reconstruction of the aesthetic after its dissolution, in other words the ability of the aesthetic element to ensure the double character of art must be reestablished in some way. In what follows I will argue that this reconstruction is possible exclusively by means of a literary conception of the artwork. This is so inasmuch as literature provides art with a way out of commodification; it helps art escape its destiny of turning into a common thing, namely of turning into a mediator of the social relation between people, like the Marxian concept of capital. In this respect, the literary character of the aesthetic is what can make up for the fact that art “abjures its autonomy and proudly takes its place among consumer goods” (DdA: 180, DoE, 127). However, it must be clearly stated that what I have in mind has nothing to do with a supposed unification of all the arts within literature, as this is something Adorno explicitly rejects (KuK: 442, AaA: 377); one should rather argue that literature ultimately forms the conditions of possibility in which art survives not as commodity, but as expression and critique of social conflicts. In order to make my point, I will take into account especially those texts written during the last twenty years of Adorno’s life, that is, after his return from the American exile. The heterogeneous nature of these texts, their paratactic style of argumentation, and the circumscribed point of view from which each essay is written require an overall examination of the material with all its cross-references and mutual implications. What I have defined as the dissolution of the aesthetic, in fact, permeates almost all of Adorno’s late production without being ever explicitly thematized. This topic therefore must be patiently drawn from the skein of his argumentative wire. Moreover, as is well known, the reader who approaches the Aesthetic Theory is met by a magmatic unfinished text, that according to its author “still needed a desperate effort”, namely the “organization” of the book’s material, as Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann make (ÄT:  See, for example, the merit he recognizes to pop-art when he writes that “That art, from my perspective, showed the way to bring to the muddles of aesthetics the clarities of high analytical philosophy” (Danto 2009, p. xv). 3

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542, AT: 361) quoting from a letter of the author himself. The principle of literary reconstruction of the aesthetic, then, needs to be extracted form a variegate, inhomogeneous, textual material, without presupposing a definitive and accomplished doctrine, inasmuch as Adorno’s aesthetics consists more in an open project than in a stable system of thoughts (Marino and Matteucci 2016, p. 24). As things stand, Adorno’s late essayistic production seems to consist in an overall project made of paratactic arguments. As Theresa Kelly has remarked, in fact, Adorno’s idea of parataxis is that of “a mode of presentation that insists […] that the intelligibility of the truth on offer lies in the cavities between statements, not zipped up inside the seams of the discourse” (Kelly 2010, p. 102). Consequently, the principle of the reconstruction of the aesthetic will never be unearthed as an explicit argument, but rather as a possible conceptual configuration that justifies some enigmatic points in Adorno’s aesthetics: how can one understand the necessity of art, if all artistic material has been deprived of its very aesthetic meaning?

3.1 A  rt, Its Right to Exist, and Aesthetic Conservatism The most pressing question in Adorno’s late aesthetic writings concerns what he perceives as the problematic, precarious status of art in general (Bertram 2014, pp. 60–63). As the opening line of the Aesthetic Theory states, in fact, “it is self-evident that nothing concerning art is self-evident anymore, not its inner life, not its relation to the world, not even its right to exist” (ÄT: 9, AT: 1). Art exists, and this is a fact, but its theoretical status as cultural product can no longer be taken as given, and it has to be justified through the process of interpretation. In the last part of his aesthetic investigation, in fact, Adorno explicitly deals with what he perceives as a deep crisis in the artistic practice. What I intend to show is to what extent the principle of the dissolution of the aesthetic defines the way in which Adorno conceives the present and the future of art. On the one hand, in fact, (i) he theoretically insists that art, if it has to exist as art,

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must be thought as new art, namely in terms of a critique of society; on the other hand, (ii) Adorno shows great difficulty in the actual interpretation of contemporary art. This tension, as I will argue in this paragraph, ensues from the dissolution of the aesthetic and from the neutralization, or de-substantialization of the artistic material. (i) Well before Danto could formulate the question, “why is something a work of art when something exactly like it is not?”,4 Adorno worried about the risk of the transformation of art in a mere product of everyday life. Unlike Danto, however, Adorno cannot find a solution in formulating the perceptual identity among art and ordinary products—as in the case of Warhol’s Brillo Box—and by supporting a conventionalist practice of art’s definition. According to his idea of art as “sedimented spirit”, what is at stake is not merely the superficial identity of art and industrial products, but rather a deepest affinity between the two. As Adorno claims in one of his essays about Paul Valéry, the French poet acknowledges “the paradoxical relationship of the autonomous work to its commodity character” typical of late capitalistic production (VA: 174, NtL1: 150). This is why, according to Adorno, art’s right to exist has much more to do with the crisis of its autonomy as cultural product than with something as its superficial indiscernibility from ordinary objects. As we have seen, in fact, art and commodity share the same mode of reference, namely the fact that they both sensuously express society. What discerns art from commodity, though, is the formal autonomy of the first, that is, notably, what is threatened by late capitalism. Nevertheless, in line with Adorno’s idea, humanity must continue to produce art, although the latter cannot be taken as a prescriptive statement. In a conference held in Berlin in 1966 at the Akademie der Künste under the title Art and the Arts, Adorno clearly declares that “while the present situation no longer has room for art – that was the meaning of the statement about the impossibility of poems after Auschwitz – it nevertheless has need for it”. What Adorno understands as “the reality without images”, in fact, “is the counterpart of another condition without  For this argument see, for example, the formulation Danto provided in his first essay about art’s discernibility (Danto 1964, pp. 571–184); the question I quote comes from his famous essay “The Disenfranchisement of Art” (Danto 1986, p. 15). 4

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images: the condition in which art disappears because the utopia encoded in every work of art has been fulfilled”. Art, however, is not the means by which its own utopia could be realized, as “in itself art is not capable of such a demise. This is why the arts eat away one another” (KuK: 452–453, AaA: 387). This leads to the consideration of art as an impossible but necessary activity of humanity. Impossible, since the realization of its own goals would bring to the dissolution of art itself; but necessary, inasmuch as humanity needs to make display of the unpacified dimension of society. Art is consistently introduced in oppositional terms. The structure itself of each work of art is said to stand in opposition to both historical trends and other artworks. In Aesthetic Theory, for instance, the general attitude of art toward society is condensed in the idea that “the revolt of art, teleologically posited in its ‘attitude to objectivity’ toward the historical world, has become a revolt against art; it is futile to prophesy whether art will survive it”; upon close inspection, art is to such a degree geared toward the production of the new that Adorno is forced to recognize that “each artwork is the mortal enemy of the other” (ÄT: 13, 59, AT: 3, 35), here quoting in all likelihood Paul Valéry.5 What Adorno ultimately suggests is that art has to be conceived as a product that opposes itself to social reality by means of an agonistic struggle for the achievement of the new. In this sense, each artwork is the enemy of the other, inasmuch as each artwork has to assume a radical orientation toward the new, and each artwork would condemn the others to get old and out of date. In this respect, due to its radical originality and novelty, art is an immanent critique of myth, precisely in the sense that “in the course of such criticism the concept of myth becomes secularized” and it turns into a concrete historical condition. “So long as one beggar remains, there is still myth” (CWB: 243, Pr: 233), writes Adorno, here taking up Benjamin’s words.6  In an essay of 1923, “The Problem of Museums”, Valéry writes that works of art are “mutually exclusive marvels, which are more inimical to each other when they are most alike” (Valéry 1971, p. 203). We know that Adorno read this essay because he compares Valéry’s and Proust’s conceptions of museum in his writing “Valéry Proust Museum”, collected in the volume Prisms. 6  “As long  as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth” (Benjamin 1999, [K6,4] p. 400). 5

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Art’s right to exist is therefore justified in the light of its double character, namely as the expression and critique of social antinomies. In a conference of 1967 titled Culture Industry Reconsidered, Adorno reiterates his assessment of the nature of artistic and cultural products in general. “Culture” writes Adorno “did not simply accommodate itself to human beings; but it always simultaneously raised a protest against the petrified relations under which they lived, thereby honouring them” (RüK: 338, CI: 100). In another public conference hosted by the Deutsche Werkbund (German Association of Craftsmen) in 1965, drawing on the example of the Bauhaus and of Adolf Loos, Adorno investigates the notion of functionalism in design and architecture and suggests that “art, in order to be art according to its own formal laws, must be crystallized in autonomous form. This constitutes its truth content; otherwise, it would be subservient to that which it negates by its very existence” (Fh: 390, FT: 14). Along the same lines, the idea that art draws its right to exist from its double character is reinforced in the pages of Aesthetic Theory. In his last unfinished masterpiece, in fact, Adorno states that “cultural phenomena cannot be interpreted without some translation of the new into the old”; he speaks about artworks as a “nonjudging judgment”, and he takes artistic activity as the production of “what is blind, expression, by way of reflection, that is, through form; not to rationalize the blind but to produce it aesthetically, ‘To make things of which we do not know what they are’” (ÄT: 36, 37, 174, AT: 19, 20, 114). It is clear, then, that if art shall still exist, then it has to exist in the terms of a product in which society sees its own image along with the painful effectiveness of its distorted and conflictual nature. (ii) The reader might have already noticed that, according to the above outlined account, art’s right to exist would coincide exactly with those features that Adorno denies to new art, as stated in the Philosophy of New Music. So, one might well think that Adorno’s philosophy of art suffers the effects of an abstract separation between theoretical and practical analysis: while Adorno insists in taking art as an exceptional product able to maintain a critical relation toward society, he concretely dismisses any existing work of art by declaring their non-artistic character. There is in fact a tendency in Adorno to deny the attribute of “artisticity” to contemporary works of art. What I wish to argue is that the principle of the

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dissolution of the aesthetic comes consistently to the fore precisely in this tension between a progressive theory of art and conservative artistic judgments. Right after the above quoted passage, Adorno writes in fact that “in so far as culture becomes wholly assimilated to and integrated in those petrified relations, human beings are once more debased” (RüK: 338, CI: 100). Along similar lines, in the text about functionalism, he remarks that nowadays “when art obliterates its own memory, forgetting that it is only there for others, it becomes a fetish, a self-conscious and thereby relativized absolute” (Fh: 390, FT: 14–15). Also in this case, though, Aesthetic Theory is the place where the argument is conclusively developed: What is qualitatively new in recent art may be that in an allergic reaction it wants to eliminate harmonizations even in their negated form, truly the negation of negation with its own fatality: the self-satisfied transition to a new positivity, to the absence of tension in so many paintings and compositions of the postwar decades. False positivity is the technological locus of the loss of meaning. (ÄT: 238, AT: 159)

From this fundamental tension in his aesthetics descends what the critique has identified as Adorno’s artistic conservatism,7 or rather his embarrassment in the interpretation of contemporary art. Adorno’s analysis of art, that is to say, his methodical and theoretical definition of art’s conditions of possibility, loses in fact its sharpness when he approaches some phenomena of contemporary mass culture. According to his late account on aesthetics, in fact, art consists in “the illusion that life goes on”, and it corresponds to “the experience […] that life no longer exists” (ÄT: 40, 333, AT: 22, 224). Adorno clearly tries to define the value of art by referring to wide concepts such as “life” and “experience”, but he avoids to theoretically define them. Then, when it comes to mass culture, embodied for instance in organized tourism and ads in personal column,  I have already mentioned Bourdieu’s opinion on the matter (1984, p.  386); also Eva Geulen (2006b, p. 103) insists on Adorno’s aesthetic conservative taste, by certifying a “certain anachronicity” in his determination of new art in the context of culture industry. It is also worth mentioning Peter Uwe Hohendahl (2013, pp. 133–136) and his study of the charges of aesthetic conservatism against Adorno’s philosophy of art as primarily coming from the new German Marxist left, right after the release of Aesthetic Theory, as the text supported the idea of the autonomy of art, which contradicts direct political engagement as well as the basic requirements of the young left movement. 7

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Adorno suggests that there is hardly anything left of true experience in them, as mass products are per se “testimonies of impoverished experience” (ÄT: 108, AT: 68). In these kinds of descriptions Adorno seems to linger over a nostalgia for the old time when experience was still possible, and when life was still full and precious. He also seems thereby to violate all basic assumptions of his anti-Romantic idea of history and society, as outlined, for instance, in the short essay published under the title “Amorbach”, where he remembers the small Bavarian town of his youth and compares it with the loss of experience in technified society (e.g. A: 304). Adorno’s difficulties in pinpointing the principle that I have defined as the dissolution of the aesthetic are also what explains his unease in the interpretation of new art. What he understands as the loss of life and experience, in fact, is nothing but the recognition of the impossibility, for new art, to fulfill its autonomy, and it is at odds with Adorno’s theoretical statements that strongly support progressive art. This tension, finally, explains Adorno’s embarrassment in front of the most advanced artistic products. On the one hand, Adorno is a passionate supporter of new art. In several essays of the last decade of his philosophical production he sharply criticizes what he sees as a “backward attitude toward contemporary art”. In these writings he charges with slowness, dullness, philistinism the aesthetic conservatism of those who take contemporary art as an immoral offense of sacrosanct values of yore. On the other hand, however, the concept of new art that Adorno identifies, and advocates, is more or less analogous to that of the historical avant-gardes, or rather to the framework of what in English-speaking culture is defined as artistic modernism.8 Based on Adorno’s description of contemporary art, in fact, what is new and provocative in the cultural landscape seems to be the kind of distortion of representation that defines the path of pre- and  I refer here to how modernism has been defined, for example, in the debate about postmodernism. According to Art Berman, for instance, by following Lyotard’s account, while modernity corresponds to the era in which humanity produced a set of narrative descriptions of history as a progressive movement, modernism is the aesthetic movement in which “a set of modernity turns its critical attention toward itself ” (Berman 1994, p. 7). As Patrizia McBride writes, “the critical impulse of modernism has been traditionally located in its self-understanding as a critique of modernity” (McBride 2007, p. 2). 8

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post-avant-­garde in terms of a mirror of the “recurrent polarity of futurisms and archaisms across the whole epoch of modernism”, as David Roberts (2011, p. ix) has remarked in his critique of Adorno’s explanation of new art. One should nevertheless be aware that the identification of modernism and avant-garde as well as the idea of postmodernism as the mere overcoming of modernism are mostly challenged by scholars.9 In the already mentioned essay “Vorschlag zur Ungüte” (“Proposal for a Disagreement”), Adorno dismissively addresses those who he takes as the opponents of new art, as representatives of the “idiosyncratic resistance toward the new” (VzU: 331). What Adorno aims to show in this text is what he takes as the element of truth included in any conservative reaction toward new art. All outrage and indignation in front of the most contemporary examples of artistic provocation, in fact, hide in disdain an indirect allusion to the true content of art. Art, in fact, and especially new art, has to cause in the subject a protest against existence, notably by means of “anxiety (Unruhe), raised with experience”. Paradoxically enough, the opponents of new art would be those who subconsciously appreciate and somehow promote its provocative value, as their conservative attitude would be nothing but the sign that new art hits the mark of its provocation. Surprising, however, is the example that Adorno gives to illustrate his idea: “I know that among the enemies [of new art] there is someone who clearly understands. But I just can’t help: if I read, for example, in one of their major texts a subtle, precise, highly appropriate analysis of Cézanne, in that understanding I feel the sympathy, laboriously hidden under the argument” (VzU: 331). In 1967, when Adorno published Ohne Leitbild, he identified the enemy of new art with those who are shocked by Cézanne, one of the most representative members of post-impressionism and already dead for sixty years back then. Something similar can be seen in the essay about functionalism (1965). In this text, contemporary artistic production is linked to the critique of ornament, to Schönberg’s early compositions, to Adolf Loos’ design and Karl Kraus’ writing style, in other words, to the expressionistic tendencies of the first thirty years of the century. In Aesthetic Theory, moreover,  See for example how Hilton Kramer (2006) understands modernism as a more vital impulse than simple avant-garde epoch and conceives postmodernism in continuity with modernism itself. 9

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expressionism is summoned as to illustrate the schema of new art. Adorno writes, in this regard, that “artworks not only produce imagines as something that endures. They become artworks just as much through the destruction of their own imagerie” and, while mentioning the  avant-­ gardes’ efficacy in upsetting the public, he adds that “the shocks inflicted by the most recent artworks are the explosion of their appearance”, here echoing Wols’ paintings (ÄT: 131, AT: 84). Particularly explicative, however, is the way in which Adorno characterizes figurative art by means of the ideal of black: “Radical art today is synonymous with dark art; its primary color is black […]. That the world, which, as Baudelaire wrote, has lost its fragrance and since then its color, could have them restored by art strikes only the artless as possible” (ÄT: 65–66, AT: 39–40). According to Adorno, radical new art, the only proper art, is the art that pursues the destruction of image, the shock of the public, the estrangement from the object, and the darkness of the picture10; conversely, when art “comes to resemble realia it assimilates itself to that reification against which it protests” (ÄT: 159, AT: 103). One should bear in mind that this kind of account of art has been put together and written down while, at the same time, on the other side of the Atlantic, Warhol’s exhibitions featured the Brillo Box and Marilyn’s serigraphy, Lichtenstein’s Mickey Mouse’s cartoons, and Richard Hamilton developed the technique of collage well beyond the merely critical stance that Adorno finds in Picasso’s collages.11 In his understanding of contemporary art, Adorno fails then to go much further than the historical avant-gardes, notably expressionism, cubism, and surrealism. His idea of radical new art is accordingly that of the modernist critique of traditional art, which by definition entails a dialectical relationship between new and traditional art. Within this framework, disharmony maintains nevertheless a reference to harmony, since fragmentation can be understood as art just in its allusion to  Gutiérrez Pozo (2009, pp. 481–491) carefully analyzes the ideal of black in Adorno’s comprehension of art. In turn, however, he understands “contemporary art”, and “radical art”, according to the conceptual framework of historical avant-gardes. 11  “The subjectivization of objective reality relapsed into romanticism, as was soon blatantly obvious not only in Jugendstil but also in the later stages of authentic impressionism. It was against this that montage protested, which developed out of the pasted-in newspaper clippings and the like during the heroic years of cubism” (ÄT: 232, AT: 155). 10

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totality. This attitude is fully endorsed by the Italian philosopher and passionate reader of Adorno, Dino Formaggio, when for instance he claims that, as unprecedented work of art, Guernica elevates itself “over the death of art as beauty, as natural or theological beauty, as academic and rhetorical narrative, as celebration of sacred values, only to give birth from its hashes to a fully human art, an art that is a naked and rough testament to the inner truth of man, society, and world” (Formaggio 1983, p.  22). While Adorno has never seriously dealt with pop-art, or in general with what Michel Tapié has called arte informale, it is not difficult to imagine what he would have said about an artistic trend that insisted on the identity of art and everyday life. Art has to be understood as a protest against reality, not as a copy of superficial life, we hear him saying. In his own words: “art, with its definitive protest against the dominance of purpose over human life, suffers once it is reduced to that practical level to which it objects”, here glossed by Hölderlin’s verses “For never from now on / Shall the sacred serve mere use” (Fh: 377–378, FT: 6). Among the several passages in which Adorno declares the necessary opposition between art and common life, the most incisive can perhaps be found in Aesthetic Theory, where he states that “precisely by virtue of its absolute autonomy the rational, purely elaborated artwork would annul its difference from empirical existence; without imitating it, the artwork would assimilate itself to its opposite, the commodity. It would be indistinguishable from completely functional works except that it would have no purpose, and this, admittedly, would speak against” (ÄT: 324, AT: 217). Surprisingly enough, Adorno’s aesthetics reaches the same descriptive conclusion of Danto’s philosophy of art: (a) contemporary art has the tendency to turn itself into a product of everyday reality; (b) once art becomes a common object, it interrupts its connection with historical life. These tenets match closely two basic ideas in Danto’s philosophy of art, namely the indiscernibility of artistic products, and the idea that pop-art is the demonstration of art’s entry into a post-historical phase. These ideas are also accepted and elaborated further within the framework of the institutional theory of art.12 Along the same lines, in Adorno’s  Although Danto keeps his distance from institutional theory of art, Thijs Lijster (2017, p. 130) sees a general continuity between the two, especially when it comes to focus on the affinities 12

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account, art—as “sedimented spirit”—maintains a connection with history just as long as it can be discerned from everyday life. Moreover, Danto sees a connection between the new post-historical art and philosophical progress—since pop-art “showed the way to bring to the muddles of aesthetics the clarities of high analytical philosophy” (Danto 2009, p. xv). Similarly, Adorno interprets this development as proof of the fact that artworks have ceased to be the “self-unconscious historiography of their epoch” (ÄT: 272, AT: 182). Like Danto, he also finds a parallel between this artistic outcome and the status of philosophical debate, as “it is inevitable that we should find a parallel in the ousting of philosophy in the Anglo-Saxon world by logical positivism: the utter renunciation of meaning of any kind” (KuK: 449, AaA: 384); with the expression “logical positivism” Adorno derogatorily refers approximately to what is commonly understood as analytic philosophy. Although very close in their descriptive conclusions, Adorno’s and Danto’s evaluations are clearly rather different. According to Danto, the fact that “the Pop artist had no inner secrets” (Danto 2009, p. 9) is the demonstration that art has turned into philosophy, that is to say it expresses its crystal-clear meaning in a free, arbitrary space of reasons. As Danto puts it, “the historical stage of art is done with when it is known what art is and means” (Danto 1986, p. 31), and now we know what art is and means. In Adorno’s view, as previously explained, this would be the case of a “pacified humanity”, in which art would “come to an end” (PnM: 24, PNM: 16). Contemporary society, instead, is neither pacified, nor harmonic. On the contrary, social life is a complex of conflicts and antagonistic behaviors that reduce the individual to mere function in the economic process of production. In Adorno’s aesthetics, therefore, the transformation of art in common reality is nothing but the outcome of what I have defined as the dissolution of the aesthetic, the fact that aesthetic material is in no condition to express the aesthetic as the autonomous reflection and critique of society. The absorption of aesthetic material in the economic process of production and reproduction, that is between the pragmatistic interpretation of art and dialectical explanations. For the idea of post-­ historic art, see for example the Introduction to his book Beyond the Brillo Box, where he clearly explains the beginning of the end of art as a historical discipline (Danto 1992, pp. 5–10).

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the principle of the dissolution of the aesthetic permeating Adorno’s reflection, is what causes his difficulty in understanding contemporary art and his backward taste toward products of contemporary art. As he sees things, contemporary visual art, while being sensuous, it dissolves its aesthetic value and, what’s more, fails to identify the ongoing process of neutralization—or better deaestheticization, deartification 13 (Entkunstung) —of art.

3.2 The Deaestheticization of Artistic Material In his aesthetic reflections, Adorno dwells more than once on the semantic field of the death of art, being anyway careful not to indulge in prognosis, or prophecy, about the definitive end of artistic practice. In Aesthetic Theory, for example, he claims that “the deaestheticization of art is not only a stage of art’s liquidation but also the direction of its development” (ÄT: 123, AT: 79). In these words, Adorno’s ambiguous attitude toward the future of art is noticeable: on the one hand, art seems to be liquidated by modern sociality and technology; on the other hand, this kind of liquidation can be seen as an integral part of art’s development itself. According to my interpretation, his aesthetic account contains all the conceptual tools needed to explain both the liquidation and the survival of art, that is, its deaestheticization and dissolution as sensuous material, and its reconstruction in the literary one. In order to understand this passage, however, it is necessary to fully explain in which terms the dissolution of the aesthetic involves the dissolution of visual and sound art as a deaestheticization of material. Adorno has never explicitly and directly thematized the deaestheticization of art in terms of deaestheticization of the sensuous (visual and sound) constitution of the  material, nor the possible literary  The German word Entkunstung is one of Adorno’s neologisms made of the negative prefix “Ent-”, the substantive “Kunst” (art), and the suffix “-ung” which has the same grammatical function of the English suffix “-ation” (e.g. form, formation). The process of Entkunstung der Kunst goes therefore in the same direction of the deartification of art. 13

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reconstruction of the aesthetic. Nevertheless, in the Aesthetic Theory there are at least two passages where this connection appears as the theoretical leitmotiv of the argument. In these passages, Adorno presents a historical process in which to the dissolution of the artistic nature of senses corresponds the possibility to reconstruct the aesthetic element in a non-sensuous art, namely in literature. In the first passage Adorno writes that “many works of contemporary music and painting, in spite of the absence of representational objectivity and expression, would rightly be subsumed by the concept of a second naturalism. Crudely physicalistic procedures in the material and calculable relations between parameters helplessly repress aesthetic semblance and thereby reveal the truth of their positedness” (ÄT: 158, AT: 103). Upon reading these words, one might be inclined to say that it is only his lack of familiarity with the most recent among the products of art of his time that prevents Adorno from turning that “many” in an “all”. Few pages before, however, he suggests that “there is no sensuous intuition, no set of images, that corresponds to what literature says; on the contrary, its concretion consists in its linguistic form rather than in the highly problematic optical representation that it supposedly provokes”; then, on this ground, “literature does not require completion through sensuous representation; it is concrete in language and through it, it is suffused with the nonsensuous, in accordance with the oxymoron of nonsensuous intuition” (ÄT: 150, AT: 97–98). A status of exception, then, is granted to literary products. I will therefore insist on this tension between the deaestheticization of artistic material and its reaestheticization in the literary form in order to define the space for the reconstruction of the aesthetic in Adorno’s philosophy of art. In the rest of this paragraph, then, I will present the process of deaestheticization of sensuous material only to expose in the next one its reconstruction in the literary form of the artwork. Having already addressed the naturalization of sound in the philosophy of music, the process of deaestheticization of sensuous material can be now  appreciated as part of Adorno’s argument especially in those essays in which he deals with the visual arts. As most of his late production on aesthetics is focused on the theory of literature, the interpretation of visual art is almost entirely to be found in the essays published in the collection Ohne Lietbild. Parva Aesthetica (1967), and in some passages of

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Aesthetic Theory. Ohne Lietbild, in particular, consists in a collection of texts written during the 1950s and the 1960s and devoted to various cultural topics. The common thread of the volume is the idea that contemporary artistic production is an activity that is pursued, precisely, Ohne Leitbild, namely without guiding principle, or model, and the challenge of art is therefore that of remaining artistic also in the age in which aesthetic, cultural, religious canons no longer provide a framework for artists to look at in their productions. Whereas modern art embodies a structural critique of the notion of tradition (Hohendahl 2013, pp. 129–134), to which canons and models are necessarily connected, in the programmatic opening of his book, Adorno insists that “the particular, to which all work of art holds to, should be revealed as universal” (OL: 298–299). In the first essay, whose title is the same as that of the collection itself, Adorno focuses then on the relationship between particular and universal in the context of visual and sound art, and he problematizes it by means of the notion of sensuous material. “Only who is able to distinguish in the material itself what is historically expired and irrevocably obsolete” writes Adorno “can produce as the material requires”, inasmuch as “colors, forms, sounds […], because of certain historical relationships, contrast with what the artist has to do”. The material is what “introduces relationships in the work” and therefore “the concept of artistic material that destroys and ignores the determinations of what it aims to comprehend, has to become poor and lose its own objectivity” (OL: 299–300). As artistic material cannot be understood as inert, but rather as what determines the work of art in its essential constitution, the deaestheticization of artistic material can be taken as a historical process that affects sound and colors. The tendency toward the deaestheticization of sensuous material can furthermore be observed in that Adorno describes the failure of art especially based on the example of sensuous artworks, that is to say, through the analysis of paintings and music compositions. About works of art in general he writes, for instance, that “their transcendence is their eloquence, their script […]. Art fails its concept when it does not achieve this transcendence; it loses the quality of being art”, and in order to illustrate this dynamic he adds that “compositions fail as background music or as the mere presentation of material, just as those paintings fail in which the geometrical patterns to which

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they are reducible remain factually what they are”. Hence, the material is what can guarantee art’s right to exist, and this is why Adorno can claim that “whether art is in any way still possible depends precisely on this. The concept of form marks out art’s sharp antithesis to an empirical world in which art’s right to exist is uncertain” (ÄT: 122, 213, AT: 78, 141). Adorno’s problematization of the empirical and sensible dimension of the artwork, therefore, is deeply connected to the peculiar form of historical materialism that he supports. Historical materialism, in Adorno’s case, means mainly a critical understanding of the historical development of society, and within the framework of aesthetics, the notion of material as “sedimented spirit” (PnM: 39, PNM: 32). In this respect, as soon as what Adorno understands as “spirit” sediments itself in the work, and thus expresses nothing but the absorption of art in the social process of production and reproduction, art turns into the mere empirical material that negates its artistic character. This is why, when Adorno tries to identify a sensuous artistic example of what he takes as real art—that is, in terms of expression and critique of social reality—he tends to use examples from nineteenth or early twentieth century’s production. In an essay originally published on the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung dedicated to the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume, he describes the process according to which the artistic particular element, from its essence as “material fact, immediately sublimates in a pure pictorial fact”. This process is said to fulfill the “recovery of optical life in the sensuous element”. The concrete artistic example, however, comes from French painting of the end of the nineteenth century, as he refers to Alfred Sisley and Camille Pissarro (JdP: 321–322). Granted that visual art has to realize an aesthetic sublimation of empirical material, these are Adorno’s conclusions, then the material is what allows the creation of an expressive or at least constructive relationship between sensibility and meaning, and this is possible only if the material can be conceived of as different from the mere empirical element. One of Adorno’s aesthetic dogmas is in fact the distinction between materiality and objectivity, based on which he criticizes Hegel for confusing “the material elements of art with its objectual content” (ÄT: 119, AT: 76); In even clearer terms, Adorno states that “aesthetic expression is the objectification of the non-objective, and in fact in such a fashion that through

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its objectification it becomes a second-order non-objectivity” (ÄT: 170, AT: 111). Along the path toward nonobjectivity, the material should not take prevalence over the subject that creates the work; otherwise, art would express nothing but the mere empirical materiality, as the objects of everyday life actually do. In the conference titled Culture Industry Reconsidered, also part of Ohne Leitbild, one finds an interesting remark on the relationship between art and objectual reality: “Only their deep unconscious mistrust, the last residue of the difference between art and empirical reality in the spiritual make-up of the masses explains why they have not, to a person, long since perceived and accepted the world as it is constructed for them by the culture industry” (RüK: 344, CI: 105). For the artwork, hence, essential is the separation from empirical reality. Far from being just an incidental element of his thought, the distinction between art and empirical reality is a pivotal feature of Adorno’s aesthetics. Right at the beginning of the Aesthetic Theory, in fact, he suggests that “only by virtue of separation from empirical reality, which sanctions art to model the relation of the whole and the part according to the work’s own need, does the artwork achieve a heightened order of existence” and—even more clearly—he adds that “artworks are afterimages of empirical life insofar as they help the latter to what is denied them outside their own sphere and thereby free it from that to which they are condemned by reified external experience” (ÄT: 14, AT: 4). The distance of art from empirical life is then repeated in several passages of Aesthetic Theory: “The empirical subject has only a limited and modified part in artistic experience tel quel, and this part may well be diminished the higher the work’s rank”; “artworks diverge from empirical reality”; and finally, “today the socially critical aspect of artworks has become opposition to empirical reality” (ÄT: 26, 113, 379, AT: 13, 86, 255). This is why the principle of the dissolution of the aesthetic that I have isolated in Adorno’s aesthetics affects precisely those works for which empirical and sensuous material make up for their essential constitution. The very fact that “today the socially critical aspect of artworks has become opposition to empirical reality” means that in this historical period the work of art—as thing—has been completely absorbed in the capitalistic process of production, and it has become one of the mediators

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in that social relation between people that the capital is, namely it has become a declination of the form of commodity. As we have already seen in the case of the philosophy of music, the dissolution of the aesthetic element turns the work in an object of ordinary capitalistic production and the capital, that is “not a thing, but a social relation between persons which is mediated through things” (Marx 1990, p.  932), absorbs the “thing” dimension of the artwork—its empirical and sensuous life—as one of those mediators. It should be made clear that this process, as is, has never been clearly described by Adorno, maybe due to the peculiar variant of Marxism he adopts, which, unlike standard interpretations of Marx’ thought, rather than the relation between capital and labor, places center stage the categories of exchange and distribution.14 Moreover, Adorno has always been very careful to separate his own stance from Eastern dialectical materialism, known under the name of Diamat, a theory that he saw as rude, dogmatic, and apologetic of Eastern dictatorships. This is notably also what has earned Adorno the title of distinguished champion of what Perry Anderson celebrates as Western Marxism (Anderson 1979). Lack of clarity about this structural dynamics in his aesthetics is what explains also some of Adorno’s disproportionate statements concerning the sensuous character of the artwork. In the Aesthetic Theory, for example, he states that “the concept of aesthetic pleasure as constitutive of art is to be abrogated [abzuschaffen]” (ÄT: 30, AT: 15). As a matter of fact, the two paragraphs from which this quotation comes (named “The Pleasure of Art” and “Aesthetic Hedonism and the Happiness of Knowledge”) seem to be a sort of censorship of any kind of artistic enjoyment (Kunstgenuss), as if the very fact of taking pleasure in an artistic phenomenon would be the sign of its objective commodification. This kind of idealization of art, the exasperated criticism of any form of pleasure and enjoyment of art, ensues from Adorno’s persistence in stating that “art is not an object” (ÄT: 27, AT: 13), while failing to clarify, though,  This is what the Italian scholar Marzio Vacatello maintains in his interpretation of Adorno’s philosophy as a sort of deferral of praxis (Vacatello 1972, pp. 59–60); the same remark has been made by Frank Böckelmann (1998, p. 143). Nevertheless, Deborah Cook suggests that Adorno keeps upholding the primacy of the economic dimension, unlike Habermas who asserts that the economic level could not corrupt the lifeworld (Cook 1995, p. 9).

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the principle of the dissolution of the aesthetic. This is why the aesthetic enjoinment itself, namely one of the artistic qualities par excellence, is irrevocably banned as what in late capitalism turns art in commodity: “While the artwork’s sensual appeal seemingly brings it close to the consumer, it is alienated from him by being a commodity”. Adorno also makes clear that this is what separates new and traditional art, since “no naked Greek sculpture was a pin-up” (ÄT: 27, 28, AT: 13, 14).15 As I will show in what follows, a clarification of the principle of the dissolution of the aesthetic allows to understand that Adorno’s harsh rejection of artistic enjoyment is less a puritan and conservative censorship of pleasure than an awareness of the problematic relationship between the sensuous element of art and late capitalistic dynamics. Adorno’s opposition to any kind of aesthetic pleasure in the enjoyment of art, against any “culinary consumption of art” (ÄT: 143, AT: 92), goes as far as to accuse the Aristotelian theory of catharsis of being sympathetic to the basic principles of culture industry: “The doctrine of catharsis imputes to art the principle that ultimately the culture industry appropriates and administers” (ÄT: 354, AT: 238). This sort of interpretation of the relationship between art and aesthetic enjoyment is clearly expressed in Adorno’s private notebook of 1955, written during the same period in which he was drafting the project of the Aesthetic Theory, where one can read that “aesthetic enjoyment, in the superficial sense of the enjoyment of the artistic object as if it were a piece of sensuous world, in general does not exist and any aesthetics that starts with that is dull. I have never enjoyed an artwork”; in the same notebook, but in the following year, Adorno comes very close to what I have defined as the dissolution of the aesthetics as he asserts that with the disposal of the object in painting and in plastic art, with the expressive conventionalism carved in music, is almost necessarily connected the fact that the unleashed elements  – colors, sounds  – express something already in themselves. This is however an illusion. […] The superstition in the elementary, immediate, to which expressionism pays tribute, expresses arbitrariness and randomness in its relationship toward sense and material. […] In itself, as a ‘natural material’, all this is empty  Eva Geulen (2006b, pp. 99–101) notes how, in Adorno, culture industry is not simply a degeneration of art, but it corresponds to the behavior of serious art itself in the dynamics of the late capitalistic social communication of artistic value. 15

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The only way to produce art with this dead material, Adorno says, is the “construction according to freedom, that bestows ‘on things new names’, and sense on material” (TWAA: TS. 20, 688–89). This kind of dismissal of the sensuous appreciation of art, therefore, is strictly correlated to the principle of the dissolution of the aesthetic. The overaccumulation of social relationships in artistic material makes the latter incapable of being a bearer of the necessary process of sublimation of social conflicts that turns art into a critique of society itself. According to my interpretation, then, the difficulties of Adorno’s aesthetics in giving a convincing interpretation of contemporary art, the aesthetic conservatism of which it has been accused, are nothing but a side effect of the lack of clarity in the structural conclusions of his own aesthetic though. At times he openly tries to defend contemporary art in the name of his progressive intentions, as, for example, when he includes a “Defense of Isms” in his Aesthetic Theory, in appreciation namely of cubism, expressionism, surrealism. In this defense, though, he makes a very problematic point. Those kinds of artistic movements, in fact, are usually connected to the practice of art manifestos, that is to normative declarations of intentions, which violates Adorno’s very idea of spontaneity of creation, which is also what makes artworks the “self-unconscious historiography of their epoch” they should be. This problem strikes a nerve of his aesthetics, to such an extent that Adorno’s way of referring to it, as a “faint contradiction” (ÄT: 44, AT: 24), ends up integrally violating the very pivotal core of his philosophical theory. Adorno, the philosopher of the radicalization of Hegel’s objectivity of contradiction, of the marked distance between “mediation” and “middle element”,16 in order not to follow the most radical but consistent conclusions of his thought, is forced to define as “faint” the contradiction that permeates his aesthetics, namely that between art and its sensuous character, as if contradiction could be understood as having intermediate degrees.

 On the radicality of contradiction, see what Adorno says in the Introduction of Negative Dialectics when about contradiction he writes that “this law is not a cogitative law, however. It is real” (ND: 18, ND: 6); about mediation and the middle element, see his book about Hegel where he suggests that “mediation is never a middle element between extremes, as, since Kierkegaard, a deadly misunderstanding has depicted it as being” (DSH: 257, HTS: 8). 16

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As one follows Adorno’s determination of the historical condition of new art, no escape from the deaestheticization or deartification (Entkunstung) of the artistic material is to be found. When he mentions art’s “loss of metaphysical meaning” (KuK: 448–449, AaA: 383), for example, he echoes in all likelihood what Hegel has in mind when he says that “we have got beyond venerating works of art as divine and worshipping them” (Hegel 1975, p. 10). Similarly, in his essay about the technological reproducibility of art, Benjamin sees the crisis of art as expressed “as clearly as possible within the limits of Idealism” (Benjamin 2008, p.  44n.). However, whereas Hegel could insert art into a rational and metaphysical, and hence conciliated, history of spirit’s development, and whereas Benjamin could drift, according to Adorno, into an immediate re-enchantment of aesthetic material, Adorno—being the harshest critic of both these options17—needs to follow a different path. As we have already seen, in fact, art cannot die, as humanity is not pacified. In one of the fragments of the Aesthetic Theory, collected by the editor at the end of the volume, Adorno drafts a text on the “Theories on the Origin of Art” and in these pages he sketches a sort of evolutionary theory of man’s aesthetic relationship toward reality. “Aesthetic comportment”, writes Adorno, “set itself off from magical practices, however rudimentarily, this distinction has since been carried along as a residue; it is as if the now functionless mimesis, which reaches back into the biological dimension, was vestigially maintained”; the aesthetic, in fact “contains what has been belligerently excised from civilization and repressed”, for being resistant to rationalization. Nevertheless, continues Adorno, since it keeps producing myth, “the obstinacy of aesthetic comportment […] testifies rather that to this day no rationality has been fully rational” (ÄT: 487, AT: 329–330). From this belligerent, residual nature of the aesthetic, one may conclude that there must be a form of aesthetic comportment that is able to escape the deaestheticization of the material. Of such a form of art Adorno avoids to say more, as he lingers on the fall of art into  I have already investigated in the first chapter to what extent Adorno criticizes Benjamin’s idea of technological reproducibility of art. By taking into account Hegel’s and Jochmann’s notion of the end of art, Adorno investigates the critical position of naïveté in the context of new art and he says that “they were compelled to understand it in the context of their classicism and so attributed the end of art to it” (ÄT: p. 501, AT: 337). 17

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c­ ommodification. Nevertheless, he often uses references to such a form of art as a counterexample of commodification itself. What is at stake here is a form of art whose formal dimension—namely, the place where art shows its autonomy—cannot be attacked by the process of deaestheticization and, hence, by the dissolution of the aesthetic. The main feature of such a work of art is, finally, that of not being a thing, but namely literature. That his aesthetics was bound to a redefinition of the concept of artwork, and that this redefinition was rooted in aesthetics, was somehow clear to Adorno himself: “The many interrelations with technocracy give reason to suspect that the principle of construction remains aesthetically obedient to the administered world; but it may terminate in a yet unknown aesthetic form, whose rational organization might point to the abolition of all categories of administration along with their reflexes in art” (ÄT: 334, AT: 225). Along the same lines, in a personal note of 1968, he writes that nowadays art “is immediately no longer possible and truly not even object of experience. It is however possible that at a certain stage, where it does not exercise anymore an ideological function, it would regain its own naïveté and it would become able of an immediate relationship” (TWAA: Ts. 20,682). The suppression of the classical conception of the work of art and its rebuilding at a different level is, clearly, one of the structural tendencies of Adorno’s aesthetics. In what follows, I will investigate in what sense this tendency pushes in the direction of a literary definition of the work of art.

3.3 T  he Literary Reconstruction of the Aesthetic (i): Three Examples Adorno’s philosophy of art, one should bear in mind, does not include any system of arts. It differs then from eighteenth- and nineteenth-­ century models of aesthetics, especially those influenced by Charles Batteux’ Aristotelian idea to reduce fine arts to a single principle, as the

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title of his famous monography suggests,18 which is usually taken as “a good summary of 18th century thinking on the arts” (Saisselin 1965, p. 4). Nothing is further from Adorno’s notion of the arts than the intention to reconnect them to a single theoretical principle and thus create a final and systematic hierarchy of single artistic forms. Differently, while pursuing the literary reconstruction of the aesthetic element in Adorno’s aesthetics, it should be clear that it has very little to do with claims concerning an alleged systematic superiority of poetry as artistic expression in general. Rather, the prominence granted by Adorno to literature has to do with the relation between art and the conditions of late capitalism, promoting the incessant absorption of the material in the social process of production. In this paragraph, what I intend to show is in which terms, according to Adorno’s aesthetic concepts, literature can be seen as the chance to save the aesthetic, and therefore art itself, from what appears as its unstoppable commodification. In what follows, I will present three examples of literary reconstruction of the aesthetic: (i) the literary reconstruction of natural beauty; (ii) the literary reconstruction of music; (iii) the literary reconstruction of visual art through the example of museum institutions. (i) As is well known, after Hegel’s dismissal of natural beauty, Adorno attempts to return to nature its aesthetic dignity. According to Adorno, in fact, rather than dialectically elevate natural beauty to the level of the artistic one, as he asserts in his Lectures on Fine Art, Hegel has idealistically “repressed” it (ÄT: 97, AT: 61). The task of aesthetics, therefore, is now to restore nature, in the same sense that true enlightenment entails a comprehension of nature without repression, and true dialectics respects the right of the non-conceptual moment.19 That of natural beauty, however, is in Adorno a thorough and thoroughly mediated, historical, category (Marino and Matteucci 2016, pp. 32–34). Generally speaking, in  I refer to The Fine Arts Reduced to a Single Principle, published by Charles Batteux in 1747 (see, Batteux 2015). For the relevance of Horace’s and Aristotle’s poetics in Batteux, see the Translator’s Introduction (Young 2015, in particular pp. xxiv–xxv). 19  As Deborah Cook noted, this role of natural beauty in Adorno’s aesthetics is the only sense in which nature can be identified with the dialectical category of non-identical (Cook 2011, p. 43). According to this interpretation, both Bernstein’s (2001, p. 193) and Jameson’s (1990, pp. 9–10) ideas of the equivalence of nature and non-identical are based on Adorno’s description of natural beauty as “the trace of the nonidentical” (ÄT: 114, AT: 73). 18

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fact, the evaluation of natural beauty corresponds to the silent protest of nature against the wounds inflicted by intellectual rationality. What is interesting here, nevertheless, is how Adorno tries to rescue natural beauty, and in particular the example he finds to describe it. Would be strongly disappointed, in fact, he who seeks in Aesthetic Theory the glorification of wild landscapes, the appreciation of romantic sunsets, or even the noble fear in front of magnificent tempests. In the paragraph about natural beauty, Adorno focuses on those kinds of artworks that, without abstractly imitating natural forms, have managed to return dignity to nature after civilization trampled and mutilated it.20 Quite obviously, Adorno’s examples are taken from French expressionism. Sisley, Monet, and Pissarro shape, hence, the figurative imagery in which “along the trajectory of its rationality and through it, humanity becomes aware in art of what rationality has erased from memory and of what its second reflection serves to remind us”. In visual art, however, the image of nature itself is doomed to follow the path toward the commodification of the aesthetic, and Adorno is forced to admit that “the green forest of German impressionism is of no higher dignity than those views of the Königssee painted for hotel lobbies”, since “natural beauty, in the age of its total mediatedness, is transformed into a caricature of itself ”. Nevertheless, insists Adorno, the dimension of natural beauty—what civilization has repressed and forgotten—has to be enclosed in the work of art, since otherwise art would be totally rationalized, or at least absorbed in the form of commodity. Face to this impasse—the belligerent resistance of natural material to artistic reproduction, and the need for its aesthetic evaluation—Adorno finds a clever way out, as he claims that: “Proust’s insight that Renoir transformed the perception of nature not only offers the consolation that the writer imbibed from impressionism, it also implies horror: that the reification of relations between humans would contaminate all experience and literally become absolute” (ÄT: 105–106. AT: 67).21  “This is also the basis for Adorno’s inversion of the theory of imitation, according to which art does not imitate reality, but at most that aspect of the real world which itself point beyond reality” (Wellmer 1991, p. 7). 21  According to Owen Hulatt (2018, p. 160) this quotation exemplifies Adorno’s instrumentalization of Proust’s novels. Hulatt argues that Adorno employs here a shorthand quotation in order to 20

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Here, one discovers that it is not impressionist painting what has been able to aesthetically turn nature to an artistically enjoyable object, Proust’s prose did it. In other words, the artistic elevation of nature, as Adorno understands it, is not the work of Monet, Helleu, Whistler, or Renoir, whose Le déjeuner des canotiers (Luncheon of the Boating Party) is so accurately described in the Recherche; rather, it is the work of Elstir, namely their ideal and literary synthesis created by Marcel Proust, a literary character who is able to narratively recreate the real and undamaged life of nature in his description of paintings. In the second marine book of the Recherche, Proust offers a powerful description of impressionist paintings. The narrator meets Elstir the painter during his journey in the small seaside town of Balbec and has the chance to see his work. One learns then that: “what he had in his studio were almost all seascapes done here, at Balbec. But I was able to discern from these that the charm of each of them lay in a sort of metamorphosis of the things represented in it, analogous to what in poetry we call metaphor, and that, if God the Father had created things by naming them, it was by taking away their names or giving them other names that Elstir created them anew”. The experience of nature, hence, is always an artistic experience, as the artist is able to form anew what nature immediately creates, but at a higher level. Most importantly, after a few lines, Proust offers one of the most dense and attractive descriptions of the relation between art and nature of the entire history of literature: Sometimes in my window in the hotel at Balbec, in the morning when Françoise undid the fastenings of the curtains that shut out the light, in the evening when I was waiting until it should be time to go out with Saint-­ Loup, I had been led by some effect of sunlight to mistake what was only a darker stretch of sea for a distant coastline, or to gaze at a belt of liquid azure without knowing whether it belonged to sea or sky. But presently my reason would re-establish between the elements that distinction which in my first impression I had overlooked. […] But the rare moments in which we see nature as she is, with poetic vision, it was from those that Elstir’s work was taken. One of his metaphors that occurred most commonly in the seascapes which he had round him was precisely that which, comparing make a point and with little consideration of the novel itself.

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land with sea, suppressed every line of demarcation between them. It was this comparison, tacitly and untiringly repeated on a single canvas, which gave it that multiform and powerful unity, the cause (not always clearly perceived by themselves) of the enthusiasm which Elstir’s work aroused in certain collectors. (Proust 1992, vol. 2, pp. 264–265)

From the point of view of Elstir, the painter, nature is what causes his art, but from the point of view of Proust, the poet, painting is an elevation of nature to its own ideal and effectual level, and finally from the point of view of Adorno, the philosopher of art, literature is what can assign nature its own aesthetic dignity. Literature, in fact, incorporates nature and gives to its materiality a new life, far from the immediate objectual—and commodifiable—dimension. In the paragraph of Aesthetic Theory dedicated to natural beauty, Adorno suggests that “the sensibility needed to recognize that genuine experience of art is not possible without the experience of that elusive dimension whose name – natural beauty  – had faded”, whereas “in Proust, whose Recherche is an artwork and a metaphysics of art, the experience of a hawthorne hedge figures as a fundamental phenomenon of aesthetic comportment”. It should then be added that, nowadays, this is the only way to give life to “authentic artworks, which hold fast to the idea of reconciliation with nature by making themselves completely a second nature”. In the same page, furthermore, artistic evaluation of natural beauty finds another exemplification, thanks to Karl Kraus, another master of literature, who “sought to rescue linguistic objects as a part of his vindication of what capitalism has oppressed: animal, landscape” (ÄT: 99–100, AT: 63). Literature, in first instance, is then the artistic form able to incorporate natural beauty and to reshape it in a form that returns aesthetic dignity to nature. (ii) This process of literary elevation of art—here taken as some sort of reaestheticization of deaesthetified material—does not concern just visual arts. In the case of Adorno’s most beloved artistic expression, that is to say, music, the same kind of dynamics takes place. As we have seen in the Philosophy of New Music, the works of contemporary music are judged as “magnificent failures”; in the Aesthetic Theory, instead, we read that “the concept of an artwork implies that of its success. Failed artworks are not

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art” (ÄT: 280, AT: 188). The isolation, the fragmentary character, of new music is the cause of its failure as art, of its inability to create an artistic whole, and to become a proper work of art. In contrast, about Beethoven’s Adagio of the Sonata in D Minor, op. 31, no. 1, Adorno suggests that “it only requires playing the passage first in context and then alone to be able to recognize how much its incommensurableness, radiating over the passage, owes to the work as a whole” (ÄT: 280, AT: 188). In this case, too, the example reminds of Proust—quoted in the same page—and especially of “the part of Vinteuil’s Sonata that contained the little phrase of which Swann had been so fond” (Proust 1992, p. 113) and whose description shows the relationship between the single piece and the whole of the work. Other than this simple assonance between Adorno’s and Proust’s determinations of the relationship of part and whole in composition, the real contribution of literature in the reconstruction of the aesthetic element of new music can be inferred from a revealing event of Adorno’s own biography. During the years of his emigration to the USA, he personally got to know, and became close to, one of the greatest German writers of the century, namely Thomas Mann. Almost thirty years his senior, Mann was revered by Adorno in his youth, and, during the period they both lived in Los Angeles, Adorno played the role of “the real Privy Councillor” in the writing of Doktor Faustus, as Thomas Mann himself wrote as dedication on the copy he personally sent to Adorno in 1947 (Müller-Doohm 5, p. 314). “All his life”, as Thomas Mann observed, Adorno “has refused to choose between the professions of philosophy and music” (Mann 1961, p. 39), although eventually he had much more relevance as a philosopher than as a composer. Even though some contemporary musicians somehow acknowledge his compositions, as in the case of Frank Zappa, who about Adorno’s music would say that “you can think of it as enjoyable Schönberg” (Volpacchio and Zappa 1991, p.  124),22 Adorno’s  Zappa’s quite sarcastic comment comes from an interview he gave to Florindo Volpacchio for the journal Telos in 1991, where he comments on Adorno’s music by saying that it “sounds like what happens if you tried to write something just like Webern and filled in all the empty spaces. Some of the things I liked, but I liked them because they reminded me of Webern. […] The piece I liked the best was the most old fashioned one, the tonal chromatic piece. It sounds more like what Wagner would have sounded like if he knew what he was doing. […] The other stuff seems to be aesthetically in the region of Webern’s aesthetic with the aroma of Berg minus the turgid flux. You 22

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influence on modern music is not comparable to his impact on twentieth-century’s philosophy. If Adorno’s musical talent has become artistically relevant, in fact, it is not due to his activity as composer, but rather to the literary transposition of his musical sensibility. As “Privy Councillor” of Thomas Mann, Adorno’s task was to unravel those passages of the novel where the author makes reference to the twelve-tone technique and thereby check the musical correctness of the descriptions. Doktor Faustus, in fact, tells the story of a fictional composer, Adrian Leverkühn, who sells his soul to the devil not to acquire knowledge—as in the case of the classic Germanic legend written among others by Marlowe, Goethe, Lessing, and Bulgakov—but to create the perfect composition. In order to literarily describe the final composition of the protagonist, however, Mann needed to “hear” it and that’s when he asked Adorno’s help. In order to create a realistic image of a dodecaphonic, Schönberg-inspired composition, Mann calls on Adorno for help and via letter asks: “Would you consider, with me, how such a work – and I mean Leverkühn’s work – could more or less be practically realized, and how you would compose the music if you yourself were in league with the devil?” (BW3: 21, Cor3: 13). One could then claim that the violin concert composed by Leverkühn roughly corresponds to the literary description of one of Berg’s pieces which Adorno knew inside out. Roughly, because it is nevertheless Adorno’s interpretation of Berg’s compositions. Adorno’s musical sensibility, his dodecaphonic competence, his intimate acquaintance with Schönberg and Berg, finally finds an artistic form in which can be crystallized, namely the literary transposition in the work of Thomas Mann. Curiously enough, Adorno himself finds a literary transposition in the pages of the novel, precisely where the author describes the appearance of the devil: “He has a white collar and a bow-­ tie, spectacles rimmed in horn atop his hooked nose […]; pale and vaulted the brow, from which the hair indeed retreats upward, whereas that to the sides stands thick, black, and woolly-an intellectualist, who writes of art, of music, for vulgar newspapers, a theorist and critic, who is can think of it as enjoyable Schoenberg. But it did not come off to me as scholastic” (Volpacchio and Zappa 1991, p. 124).

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himself a composer, in so far as thinking allows” (Mann 1997, p. 253).23 Besides the anecdotic nature of this episode, what is interesting is how the dodecaphonic artistic “magnificent failures” ultimately find a successful artistic configuration in how literature reshapes it into a true artistic form. (iii) The third example of the literary reconstruction of the aesthetic, as previously anticipated, consists in the literary reconstruction of the museum, as the existing space where visual art rests. Nowadays, in fact, we are accustomed to think the museum as a positive cultural institution, as a framework of evaluation of art, or rather as space in which artistic heritage can be preserved for acculturation or education. Nevertheless, in modern art’s history there is no shortage of sharp critique of the museum institution as such. “We will destroy the museums, libraries, and academies of every kind” wrote for example Tommaso Filippo Marinetti in The Futurist Manifesto; “Museums: cemeteries! Identical, surely, in the sinister promiscuity of so many bodies unknown to another” (Marinetti 2001, pp.  187–188), he would claim. Also in the present days, the French author, Jean Clair, sharply criticizes the transformation of the museum in a public space where the actual exhibition consists in all the commercial services against which art is nothing but a pretext (Clair 2007). If the French tradition has always been prone to critically scrutinize the notion of museum, also the English-speaking world is not immune to the kind of cultural tensions that are inscribed in the museum practice to collect art in a well-protected space, separated from the rest of society.24 The  Can be interesting to observe that Thomas Mann is not the only writer who has hidden Adorno behind horn-rimmed spectacles. Kurt Mautz, in fact, was a student in Frankfurt right before the Nazi-time and in his book, The Old Friend (Der Urfreund) he describes the young Adorno by using the pseudonym of Amorelli: “His roundish head with the curly black hair, already beginning to recede, and his large dark eyes behind the horn-rimmed spectacles gave him a frog-like appearance. Sometimes he was accompanied by a young lady with golden hair, gold-brown eyes, and rosy cheeks. She would sit next to him like a princess in ‘The Frog-Prince’, but she never uttered a single word” (Mautz 1996, p. 44; see also Müller-Doohm 5, pp. 141–142). 24  See, for example, the editor’s introduction to the volume From Museum Critique to Critical Museum where more than ten years of debate are sketched (Murawska-Muthesius and Piotrowski 2015, pp. 1–12). From an aesthetic point of view, as Charls Tagliaferro (2016, pp. 48–50) shows, also American pragmatism criticized the institution of museum as overshadowing the art of ordinary life. The reference here is to Dewey’s argument according to which “our present museums and galleries to which works of fine art are removed and stored illustrate some of the causes that have operated to segregate art instead of finding it an attendant of temple, forum, and other forms of associated life” (Dewey 1980, p. 8). 23

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museum institution itself is often seen as the end of an artwork’s life, shut behind glass, being the need for collection itself the result of the death of art’s vitality. Adorno approaches the question of art institutions in an essay collected in Prisms under the title “Valéry Proust Museum”. In this essay Adorno compares the way in which the two authors face the deartification of artworks in a museum, as “like Valéry, Proust returns again and again to the mortality of artefacts”, and his reflection about art is part of a “death symbolism” (VPM: 185, Pr: 178). In Valéry, the essayist, however “art is lost when it has relinquished its place in the immediacy of life, in its functional context […], threatened by reification and neutralization. This is the recognition that overwhelms him in the museum”; on the other hand, “Proust, the novelist, virtually begins where Valéry, the poet, stopped”, as “for him works of art are from the outset something more than their specific aesthetic qualities. They are part of the life of the person who observes them; they become an element of his consciousness” (VPM: pp. 187–189, Pr: 180–181). In so doing, Proust absorbs the aesthetic quality that according to Valéry artworks lose in the museum and in his Recherche rebuilds it in the literary dimension of the novel. Behind Adorno’s words on Proust’s reaction to works of art in a museum, one can find something like a subjective recollection of deartified objects, which implicitly leads to the possibility to collect them in a new artistic form which is supposed to be able to express their artisticity. This form, and at this point it should be clear, is the literary one, namely the artistic form which is able to express art’s being part of the consciousness of the observer who, in the act of writing, becomes at the same time the producer. Adorno has probably in mind Proust’s description of Elstir’s paintings, where the writer imagines an ideal impressionist work of art, by ideally collecting together the style of the greatest painters of that time. The museum that Adorno contemplates is accordingly an ideal museum, where the power of literary description rebuilds the aesthetic element that has been socially dissolved, namely a sort of “Jeu de Paume, where […] Proust’s Elstir and Valéry’s Dégas live peacefully near each other in discrete separation” (VPM: 194, Pr: 185).

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3.4 T  he Literary Reconstruction of the Aesthetic (ii): The Form of Literature After having discussed a few concrete examples of the literary reconstruction of the aesthetic element, I intend to focus my analysis on the theoretical reasons of this process. Contrary to what Adorno claims for example in Aesthetic Theory—namely, that the “immanent character of being an act establishes the similarity of all artworks, like that of natural beauty, to music, a similarity once evoked by the term muse” (ÄT: 123–124, AT: 79)—Adorno’s aesthetics is marked by a progressive priority given to literature. As I have already made clear, however, this is not about thinking all the arts, and art’s genres, in a sort of confluence into literature; on the contrary, what I have identified as the literary reconstruction of the aesthetic consists in thinking literature—the concrete literary works of art—as a framework in which aesthetic success (Gelingen) can be realized. What I have presented as the crisis of sensuous artworks, that is the impossibility to single-handedly achieve aesthetic form and thereby the simultaneous expression and critique of existing society, is something the literary form seems immune to. Literature, and this is what I am going to show, has the power to instantiate a work in which the aesthetic element finds its own formal expression. In the 1970s, Giulio Carlo Argan, one of the most influential Italian art historians, dealt with the issue of the end of visual art, especially face to the success of industrial design, and he declared: “I would like to answer that art is a sacred enclosure, in which it will never be possible to penetrate the technicality that we ourselves have set in motion, the place where the individual will always be sovereign. In conscience I cannot say: art is only a bastion already invested, on which we still fight” (Argan 1965, p. 16).25 According to Adorno, art has never been a “sacred enclosure”. Art, on the contrary, is a historical instantiation of the aesthetic behavior of humanity, and therefore it has always been “invested” and “penetrated” by social relationships and technique. This is also why, however, art can never be  On the issue of the end of art in Italian aesthetics, in particular on Giulio Carlo Argan and Dino Formaggio in comparison with Adorno, see Farina (2015, pp. 291–305). 25

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taken as a universal and fixed form, but rather as a different expression each time of the same aesthetic need. And this, according to his aesthetic model, is the time of literary aesthetics. Literature, to say it otherwise, is in the condition to instantiate itself in an autonomous form, according to the dialectics between universal and particular, the double character that Adorno has identified in the construction of his aesthetics and preserved as guiding principle of his thought about art; literature, in this sense, realizes “the distance of art from the crudely empirical in which its autonomy developed” (ÄT: 303, AT: 203), since its formal means, that is to say, language, as suggested by Eva Geulen (2006a, p.  58), allows to artistically express the dialectical relationship of universal and particular. This explains why, especially in Aesthetic Theory, Adorno often relies on literary examples when he wants to describe successful works of art, but he tends to exclude them when the obstacles in the achievement of a fulfilled artistic form are at stake. This happens, for instance, in the essay “Art and the Arts”, where Adorno is interested in the fraying of art’s board, especially in the case of visual arts; this essay has been quite relevant in the contemporary debate about the dissolution, or rather the crisis, of artistic genres.26 In this regard, Adorno takes as examples the techniques of Dadaism and Surrealism, in particular that of montage, and he points to the tendency of those kinds of arts to fall beneath the a priori of art. “The fraying of art genres [Kunstgattungen]” writes Adorno “is almost always accompanied by the attempt by works of art to reach out toward an extra-aesthetic reality. This element is strictly opposed to the principle of reflecting reality”; the more this dynamics takes place, “the more it participates in alien, thinglike matter, instead of imitating it. It therefore becomes virtually a thing among things, a something we know not what”. There is, however, a positive function of this “not knowing”, a function that the visual technique of montage stresses to the point of dissolving the work of art in a mere thing, but that literature is able to  For example, Stewart Martin (2006, pp. 18–22) dwells on it in order to identify in Adorno the sources of a literary criticism of the modern system of arts; moreover, Juliane Rebentisch (2003, pp. 120–130) dedicates a substantial part of her relevant essay about the aesthetics of installation art to Adorno’s essay, in particular discussing the fringing of art’s border in Adorno as a progressive concept.

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use for true artistic purposes: “The not-knowing of explicitly absurdist works of art, such as Beckett’s, marks a point where meaning and nonmeaning become identical. Admittedly, we would distort this identity if, having a sigh of relief, we were to read a positive meaning into his writings” (KuK: 450–451, AaA: 385). In a similar context, Adorno calls often the work of Samuel Beckett into question as an example in which the literary form has been able to prevent the individual crisis of sensuous works of art. This happens, for instance, in Aesthetic Theory. When he focuses on the end of historical avant-gardes—Expressionism, Surrealism, Dadaism, Cubism, as exemplification of new art—Adorno suggests that all the artists had to come to terms with reality and made concessions, even “artists with the integrity of Picasso and Schoenberg went beyond the subjective point” in order to overcome difficulties that “developed into the difficulties of art as such”. As counterbalance to this condition, Adorno takes again the example of literature, since “[in] recent years it has been fashionable to accuse Samuel Beckett of simply repeating his basic idea; he exposed himself to this accusation in a provocative fashion. In this his consciousness was correct that the need for progress is inextricable from its impossibility”. He thus points to the one contradiction that can only be solved by literature, since only in the chronological development of literature the “fulfilled moment reverses into perpetual repetition” (ÄT: 52–53, AT: 30). Beckett’s plays, novels, and short stories do not need to give up their artistic form in order to face social reality, like visual techniques do, since his works “touch on fundamental layers of experience hic et nunc, which are brought together into a paradoxical dynamic at a standstill”, without having to superficially imitate “things”; this is how Beckett realizes “all the attempts to free oneself from the illusion of a subjectivity that bestows meaning” (ÄT: 53, AT: 31), thus avoiding to fall into the material failure of sensuous works or in the Brechtian idea of artistic creation as subjective conferring of meaning.27 Meaningfully, though, one could say that  In a conversation of 1967, Samuel Beckett told Adorno that before dying Bertolt Brecht was planning to write an “anti-Godot”. As Rolf Tiedemann says, after the conversation Adorno takes a personal note about Brecht’s project in which he remarks: “My God, what a piece of crap that would have been” (Tiedemann 1994, p. 24). On Adorno’s Beckettian and anti-Brechtian position, see Klasen (2018, 1024–1037). 27

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Beckett’s literary form shows the possibility to succeed in failure (Berger 2014, p.  214). Analogously, literary examples abound when the focus shifts on the relationship between aesthetic transcendence and disenchantment, namely on the possibility that a disenchanted—deartified— material could anyway result in an artistic one. In this regard, Adorno says that “aesthetic transcendence and disenchantment converge in the moment of falling mute: in Beckett’s oeuvre”; and this happens also in “good poems by Brecht” and primarily in Baudelaire, in whose poetics “the transcendence of the artistic appearance is at once effected and negated” (ÄT: 123–124, AT: 79). Hence, the historical difficulty of sensuous art to carry out this aesthetic transcendence is connected to “the illusion of a subjectivity that bestows meaning”, since “the plastic arts speak through the How of apperception. Their We is simply the sensorium according to its historical condition” (ÄT: 251, AT: 168). The historical condition of this material, as I have repeated enough, is that of disenchant and deartification, that of the assimilation in the social process of exchange and production; therefore, when the subject of contemporary art tries to make art by using simple empirical material, he or she cannot escape the mere and insignificant exposition of deartification itself. Sensuous material is so deprived of any kind of possible meaningfulness that is only able to communicate its own reduction to the social process of production, its own being part of capital reproduction, and in this way it gives to the subject the illusion of domination, as “even progressive mastery over the material is sometimes paid for with a loss in the mastery over the material” (ÄT: 314, AT: 211). Within this scenario, literature manages to guarantee to art its own formal autonomy, its double character, and its anti-mythological activity, all elements that discriminate art from the object of everyday empirical life. Upon careful inspection of Adorno’s aesthetic production, moreover, it is also possible to carve out the precise function assigned to literature in the operating of this specific aesthetic activity, this function being that, as Adorno puts it, of an epic narrator. What is at stake is nothing but the formal structure of literature, especially of the novel, that consists in the pure voice where the literary space is located, what in Lukács’ analysis of the form of the novel was “the empirical ‘I’” of the epic (Lukács 1971, p. 47), and that Szondi (1987, p. 9) called “Epic I”. According to Adorno,

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the narrator is precisely the formal structure that allows literature to perform its aesthetic behavior, since its “naiveté is not only a lie intended to keep general reflection at a distance from blind contemplation of the particular”, but rather “an anti-mythological enterprise, epic naiveté emerges from the enlightenment-oriented and positivist effort to adhere faithfully and without distortion to what once was as it was, and thereby break the spell cast by what has been, by myth in its true sense”. The activity of the literary ‘I’, hence, is that “to recover from the negativity of its intentionality, the conceptual manipulation of objects, by carrying its defining intention to the extreme and allowing what is real to emerge in pure form […]. The narrator’s stupidity and blindness […] expresses the impossibility and hopelessness of this enterprise” (ÜeN: 36, 37, NtL1: 25, 27). In this sense, it is fair to argue that precisely the most subjective element of literature, that is its structure given by the “Epic I” as the formal law of literary material, is what allows it to obtain that objective, autonomous, meaning through which Adorno designates art. In the next section I intend to show how he theoretically understands this process.

3.5 T  he Literary Reconstruction of the Aesthetic (iii): The Reflection of the ‘I’ and the Literary Material By taking the literary reconstruction of the aesthetic seriously, a question spontaneously arises, namely how can it be that the least empirical among the forms of art is the one that is able to solve an aesthetic empirical problem? As we have already seen, this is typical of Adorno’s dialectical arguments. As the isolation of individual inwardness expresses the influence of the historical moment, the autonomy of art is nothing but the outcome of social external pressure. In the same sense, the “historical and social content” is signified “in the work of Valéry, work that forbids itself any kind of shortcut to praxis”; always accused of elitism, in fact, “Valéry expresses the contradiction between artistic work and the current social conditions of material production” (AaS: 115, 121, NtL1: 99, 104).

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Literary form realizes the double character of art precisely by sublating the empirical dimension of art and by reproducing the aesthetic element beyond mere sensuous existence. The reason why literature is able to accomplish this task—and this is what I will show in this paragraph—has to do with the specific kind of aesthetic material it uses. Whereas sensuous art fails in its material element, literature obtains the tools for its aesthetic success in its material constitution. That of literature, in fact, is a highly mediated form of material, a form of material that qualitatively differs from the empirical one and that turns out to be the outcome of a subjective operation of reflection. This formal structure is finally what confers to literature its resistance to myth, its aesthetic autonomy, its artistic formality, and its double character. As Adorno writes in his pathbreaking essay about Hölderlin: For demythologization itself is nothing other than the self-reflection of the solar Logos, a reflection that helps oppressed nature to return, whereas in myth nature was one with the oppressing element. Only what gives myth its due can provide liberation from myth. The healing of what the romantic-­ mythologizing thesis conceives reflection to be guilty of is to occur, according to the Hölderlinian antithesis, through reflection in the strict sense, through the assimilation of what has been oppressed into consciousness through remembrance. (P: 486–487, NtL2: 145)

In Aesthetic Theory Adorno takes into account the process of deartification of art by means of what he understands as the “crisis of semblance”, namely the difficulty of the artworks to express a meaning through the aesthetic constitution of their material, although aesthetic “semblance is indeed their logic”. The crisis of semblance is to such a point serious that Adorno admits that “if the question as to the future of art were not fruitless and suspiciously technocratic, it would come down to whether art can outlive semblance”; as a solution to the critical condition of art, however, Adorno calls upon an example which is well suited to what we have seen about literary reflection: “The beginning of Proust’s Recherche is to be interpreted as the effort to outwit art’s illusoriness: to steal imperceptively into the monad of the artwork without forcibly positing its

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immanence of form and without feigning an omnipresent and omniscient narrator” (ÄT: 155–156, AT: 101–102).28 As in the case of Hölderlin, also in Proust the literary form finds an aesthetic realization through “the assimilation of what has been oppressed into consciousness”, namely by reflecting through consciousness on the empirical constitution of aesthetic material. When we consider literature, hence, we are not dealing with the empirical material for how it presents itself to the senses, but rather with the elaboration of the sensuous material by means of the individual experience of the author. This is why literature does not express the empirical world but instead how the author understands the empirical world. In this way, it realizes the paradoxical ideal which according to Adorno describes the relationship between the musical score and its performance, as “scores are not only almost always better than the performances, they are more than simply instructions for them; they are indeed the thing itself ” (ÄT: 153, AT: 100). This is why music has an ideal form—namely the score—that every time it is executed, it decays, as in a type-token distinction. The literary work, on the contrary, cannot fall into this equivocal relationship, as it is identified by no empirical element. Neither ink stains, nor the paper or the graphic aspect of the text determine the aesthetic material. The latter, instead, is defined by the amount of representations that the text communicates to the reader, according to the classic Hegelian argument.29 It is a pure consciousness material that results from a mediation of empirical world. As Adorno writes in an unpublished fragment of 1961/62, “artistic experience is the subjective unfolding of works’ objective processes, that the latter contain their own” (TWAA: TS. 20680).  In this quotation, Adorno refers to the incipit of Proust’s famous novel: “For a long time I would go to bed early. Sometimes, the candle barely out, my eyes closed so quickly that I did not have time to tell myself: ‘I’m falling asleep’. And half an hour later the thought that it was time to look for sleep would awaken me; I would make as if to put away the book which I imagined was still in my hands, and to blow out the light; I had gone on thinking, while I was asleep, about what I had just been reading, but these thoughts had taken a rather peculiar turn; it seemed to me that I myself was the immediate subject of my book: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between François I and Charles V” (Proust 1992, vol. 1, p. 1). 29  “What, in default of musical notes, will now be the exteriority and objectivity in the poetry?”, asks Hegel in the Aesthetics, “We can answer quite simply: it is the inner representing [Vorstellen] and intuiting [Anschauen] itself ” (Hegel 1975, p. 964). 28

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This theoretical point is something on which Adorno insists during the last decade of his reflection, in particular in the essays he collected between 1958 and 1965  in the first three volumes of the Notes on Literature and in the fourth posthumous volume published in 1974. Besides that, the Aesthetic Theory contains various remarks in the same direction. In this regard, of particular interest is a group of comments that Adorno includes in his polemical essay against Lukács’ late production. As is well known, Adorno has never forgiven the author of History and Class Consciousness for his subsequent accession to Eastern Marxism, and to the orthodoxy of the Soviet intellectual system. This is also the main reason for his frequent contemptuous and dismissive judgments concerning The Destruction of Reason, as for example when he asserts that “it was probably in his The Destruction of Reason that the destruction of Lukacs’ own reason manifested itself most crassly” (EV: 252, NtL1: 217). In order to counterclaim Lukács’ apology of socialist realism, Adorno develops the idea of art’s autonomy—that, ironically enough, he had first outlined through the influence of Lukács himself. “Art”, writes Adorno, “does not come to know reality by depicting it photographically […], but by expressing, through its autonomous constitution, what is concealed by the empirical form reality takes”; this is why “even the assertion that the world is unknowable […] can become a moment of knowledge, knowledge of the gulf between the overwhelming and unassimilatable world of objects, on the one hand, and experience, which glances helplessly off that world, on the other”. In the work of art, in fact, “nothing empirical remains unaltered” (EV: 264, NtL1: 227). If art corresponds to the activity of human life that transforms empirical material, ensuring that the latter, once it has been configured in an aesthetic autonomous form, becomes meaningful; if, however, the empirical material is so disenchanted that it cannot anymore be a sensuous expression of meaning; then, just a form of art able to shape aesthetic material into a pure mediated form can, in doing so, be a vehicle of artisticity. As Adorno writes, in fact, “its antithetical relationship to empirical reality […] consists precisely of the fact that, unlike intellectual forms that deal directly with reality, it never defines reality unequivocally as being one thing or another” (EV: 270, NtL1: 232). It is exactly this kind of literary process

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what instantiates the artistic logic that Adorno describes in the opening page of his Aesthetic Theory, according to which “Artworks detach themselves from the empirical world and bring forth another world, one opposed to the empirical world as if this other world too were an autonomous entity” (ÄT: 10, AT: 1). The principle of the dissolution of the aesthetic element—that is, the common thread of my interpretation—acts in the core structure of Adorno’s philosophy of art. The final aim of his aesthetics, hence, is that of the reconstruction of the aesthetic element through the mediation of the creating subject. Without making this operation explicit, Adorno deals with the conceptual tensions of his own aesthetics. On the one hand, the work of art has to be thought as a form of knowledge—even if only as a “knowledge sui generis” (EV: 264, NtL1: 227)—and this is why it needs to be defined according to the notion of autonomy, namely as a mediation of society itself; on the other hand, the autonomy of the work goes into crisis due to the social transformation of images and materials in phantasmagories and to the commodification of the sensuous element. The critical condition of art in Adorno is the result of the “precariousness of the thing-character in art” (ÄT: 153, AT: 100), caused by the tension between the work of art—as empirical object—and the commodified, disenchanted empirical world. In other words, this is the tension between the necessity of artistic expression and criticism of society, and the absorption of all empirical things in the economic process that turns art into a form of mediation of the social relation of capital. To this tension, however, Adorno reacts with the idea that “only for a pacified humanity would art come to an end”, and he elaborates an aesthetic model in which literary mediation restores the aesthetic element in its non-empirical form. For these reasons the literary aesthetic model is an answer to the historical necessity to de-sensualize art, without turning art into a pure conceptual expression of meaning. The idea of the truth of art as a cultural product, in fact, is that “of the nonexistent as if it existed”, and it corresponds to the principle according to which “what spirit promises, not the sensual pleasure of the observer, is the locus of the sensual element in art” (ÄT: 128, AT: 82). In order to conceptually explain these kinds of achievements either we have to think about some sort of re-enchantment of the sensuous element—as the one that Adorno criticizes in Benjamin—or we

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have to imagine another way to understand the sensuous, namely through a literary model. The particular qualities of literary material consist, indeed, in the fact that literature allows what Adorno describes as the process in which “the artwork suspends empirical reality as an abstract and universal functional nexus”, being anyway determined through “the indispensable sensual element of artworks” (ÄT: 204, AT: 135). Literary material, in fact, is made of the various representations that the text causes, since the reader relates to the text not as a collection of direct information about reality, but as an artistic form in general, namely as an aesthetic sediment of historical and social content. Therefore, in literature the actual external material—the paper, the ink, the font, and so on— according to the already mentioned Hegelian argument,30 is reduced to a simple and arbitrary bearer of a representational, subjectively mediated, content. These characteristics allow the literary material to get to the bottom of the splittings that torment new art. As we have seen, in fact, new art is marked by persistent and contradictory tensions, that in the case of music are represented by the split of progression and regression, and in the visual art by that of imitation of reality and expression of subjective intentions, as it can be seen in the so-called Brecht-Lukács-Debate between expressionism and realism in art.31 In literature, instead, it seems that this split can be solved, as in the case of Proust’s novel, in the terms of a synthesis of realism and psychologism (SdE: 44, NtL1: 32). In the essay “The Position of the Narrator in the Contemporary Novel”, Adorno makes this point clear by writing that “the more strictly the novel adheres to realism in external things, to the gesture that says ‘this is how it was’, the more every word becomes a mere ‘as if ’, and the greater becomes the contradiction between this claim and the fact that it was not so” (SdE:  David James (2009, p. 45) notes that in Hegel “the development that the romantic form of art undergoes is thus one that, in poetry, reaches the stage at which the sensory material serves merely as the sign of the representations and feelings that now form the real content of art”. 31  With the expression Brecht-Lukács-Debate scholars indicate a huge discussion during the 1930s between the two Marxists about the value of art as direct communication of reality or as expression of subjective pain toward social conflicts, where Bertolt Brecht was the supporter of the latter solution and Lukács that of the realistic option. Fredric Jameson takes the debate as a reproduction in the twentieth century of an incessant division of art, like that of the querelle des anciens et des modernes (Jameson 1980, pp. 196–213). 30

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44, NtL1: 33). Mediated by the subjective forms of consciousness (memory, thought, representation, etc.), empirical material is reconstructed in the aesthetic form of literature and, in this very form, it gets that kind of aesthetic sedimentation that its immediate sensuous form is unable to reach. In reference to the double character of literature, about Proust it is said that “it coaxes mythical images out of modernity at the points where it is most modern” (KPK: 208, NtL1: 178). The essay “The Position of the Narrator” includes, in this regard, some remarks that are of primary importance. The novel, Adorno observes, allows the artistic activity to create an illusory form in which the empirical matter exists indeed as semblance, namely as the Schein (semblance, illusion, appearance) that forces the mythical nature to show its transitory, and therefore historical, character. When about artworks Adorno writes that “semblance is indeed their logic” (ÄT: 155, AT: 101), in fact, he is quoting, by overturning its meaning, the traditional Hegelian idea of beautiful as “the pure appearance [scheinen] of the Idea to sense” (Hegel 1975, p. 111). This definition has been long understood as the demonstration of Hegel’s Platonic classicism, as art would consist in a mere illusion of real truth. What Adorno is suggesting, on the contrary, is that appearance is indeed the category that makes art able to express society’s truth, as in the moment in which the social conflictual nature shows itself as apparent, it reveals its transitory, that is, historical essence.32 In the literary form of the novel, hence, it is the empirical itself what appears as semblance, by expressing its illusory, ideological, and commodified nature, as “during the 19th century aesthetic semblance was heightened to the point of phantasmagoria” (ÄT: 156, AT: 102). In the essay “Narrator”, Adorno mentions Flaubert, whose linguistic purity brings the historical reality to appearance and at the same time, “by spiritualizing language, removes it from the empirical realm to which it is committed” (SdE: 45, NtL1: 33).

 This argument calls into question what we have seen in the previous chapter when I mentioned the role of illusion in the appearance of myth in art. When Adorno writes that “the second nature of tonal system is an illusion [Schein] originating in history” (PnM: 20, PNM: 13), he means exactly the fact that the artistic expression of social contradiction, in the moment in which it appears as Schein, shows its own transitory and historical nature. 32

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This is how literature is able to create those “things of a second order” (ÄT: 152, AT: 99) that according to Adorno define the works of art and that empirical material holds back. To make this possible, then, the activity of reflection, as we have seen concerning Hölderlin, is what presents the empirical material as mediated by consciousness. What Adorno means when he talks about reflection, however, has nothing to do with the conceptual operation of intellectual reflection, but rather with the fact that “the new reflection takes a stand against the lie of representation, actually against the narrator himself, who tries, as an extra-alert commentator on events, to correct his unavoidable way of proceeding”. Right after this passage, Adorno clearly describes the very literary nature of this process, when he asserts that the author—in this case, Thomas Mann— “acknowledges the peep-show element in the narrative, the unreality of illusion, through his use of language. By doing so, he returns the work of art […] to the status of a sublime joke, a status it had until, with the naiveté of lack of naiveté, it presented illusion as truth in an all too unreflected way” (SdE: 43–46, NtL1: 34). What literature realizes, hence, is a critical form of realism (Hohendahl 2013, pp. 113–116). Literature, in fact, testifies the power of objectivity toward the subject, but instead of flatly reproducing it, it has the force to reproduce it in an aesthetic form “of a second order” in which that objective power of social conflict declares its own appearance, transitoriness, namely the historical nature of the essential myth he would like to be, and in this way he can be dissolved as myth. Always in the essay “Narrator”, Adorno writes that “[there] is a tendency inherent in form that demands the abolition of aesthetic distance in the contemporary novel and its capitulation thereby to the superior power of reality – a reality that cannot be transfigured in an image but only altered concretely, in reality”; as Karl Kraus recognizes, this result can be achieved “solely under the law of language” (SdE: 47–48, NtL1: 36). Language, hence, is the artistic medium in which the historical content, by means of subjective mediation, “with no remaining trace of mere matter, sounds forth in language until language itself acquires a voice”. This key position of language prompts Eva Geulen to wonder whether Adorno’s philosophy of art can be even conceived as having art, or rather any kind of aesthetic experience, as its object, or whether all its concerns are outcomes of a latent

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philosophy of language (see Geulen 2006b, p.  92 and Martin 2006, pp. 15–16); this is why, literary expressions of meaning “owe their quality to the force with which the ‘I’ creates the illusion of nature emerging from alienation” (RüL: 56, 53, NtL1: 43, 41); and this is also why literature can operate a reconciliation in the fragment, that is the kind of paratactic composition that visual arts attempted to realize with collage technique and music with a-tonal system. According to Adorno, new art is subjected to the “shadow of fragment”, as “all the works are fragments, and the highest of them  – those in which their contradiction is most deeply impressed  – are even more fragments” (TWAA: Ts. 20673, 20675).33 In this regard, Hölderlin can be seen as an ante litteram example of literary fragmentation of the work of art, as he shows in his anti-­ Heideggerian interpretation of the poet in the essay “Parataxis”. Thanks to the function of the I’s representational consciousness, what in empirical reality would be mere natural material, if not an ideological expression of social relationships as commodities, can be literarily presented in artistic form. On this ground, the literary work, here that of Valéry, can “refuse the opiate that great sensuous art has become since Wagner, Baudelaire, and Manet; to fend off the humiliation that makes works of art media and makes consumers victims of psychotechnical manipulation” (AsS: 125, AeA: 107). After the so-called modernism, insists Adorno, “everything sensually pleasing in art, every charm of material, has been degraded to the level of the preartistic”. Art is possible only as “radical spiritualized art”, namely in the case that the objective realm is mediated through what Adorno calls, with a Hegelian term, “subjective spirit”, that is, the interiority of the individual. This is how in the artwork “the external must pass by way of spirit and has increasingly become the appearance of the inward” (ÄT: 142, AT: 92), that according to the notion developed in the Kierkegaard is equivalent to the manifestation not of the simple inwardness but of what the objectivity of society has done with the subject; Adorno seems therefore to repeat Karl Kraus’ verse of despair, when in the poem “Flieder” he bitterly observes “was hat die Welt aus uns gemacht [what the world has made of us]” (Kraus 1959,  These quotations come from an unpublished text written during the composition of Aesthetic Theory named Fragment als Form und Zufall (Fragment as Form and Accident). 33

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p.  235). Art as material thing, however, can no longer oppose its own meaningful structure to the social process that absorbs it as a mediator in the social relationships between people. The society of late capitalism needs a form of art “that leaves no material untransformed” (SdE: 41, NtL1: 30) and, thereby, that presents social reality as mediation. This art is literature, not just in itself, but as a sort of assurance of survival for art in general. This is, hence, the most radical outcome of Adorno’s literary aesthetics. The fact that literature, thanks to the mediation of the I as the formal structure in which aesthetic material is produced, is in the position to reconstruct the aesthetic principle that social production has historically dissolved in the empirical world. Literature, in this sense, can be seen not as the only art that survived to the dissolution of the aesthetic, but as I have already remarked, as the assurance of survival of art itself. While dealing with contemporary debates about the end of art, about the institutional explanation of art’s essence, or even about the seemingly post-­ historical condition of art, Adorno’s aesthetics would answer with the notion of the literary reconstruction of the aesthetic: what seems to be non-artistic in contemporary art, what in art seems to be undistinguishable from everyday life, what appears as the post-historical condition of art, or even its death can still be seen as artistic; this is so, however, only as far as it is framed in a literary paradigm, which defines art in terms of its inclusion in a narrative framework.

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Gutiérrez Pozo, Antonio. 2009. Utopia in Black. The Negative Aesthetics of Adorno and the Contemporary Black Art. Filozofia 64 (5): 481–491. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1975. Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Art. Trans. T.M. Knox. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hohendahl, Peter Uwe. 2013. The Fleeting Promise of Art. Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory Revisited. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press. Hulatt, Owen. 2018. Seeing In, Seeing Through: Adorno and Proust. In Benjamin, Adorno, and the Experience of Literature, ed. Corey McCall and Nathan Ross, 159–178. New York/London: Routledge. James, David. 2009. Art, Myth and Society in Hegel’s Aesthetics. London/New York: Continuum. Jameson, Fredric. 1980. Reflection and Conclusion. In Aesthetics and Politics, ed. Ronald Taylor, 196–213. London: Verso. ———. 1990. Late Marxism: Adorno, or, the Persistence of the Dialectic. London/ New York: Verso. Kelly, Theresa M. 2010. Adorno–Nature–Hegel. In Language Without Soil. Adorno and Late Philosophical Modernity, ed. Gerhard Richter, 99–116. New York: Fordham University Press. Klasen, Isabelle. 2018. Rather No Art then Socialist Realism. Adorno, Beckett, and Brecht. In The SAGE Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory, ed. Beverly Best, Werner Bonefeld, and Chris O’Kane, 1024–1037. Los Angeles/ London/New Delhi/Singapore/Washington, DC/Melbourne: SAGE Publications. Kramer, Hilton. 2006. The Triumph of Modernism: The Artworld, 1987–2005. Lanham/Boulder/New York/Toronto/Plymouth: Rowman & Littlefield. Kraus, Karl. 1959. Worte in Versen. München: Kösel Verlag. Lijster, Thijs. 2017. Benjamin and Adorno on Art and Art Criticism. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Lukács, György. 1971. The Theory of the Novel. A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature. Trans. Anna Bostock. London: The Merlin Press. Mann, Thomas. 1961. The Genesis of a Novel. Trans. C. Winston, and R. Winston. London: Sacker & Warburg. ———. 1997. Doctor Faustus. The Life on the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn As Told by a Friend. Trans. J.E. Woods. New York: Knopf. Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso. 2001. Manifesto of Futurism. In Manifesto. A Century of Isms, ed. Mary Ann Caws, 187–189. Lincoln/London: University of Nebraska Press.

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Marino, Stefano, and Giovanni Matteucci. 2016. The Dark Side of the Truth. Nature and Natural Beauty in Adorno. Discipline Filosofiche 2 (XXVI): 5–45. Martin, Stewart. 2006. Literature and Modern System of Arts: Sources of Criticism in Adorno. In Adorno and Literature, ed. David Cunningham, and Nigel Mapp, 9–25. London/New York: Continuum. Marx, Karl. 1990. The Capital. A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1. Trans. B. Fowkes. London/New York: Penguin. Mautz, Kurt. 1996. Der Urfreund. Paderborn: Ingel Verlag. McBride, Patrizia C. 2007. Introduction: The Future’s Past  – Modernism, Critique and the Political. In The Legacies of Modernism: Art and Politics in Northern Europe, 1890–1950, ed. Patrizia C.  McBride, Richard W. McCormick, and Monika Žaga, 1–13. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. McLaren, Peter, and Rami Farahmandpur. 2002. Breaking Signifying Chains: A Marxist Position on Postmodernism. In Marxism against Postmodernism in Educational Theory, ed. Dave Hill, Peter McLaren, Mike Cole, and Glenn Rikowski, 35–66. Lanham/Boulder/New York/Oxford: Lexington Books. Müller-Doohm, Stefan. 2005. Adorno. A Biography. Trans. R.  Livingstone. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Murawska-Muthesius, Katarzyna, and Piotr Piotrowski. 2015. Introduction. In From Museum Critique to Critical Museum, ed. Katarzyna Murawska-­ Muthesius, and Piotr Piotrowski. Farnham: Ashgate. Proust, Marcel. 1992. In Search of Lost Time. 7 vols. Trans. C.K.S. Moncrieff, and T. Kilmartin, rev. D.J. Enright. New York: The Modern Library. Rebentisch, Juliane. 2003. Ästhetik der Installation. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. Roberts, David. 2011. The Total Work of Art in European Modernism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Saisselin, Rémy G. 1965. Taste in Eighteenth Century France: Critical Reflections on the Origin of Aesthetics or an Anthropology for Amateur. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Szondi, Peter. 1987. Theory of Modern Drama. Trans. M. Hays. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Tagliaferro, Charles. 2016. The Open Museum and its Enemies: An Essay in the Philosophy of Museums. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 79: 35–53. Tiedemann, Rolf. 1994. “Gegen den Trug der Frage nach dem Sinn”. Eine Dokumentation zu Adornos Beckett-Lektüre. In Frankfurter Adorno Blätter III, ed. Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, 18–77. München: Text+Kritik.

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Valéry, Paul. 1971. The Problem of Museums. In The Collected Works of Paul Valery, ed. Jackson Mathews, vol. 12. Trans. D. Paul, 202–206. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Volpacchio, Florindo, and Frank Zappa. 1991. The Mother of All Interviews: Zappa on Music and Society. Telos 87: 124–136. Wellmer, Albrecht. 1991. The Persistence of Modernity. Essay and Aesthetics, Ethics and Postmodernism. Trans. D. Midgley. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Young, James O. 2015. Translator’s Introduction. In The Fine Arts Reduced to a Single Principle, ed. C.  Batteux. Trans. J.O.  Young. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Vacatello, Marzio. 1972. Th. W.  Adorno: il rinvio della prassi. Firenze: La Nuova Italia. Böckelmann, Frank. 1998. Über Marx und Adorno. Schwierigkeiten der spätmarxistischen Theorie. Freiburg: Ça Ira.

4 Adorno’s Philosophy of Literature: A Theory of Literary Interpretation

So far my aim has been to follow the trace left by a fundamental argument underpinning Adorno’s understanding of aesthetics as philosophical interpretation of art. The principle of the dissolution of the aesthetic element—or deaestheticization as “final dissolution of the essential aesthetic qualities which have until this century been inseparable from the concepts of art itself ” (Wolin 2004, p. 11)—has been recognized as the pivotal issue around which Adorno tries to establish a consistent theory accounting for the nature and structure of that intricate cultural product that an artwork is. The outcome of my interpretation has been the definition of the process of literary reconstruction of the aesthetic, a process that makes literature what guarantee that art—and the aesthetic comportment of humanity in general—can still perform its task of expression and critique of the social condition. This is notably meant as embodiment of the hope for a different set up of social reality. In this way, Adorno’s aesthetics justifies the peculiar role of literature in the general field of artistic activity.1 Conversely, in this chapter, I will investigate the  Stewart Martin points out that literature plays a key role in post avant-gardist art since the critique of art itself has been developed in the very field of literature, turning literature in a sort of meta-­ artistic framework of art critique (see Martin 2006, p. 10). 1

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most basic elements of Adorno’s aesthetics from the viewpoint of a philosophical determination of literary products. In other words, I will test the possibility to take Adorno’s aesthetics as a philosophy of literature. The kind of philosophy of literature that I believe could fit the framework of Adorno’s philosophy is less an abstract definition of the qualities of literature as a collection of utterances and propositions than a determination of its properties by means of a philosophical interpretation of concrete literary products. This means that we cannot expect Adorno to undertake a definitory analysis of literature as, for example, the contemporary analytic debate on the topic does.2 In the current academic division of labor, in fact, philosophy of literature corresponds to a specific branch of aesthetics, in turn a specific branch of philosophy, whose purpose is to establish how literature can be conceived as an object on which philosophy can be applied. This approach to philosophy of literature aims to find conceptual legitimacy for utterances like “literature is writing that has a certain property, or certain properties, of literariness” (New 1999, p. 16), or to investigate the conditions of possibility of literature in general (Lamarque 2009, p.  8).3 It may then come as a surprise that, despite his rejection of any definitory approach to art, Adorno’s consideration and interpretation of literature provides interesting answers to some essential questions typical of the philosophy of literature as outlined above, namely to the questions concerning what a literary text is, what kind of relationship literature has with reality, what does it mean to interpret a literary product, what is the form, and what is the content.  Ulrich Plass suggests that Adorno’s avoidance of conceptual definitions does not imply an ambivalent concept of language, but rather a precise argumentative strategy based on a critique of the intellect’s abstract conceptuality (Plass 2007, p. xxii). 3  This kind of definitory approach to literature includes definitions like “Anna Karenina is the discourse consisting of the concatenation of (mainly) Russian sentences uttered by Tolstoy in the writing of a certain sequence of inscriptions which was completed, or at any rate published” (New 1999, p. 15). Adorno’s philosophy rejects any definitory approach to art as it applies the instruments of abstract thought to concrete objects. As it will become clear in the section in which I deal with the issue of interpretation of literature, even a broader and socially oriented definition such as “a text is identified as a literary work by recognizing the author’s intention that the text is produced and meant to be read within the framework of conventions defining the practice (constituting the institution) of literature” (Lamarque, and Olsen 1994, pp.  255–156), would be understood by Adorno as an anti-historical, abstract attempt to cut away literature from the concrete activity of critique of the existing society. 2

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Adorno’s approach to literature differs from that of the mainstream of contemporary debate also in that it is critical and evaluative when the other is programmatically neutral. Another effect of the academic division of labor, coupled with the Humean tradition of English aesthetics, consists hence in the sharp division between the role of philosopher and that of critic. The critic is the one whose evaluative judgment establishes the field of literary objects, that is, the critic is the one who decides which texts among the considerable amount of those produced are worth to be considered as part of the literary canon; differently, the philosopher of literature has the task to conceptually justify the literariness of literature (Lamarque 2009, p. 275). According to Adorno, by contrast, the process of art critique is, simultaneously, the philosophical demonstration of its nature and essence. By following the romantic and the Hegelian tradition, as a peculiar elaboration of Kant’s notion of critique, Adorno conceives the process of art critique as a demonstration of art being part of what the Romantics called absolute and Hegel called spirit. Adorno himself picks up the word “spirit”, but understands it—negatively—as the historical (un)truth of social reality,4 according to the famous statement included in Minima Moralia by which “the whole is the untrue” (MM: 55, MM: 50), or what one reads in Negative Dialectics, that truth is the “ontology of false condition” (ND: 22, ND: 11).5 Art critique, hence, is the demonstration that art is part of the world’s untruth.6 While distinguishing philosophy of literature and literary theory Noël Carroll and John Gibson assert that the former is a narrower field “not restricted to but in practice often coextensive with the work produced by professors of philosophy who pursue their interests in literary aesthetics in  This concept of spirit as social labor is clearly outlined in the first of the three studies that in the 1950s Adorno devotes to Hegel (see, DSH: 264–266, HTS: 17–18). Zuidervaart (1991, pp. 93–121) places particular emphasis on Adorno’s notion of art as social labor. 5  The translation of both texts has been modified. Jephcott translates the quotation from Minima Moralia as “the whole is the false”, where “false” translates Unwahre (untrue) and not Falsch (false); moreover, Adorno’s quotation explicitly plays, by overturning it, with Hegel’s line “the true is the whole” (Hegel 2018, p. 13). In his edition of Negative Dialectics, Ashton translates Adorno’s expression Ontologie des falschen Zustandes with “ontology of the wrong state of things”, by erasing this way the reference to falsity. 6  The idea that Adorno’s notion of aesthetic critique consists in the negation—or in the critical version—of Hegel’s positive notion has been suggested by Raymond Geuss (2004, pp. 41–42). 4

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conversation with debates in the core areas of professional philosophy”; and while introducing a companion on the topic, they suggest that “whatever philosophy of literature precisely designates as a field of research in the Anglophone academic world, this volume acts as a very good representative of its concerns and boundaries” (Carroll, and Gibson 2016, p. xxii). In stressing Adorno’s non-differentiation of critique and philosophy of literature, my aim is not to delegitimize the analytic philosophy of literature, but rather to put into question the full identification of philosophy of literature with one distinctive approach. My inquiry on Adorno’s interpretation of literature has the goal to show that the basic questions of philosophy of literature can be answered also by following a different aesthetic approach, without being thereby propelled out of the field of the genitive that connects philosophy and literature in the expression philosophy of literature, and without identifying philosophy with a specific branch of the academic labor, as it happens in the mostly unchallenged division between “philosophy” and “the Theory”.7

4.1 W  hat Literature Is About: Reality, Truth, and Ontology Since its first appearances in Western philosophical thought, what we nowadays call literature—especially thanks to Romanticism and, precisely, to what has been defined as the Romantic “theoretical institutionalization of the literary genre” (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1988, p. 3)—has been assessed on the basis of its relationship toward reality and truth. As is well known, in the second book of The Republic, Plato condemns fictional stories precisely because of their relationships to reality, by referring to the stories that “Hesiod and Homer both used to tell us – and the other poets. They made up untrue stories, which they used to tell people  – and still do tell them” (Plato 2000, 377d 5–7, p.  62). To an  David Shusterman, for example, refers to T.S. Eliot and emphasizes his proximity to “what is today in the academy often called ‘theory’, a genre where non-professional philosophers like Walter Benjamin can be studied for their philosophical import and where Eliot himself deserves a better place” (Shusterman 1994, p. 31). 7

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opposite outcome, but according to a similar interpretation of the relationship between text and world, in the first great philosophical treatise on fictional writing—namely, the Poetics—Aristotle conceives the stance of literature—or better, of tragedy and epic—toward real actions as a form of imitation, and he assesses the result of such imitation in terms of “what is possible as being probable or necessary” (Aristotle 1985, 1451b 3–4, p. 2323). This approach to the problem of the relationship between text and reality has been pivotal in the great modern revival of the debate on literature, to the point that Aristotle has been recently defined as “the father of the philosophy of literature” by Carroll and Gibson (2016, p. xxi). Questions concerning how literature can give rise to emotions in the audience despite its fictional nature, or to what extent can aesthetic illusion be taken as a sort of reality, have been occupying center stage in the modern discipline of aesthetics, especially during the Enlightenment, as they call upon the relationship between the aesthetic effect and the subjective faculties of knowledge.8 According to this conceptual framework, how literature relates to reality can be linked to the denotative power of language, as exemplified, for instance, by Victor Hugo’s description of French revolution in Les Misérables and its relation to the real historical event that the text is about. The interweaving of truth and ontology of fiction with their relationship with textual references to external reality can be found, for example, in the contemporary discussion of literary realism in terms of verisimilitude and in questions about the adequacy of real cities and their representation in fictional contexts.9  See what the popular German philosopher, Moses Mendelssohn, writes on November 23, 1756, in his famous epistolary exchange with Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Christoph Friedrich Nicolai known as Correspondence Concerning Tragedy (Briefwechsel über das Trauerspiel): “Above all, we want to let ourselves out more broadly once we have put in order our thoughts of the effect of the theatrical illusion, and of the contrast of it with the clear knowledge” (Lessing et  al. 1973, p.  169). Frederick Burwick (1991, pp. 81–94) shows how the discussion among the three rose from the eighteenth-century concern to rationalize emotions as pivotal problem of the Enlightenment’s aesthetics. Serena Feloj (2017, pp. 69–73) highlights the connection of this issue with the theoretical faculties of knowledge. 9  When I talk about realism and verisimilitude in the context of the question concerning the truth of literature, I think about, for example, how Peter Lamarque frames the issue in the fifth chapter of his book, The Philosophy of Literature. I am not interested here in reconstructing Lamarque’s argument, but only in how he understands the problem of the truth of literature in terms of its adequacy to the description of the external world (Lamarque 2009, pp.  220–253). About the ontology of fictional elements taken as reference to objectual things, see how Kroon and Voltolini 8

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In this section my intention is to present Adorno’s position with regard to the issue of literary realism, truth, and ontology, a position that embodies an implicit criticism of the reality, or truth, of literature in terms of verisimilitude, correspondence, or adaequatio of a text to an alleged external reality. What I intend to show is the fact that, according to Adorno’s aesthetic model, literature is not a pure universe of meaning separated from reality, but it has instead a realistic dimension. This entails a clear stance concerning truth and ontology in literary texts. In what follows, I will mainly outline Adorno’s position as a critical response to the idea that literary reality, truth, and ontology could ever be conveyed by how a text depicts the world. Instead of being a matter of style or reference, realism is, in Adorno’s eyes, the specific manner in which literature autonomously takes position in relation to how reality should be according to its truth. First of all, the issue of realism. As everyone who has gone into the literary debates of the nineteenth century knows, Lukács and Brecht are two of the most prominent authors who fought the cultural war between the realistic and the expressionistic idea of literature, to the point that the quarrel took the name of Brecht-Lukács-Debatte.10 At the same time, as everyone who dealt with those issues equally knows, Adorno criticized both parts of the quarrel. Brecht, as we have seen, because of his normative idea of literary pedagogy, Lukács on the contrary for what Adorno felt as a narrow, blunt, and ideological notion of realism; and precisely in this critique of Lukács’ realism, it is possible to get a glimpse of Adorno’s understanding of the realistic dimension of literature. The notion of realism, in this context, has to be carefully handled. Indeed, it is not always easy to clearly distinguish between realism as a literary style (e.g. that of Émile Zola), and realism as a specific position of literature toward reality. My idea is that Adorno’s interpretation of the first reveals his own conception of the second. discuss the problem: “neither London nor Napoleon are fictional entities in the sense in which we are using the term, since both exist. By contrast, some think that the London of the Holmes stories and the Napoleon of War and Peace are different from the real London and Napoleon and should be considered distinctive fictional entities” (Kroon and Voltolini 2018, p. 386). 10  The expression Brecht-Lukács-Debatte has been coined by the German literature scholar, Werner Mittenzwei as title of an article published in 1967 on the journal Sinn und Form (Mittenzwei 1967, pp. 235–269), and it indicates the debate between the two authors started in 1938 about the value of socialist realism in literature.

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In the November 1958 issue of the journal Die Monat, a polemical article was published under the title “Erpresste Versöhnung” (“Extorted Reconciliation”), in which Adorno harshly criticized Lukács’ essay, “Wider den missverstandenen Realismus” (“Against Misunderstood Realism”), published in the same year in West Germany.11 The essay is packed with disdainful judgments about Lukács’ late production, and sometimes Adorno goes beyond the valley of good taste, for examples when he asserts that “it was probably in his The Destruction of Reason that the destruction of Lukacs’ own reason manifested itself most crassly” (EV: 252, NtL1: 217); nevertheless, the argument is clear and it concerns less realism in itself as a literary style than the normative meaning of the category imbedded into Lukács’ idea of literature. In the essay about realism, Lukács insists on his theory of literature as reflection (Widerspiegelung) of social reality, and already in the Introduction he writes that “the struggle between socialism and capitalism is still […] the fundamental reality of modern age. We would expect literature and criticism to reflect this reality” (Lukács 1963, p. 13). What Adorno rejects in this idea is precisely what he includes in the title of the essay, namely the idea that a reconciliation can be extorted. From his point of view, Lukács would in fact take the faithful representation of reality as the reflection of things as they ought to be; this extorted reconciled point of view would notably be that of socialist republics, in defense of which Lukács’ realistic idea of literature speaks. In other words, what Adorno criticizes in Lukács is the assumption that a pacified reality, as in theory that of Soviet Socialism, does not need the critical element of art, but just the reflective one. Broadly speaking, Lukács lays emphasis on an element of the Hegelian Marxist aesthetic model according to which literature is knowledge of reality, but in so doing he downplays the fact that literary forms have the power to put reality to trial and uncover its inadequacy compared to their formal reconciliation. Indeed, as Marx himself knew, “the difficulty we  Lukács’ essay is best known under the title of the original talk, that is to say, “Zur Gegenwartsbedeutung des kritischen Realismus”, translated into English in 1963 by John and Necke Mander with the title “The Meaning of Contemporary Realism” (see the already mentioned Lukács 1963). To my knowledge, the first publication of the essay has been edited by Paolo Chiarini for the Italian edition (Lukács 1957) with the title “Il significato attuale del realismo critico” (“The Present Meaning of Critical Realism”), after a round of conferences held by  Lukács in Rome, Florence, Bologna, Turin, and Milan in 1956. 11

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are confronted with is not, however, that of understanding how Greek art and epic poetry are associated with certain forms of social development. The difficulty is that they still give us aesthetic pleasure and are in certain respects regarded as a standard and unattainable ideal” (Marx 1970, p. 217). Along the same lines, Hegel’s so-called classicism—his alleged nostalgia for ancient Greece—consists less in the uncritical evaluation of traditional forms than in the power of aesthetic dimension to show the unreconciled side of modernity. Lukács, according to Adorno, decides to cut off the critical potential of literature and to pursue only its expressive nature. The core of Adorno’s criticism hinges upon Lukács’ normative realism and, at the same time, upon the source of that normativity. Realism, in fact, is conceived as the correct manner in which literature purifies itself from all the decadent, bourgeois, subjective formalism of modern avant-­ garde, as Eastern socialist dogma would say, and the power of this normative stance derives from the particular position of the critic, rooted in not antagonistic reality as that of achieved communism.12 Accordingly, Adorno is of the opinion that, instead of interpreting concrete literary works, Lukács “issues decrees” and they are “symptomatic of the stultification that befalls even the most intelligent when they fall in line with directives like those ordaining socialist realism” (EV: 245, 273, NtL: 219, 234). This kind of normative attitude toward literature follows the sharp differentiation between realism and avant-garde, the first being the correct way in which the world has to be depicted by literature, whereas the second corresponds to a formalist and existentialistic deformation of reality. As Adorno points out, moreover, Lukács uses a violent and discriminating vocabulary, to the point that his description of realism is that of an art that comes from “what is socially healthy” (Lukács 1970, p.  103), opposed to a sick artistic stance, thus echoing the Nazi definition of expressionism as degenerate art. In order to be able to so sharply divide art into a correct and a wrong way to express reality, and this is what Adorno insists on, Lukács has to be convinced that he could read literature from the standpoint of that reality whose values need to be r­ ealistically  As Bela Kiralyfalvi underlines, the notion of ‘realism’ in the Brecht-Lukács debate is not simply a matter of style, or trend, but it is instead methodological (Kiralyfalvi 1985, pp. 340–341). 12

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expressed, in other words from the point of view of a reconciled world. As Adorno says in the last page of the essay, “the postulate of a reality that must be represented without a breach between subject and object and which must be ‘reflected’ […] for the sake of that lack of a breach: that postulate, which is the supreme criterion of his aesthetics, implies that that reconciliation has been achieved, that society has been set right, that the subject has come into its own and is at home in its world” (EV: 280, NtL1: 240). As we have already seen, this is the basic argument of Adorno’s critique of Lukács’ realism: the social reality of the Soviet Union is not the achievement of the pacified humanity in which art would dissolve itself, and the defense of realism as the only healthy art is nothing but a refined form of brutal propaganda. In this kind of criticism, generally formulated especially by English-speaking critique,13 however, it is possible to understand what Adorno is effectively interested in when he speaks about realism as a peculiar quality of any literary text. In other words, through Adorno’s critique of Eastern realism it is possible to understand what he takes true realism to be, meaning by that literature’s necessary form of—indirect— reference to reality. Without being explicitly thematized in these terms, Lukács’ realism consists in the idea that literature can faithfully represent reality, without inventing or deforming it by means of subjective interiority as in the modernist style of Proust and Joyce. Differently, while taking a more mediated approach to realism, Adorno does not see in realism—namely, literature’s chance to show reality—the textual ability or inability to be more or less identical to the world. Lukács harshly criticizes modernist literature because of what he presents as the universalization of the subject’s interiority as a metahistorical fact. The way in which Proust explores his own inwardness would suggest, in this regard, that only the subject’s interiority is worth to be literarily expressed, whereas historical reality is  Fredric Jameson, in his “Reflections and Conclusion” to the collection Aesthetics and Politics published in 1977 (that I quote from the Verso edition of 1980), highlights what he perceives as “the equivocal rhetoric of Adorno’s attack on Lukacs” (1980, p.  209). David Cunningham and Nigel Mapp remark that, since this publication, Adorno’s aesthetics is most famous in English-­ speaking debates precisely for this kind of dispute with Lukács (Cunningham, and Mapp 2006, pp. 4–5).

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locked out of pure intimacy. As in the case of Kierkegaard’s inwardness, Adorno shifts the focus on the historical origin of the interior loneliness, since “certainly Lukacs, who claims to think in radically historical terms, ought to see that in an individualistic society that solitude is socially mediated and essentially historical in substance” (EV: 259, NtL1: 223). Literature, hence, is not realistic when it represents the way in which things are, or when it directly describes the external world, but rather when it allows reality to emerge from its aesthetic means; as Adorno explains it, “art exists within reality, has its function in it, and is also inherently mediated with reality in many ways. But nevertheless, as art, by its very concept it stands in an antithetical relationship to the status quo” (EV: 260, NtL1: 224). Reality, in this sense, is not something to which literature simply refers. It is not some kind of essence external to literature that maintains with the text a more or less close relationship. Strictly speaking, there is no difference between literature and reality. Literature is a way in which reality expresses itself without being a direct and immediate representation of its empirical exteriority but by showing itself through a subjective aesthetic mediation. This is why also “realistic” literature, as in the case of Balzac, cannot be taken as an immediate exposition of reality, but as “an imaginative reconstruction of an alienated reality, that is, a reality that can no longer be experienced by the subject” (EV: 265, NtL1: 228).14 Then, “art does not come to know reality by depicting it photographically or ‘perspectivally’ but by expressing, through its autonomous constitution, what is concealed by the empirical form reality takes” (EV: 264, NtL1: 227). Regardless of the fact that literature faithfully depicts reality, literature can always be seen as realistic. As artistic expression, in fact, art is necessarily a way in which social reality expresses its own nature and criticizes the way in which things are. Realism, as literary style, is nothing but one of the possibilities in which literature accomplishes its task, a possibility that was particularly effective during the decay of the grande bourgeoisie in the nineteenth century and that gave way to the modernist distortion of life in the early twentieth century. The realistic dimension of  In a forthcoming article I investigate the notion of literary realism in Adorno by reconstructing its complex relationship with realism as literary style (Farina 2019). 14

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literature, hence, is not based on a stylistic depiction of reality as it reveals itself, but instead on the way in which literature, thanks to its aesthetic formal sedimentation of historical content, reveals the antagonistic structure of society. When Émile Zola describes Balzac’s realism by saying that “Cousine Bette, for example, is simply the report of the experiment that the novelist conducts before the eyes of the public” (Zola 1964, p. 9), he comes very close to Adorno’s idea. Realism is not, or it is not necessarily, the depiction of reality, but it is a quality that expresses reality by means of the subjective experience of the writer. As Adorno writes in the Aesthetic Theory, “thoroughly formed artworks that are criticized as formalistic are the most realistic works insofar as they are realized in themselves and solely by means of this realization achieve their truth content” (ÄT: 196, AT: 129). Based on this account of the relationship between text and reality, the issue of literary realism has crucial consequences for what can be taken as the truth of literature. When Adorno defines the objective, historical, result of the apparently subjective narrative of Proust, he follows the complex interweaving of truth and illusion in the context of literary expression.15 As the description of personal interiority becomes a concrete representation of historical reality, the illusion (or semblance) of subjective loneliness can be taken as the truth of the collective condition: The monologue intérieur […] is both the truth and the illusion [Schein] of a free-floating subjectivity. The truth, because in a world that is everywhere atomistic, alienation rules human beings and because […] they thereby become shadows. But the free-floating subject is an illusion, because the social totality is objectively prior to the individual; that totality becomes consolidated and reproduces itself in and through alienation, the social contradiction. (EV: 262, NtL1: 225)

The truth of literature—and this is one of the most qualifying elements of Adorno’s idea of literary aesthetics—can be understood just in terms of indirect, mediated, reference to things, that is to say, as a  Roger Foster shows that it is in the deep interiority of Proust’s self and not in the external social self that Adorno sees genuine artistic expression, being the social self the mere representation of a superficial self-projection (Foster 2018, pp. 143–158). 15

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reference that applies the tools of illusion, or semblance (Schein), in order to reveal reality.16 The truth of literature, in this sense, entirely eludes the question concerning the extent to which literature communicates propositional or non-propositional truth, as formulated by contemporary analytic philosophy;17 it rather expresses the historical condition of the world inasmuch as it exposes the illusional nature of semblance. By showing the apparent essence of the free-floating subject in comparison with the social antagonistic order that oppresses it, Proust sheds light on the truth of a world that is everywhere atomistic. This nexus between semblance and truth is investigated in Aesthetic Theory in a fragment dedicated to the truth content of art. The question Adorno tries to answer concerns what he understands as the enigmaticalness of art, that is, the fact that every work of art produces an enigma to which philosophy tries to find a solution. What is at stake is the “indefatigably recurring question that every work incites”, namely “the ‘What is it all about?’” that becomes “is it true?” (ÄT: 192, AT: 127). Works of art—and based on the dissolution and reconstruction of the aesthetic element, one could to equal effect say literary works—consist in this regard in a formal structure that alludes to a sense, without immediately expressing it. Their enigmatic character is therefore the fact that the observer perceives this meaning without conceptually understanding it. This meaning is the truth of art and in what follows I will show why it must be taken as the untruth of the reality it expresses. Since art always maintains a connection to the reality from which it emerges, and since the above outlined notion of truth in literary sense is non-referential,18 “great artworks” writes Adorno “are unable to lie”. In  As Jay Bernstein suggests, the notion of semblance is related to truth since “the question of aesthetic semblance is the question of the possibility of possibility, of a concept of possible experience that transcends what is now taken to be the parameters of possible experience” (Bernstein 1997, p. 195). 17  See, the summary of the contemporary debate about propositional and non-propositional theories of literature within the field of the “cognitivist” positions about literary truth included in Mikkonen 2013, pp. 9–12. 18  Andrew Bowie insists on the relevance of Adorno’s non-referential conception of truth in the twentieth-century critique of the classical idea of literary truth as substantial meaning. What he suggests is that Derrida’s idea of a non-substantiality of meaning is a theoretical result that has been bought at too high price, namely the risk of the disappearing of truth in general, and he takes Adorno’s dialectical idea of literary truth as a reduction on that price (Bowie 2006, pp. 40–52). 16

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fact, “even when their content is semblance, insofar as this content is necessary semblance the content has truth, to which the artworks testify; only failed works are untrue” (ÄT: 196, AT: 130). The dynamics that Adorno outlines in this passage is based on the same dialectics that, in the aesthetic conciliation of social conflict, shows the antagonistic structure of reality, as by “reenacting the spell of reality, by sublimating it as an image, art at the same time liberates itself from it” (ÄT: 196, AT: 130). This is why the truth content of art is not simply the reality that the artworks represent, but rather the fact that they distance themselves from social reality as it is, create a different organized structure, and show the untruth of the social order, since “the spell with which art through its unity encompasses the membra disjecta of reality is borrowed from reality and transforms art into the negative appearance of utopia” (ÄT: 196, AT: 130). This process corresponds to what Adorno conceives as the spiritualization of art, that has nothing to do with the irrational or transcendent meaning of the term. Aesthetic spiritualization is rather the process that turns reality into pure aesthetic meaning by showing this way the untruth of social organization. Artistic semblance, hence, can be seen as the aesthetic counterpart of what a negative dialectics theoretically is, since “regarding the concrete utopian possibility, dialectics is the ontology of false condition” (ND: 22, ND: 11). Ontology cannot be seen as the conceptual definition of what things, broadly speaking, “are”; on the contrary, ontology is the demonstration of the falsity—in the sense of its unreconciled and antagonistic structure—of social reality. Ontology of aesthetic semblance corresponds therefore to its capacity to show in which terms a historical condition is false, as it is not adequate to its own concept.19 When Adorno criticizes Lukács for his praise of realism, his intention is less to delegitimize realism in general as literary style than to question the normative perspective according to which literature needs to be realistic. The realistic element of literature is not its adequacy to things as they are, but its capacity to show the untruth of a historical social  Albrecht Wellmer takes the relationship between the categories of semblance and truth as pivotal to fully understand Adorno’s aesthetics within the framework of a non-overcome modernity. In Wellmer’s interpretation, the critical notion of the truth of art ensues, hence, from what I have presented as its dialectical relationship with semblance (Wellmer 1991, pp. 1–35). 19

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condition. There are historical moments in which this process can be triggered by the precision of the realistic description, like in Balzac’s time, where the writer “needs, in reaction, permanent assurance that it is so and not otherwise”, in a sort of “realism on the basis of a loss of reality”; in the twentieth century, by contrast, “literary realism became obsolete because, as a representation of reality, it did not capture reality” (B-L: 147–148, NtL1: 128). The same thing happens in Dickens’ realism, whose realistic depiction is the most effective way to dissipate the world he presents, since “[the] prebourgeois form of Dickens’ novels becomes a means of dissolving the very bourgeois world they depict” (RüR: 516, NtL2: 172).

4.2 T  he Interpretation of Literature and Its Unity After having defined the relationship between literature and reality, a second question arises within the framework of a philosophy of literature, namely that of how this kind of relationship can be detected in a literary product. This question corresponds to the issue of the interpretation of literature. Since “hermeneutics” and namely interpretation “of artworks is the translation of their formal elements into content” (ÄT: 210, AT: 139), and since in a literary work one cannot presuppose a clear-cut division between the formal dimension and the content—as the content is always mediated by the form—this relationship requires further explanation. Before having a clear understanding of what “form” and “content” are, what I propose is to show in which sense to “interpret” a literary work means to separate what appears as an inseparable unity, namely that of form and content as the dialectical structure of the work. In order to determine how what in the previous section I have described as the “truth content” of the work can be recognized in a literary and therefore not conceptual product, one necessarily has to interpret the literary product itself; “the need of artworks for interpretation” corresponds indeed to “their need for the production of their truth content”. Interpretation, hence, is the critical activity in which a product is scrutinized as to verify its possession of a “truth content” (ÄT: 194, AT: 128).

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What Adorno has in mind is a sort of theoretical interweaving in which a literary product is conceived as having an enigmatic character that consists in its truth content, or rather in the way in which it expresses objective reality; this truth content, in turn, can be isolated by means of art critique, that is through the activity that recognizes a text as a genuine literary product; critique, finally, is part of the most general philosophical attempt to interpret literature by defining at the same time its conceptual limits and meanings. As Adorno asserts in the Aesthetic Theory: The truth content of artworks is the objective solution of the enigma posed by each and every one. By demanding its solution, the enigma points to its truth content. It can only be achieved by philosophical reflection. This alone is the justification of aesthetics. Although no artwork can be reduced to rationalistic determinations, as is the case with what art judges, each artwork through the neediness implicit in its enigmaticalness nevertheless turns toward interpretive reason. (ÄT: 194, AT: 127–128)

As is well known, Adorno opposes his own theory to what he understands as a definitory or systematic ideal of philosophy. Faithful to Hegel’s criticism of any methodological introduction to philosophical concepts,20 he rejects in fact the practice of abstract definition. “The movement that begins with Kant”, writes Adorno thinking of himself as an epigone of that philosophical stream, “a movement against the scholastic residues in modern thought replaces verbal definitions with an understanding of concepts in terms of the process through which they are produced” (EaF: 19, NtL1: 12). This means that it is impossible to find in Adorno a definitive description of how, for example, interpretation should be undertaken; he would rather claim that the practice of interpretation has to be identified starting from its activity. In order to clarify the practice of literary interpretation, then, it is necessary to shed light on how its constitutive elements effectively work; and since “hermeneutics of artworks is the  See what Hegel says in his first public writing (The difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy, 1801) about Reinhold and his attempt to introduce the philosophical method: “His love of, and faith in, truth have risen to an elevation so pure and so sickening that in order to found and ground the step into the temple properly, Reinhold has built a spacious vestibule in which philosophy keeps itself so busy with analysis, with methodology and with storytelling, that it saves itself from taking the step altogether” (Hegel 1977, p. 88). 20

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translation of their formal elements into content” (ÄT: 210, AT: 139), what needs to be preliminarily done is to define the form-content relationship in literature. Adorno’s notion of interpretation consists in the analytical demonstration that a literary form is indeed a concretization of content. His idea that a philosophy of literature necessarily includes a practical activity of critical interpretation proving that a work belongs to the general realm of literature is the most striking historical embodiment of the early Romantic aesthetic model,21 that Adorno reinterprets in a non-mystical, and non-divinatory,22 but materialistic way. The “absolute” as the divine content of Romantic literary interpretation becomes in Adorno the denial of the absolute as reconciled content and the demonstration of the social origin of absoluteness as oppression of individuality. This is why form-content relationship can be conceived as the core structure of the practice of literary interpretation. This relationship is understood by Adorno as a unity, or better as a dialectic unity. To define literary interpretation means then to define how what is taken as a unity can be expressed as divided, namely how form can be explained through the conceptual language of the content. What is difficult, but crucial, is to explain the nature of form-content relationship in terms of reciprocal correspondence, and this is particularly true in the case of Adorno, given his careful elaboration of that relationship. As Peter Szondi has aptly pointed out, in fact, the most consistent outcome of Adorno’s rethinking of Hegel’s aesthetics is the notion of form as “sedimented contents” (PnM: 47, PNM: 37). Adorno’s contribution makes explicit the idea according to which form and content cannot be independently grasped, as the content is just the expression of a meaningful concept by means of an aesthetic form, and its sense  This pathbreaking interpretation of the notion of art critique in early Romanticism has been given by Walter Benjamin in his dissertation of 1919: “the Objective grounding of the concept of criticism provided by Friedrich Schlegel has to do only with the objective structure of art as idea, and with its formations, its works” (Benjamin 1996, p. 118). Precisely because of these methodological implications, the German literature scholar, Ernst Behler, takes Adorno’s aesthetics as an actualization of the early Romantic idea of critique (Behler 1993, p. 8). 22  See how Friedrich Schlegel presents the Romantic notion of critique in the number 166 of the Athenäums-Fragmente: “The romantic kind of poetry is still in the state of becoming; that, in fact, is its real essence: that it should forever be becoming and never be perfected. It can be exhausted by no theory and only a divinatory criticism would dare try to characterize its ideal” (Schlegel 1971, p. 32). 21

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is given by the fact itself that only this very aesthetic and formal crystallization can communicate the content. The fact that form and content constitute a unity by not being at the same time identical is what Adorno understands as a dialectical relationship. In the already mentioned assay about Hölderlin, Adorno suggests that form and content should be thought according to a dialectical relationship, in the sense that, on the one hand, they give rise to a unity and, on the other hand, they present themselves as opposites. As Adorno writes: In contrast to the crude textbook separation of content and form, contemporary poetology has insisted on their unity. But there is scarcely any aesthetic object that demonstrates more forcefully than Hölderlin’s work that the assertion of an unarticulated unity of form and content is no longer adequate. Such a unity can be conceived only as a unity across its moments; the moments must be distinguished from one another if they are to harmonize within the content and be neither merely separate nor passively identical. (P: 469, NtL2: 128)

According to this reconstruction of the relationship between form and content, hence, it must be remarked that their unity consists in the fact that it is impossible to speak about literary content without thematizing its form, where at the same time to analyze form means to describe what form communicates, that is its content. As Josh Robinson writes, Adorno’s treatment of poetics “in terms of form and content is not an endorsement of a metaphysic separation between the two, but a conceptual separation that is necessitated” by conceptual, that is, abstract, thought (Robinson 2018, p. 41). Despite their unity, however, their relationship is articulated by the fact that they represent two different moments of the work, and this is why critique can refer to them as separate, even if said separation has to be seen as an abstraction. Broadly speaking, the content corresponds to what the work is about, and the form is the “how” of that being about; at the same time, content is about something only inasmuch as it is the formal sedimentation it is, and form is such to the extent that it is the “how” of something, namely of the content. Stripped to its core, this is what has to be regarded as the dialectical interrelation of form and content.

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In Aesthetic Theory Adorno insists on the fact that “aesthetic success is essentially measured by whether the formed object is able to awaken the content sedimented in the form”, and as we have seen, “in general, then, the hermeneutics of artworks is the translation of their formal elements into content” (ÄT: 210, AT: 139). Form, hence, is what appears as logically connected into the work, or, rather, what gives the impression of coherence without following an intellectual link of causality. This is why Adorno calls into question the “logic of dreams” (ÄT: 206, AT: 137),23 where every step gives the impression of an internal consistence, by distancing itself at the same time from external “awake” logic. The content of a literary work has therefore a relationship with the form analogous to that of the latent content of a dream with its explicit narrative. It is clearly not a coincidence, in this regard, that Adorno insists on the notion of aesthetic interpretation (Deutung), as the same notion that Freud has elaborated in The Interpretation of Dreams (Traumdeutung). Form, then, is the legal space that defines the literary work, is the principle of coherence that connects the single elements, is the legislation that rules on the material. The content, on the contrary, is the translation of that aesthetic legality into a conceptual position toward reality. The dialectics of form and content is less the mechanical image of a relationship between two distinct objects, than the concrete attempt to explain what appears as an inextricable unity that, however, presents the need of being thought as made of two distinct elements. Thereby, the interpretation of literature consists in the transposition of a literary form—since all what can be perceived in literature is part of the form—into the language of the content—as “hermeneutics of artworks is the translation of their formal elements into content”. This is why literary interpretation can be seen as the recognition of the dialectical structure of the work and, at the same time, as the isolation of its elements through the interruption of that dialectics. An interpreted literary work is a work that has been understood in its dialectical structure and thereby resolved in its tension, and any literary interpretation is a critical activity that is applied to the formal dimension  Richard Wolin (1997, pp. 106–119) emphasizes how Adorno takes the technique of surrealistic avant-garde as a fetishization of dreams. In fact, according to Adorno the parallelism between dream and art is simply logic, whereas the imitation of dreams, as surrealism did, is to be conceived as a form of fetishism. 23

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of the work in order to make its contentment explicit. This is what Adorno means when he says that “in the dialectic of form and content, the scale also tips toward form” (ÄT: 218, AT: 145). Since “everything appearing in the artwork is virtually content as much as it is form, whereas form remains that by which the appearing determines itself and content remains what is self-determining” (ÄT: 218, AT: 145), a study on the notion of literary interpretation—again, the resolution of form-content unity—has to begin from the comprehension of what in the work appears, namely the form.

4.3 The Form The notion of form, and this is made clear by how Adorno refers to it, is not an abstract and eternal structure—as the word “formalism” would suggest—but a historical concretion of the social condition in an individual product. Adorno’s understanding of literary form as always historically mediated, and not as some static and normative notion according to which there is an ideal form that has to be applied, has awaken a new wave of interest in Adorno especially in the field of so-called new formalism, or better in the most recent attempt to rework it.24 Even though it may appear contrived, in what follows I will attempt to provide a concrete exemplification of what literary form is. If one is to faithfully follow Adorno’s perspective, the elements of a dialectic tension can be caught just as they are into that tension, and not as isolated objects. Dialectical mediation, in fact, “is never a middle element between the extremes, […] mediation takes place in and through the extremes, in the extremes themselves” (DSH: 257, HTS: 8–9). This is why Adorno is very thorough about not giving an abstract and definitive definition of what form, the sedimentation of content, abstractly is. In the fragment of Aesthetic Theory about the notion of form, he almost limits himself to a negative definition of the concept, by excluding for example the flattening of the idea of  In the Introduction to his recent research, Josh Robinson shows how deeply Adorno’s notion of form is related to the debate of New Historicism—identified in particular with the works of scholars such as Susan Wolfson, Marjorie Levinson, Stephen Cohen, and Anna Kornbluh—against what is felt as the empty notion of form of New Criticism (see Robinson 2018, pp. 1–26). 24

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form on symmetry or on mathematical relations. The latter, in fact, “are not form itself but rather its vehicle” (ÄT: 214, AT: 142). What is closer to a definition of form can be found in the same fragment, precisely when Adorno writes that “form is the artifacts’ coherence, however self-­ antagonistic and refracted, through which each and every successful work separates itself from the merely existing” (ÄT: 213: AT: 142). According to this minimal description, form can be understood as the legal principle that allows literary material not to appear as a random collection of elements. In this sense, a literary form has not to be understood just in terms of harmony or pacified unity, since also the contrast between the elements can be seen as a kind of legal principle. If it is true that Adorno has no intention of giving any definition of the concept of literary form, there is anyway the chance to approach its functional structure thanks to what Adorno suggests in one of his most pivotal papers on literary interpretation, namely the “Essay as Form”. Thought as retrospective response to Lukács’ paper “On the Nature and Form of the Essay”,25 the text results in an accurate reflection on the notion of form in general. Although the text is specifically devoted to the form of the essay, it sheds some light also on what the interpreting activity of the essay is exerted on, namely “what others have done”, the “intellectual [geistigen] phenomenon” (EaF: 11, NtL1: 4), in this case literary works. According to Adorno, in fact, the essay is a peculiar form of writing whose aim is to interpret existing products, not to invent concepts or ideas. Since philosophical thought cannot directly address the world, as its systematic concepts are unable to conceive the fragments of reality, the essay is the only way to indirectly conceive the world by means of the interpretation of cultural products, in turn originated by historical conditions of reality itself; in Adorno’s own words, “the paradises of thought too are now only artificial ones, and the essay strolls in them” (EaF: 29, NtL1: 20). Even though one might object that Adorno’s argument is

 The essay is the first chapter of Lukács’ Soul and Form (1911) and it is written in the form of a letter to his friend, Leó Popper, who died the same year. In the text Lukács complains about how difficult it is for the essay to find an autonomous form: “The essay form has not yet, today, traveled the road to independence which its sister, poetry, covered long ago—the road of development from a primitive, undifferentiated unity with science, ethics, and art” (Lukács 1974, p. 13). 25

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much more complex than I have just accounted for,26 what I am interested to show is the correspondence between the form of the essay and the form of what the essay is devoted to, being for Adorno the essay the privileged form of literary interpretation.27 As Adorno writes: The word Versuch, attempt or essay, in which thought’s utopian vision of hitting the bullseye is united with the consciousness of its own fallibility and provisional character, indicates, as do most historically surviving terminologies, something about the form, something to be taken all the more seriously in that it takes place not systematically but rather as a characteristic of an intention groping its way. The essay has to cause the totality to be illuminated in a partial feature, whether the feature be chosen or merely happened upon, without asserting the presence of the totality. (EaF: 25, NtL1: 16)

What is suggested in this passage is the existence of a peculiar formal isomorphism between the essay and its object, namely the fact that both are dominated by the same logical structure. Regardless of what the form expresses—in this case, the untruth of social totality—of great interest is the way in which the form is conceived, that is to say, by means of the recognition of a logical principle. The form of the essay, writes Adorno, “is both more open and more closed than traditional thought would like. […] more closed, because it works emphatically at the form of its presentation. Consciousness of the non-identity of presentation and subject matter forces presentation to unremitting efforts. In this alone the essay resembles art” (EaF: 26, NtL1: 17–18). This means that what defines form, both in the case of essays and in that of literature in general, is the unitary principle that keeps together the elements of what is made without being conceptually expressed.  In addition to the fragmentary structure of the essay in correspondence to that of reality, as Ulrich Plass (Plass 2007, pp. 25–29) remarks, the essay maintains a sort of openness, an asymptotic relationship to an accomplished form that remembers the logic of the utopia. See also Christian Scharf Schärf (1999, p. 275). 27  As Shierry Weber Nicholsen suggests, hence, it is precisely the formal quality of the a-conceptual linking of particulars what forms the affinity of essays with art and literature (Nicholsen 1997, p. 110). Analogously, Hullot-Kentor (2006, p. 130) points out that according to Adorno’s writing the essay “shares with art its aspect of presentation”, that is, its formal structure. 26

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Based on what we have seen, namely the idea that the form corresponds to the ground logical principle that keeps together the elements of the work, in other words the most essential and necessary law that rules on the space of the product, it is now possible to give a concrete example of what literary form can be, even though Adorno has never explicitly bothered to do this. Form corresponds to the identifying principle of the work. It is thanks to the form that we can distinguish different literary products, for example Joyce’s Ulysses and Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse— being form “everything appearing in the artwork”, or rather “that by which the appearing determines itself ”—and the very individuality of these particular forms is precisely what Adorno considers as conceptually indefinable, discernible just through the critical exercise of literary analysis. The formal dimension, however, has also a more general connotation; it is in fact the form what allows to identify different literary genres,28 types, and forms, and in this case, thanks to its generality, intellectual thought—that operates through abstract and general concepts—has a handhold to concretely exemplify what form is. Therefore, instead of focusing on the specific form of one particular literary product, I believe that the comparing of the three traditional literary forms, drama, poetry, and novel, will allow to make headway in the investigation of the nature of the formal element Adorno has in mind in his accounts. It cannot be said that Adorno has been very concerned with the dramatic form, surely not as much as his friend Benjamin. Nevertheless, as is well known, one of his most beloved authors is the playwright, Samuel Beckett, to whom he has dedicated the essay, “Trying to Understand Endgame”, that depicts what life means in the late capitalistic disenchanted condition.29 The main argument of the text concerns “the explosion of the metaphysical meaning” taken as the content of Beckett’s piece, a content that does not simply convey a negative meaning as in existentialist writings, but rather the impossibility to understand something as a

 As I will show in the next chapter, Eva Geulen derives her theory of literary genre in Adorno from the idea that according to him, “the dialectic of particular and universal, of general genre and individual work, is immanent to each (authentic) artwork” (Geulen 2006, p. 57). 29  This is how Alastair Morgan (2007, pp. 112–114) presents Beckett as one of the figures of the exhaustion of life that for Adorno defines the late modern age. 28

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meaning in general,30 and that content, “however, disrupts the dramatic form down to its linguistic infrastructure”. Unlike what happens in Sartre, where the negativity of existence is conveyed through a traditional form as the explicit intention of the author, in Beckett’s composition is the form itself that is permeated by the absence of sense, a process that Adorno describes as follows: The explosion of the metaphysical meaning, which was the only thing guaranteeing the unity of the aesthetic structure, causes the latter to crumble with a necessity and stringency in no way unequal to that of the traditional canon of dramatic form. […] Through its own organized meaninglessness, action must model itself on what has transpired with the truth content of drama in general. (VE: 282–283, NtL1: 242)

What matters to Adorno is the fact that in Beckett what can be taken as the content is not directly said through the voice of the characters—as in Sartre’s engaged theater he harshly criticizes in the essay “Commitment”—but it aesthetically emerges from the literary form, that in the case of the drama consists in the action. In this respect, when Adorno employs the word “form” in the context of drama, what he means is strictly speaking the chaining of actions that happens in the play. This is the unitary principle of the drama, namely the fact that to an action corresponds a reaction, or even the absence of reaction, and the form of the play can be identified with the exposition of actions, in line with the modern elaboration of the Aristotelian theory of drama.31 Adorno’s characterization of drama provides then a first concrete example of what a literary form can be. Its purpose is increasingly clear  Nigel Mapp (2006, pp. 161–162) points out that Adorno takes the process of disenchantment as extended to the sphere of language, and therefore of meaning, as exemplified by Samuel Beckett’s dramas and novels. 31  In the Poetics, Aristotle writes that “this in fact […] is the reason for plays being termed dramas, because in a play the personages act the stories” (Aristotle 1985, 1448a 28–29, p.  2317). Analogously, Hegel in the Aesthetics says that drama “displays a complete action as actually taking place before our eyes” (Hegel 1975, p. 1158). The central role of the action in the determination of the form of drama, especially in relationship with Aristotle’s definition, is clearly exemplified in one of the most relevant literary treatises of German classical aesthetics, namely Lessing’s Hamburg Dramaturgy, for example, where the poet discusses the role of history in dramatic actions (Lessing 1962, pp. 51–52). 30

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especially if we compare the interpretation of drama with that of other literary forms, in which the action does not consist in the pivotal formal element, as in the case of poetry. Adorno’s conception of the poetic form can be found in the essay, “On Lyric Poetry and Society”, where he tries to explain how an individual, intimate product such as lyric poetry can be taken as the expression of a social content. This transition from an isolate inwardness to the external social world is possible, according to Adorno, not through the explicit argument about how the world damages the subject, but rather by means of the creation of a formal space in which the subject finds itself at home and that, once compared with the external world, reveals the alienated condition of social reality. In the lyric, writes Adorno, “a second immediacy is promised: what is human, language itself, seems to become creation again, while everything external dies away in the echo of the soul”, since it is only in this way that “in every lyric poem the historical relationship of the subject to objectivity, of the individual to society, must have found its precipitate in the medium of a subjective spirit thrown back upon itself ” (RüL: 54, 55, NtL1: 41, 42). Even more explicitly, while describing the way in which lyric poetry expresses its social content, that is, according to what we have seen, while describing its form, Adorno suggests that the medium of this is language. The paradox specific to the lyric work, a subjectivity that turns into objectivity, is tied to the priority of linguistic form […]. Hence the highest lyric works are those in which the subject, with no remaining trace of mere matter, sounds forth in language until language itself acquires a voice. The unself-consciousness of the subject submitting itself to language as to something objective, and the immediacy and spontaneity of that subject’s expression are one and the same: thus language mediates lyric poetry and society in their innermost core. (RüL: 56, NtL1: 43)

Obviously, literature is always made of language. The specificity of poetry, however, is that of having the language itself, the juxtaposition of every single word, of every single linguistic atom, as the essential element

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of the form.32 The form, in poetry, is the language itself, in the sense in which a syntactic structure, namely the parataxis, defines Hölderlin’s poetry better than any other quality, as in his late compositions “the transformation of language into a serial order whose elements are linked differently than in the judgment is music like”, without being at the same time musical.33 By means of parataxis—namely, the composition of words that refrains as much as possible from conceptual and judgmental correlation—“the indictment of an act of violence on the part of spirit […] searches for a linguistic form that would escape the dictates of spirit’s own synthesizing principle”, and it is always the paratactic structure what “puts explication without deduction in the place of a so-called train of thought”. The structural correlation of linguistic elements, therefore, is precisely what defines poetry as such, as in the case of Hölderlin where the paratactic consecution “gives form its primacy over content, even the intellectual content. The content is transposed into the poetic substance in that form accommodates to it and decreases the weight of the specific moment of thought, the synthetic unity” (P: 472, NtL2: 131–132). The prevailing position of language in poetry, of the syntactic disposition itself, and the formal centrality of action in drama clearly do not exclude that dramatic writings could have a focus on language, as for example in Beckett, or that poetry could expose actions. What I intend to show is the fact that form, as the distinctive element of an artwork, can be identified with a predominant legislating tension that gives a coherence to a literary product, a tension that in the case of poetry is determined by the logic of language, whereas in the case of drama by action. Moreover, a predominant legislating principle can be recognized also for one literary product that more than others seems to defy any kind of formal structure, that is, the novel. As Adorno opens his essay about the novel,

 This is why Eva Geulen suggests the pivotal role of lyric in Adorno’s literary theory, precisely “on account of its ostentatious linguisticality, what Adorno calls ‘the primacy of language’” (2006, p. 59). 33  As Simon Jarvis remarks, Adorno does not escape from the obvious musical element that distinguishes poetic language. What he means, however, is that such musicality is something that has to be listened into poetry, namely by means of the structure, and not through the external sound (see Jarvis 2006, pp. 82–90). 32

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the task of compressing some remarks on the current status of the novel as form into the space of a few minutes forces me to select, albeit by doing violence, one aspect of the problem. This must be the position of the narrator. Today that position is marked by a paradox: it is no longer possible to tell a story, but the form of the novel requires narration. (SdE: 41, NtL1: 30)

In Adorno’s view, the form of the novel—as I will investigate in more detail in the next chapter—has to be defined in light of the modifications recorded by the issue of the narrator, or rather by the problem of the “Epic I”, namely the guarantee of the unity of the narration itself, that is, what defines the novel as form. The “I”, the voice that seems to tell a story, corresponds then to the most decisive formal element of the novel, or rather to what is able to discern the novel from the other kinds of literary forms. As far as we have seen, even if the notion of form cannot be isolated from the content in a concrete literary product, it is possible to get close to it by means of a particularization of the general notion of literary form. The form of a single literary product, in fact, is a particular configuration that is not identical to the general literary form to which it belongs, but that shares with the general form its own basic normative law.34 As I have already pointed out, Adorno does not negate the rule of general artistic forms and genres, as he also never denies the individuality of the work in relation to its general concept. Taking up the example that I have mentioned, the formal distinction between the Ulysses and To the Lighthouse is something to be extracted through the analysis of how the particular form of those novels reflects a concrete modification of the general literary form of the novel, being the decisive issue of the novel the issue of the I’s capacity to institute a legality that hosts and keeps together the element of a story.

 This kind of relation between particular and universal in the work of art has been addressed by Adorno in the already quoted essay “Art and the Arts”. Although in that context what is at stake is the relationship between the single art form, and the single work, with the general idea of art, based on what is suggested by Stewart Martin (2006, pp. 18–10), it is fair to say that Adorno’s argument follows the same logic I have exposed in this paragraph. 34

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4.4 The Content and the Author After having clarified how literary form is understood by Adorno, one needs to focus on the other—and apparently less problematic—pole of literary dialectics, namely the content. If form is the how of literature, the content can be understood as its what, that is as what a literary text means. In the first section of this chapter, I have marked the boundaries of something like the aboutness of literature, namely the portion of reality that literature alludes to. In this sense, the issue of content has already been sketched. In this section, however, what I intend to do is to specify precisely the notion of content and, in particular, to clear the field of some misunderstandings concerning how the content should be taken. In particular, I will come back to the vexata quaestio affecting any content-­ related approach to literature, that is to say, the role of the author, or creator, in the determination of the content. This clarification will hopefully allow to understand how the notion of content should instead be taken in Adorno’s terms. It would be no exaggeration to suggest that one of the main problems in a philosophical comprehension of literature concerns the role of the author. Among the greatest turns in literary aesthetics has to be counted, in fact, what the contemporary debate still defines as the issue of “the death of the author”, as announced by the title of Roland Barthes’ essay from 1968. Taken as one of the many turning points between modernism and postmodernism,35 Barthes’ text actually explicitly and clearly states something that was in the air already in T.S. Eliot’s idea of depersonalization. While speaking about Mallarmé’s poetry Barthes suggests that “it is language which speaks, not the author; to write is, through a prerequisite impersonality (not at all to be confused with the castrating objectivity of the realist novelist), to reach that point where only language acts, ‘performs’, and not ‘me’” (Barthes 1977, p. 143), his words echo in fact Eliot’s theory of the impersonality of poetry. In his 1919 essay, “Tradition and Individual Talent”, indeed, Eliot suggests that

 See, for example, Peter Lamarque (2009, p. 107), who suggests that Barthes’ essay is the end of a literary critique based on the author’s intention. 35

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there are many people who appreciate the expression of sincere emotion in verse, and there is a smaller number of people who can appreciate technical excellence. But very few know when there is an expression of significant emotion, emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet. The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrounding himself wholly in the work to be done. (Eliot 1986, p. 58)

Both in Eliot and Barthes—despite of how the modernist critique of Romanticism and structuralism may differ in their determination of what the effective content of poetry is36—the issue of the author’s contribution in the determination of the content is sharply addressed. Moreover, it would not be foolish to assert that the notion of a philosophical critique of literature starts exactly from the idea of the author as genius. This idea was developed along the lines of a certain unaccountability of the subjective individuality behind the work of art, as testified, for example, by the early Romantic rhetoric of geniality, as well as by the Hegelian “inspiration of the artist” as an “unfree passion, like an alien power within” him or her (Hegel 2007, § 560, p. 260). The role of the creator/author in the determination of literary content is also a recurrent issue in the modern philosophical investigation of literature, as the current debate between anti-intentionalism and intentionalism in analytic philosophy clearly shows.37 An issue that plays a decisive role also in Adorno’s determination of literary content, especially in defining how literary works have to be interpreted, namely, how “the translation of their formal elements into content” has to be accomplished. In particular, in the already quoted text about “The Essay as Form”, Adorno addresses the process of literary interpretation through the redefinition of Hegel’s idea of the objective content of the work, and he  Remarks on the modernist, namely Eliot’s, heritage in the general issue of the death of the author can be found in Bora 2017, pp. 45–51. 37  For example, when Jerrold Levinson writes that “the core meaning of a literary work is given by the best hypothesis, from the position of an appropriately informed, sympathetic, and discriminating reader, of authorial intent to convey such and such to an audience through the text in question” (Levinson 2006, p. 302), he is proposing what he defines as a “hypothetical intentionalism”, that is an answer to anti-intentionalism, namely to the theoretical positions that sharply distinguish between author’s intention and work’s meaning. For a reconstruction of this debate, see Lamarque 2009, 115–128. 36

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e­ laborates an argument that, to an extent, anticipates Barthes’ theory of the death of the author, with the difference that, while Barthes’ concept can be taken as the description of authorship in the historical context created by late capitalist conditions,38 Adorno understands the separation between the author’s intention and the literary content as constitutive of the autonomy of literature itself. What is distinctive of his position, in fact, is the persistence with which he states the necessity of literary interpretation, conceived as the attempt to go beyond the superficial character of the text, namely beyond what the text explicitly says. Adorno’s essay can be taken both as a refinement of Lukács’ theory of essay and as a polemical blow against the conservative cultural philistinism of post-war Germany which, instead of developing an accomplished theory of literary interpretation, blamed any genuine hermeneutics as impotent speculation.39 At variance with the “prohibition against saying more than was meant right then and there”, Adorno takes literary interpretation as “the subject’s efforts to penetrate what hides behind the facade under the name of objectivity” (EaF: 10, NtL1: 4), having thereby access to what he takes as the proper content of the work. What Adorno wants to discard is the idea that literary interpretation—again, the translation of formal elements into content—could be identified with the isolation of a linear conceptual message that someone has decided to communicate through an aesthetic literary form, since “interpretation then becomes nothing but removing an outer shell to find what the author wanted to say, or possibly the individual psychological impulses to which the phenomenon points”; on the contrary, and this is a consequence of Adorno’s core notion of literature, “the author’s impulses are extinguished in the objective content they seize hold of ” (EaF: 11, NtL1: 4), and this objective content is nothing but the crystallization of individual impulses in a literary form. Form, as we have seen, is in fact what defines literature and art against other phenomena, and any literary interpretation has to begin with the assumption of form as the autonomy structure that defines  See how Graham Allen (2003, 73–77) defines “The Death of the Author” as the main turning point of Barthes from a structuralist to a post-structuralist comprehension of cultural phenomena. 39  The relevance for Adorno of the issue of conformism of literary criticism in post-war Germany has been highlighted by Ulrich Plass (2007, p. xxv), by scrutinizing the question in the essay “On the Crisis of Literary Criticism”, also published in the Notes to Literature. 38

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l­iterary content. Differently, to identify the content with the subjective intentions of the author would amount to identifying what literature means with what a single man has thought and instrumentally designated in a literary form; this is precisely what according to Adorno the engaged conception of art does, thereby earning strong criticism. One of the most representative models of the practice of objective interpretation of literature can be found, for example, in Hegel’s famous understanding of the Greek tragedy Antigone. In a remarkable section of the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel conceives Sophocles’ tragedy as the literary expression of the basic social conflict of the polis, that is of the historic condition of spirit in ancient Greece.40 The conflict that the tragedy presents, that between Antigone’s law of family and Creon’s law of State,41 consist in the literary formal crystallization of a structural and intimate division within Greek society itself that, being still devoid of the modern mediation tool of civil society, is unable to peacefully settle its conflicts. Since the author is rooted in that social—or in Hegel’s terms spiritual—framework, the nature of the historical contradiction can be expressed by him. What is clear, however, is that Hegel does not imagine Sophocles sitting at his desk with the intention to express the polis’ conflicts. On the contrary, what Hegel calls in some sort of mystic terms inspiration, that is, the author’s unfree pathos, is essentially shaped by the social tensions in which he has grown up. The author acts, therefore, as a middle term, which by means of personal choices and taste gives shape to the particular form that the historical content acquires. In this sense, in opposition to any psychological understanding of literature, the content of the work does not correspond to the author’s intentions. With Adorno’s words, the author is a deputy (Statthalter), as the title of one of his essays about Valéry suggests (“The Artist as Deputy”), namely someone who represents something else. This is why “the artist is to remake himself into an instrument, to become a thing himself if he does not want to succumb to the curse of anachronism in a reified world”, and “with this, Valery  As Robert R. Williams asserts, “in ancient Greek tragedy which is our focus here, Tragedy is a conflict between important substantial interests, e.g., the main institutions of ethical life such as family and state” (Williams 2012, p. 126). 41  For a short recap of Antigone’s plot and for its meaning in Hegel’s Phenomenology, see Terry Pinkard 2002, pp. 234–235. 40

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attacks the extremely widespread conception of the work of art that ascribes it, on the model of private property, to the one who produces it” (AaS: 122, NtL1: 104). By following this notion of author and authorship, one can see in which sense Adorno’s theorization of literature dispels the idea that the content of literature could be identified with the theoretical position of the author or directly with the idea expressed by the characters, as “mouthing profundities will no more make a man profound than narrating the metaphysical views of its characters will make a novel metaphysical” (ND: 28, ND: 16). The personality of the author disappears hence behind the work, as in the famous saying by Flaubert, who wanted to write a book about “nothing”.42 Therefore, literary content is not a philosopheme taken from a novel, a pill of wisdom, a brilliant sentence, or a commonsense quotation, as those that can be written on motivational posters. To interpret literature, hence, does not mean to isolate a meaningful idea expressed by a character, or by the narrator, and identify the content with it. For example, Stephen Dedalus’ idea of Irish art as “the cracked looking-glass of a servant” (Joyce 2000, p. 6) is by no means the meaning of Joyce’s Ulysses, it is rather one of the elements that compose the cosmos of the novel and that collaborates in creating its content. In order to clarify what literary content is, it can be helpful to compare how Adorno discriminates, although not rigorously, the two different but similar words that express in German the notion of content, namely: Inhalt and Gehalt.43 In his essay on Hölderlin, “Parataxis”, in fact, he writes that “only through the hiatus, the form, does the content [lnhalt] become essential content [Gehalt]” (P: 470, NtL2: 129).44 Regardless of the particular issue Adorno is arguing for in this passage,45 what he  The quotation comes from the letter dated January 19, 1852, that Flaubert wrote to Louise Colet (see Flaubert 1980, p. 154). 43  Robinson 2018, pp. 41–41 takes the difference between Inhalt and Gehalt as a technical terminological choice. It is true that, when Adorno wants to differentiate two different levels of content, he applies the distinction of Inhalt (content as argument) and Gehalt (essential content), but in his works he does not follow the distinction as technical terminology. 44  I have slightly modified the translation, since the English version translates “Gehalt” with “substance”, whereas I prefer to maintain the assonance with “Inhalt”. 45  In this passage Adorno wants to show to what extent the conceptual argument of Hölderlin’s poem, “Mnemosyne” (the Idealistic conception that spirit can attain itself only by means of dis42

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s­ uggests is that only the literary element of the form is able to turn content, in the sense of topic, argument, idea, or opinion into content as the strictly aesthetic literary content, which he is philosophically interested in. In the quotation from “Parataxis”, the Inhalt represents the conceptual argument of the poem, but it can also be understood as the general representation that the author has in mind, whereas the Gehalt, as the essential literary content, is the expression of the argument as it is communicated by means of literary form. I can image, for example, that any brilliant observer of U.S. society in the early 1950s could easily glimpse the problem of young writers destroying their creativity buying heroin in New York’s ghettos, but what turns this notion into a literary content is the form in which Ginsberg says I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night. (Ginsberg 1980, p. 126)

Far from being the bare statement of a sociological—or emotional, subjective, natural, and so on—condition, literary content is the sedimentation in a literary form of what German idealism called “spirit”, and that Adorno with his twentieth-century sensibility considers as the world’s historical condition, in other words, what it means to be human in a certain time and under certain conditions. In short, the notion of interpretation that I have outlined in this section, namely the translation of the formal element into content, amounts to recognizing a literary form as the expression of the human situation, being at the same time a critique of that historical reality, as we have seen in the theory of the double character of art. Now, it should be clear why Adorno criticizes any psychological explanation of literary content and why the content cannot be identified with the following argument:

tance) becomes a proper literary content only through the formal, linguistic, element of the hiatus.

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what artists can say they say only through the configuration [Gestaltung], not by letting that form deliver a message. Among the sources of error in the contemporary interpretation and critique of artworks the most disastrous is the confusion of the intention, what the artist supposedly wants to say, with the content [Gehalt] of the work. In reaction, the content of the artwork is increasingly lodged in what has not been cathected by the artist’s subjective intentions, whereas content is blocked in works in which intention, whether as fabula docet or as philosophical thesis, demands primacy. (Ä: 226, AT: 150)

4.5 Interpreting Literature: The Case of Franz Kafka Based on what I have pointed out in this chapter, a philosophy of literature has to be taken as that concrete exercise of philosophical thought that elucidates the nature of literary products in the framework of a historical understanding of reality. A philosophy of literature, according to Adorno, is therefore not a discipline that asserts something about literature and its abstract—that is, forever valid—conditions of possibility, but rather it is a critical practice in which philosophy, by specifying literature as a philosophical problem, takes position toward reality itself; literature, in fact, is a product of human social labor and for this reason it cannot be neutrally conceived. The best way to understand this process, however, is to show how it concretely works in the interpretation of a particular literary product. Among the many authors that Adorno takes in account, my choice has fallen on the work of Franz Kafka for many reasons. First of all, Adorno takes Kafka as one of the most paradigmatic authors for the genre of novel, similar to what is Schönberg for new music, Beckett for theater, and Hölderlin for lyrical poetry. Furthermore, his essay on Kafka, because of its exceptional clarity and argument delimitation, is one of the best examples of what it means for Adorno to turn literature into a philosophical problem. Moreover, in spite of the relevance of Kafkian themes in Adorno, in this book I have so far given priority to other authors—like Mann, Beckett, and Proust—and now it seems fair to restore to Kafka the centrality he deserves. By reviewing Adorno’s philosophical account on

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Kafka’s novels, my aim is to present a concrete paradigm of literary interpretation as one of the outcomes of a philosophy of literature. Written in the form of nine fragments, the only essay that Adorno explicitly dedicated to Kafka has been drafted between 1942 and 1953, and published in 1955 as closing text of the collection, Prisms, under the title “Notes on Kafka” (“Aufzeichnungen zu Kafka”). What makes this essay particularly relevant from a methodological point of view is the fact that in its pages Adorno directly faces up to the challenge of interpretation by insisting on the risk of “confounding the abstract thesis of Kafka’s work, the obscurity of the existent, with its essential content [Gehalt]” (AzK: 255, Pr: 246).46 As Adorno remarks, Kafka’s “two great novels, The Castle and The Trial, seem to bear the mark of philosophical theorems”, and this makes it remarkably hard to discern the content of his literary work, as “Kafka’s works protected themselves against the deadly aesthetic error of equating the philosophy that an author pumps into a work with its metaphysical content [Gehalt]”, while at the same time “the artist is not obliged to understand his own art, and there is particular reason to doubt whether Kafka was capable of such understanding” (AzK: 256, Pr: 247). In Kafka, hence, is notably relevant to differentiate the philosophy of the author—namely, the particular concept that the author wishes to insert in the writing—from the essential content of the work, that is what formally results from the author’s work. This is why, according to Adorno, the existentialist interpretation of Kafka’s works amounts to a superficial understanding that takes him for “an information bureau of the human condition” (AzK: 254, Pr: 245), precisely inasmuch as it mistakes Kafka’s own idea of the grayness of life he effectively expresses in The Trial with the substantial content of the novel. Thus, in order to overcome the problem concerning how to conceive the elements of Kafka’s writing that may be subjected to an existentialist, ontological, or directly philosophical explanation, Adorno states what can be understood as the first methodological point of his literary interpretation: “Take everything literally; cover up nothing with concepts invoked from above. Kafka’s”—but in general literature’s—“authority is  Also in this case, I have modified the translation of Gehalt (“substance” in Weber’s English version). 46

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textual” (AzK: 257, Pr: 247). This means that, in reading a literary text, at first sight one should not give in to the temptation to symbolically read every enigmatic element, being a symbolic interpretation based upon the principle according to which individual moments of the work of art point beyond themselves by virtue of their interrelations.47 On the contrary, when a literary text presents something that shows the necessity to be interpreted, the reader has firstly to try and understand it in its literal sense. Instead of taking the mythical court of The Trial as the symbol of human power in general and the condition of the defendant, Joseph K., as that of the misery of the individual, the novel should be taken as representing nothing but the mere fact that a man has been accused by an unknown tribunal for a crime he is not guilty of. This methodological principle is crucial as “without the principle of literalness as criterion, the ambiguities of Kafka would dissolve into indifferent equivalence”; according to Adorno, literalness serves its purpose inasmuch as it “invalidates the most commonly held conception of the author, one which seeks to unite in him the claim to profundity with equivocation”. Furthermore it is precisely according to this kind of literalness that the prose of Kafka produces a shock, as “it is not the horrible which shocks, but its self-­ evidence” (AzK: 258, Pr: 248). To deal with Kafka’s prose is not the attempt to solve its enigma by dissolving it through an artificial explanation that makes the meaning clear and explicit; instead, “the attitude that Kafka assumes towards dreams should be the reader’s towards Kafka. He should dwell on the incommensurable, opaque details, the blind spots” (AzK: 258, Pr: 248). Arguably, the principle of literalness—and this can be seen as the second methodological point of literary interpretation that Adorno displays in his essay—has the same role that in psychoanalysis is played by the notion of reality of psychic phenomena. In an explicit parallelism between the psychoanalytic method and the literary significance of Kafka’s elements, Adorno remarks that “Freud conceived of an archetypal scene such as the murder of the primal father, a pre-historical narrative such as that of Moses, or the young child’s observation of its parents having  This definition can be found in Adorno’s essay on Kafka (AzK: 254–255, Pr: 245) and it alludes to Benjamin’s debasement of symbol in Trauerspiels Buch (see, Benjamin 1998, pp. 159–160). 47

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sexual relations, not as products of the imagination but in large measure as real events” (AzK: 261, Pr: 251). The primal violent scene to which Adorno refers here is often presented by Freud not by highlighting its real occurrence in front of the child, but rather as a psychological phenomenon that has to be taken as real according to its effect on child development, regardless of its external effectiveness.48 The use of Freud’s notion of interpretation as paradigmatic is a common thread in Adorno. Already in his first conference, The Actuality of Philosophy, he insists on the interpretation of the enigmatic nature of reality in a stark parallelism with Freud’s example of rebus as an example of interpretation of dreams.49 In this case, suggesting an analogy between the Freudian account of the reality of the psychological dimension and Kafka’s literariness, Adorno is defining a specific methodological point. As the reality of the primal scene consists in its effect on individual development, the literariness of Kafka’s writings does not mean an actual belief in the existence of what it represents, but rather it indicates the fruitfulness and effectiveness of the interpretation that takes Kafka literally, since “this is the function of Kafka’s literalness. As though conducting an experiment, he studies what  As Freud writes in his essay, “On the Sexual Theories of Children” (1908), “I have not been able to ascertain that children recognize this behavior which they have witnessed between their parents as the missing link needed for solving the problem of babies; it appears more often that the connection is overlooked by them for the very reason that they have interpreted the act of love as an act of violence” (Freud 1959, pp. 220–221). 49  Adorno describes the philosophical notion of interpretation as follows: “Anyone who interprets while searching for a world-in-itself behind the phenomenal world, a world that underlies and supports the latter, is acting like someone who hopes to find in the puzzle the likeness of a Being sited behind it, a likeness that mirrors the puzzle on which it is based; whereas the function of the solution to the puzzle is to illuminate the shape of the puzzle for the briefest of instants and to sublate it, not to cling to it and mimic it. Authentic philosophical interpretation does not hit upon a meaning that is already clinging to the other side of the question; rather, it suddenly and momentarily illuminates the question and consumes it at the same time” (AdP: 335, PRP). It is interesting to compare this with what Freud says about dreams interpretation as the resolution of a rebus: “The dream-content on the other hand is expressed as it were in a pictographic script, the character of which has to be transposed individually into the language of the dream-thoughts. If we attempted to read these characters according to their pictorial values instead of according to their symbolic relation, we should clearly be led into error. Suppose I have a picture-puzzle, a rebus, in front of me. It depicts a house with a boat on its roof, […] and so on […]. We can only form a proper judgement of the rebus if we […] try to replace each separate element by a syllable or word that can be represented by that element in some way or other. The words that are put together in this way are no longer nonsensical but may form a poetical phrase or the greatest beauty and significance. A dream is a picture-puzzle of this sort” (Freud 1953, IV, pp. 277–278). 48

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would happen if the results of psychoanalysis were to prove true not merely metaphorically but in the flesh” (AzK: 262, Pr: 251). In this way, by taking literature not as a symbolic system of meanings but literally throughout, any form of subjectivism is blown away from interpretation, as only the text has authority. This is the ultimate similarity of Kafka’s prose with psychoanalysis, the fact that “personality is transformed from something substantial into a mere organizational principle of somatic impulses” (AzK: 262, Pr: 251). By interpreting Kafka this way, his novels cease to simply appear as the symbolic representation of a bureaucratic power, as the adjective “Kafkian” seems to indicate in feuilleton’s language, and they begin to literally—in the sense that I have described—express the real historical condition of humanity. Only literariness allows to recognize the most prominent element of shock, the fact that in Kafka “the déjà vu is declared permanent”, as “each sentence says ‘interpret me’, and none will permit it. Each compels: the reaction, ‘that’s the way it is’, and with it the question, ‘where have I seen that before?’” (AzK: 255, Pr: 246). All the creatures of Kafka’s world have literally been already seen by the readers and can be easily recognized by them. “The sameness”, observes Adorno, “or intriguing similarity of a variety of objects is one of Kafka’s most persistent motifs; all possible demi-creatures step forward in pairs, often marked by the childish and the silly, oscillating between affability and cruelty like savages in children’s books”, and this is the literariness in which the world appears in Kafka: “the realm of the déjà vu is populated by doubles, revenants, buffoons, Hasidic dancers, boys who ape their teachers and then suddenly appear ancient, archaic” (AzK: 264, Pr: 252–253). What Adorno suggests is the fact that Kafka’s literary images, precisely in the seriousness of their literal buffoonery, are able to show what the world really is. In The Trial, Joseph K. has the impression that his executors resemble tenors (Kafka 2009a, p.  162), by bringing this way to the extreme the cruelty of an execution depicted as a vaudeville’s running gag. I bet that no one of Kafka’s readers has ever been really escorted to the scaffold, but I guess that each one of them has familiarity with the dream-association mode based on which a couple of executioners could be taken for tenors because of their large double chin.

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The world that Kafka depicts in his writings, as any reader immediately remarks, gives the impression of being placed somewhere between the past and the future, without being recognizable as the actual present. It is not the image of an alternative present, but rather the realistic feeling of the way in which things are going bad. This is why, for Adorno, Kafka’s world is in no way a non-historical one, since his demi-creatures are able to show “the social origin of the individual” that “ultimately reveals itself as the power to annihilate him”. Kafka does not try to stage a critique of social power, as engaged literature does by virtually setting outside the ties of that power; he rather “scrutinizes the smudges left behind in the deluxe edition of the book of life by the fingers of power” (AzK: 264–265, 268, Pr.: 253, 256). The way to express history, as Beckett’s dramas teach, is not to bring on stage Mother Courage fighting for her children and allegorically describe the inhumanity of power, but instead to show the literal condition of humanity in its parasitic and mimetic resistance to power. Joseph K. and the land surveyor K. are doomed to be punished right from the beginning exactly as they oppose their strength of will to what they perceive as an injustice. Differently, only literally becoming a parasite—as Gregor Samsa does in The Metamorphosis—human beings can still hope for salvation, not for themselves but for someone else, as it happens at the end of the short story, when Gregor’s death frees his family from the oppression of the typically childish cruelty of Kafka’s side characters, the gentlemen-lodgers: Leaning on the banisters, they watched as the three gentlemen went slowly but steadily down the long staircase, disappearing at a bend in the stairs at each floor and reappearing after a few moments; the lower they went, the more the Samsa family lost interest in them, and when a butcher’s boy came climbing proudly towards them and then higher up above them, tray on head, Herr Samsa soon left the landing with the women and they all returned, as if relieved, into their apartment. (Kafka 2009b, p. 73)

History does not emerge in the representation of an identifiable power that can be actively defeated—maybe hit with a pan, as in Chaplin’s Great

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Dictator50—on the contrary, it emerges in the social origin of the individual in the apparently non-historical world of Kafka’s negative utopia. This is how Adorno shows in which sense literary interpretation consists in the translation of formal elements into content. My reconstruction of Adorno’s argument, in fact, has started from the observation of the enigmatic character of single formal elements, as literary images are, only to end up with the expression of their content, namely the literary representation of the historical social world. This content does not limit itself to be expressed in the enigmatic figure from which I have taken my move, but it crystallizes itself in the very form of the novel, as Adorno shows in the final part of the essay. The content—as Gehalt—of Kafka’s novels, in fact, cannot be expressed by the whole pacified unity of the form, but instead it has to be obtained through the fragment. As it has been suggested, the universe of The Trial resembles the Third Reich, says Adorno repeating Klaus Mann’s opinion, and this similarity has been felt to such an extent that one of the most relevant Italian translations of the book has been made by Primo Levi, writer and Jewish deportee in Auschwitz.51 What Adorno aims to clarify, however, is that this resemblance is made possible not by means of a whole symbolic correspondence of the Trial’s society to political fascism, but through the enigmatic fragments that compose the novel’s form. It is not fascism as an invincible power what emerges from the novel, but its historical origin in the violence of the power on the demi-creatures of the world, as Nazism was really “the smudges left behind in the deluxe edition of the book of life by the fingers of power”; as Adorno writes, “acts of unbridled violence are performed by figures in subordinate positions, types such as non-commissioned officers, prisoners-of-war and concierges. They are all déclassés, caught up in the collapse of the organized collective and permitted to survive” (AzK: 272, Pr: 259), and this is why, from a formal point of view, “the fact that Leni’s fingers are connected by a web, or that the executioners resemble

 As Adorno writes in his essay “Commitment”: “The Great Dictator also loses its satirical force and becomes offensive in the scene in which a Jewish girl hits one storm trooper after another on the head with a pan without being torn to pieces” (E: 418, NtL2: 84). 51  The author of If This Is a Man (1947) translated Kafka’s novel in 1983, four years before taking his own life. 50

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tenors, is more important than the Excursus on the law” (AzK: 258, Pr: 248), as the fragment takes prevalence over the whole. This is the formal crystallization of the content in the novel, the crumbling of the form into “a parabolic system the key to which has been stolen” (AzK: 255, Pr: 245), as the linear compactness of the form is unable to host it. The fragments, the single elements, and in particular the constant shrilling and contrast between them are what defined the form of Kafka’s novels in general, in this respect qualifying as the literary translation of musical twelve-tone dissonance. In Adorno’s own words, “the fragmentary quality of the three large novels, works which, moreover, are hardly covered any more by the concept of the novel, is determined by their inner form. They do not permit themselves to be brought to an end as the totality of a rounded temporal experience” (AzK: 279, Pr: 265). What defines the form of the novel, in fact, and this is something to which I will come back in the next chapter, is the I of the narrating voice, the “Epic I” of the subject that holds together the world of the novel, its principle of legality. But the subject of Kafka’s novel is oppressed by the power of the world, is the subject of expressionism, that screams out of fear of reality. This kind of subject, as one can see, is unable to catch his or her world in a linear form, as the world is much more powerful as it is. Material things are charged by the power of social production—that is, of the social labor that spirit is—and as commodities commend over the I of the subject: The more the I of expressionism is thrown back upon itself, the more like the excluded world of things it becomes. By virtue of this similarity Kafka forces expressionism – the chimerical aspect of which he, more than any of his friends, must have sensed, and to which he nevertheless remained faithful – into the form of a torturous epic; pure subjectivity, being of necessity estranged from itself as well and having become a thing, assumes the dimensions of objectivity which expresses itself through its own estrangement. The boundary between what is human and the world of things becomes blurred. (AzK: 275–276, Pr: 262)

The interpreting of literature, as shown by Kafka’s case in the clearest terms, means therefore for Adorno to commit oneself to develop both a

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literary critique and a philosophy of literature. As I have shown in this paragraph, in fact, any question about the condition of possibility of the text, about the role of the author, the form, the content, and so on is inseparable from the practice of critically evaluative literature. Through the example of Franz Kafka, what I aimed to clarify was that, from Adorno’s point of view, a philosophy of literature is possible only in terms of concrete interpretation of literature as a historical product, that is, as a product of human social labor. In full honesty, one should admit that literature is a very peculiar example of social labor, since its artistic nature makes it both an expression and a critique of the social condition from which it originates. In the next chapter my account will go beyond Adorno’s own analysis, trying to prove its method on literary products that are historically subsequent to his life, namely on contemporary American novels.

References Allen, Graham. 2003. Roland Barthes. London/New York: Routledge. Aristotle. 1985. Poetics. In The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes, vol. 2, 2316–2340. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Barthes, Roland. 1977. The Death of the Author. In R. Barthes. Image Music Text, Stephen Head, 142–148. London: Fontana Press. Behler, Ernst. 1993. German Romantic Literary Theory. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Benjamin, Walter. 1996. The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism. In W. Benjamin. Selected Writings. Volume 1. 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock, and Michael W.  Jennings, 116–200. Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press. ———. 1998. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Trans. J.  Osborne. London/New York: Verso. Bernstein, Jay M. 1997. Why Rescue Semblance? Metaphysical Experience and the Possibility of Ethics. In The Semblance of Subjectivity. Essays in Adorno’s Aesthetics, ed. Tom Huhn, and Lambert Zuidervaart, 177–212. Cambridge, MA/London: Cambridge University Press.

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Bora, Sumi. 2017. Is the Author Dead? Juxtaposing the Poet and the Person to Understand T. S. Eliot, a Notable Modernist. In Spring Magazine on English Literature III (1): 45–51. Bowie, Andrew. 2006. Interpretation and Truth: Adorno on Literature and Music. In Adorno and Literature, ed. David Cunningham, and Nigel Mapp, 40–52. London/New York: Continuum. Burwick, Frederick. 1991. Illusion and Drama. Critical Theory of Enlightenment and Romantic Era. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Carroll, Noël, and John Gibson. 2016. Introduction. In The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Literature, ed. Noël Carroll, and John Gibson, xxi–xxiii. New York: Routledge. Cunningham, David, and Nigel Mapp. 2006. Introduction. In Adorno and Literature, ed. David Cunningham, and Nigel Mapp, 1–5. London/New York: Continuum. Eliot, Thomas S. 1986. Tradition and the Individual Talent. In T.S. Eliot. The Sacred Wood. Essays on Poetry and Criticism. London/New York: Methuen. Farina, M. 2019. The Question of Literary Realism: Adorno and the Form of Novel. In Aesthetic Investigation 3 (2): 65–82. Feloj, Serena. 2017. Estetica del disgusto. Mendelssohn, Kant e i limiti della rappresentazione. Roma: Carocci. Flaubert, Gustave. 1980. In Letters of Gustave Flaubert 1830–1857, ed. Francis Steegmuller. Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press. Foster, Roger. 2018. Adorno and Proust. Memory, Childhood, and the Experiential Grounds of Social Criticism. In Benjamin, Adorno, and the Experience of Literature, ed. Corey McCall, and Nathan Ross, 143–158. New York/London: Routledge. Freud, Sigmund. 1953. The Interpretation of Dreams. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. IV–V, ed. James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud, 209–226. London-Hogarth. ———. 1959. On the Sexual Theories of Children. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. IX, James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud, 209–226. London: Hogarth. Geulen, Eva. 2006. Adorno and the Poetics of Genre. In Adorno and Literature, ed. David Cunningham, and Nigel Mapp, 53–66. London/New York: Continuum. Geuss, Raymond. 2004. Art and Art Criticism in Adorno’s Aesthetics. In Theodor W. Adorno, ed. Gerard Delanty, vol. II, 137–159. London/Thousand Oak/ New Delhi: SAGE Publications.

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Ginsberg, Allen. 1980. The Howl. In Collected Poems 1947–1980, ed. A. Ginsberg. New York: Harper & Row. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1975. Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Art. Trans. T.M. Knox. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1977. The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy. Trans. H.S. Harris, and W. Cerf. Albany: SUNY. ———. 2007. Philosophy of Mind. Trans. W. Wallace, and A.W. Miller, Rev. M. Inwood. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2018. The Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. T. Pinkard. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Hullot-Kentor, Robert. 2006. Things Beyond Resemblance: On Theodor W. Adorno. New York: Columbia University Press. Jameson, Fredric. 1980. Reflection and Conclusion. In Aesthetics and Politics, ed. Ronald Taylor, 196–213. London: Verso. Jarvis, Simon. 2006. The Truth in Verse? Adorno, Wordsworth, Prosody. In Adorno and Literature, ed. David Cunningham, and Nigel Mapp, 82–98. London/New York: Continuum. Joyce, James. 2000. Ulysses. London/New York: Penguin. Kafka, Franz. 2009a. The Trial. Trans. M.  Mitchell. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2009b. The Metamorphosis and Other Stories. Trans. J. Crick. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kiralyfalvi, Bela. 1985. Georg Lukács or Bertolt Brecht? British Journal of Aesthetics 25 (4): 340–348. Kroon, Frederick, and Alberto Voltolini. 2018. Language, Ontology, Fiction. In The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature, ed. Barry Stocker, and Michael Mack, 385–406. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, and Jean-Luc Nanay, 1988. The Literary Absolute. The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism. Trans. P.  Bernard, and C. Lester. Albany: SUNY. Lamarque, Peter. 2009. The Philosophy of Literature. Malden: Blackwell. Lamarque, Peter, and Stein Haugom Olsen. 1994. Truth, Fiction, and Literature. A Philosophical Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lessing, Gotthold E. 1962. Hamburg Dramaturgy. Trans. H.  Zimmern. New York: Dover Publications. Lessing, Gotthold E., Christoph F.  Nocolai, and Moses Mendelssohn. 1973. Briefwechsel über das Trauerspiel. In G.E.  Lessing, Werke, ed. Herbert G. Göpfert, vol. IV, 155–227. München: Hanser.

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Levinson, Jerrold. 2006. Hypothetical Intentionalism: Statement, Objections, and Replies. In Contemplating Art. Essays in Aesthetics, 302–311. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lukács, Georg. 1957. Il significato attuale del realismo critico. Trans. P. Chiarini. Torino: Einaudi. ———. 1963. The Meaning of Contemporary Realism. Trans. J.  Mander, and N. Mander. London: Merlin. ———. 1970. Healthy or Sick Art?. In Writer & Critic and Other Essays. Trans. A. Kahn, 103–109. New York: Grosset & Dunlap. ———. 1974. Soul and Forms. Trans. A. Bostock. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Mapp, Nigel. 2006. No Nature, No Nothing: Adorno, Beckett, Disenchantment. In Adorno and Literature, ed. David Cunningham, and Nigel Mapp, 159–170. London/New York: Continuum. Martin, Stewart. 2006. Literature and the Modern System of the Arts: Sources of Criticism in Adorno. In Adorno and Literature, ed. David Cunningham and Nigel Mapp, 9–25. London/New York: Continuum. Marx, Karl. 1970. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, ed. Maurice Dobb. Trans. S.W. Ryazanskaya. New York: International Publishers. Mikkonen, Jukka. 2013. The Cognitive Value of Philosophical Fiction. London/ New Delhi/New York/Sydney: Bloomsbury. Mittenzwei, Werner. 1967. Die Brecht-Lukács-Debatte. Sinn und Form 19 (I): 235–269. Morgan, Alastair. 2007. Adorno’s Concept of Life. London: Continuum. New, Christopher. 1999. Philosophy of Literature. An Introduction. London/New York: Routledge. Nicholsen, Shierry W. 1997. Exact Imagination, Late Work. On Adorno’s Aesthetics. Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press. Pinkard, Terry. 2002. German Philosophy 1760–1860: The Legacy of Idealism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Plass, Ulrich. 2007. Language and History in Theodor W.  Adorno’s Notes to Literature. New York/London: Routledge. Plato. 2000. The Republic. Trans. T.  Griffith. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Robinson, Josh. 2018. Adorno’s Poetics of Form. Albany: SUNY. Schärf, Christian. 1999. Geschichte des Essays: Von Montaigne bis Adorno. Göttingen: Vendenhoeck & Ruprecht.

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Schlegel, Friedrich. 1971. Athenaeum Fragment. In F.  Schlegel. Philosophical Fragments. Trans. P.  Firchow, 18–93. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press. Shusterman, Richard. 1994. Eliot as Philosopher. In The Cambridge Companion to T.S.  Eliot, ed. A.  David Moody, 31–47. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Wellmer, Albrecht. 1991. The Persistence of Modernity. Essay and Aesthetics, Ethics and Postmodernism. Trans, D. Midgley. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Williams, Robert R. 2012. Tragedy, Recognition, and the Death of God. Studies in Hegel and Nietzsche. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wolin, Richard. 1997. Benjamin, Adorno, Surrealism. In The Semblance of Subjectivity. Essays in Adorno’s Aesthetics, ed. Tom Huhn, and Lambert Zuidervaart, 93–122. Cambridge, MA/London: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2004. The De-aestheticization of Art: On Adorno’s Aesthetische Theorie. In Theodor W. Adorno, ed. Gerard Delanty, vol. II, 5–30. London/Thousand Oak/New Delhi: SAGE Publications. Zola, Émile. 1964. The Experimental Novel and Other Essays. Trans. B.M. Sherman. New York: Haskell House. Zuidervaart, Lambert. 1991. Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory. The Redemption of Illusion. Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press.

5 Beyond Modernism: The American Postmodern Novel

Adorno’s aesthetics has been oftentimes read either as an outdated cultural product, namely as one of the last attempts to write an aesthetics along the lines of the German classical tradition, or as an example of fully modernist theory of art.1 In both cases, Adorno’s theory is deemed unable to deal with the most advanced products of late- or postmodernity. In this concluding chapter, my aim is to show in which sense Adorno’s aesthetics, taken as a philosophy of literature in the sense outlined in this book, could be a valid conceptual framework to understand one of the most debated, influential, and radical literary phenomena of the last fifty years, namely the so-called postmodern American novel. Although questionable as a category, the label “postmodern” applied to novels has, in my opinion, some encompassing advantages, mainly linked to its reference to a loose historical delimitation (more or less the three decades  As to exemplify this abundantly widespread opinion, it will suffice to refer to Max Paddison’s argument included in a long review of Lenhardt’s translation of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (London 1984). Paddison writes that “Aesthetic Theory represents the culmination of Adorno’s lifelong preoccupation with philosophical interpretation of works of art and with the critique of traditional aesthetic theories. It is an attempt, from what would now be called a modernist” (Paddison 1987, p. 357). Famously, the “modernist” imputation is also key to Peter Bürger’s criticism of Adorno’s aesthetics, by him described as a modernist, pessimistic, theory unable to understand political avant-garde (see Bürger 1987, p. xix, and in general Bürger 1990, pp. 49–60). 1

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between the 1970s and the 1990s) as well as to a given cultural milieu and sensitivity. An otherwise hard to define literary product is thus captured and can be discussed as such. After the long cultural war to postmodernism has come to end, finally becoming a standard intellectual item, the expression “postmodern novel” can now be used without implying cultural fetishism, militancy, or affiliation to one of the two sides of the battle. While testing an Adorno-inspired conceptual toolbox,2 what I will try to do in this chapter is to contribute to the clarification of the status of novels as contemporary literary form, namely through a philosophical interpretation of three contemporary American novels. This is meant to show to what extent such an approach allows us to convincingly gather all three novels under a general literary category, that of American postmodern novel. The novels I have chosen are Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996), and Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1997). The reader should know that the case studies here chosen fall within the problematic coordinates of a concrete literary constellation that I define, here, as postmodern novel. Other attempts have been made to find a conceptual framework for this kind of novel and define a literary genre while explaining their status. I refer here to the work of Tom LeClair, Frederick Karl, and more recently Stefano Ercolino. Similar to LeClair’s “systems novel”, Karl’s “mega-novel”, and Ercolino’s “maximalist novel”, my idea of the constellation of postmodern novels aims to find a general category that explains how different single works can be collected under a common concept; unlike them, I do not intend to isolate a number of definite characteristics that are supposed to be shared by all the novels that belong to the constellation of postmodern novels. In his Maximalist Novel, Ercolino takes the relay from LeClair’s and Karl’s attempts only to argue that they both fail to grasp some aspects of what he defines as maximalist novel (Ercolino 2014, pp.  1–10). Whereas LeClair sees systems novel as dominated by “mastery” and “system  From an Hegelian point of view, something similar has been recently attempted by Francesco Campana in his book The End of Literature, especially in the fourth and fifth chapters where he draws “from Hegel’s work interpretative elements that will be central to demonstrating the resistance of literature to Danto’s claim for the ‘transgenerical character’ of the thesis” (Campana 2019, p. 127). 2

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theory” as expression of a liberating utopia face to the economic power (LeClair 1989, pp. 1–31), Ercolino points out that what is described by Pynchon is anything but liberating; whereas Karl hinges his idea of mega-­ novel—as an open, apparently incomplete, and chaotic form—upon its being originated by the “American spirit” (Karl 2001, p. 162), according to Ercolino this does not explain both the world-wide diffusion of such novels and their appearance outside the USA, as in the case of Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, or Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. Instead of trying to find a different list of characteristics and build a competing literary category to identify those novels,3 I will attempt to follow the path I have identified within Adorno’s philosophy of literature, namely that of an interpretation of postmodern novels from a strictly “formal” point of view, according to the special meaning of “form” retrieved within Adorno’s accounts. In so doing, rather than contributing to the field of history (or theory) of literature, my intention is, more narrowly to provide a philosophical account on the issue of contemporary novels. Inspired by Adorno’s aesthetics, form is the legal principle of a literary product and, at the same time, the answer to a historical set of problems. Along these lines, the American postmodern novel can be understood as a category that collects a number of works that somehow react to the same state of affairs by offering a formal answer and developing the same problematic field. The interpretation of concrete literary products might then provide the chance to grasp what kind of answer has been formulated to what kind of material. Before undertaking the actual scrutiny of the selected novels, a methodological clarification is due. In the light of the previous chapter’s remarks on form, the reader might still wonder why an Adorno-inspired philosophy of literature should apply to novels in particular and in what respect it might yield a theory of the novel. More precisely, the issue of the normativity of the novel as literary form requires, in my opinion, some additional comments.  From a philosophical point of view, the risk, in fact, is that of a recursive definition of the category. For example, when Stefano Ercolino defines the category of maximalist novel (Ercolino 2014, pp. xiii–xiv), he isolates ten characteristics “chosen after intense close readings and syntheses of the seven novels in question”. The same seven novels are also taken as representative of the category of maximalist novel, since they comply with those categories.

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5.1 A Theory of the Novel as Literary Genre As I have mentioned at the beginning of the third chapter, Adorno deals with the issue of literary genre by taking into account what he conceives as the limits of aesthetic nominalism. Borrowing this lexicon from the Epistemo-Critical Prologue of Benjamin’s Trauerspielbuch and developing his argument through a rigorous study of Croce’s Aesthetics,4 Adorno traces the persistence of the notion of genre in aesthetics as an instantiation of the relationship between particular and universal. As Eva Geulen (2006, pp. 53–66) has shown, though, reducing Adorno’s interpretation of literary genre to the complete depletion of its validity based on the fraying and fragmentation of art’s borders, as displayed in the essay “Art and the Arts”—something Juliana Rebetisch and Christine Eichel are inclined to do5—is too simplistic. There is much more to this question than “the death of literary genre”. Instead of thoroughly reconstructing Adorno’s argument—for which I refer the reader to Geulen’s essay—I will limit myself to highlighting some relevant aspects. First of all, Adorno has a dialectical idea of literary genre, and this means that the relationship between each single work and its genre is neither a dissolution of the former in the latter—as pure rational classicism would assert—nor a negation of the value of the universal dimension of genre in the particularity of the work, as a strict form of nominalism would maintain. On the contrary, every production of a particular and completely new work— namely, what art structurally aims to do—carries with it a reference to the genre, if only in the form of an opposition. Judging from how Adorno develops his argument, this dialectical aspect is less influenced by Kant’s theory of regulative ideas and reflecting judgment—as it is the case for Benjamin’s notion of “idea” in the Epistemo-Critical Prologue—than by the dialectics of particular and universal at the very beginning of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Here, in fact, Hegel shows that when the  Benjamin talks about the nominalist approach of Konrad Burdach in historical studies and of Benedetto Croce in the field of aesthetics in terms of the attitude that negates any kind of generalization of particular phenomena (Benjamin 1998, pp. 43–44). 5  Geulen argues that Juliana Rebentisch’s (2003) and Christine Eichel’s (1993) accounts on Adorno’s aesthetics as negation of artistic genre fail to grasp the dialectic interweaving of universal and particular put forward by Adorno in particular in Aesthetic Theory. 4

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consciousness affirms the validity of the “Sensuous-Certainty” and tries to identify truth with the singular thing it deictically alludes to (this thing), the consciousness always implies a universal element (that of this, and that of thing), failing this way in purely grasping a simple particular.6 In his argumentatively dense section about Sensuous-Certainty, Hegel hints to the necessarily conceptual—namely universal—dimension of every supposed immediate intuition.7 Along the same lines, Adorno writes that “the more specific the work, the more truly it fulfills its type: The dialectical postulate that the particular is the universal has its model in art” (ÄT: 300, AT: 202). This passage is part of the section of Aesthetic Theory where Adorno discusses the notion of genre by insisting both on the need not to identify the work with its type and on the fact that, without a reference to the genre, the work cannot even be thought. Otherwise stated, the radical individuality to which every work aims—the individuality that has been registered by Croce’s nominalism—can be thought as such only to the extent that it alludes to a universal dimension in which it cooperates to fulfill the notion of genre, and this is why “the simple disjunction of nominalism and universalism does not hold” (ÄT: 299, AT: 201). It is therefore in the dialectics of universal and particular that Adorno sees the theoretical key to the explanation of the notion of genre, since “just as the arts as such do not disappear tracelessly in the general concept of art, the genres and forms do not merge perfectly into the individual art forms. Unquestionably, Attic tragedy was also the ­crystallization of no less a universal than the reconciliation of myth. Great autonomous art originated in agreement with the emancipation of spirit; it could no more be conceived without an element of universality than could the latter” (ÄT: 297, AT: 199–200).  “If I say: ‘A singular thing,’ then instead I say something entirely universal about it, for everything is a singular thing. Likewise, this thing is anything one pleases. To characterize it more precisely: As this piece of paper, every and each bit of paper is a ‘this piece of paper,’ and I have only spoken, as usual, of the universal” (Hegel 2018, 70, p. 67). On this topic, see Gianluca Garelli’s interpretation that takes this property of the Sensuous-Certainty as the proper trigger of the phenomenological movement (Garelli 2010, pp. 60–63). 7  Interestingly, Willem A. deVries sees a parallel between Hegel’s account on Sensuous-Certainty and Sellars’ notion of intuition not as a mere representation of this, but of this-such, namely as the particular this within a predicative relationship with a general category (deVries 2008, pp. 65–68). 6

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According to what Adorno writes in Aesthetic Theory, the genre (Gattung) corresponds to the universal dimension of the formal element of the particular work, as made clear by the musical example of the fugue. Adorno, in fact, suggests that “the substantial element of genres and forms has its locus in the historical needs of their materials”, and the “fugue is the form in which polyphony that has become tonal and fully rationalized is organized”, polyphony being here the material element of music in the seventeenth century.8 In this sense, then, the formation of genres corresponds to the organization of the aesthetic materials around a historical question, being the material—in the sense of dialectical materialism—not the raw sensible thing, but rather the expression of power relationships in the production of social labor.9 Hence, the genre is the answer to a specific question that originates from the historical state of affairs, and it can be represented as the way in which a set of works react to that question. A very peculiar example of genre, a decisive exemplary instantiation of the universal element of art, according to what is asserted in the Aesthetic Theory, is the genre of novel. As Adorno says, “the authenticity of individual works is stored away in the genre”, since “the dialectic of the universal and the particular does not, as does the murky concept of the symbol, eliminate their difference”, and it turns every work in a critique of the genre to which it belongs and—precisely by means of this opposition—in a consolidation and reassertion of genre; “prototypical of this”, writes Adorno, “is the rise of the novel in the bourgeois age, the rise of the nominalistic and thus paradoxical form par excellence; every loss of authenticity suffered by modem art derives from this dialectic” (ÄT: 299, AT: 201). The novel, hence, is what Adorno understands as a nominalistic form, that is a form at its highest peak of singularity, a literary work in which is almost impossible to denote what the form is, since its form is  On the notion of musical material in Adorno, Max Paddison says that “it is not what ‘musical sounds’ are in themselves—their natural, physical qualities—that is significant, but rather what they have become in any particular instance” (Paddison 1993, p. 65). Music material, and aesthetic material in general, consists in the development of the historical conditions of production under which the work has been created. 9  This is Adorno’s undogmatic interpretation of Marx’s materialism, as it is presented also by Simon Jarvis (2004, pp. 91–94). Deborah Cook (2006, 719–721) mentions the Italian communist and materialist school’s, in particular Lucio Colletti and Sebastiano Timpanaro’s, biologist reduction of Marx’s notion of material, as the counterpart of Adorno’s critical notion. 8

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the form of the unformed, or as Bakhtin suggests, a form that is yet uncompleted, qualifying the novel as “the only developing genre” (Bakhtin 1981, p. 4). Moreover, confirming the theory of the dissolution and literary reconstruction of the aesthetics, the dialectic of particular and genre is the intrinsic cause of art’s loss of authenticity, to which literature reacts with the paradoxical form of the novel. After having shown the validity of the notion of genre, it is now possible to outline the basic elements of a theory of the novel as literary genre. Adorno’s arguments on the topic, which I will outline in what follows, are laid out in two essays of the first volume of the Notes to Literature, namely “On Epic Naiveté” (an at the time unpublished fragment of the Dialectic of Enlightenment), and “The Position of the Narrator in Contemporary Novel” (published for the first time in 1954 in the journal Akzenten). What the first essay suggests is a sort of assimilation of the novel within the story of the epos, or rather the idea that the novel should be conceived as the modern version of what the epos was for ancient society. If the Homeric epos consisted in a peculiar form of fluidification of mythical meaning, modern epos—the novel—is a fluidification of what in modernity has replaced myth, namely social antagonism. With this idea, Adorno follows a long-lasting tradition supporting, in various ways, an analogy with the form of epos and that of the novel, from Friedrich Schlegel’s Romantic predilection for the novel,10 to Lukács’ Theory of the Novel assessing novels as dialectical modification of the epos’ form,11 up to Franco Moretti’s idea of “world texts” as modern epic.12 What I am interested in, however, is how Adorno defines the novel as genre, namely how—based on the assumption that “the substantial element of genres and forms has its locus in the historical needs of their

 In the “Letter About the Novel”, included in the Dialogue on Poetry, Friedrich Schlegel writes that “just as our literature began with the novel, so the Greek began with the epic and eventually dissolved in it” (Schlegel 1968, p. 101). 11  In Theory of the Novel, Lukács’ idea is that “tragedy, although changed, has nevertheless survived in our time with its essential nature intact, whereas the epic had to disappear and yield its place to an entirely new form: the novel” (Lukács 1971, p. 41). 12  More precisely, Franco Moretti’s idea is that there is a group of texts (Goethe’s Faust, Joyce’s Ulysses, Melville’s Moby-Dick, etc.) that exceed the form of the novel, escape the genre, and become a form of modern epic (see Moretti 1996, pp. 1–3). 10

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materials”—he sees the historical materials being organized and giving rise to the novel as the modern form of the epos. What Adorno calls epic naiveté, hence, is precisely the organization of the historical materials into the form of the novel, defined in turn through the description of “the sound of epic discourse, in which what is solid and unequivocal comes together with what is ambiguous and flowing, only to immediately part from it again”, as the “beating of the sea on the rocky coast” (ÜeN: 34, NtL1: 24). With these words—which bring to mind Benjamin’s review of Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, where existence, from the point of view of epic, is depicted as the ocean13—Adorno tries to determine the epic balance between the “amorphous flood of myth” and the “telos of narrative”, namely the paradoxical form of the novel as expression, by means of the logical continuity of the plot, of the rigid and non-fluid—in his vocabulary, mythic—social antagonism. The continuity that Adorno sees between epic and novel, in fact, consists in the paradoxical structure of their form, namely the logical-narrative process that produces a static and rigid content. This tension, as Adorno suggests, is expressed by the position of the narrator. “As long as great epic poetry has existed” writes Adorno “this contradiction has informed the narrator’s modus operandi” (ÜeN: 35, NtL1: 25), since the ancient epic process of fluidification of myth consisted in the presentation of it as something past, shown for example in Homer’s practice of invoking the muses. In the modern epic, and this is what makes up the continuity between the two forms, the narrators maintain this kind of naïve attitude, not toward myth, but toward the history of their own society, inasmuch as in the process of telling a story they perform an aesthetic presentation, namely a conciliated exposition, of the events as if they had actually happened. The narrator’s presentation qualifies therefore as an apology for how things are not. This latter aspect allows me to argue that the formal aspect thanks to which the novel qualifies as a literary expression of history coincides with the position of the narrator, namely of what can be defined as the “Epic  “From the point of view of epic, existence is an ocean. Nothing is more epic than the sea. One can of course react to the sea in different ways, for example, lie on the beach, listen to the surf, and collect the shells that it washes up on the shore. This is what the epic writer does” (Benjamin 2005, p. 299). 13

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I” that holds together the world of the novel. And this is what Adorno argues in his essay “The position of the Narrator”. Pressed to briefly present the key aspects most generally and consistently defining the formal problem of the novel, Adorno states that: “The task of compressing some remarks on the current status of the novel as form into the space of a few minutes forces me to select, albeit by doing violence, one aspect of the problem. This must be the position of the narrator” (SdE: 41, NtL1: 30). Whereas the essay on epic naiveté explores the continuity between ancient and modern narrator, here Adorno examines the formal variation of the “Epic I” within the context of late capitalism, and consequently outlines how the organization of the material inside a specific genre can be altered in time. Just like the epic subject, the position of the narrator in the contemporary novel “is marked by a paradox: it is no longer possible to tell a story, but the form of the novel requires narration” (SdE: 41, NtL1: 30). What Adorno has in mind is the issue of the narrator in the so-called modernist literature; rather than describing the world’s objectivity as it is, the modernist narrator feels in fact the need to distort its perspective. Contrary to what the realism-oriented criticism of Kafka, Proust and Beckett argue, this is not an attempt to build an imaginary world away from the roughness of reality, but it rather corresponds to a reaction triggered by the historical state of affairs and eventually expressed by the formal organization of the novel. When Adorno writes that “nowadays, anyone who continued to dwell on concrete reality […] and wanted to derive his impact from the fullness and plasticity of a material reality contemplated and humbly accepted, would be forced into an imitative stance that would smack of arts and crafts” (SdE: 41, NtL1: 30), he is suggesting that in the contemporary circumstances, the very attempt to tell a story in the way in which the great bourgeois novel did either fails, or falls into kitsch, or it is a mere product of culture industry’s entertainment. The historical development of the novel corresponds then to its formal modifications as literary genre, and the formal modifications of the novel feature the reconfiguration of the position of the narrator. A disenchanted world, as that felt by modernist subjects, gives rise to a hyper-subjectivist “Epic I”, since the world cannot be narrated as it is, but only by following the wounds it leaves on the subject’s interiority. If the narration is always

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the narration of an experience of the world, in late capitalism “a narrative that presented itself as though the narrator had mastered this kind of experience would rightly meet with impatience and skepticism on the part of its audience” (SdE: 42, NtL1: 31). This is the reason behind what is supposed to be the crisis of the novel—namely, the crisis of the harmonic and ordered plot—that is nothing but the formal reaction and reorganization of the matter of the novel. The incessant reasoning of the narrator about himself, about the world, social relationships, and even metaphysical theories is not to be taken as the end of narrative in the name of philosophical literature, but as the demonstration of the “historical changes in the form” (SdE: 43–44, NtL1: 32), whose needs push the formal organization of materials—namely, the position of the narrator—toward the dissolution of the alleged world’s objectivity. This is not, however, some kind of normative command imposed on the author, nor it is the identification of contemporary novel with the intimist narrator in the first person. In the narrative technique of Adorno’s most quoted and beloved novelists—Proust, Kafka, Beckett, Joyce, Mann—the stance of the narrator differs significantly. What they have in common, however, is an astonishment in the narrator, in other words, the inability to master the world. In Proust’s paradigmatic first-person narrator, this is attested by the extremely stratified role played by habit, “that skillful but slow-moving arranger” (Proust 1992, vol. 1, p. 8), whose veil gradually covers the world making the subject unable to have a vivid experience of reality, “for if habit is a second nature, it prevents us from knowing our original nature, whose cruelties it lacks and also its enchantments” (Proust 1992, vol. 4, p. 208). Nevertheless, it is exactly the blunting of sensibility created by habit that allows, once the veil is ripped off, to have access to a higher level of world experience, that awakes from habit. The same formal shift in the I’s position can be observed also in Kafka’s third-person technique, where the novel’s world seems to slip through the narrator’s fingers. The reader will remember that the narrator of The Castle is upset to observe that K. has been surprised by the sun setting too soon (Kafka 2009, p. 18). Whereas in the traditional, bourgeois novel “the narrator raises a curtain: the reader is to take part in what occurs as though he were physically present” (SdE: 45, NtL1: 33), in late modern novels “the literary subject who declares himself free of the

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conventions of concrete representation acknowledges his own impotence at the same time; he acknowledges the superior strength of the world of things that reappears in the midst of the monologue” (SdE: 47, NtL1: 35). Based on what we have seen in this section, then, an interpretation of the novel as form, namely an interpretation that aims to understand the position of the novel as literary genre, is required to investigate mainly how its formal law organizes the elements. Being the “Epic I” the legislating principle of the novel, this interpretation should be mostly concerned with how the narrator reacts to the historical development of the aesthetic material. In the interpretation of postmodern novel as literary problem I undertake precisely this task. In what follows, I will use the literary categories of “Epic I” and “narrator” as de facto synonyms. I indeed take the voice of the narrator as the literary expression of the formal principle of the novel, namely the “Epic I”. The “Epic I”, in this sense, cannot be identified with the neutral third person, or with other possible declinations of narration; rather, being the “Epic I” the formal principle around which the literary material of the novel coagulates, it can change its shape, right as the iron powder disposes its grains in different patterns by following the tension of a magnetic field. The “Epic I”, hence, is the magnetic field that gives a form to the literary material of the novel.

5.2 T  he American Postmodern Novel as Literary Form Why is there form instead of chaos? This is the first and most urgent question raised by those literary products generally gathered under the label American postmodern novel. The second question, however, is even more radical, and it asks if it is at least possible to identify something as the category of American postmodern novel itself, given the lack of a literary manifesto, of a shared set of intentions among the authors, of anything allowing to discriminate postmodern novels from the broad range of contemporary literature. According to what I suggest in this closing chapter to this book, the two questions are interrelated, and the answer to the first offers the solution of the second.

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Why is there form instead of chaos? This question is posed by the very first attempt to identify the nature of postmodern novel. Its superficial aspect, in fact, is that of a collection of fragments, without a common thread that can be identified as the center of the novel. Jack London’s Martin Eden, for example, tells the story of an ignorant Seaman who, for the love of an educated bourgeois girl, becomes a refined man of letters. But what is the story told by DeLillo’s Underworld? Granted that there is no narrative center, how can we recognize that novel as a unitary product? It is just the fact that it is written on a certain number of pages bound in a single volume? Gogol’s Petersburg’s Tales, even though printed in a single volume, is not a unitary product, but a set of short stories. Nevertheless, when we read what we recognize as a successful product of postmodern literature, we perceive a literary form instead of a chaotic group of fragments. It is not just the fact that a publisher presents the text as a novel, but the effective presence of a general issue to which the single fragments of the text are related. According to the interpretation that I will give in the following pages, this issue corresponds to the struggle of the formal principle of the novel—namely, what I have defined as the “Epic I”—in maintaining its unitarian structure as a reaction to a historical context that negates the autonomy of the subject. At the same time, however, this is the answer also to the second question, namely the question that asks for a delimitation of postmodern novel as a literary genre. Literary genres are not universal concepts decided in advance once and for all. As it has been shown by Szondi, the genre of tragedy, for example, is constituted each time by the works whose aesthetic issue proved to fall into the same literary framework of the other works that the literary canon recognizes as tragic.14 According to my analysis, that of postmodern novel is the genre that collects those novels whose literary elements are put together in the desperate attempt of solving the problem of a ­dissolving form, namely the dissolving unity of the “Epic I” as formal principle of the novel. The fact that postmodern novels share a common thematic field—language theory, popular culture, mass media, paranoia  This is what Peter Szondi (2002, pp. 49–55) alludes to when he claims that there is no such a thing as the tragic, at least not as an essence. 14

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for technology, and so on—has to be seen more as a consequence of the development of a literary principle than as the starting point for the definition of the genre. What I will do in what follows is to present the issue of postmodern novels as the issue of the narrator, and then to show a possible historical and morphological development of the attempt to solve it. In so doing, I do not intend to develop in few pages a literary interpretation of three of the most read and studied novels of the second half of the last century. It would be foolish to attempt to do so. Rather, my intention is to set up a suitable framework for the discussion of postmodern novels in relation with the philosophical tradition of critical theory. I hope the reader will concede that, to this aim, it still makes sense to retrieve an intellectual enterprise whose most relevant members happened to die right before the first instances of the literary phenomenon of postmodern novels. The last part of this chapter is dedicated, in other words, to an investigation of American postmodern novels in light of the philosophy of literature that I have extracted from the study of Adorno’s aesthetics.

The Narrator “Young white overeducated males” (Wallace 1998, p.  65). With these lapidary words David Foster Wallace describes the authors of postmodern novels in one of the most lucid analysis of what writing meant at the beginning of the 1990s,15 and to a white young overeducated male seems to belong also the voice of the narrator of that singular literary phenomenon that is the American postmodern novel. “White” since white are the problems of the characters, for instance the estate of a Californian rich man; white is the sport they practice, tennis; white is the milieu of U.S. North-Eastern campuses, and white is the bored middle class with nothing more to ask for, directly called upon by the narrator’s words: “he speaks in your voice, American”, used to introduce an Afro-American 15  I have quoted Wallace’s essay, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction”, from its 1998 version in the collection, A supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. In the 1993 edition of the text, in the Review of Contemporary Fiction, the line is just “young white males” (Wallace 1993, p. 182).

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boy (DeLillo 1997, p. 11). “Young” since young is the energy needed to write a thousand pages, but young is also the impossibility to grow up, and once and for all become an adult who doesn’t need to ironically elbow up the reader to justify the fact that one may genuinely believe in something weird, as the narrator of postmodern novel constantly does. “Overeducated” since the characters that the narrator shapes speak with the linguistic register of a highly educated person, regardless whether he or she is an ignorant former thief, a child, or a young member of a savage, almost extinct Namibian population. To read the great American postmodern literature means to get acquainted with the voice of an ironic, often irritating, know-it-all “I”, who pretends the readers are as smart and brilliant as “he” is to the only aim of gaining their trust; but at the same time, it also means learning to see, and appreciate, the cracks in the giant ideological construction of the narrator, namely the not so rare moments in which the “I” fails in keeping together the neurotic system under construction. These cracks, what we can call the narrator’s honesty moments, are all the more capable to express the historical problem to which the form of the novel is trying to react, the more the super-construction the “Epic I” builds around its core has the appearance of an inviolable enigma, like an apparently impenetrable magic puzzle box. David Foster Wallace, who welcomed the comparison between the form of Infinite Jest and the geometric figure of the fractal,16 must have been more aware than anyone else of the bluff he was holding. Whereas the fractal is a consistent, symmetrical figure in which a definite shape is constantly repeated and can be expressed through a mathematical formula, Infinite Jest, resembles much more the organic image of what a fractal would be if it were the expression of the real world, namely a patched fractal. And this—that is, the way in which literary material escapes the cage of an abstract and geometrical structure—is its literary greatness. More than any clever observation about the relationship between cynicism and desperation—“sarcasm and jokes were often the bottle in which 16  See the interview that Wallace gave to Michael Silverblatt for the literary talk show, Bookworm on April 11, 1996, where he explicitly compares Infinite Jest to a fractal structure (here, the link to the original registration: https://www.kcrw.com/culture/shows/bookworm/david-foster-wallace-infinite-jest).

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clinical depressives sent out their most plangent screams for someone to care and help them” (Wallace 1996, p. 7)—more than any brilliant theory about the nostalgia for the limited choice of the dear old cathodic TV compared to the unlimited absence of choice of the web—“I miss sneering at something I love. […] Sneer at the commercial vapidity of broadcast stuff. […] The choice, see. It ruins it somehow. With television you were subjected to repetition. The familiarity was inflicted. Different now” (Wallace 1996, pp. 599–600)—the formal logic of Infinite Jest is exemplified by the dynamics of Eschaton, an unbelievably complicated and abstract war game played by a group of children from the Enfield Tennis Academy. After twenty pages painstakingly describing a boring, pointless game, where a dozen boys are completely engrossed in an extremely complex system of rules, the situation promptly worsens because of a misinterpretation of the relationship between the reality of the game (what the game represents) and the external reality of the players (what the body of each player is outside the game). Suddenly, all falls into chaos and the readers find themselves in the position to understand the seriousness of the matter just as they have trawled through the previously twenty pages of neurotic description of the pointless game. Likewise, the fact of trusting the non-credible virtuosity and irritating irony of the narrator is back paid by the moments in which the “I” of the novel loses the control over its own system and shows its weakness. Without this weakness, the narrator of American postmodern novel would be nothing but a mannerist deployment of empty virtuosity, a brilliant blabbermouth who would leave the reader spent, “as for actually driving cross-country with a gifted ironist, or sitting through a 300 page novel full of nothing but trendy sardonic exhaustion, one ends up feeling not only empty but somehow… oppressed” (Wallace 1993, p. 183). According to my interpretation, the “Epic I” of postmodern novel— namely, its formal principle—should be understood in the light of its weakness in relation to the world of the narration, and not as the expression of the narrator’s omniscience and omnipotence, as the narrator would deceivingly invite us to do. Needless to say, I do not intend to negate the fact that the narrative technique of postmodern novel includes the presence of an omniscient narrator, if not in all passages of the text, at

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least at a macrostructural level.17 What I intend to show is rather the fact that, as formal principle that keeps the world of the novel together, the postmodern “Epic I” is forced to demonstrate omniscience, to pretend to be omnipotent, to ironically comment the facts, as expression of its loss of autonomy in the real world. The I of the novel, as a paradigmatic literary expression of how the subjectivity rules itself in reality and interprets its own position in the world, gives rise to a labyrinthine space where one pretends to be in charge only to compensate for the loss of autonomy one experiences in life. The greatness of some products that belong to postmodern literature, however, rests on how they unveil their own ideological constructions. The cracks in the gargantuan buildings of postmodern novels are precisely the sign that the “Epic I” allows historical reality to penetrate the force of the construction. There, the detached cynicism of the narrator connects itself to society and history. The subject, surrounded by objects whose “supersensible or social” (Marx 1990, p. 165) nature makes them ungovernable, is reflected in the alleged literary omnipotence of the postmodern narrator, whose effective weakness becomes conversely visible where it gives in to the power of the world of the objects. The narrator of postmodern novels, hence, seems to be some kind of secularization of Benjamin’s historic interpretation of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, as his face is turned toward the past. Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise and has got caught in his wings; it is so strong that the angel can no longer close them. (Benjamin 2003, p. 392)

By scrutinizing the formal principle of the American postmodern novel, a morphological evolution becomes visible which can be suitably outlined in the chosen sequence of novels: Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s  This distinction is made by Stefano Ercolino in his investigation of the narrator’s omniscience in maximalist novel. He points out that large sections of Infinite Jest and Underworld are written in the first person, but he anyway links the narrator’s omniscience to the macrostructural level of the novel as a collection of fragments (see Ercolino 2014, pp. 97–104). 17

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Rainbow, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, and Don DeLillo’s Underworld. This evolution corresponds to one of the possible ways in which postmodern novels organize their matter under the law of their formal literary principle, namely the “Epic I”. According to my interpretation, this path corresponds to the progressive renunciation, by the narrators, to their own unity in order to allow the historical omnipotence of the objects over the subject to be expressed in a literary form. In this argument the reader can spot the fingerprints of the principle of the literary reconstruction of the aesthetic element after its sensuous dissolution in the realm of things, as outlined in the previous chapters of this book. American postmodern novel is then the way in which literature saves the aesthetic from its dissolution, namely by renouncing to the unity of its formal, subjective, principle face to the emergence of the power of the objects.

Thomas Pynchon: Gravity’s Rainbow Postmodern novel, and this is particularly true in the case of Thomas Pynchon, puts a great emphasis on the theoretical ideas communicated in the narration. What makes its interpretation so difficult is the wall erected by the author around the core of the novel, a bastion, an impenetrable fortress made by a patchwork of media theory, psychoanalysis, linguistic theory, sociology, Marxism, new age philosophy, and pop-culture studies. This is a sort of entertainment screen for the prototypical overeducated reader to which the author refers, an amusement park in which cultural professionals, academics, and the increasing sector of workers in the advanced tertiary—namely, the main readership of postmodern novels— play with a tantalizing parody of those cultural ideas that, meanwhile, far from being the beloved objects of their life choice as the idealized model of intellectual existence would demand, have become as alienated as the tools of hand labor from which they intended to escape. As the readers of Goethe’s Werther sought in the cult of feeling and sensitivity an imaginary way out of the cage of the alienated traditional society in the heroic years of the beginning of the modern novel, as the decadent grande bourgeoisie found in Madame Bovary’s attempt to escape from the emptiness

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of her life a confirmation of the pointlessness of its own existence, the increasingly precarious, absorbed in the economic process, members of the intellectual lower-middle class find in Pynchon’s sophisticated reasoning over the naturalizing power of history through war destruction— “straight-ruled boulevards built to be marched along are now winding pathways through the waste-piles, their shapes organic now, responding, like goat trails, to laws of least discomfort” (Pynchon 2006, p. 379)—a reassurance on the supposed immortal value of their studies. Behind the philosophical theories, behind the analogy of technology and religion through the mystic value of the rocket—“every bit and piece a sacred relic, every scrap of manual a verse of Scripture” (Pynchon 2006, p.  397)—behind the proud feeling of getting the reference to Walter Benjamin,18 the literary problem of Gravity’s Rainbow has to be found in the strenuous efforts of the narrator to present himself as a unitary subject right in the middle of the crumbling of the storyline. The emphasis on the problems entailed by the description of reality by means of a linear and harmonious plot, coupled with the intuition that the meaning of history is better understood by means of a fragmentary representation, is all in all the most pervasive insight of large part of modernism. The postmodern literature features instead the loss of unity experienced to the highest degree by the formal principle of the novel, the I itself. This is why the narrator is forced to build an apparently overthought structure, a legal system of which one pretends to be the master. Along these lines  Surprisingly, the presence of references to Walter Benjamin in Pynchon’s works is often underestimated. Bernard Duyfhuizen (2003, pp. 235–249) employs Benjamin’s concepts to understand the disrupting story in The Crying of Lot 49, and John Heon (2003, p. 157) quotes Benjamin’s lines over laughter and thinking to explain Mason & Dixon’s position in relation to history, but direct references to Benjamin’s passages do not find the same attention. In an oneiric description of the utopia of the Raketen-Stadt in Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon introduces Marcel, “a mechanical chessplayer dating back to the Second Empire”, and then the narrator asks to himself, “but where inside Marcel is the midget Grandmaster, the little Johann Allgeier? where’s the pantograph, and the magnets? Nowhere. Marcel really is a mechanical chessplayer” (Pynchon 2006, pp. 688–689). It is hard in the case of a novel about a theological metaphor explaining history and technology not to think about the first of Benjamin’s accounts On the Concept of History: “There was once, we know, an automaton constructed in such a way that it could respond to every move by a chess player with a countermove that would ensure the winning of the game. […] Actually, a hunchbacked dwarf – a master at chess – sat inside and guided the puppet’s hand by means of strings. One can imagine a philosophic counterpart to this apparatus. The puppet, called ‘historical materialism,’ is to win all the time. It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which today, as we know, is small and ugly and has to keep out of sight” (Benjamin 2003, p. 389). 18

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one can explain, for instance, Pynchon’s obsession for the logic of conspiracy. Conspiracy, that is to say, the paranoid feeling of the characters of being puppets of an invisible and possibly unconscious power, is the fear of the narrators themselves; it is a sense of impotence that, in an extreme attempt of transfiguration and exorcising, is depicted as comical, grotesque, stupid, and unlikely. When the narrators undertake the description of the conspiracy, they react like the viewers of a horror movie who make fun of the scene to downplay their being frightened: Bodine finds him sitting inside a coat closet, chewing on a velvet ear of his mask. “You look bad, Rocky […]”. “This is some kind of a plot, right?” Slothrop sucking saliva from velvet pile. “Everything is some kind of a plot, man,” Bodine laughing. “And yes but, the arrows are pointing all different ways,” Solange illustrating with a dance of hands, red-pointed fingervectors. (Pynchon 2006, p. 613)

But also: Paranoids are not paranoids (Proverb 5) because they’re paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations. “Now how on earth,” elaborately uncorking a fresh bottle of Nordhäuser Schattensaft, thoppp, best Gary Grant imitation he can summon up with bowels so echoing tight, suavely refilling glasses, handing one to her, “would a sweet, young, thing, like you, know anything, about rocket, hahd-weah?” (Pynchon 2006, p. 297)

The ironic reaction of the narrator in front of the manifestly grotesque aspect of conspiracy, the necessity to comment with detachment on the characters’ beliefs, is the hysterical laughter of someone who is afraid of getting caught while disguising their fears. Since reality is intolerable— namely what deep down everyone, even the most faithful conspiracist, knows, namely that there is nothing as comforting as an intrigue, and that no evil plot behind history can be simply removed to fix all the problems—the narrator stages the parody of his or her own powerlessness,

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hoping to be thus able to control it. The form of the “Epic I” in Gravity’s Rainbow has something in common with the form of the conspiracy, that is the fact that it cannot sustain itself without the external support of an ironic laughter. And it is in this process that the narrator shows signs of cracked unity. It is especially in those passages in which the narrative approaches the most delicate and unbelievable episodes that the voice of the “I” needs to be supported by a sort of self-detachment, and self-ironic comment on what is actually being told. Paradigmatic is the vicissitude that leads to the actual dissolution of Tyrone Slothrop, namely the character who comes the closest to having the leading role in Gravity’s Rainbow. In the final part of the novel, in fact, the more the plot loses consistency and linearity, eventually becoming a collection of fragments, the protagonist of the novel dissolves, by gradually turning into an imaginary creature dressed as a distorted superhero until he effectively disappears, breaking up into fragments scattered through the entire world. The destiny of the form of the novel, hence, is the destiny of the protagonist himself, namely that of a man who loses unity. Long before the character effectively dissolves, the narrator observes that “Slothrop, as noted, at least as early as the Anubis era, has begun to thin, to scatter” (Pynchon 2006, p. 517). The essayistic parenthesis—“as noted…”—is the sign of the detachment of the narrator, who makes a step back and stops the description to reassure the readers about what they are reading. As a result, the readers no longer merge in the form of the narration, but, in the company of the narrator, they find themselves watching the scene. The narrator, in fact, needs to break the illusion of realism in order to be credible. This behavior of the narrator can be observed by comparing the last appearance of the dissolving Slothrop with the description, a few pages later, of the place in which he has by now disappeared: It appears that some part of Slothrop ran into the AWOL Džabajev one night in the heart of downtown Niederschaumdorf. (Some believe that fragments of Slothrop have grown into consistent personae of their own. If so, there’s no telling which of the Zone’s present-day population are offshoots of his original scattering. There’s supposed to be a last photograph of him on the only record album ever put out by The Fool, an English rock

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group—seven musicians posed, in the arrogant style of the early Stones, near an old rocket-bomb site, out in the East End, or South of the River. It is spring, and French thyme blossoms in amazing white lacework across the cape of green that now hides and softens the true shape of the old rubble. There is no way to tell which of the faces is Slothrop’s: the only printed credit that might apply to him is “Harmonica, kazoo—a friend.” But knowing his Tarot, we would expect to look among the Humility, among the gray and preterite souls, to look for him adrift in the hostile light of the sky, the darkness of the sea….) (Pynchon 2006, 757)

And In a field, beyond the clearing and the trees, the last horse is standing, tarnished silver-gray, hardly more than an assembling of shadows. The heathen Germans who lived here sacrificed horses once, in their old ceremonies. Later the horse’s role changed from holy offering to servant of power. By then a great change was working on the Heath, kneading, turning, stirring with fingers strong as wind. (Pynchon 2006, p. 764)

In the first passage the narrator cannot maintain the unity of description and drifts on a long digression, an actual parenthesis in which a change of tone occurs, becoming ironic and breaking the illusion: the story of Tyrone Slothrop in 1945 is written in the present—“Slothrop’s Visitor by this time may be scrawled lines of carbon on a wall” (Pynchon 2006, pp. 756–757)—but the voice of the narrator tells of a last photograph taken in the 1960s—“seven musicians posed, in the arrogant style of the early Stones”—as an event occurred in the past. In the second passage, on the contrary, where the problem is solved, and the character has already disappeared as the unity of the “Epic I” itself, the narrator does not need to comment the scene, and provides a regular description as in a traditional novel. The examples I have given here bear testimony to the constant ambiguity of the role of the narrator in Pynchon’s novel. Plenty of other examples are nevertheless available. See for example the description of the dialogue between the Seaman Bodine and Roger Mexico, where the narrator says “they are grinning at each other like fools. Their auras, for the record, are green. No shit” (Pynchon 2006, p. 729). In full detachment

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from the scene (“for the record”, “no shit”), as to reassure the readers about the truth of what they are reading, the narrator unveils the trick. Adorno would observe that in Kafka’s Castle “no sooner has the surveyor driven the bothersome assistants from his room in the inn than they climb back through the window without the novel stopping for one word more than required to communicate the event” (AzK: 258, Pr: 248); and thus accounts for the déjà-vu feeling of the scene, namely something that everyone has at least once experienced in the illogic logic of one’s dreams. The green aura of Pynchon’s characters, to the contrary, is directly taken from the acid special effects of sci-fi movies from the 1950s and 1960s and a realistic touch is—supposedly—achieved by means of the comment: “no shit”. Said comment exploits the same ironic cynicism of the material from which it derives, that is TV’s scenes. Already in The Crying of Lot 49 is clear that TV imagination has the upper hand over dream’s logic: “What were you dreaming about him?” “Oh, that,” perhaps embarrassed. “It was all mixed in with a Porky Pig cartoon.” He waved at the tube. “It comes into your dreams, you know. Filthy machine. Did you ever see the one about Porky Pig and the anarchist?” (Pynchon 1966, p. 91)

Pynchon’s novel, hence, maintains a formal union at the cost of a fracture in the narrator itself, namely in its formal principle. The irony, the virtuosity, that is, of the detached narrator—generally presented as the expression of a powerful and omniscient “Epic” I19 that, as the author of the Romantic humor of Jean Paul, flies over the world by judging it and  Paradigmatic is the way in which Hegel describes the function of Jean Paul’s narrator as the power which is able to arbitrarily connect novel’s material: “Jean Paul’s humour often surprises us by its depth of wit and beauty of feeling, but equally often, in an opposite way, by its grotesquely combining things which have no real connection with one another, and the relations into which his humour brings them together are almost indecipherable. Even the greatest humourist has not relations of this kind present in his memory and so after all we often observe that even Jean Paul’s interconnections are not the product of the power of genius but are brought together externally. Thus in order always to have new material, Jean Paul looked into books of the most varied kind, botanical, legal, philosophical, descriptive of travel, noted at once what struck him and wrote down the passing fancies it suggested; when it was a matter of actual composition, he brought together the most heterogeneous material-Brazilian plants and the old Supreme Court of the Empire. This is then given special praise as originality or as humour by which anything and everything is excused. But such caprice is precisely what true originality excludes” (Hegel 1975, pp. 295–296). 19

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laughing at it20—is nothing but a strategy to hide the real impotence of the narrator, the impotence to reconnect the world of things in a meaningful picture. The formal principle of the novel, in fact, has the task to organize under its law the material, that has meanwhile become ungovernable by the subject. As a result, the narrator comes across as constantly uncertain of what is being told and tries to arouse the interest of the readers by means of direct questions: “what message, what possible greeting or entente will flow between the king and the infant prince? Is the baby smiling, or is it just gas? Which do you want it to be?” (Pynchon 2006, p. 133). The only element which does not require any kind of explanation by the narrator, in other words what the narrator realistically observes and describes, by holding on to its solid reality, is the existence of the objects. Endless series of objects, products of human labor, objectified figures of collective imagination, in fact, stare at the “Epic I”, who holds to their indubitable reality, disseminating them in the plot: In the pipefitters’ sheds, icicled, rattling when the gales are in the Straits, here’s thousands of old used toothpaste tubes, heaped often to the ceilings, thousands of somber man-mornings made tolerable, transformed to mint fumes and bleak song that left white spots across the quicksilver mirrors from Harrow to Gravesend […] as one by one these old tooth-paste tubes are emptied and returned to the War, heaps of dimly fragrant metal, phantoms of peppermint in the winter shacks, each tube wrinkled or embossed by the unconscious hands of London, written over in interference-patterns, hand against hand, waiting now—it is true return—to be melted for solder, for plate, alloyed for castings, bearings, gasketry, hidden smokeshriek linings the children of that other domestic incarnation will never see. (Pynchon 2006, pp. 132–133)

This is what is collected under the formal law of the America postmodern novel: a collection of objects, whose historical reality overcomes the power of the subject, that in order to think about itself as meaningful  I am referring to the book Des Luftschiffers Giannozzo Seebuch (The Airship Pilot Giannozzo Sea Book (1801)), where Jean Paul tells the fictional story of a hot-air balloon’s pilot who flies over German territory laughing at the culture of his time. 20

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principle, has to give up its autonomy and split itself in obedience to the commodified objective reality. And it is for this reason that the form of the novel resembles a collection of fragments, whose value is that of petrified objects, that anyway seem to create a literary form, which is ensured by the astonished, overwhelmed gaze of the narrator, unable to find a meaningful plot face to the preponderance of objects. The grotesque, ironic, comical idea of conspiracy thus expresses the idea of unity of a number of single scenes kept together by the fears of a neurotic I.

David Foster Wallace: Infinite Jest While qualifying as an answer to the problem of how it is possible to literarily and aesthetically structure the preponderance of the objects, Infinite Jest is a radicalization of Pynchon’s Epic I’s position. If the dissolution of the narrative in Gravity’s Rainbow, in fact, concerns the clutter of different storylines without a center and the progressive loss of consistency in the novel’s reality, Infinite Jest couples a form of realism of literary description with the explosion of all idea of storyline. As the reader of Infinite Jest knows, the pivotal formal feature of the novel concerns not merely the interweaving of different stories, but rather the continuous jumps through the timeline of each plot, the absence of any kind of reference point, and the impression of having to do with something randomly written. Within the apparently chaotic mess of the narrative, however, the figure of the narrator stands out with an intriguing personality, an eyebrow constantly raised, and the air of someone who finds it hard to believe in what one is staring at but that also reassures the reader that all that mess is really there in front of them all. That the nature of postmodern literature consists in vision and spectation, in fact, has been one of the most incisive remarks of Wallace himself when, analyzing a passage of DeLillo’s White Noise, he points out that “the narrator’s ‘extended silence’” is the only possible response to the blathering of “the would-be transcender of spectation” (Wallace 1993, p. 170). As in Pynchon, the formal principle of the novel is split in two, being the narrator on the one hand the one who tells the story and on the other hand the one who ironically comments on it.

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The layering of vision and the stratification of reality’s uncontrollability have become to such an extent intricate that the “Epic I” even deems as plausible a character who is afraid to forget to blink,21 and in the frustrated efforts in which the narrator tries to govern the objects in the world, it comes across as an obsessive-compulsive and depressed counterbalance to Pynchon’s conspiracist “Epic I”. Whereas in Pynchon the narrator could still point to the presence of a hidden power, or at least allude to a parody of what the subject effectively perceives behind the way in which single objects give the impression to conspire against personality—as the opening scene of Falling Down (1993) has perfectly recorded—in Infinite Jest there is just the terrifying presence of the objects, that the narrator attempts to make familiar by qualifying them through the industrial process from which they stem,22 through the typical postmodern affection to name the brands, or through the often pointless specification of their technical features.23 Only this maniacal tendency of the narrator to gain control over every single object can explain the passage in which the entire population of the Enfield Tennis Academy falls prey of a mass psychosis for the presence of neutral and ordinary objects out of their usual place: inanimate objects have either been moved into or just out of nowhere appearing in wildly inappropriate places around E.T.A. for the past couple months in a steadily accelerating and troubling cycle. Last week a grounds-­ crew lawnmower sitting clean and silent and somehow menacing in the middle of the dawn kitchen […]. Yesterday A.M. there’d been a cannonesque ball machine […]. The inappropriate found objects have had a ­tektitic and sinister aspect: none of the cheery odor of regular pranksterism; they’re not funny. To varying degrees they’ve given everyone the fantods. (Wallace 1996, p. 632)  “He’s got your autodidactic orator’s way with emotional dramatic pauses that don’t seem affected. Joelle makes another line down the Styrofoam coffee cup with her fingernail and chooses consciously to believe it isn’t affected, the story’s emotive drama. Her eyes feel sandy from forgetting to blink” (Wallace 1996, p. 710). 22  The word “anodized” appears six times in the novel, and I’m pretty sure that it can be considered a record for a non-chemistry related story. 23  “About a month later, an envelope arrived in the A.D.A.’s home’s exquisite wrought-iron mailbox. In the envelope were a standard American Dental Association glossy brochure on the importance of daily oral hygiene—available at like any dentist’s office anywhere—and two high-pixel Polaroid snapshots” (Wallace 1996, p. 56). 21

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Nothing has more literary power to generate meaning in Infinite Jest than the bare and threatening objects that seem to come up from everywhere, as for the maniac and depressed feeling of the narrator “everything becomes an outline of the thing. Objects become schemata. The world becomes a map of the world” (Wallace 1996, p. 693). Against the power of the objects, the “Epic I” as formal principle of the novel tries anyway to vindicate for itself the position of unitarian grounding, but at the cost of a schizophrenic behavior. The role of the footnotes in Infinite Jest is that of having a reassuring voice in the middle of the dissolution of the form, like a whimsical man that constantly unveils the trick of the narration and its illusion. Somehow, Infinite Jest’s footnotes— way more than a simple stylistic affectation—have anticipated by a dozen years the experience of reading a novel by holding a smartphone, namely the compulsive drive to have full control over reality, even the fictional one, coupled with the impossibility to immerse entirely in the reading, to get lost in the book like in the old ideal image of the bookworm, as if the readers were now in the grip of an attention deficit disorder. If Proust’s narrator was in the condition to analyze his fear to lose grip on the world’s object in the moment in which he tries to fall asleep, Wallace’s “Epic I” is constantly attacked by the obsession of having forgot something. This obsession for the threat that comes from the world of things is what makes plausible the identification with a boy—named The Darkness— who thinks he has been “somehow selected or chosen to get haunted or possessed by some kind of beneficiary or guardian ghost that resides in and/or manifests in ordinary physical objects, that wants to teach The Darkness how to not underestimate ordinary objects and raise his game to like a supernatural level, to help his game” (Wallace 1996, p. 943). The morbid attention for the object, for their technical features and production, the sense of anguish they are able to provoke is condensed in passages like the one where the narrator decides to enumerate all the blue objects in the room, by observing finally that Each chair had a 105-watt reading lamp attached to the back on a flexible metal stalk that let the reading lamp curve out from behind and shine right down on whatever magazine the waiting person was looking at, but since the curved lamps induced this unbearable sensation of somebody feverish

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right there reading over your shoulder, the magazines (some of whose covers involved the color blue) tended to stay unread, and were fanned neatly out on a low ceramic coffeetable. (Wallace 1996, p. 509)

The crumbling of the narrative, the disruption of the storyline, the apparent impossibility to find a logic in the 1079 pages of the novel, all these superficial characteristics are the result of the impossibility to govern the world of objects by collecting them in a meaningful image. The only chance the narrator has to constitute the formal principle of the novel is the obsessive way in which what is told is commented, an ironical stance toward what the narrator is afraid of, namely the power of the bare objects that are transfigured not by the mystic assertion that they have a soul, but by telling that someone thinks they have a soul, as if that impression would be somehow understandable. Hence, the narrator has the need to constantly interpret what is being told, since images left free to generate associations that would be impossible to control are intolerable. This is clear, for example, when Ms. Tawni Kondo’s morning aerobic exercise program is described in terms of an “upwards of 60 million North Americans daily kicking and genuflecting with Tawni Kondo, a mass choreography somewhat similar to those compulsory A.M. tai chi slo-mo exercise assemblies in post-Mao China—except that the Chinese assemble publicly together” (Wallace 1996, p. 620). The association of images of sixty million people alone at home in front of the TV making exercise—that came from reality and not from a dystopic world—is blocked by the allusion to what Western audiences perceive as the parody of a regime, namely “slo-mo exercise assemblies in post-Mao China”. This role of the narrator, namely that of making the effort to keep together the mass of objects, is at the origin of the modesty with which the narrator withdraws from the most evident excesses, namely those passages in which Wallace is most influenced by the postmodern virtuosity of Mark Leyner’s cynical style.24 In the episode in which Hal tells he has 24  “I crack open an ampule of mating pheromone and let it waft across the bar, as I sip my drink, a methyl isocyanate on the rocks  – methyl isocyanate is the substance that killed more than 2000 people when it leaked in Bhopal, India, but thanks to my weight training, aerobic workouts, and low-fat fiber-rich diet, the stuff has no effect on me” (Leyner 1990, p.  6), writes Leyner six years after almost double of the people he mentions died in a disaster caused by the U.S. company Union Carbide.

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found the body of his self-murdered father with the head exploded in the microwave, in the passage where Joelle reveals to Gately that she covers her face with a veil as a member of U.H.I.D. (Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed) since “I’m perfect. I’m so beautiful I drive anybody with a nervous system out of their fucking mind. […] I’m so beautiful I am deformed” (Wallace 1996, p. 538), in the scene where the teenager Pemulis explains to a blindfolded Pakistani boy the implausible technology of annihilation and the resulting Great Concavity inhabited by “rapacial feral hamsters and insects of Volkswagen size and infantile giganticism” (Wallace 1996, p.  573), in all these textual passages the novel—the literary form governed by the “Epic I” as its principle—gives in to the form of drama: the narrator disappears and the text becomes a pure dialogue without description. The material that is expressed without comment, without the narrator’s obsession for sense in an overabundant reality, is the material that belongs to the logic of TV sitcoms, namely brilliant and implausible dialogues whose empty cynicism anesthetizes any commitment toward reality. Only the absence of the narrator can excuse the tale of a young kid that finds his father suicided with the head in a microwave and whose first thought is that something smelled delicious (Wallace 1996, p. 256). Now, if the novel is how the historical material organizes itself under the attractive pole of the “Epic I”, according to the already evoked image of the iron powder that disposes its grains according to the tension of a magnetic field, more than anywhere else, the weakness of the I in the Post-Reagan era is perceivable in the difficulty to govern the objects, without these sneaking around in a chaotic absence of sense. It is not because of a stylistic trend that in Infinite Jest the brand Gatorade is named fourteen times; this mirrors instead the meaningless of a mineral sport beverage that is simply linked to its quality, namely to its effect on the subject, being its value connected to the entire economic process imposed over the subject. And this economic process is what is brought into light in Infinite Jest, whose formal principle is the everlasting effort of the narrator to keep together the mass of objects. His ironic detachment, his exhibition of virtuosity, is not the omnipotence of the narrator over the world of the novel, but rather the final attempt of a unitary “Epic I” to be the law under which the narrative content organizes itself. All

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what remains of the traditional great unity of the “Epic I” of the novel is a stream of ironic comments on an objective reality that imposes its own power on the subject. Infinite Jest is not just a novel about desire and addiction, about the substitution of desire through the schema of addiction and satisfaction. Infinite Jest is the novel whose form is that of dependence, that of a subject that desperately tries to vindicate its existence by imposing an addiction on itself, the writing addiction, the addiction to commenting the objectual world.

Don DeLillo: Underworld Read in line with the development of the American postmodern novel, the position of the narrator in Don DeLillo’s Underworld seems to achieve Hegel’s recommendation in the Introduction to The Phenomenology of Spirit, “the only thing that remains to us is purely to look on [das reine Zusehen]” (Hegel 2018, p. 56). If Pynchon and Wallace have given rise to the attempt to unify a recalcitrant historical material under the unity of a legislating subjective principle, Underworld is the demonstration of how the subjective claim on the novel is in a position of rearguard and, without the need to constantly wink at the reader, without any ironic stance against the world, DeLillo succeeds in the construction of a literary unity precisely by giving up the subjective legal pretension and by accepting, on the contrary, the law of the objects. What is missing in DeLillo’s novel is in fact the very existence of something as a unitary “Epic I”. Even though I am obviously aware to which generation DeLillo as author actually belongs—he is six months older than Pynchon, and his first novels, for instance Americana (1971), belong to the atmosphere of early postmodernism, while his books from the 1980s, such as White Noise (1985) and Libera (1988), form some sort of cultural common canon, a starting point, for the authors of Wallace’s generation25—I do anyway recognize  I have already mentioned Wallace’s essay, “E Unibus Pluram” (Wallace 1993), where he declares his debt to DeLillo’s White Noise. In a famous article for the Los Angeles Times, Richard Rayner wrote about White Noise that “without it, writers such as David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Lethem, Jonathan Franzen, Dave Eggers, Martin Amis, Zadie Smith and Richard Powers (who provides an excellent introduction here) don’t happen – or don’t happen in the same way” (Rayner 2010). 25

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in Underworld a morphological change in the position of the narrator that can be conceived as in continuity with the form of Infinite Jest. In fact, while the novel is made of the same matter of what in terms of content and atmosphere is generally recognized as postmodern literature—as Harold Bloom says “Pynchon’s cosmos of paranoia, indispensable waste, plastic consumerism is the literary context of Underworld” (Bloom 2003, p.  1)—the way in which he problematizes the “Epic I” represents an answer to the previous attempts to save the unity of the narrator toward the preponderance of the objective reality. It should be noted that Underworld, unlike Gravity’s Rainbow and Infinite Jest, appears as the final outcome of the previous literary activity of his author. Pynchon’s and Wallace’s novels are the great works with which the subsequent production of the authors has been inevitably compared, literary masterpieces that marked a before and an after in the literary careers of their writers; one needs only to think about the almost twenty years of silence of Pynchon after his 1973 novel, accompanied by a clear thematic variation in his production, and to the fact that, in the nine years between Infinite Jest and Wallace’s death, the writer has not been able to publish another novel. On the contrary, Underworld is placed at the top of a wide literary production, and its formal structure can be seen as the outcome of the impact between the mature writing style of the author and an uncontrollable literary material. As a result, a formal principle can only be found in the absence of unity. One should also notice how the direct, intimate, and honest first-person narrator typical of DeLillo’s narrative technique—the first-person voice of Americana, End Zone, The Names, and White Noise—if dealing with historical arguments, necessarily switches to the third person, namely the only viable perspective in which, for instance in Libra, something like Kennedy’s murder— the most viewed murder of history—can be told. “The narrator’s ‘extended silence’” of White Noise is no longer enough, although Wallace would present it as a distinctive trait in the attitude of DeLillo’s “Epic I” against the “poor schmuck of a popologist” (Wallace 1993, p.  184). History requires then a position to take on, preferably one guaranteeing the objectivity of the direct view. With Libra, hence, DeLillo deals with direct historical material in the novel, shifts the narration into a neutral third person, but—even in a very determinate, non-fictional, universally

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known story—he feels the need to problematize the reluctant autonomy of the objects, the impossibility to govern their schizophrenia by means of an almost external character, whose intimacy with the reader resembles that of the close first person, namely the CIA archivist Nicholas Branch, whose task is that of piecing together the fragments of Kennedy’s murder. What Branch regrets is the lack of a general meaning in the historical event, the fact that every piece seems to have its own life impossible to reconnect to a general sense that the subject is able to understand, as “there is no formal system to help him track the material in the room. He uses hand and eye, color and shape and memory, the configuration of suggestive things that link an object to its content” (DeLillo 1988, p. 15). Jewel novel of American postmodern literature, Underworld is the release of what Adorno would call “the history locked in the object” (ND: 165, ND: 163), the dissolution of any subjective pretense to build a formal unity starting from the grounding principle of the “Epic I”. There is in Underworld a latent materialistic motive, namely the constant acknowledgment of the priority of the object, that does not amount to the enthusiastic glorification of objectivity, and neither to the projection of a conspiracy, but rather to the recognition that the only way to recover something like subjectivity has to pass through the admission of its impotence toward the world of things and objects. If in Pynchon, Slothrop, the main character, disappears by alluding to the dissolution of the meaning of the narration, in Underworld it is the voice of the I itself that undergoes disintegration. The transitions between third and first person in Underworld are not occasional insertions, exceptional portions almost external to the corpus of the novel—as in the case of the opening internal monologues of Hal Incandenza in Infinite Jest, to which apply Ercolino’s comments about a generally omniscient and omnipotent narrator that collects the fragments26—but it is the formal principle of the novel itself, that constitutes its unity right in the dissolution of a solid union. What happens at a formal level, namely the dissolution of a unitarian “Epic I”, is the coagulation of the literary material not in the voice of the narrator,  “It is an omniscience attained through the recomposition of the single points of view adopted by the narrator at various times at the microstructural level” (Ercolino 2014, p. 100). If this is true for Infinite Jest, my point is that it is not the case for Underworld, where the composition is not to be searched in the narrator, but in the objects of the narration. 26

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but in the need for it to change, in the need to follow the characteristics of what is described, that is, the objects. The dissolution of the subjectivity of the narrator in the name of the objectivity of the external things, however, is an ideal that cannot be fully achieved, since the novel has always still the form of something told. But the way in which Underworld makes the unity of the narration waver testifies to the instability of a definite point of view on the things to the highest degree that was passible at the end of the 1990s, given the historical development of productive force and technology at the time. Possibly, the task of the narration in the immediate future will be linked to the fact that capital has ceased producing value from labor, and to the consequent development of technology not as means of satisfaction of desire, but as a self-referential structure for which desire itself is a means. But in the years in which Underworld has been written, the way in which the novel dissolves the narrator, coupled with a non-ironical and genuine lyrical description of a humanized landscape, has marked a seminal passage in the development of American postmodern novel. The way in which the dissolution of the narrator is pursued in Underworld can be understood by observing the formal principle that organizes the material of the novel, that is, the ideal of the object itself. If not the “Epic I”, in fact, the only common thread of the novel is a mythical baseball, an object whose adventure coagulates in itself the entire history of America in the second half of the twentieth century, from the first Soviet nuclear test to the Chernobyl disaster. A ball that passes from hand to hand, condensing in itself an incredible amount of desires, hopes, and projections, becoming what Wallace, quoting Domyns, calls the result of the metastasis of watching (Wallace 1993, p. 170). An object whose ideal and legendary nature is clear from the beginning of the novel: “Tell them about the baseball,” Classic said. […] “Nick owns the baseball. The Bobby Thomson home-run ball. The actual object.” Sims took his time lighting the cigar. “Nobody owns the ball.” “Somebody has to own it.”

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“The ball is unaccounted for,” Sims said. “It got thrown away decades ago. Otherwise we’d know it.” “Simeon, listen before you make pronouncements. First,” Classic said, “I found a dealer on a trip I took back east some years ago. This guy convinced me that the baseball in his possession, the ball he claimed was the Thomson home run, was in fact the authentic ball”. (DeLillo 1997, p. 96)

After all nobody can know for sure the secret of the ball. The Underworld of the title alludes, in fact, to what lies beneath the surface of reality, to the essence of Pynchon’s conspiracy and Wallace’s paranoia. DeLillo’s answer is, in this respect, very simple: nothing. Rather than conspiracy, rather than the paranoid fear of the objects, rather than everything toward which the narrator dissimulates his impotence by means of irony, what remains in DeLillo’s narrative is the sluggish legend of a baseball  ball, nothing but a rumor that, however, represents the nature of historical development taken as destiny. The dissolution of the narrator, hence, is the dissolution of the figure of the “poor schmuck of a popologist”, of any enthusiasm toward the sublimity of chemical sunsets of White Noises; it is—in DeLillo’s own words—“the revenge of popular culture on those who take it too seriously” (DeLillo 1997, p. 323). The ball, as the center around which the material of the novel organizes itself, forms the concrete image of the objectified human relationships. As the capital is “not a thing, but a social relation between persons which is mediated through things” (Marx 1990, p. 932), the baseball—a useful waste of consumption economy—is the mediator par excellence, being at the same time a real and an idealized thing, a bare material object and a humanized social thing. The role of the ball as an amphibious object, hence, is what is able to turn it in the legal field that structures the novel, and this peculiar power of the world of the things is visible in how the narrator is obsessed by the presence of objects, to the point of becoming lyrical just in front of the death of material things: It was reddish brown, flat-topped, monumental, sunset burning in the heights, and Brian thought he was hallucinating an Arizona butte. But it was real and it was man-made […]. It was science fiction and prehistory, garbage arriving twenty-four hours a day […]. Specks and glints, ragtails of

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color appeared in the stratified mass of covering soil, fabric scraps from the garment center, stirred by the wind, or maybe that teal thing is a bikini brief that belonged to a secretary from Queens, and Brian found he could create a flash infatuation, she is dark-eyed and reads the tabloids and paints her nails and eats lunch out of molded styrofoam, and he gives her gifts and she gives him condoms, and it all ends up here, newsprint, emery boards, sexy underwear, coaxed into high relief by the rumbling dozers – think of his multitudinous spermlings with their history of high family fore-heads, Stranded in a Ramses body bag and rollered snug in the deep-down waste. (DeLillo 1997, pp. 183–185)

This lyrical funeral oration to consumption objects, the declamation of the cemetery of the inorganic receptacles of human history’s desires, is together the acknowledgment of the power of the things and the last shot tail of the subjectivity, that remembers what the destiny of objects is: Marian and I saw products as garbage even when they sat gleaming on store shelves, yet unbought. We didn’t say, What kind of casserole will that make? We said, What kind of garbage will that make? Safe, clean, neat, easily disposed of? (DeLillo 1997, p.121)

It is only by playing on the border of this intricate relationship to the objects that Underworld’s dissolution of the unitary formal principle does not crumble in a chaotic mass of meaningless fragments. The role of the “I”, in this sense, is that of an objects collector, who renounces to its own integrity on behalf of the object’s salvation, but at the same time it is the pot in which the objects can be seen as something instead of nothing. As in contemporary institutional theory of art the work of art is such as it is placed into a museum, in the postmodern novel the “Epic I” is nothing but the collector of the objects, but the objects are subjects just as they are watched by the narrator. In front of the dissolution of the narrator, the great “Epic I” of the traditional novel, source of any possible literary meaning, is just like Brian—one of DeLillo’s stereotypes of pop-culture enthusiasts, like Murray in White Noise—in the words of the resigned baseball collector, “you used to have the same dimensions as the observable universe. Now you’re a lost speck. You look at old cars and recall a purpose, a destination” (DeLillo 1997, p. 170).

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5.3 Conclusion: The Novel as Postmodernist Genre In the opening lines of his essay about U.S. fiction and TV, David Foster Wallace describes fiction writers as watchers, viewers, as persons who “tend to lurk and to stare” (Wallace 1993, p. 151). Himself being someone who tends to lurk, and a self-declared TV addict, Wallace points to the link between the main issue of contemporary novel and that constantly open window in every Western living room that television is. No doubt, Wallace touches a nerve explaining the success of postmodern fiction, namely the accumulation of visual layers placed by television—as a narrative of reality—between things as they are and things as they are told. What Wallace does not say, precisely as a fiction writer himself, is that in American postmodern novels the narrator tends to progressively disappear and leave the job of unitary principle in the narrated world unattended. What can be seen in the morphological development that I have presented here is certainly not, then, a final answer to the question on what a postmodern novel is, a question that would be even naive to think it might have a final answer. Rather, by following the historical turn in the formal principle of postmodern novels, these latter emerge as a genre, namely as a general literary category which collects under its legal sovereignty a number of individual products. The American postmodern novel is in this sense the literary phenomenon that, through the progressive dissolution of the figure of the unitary “Epic I”, aesthetically reacts to the economic, social, and historic power of the objects toward the subject. Postmodern novels are tied, therefore, to the history of twentieth-century novel in general. As is well known, modernist literature, as conveyed by products stemming from the broad context of German-speaking post-­ expressionism, and in the productive contrast between French symbolism and realism, was confronted by the issue of how to close the form of the novel itself. Exemplary in this regard are the struggles of Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, and Marcel Proust in closing their masterpieces. Their failures are the result of a modernist attempt to incorporate the alienated, disenchanted world of late capitalism within the realm of an “Epic I”,

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which is still regrettably structured according to the formal law of the narrator of classic novels, namely as a subject able to meaningfully describe reality by hosting it in its interiority. In his essay “The Position of the Narrator in Contemporary Novel”, Adorno correctly defines post avant-garde narration as a modification of the traditional one. As previously already remarked, whereas the traditional narrator “raises a curtain” over an illusion depicted for the reader (SdE: 45, NtL1: 33), the narrator in late capitalism “acknowledges the superior strength of the world of things” (SdE: 47, NtL1: 35), and, in this regard, it acknowledges its own inability to describe reality, even though its formal law and task is still “to tell a story” (SdE: 41, NtL1: 30). Probably for lack of historical distance, Adorno fails to pinpoint, though, the paradoxical nature of the task of modernist writers, which indeed leads to a narration that is impossible to conclude, as in Kafka’s and Musil’s novels, where no ending can be imaged, or in Proust’s Recherche, where there is no possible consistent passage from the youth of the narrator to his old age in the last volume, since the steadfastness of adulthood is incompatible with a world that is fragile as a childish, or senile, narration. The missing piece in Adorno’s account, perhaps just for biographical reasons, is the historical turn that occurred in the form of the Roman with the emergence of the American postmodern novel. Postmodern novels, in fact, renounce the very idea of a closed form, and in so doing achieve the most consistent result of this renunciation, namely the dissolution of the unitary “Epic I” as formal principle of the novel. According to this exquisitely formal development, postmodern novels boldly articulate the literary answer to the structural question that undermines the genre of the novel itself—“the nominalistic and thus paradoxical form par excellence” (ÄT: 299, AT: 201), or “the only developing genre” in Bakhtin words (Bakhtin 1981, p. 4)—namely, the question about the possibility to shape, in the sense of giving form, to a reality that is refractory to any meaningful aesthetic form. In 1773, the German philosopher, literary critic, and theologist, Johann Gottfried Herder published a seminal volume titled Von Deutscher Art und Kunst (Of German Style and Art), which includes, among other things, Goethe’s piece “On German Architecture”. The volume bears testimony to Harder’s effort to present the distinctive character of German culture, art and poetry, despite the fact that “Germany”, as an

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autonomous institutional entity, did not yet exist, and it would not have existed for—almost—another hundred years. In one of the essays of the book, Herder sharply polemicizes, in Winckelmann’s spirit, against the French-­inspired German classicism of authors such as Johann Christoph Gottsched, who saw poetics as the normative application of the so-called Aristotelian rules, or unities, to modern tragedies. Herder’s idea, on the contrary, was to elevate the peculiarity of modern dramatic poetry, whose greatest representative is identified in Shakespeare—precisely the name against which all the normative classicism would speak. What Herder highlights is the fact that, to his mind, writing a tragedy in the spirit of Sophocles—the most beloved Greek classical model—does not mean to imitate his works, but rather to imitate his own originality, and become per se original. In this notion Shakespeare’s demolition of Sophocles’ unity is fully justified, inasmuch as for the modern world another form is required, namely that of totality: If in Sophocles a single action prevails, then Shakespeare aims at the totality of an event, an occurrence. If in Sophocles’ characters a single tone predominates, then Shakespeare assembles all the characters, estates, and ways of life that are necessary to produce the main melody of his symphony. […] And if Sophocles represents and teaches and moves and cultivates Greeks, then Shakespeare teaches, moves, and cultivates northern men! (Herder 2006, pp. 298–299)

As one of the authors that most contributed to feed the seeds of German Romanticism,27 Herder places right at the beginning of his theorization of the novel as an autonomous literary form a strong acknowledgment of the distinctive quality of modern poetry in the break of unity in the name of a more extensive and comprehensive category such as that of totality; the modern destiny of the novel is first anticipated by the problematization and rupture of the unity. The novel will indeed go through the realism of totality outlined by Herder, through the crashing of the harmonic totality in the modernist age, and finally through the postmodern dissolution of the “Epic I” as the formal principle of the novel.  On Herder’s influence on early Romanticism, see for example the account provided by Terry Pinkard (2002, pp. 132–134). 27

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The formal development that I have described in this chapter, hence, has to be understood in terms of the morphological path undertaken by the postmodern novel facing its defining challenges. In its attempt to achieve an autonomous aesthetic form, while responding to those dynamics of social dissolution and literary reconstruction of the aesthetic that I have outlined in the first chapters of this book, novels become postmodern. The development of the American postmodern novel can in this regard be seen as an experimental test for Adorno’s theory of literature. The sequence that I have presented, with Pynchon, Wallace, and DeLillo, should not, under any respect, be understood as a rigid schema, as if it were the expression of a historical ontology of the novel. Many of the thoughts that I have extracted from those authors can be found in other writers and novels, taken not only from the broad context of postmodernism, or even of American literature.28 The sequence that I have chosen, however, has the advantage to clearly, and radically, expose the development of a problem—that of the dissolution of the “Epic I” as the unitarian formal principle of the novel—that is connected to what is generally taken as postmodern shared sensitivity: the collapse of great narrations; the paranoid attitude toward reality; the hysterical stance toward realism; the cynicism of the subject as reaction to its fragility. The postmodern ideas about the end of ideology, the downfall of the narration, and the meltdown of historical and social sense are presented, in this way, in readable form in a literary figure, namely in the constellation of postmodern novels as a specific development of the formal problem of the novel as a literary genre. An otherwise elusive historical category such as that of postmodernism can in this way be caught in a constellation of products, namely the constellation of postmodern novels, being the  Besides Jonathan Franzen, I can surely mention, as Ercolino does, Zadie Smith and Roberto Bolaño, but also Marx Leyner and—as I do not include the quantitative length of the book in the decisive qualities of the literary phenomenon I am interested in—the Italian writer Pier Vittorio Tondelli, at least the novel Camere separate (Separate Rooms). However, what I have presented as the breakup of the “Epic I” as the legal principle of the novel, or at least its problematization, shows its effects in many other literary products, even far from what is generally taken as the postmodern cultural framework, as for example in Emmanuel Carrère’s non-fictional way to cross the line of the story with personal interventions, or in the obsession with which the narrator of Philip Roth’s American Pastoral lingers in the description of the technical production of leather gloves, as if it were the only firm point in the middle of the crumble of American history. 28

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latter—or rather, the difficulties with which they grew into a determinate literary form—the figure, in terms of philosophy of history, of an age that thinks of itself as a meaningless layering of illusions. In this operation, I have tried to stay true to the method applied by Szondi when he reads the formal development of modern drama. By applying to the form of the novel his Adornian approach to the relationship between literary form and history, my aim has been that of remaining “within the realm of aesthetics rather than branching out into a diagnosis of the period. The contradictions between dramatic form and the problems of contemporary life should not be set down in abstracto. Instead, they should be examined as technical contradictions, as ‘difficulties’, internal to the concrete work itself ” (Szondi 1987, p. 5).

References Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhaı ̆lovic. 1981. Epic and Novel. In M.M.  Bakhtin. The Dialogic Imagination. Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, 3–40. Austin: University of Texas Press. Benjamin, Walter. 1998. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Trans. J. Osborne. London/New York: Verso. ———. 2003. On the Concept of History. In W. Benjamin. Selected Writings. Volume 4. 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland, and Michael W.  Jennings, 389–400. Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press. ———. 2005. The Crisis of the Novel. In W.  Benjamin. Selected Writings. Volume 2, Part 1. 1927–1930, ed. Howard Eiland, Michael W. Jennings, and Gary Smith, 299–304. Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press. Bloom, Harold. 2003. Introduction. In Don DeLillo, ed. Herold Bloom, 1–3. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publisher. Bürger, Peter. 1987. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Trans. M. Shaw. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 1990. Adorno’s Anti-Avant-Gardism. Telos 86: 49–60. Campana, Francesco. 2019. The End of Literature, Hegel, and the Contemporary Novel. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Cook, Deborah. 2006. Adorno’s Critical Materialism. Philosophy & Social Criticism 32 (6): 719–737.

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de Vries, Willem A. 2008. Sense-Certainty and the “This-Such”. In Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. A Critical Guide, ed. Dean Moyar, and Michael Quante, 63–75. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. DeLillo, Don. 1988. Libra. New York: Viking. ———. 1997. Underworld. A Novel. New  York/London/Toronto/Sydney/ Singapore: Scribner. Duyfhuizen, Bernard. 2003. “Hushing Sick Transmissions”: Disrupting Story in The Crying of Lot 49. In  Thomas Pynchon, ed. Harold Bloom, 235–249. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publisher. Eichel, Christine. 1993. Vom Ermatten der Avantgarde zur Vernetzung der Künste: Perspektiven einer interdisziplinären Ästhetik im Spätwerk Theodor W. Adornos. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Ercolino, Stefano. 2014. The Maximalist Novel. From Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow to Roberto Bolaño’s 2666. Trans. A. Sbragia. New York/London/New Delhi/Sydney: Bloomsbury. Garelli, Gianluca. 2010. Lo spirito in figura. Il tema dell’estetico nella “Fenomenologia dello spirito” di Hegel. Bologna: il Mulino. Geulen, Eva. 2006. Adorno and the Poetics of Genre. In Adorno and Literature, ed. David Cunningham, and Nigel Mapp, 53–66. London/New York: Continuum. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1975. Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Art. Trans. T.M. Knox. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2018. The Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. T. Pinkard. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Heon, John. 2003. Surveying the Punch Line: Jokes and their Relation to the American Racial Unconscious/Conscience in Mason & Dixon and the Liner Notes to Spiked! In American Postmodernity. Essays on the Recent Fiction of Thomas Pynchon, ed. Ian D.  Copestake, 147–171. Oxford/Bern/Berlin/ Bruxelles/Frankfurt a. M./New York/Wien: Peter Lang. Herder, Johann Gottfried. 2006. Selected Writings on Aesthetics. Trans. G. Moore. Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press. Jarvis, Simon. 2004. Adorno, Marx, Materialism. In The Cambridge Companion to Adorno, ed. Thomas Huhn, 79–100. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Kafka, Franz. 2009. The Castle. Trans. A. Bell. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Karl, Frederick R. 2001. American Fictions 1980–2000. Whose America is it Anyway? Philadelphia: Xlibris.

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LeClair, Tom. 1989. The Art of Excess. Mastery in Contemporary American Fiction. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Leyner, Mark. 1990. My Cousin. My Gastroenterologist. New  York: Harmony Books. Lukács, György. 1971. The Theory of the Novel. A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature. Trans. Anna Bostock. London: The Merlin Press. Marx, Karl. 1990. The Capital. A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1. Trans. B. Fowkes. London/New York: Penguin. Moretti, Franco. 1996. Modern Epic. The World-System from Goethe to García Marquez. Trans. Q. Hoare. London: Verso. Paddison, Max. 1987. Adorno’s ‘Aesthetic Theory’. Music Analysis 6 (3): 355–377. ———. 1993. Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Pinkard, Terry. 2002. German Philosophy 1760–1860: The Legacy of Idealism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Proust, Marcel. 1992. In Search of Lost Time, 6 vols. Trans. C.K.S. Moncrieff, and T. Kilmartin, Rev. D.J. Enright. New York: The Modern Library. Pynchon, Thomas. 1966. The Crying of Lot 49. Philadelphia: Lippincott. ———. 2006. Gravity’s Rainbow. London/New York: Penguin. Rayner, Richard. 2010. Tuning Back in to ‘White Noise’. Los Angeles Times, January 3, 2010. Rebentisch, Juliane. 2003. Ästhetik der Installation. Suhrkamp: Frankfurt a. M. Schlegel, Friedrich. 1968. Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms. Trans. E.  Behler, and R.  Struc. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Szondi, Peter. 1987. Theory of Modern Drama. Trans. M. Hays. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2002. An Essay on the Tragic. Trans. P.  Flaming. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Wallace, David Foster. 1993. E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S.  Fiction. Review of Contemporary Fiction 13 (2): 151–194. ———. 1996. Infinite Jest. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. ———. 1998. A supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments. London: Abacus.

Index1

A

Addison, Joseph, 83n28 Agamben, Giorgio, 33n41, 36, 36n44, 37, 86 Allen, Graham, 171n38 Amis, Martin, 217n25 Anderson, Perry, 111 Argan, Giulio Carlo, 124, 124n25 Aristotle, 116n18, 147 B

Bachofen, Johann Jakob, 16, 16n18, 17, 32 Baeumler, Alfred, 16, 16n18, 17, 33 Bakhtin, Mikhail M., 195, 224 Balzac, Honoré de, 152, 156 Barthes, Roland, 169–171 Bataille, Georges, 42n48 Batteux, Charles, 115, 116n18

Baudelaire, Charles, 12, 31, 35–37, 72, 103, 127, 136 Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb, 83n28 Beckett, Samuel, 126, 126n27, 127, 164, 165, 167, 175, 180, 197, 198 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 63, 81–83, 81n24, 81n25, 81n26, 120 Behler, Ernst, 20n27, 158n21 Benjamin, Walter, 11, 11n13, 12, 12n14, 16n18, 17, 17n21, 21–23, 28–38, 31n38, 31n39, 33n41, 35n43, 36n44, 39n45, 40–46, 42n48, 44n50, 44n51, 54, 59, 59n8, 78, 98, 98n6, 114, 114n17, 132, 146n7, 158n21, 164, 177n47, 192, 192n4, 196, 196n13, 204, 206, 206n18

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2020 M. Farina, Adorno’s Aesthetics as a Literary Theory of Art, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45281-0

231

232 Index

Berg, Alban, 2, 72, 120n22, 121 Bergengruen, Werner, 71n16 Berio, Luciano, 55, 56 Berman, Art, 101n8 Bernstein, Jay M., 19n25, 116n19, 154n16 Bernulli, Carl A., 16n18 Bertram, Georg W., 96 Bloch, Brandon, 9n10 Bloch, Ernst, 6n6 Bloom, Harold, 218 Blumenfeld, Harold, 55n1 Boccioni, Umberto, 43 Böckelmann, Frank, 111n14 Bolaño, Roberto, 191, 226n28 Bosanquet, Bernard, 80n23 Boulez, Pierre, 67n13 Bourdieu, Pierre, 93, 100n7 Bowie, Andrew, 154n18 Bozzetti, Mauro, 82 Brecht, Bertolt, 29, 29n36, 35, 41, 126n27, 127, 133, 133n31, 148 Buben, Adam, 4 Buck-Morss, Susan, 2n1, 21n28, 33n41, 44, 45n53 Bulgakov, Mikhail A., 121 Burdach, Konrad, 192n4 Bürger, Peter, v, vi, 189n1 C

Cage, John, 67n13 Campana, Francesco, 190n2 Carrère, Emmanuel, 226n28 Carroll, Noël, 145–147 Cassirer, Ernst, 17n22 Cézanne, Paul, 102 Chaplin, Charles S., 180

Chua, Daniel K.L, 55n1 Clair, Jean, 122 Cohen, Stephen, 161n24 Colet, Louise, 173n42 Colletti, Lucio, 194n9 Cook, Deborah, 111n14, 116n19, 194n9 Cornelius, Hans, 3, 9, 9n10 Covach, John, 56 Croce, Benedetto, 42, 42n49, 80n23, 94, 94n2, 192, 192n4, 193 Cunningham, David, 151n13 D

D’Angelo, Paolo, 70n15 Danto, Arthur C., vii, 20, 85, 86, 95, 95n3, 97, 97n4, 104, 104–105n12, 105, 190n2 Davies, Peter, 16n18 Debord, Guy, 40, 40n47 DeLillo, Donald R., ix, 190, 200, 201, 205, 212, 217–222, 217n25, 226 Derrida, Jacques, 40n47, 154n18 deVries, Willem A., 193n7 Dewey, John, 122n24 Dickie, George, 85 Disney, Walter E., 44 Döblin, Alfred, 196 Duyfhuizen, Bernard, 206n18 E

Eggers, Dave, 217n25 Eichel, Christine, 192, 192n5 Eiland, Howard, 12n14, 31n39, 35n43, 42n48

 Index 

Eliade, Mircea, 16n18 Eliot, Thomas S., 146n7, 169, 170 Ercolino, Stefano, 190, 191, 191n3, 204n17, 219, 219n26, 226n28

233

Gottsched, Johann Christoph, 225 Gutiérrez Pozo, Antonio, 103n10 Guyer, Paul, 7, 19n25, 83n28 H

F

Farahmandpur, Ramin, 93 Farina, Mario, 19n26, 70n15, 124n25, 152n14 Feher, Ferenc, 12n14 Feloj, Serena, 71n17, 147n8 Flaubert, Gustave, 134, 173, 173n42 Formaggio, Dino, 22n29, 104, 124n25 Foster, Roger, 153n15 Foucault, Michel, 33n41 Fourier, Joseph, 72 Franze, Jonathan, 226n28 Freud, Sigmund, 17n22, 28, 39n45, 160, 177, 178, 178n48, 178n49 G

Garelli, Gianluca, 193n6 Gethmann-Siefert, Annemarie, 58n7, 70n15, 80n23 Geulen, Eva, viii, 80n23, 94, 100n7, 112n15, 125, 135, 136, 167n32, 192, 192n5 Geuss, Raymond, 145n6 Gibson, John, 145–147 Ginsberg, Allen, 174 Ginsborg, Hannah, 7n9 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 19, 121, 195n12, 205, 224 Gogol, Nikolai V., 200

Habermas. Jürgen, v, vn1, 35n42, 45, 111n14 Hall, Timothy, 2n1 Hamilton, Richard, 103 Hammer, Espen, vi Hampson, Daphne, 4 Hansen, Miriam, 43 Harding, James M., 13n16 Hartmann, Edward von, 80n23 Heath, Stephen, 209 Heidegger, Martin, 4 Helleu, Paul César, 118 Hellings, James, 79n22 Heon, John, 206n18 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 27n33, 224, 225 Hesiod, 146 Hirst, Damien, 9 Hitler, Adolf, 16, 55n3 Hobsbawm, Eric J., vi Hohendahl, Peter Uwe, 100n7, 108, 135 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 104, 129, 130, 135, 136, 159, 167, 173, 173n45, 175 Homer, 146, 196 Honneth, Axel, 24n30 Horkheimer, Max, vn1, 25, 25n31, 42, 43, 45, 45n52, 46, 66 Horney, Karen, 39n45 Howald, Ernst, 16n18 Hugo, Victor, 147

234 Index

Hulatt, Owen, 117n21 Hullot-Kentor, Robert, 4n5, 10n12, 28n35, 55n2, 62n10, 163n27 I

Iannelli, Francesca, 70n15 J

James, David, 133n30 Jameson, Fredric, v, 36n44, 39n45, 116n19, 133n31, 151n13 Jarvis, Simon, 39n45, 167n33, 194n9 Jay, Martin, 45n53 Jean Paul (Paul Friedrich Richter), 210, 210n19, 211n20 Jennings, Michael W., 12n14, 31n39, 35n43, 42n48 Jephcott, Edmund, 145n5 Jesi, Furio, 16n18 Jochmann, Carl Gustav, 114n17 Joyce, James, 151, 164, 173, 195n12, 198 Jung, Carl Gustav, 17n22, 35 Jünger, Ernst, 17n22 K

Kafka, Franz, 32, 175–183, 197, 198, 210, 223, 224 Kamenetsky, Christa, 27n33 Kant, Immanuel, 6–9, 7n9, 9n10, 9n11, 17–19, 23, 31, 145, 157, 192 Karl, Frederick R., 190, 191 Kelly, Theresa M., 96

Kennedy, John F., 218, 219 Kierkegaard, Søren Aabye, 3–23, 58, 68, 113n16, 152 Kivy, Peter, 83n28 Klages, Ludwig, 16n18, 17n22, 35, 35n42 Klasen, Isabelle, 126n27 Klee, Paul, 204 Klemperer, Victor, 27n33 Klimt, Gustav, 15 Klossowski, Pierre, 42n48 Köhler, Wolfgang, 82n27 Kornbluh, Anna, 161n24 Kracauer, Siegfried, 6n6 Kramer, Hilton, 102n9 Kraus, Karl, 28, 28n35, 102, 119, 135–137 Kroon, Frederick, 147n9, 148n9 L

Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 146 Lamarque, Peter, 144, 144n3, 145, 147n9 LeClair, Tom, 190, 191 Leeuw, Ton de, 56 Leonardo da Vinci, 9, 42 Leppert, Richard, 25 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 121, 147n8 Levi, Primo, 181 Levinson, Jerrold, vi, 170n37 Levinson, Marjorie, 161n24 Leyner, Mark, 215, 215n24, 226n28 Lichtenstein, Roy, 103 Lijster, Thijs, 13n15, 31n39, 44n50, 45, 104n12 London, Jack, 200

 Index 

235

Lukács, George, 34 Lukács, György, 1, 2, 11, 21–23, 40n47, 80, 127, 195, 195n11 Lyotard, Jean-François, v, 66, 101n8

Murawska-Muthesius, Katarzyna, 122n24 Musil, Robert, 223, 224 Mussolini, Benito, 67n14

M

N

Mallarmé, Stéphane, 169 Manet, Édouard, 15, 136 Mann, Klaus, 122n23, 135, 175, 181, 198 Mann, Thomas, 16, 16n18, 16n19, 16n20, 120–122 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 122 Marino, Stefano, 77n21, 96, 116 Marlowe, Christopher, 121 Marquard, Odo, 7, 7n8 Martin, Stewart, 125n26, 136, 143n1, 168n34 Marx, Karl, viiin3, 24, 32, 32n40, 38–40, 39n45, 45n53, 61n9, 62, 84, 85, 111, 149, 150, 194n9, 204, 221 Matteucci, Giovanni, 96, 116 Mautz, Kurt, 122n23 McBride, Patrizia C., 101n8 McLaren, Peter, 93 Melville, Herman, 195n12 Mendelssohn, Moses, 147n8 Menninghaus, Winfried, 71n17 Metzger, Heinz-Klaus, 55n4 Mikkonen, Jukka, 154n17 Mioyasaki, Donovan, 39n45 Monet, Claude Oscar, 117, 118 Moretti, Franco, 195 Müller-Doohm, Stephen, 2n1, 3n4, 6n6, 25n31, 31n39, 45n52, 120, 122n23

Nancy, Jean-Luc, 146 Nehamas, Alexander, vi Nicholsen, Shierry W., 163n27 Nicolai, Christoph F., 147n8 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 16, 16n20, 35n42, 45n53, 53–55, 60, 61, 70 Nitsch, Hermann, 14 Nono, Luigi, 67n13 Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), 20n27, 27 O

Oberhelmen, David D., 28n34 Olsen, Stein Haugom, 144n3 Ophälders, Markus, 81n26 P

Paddison, Max, 26n32, 55n1, 84, 86, 189n1, 194n8 Pensky, Max, 21n28 Picasso, Pablo, 43, 87n29, 103, 126 Pinkard, Terry, 15, 71n18, 172n41, 225n27 Piotrowski, Piotr, 122n24 Pippin, Robert B., 15n17 Pissarro, Camille, 109, 117 Plass, Ulrich, 144n2, 163n26, 171n39

236 Index

Plato, 146 Popper, Karl R., 75 Powers, Richard, 217n25 Proust, Marcel, 98n5, 117–120, 117n21, 123, 129, 130, 130n28, 133, 134, 151, 153n15, 154, 175, 197, 198, 214, 223, 224 Pynchon, Thomas, ix, 190, 191, 204–212, 226 R

Rayner, Richard, 217n25 Rebentisch, Juliana, 125n26, 192, 192n5 Reinhold, Karl L., 157n20 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste, 117, 118 Ritter, Joachim, 83n28 Roberts, David, 102 Robinson, Josh, ixn4, 159, 161n24, 173n43 Rosenkranz, Karl, 70, 72 Roth, Philip, 226n28 Ryan, Bartholomew, 11n13 S

Sachs, Harvey, 67n14 Saisselin, Rémy G., 116 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 165 Scährf, Christian, 163n26 Schiller, Friedrich, 18, 19, 19n24, 20n27 Schlegel, August Wilhelm, 20n27 Schlegel, Friedrich, 19, 26, 158n21, 158n22, 195, 195n10 Schmitt, Carl, 17n22

Scholem, Gershom, 36n44 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 19n25, 35n42 Scruton, Roger, vi, 64, 64n12 Seubold, Günter, 67n13, 87 Shakespeare, William, 225 Shusterman, Richard., 146n7 Sibelius, Jean, 74 Silverblatt, Michael., 202n16 Sisley, Alfred, 109, 117 Smith, Zadie, 191, 217n25, 226n28 Social, 145 Sophocles, 172, 225 Spengler, Oswald, 17n22 Spitzer, Michael, 81n26 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 67n13 Szondi, Peter, 18, 57n6, 59, 60, 127, 158, 200, 200n14, 227 T

Tagliaferro, Charles, 122n24 Tapié, Michel, 104 Tiedemann, Rolf, 81n25, 95, 126n27 Timpanaro, Sebastiano, 194n9 Tolkien, John R.R., 28, 28n34 Tolstoy, Leo, 144n3 Tondelli, Pier Vittorio, 226n28 V

Vacatello, Marzio, 111n14 Valéry, Paul, 76, 97, 98, 98n5, 123, 128, 136, 172 Volpacchio, Florindo, 120, 121n22 Voltolini, Alberto, 147n9, 148n9 Vries, Hent de, 28n35

 Index  W

Wagner, Richard, 29, 30, 40, 41, 75, 120n22, 136 Wallace, David F., ix, 201–203, 201n15, 202n16, 205, 212–218, 217n25, 220, 221, 223, 226 Warhol, Andy, 9, 97, 103 Weber, Max, 24, 24n30, 45n53 Webern, Anton, 66, 120n22 Weitzman, Erica., vin2 Wellmer, Albrecht, 35n42, 117n20, 155n19 Wenzel, Christian Helmut, 18n23 Whistler, James A. McNeill, 118 Whyman, Tom, 21n28 Williams, Robert R., 172n40 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 225

237

Witkin, Robert W., 55n1, 58, 74, 74n19, 77n21, 86 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 15 Wolfson, Susan, 161n24 Wolin, Richard, vi, 143 Wols (Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze), 103 Woolf, Virginia, 164 Y

Young, James O., 116n18 Z

Zappa, Frank, 77n21, 120, 120–121n22 Zola, Èmile, 148, 153 Zurletti, Sara, 74n19, 87