Benjamin and Adorno on Art and Art Criticism: Critique of Art 9789048531059

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction: Critique of Art
1. Autonomy and Critique
2. Ends of Art
Excursus I – The (N)everending Story
3. Experience, History, and Art
Excursus II – Base and Superstructure Reconsidered
4. The Art of Critique
Excursus III – Where is the Critic?
Conclusion
Appendix – Notes on a Camp
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Benjamin and Adorno on Art and Art Criticism

Benjamin and Adorno on Art and Art Criticism Critique of Art

Thijs Lijster

Amsterdam University Press

Cover design: Gijs Mathijs Ontwerpers, Amsterdam Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout Amsterdam University Press English-language titles are distributed in the US and Canada by the University of Chicago Press. isbn 978 94 6298 140 9 e-isbn 978 90 4853 105 9 (pdf) doi 10.5117/9789462981409 nur 640 | 654 © T. Lijster / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2017 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book.



Table of Contents

Acknowledgements 7 Abbreviations 9 Introduction: Critique of Art

11

1. Autonomy and Critique 1.1 Introduction 1.2 The birth of autonomy 1.3 The artist in the marketplace 1.4 Art versus society 1.5 Conclusion

19 19 24 31 50 65

2. Ends of Art 2.1 Introduction 2.2 Annihilation of semblance: Baroque allegory 2.3 Allegory and commodity 2.4 Proliferation of the aesthetic: technological reproducibility 2.5 Adorno’s dialectic of semblance 2.6 Culture industry: the social liquidation of art 2.7 Modernism: self-critique of semblance 2.8 Conclusion

71 71 72 81 87 96 98 107 119

Excursus I – The (N)everending Story 123 Hegel and the beginning of the end 124 Danto’s post-historical pluralism 129 Vattimo’s weak reality 136 Conclusion 142

3. Experience, History, and Art 3.1 Introduction 3.2 Benjamin’s concept of experience 3.3 Experience and history 3.4 Art history and monadology 3.5 Adorno: experience and mimesis 3.6 Natural history

147 147 148 158 169 177 189

3.7 The tendency of the material and the crystallization of the monad 194 3.8 Conclusion 199 Excursus II – Base and Superstructure Reconsidered 207 Struggling with a metaphor 208 A farewell to Marx 214 A parallax view on historical materialism 218 Conclusion 225 4. The Art of Critique 4.1 Introduction 4.2 Benjamin’s reading of the early German Romantics 4.3 Revolutionary criticism 4.4 An exemplary piece of criticism: Benjamin’s Goethe essay 4.5 Adorno’s immanent criticism 4.6 The necessity, and impossibility, of criticism 4.7 Adorno’s Mahler 4.8 Conclusion

229 229 230 236 250 259 267 277 286

Excursus III – Where is the Critic? 293 Rise and fall of the critic 294 Why criticism? 302 The critic as intellectual 306 Conclusion 311 Conclusion 313 ‘A distance, however close’ 313 The ‘actuality’ of Benjamin and Adorno 318 Critical models 322 Post-Fordism and the new spirit of capitalism 328 Becoming life versus resistance 333 Appendix – Notes on a Camp

339

Bibliography 351 Index 363

Acknowledgements Der arme Schlucker, der mit leerem Magen über den Büchern sitzt, wird erst durch ein Werk, das die Menschen aufsehen läßt, zu erweisen haben, daß er etwas anderes ist als ein Müßigganger. – Walter Benjamin

This book is an abridged version of my PhD dissertation. Therefore, I first of all want to thank the University of Groningen for giving me the opportunity to do the research that lies at the basis of this study. I also want to thank all my former colleagues at the Faculty of Philosophy, as well as my present colleagues at the Arts, Culture and Media department for providing me with such a stimulating working and research environment. I owe a lot to René Boomkens and Rudi Laermans for their help and guidance throughout the years. In 2010, a grant by the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds allowed me to spend some time at the New School for Social Research in New York, where I benefitted greatly from the comments of Jay Bernstein on draft versions of my chapters, as well as from his lectures on Kant’s third Critique. I thank the Boekman Stichting for encouraging me to find a publisher for my dissertation, by granting me with their triennial dissertation prize in 2015, and I thank my publisher, Amsterdam University Press, for the meticulous reviewing and editing process. I am very thankful for the comments by the reviewers, Anders Johansson and Holger Kuhn, which not only led to some important revisions, but, perhaps more importantly, opened some new paths to future research. The rewriting process was further stimulated by conversations with, among others, Fabian Freyenhagen, Josef Früchtl, René Gabriëls, Samir Gandesha, Pascal Gielen, Johan Hartle, Martin Jay, Leon ter Schure, Jan Sietsma, and Ruth Sonderegger. I also want to thank my friends and family, especially my wife Daniëlle, my son Ruben and my daughter Eline. This book is dedicated to my father and to the loving memory of my mother.

Abbreviations References to the writings of Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno are given first to the English translations (if available) and then to the German original. Where no English translation was available, translations are my own. With regard to the German original, roman numerals refer to Walter Benjamin (1974-1989) Gesammelte Schriften (I-VII), edited by R. Tiedemann and H. Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp); Arabic numbers refer to Theodor W. Adorno (1973-1986) Gesammelte Schriften (1-20), edited by G. Adorno, S. Buck-Morss, and R. Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp). For references to German texts not included in the Gesammelte Schriften and English translations, I have used the following abbreviations: ANS ABB ABC AP AT BB CI CM CWB DE

Theodor W. Adorno Nachgelassene Schriften, published by the Theodor W. Adorno Archiv. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin (1994) Briefwechsel 1928-1940, edited by H. Lonitz. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin (1999) The Complete Correspondence 1928-1940, translated by N. Walker. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Walter Benjamin (1999) The Arcades Project, translated by H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin. Cambridge MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Theodor W. Adorno (1997) Aesthetic Theory, translated by R. Hullot-Kentor. London: Continuum. Walter Benjamin (1966) Briefe (1-2), edited by G. Scholem and Th. W. Adorno (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp). Theodor W. Adorno (1991) The Culture Industry, edited by J. M. Bernstein. New York: Routledge. Theodor W. Adorno (1998) Critical Models, translated by H. W. Pickford. New York: Columbia University Press. Walter Benjamin (1994) The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, translated by M. R. Jabobson and E. M. Jacobson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer (2002) Dialectic of Enlightenment. Philosophical Fragments, translated by E. Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

10 

EM HTS INH

ISM ISW M MM ND NL O P PNM QF SW

Benjamin and Adorno on Art and Art Criticism

Theodor W. Adorno (2002) Essays on Music, edited by R. Leppert. Berkeley: University of California Press. Theodor W. Adorno (1993) Hegel. Three Studies, translated by S. Weber Nicholsen Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Theodor W. Adorno (2006) ‘The Idea of Natural History’, translated by R. Hullot-Kentor. In: R. HullotKentor (2006) Things Beyond Resemblance. Collected Essays on Theodor W. Adorno. New York: Columbia University Press. 252-269. Theodor W. Adorno (1976) Introduction to the Sociology of Music, translated by E. B. Ashton. New York: Seabury Press. Theodor W. Adorno (1971) In Search of Wagner, translated by R. Livingstone. London: Verso. Theodor W. Adorno (1992) Mahler. A Musical Physiognomy, translated by E. Jephcott. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Theodor W. Adorno (1974) Minima Moralia. Reflections on a Damaged Life, translated by E. Jephcott. London: Verso. Theodor W. Adorno (1963) Negative Dialectics, translated by E. B. Ashton. London: Continuum. Theodor W. Adorno (1991-92) Notes to Literature (1-2), translated by S. Weber Nicholsen. New York: Columbia University Press. Walter Benjamin (1977) The Origin of German Tragic Drama, translated by J. Osborne. London: NLB. Theodor W. Adorno (1981) Prisms, translated by S. and S. Weber. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Theodor W. Adorno (2006) Philosophy of New Music, translated by R. Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Theodor W. Adorno (1992) Quasi una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music, translated by R. Livingstone. London: Verso. Walter Benjamin (1996-2003), Selected Writings (1-4), edited by M. Jennings et al., translated by E. Jephcott et al. Cambridge MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.



Introduction: Critique of Art Digressions, incontestably, are the sun-shine; – they are the life, the soul of reading; – take them out of this book, for instance; – you might as well take the book along with them. – Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

When, soon after the financial crisis of 2008, several European governments announced plans to cut budgets for art and culture, a heated public debate erupted. The opinion pages in newspapers, and blogs, overflowed with comments from all kinds of people – everyone from representatives of the cultural sector (such as curators, actors, critics and so on) to philosophers, and from politicians to ‘the man in the street’ – arguing for, or against, the need for art in society. All sorts of demonstrations were organized against the budget cuts, for instance in Italy, Hungary, and the Netherlands. Opponents of the cuts had it that art promotes civilization and solidarity, or brings us into contact with something higher, or with ourselves; that it is a mirror of society, or simply part of our tradition, and for all these reasons deserves government support. Cutting subsidies was considered to be nothing other than a one-way ticket to barbarism. Meanwhile, supporters of the cuts asked why taxpayers should support the extravagance or ‘hobbies’ of others, or should promote works of art that the general public considered incomprehensible, obscure, or downright banal. Atonal music and avant-garde works such as Duchamp’s urinal often functioned as whipping-boys for their arguments. What was most striking in this public discussion was how difficult it seemed to be to come up with decisive arguments about why art mattered. The autonomy of art, which was dearly won in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, now presented itself as a problem: artists and art enthusiasts seemed unable to provide a raison d’être for what, to them, was evidently valuable. Thus, they unwillingly confirmed the opening lines of Theodor W. Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (1970): ‘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’ (AT, 1; 7, 9). Adorno was pointing up a crisis in art and aesthetics – a crisis one might describe, following art theorist Jean-Marie Schaeffer, as a legitimation crisis.1 In my view, this crisis has by no means ended since Adorno wrote Aesthetic Theory. If anything, it has gotten larger 1

Schaeffer (2000), 3.

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and larger, as the debate on subsidies shows. Ever since art emancipated itself from church and state, it has seemed to flail around without a function, while attempts by philosophers and the historical avant-gardes to provide it with a new one have failed. Artists, philosophers, critics and the public have often considered art’s unbridled freedom a mixed blessing: the lack of guiding principles and the sense that ‘anything goes’ raise questions about the value, function and responsibility of art in society. This is precisely why the same question comes up again and again in the course of modernity: Why art? It is this question around which the present study navigates, although I certainly do not claim to provide the reader with a definitive answer. This question of the function of, and the need for, art can be approached in many ways, but in my view it can never be merely an empirical question. Although sociological research into the actual function of art in people’s lives is certainly of interest to me, I am primarily concerned here with the philosophical question of how this function should be considered. My guides in approaching this question are two German philosophers and critics from the early and middle twentieth century, Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) and Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969). This book is largely an investigation into their work, and into the relations between them. Undoubtedly, their theories are among the most interesting and sophisticated in twentieth-century philosophy of art and art criticism. But, one may ask, why not choose others who, it could be argued, have equal status, such as Georg Lukács or Martin Heidegger, or later thinkers such as Roland Barthes or Jacques Derrida? There are several reasons. First, there are few philosophers who were more acutely aware of the shifts in the social function and significance of art in their time. The interaction between these thinkers – which is documented in their lively correspondence as well as in essays in which they respond to each other – ushers in some of the most crucial and fascinating discussions taking place at the crossroads of aesthetics and politics: on the relation between art and historical experience, between avant-garde art and mass culture, and between the intellectual and the public, to name but a few. Second, I believe that their work contains certain elements that have been forgotten, neglected or perhaps been too quickly dismissed in contemporary art theory. They emphasize the utopian, emancipatory and critical potential of art – that is, the ability of the work of art to break through, at least momentarily, the mythic veil that capitalism has cast over society. The work of art, they argue, allows us to view history and society in a different light. It is, in their view, nothing less than a bearer of truth. This truth, however, is accessible only through art criticism. The art critic can thus be said, as Benjamin puts it, to ‘complete’ the work of art. These

Introduc tion: Critique of Art

13

ideas, which were central to Benjamin’s and Adorno’s work – art as a form of (social) critique, art as a bearer of truth, and art criticism as a condition for disclosing this truth – are not the kinds of idea that are particularly en vogue today.2 I deem them crucial, however, to the belief that works of art have something to say to us. This already points to the subtitle of the present book. It can be read in three ways, each referring to a separate aspect. In the first place, a ‘critique of art’ can be read in the Kantian sense, namely as an investigation into the boundaries of what art can say or do. In my view, these boundaries are socially and historically determined. That also means that I regard the question that is traditionally central to aesthetics, namely ‘What is Art?’, as secondary to the question of what art does, that is, of how it functions in the world and why it is important. Here I should mention that, when I speak of art, I have in mind not just the visual arts but also literature and music, which play a prominent part in the writings of Benjamin and Adorno. The second way in which the subtitle can be read already betrays my hypothesis regarding art’s function. As I will argue, art can and should be conceived of as social critique. In arguing this, I am not primarily addressing artists, or urging them to produce so-called ‘committed’ art and criticize social or political structures. Rather, I want to address theorists of art, and to argue that art should be interpreted as critique and should be granted the social and historical significance it still deserves. This is not to say, of course, that theorists should ascribe meanings to works of art in any way they please. As I will argue, by putting itself in a reciprocal and transformative relation to the singular work of art, art criticism can function as an ‘interpreter’ of that work of art and as a ‘medium’ between it and society. And this brings me to the third meaning of the subtitle. ‘Critique of art’ refers not only to art criticizing, but also to art that is criticized, namely by art criticism. The German word Kritik can mean both philosophical and social critique, as well as literary and art criticism. Although some theorists argue that these two meanings have nothing in common aside from their etymological root, I will argue that, at least for Benjamin and Adorno, they are inseparably connected. The ‘critique of art’ depends on art criticism, and hence art criticism is also a form of critique. The first objective of this study, then, is to shed new light on the work of Benjamin and Adorno, and the relations between their work. To be sure, much has already been written about the famous ‘Benjamin-Adorno 2 Nevertheless, in recent years the idea of politically committed art has enjoyed something of a renaissance. I will come back to this point in the conclusion.

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dispute’ or ‘debate’. Their differences of opinion about the utopian potential of mass culture, for instance, are textbook knowledge and are part of every introduction to cultural or media theory. However, despite the familiarity of this discussion, and arguably even because it has turned into something of a caricature of itself, the precise details of their relationship have hardly been explored. Although their correspondence is elaborately discussed by Susan Buck-Morss and Richard Wolin, for instance, neither of them takes into account Adorno’s post-war writings, most notably Aesthetic Theory.3 Smaller studies have explored and compared their views on specific subjects, such as philosophical form, photography, and surrealism.4 A systematic comparison between these two philosophers, however, has yet to be written. The present study will not be able to fill this void completely, since it is primarily concerned with Benjamin’s and Adorno’s views on aesthetics and art criticism. More specifically, I will discuss how they address three problems: the ‘end of art’, the problem of the relation between art and history, and the problem of the relation between art and criticism. Although my investigation will also lead me to their philosophies of history and theories of experience, other domains which would deserve further research fall outside the scope of this book, such as their philosophies of language and their moral philosophy. The literature on Benjamin and Adorno has focused primarily on the differences between them – their so-called ‘controversy’ or ‘dispute’. They are often set off one against the other, as the representatives of two opposite sides in a debate on mass culture versus elite culture, the one mounting a ‘rescuing’ critique, the other an ideology critique (Habermas), or a discontinuous as opposed to a teleological (Hegelian) view of history. Furthermore, there is a certain tendency, as Michael Steinberg has observed, to see their relationship as similar to that between Mozart and Salieri, in the sense that Adorno is considered to be the stubborn theoretician fettering the tragic brilliance of Benjamin.5 Now, obviously, the differences between these philosophers are considerable, and in the following chapters I will provide a detailed discussion of 3 Buck-Morss (1977), Wolin (1994), Chapter 6. 4 See Weber Nicholsen (1999), Chapters 4 and 5, and Wolin (1997). Some other studies, essays and volumes in which aspects of their thinking are compared are Kaiser (1974), Chapter 1 of Hanssen (1998), Hullot-Kentor (2006) and several of the contributions in Ross (2015). 5 Pensky (1993), 227 (Pensky refers to an unpublished manuscript by Steinberg). In an even more striking simile, Giorgio Agamben compares Adorno to a witch who turns the ‘prince of history’ into a frog with the ‘magic wand of dialectical historicism’, while Benjamin is the fair maiden kissing the frog and thus bringing the prince back to life. See Agamben (1993), 133. I will discuss Agamben’s view of the Benjamin-Adorno dispute in Chapter 3.

Introduc tion: Critique of Art

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them. However, in focusing on these differences and disputes, many theorists have tended to overlook the considerable similarities between their theories, thus failing to appreciate the close collaboration and ‘philosophical friendship’ they themselves spoke of in their letters. In this study, I will regard the relationship between Benjamin and Adorno less as a ‘dispute’, and more in terms of this philosophical friendship and the mutual influence it entailed. Moreover, Benjamin’s influence did not end with his untimely death in 1940. I agree with Britta Scholze’s argument that Benjamin, more than any other philosopher, is explicitly or implicitly present in each and every one of Adorno’s writings.6 In my attempt to bring them closer to one another, I will read the one through the other. This means that, even when they are not explicitly referring to each other, using the same philosophical terminology, or conversing with each other, one can still conceive of their texts as addressing the same problems.7 These problems are the ones I have referred to above, and they define the structure of this book. The first chapter, ‘Autonomy and Critique’, is a historical and sociological prelude to the philosophical problem that is my main concern: that of the function of, and the need for, art in society. I will provide a short ‘genealogy’ of the autonomy of both art practices and theory, starting with the genesis of the discourse on autonomy in the eighteenth century. Using examples of nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century art that Benjamin and Adorno also addressed, this chapter also functions as a historical contextualization of their aesthetic theories (although I do not explicitly discuss those theories here). The second chapter, ‘Ends of Art’, is concerned with the most famous of Adorno’s and Benjamin’s ‘disputes’, about the latter’s essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’ (1936). That essay, I will show, does not stand on its own, but draws on many themes in his early work, most notably from his book on German Baroque drama. Taking into account the context of Benjamin’s work-of-art essay, I will argue that his ‘dispute’ with Adorno is not essentially about mass culture, but rather about the ‘end of art’. I thus investigate how the idea of the end, or ‘liquidation’, of art, as both philosophers sometimes call it, functions in their works. The end of art can mean two things for both: first, the immanent dissolution 6 Scholze (2000), 33. Benjamin himself once said to his cousin Egon Wissing that ‘Adorno was my only disciple’. See Eiland and Jennings (2014), 359. 7 I am aware that such a ‘homogenizing’ way of reading is out of step with the times, especially considering the theoretical reflections on ‘oeuvre’ and ‘authorship’ by theorists such as Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. Nevertheless, I believe it to be a fruitful strategy for reconsidering and rereading certain texts by Benjamin and Adorno.

16 

Benjamin and Adorno on Art and Art Criticism

of the semblance of the work of art and, second, the proliferation of the aesthetic brought about by technological reproduction. Their debate on the work-of-art essay ultimately comes down to the way they perceive the relation between these two ‘versions’ of the end of art. After having concluded in Chapter 2 that art still has a historical role to play, I will investigate how Benjamin and Adorno regard the relation between art and history in the third chapter, ‘Experience, History, and Art’. They conceive of the work of art as a repository of experience: the way in which people perceive and interact with their world and with one another is recorded in works of art. Art, in other words, is a medium of experience. However, since experience is, in their view, subject to historical change, works of art are also a form of ‘unconscious historiography’, as Adorno puts it. They even argue that modernist art should be understood as expressing the experience of the impossibility of experience in modernity. This impossibility of experience is caused by an alienation and a reification of consciousness, which also affect our conception of history itself. Much has been written about Benjamin’s critique of the concept of historical ‘progress’, but Adorno is still often considered an inverted Hegelian who regards history as an unstoppable process of decline. As we will see, however, his philosophy of history draws heavily from Benjamin’s, and a fresh reading of it may also shed new light on his philosophy of art history – most notably, his notorious theory of the ‘tendency of the musical material’. In the fourth chapter, ‘The Art of Critique’, I will show that, according to both Benjamin and Adorno, art criticism is essential both for the ontological existence of works of art and for our experience of them. Both philosophers conceive of works of art as essentially unfinished and fragmentary, and hold that the objective of art criticism is to ‘complete’ the work. This implies that, even though art still has social and historical significance, it can have this significance only if it is interpreted and criticized. I will point to the similarities and differences between their concepts of criticism, which I will illustrate through a close reading of their texts on Goethe and Mahler. In each chapter, I will discuss Benjamin and Adorno side by side. Thus, the book is structured somewhat like a fugue, in which a subject is stated and then counter-stated in a dialogic and contrapuntal way, enhancing and contributing to its progressive development. Any discussion of the writings of these thinkers themselves demands an almost musical structuring, as it were, with the same themes and lines recurring in different registers. All their philosophical concepts are linked to each other, and often have a slightly different meaning, depending on the contexts in which they occur. Benjamin once wrote in a letter that he had ‘never been able to do research and think

Introduc tion: Critique of Art

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in any sense other than […] a theological one, namely, in accord with the Talmudic teaching about the forty-nine levels of meaning in every passage of Torah’ (CWB, 372; BB 2, 524). Benjamin’s writings, like those of Adorno, demand an almost Talmudic way of reading and interpreting, in which every concept changes according to the passages they are compared with or the problems they are confronted with. And, though I try to do justice to the aesthetic side of their works, any presentation of Benjamin’s and Adorno’s ideas will inevitably tend to obscure the literary and essayistic aspects of those works, necessarily treating them as content taken out of their form. Again, in emphasising the close affinity between Benjamin’s and Adorno’s theories, I do not mean to obscure their differences. I will discuss these at the end of each chapter, as well as in the conclusion to this book. There is a ‘distance, however close’ between the two philosophers, as Shierry Weber Nicholsen puts it in reference to Benjamin’s definition of the aura – that is, differences so subtle that they themselves sometimes overlook them.8 Only by putting our finger on these differences, can we recognize the full extent to which their theories overlap. But, as I have suggested above, my attempts to bring Benjamin and Adorno closer are borne not merely of historical interest. There are strategic reasons, too, to reread their work. These reasons comprise the second overall objective of my study: to show that Benjamin’s and Adorno’s theories, taken together despite the differences between them, could contribute to contemporary debates taking place at the crossroads of aesthetics and politics. I like to think of this strategic reading in terms of a metaphor of Plato, from his dialogue Phaedrus, where he compares the human soul to a charioteer who is driving a chariot. The chariot is being pulled along by two winged horses, which are, however, quite different in temperament, and sometimes wish to go in opposite directions. Benjamin and Adorno too, have their differences, of course, in terms of both opinions and their character, and their work often goes in opposite directions. At the moment, however, I think it is of greater importance to investigate to what extent their thoughts move in the same overall direction. In his Arcades Project, Benjamin writes: ‘The events surrounding the historian, and in which he himself takes part, will underlie his presentation in the form of a text written in invisible ink’ (AP, 476; V/1, 595). In other words, the phenomena the historian writes about, and the way they write about them, are influenced by the time in which they live. That is certainly the case for the present study. I have done my research on Benjamin’s and Adorno’s work, not out of pure historical interest, but based on the 8

Weber Nicholsen (1999), 222.

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assumption that their theories are still topical. However, I will be of more service to the reader than the Benjaminian historian by making visible the inscription of the present. This is why I have included, between the main chapters, which are historical and exegetical, three smaller essays. I have called these excursuses, because they digress from the straight path that an academic study would standardly be expected to take. In each excursus, the issue I have just discussed in the preceding chapter is transferred to our own time and examined in light of more-recent debates. In the first excursus, I will show how the ‘end of art’ debate reocurred at the end of the twentieth century, after a whole series of end-of… debates that came along with postmodernism. I will discuss how it has been conceived of by several authors, most famously Arthur Danto and Gianni Vattimo. Both of these thinkers, however, neglect crucial aspects of the ‘end of art’ discussion in Benjamin’s and Adorno’s work. This allows them to conceive of the end of art as an accomplished fact, instead of a historical chance, as the latter do. But this also means that they cannot account for the need for art in people’s lives, and for our society – surely a crucial matter. The second excursus starts from a problem with which we find ourselves confronted at the end of the third chapter: how the artwork relates to history. I will discuss the most notorious historical answer to this question: the base-superstructure model. Although this model has been rightfully criticized, especially the dogmatic variants of it, I look at whether there may still be something to it. By using Benjamin’s and Adorno’s ‘monadology’, which I discuss in the third chapter, I attempt to combine historical materialism with what psychoanalytic theory calls the ‘parallax view’. The third excursus, finally, deals with an altogether different problem, the role of the intellectual, and most notably that of the art critic. Recently, there has been much debate about the ‘crisis’ of, or the death or disappearance of, criticism caused by democratization and the loss of aesthetic standards. Drawing on Benjamin’s and Adorno’s views on art criticism, which I discuss in the fourth chapter, I will argue that the art critic still has an important public role to play in contemporary society. The excursuses are written in a style somewhat different from that of the main chapters, and are more experimental, adventurous and speculative than they are. They are just first attempts, in the way of hints, to make Benjamin’s and Adorno’s thoughts fruitful for certain contemporary debates. Juxtaposing past and present, academic form with essay, and historical exegesis with experiment, I follow Benjamin’s observation, ‘method is digression’ (O, 28; I/1, 208). However, I will leave it up to the reader to determine which parts constitute the real digression.

1.

Autonomy and Critique I! I who called myself a seer or an angel, exempt from all morality, I am restored to the earth, with a duty to seek, and rugged reality to embrace! Peasant! – Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell

1.1 Introduction 11 April 1727: At about half past one in the afternoon, in the town of Leipzig, people gather in the Church of Saint Thomas for Good Friday vespers. It is not the first time they have been to church today: this morning they have already been to the Lutheran Mass. It is quiet in the city: the town gates are closed for the day, and iron chains keep traffic away from around the Church. The people take their seats, and the service starts with the singing of the hymn Da Jesus an dem Kreuze stund. The church organ and the orchestra then strike up a beautiful but sad piece, in which two four-part choirs sing of mourning and despair: Kommt, ihr Töchter, helft mir klagen. Suddenly, from above the altar, a third choir of boy sopranos answers with the hopeful and comforting sound of a familiar hymn: O Lamm Gottes, unschuldig. After this choral opening, the story of the Passion according to Saint Matthew is told. It has been set to music by the local cantor, Johann Sebastian Bach, who has been providing the community of Leipzig with new religious music every week for over five years. The churchgoers know the biblical texts and the chorales by heart. The other texts, written by Picander (the pen name of Christian Friedrich Henrici, the postmaster general), consist of reflections on the Gospel written from the perspective of the community of believers. Both Bach’s music and Picander’s libretto seek to remind the congregation that the suffering of Christ does not lie in the distant past but is happening here and now, in the heart of every individual believer. Between the two parts of the Passion, the minister gives a sermon that lasts about an hour. After the second part, when the last notes of the final chorus have slowly died away, the congregation keeps its solemn silence. The motet Ecce quomodo moritur by Jacob Handl is performed, followed by the offertory and the benediction. Finally, after the singing of the hymn Nun danket alle Gott, the service draws to a close. It is getting dark outside, and the people go back home to have a light meal. They will come back to the church yet again later in the evening.

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Wednesday, 11 March 1829: The beau monde of Berlin gathers in the afternoon at the Singakademie at Unter den Linden to attend a concert by the talented young conductor Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy. It is the event of the year, if not of the decade. It has been the talk of the town for weeks, and all the newspapers and journals have announced and written about it. The work to be performed this afternoon is, as a prominent critic has called it, ‘the greatest work of our greatest master, the greatest and holiest musical work of all peoples, the great Passion music of Matthew the Evangelist by Johann Sebastian Bach’. It has not been performed since Bach’s death, almost 80 years ago. Over a thousand people enter the concert hall, among them royalty, nobility, and intellectuals such as the philosophers Hegel, Schleiermacher, and Humboldt, and the poet Heinrich Heine. Another thousand have to be turned away. On stage are an orchestra, a choir of over 150 singers (more than 6 times the combined size of the choirs that performed in the Church of Saint Thomas in 1727), and the most famous and celebrated soloists of the Royal Opera House. Mendelssohn has been practicing with them for weeks. He has changed the score to accommodate the use of modern instruments, and has cut ten arias, seven choruses and a few chorales to bring the performance down to the standard length of a concert: about two hours. The audience knows the story of Christ’s suffering, of course, but it has no understanding of the Passion tradition. Once the music starts, they marvel at the beauty and intensity of this forgotten piece. The concert is a resounding success, according to both the audience and the critics (with the exception of Heine, who said he had come out ahead because he had paid a guilder but had got a thaler’s worth of boredom from the experience). The critic Ludwig Rellstab calls it ‘an artistic event of the highest importance’; another critic says it presages ‘a new and higher period of music’. That evening, a festive dinner is held in honour of Mendelssohn and Bach. In the months to follow, the Saint Matthew Passion is performed again in Berlin and Frankfurt.1 One piece of music, two very different performances. What has changed in the hundred years or so that lie between them? All the specific differences – the size and placement of the orchestra and of the audience, the ceremony and the etiquette, the setting, the ambience, and even the different days of the week on which the performance take place – actually boil down to one key difference: in the first case, people are attending a 1 For these reconstructions, I have used the following sources: Applegate (2005), Boyd (2000), Stiller (1970) and Wolff (2000).

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religious service; in the second, a concert. In the first, the music is fully embedded in the liturgy, and is thus performed and experienced as such. Those in attendance are not an audience but a congregation. In the second case, people come to hear Bach’s music, and this music is enjoyed for its own sake. To put it more strongly: in the second case we are dealing with a work of art, in the specific sense that I will elaborate below, whereas in the first case we are not. According to Karol Berger, one sin endemic to the philosophy of art is to speak of art ahistorically.2 We tend to conceptualize and analyse art without realizing that the concept is only about two hundred and fifty years old. Of course, everyone is aware of, and recognizes, the ways works of art have changed throughout history, but what we tend to neglect are the shifts in the very concept of art and the different ways in which this concept has functioned in different eras. We speak of art and beauty in general terms, in the tradition of Kant, who in his Critique of Judgment (1790) mentions hardly any specific artists or works of art and neglects art history altogether. The silent premise behind this sin is that we can have a concept of art that covers all art from all periods, from ancient Greek vases and Christian icons to modern paintings, and from Palestrina’s masses to Mahler’s symphonies. The first philosophers to point out the importance of art history for theorizing the concept of art were nineteenth-century German philosophers such as Herder, Schlegel, Schelling, and Hegel. Although Hegel still employed a general definition of artistic beauty as ‘the sensuous semblance of the idea’, he acknowledged that the nature of the ideas expressed and the way in which they are expressed differ across periods and cultures.3 Art, in Hegel’s view, is the expression of the way cultures look at themselves. Hence, he considered art history an essential part of the ‘science of art’, as he described it in the prologue to his Lectures on Aesthetics (1835). Moreover, Hegel argued that art has a specific historical function, which makes it a necessary element of spiritual life during a certain phase in world history, though it will become more or less superfluous later on. 4 The lesson to be learned from Hegel and the Romantics is that our concept of art today differs as much from, say, Aristotle’s as does our concept of ‘movement’ from his, primarily because both the objects we are referring to and the concepts we are using have different functions at different times. 2 3 4

Berger (2002), 109. Hegel (1970), I, 151. This is, of course, the famous thesis of the ‘end of art’, upon which I will elaborate below.

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Greek temples or vases, for instance, were in their own time not considered works of art, at least not in our sense of the word. The same goes for an earlyChristian icon, a madrigal from the Middle Ages, or an African mask.5 When these objects were created, their social function differed radically from the function they have today, or that contemporary art has. We should subscribe to the dictum of Fredric Jameson: ‘Always historicize!’ Jameson calls it the one absolute and ‘transhistorical’ imperative.6 This applies especially to such a hybrid, contested concept such as ‘art’. The concept of art, as we know it, is not self-evident; the social function of art has changed over the years and is changing still. A genealogy of art will neither validate nor dismiss the present concept and social function of art, because unveiling the historical process behind a phenomenon is an argument neither for nor against it. However, by locating certain shifts in the social function of art and pinpointing the specific historical conditions that have informed them, we can gain a better understanding of the social function of art in our time. Of course, my interest is not purely historical: I aim to continue what Benjamin calls a ‘telescoping of the past through the present’ (AP, 471; V/1, 588), by which he meant that our image of the past is as much determined by the present as our understanding of the present is determined by the past. As many theorists have argued, the most important shifts in the concept and function of art took place at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, when art became ‘autonomous’.7 The autonomy of art is of course a difficult and multi-faceted concept. It can refer to many things, such as the autonomy of the concept of art, the autonomy of the aesthetic experience or judgment, the autonomy of art as an institution, the autonomy of the artist, and the autonomy of the work of art. One could tell a story about each of these distinct autonomies, but in my view it is more interesting to show how they have arisen and how each has influenced the others. The idea of the autonomy of art is traditionally opposed to the idea that art has a moral or political function. This chapter also discusses the idea of 5 As André Malraux famously wrote: ‘The Middle Ages were as unaware of what we mean by the word ‘art’ as were Greece and Egypt, who had no word for it. For this concept to come into being, works of art needed to be isolated from their functions. What common link existed between a ‘Venus’ which was Venus, a crucifix which was Christ crucified, and a bust? But three ‘statues’ can be linked together’ (Malraux (1978), 158). 6 Jameson (1981), 9. 7 See, for instance, Bürger (1984), Schmidt (1989), Bell-Villada (1996), Berger (2002), and Woodmansee (1994).

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art as critique, of so-called ‘committed’ art. Historically, these two ways of viewing art and artistic life – as autonomous or as critically engaged – have been alternately dominant, sometimes coexisting peacefully, but often diametrically opposed to each other. Art was either said to be, in Oscar Wilde’s famous words, ‘quite useless’, or held to be, in a Marxist phrase of disputed origin, ‘not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.’ As we will see, however, the relation between these two different viewpoints is somewhat more complex than this apparently simple either/ or would seem to suggest. I will start by discussing the birth of the concept of autonomy in eighteenth- and early‑nineteenth-century aesthetics, most notably in the work of Kant and Schiller. Their theories mark the beginning of the idea of autonomous art, and have been a constant inspiration for the different ‘art for art’s sake’ movements throughout history. Simultaneously, however, their theories form the basis for modern thinking about a critical or moral function of art. Historical, social and economic conditions help explain how Kant’s and Schiller’s theories found such a large audience. In the second part of this chapter, I will sketch the way in which the notion of ‘art for art’s sake’ found its way into nineteenth-century artistic life. Kant and Schiller’s ideas resonated among artists who found themselves caught between a situation of courtly or clerical patronage on the one hand, and the new free market on the other. Through a discussion of literary life in Paris that focuses primarily on Charles Baudelaire, and of musical life in Vienna, focusing on Mozart and Beethoven, we will see how the artistic market changed the position of the artist, and how both theorists and the public conceived of art and the artist. In the third part of this chapter, I will pinpoint the shifts in the concept of art during the early twentieth century, again in Paris and Vienna, by discussing the Surrealist movement and the work of the composer Arnold Schoenberg. The choice of Paris and Vienna is by no means arbitrary. These cities, each in their own way, have been crucial for the thought of the protagonists in this study. Walter Benjamin visited Paris many times before living there, in exile, from 1933 until his death in 1940. The Surrealist movement, based in Paris, had a decisive influence on his thinking, while the city, as well as its famous inhabitant Baudelaire, was the primary research subject of his last years. Adorno spent several years in Vienna, taking classes in musical composition with Alban Berg and studying piano with Eduard Steuermann, both of whom were disciples of Arnold Schoenberg. Adorno wrote books on Beethoven, Mahler, Schoenberg, and Berg, and for many years the music of the Second Viennese School was the epitome, for him, of autonomous

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art. Hence, although I do not refer directly to Benjamin and Adorno in this chapter, they will already figure in the background.

1.2

The birth of autonomy

The eighteenth century saw the birth of our modern concept of art. In the Middle Ages, and up until the end of the seventeenth century, the various disciplines of what we would today call art fell into two categories: the artes mechanicae and the artes liberales. Painting and sculpture belonged to the former, together with the other crafts and applied arts. The seven liberal arts, which actually also comprised what we today call sciences, were further divided into two categories, each with its own subcategories: three sciences of the word, grammatica, retorica and dialectica, and four of the number: aritmetica, geometria, astronomia and musica. Crafts, arts, and sciences were thus classified quite differently from how they are classified today.8 In the course of the seventeenth century, this order was gradually replaced by a separation between arts and sciences on the one hand, and the new distinction between applied (or mechanical) arts and ‘fine’ arts on the other. An important step towards a concept of art (as distinguished from the plural ‘arts’) was an essay by the Abbé Charles Batteux, The Fine Arts Reduced to a Single Principle (1746). As the title indicates, Batteux subsumed the different arts – music, poetry, painting, sculpture and dance – under ‘fine arts’, based on the principle that they give pleasure without having an external purpose.9 Following Batteux, a number of German philosophers reflected on the concept of art, and sought to separate and free it from any external purpose it might serve. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, in his Laocoön (1766), writes: I should like the name of ‘works of art’ to be reserved for those alone in which the artist could show himself actually as artist, in which beauty has been his first and last object. All the rest, in which too evident traces of religious ritual appear, are unworthy of the name, because Art here has not wrought on her own account, but has been an auxiliary of religion, looking in the material representations which she made of it more to the significant than to the beautiful.10 8 Heinich (1996a), 12. 9 Woodmansee (1994), 13. 10 Lessing in Bernstein (ed., 2003), 64-65.

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Karl Philipp Moritz published two important texts, Attempt at a Unification of All the Fine Arts and Sciences Under the Concept of That Which is Perfect in Itself (1785) and On the Artistic Imitation of the Beautiful (1788), in which he ascribed intrinsic value to the fine arts. Moritz characterized works of art as ‘self-sufficient totalities’ and linked beauty to uselessness: For the concept of the useless, insofar as it has no end, no purpose outside itself for which it exists, is the closest and most willing to connect up to the concept of the beautiful insofar as the beautiful does not need an end, a purpose for existing, except itself, but finds its whole worth, the end of its existence, within itself.11

Three decades earlier, Alexander Baumgarten had published the two volumes of his Aesthetica (1750–58), in which he first uses the term ‘aesthetics’ in its modern meaning. ‘Aesthetics’ was up until then known as the science of perception. This is the sense in which we can find the term in the work of Descartes and still in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781). With Baumgarten, aesthetics becomes the name of the philosophical discipline specifically concerned with the beautiful.12 The notion of an autonomous domain of art was slowly but surely developing in the minds of late‑eighteenth‑century philosophers, of whom Immanuel Kant was undoubtedly the most important. The work of Kant marks a turning point and a true ‘Copernican revolution’ in many branches of philosophy – and his writing on aesthetics was no exception. His Critique of Judgment is a key text of modern aesthetics, introducing or systematically elaborating such notions as ‘disinterestedness’, ‘purposiveness without a purpose’, ‘genius’, and the ‘sublime’ – concepts that have been central to aesthetics ever since. But we should not be mistaken about Kant’s project. Although it is often read this way, the Critique of Judgment is primarily concerned, not with the question: What is art? but with the transcendental question: How is an aesthetic judgment possible? I will not discuss how Kant attempts to answer this question. What is most important for now is that, in order to answer it, he distinguishes aesthetic judgments from judgments both on the agreeable (for instance, ‘This meal tastes nice’) and on the good (‘This deed is good’). Both kinds of judgment, he holds, are 11 Moritz in Bernstein (ed., 2003), 136. 12 It is worth noting that, for Baumgarten, as for Kant, aesthetics is concerned with both the beauty of nature and the beauty of art, and that both hold the latter to be inferior to the former. The aesthetic theories of Schelling and Hegel reverse this hierarchy for the first time.

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connected with a certain interest (one either desires the object or wants the deed to happen), while aesthetic judgment is ‘devoid of all interest’.13 Moreover, Kant argues that aesthetic judgments, in contrast to moral judgments, are based, not on a concept of what the beautiful object is, but on a feeling. Nevertheless, and precisely because of their ‘disinterestedness’, aesthetic judgments make a claim to universality. Because no individual interests are involved in my judgment, there is no reason why everybody should not share it, even if I am unable to give arguments in support of it. The feeling of the beautiful, according to Kant, is grounded in the ‘free play’ of the cognitive faculties intuition and understanding, which everyone shares – hence his definition of beauty as ‘what, without a concept, is liked universally’.14 Kant’s other famous characterization of beauty as ‘purposiveness without purpose’ is derived from this. Certain objects are held to be beautiful because they seem fit to fulfil their purpose in nature or society. Kant calls these ‘accessory’ or ‘adherent’ beauties, and mentions humans, horses and buildings as examples. But a judgment that objects possess true and ‘free’ beauty is made without our knowing their actual purpose, even if their sheer form forces us to presuppose such a purpose.15 Although Kant was, as we will see, often thought of as one of the founding fathers of the idea of ‘art for art’s sake’, this was never his intention and is far from what he writes. He makes clear that, although the aesthetic judgment should arise autonomously, that implies neither that an interest cannot be attached to it afterwards, nor that a beautiful object could not have an external purpose.16 Towards the end of part one of the Critique of Judgment, Kant even connects beauty explicitly to morality: ‘Now I maintain that the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good.’17 Kant argues that, while moral considerations should play no part in deciding whether an object is beautiful, beauty can indeed play a part in people’s moral education. 13 Kant (1987), 211:53. Here and in subsequent references, the page number in the Akademie edition appears before the colon; that in Pluhar’s translation of the Critique of Judgment, after it. 14 Ibidem, 219:64. 15 Ibidem, § 16 (229-231: 76-78). 16 In § 41 of the Critique of Judgment he writes: ‘That a judgment of taste by which we declare something to be beautiful must not have an interest as its determining basis has been established sufficiently above. But it does not follow from this that, after the judgment has been made as a pure aesthetic one, an interest cannot be connected with it’ (Kant [1987], 296: 163). 17 Kant (1987), 353: 228. This passage has puzzled many scholars, and is still a point of much debate. However, that debate falls outside the scope of this chapter. See Allison (2001), Chapters 10 and 11, for an in-depth discussion of the relation between disinterestedness and morality.

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Kant does not make any pronouncements on the autonomy of the practice of art, or the social status of the artist. He argues that judgments of the beautiful should be autonomous, in the sense that, in order for a judgment to be purely about taste, it should be disconnected from subjective interests, moral concerns or truth claims. The popularity Kant’s theories came to enjoy among artists is mostly because of the mediation of the romantic playwright and philosopher Friedrich Schiller, who complemented Kant’s aesthetic theory with anthropology and social critique. In On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795), a collection of letters to his patron, the Duke of Augustenburg, Schiller describes human beings as torn in two by conflicting forces, which he calls the sensuous and the formal impulses.18 In ancient Greece, Schiller argues, these were still in harmony, but in modern society, people’s individual development becomes one-sided and distorted. Their impulses constantly strive for domination, and when either of the two gets the upper hand, people turn into either wild animals or heartless intellectuals. As long as they are not able to achieve harmony between these impulses, people have no individual freedom, and without this they are not ready for political freedom. In Schiller’s view, the reign of terror following the French Revolution was a clear illustrative example of this inability and this lack of readiness. Harmony between the two impulses can be achieved, according to Schiller, only through a third impulse, which results from the interplay of the first two: the impulse to play.19 Schiller writes: ‘For, to declare it once and for all, Man plays only when he is in the full sense of the word a man, and he is wholly Man only when he is playing.’20 The expression of this impulse to play, according to Schiller, is art, and it is therefore only through art that people can be educated and become truly free. It seems that Schiller has formulated a clear purpose for art: to educate people, thus bringing about political freedom. And yet he rejects any notion of functional or instrumental art, as he makes clear in his second letter, where he criticizes the way modern society treats its poets: But today Necessity is master, and bends a degraded humanity beneath its tyrannous yoke. Utility is the great idol of the age, to which all powers must do service and all talents swear allegiance. In these clumsy scales 18 Schiller (1954), 64-67. These two impulses can be considered as anthropological translations of the two Kantian domains, necessity and moral law. 19 Ibidem, 74. 20 Ibidem, 80 (italics in the original).

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the spiritual service of Art has no weight; deprived of all encouragement, she flees from the noisy mart of our century.21

Schiller condemns his age and society, in which, he says, everything must have a function or serve a purpose. This attitude, he argues, results in a general hostility towards art and artists, who serve no purpose and have no function. He writes: We must therefore acknowledge those people to be entirely right who declare the Beautiful, and the mood into which it transports our spirit, to be wholly indifferent and sterile in relation to knowledge and mental outlook. They are entirely right; for Beauty gives no individual result whatever, either for the intellect or for the will; it realizes no individual purpose, helps us to perform no individual duty, and is, in a word, equally incapable of establishing the character and clearing the mind.22

In the spirit of Lessing, Moritz and Kant, but more forcefully and emphatically than they do, Schiller formulates here the idea and ideal of an art that exists for no outside purpose, an art that exists only for its own sake and is, indeed, quite useless. In the work of both Kant and Schiller, we are confronted with the peculiar combination of two ideas about art: as the object of a ‘pure’ aesthetic experience and as a means of moral or political education. Many scholars have had difficulties reconciling these two seemingly contradictory notions. Siegfried Schmidt argues that Kant’s and Schiller’s concept of autonomy lays the groundwork for the ‘depoliticization’ (Entpolitisierung) of art.23 Likewise, Martha Woodmansee holds that Schiller, in arguing for the autonomy of art, betrays his original project of emancipation and propagates ‘the kind of freedom to dream that is the consolation of the subjects of even the most repressive regimes.’24 These remarks neglect, in my view, the dialectical character of Schiller’s theory, according to which art can be politically meaningful only by refraining from an immediate political function.25 Nevertheless, Schmidt and Woodmansee do ask why Schiller would stress 21 Schiller (1954), 26 (italics in the original). 22 Ibidem, 101 (italics in the original). 23 Schmidt (1989), 369. 24 Woodmansee (1994), 59. 25 As Peter Bürger writes, ‘Schiller attempts to show that it is on the very basis of its autonomy, its not being tied to immediate ends, that art can fulfill a task that cannot be fulfilled in any other way: the furtherance of humanity’ (Bürger 1984, 44).

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the autonomy of art in his time, and investigate, by way of an answer, the economic and social-historical conditions that can give rise to the autonomy of art (or, in Schiller’s case, of literature). Many factors contribute to the autonomy of the ‘social system’ of literature, as well as to the genesis of the idea of autonomous art, in the eighteenth century: the professionalization of the author, the development of copyright laws, technological improvements in printing and in the paper industry, the change in the status of the artist from craftsman to ‘genius’, and, most importantly, the rise and growth of a literate middle class, which in turn led to an enormous increase in the demand for literary works.26 Towards the end of the century, nearly 25 percent of the German population was literate – twice as high as it had been a few decades earlier.27 Some German critics expressed their worries about this ‘reading mania’. A series of journal articles in 1789 and 1790 discussed the ‘causes of the contemporary ubiquitous ink-slinging [Vielschreiberei] in Germany.’28 These developments made it possible for German men of letters to live by the pen, especially because patronage was less common in Germany than it was in France and England. The provincial German nobility, scattered over small city-states and principalities and relatively impoverished after the Thirty Years’ War, was generally not that interested in art, and where it was, it preferred French art. 29 As Norbert Elias argues in The Civilizing Process, the German literary movement of the second half of the eighteenth century was also a social movement that contrasted what it saw as the ‘cold reason’ and empty rituals of the aristocracy with the true and honest culture of the middle class. The movement’s ideal of Kultur was opposed to aristocratic Zivilisation.30 According to these writers, the French idea of civilization primarily promoted norms of public behaviour in matters of politics, morals, religion, taste, and so on, and was thus, in their view, superficial, hypocritical and false. They held that culture, by contrast, had nothing to do with behavioural norms and was a matter of honesty and virtue: it concerned one’s inner being, and one’s deepest emotions and convictions. It was in this ideal of culture, voiced most prominently by Goethe’s Werther, that the German middle class invented itself. 26 Schmidt (1989), 286. 27 Woodmansee (1994), 25. 28 Schmidt (1989), 292. 29 Schmidt notes, for instance, that Wieland was first noticed in Germany once his novels had been translated into French (Schmidt [1989], 288n). 30 See Elias (1978), especially 1–35.

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The new generation of writers thus readily embraced the possibility of writing for a middle‑class audience. Woodmansee takes the literary career of Schiller as an example of this generation. In a piece he wrote for a periodical and that was published in 1784, Schiller boldly declared: The public is now everything to me, my school, my sovereign, my trusted friend. I now belong to it alone. I shall place myself before this and no other tribunal. It alone do I fear and respect. Something grand comes over me at the prospect of wearing no other throne than the human spirit.31

Schiller’s enthusiasm for the free literary market did not last long, however. While his play The Robbers (1781) was a great public success, the audience responded coolly to his later works. Theatre managers preferred other playwrights, who could finish a play within a few weeks, to Schiller, who took more than three years to write Don Carlos (1787), for instance. A few years after his paean to the public, Schiller began to realize that there might be a larger reading audience available, but that it was not necessarily interested in his plays or in the work of other esteemed poets such as Wieland and Goethe. Instead, the public wanted to read what he called ‘mindless, tasteless, and pernicious novels, dramatized stories, so-called journals for the ladies and the like.’32 When in 1791 the Danish Duke of Augustenburg offered the impoverished poet a patronage, he jumped at it. And in 1799, fifteen years after he had declared his love for the public, he wrote a letter to his friend Goethe, saying that ‘the only possible relationship to the public is war.’33 What does the case of Schiller tell us? First, it shows that he, Lessing, Moritz and Kant produced their philosophical theories on the autonomy of art and of individual works of art against the backdrop of the actual development of an autonomous sphere of art in society. The autonomy of art was, in other words, not just a philosophical theorem or a discourse, but also a social fact. Second, it shows us that the relation of artists towards this newly won freedom was, to say the least, ambivalent. On the one hand, the decline of patronage by the Church and the state was welcomed as a kind of liberation. On the other hand, the new market in which artists were forced to operate brought new constraints with it. This ambivalence would become even more apparent in the two cases I will discuss in the following section. 31 Quoted in Woodmansee (1994), 41. 32 Ibidem, 29. 33 Ibidem, 29. See also Schmidt (1989), 306–307.

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31

The artist in the marketplace

In the preceding section, I touched on the relation between shifts in philosophical theories on the autonomy of art and shifts in the social situation of the artist. In this section, I will elaborate on the changes in the social situation of art and artists by discussing literary life in nineteenth-century Paris and musical life in Vienna. This is not to suggest that this period in the artistic life of Paris or Vienna marks the ‘beginning’ of autonomous art or artists – speaking of ‘beginnings’ or ‘first times’ in history is always precarious. The social situation of art depends on geographical borders and on the art form. One could argue, for instance, that seventeenth-century Dutch Realism marks the beginning of autonomous painting.34 In France, on the other hand, the institutional power of the Académie makes it hard to speak meaningfully of autonomous painting before the Salon des refusés (1863, the birthplace of impressionism) and the Salon des indépendants (1884).35 Moreover, there are many kinds of artist-patron relationship along a continuum from control by the Church or the state at one end and, at the other, a completely free market, and this often makes it difficult to establish how ‘autonomous’ an artist actually is or was.36 And yet, nineteenth-century literary life in Paris and musical life in Vienna saw important shifts in the social situation of art and the artist. Paris was the cradle of artistic ‘bohemia’ – the city where the notion of l’art pour l’art had its most enthusiastic proponents. It was the centre of literary innovation, of new literary styles and genres, and the home of such influential poets and writers as Balzac, Hugo, and Baudelaire. Benjamin referred to Paris as the ‘capital of the nineteenth century’, the place where ‘modern life’ itself was invented. Vienna around 1800 became the musical capital of Europe and kept this position throughout the nineteenth century. Its rich court and nobility were keenly interested in music, and attracted many composers who wanted to make a living there. It was the home of what we now call the ‘First Viennese School’, whose importance cannot be overestimated.37 In Vienna, as 34 See Alpers (1988). As Alpers argues, this autonomy does not only concern the free bourgeois market, but also the introduction of scenes from everyday life in painting, as contrasted with Biblical, mythological, or courtly scenes. 35 See Boime (1970) and Heinich (1996a), 35. Note that these examples only concern the Western world. Some scholars have argued that, during the Song Dynasty (960-1368), China had a free market of works of art (Hamilton (2007), 185). 36 See Williams (1995), especially Chapters 2 and 3. 37 The name ‘First Viennese School’, referring to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Joseph Haydn and Ludwig van Beethoven (and sometimes also Franz Schubert) has been given in retrospect,

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I will show, not only did the character of music itself change, but also the appreciation and social position of the composer and of music as an art form. 1.3.1

Literary life in Paris Baudelaire knew the true situation of the man of letters: he goes to the marketplace as a flâneur, supposedly to take a look at it but in reality to find a buyer. ‒ Walter Benjamin, ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’38

Nowhere was the rise of the middle class felt more deeply than in France. The revolution of 1789 and the proclamation of the First Republic in 1791 marked the end of the absolute power of the Ancien Régime. In the course of the nineteenth century the ‘third estate’ or bourgeoisie became the dominant class, politically as well as culturally. This shift in the structure of society has a tremendous impact on the arts, which up until then could count on the nobility for protection. In the Ancien Régime, the patronage of artists was considered a status symbol. The Sun King, Louis XIV, supported a variety of artists (for instance Racine and Corneille), who received royal honours and lodging in Versailles. Contrary to what is often thought, patronage did not necessarily entail subordination. These artists often had considerable freedom to produce as they pleased. That said, to a certain extent they had to take into account the tastes of their patron, and this taste was generally theirs as well, since it reflected what was traditionally considered to be good art. César Graña writes: What made aristocratic literature ‘aristocratic’ was not any one subject or aesthetic. It was rather the capacity of this literature to reflect a milieu which, by putting intellectual craftsmanship under the protection of traditional power, allowed the perpetuation of certain concerns of taste and imagination.39

This protection by patrons, along with the standards of taste patron and artist shared, starts to change once the bourgeoisie seized power. While and only after the rise of the ‘Second Viennese School’ (whose best-known members are Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg and Anton Webern). The first ‘School’, however, was never a school in the sense of the second, which had a common project and teacher (Schoenberg). 38 SW 4, 17; I/2, 536. 39 Graña (1964), 38. There is also an aristocratic theory of art, namely the (Platonic) idea that art allows us to see things as they truly are. A discussion of this theory, however, falls outside the scope of this chapter (but see Heinich (1996a)).

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Napoleon still protected some artists (most notably the painter JacquesLouis David), the installation of the so-called July Monarchy after the revolution of 1830 ushered in difficult times for the artists. The popular and liberal roi bourgeois Louis-Philippe was not that interested in art. He wanted to be the ‘King of the French’ rather than the ‘King of France’ – a people’s king, in other words – and he considered art an exorbitant luxury that would only obstruct this goal. 40 The dwindling level of aristocratic patronage meant that artists had to look for new ways to make a living, and for new audiences. They fund them in the ever-growing crowd of new middle-class readers: an anonymous patronage of the market. As Jerrold Seigel writes: ‘For artists and writers, the basic change is as easily summarized as it was often noticed: patronage gave way to the market.’41 The collapse of the Ancien Régime caused major changes in the production, distribution, and reception of literature. During Louis XVI’s reign, only 36 printing houses were allowed in France. Books were luxury products, purchased almost exclusively by the aristocracy. The number of copies hardly ever exceeded a thousand, and only bibles and almanacs were printed and sold on a larger scale. Of course, industrialization contributed to the increase in production. While the traditional wooden hand press could print about 250 sheets per hour, by 1834 the iron, steam‑driven mechanical press could manage 3,600 sheets per hour. 42 Technological, economic and demographic factors turned publishing into an industry. In 1814, 3,000 new titles appeared; 50 years later this number had increased to almost 14,000. 43 Newspapers, too, became increasingly popular. In Paris alone, the number of daily newspapers grew from 11 in 1811 to 26 in 1846. 44 During the first decades of the nineteenth century, however, newspapers were sold only by subscription, and were not generally affordable. In 1836, Emile de Girardin, publisher of the newspaper La Presse, started a trend by lowering the price of a subscription from 80 to 40 francs, drawing the rest of his income from advertisements. Other publishers soon followed, and in France as a whole the number of subscriptions grew from 47,000 in 1824 to 70,000 in 1836 and to 200,000 in 1846 (SW 4, 13; I/2, 528). 40 See Boime (1970) and Seigel (1986), 13. 41 Seigel (1986) 13. Seigel focuses primarily on the social status of writers. For the case of painting see also White and White (1965). 42 Bell-Villada (1996), 42. 43 Allen (1991), 33. 44 Graña (1964), 32.

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The impact that these changes had on literary life in Paris can hardly be overestimated. 45 The publishing industry and the newspapers created a market for literature, and most notably for the roman feuilleton. The feuilleton is a kind of cultural supplement, containing gossip, criticism, fashion news, and short stories, which are often inspired by the news of the day. Around the middle of the nineteenth-century, newspapers started publishing novels, too – a short section every day, often containing a cliffhanger at the end. Full of incident and adventure, these serial novels attracted new subscribers to the newspapers, and the roman feuilleton became extremely popular. Eugène Sue, for instance, writer of the serial novel The Mysteries of Paris (1842-1843), received a letter from a friend saying: Your work is everywhere – on the worker’s bench, on the merchant’s counter, on the little lady’s divan, on the shop-girl’s table, on the officeworker’s and magistrate’s desk. I am sure that of the entire population in Paris, only those people who cannot read do not know of your work. 46

The writer and critic Théophile Gautier wrote that even the illiterate would buy Sue’s novel and have it read to them, and that the sick would delay their deaths in order to finish it. Consequently, the financial situation of many serial novelists was strong. Sue, for instance, received an advance of a 100,000 francs for The Mysteries of Paris. Newspapers paid well, sometimes up to 2 francs per line (which explains why long dialogues were introduced), so business was booming for productive authors such as Sue, George Sand and Alexandre Dumas. 47 The publishers usually got value for their money: after the newspaper Le Constitionell contracted Sue, circulation increased from 3,000 to 40,000, while Le Siècle gained 100,000 subscribers by publishing one of Dumas’s novels. 48 Literature had become big business. The democratization and commodification of literature were accompanied by utopian visions and exalted declarations reminiscent of Schiller’s 45 The most vivid illustration of the impact of journalism on literary life remains Honoré de Balzac’s Lost Illusions (1837-1843). Its protagonist is a provincial and naïve adolescent who travels to Paris in order to become a famous novelist, but soon falls prey to the world of journalism and the publishing industry. 46 Quoted in Allen (1991), 55. 47 Of Dumas, writer of famous serial novels such as The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, it was rumoured that he owed his productivity to an army of poor writers he kept locked in his basement (I/2, 532 and Allen (1991), 35). 48 Graña (1964), 34.

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(see page 30 above). In 1832 the magazine L’Artiste published the following statement: Today the artist is placed in the middle of society as a whole, he takes inspiration from the desires and sufferings of everyone, he speaks to all, he cries for all; he is no longer a retainer but a part of the people; he expects to be paid only for his work and the free products of his genius. His social position has therefore become more moral, more independent, more able to favour the progress of art. 49

On this view, in other words, the public would from now on decide the author’s fate. It soon became clear, however, that the market was not kind to everybody, and many writers found themselves unable to profit from it. For every success story of a Sue or a Dumas, there were plenty of starving artists in literary bohemia, centred in the Latin Quarter of Paris and famously portrayed by Henry Murger in his Scenes from the Bohemian Life (1845-46). Bohemia, which according to Murger was the ‘short road to the morgue’, might be considered the first subculture in modernity. The literary market caused, in the words of Pierre Bourdieu, ‘the inflow of a substantial population of young people without fortunes, issuing from the middle or popular classes of the capital and especially the provinces, who come to Paris trying for careers as writers and artists.’50 In his classic study Bohemian Paris (1986), Jerrold Seigel characterizes this artistic reserve army as both a part of and an antipode to the bourgeoisie. The bohemians shared the bourgeois values of freedom, equality, and fraternity, but considered newly emerging forms of exploitation and alienation to be a sign of the bourgeoisie’s betrayal of these values. The bohemian lifestyle, which involved, among other things, a romanticization and dramatization of social and economic maladies (poverty, crime, and prostitution), was the expression of the ambivalence lying at the very heart of the bourgeois.51 Surely not every poet was condemned to bohemia. Some, such as Stendhal and Flaubert, lived off an inheritance, while others, such as the Parnassian poets, were supported by a niche market of aristocrats and upper-class bourgeois, whom they meet in literary circles and salons. Nevertheless, it is evident that high literary quality was in itself no guarantee of popular success. There was no longer a self-evident common tradition and shared 49 Quoted in Seigel (1986), 15. 50 Bourdieu (1996), 54. 51 Seigel (1986), especially Chapter 1.

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taste between author and public. More often their interests even ran counter to one another. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the literary elite considered popular success, in the words of the poet Leconte de Lisle, ‘the mark of intellectual inferiority’.52 In this milieu, the theories of Moritz, Kant, and Schiller found fertile ground. Émigrés such as Madame de Staël and Benjamin Constant introduced their theories to the French public. Their reports, however, were based on hearsay rather than on close scrutiny. Kant’s Critique of Judgment, which was not translated into French until 1846, was therefore reduced to a set of phrases.53 Nevertheless, this misunderstanding of German aesthetics spawned the most important doctrine of nineteenth-century French literature, namely that of l’art pour l’art (art for art’s sake). Théophile Gautier’s preface to Mademoiselle Maupin (1835) is often considered to be a manifesto for this doctrine. He writes: The useless alone is truly beautiful; everything useful is ugly, since it is the expression of a need, and man’s needs are, like his pitiful, infirm nature, ignoble and disgusting. – The most useful place in the house is the latrines.54

The idea that an artwork is produced with no other goal than art itself appealed to many a poet, especially to those disillusioned by the market, or by the failed revolution of 1848. Authors such as Flaubert, Leconte de Lisle, and later Verlaine, Rimbaud and Mallarmé, distanced themselves both from literature reflecting bourgeois values and from so called ‘socialist’ art, which, taking its cue from Hugo, portrayed the suffering of the lower classes.55 Despite their vast differences, these writers shared a contempt for public taste and for any external purpose the work of art was supposed to serve, whether this was commercial or political or propounded bourgeois morality. By the 1870s, the doctrine of art for art’s sake was so well known that Flaubert could include it in his Dictionary of Accepted Ideas: ‘Artists. All charlatans. Praise their disinterestedness.’56 Apart from the idea of disinterestedness, the Romantic notion of the ‘genius’ dominated the self-image of the nineteenth-century artist. While, 52 53 54 55 56

Quoted in Bourdieu (1996), 83. See Bell-Villada (1996), 35-36. Gautier in: Harrison and Wood (eds., 1992), 99. Bourdieu (1996), 71. Flaubert (1954), 16.

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roughly stated, the criterion for quality had lain in the extent to which the rules of good taste were followed, a new paradigm emerged in which the greatness of the artist was expressed rather by the extent to which they broke the rules. The ‘new’, the ‘strange’, the ‘original’, and the ‘abnormal’ become the new artistic values.57 The image of the artist, including the image that artists had of themselves, entered the ‘regime of singularity’, as Heinich calls it.58 The notion of artistic genius reflected artists’ ambivalence towards the public. On the one hand they regarded themselves as spokespersons for the truth, and therefore as representatives of ‘real’ humanity. They believed that through their art they pointed the way – they were part of the avant-garde of society.59 However, their message often went unheard and they were not recognized as the prophets they thought themselves to be. Consequently, the genius felt alienated from the crowd – an unsung hero. This alienation was expressed, for instance, in Baudelaire’s poem ‘The Albatross’. The albatross in this poem becomes an allegory for the poet, gracefully floating through the sky, but moving clumsily on deck when sailors catch it: The Poet is a kinsman in the clouds Who scoffs at archers, loves a stormy day; But on the ground, among the hooting crowds, He cannot walk, his wings are in the way.60

The poet and critic Charles Baudelaire epitomized the poet’s ambivalence in nineteenth-century France. All the contradictions of the era were combined in his person and in his work: revolutionary and proponent of pure art who both praised and scorned the bourgeoisie, he was a poet of classic beauty and profane vulgarity, an unwilling bohemian and a wannabe dandy.

57 See Laermans (2009), 132-133. 58 Heinich (1996a), Chapter 3. For painting, the definitive shift from academism to singularity is marked by Van Gogh, as Heinich argues in her case study: ‘The new Vangoghian paradigm quite literally embodies a series of shifts in artistic value, from work to man, from normality to abnormality, from conformity to rarity, from success to incomprehension, and, finally, from (spatialized) present to (temporalized) posterity. These are, in sum, the principal characteristics of the order of singularity in which the art world is henceforth ensconced’ (Heinich (1996b), 146). 59 The utopian socialist Claude Henri de Saint-Simon first uses the military term avant-garde in connection to artists: ‘It is we, the artists, who will serve you as an avant-garde: the power of the arts is in fact most immediate and most rapid: when we wish to spread new ideas among men, we inscribe them on marble and canvas’ (Quoted in Egbert (1970), 121). 60 Baudelaire (1993), 17.

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To most of his contemporaries, Baudelaire was known rather as a literary and art critic and translator of English literature (Poe and De Quincey) than as a poet. He could never live off his poetry, and was himself well aware of this. In an 1846 essay entitled ‘Advice to Young Authors’ – full of advice he himself hardly followed – he wrote: ‘In our day, it is necessary to produce quantities; therefore, one has to go fast; one therefore has to hasten slowly.’61 Baudelaire seems to be acutely aware, more than any other author of his day, of the opportunities and constraints the new market situation brought along. His eulogy on the bourgeoisie in ‘The Salon of 1846’ was not meant purely ironically: ‘And so it is to you, bourgeois, that this book is naturally dedicated; for any book that does not appeal to the majority, in numbers and intelligence, is a stupid book.’62 These remarks, however, contrast sharply with a prose poem he wrote 20 years later, ‘The Dog and the Scent Bottle’ from Paris Spleen (1869), in which he presents a bottle of exquisite perfume to a dog, who sniffs and then barks disappointedly. The poet exclaims: Ah, you wretched dog, had I offered you a bag of excrement, you would have opened your nostrils in pure pleasure, and even eaten it. You, shabby companion of my sad life, are exactly like the populace, to whom delicate fragrances, which it finds exasperating, should never be proffered, but only carefully chosen muck.63

The relation of the poet to the crowd was, to say the least, a problematic one. Baudelaire, like so many artists, had been enthusiastic about the Revolution of 1848, even fighting on the barricades, but he was ‘physically apoliticized’, as he put it, by the coup d’état of Louis Napoleon in 1851.64 He became the greatest enemy of a ‘committed’ literature that expressed and educated bourgeois morality, especially of the so-called ‘school of good sense’ of Émile Augier.65 His struggle with bourgeois values reached its climax in 1857, when a lawsuit against The Flowers of Evil cost him his access not only to the public (when the book was pulled from the shelves) but also to the salons. Despite his contempt for explicitly moral literature, Baudelaire was no proponent of l’art pour l’art either. In an introduction to the poems of his 61 62 63 64 65

Quoted in Hemmings (1982), 80. Baudelaire (1972), 49. Baudelaire (2010), 14. Quoted in Bourdieu (1996), 59. See his essay ‘On Virtuous Plays and Novels’, in Baudelaire (1972), 108-114.

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friend Pierre Dupont, he wrote: ‘The puerile utopia of the school of l’art pour l’art excluded morality and often even passion, and this necessarily made it sterile’ (quoted in SW 4, 12; I/2, 527). Art, he thought, should not be locked up within the confines of pure form. He wrote that, while Gautier had his friendship and his greatest admiration, his literature ran the danger ‘of losing contact with reality’.66 Furthermore, Baudelaire did not recognize himself in the exalted self-image of the Parnassians, the group of poets who had named themselves after the home of the Muses. Because of his lack of success, he knows all too well what modernity has in store for the poets. Baudelaire foresaw the future of poetry in the prose poem ‘Losing a Halo’.67 In it, the narrator encounters a famous poet, barely recognizable, in a ‘disreputable place’ not further specified (but most likely a brothel), and expresses his surprise to find such a dignified creature (‘you, the imbiber of quintessence, the consumer of ambrosia!’) in such a place. The poet tells his admirer that, earlier that day, he lost his halo while dodging the heavy traffic of the streets of Paris. Instead of risking his life once more by picking the halo from the street, he has decided to make a virtue out of necessity: ‘Now I can go about incognito, do bad things, descend to the lowest levels. So, as you see, here I am, just like you!’ The narrator asks whether the poet is going to put up a notice so as to retrieve his halo, but the poet will hear nothing of it. He is quite content in his new situation, and gloats, furthermore, over the very thought of some second-rate poet’s finding and wearing his halo: ‘What if it was X, or Z? Wouldn’t that be hilarious?’68 The image is clear. ‘Losing a Halo’ shows how the advance of modernity (captured in the image of heavy traffic) deprives art of its divine status. The market will disenchant art, as it does everything else.69 Instead of mourning over the lost halo, however, the poet in Baudelaire’s story embraces the new opportunities, because he can behave like ‘ordinary’ people do. Poets who, like the Parnassians, go on pretending to be saints or prophets are making fools out of themselves, Baudelaire seems to be saying. The modern artist, he argues, should be a flaneur, out and about among the crowd, rather than above it: ‘The crowd is his domain, just as the air is the bird’s, and water 66 ‘Théophile Gautier’, in Baudelaire (1972), 276. 67 Benjamin discusses this poem in ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’ (SW 4, 342-343; I/2, 652-653). See also Berman (1982), 155-164. 68 Baudelaire (2010), 90. 69 Berman points out that Marx and Engels use the same metaphor the Communist Manifesto: ‘The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every activity hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has transformed the doctor, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage-laborers’ (quoted in Berman (1982), 157).

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that of the fish.’70 Baudelaire valued Constantin Guys’s paintings of modern life, and he strove for something similar in his poetry, by juxtaposing the poetic and the prosaic, the exceptional and the ordinary, the exalted and the vulgar.71 For Baudelaire, contrary to what Marshall Berman argues, becoming ‘ordinary’ has nothing to do with becoming more ‘authentic’.72 Authenticity, the equation of art with genuine feeling, is what Baudelaire resents in the literature of both bohemians and bourgeois alike. For him, the ‘ordinary man’ is just another role the poet could play, in a society in which, as Flaubert once wrote, everything was false. In his journal, he writes: ‘On the vaporization and the centralization of the Self. Everything is there.’73 This conviction is behind his eulogy to make-up and fashion, as well as his contempt for the ‘naturalness’ of women: ‘Woman is natural, that is to say abominable.’74 The essential characteristic of the modern poet was, according to Baudelaire, not authenticity but inauthenticity, namely the ability to dissolving the self and relate to any member of the public, any potential buyer. The game of identities connects the poet to the prostitute. As T. J. Clark writes in his classic study of Manet, the nineteenth-century Parisian prostitute could take on any role: ‘Bored chatelaine, misunderstood bourgeoise, failed actress, corrupted peasant girl, she is all of these… She is the perpetually undeciphered enigma, intriguing and terrifying man.’75 In his essays, as well as in his poems, Baudelaire repeatedly expresses his sympathy for the prostitute, and the resemblance of her fate to that of the poet.76 Both are, as Benjamin writes, salesperson and commodity in one (AP, 10; V/1, 55).77 70 ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, in Baudelaire (1972), 399. 71 See also Baudelaire’s famous definition of modernity as ‘the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and immovable’ (Baudelaire (1972), 403). 72 ‘One of the paradoxes of modernity, as Baudelaire sees it here, is that its poets will become more deeply and authentically poetic by becoming more like ordinary man’ (Berman (1982), 160). 73 Quoted in Seigel (1986), 114. 74 Quoted in Hemmings (1982), 100. 75 Clark (1984), 111. As Clark argues, the scandal caused by the exhibition of Manet’s Olympia was not because Olympia was a prostitute – prostitutes often modelled for painters – but rather because she (like Manet) obviously made no effort to mask her social class. The reason for the scandal was ‘the degree to which she did not take part in the game of prostitution, and the extent to which she indicated the place of that game in class’ (Clark (1984), 146). 76 See for instance ‘The Venal Muse’ (in: Baudelaire (1993), 27). 77 Benjamin’s reflections on the relation between the autonomous work of art and the commodity will be discussed in the next chapter.

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From courtier to prophet to salesman to prostitute – such was the trajectory the poet had covered during the nineteenth century, according to Baudelaire. Although few of his contemporaries shared his realism, many shared his sense of disillusionment. Many artists had big political dreams, inspired by Fourier and Saint-Simon, and many were, like Baudelaire, disappointed by the failure of the revolution of 1848.78 Although most of them subsequently refrain from politics, they maintain that artists are capable of disrupting common social patterns, experimenting with new forms, and exploring the unknown, thus attempting to change human consciousness. In this way, as even Baudelaire writes, ‘any poem, any work of art, well made, suggests naturally and inevitably a moral.’79 The critical impulse of much nineteenth-century literature, from the bohemians to Gautier and Baudelaire, is the rejection of the bourgeois principle of utility. Two souls live in the bourgeois’ chest: both the lover of eternal and exalted beauty, and the ‘philistine’, judging art by its use – its moral, political or pedagogical value. The authors discussed here did not renounce morality or politics altogether, even after 1851. They merely renounce the morality and politics of dominant bourgeois culture. This anti-bourgeois attitude would later be at the heart of twentieth-century avant-garde movements. 1.3.2

Musical life in Vienna First Beethoven dared to compose as he wanted. ‒ Theodor W. Adorno, Beethoven. Philosophie der Musik80

Throughout the nineteenth century, most composers remained dependent on patronage.81 Apart from some opera composers, few could live exclusively off the market – most also had a position as a teacher, a conductor, or a performer. Even today there are few composers of ‘serious’ music who can make a living from their compositions, without subsidies, government support and the like. Nevertheless, the nineteenth century witnessed an important shift in the social position and status of the composer: from employee and artisan to independent artist and genius – a shift from the 78 Egbert (1970), 145-163. 79 Baudelaire (1972), 20. 80 ANS 1, 51. 81 As Adorno writes in the Introduction to the Sociology of Music (1962): ‘Of the famous composers of the official musical culture, the first to make full capitalist use of their production were probably Puccini and Richard Strauss’ (ISM, 58; 14, 240).

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‘professional’ to the ‘vocational’ regime, to use Heinich’s terms.82 Comparing the careers of Mozart and Beethoven, we can clearly recognize this shift. In his youth, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had tasted the life of a (relatively) independent artist, travelling through Europe with his father and sister as a famous child prodigy. He had performed for, and dined with, kings and emperors. He even sat on the Empress’s lap in Vienna, and kissed her cheek. He had lived more or less on an equal footing with the aristocracy, and he felt that he deserved no less for his talents, of which he was very conscious. One can imagine, then, his discontent when he became court musician to Archbishop Colloredo in Salzburg – a subordinate position. Composers in service of a court were regarded, and treated, as common employees. During a visit by Colloredo to Vienna, Mozart complained in letters to his father that he had been treated as the archbishop’s doormat, dining with the lackeys, and forbidden to take on any other commissions. Soon Mozart could no longer acquiesce in what he saw as this servile role, and offered his resignation to the archbishop. In a letter to his father, who vehemently protested his decision, he reassured him that he would be able to live off several commissions: ‘I would rather go out begging than ever to serve such a master again.’83 After much nagging from Mozart’s side, Colloredo agreed to his resignation, after which Mozart was literally kicked out of the archbishop’s house by the chamberlain.84 Vienna at the end of the eighteenth century was the economic and cultural centre of the Habsburg Empire, and the seat of the throne. Mozart set his hopes on the good graces of Joseph II, but also envisaged himself as an independent artist, selling his compositions to publishers and organizing subscription concerts. Traditionally, concerts were courtly events, with an audience of invited guests. Subscription concerts, by contrast, were open to anyone who paid in advance, and the proceeds went to the composer and the musicians. At first Mozart was quite successful. He received commissions from the Emperor, while his subscription concerts were popular, as he proudly wrote to his father.85 This success did not last, however. In 1789, a series of concerts had to be cancelled because there was only one subscriber (namely his friend and protector baron Van Swieten). The problems Mozart ran into in his struggle to be an independent artist were twofold. First, the lack of copyright protection made it impossible for 82 83 84 85

Heinich (1996a), 35. Mozart (1963), 116. Ibidem, 126. See also Gay (1999), Chapter 3. Mozart (1963), 303-307.

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him to earn money through the printing of his work. A composer could sell his compositions to a publisher only once, and no one could prevent other publishing houses from printing pirate copies afterwards. The second problem he encountered was the lack of a middle-class audience. Although Mozart wanted to be independent from any (aristocratic) employer, the audience he sought would still consist mostly of aristocrats. Mozart knew this, of course, but he misjudged the extent to which the Viennese aristocracy would be able to appreciate his musical experiments. His later compositions were often considered too difficult. 86 The chilly reception that greeted The Marriage of Figaro in 1786 marked a turning point in the Viennese appreciation of Mozart. The opera was considered too critical of the social structure, and the aristocratic audience turned its back on him, making it ever harder for him to make a living. The (by no means completely fictitious) destitution of his last years was partly a result of his own extravagance, but can also be traced to his keenness to enter a market that did not yet exist.87 Shortly after Mozart’s death in 1791, the social status of the composer changed drastically, as can be seen from the case of Ludwig van Beethoven, who was born only 15 years later than Mozart. Beethoven’s relationship with his employer, Elector Maximilian Franz of Bonn, differed greatly from Mozart’s with Colloredo. Maximilian Franz allowed Beethoven to travel freely, and paid for the lessons he took from Salieri and Haydn. Only after he had already spent 2 years in Vienna did the Elector decide to cut off his salary. After 1794 Beethoven would never again have an official appointment. By then copyrights were better regulated, and Beethoven had the luxury of seeing publishing houses fight over his compositions. In 1800 he wrote: My compositions bring in a considerable amount, and I might say that I have more commissions than I can possibly honor. I can also count on six or seven publishers for each thing, and even more, should I want them. People no longer bargain with me; I demand and they pay. You can see that this is a rather nice situation.88

Beethoven is often said to be the first genuinely independent composer. We should, however, not take the epithet ‘independent’ too literally. Besides a 86 According to a famous anecdote, Emperor Joseph II commented on The Abduction from the Seraglio: ‘Zu schön für unsere Ohren, und gewaltig viel Noten, lieber Mozart.’ 87 See also Elias (2010). 88 Quoted in Wegeler and Ries (1987), 28. Lewis Lockwood writes: ‘He was […] the first major composer whose music was regularly printed during his lifetime by a host of publishers, sometimes in rival editions’ (Lockwood (2003), 88).

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few compositions, such as Wellington’s Victory, Beethoven’s work did not attract a mass middle class audience during his lifetime, and the major part of his income was still provided by the aristocracy. It would thus be a gross exaggeration to say that Beethoven single-handedly overthrew the patronage system.89 Nevertheless, the relation between him and his patrons was no longer one of employee to employer, but was based on equality and reciprocity. Aristocrats would pay him for nothing but his friendship, which in turn granted them the status of supporting a famous ‘genius’. How radical and sudden this shift was, is nicely illustrated in the memoires of Frau von Bernhard, a friend of the aristocratic family Lichnowsky, one of Beethoven’s patrons: I still remember clearly Haydn and Salieri sitting on a sofa, both carefully dressed in the old-fashioned way with wig, shoes, and silk stockings, while Beethoven would come dressed in the informal fashion of the other side of the Rhine, almost badly dressed. I myself saw the mother of Princess Lichnowsky, Countess Thun, go down on her knees to him as he lolled on the sofa, begging him to play something. But Beethoven did not...90

Clearly, the tables had turned. To be sure, Beethoven stays on good terms with the aristocracy, but only as long as it is of service to him. Anyone who dares to interfere with his work has to pay the price of antagonism.91 When, in 1809, Beethoven considered taking on the function of Hoffkapellmeister in Kassel, three Viennese aristocrats whom he had befriended offered him an annual payment of a thousand florins. They asked him, in return, only to remain in Vienna. A contract they drew up read, in part: As it is fairly clear that one needs to be free of worries to fully dedicate oneself to a cause and create grand and outstanding works, the signatories have decided to enable Mister Ludwig van Beethoven to fulfil his most relevant necessities in order to not inhibit his powerful genius.92 89 See DeNora (1995), 38. 90 Quoted in Lockwood (2003), 78. 91 There is a famous and probably not completely f ictitious anecdote about a conflict of Beethoven with his patron prince Lichnowsky. In a letter to the prince Beethoven writes: ‘Prince! What you are, you are through chance and birth. What I am, I am through myself. There have been, and will be thousands of princes. There is only one Beethoven!’ (quoted in: Cooper (ed., 1991), 104). 92 Quoted in Cooper (ed., 1991), 69.

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The text of this contract offers an insight into the status, not only of the composer, but also of music. Until the end of the eighteenth century, music was not considered an ‘autonomous’ art form or as an end in itself. It functioned as an accompaniment to religious services, courtly festivals, meals, military marches, or, in the case of the opera, as a form of entertainment.93 In the course of Beethoven’s life, and partly thanks to him, music began to be seen, as Lockwood writes, ‘not as a marvellous craft but as an inborn, basic means of human expression.’94 In contrast with the works of Bach, Händel, Haydn, and Mozart, Beethoven’s most important works were instrumental – the sonatas, quartets, and symphonies – that served no other purpose than music itself. For the first time, these works were granted the status of works of art. In the nineteenth century, and especially in the German-speaking countries, music became the juggernaut in the aforementioned battle between Kultur versus Zivilisation. The aristocracy considered music as a form of entertainment. An aristocrat visiting an opera usually showed up at the end of the first act, talked during the second, and left during the third. For the nineteenth-century bourgeois, by contrast, music represented the nobility of the soul, and was to be revered as such. They not only disapproved of the aristocratic attitude, but also of the vaudeville theatres of the lower classes, where arias by Rossini and Mozart alternated with popular songs and other ‘vulgarities’. Consequently, a new etiquette was introduced to the music theatres. Doors were locked once the music started, food and drinks were no longer allowed in the hall, the lights were dimmed during the concert, silence was required and it was considered rude, even barbaric, to leave early.95 This ‘sacralization’ of music brought with it a division between serious music as ‘high art’ on the one hand, and vaudeville and variety theatre as ‘low art’ on the other.96 Along with the rising status of the composer, and the sacralization of the music, the nineteenth century witnesses the birth of a theory of musical 93 DeNora (1995), 16. 94 Lockwood (2003), 171. 95 See Smithuijsen (2001), 88-99. As Smithuijsen writes, Richard Wagner’s Festspielhaus in Bayreuth, which opened in 1872, contained many architectural novelties, functioning to focus the audience’s attention solely on the stage. 96 Of course, this goes not only for music, but for all of the arts. Lawrence Levine writes: ‘No more than drama, opera, or instrumental music, then, were painting and sculpture elevated above other forms of expressive culture in the first half of the nineteenth century; they were part of the general culture and were experienced in the midst of a broad range of other cultural genres by a catholic audience that cut through class and social lines. This situation began to change after mid-century and, characteristically, the change was accompanied by sacred language and religious analogies’ (Levine (1988), 149).

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autonomy. According to both Rousseau and Kant, music was still inferior to the other fine arts, since it stimulated merely the senses and not the intellect. The latter wrote: ‘[Music] is admittedly more a matter of enjoyment than of culture […] and in reason’s judgment it has less value than any other of the fine arts.’97 Still, it is Kant’s own theory of the sublime (which he himself restricts to nature) that provides music critics of the nineteenth century with a new vocabulary. The sublime, as both Kant and Edmund Burke described it, is the experience of something infinitely great or powerful, which would arouse a feeling of terror in the subject, but that tey can still enjoy, knowing they are safe. This is clearly what E. T. A. Hoffmann had in mind in 1810, when he wrote that Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony: opens the realm of the colossal and the immeasurable for us. Radiant beams shoot through the deep night of this region, and we become aware of gigantic shadows which, rocking back and forth, close in on us and destroy all within us except the pain of endless longing [...]. Beethoven’s music evokes terror, fright, horror, and pain, and awakens that endless longing that is the essence of romanticism.98

Arthur Schopenhauer, differed from both Kant and Hegel in seeing music as standing at the top of the hierarchy of art forms, and precisely because it does not represent specific ideas, as the other art forms do. Music speaks directly to us, he argued in The World as Will and Representation (1819), without the mediation of images, concepts, or ideas, and therefore it can express the very essence of the cosmos: ‘[Music] never expresses the phenomenon, but only the inner nature, the in-itself, of every phenomenon.’99 Consequently, Schopenhauer disapproved of Tonmalerei, or any other way of mimicking nature through tones, and considered instrumental music superior to vocal.100 Lyrics, he argued, are at best aesthetically irrelevant, and at worst distract us from the pure meaning of music by focusing our attention on arbitrary details. The mimetic discourse of music, that is, the idea that music mimics sounds or represents emotions, receives another blow from the Viennese 97 Kant (1987), 328: 189. 98 Quoted in Lockwood (2003), 220. 99 Schopenhauer (1959), vol. 1, 261. 100 See his Paralipomena: ‘The great opera is, really, not a proof of a pure sense for the artistic, but rather of the somewhat barbaric notion of raising aesthetic pleasure through the accumulation of means, the simultaneity of completely different impressions, and the strengthening of effect through the increase of working masses and forces; whereas music, of all the arts the most powerful, should perfectly space out the susceptible mind’ (Schopenhauer (1986), II, 509).

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music critic and theorist Eduard Hanslick. In his seminal essay, Of the Musically Beautiful (1854), he argues that the essence of music cannot have anything to do with human emotions. Arousing emotions, in his view, is not music’s function, and emotions are not its content. Just as we cannot learn the essence of wine by getting drunk, we will not, he argues, learn about music by getting emotional. Furthermore, the emotions we attribute to music are mere human projection – music may be restless or tranquil, but the association with the restlessness or tranquillity of the heart has nothing to do with it. In the spirit of Kant, Hanslick writes: ‘In pure contemplation the hearer takes in nothing but the piece of music being played; every interest must be far from him. One of those is the interest to arouse affects in him.’101 In what seems to be a tautology, Hanslick states that the true nature of music is musical, and that the only things expressed in it are musical ideas.102 Its language has syntax, but no semantics – like formal logic – and can therefore not be translated to any other language. And yet, musical ideas are not empty, but rather filled with the creativity of the human ‘spirit’. Since in Hanslick’s theory music refers to nothing but its own formal laws, it has been called a theory of ‘absolute music’.103 What do we learn from this juxtaposition of musical, cultural, economic and theoretical developments? First, we have seen the shift, exemplified in the careers of Mozart and Beethoven, in how composers were regarded: from craftsman and servant to genius and master. Second, his went along with the institutionalization of the bourgeois idea of a separate cultural sphere. Music, instead of having to fulfil an immediate function, was increasingly regarded as a goal in itself, and, for that very reason, as the gateway to the sublime, the divine, or the ‘absolute’. This ‘autonomization’ of music in turn provided the composer with the freedom to experiment with the laws and techniques of the art form. However, Schopenhauer’s and Hanslick’s theories of absolute music reflected an ambivalence towards its place in bourgeois society. While they shared with the bourgeoisie the idea of a separate cultural sphere, autonomous from other spheres in society, their theories also resisted granting new functions to music, especially that of entertainment. They opposed not only the commodification of music that necessarily underlay its autonomy, but also, as can be seen most clearly in Hanslick’s essay, the idea of music as an emotional stimulant. The general public, he argued, 101 Hanslick (1990), 29. 102 Ibidem. 103 Or, as musicologist Peter Kivy calls it, ‘music alone’. See Kivy (2002), 25.

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turned to music in order to arouse a range of common-of-garden emotions or to be in contact with the divine, thus misunderstanding music’s true nature and jeopardizing its true autonomy. In The Philosophy of New Music, Adorno wrote: ‘Since the middle of the nineteenth century, great music has broken away from social functionality of any kind. The logic of its development now stands in conflict with the manipulated and simultaneously self-content needs of the bourgeois public’ (PNM, 11; 12, 17). In the production, as well as in the justification, of music during the second half of the nineteenth century (and, as we will see below, in the first half of the twentieth), one can recognize an increasing hostility towards the public, resulting in music that is unintelligible to laypeople. 1.3.3

Autonomy and resignation

The idea of art as autonomous – disinterested, having no function in society, detached from morality, pedagogy and politics, and existing for nothing but itself – is rooted in the actual social, cultural and economic autonomy of the artist and of art as an institution. Art emancipates itself from church and court, and becomes an autonomous subsystem in bourgeois society. With the decline of patronage, art entered the free market. Paradoxically, therefore, art becomes autonomous the very moment it becomes a commodity. The idea of art as autonomous – as found in l’art pour l’art as a movement and in the theories of absolute music – can be understood as a response to its commodification. As Bourdieu argues, the economic logic of art industries is complemented by ‘an anti-“economic” economy of pure art’.104 Commercial, popular and ‘lowbrow’ entertainment stands in contrast to pure, avant-garde and ‘highbrow’ art. In his Theory of the Avant-Garde (1984[74]), Peter Bürger states that the category of autonomous art belongs to bourgeois society. The fact that the theories of autonomous art reflect the autonomy of art as a socio-historical phenomenon marks their ‘truth moment’. However, as Bürger further argues, these theories also have an ideological moment, insofar as they 104 ‘At one pole, there is the anti-“economic” economy of pure art. Founded on the obligatory recognition of the values of disinterestedness and on the denegation of the “economy” (of the “commercial”) and of “economic” prof it (in the short term), it privileges production and its specific necessities, the outcome of an autonomous history. […] At the other pole, there is the “economic” logic of the literary and artistic industries which, since they make the trade in cultural goods just another trade, confer priority on distribution, on immediate and temporary success, measured for example by the print run, and which are content to adjust themselves to the pre-existing demand of a clientèle’ (Bourdieu (1996), 142).

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fail to recognize the specific historical origins of the autonomy of art, and posit it as an absolute truth: ‘The category “autonomy” does not permit the understanding of its referent as one that developed historically.’105 In other words: the artists embracing the doctrine of l’art pour l’art or the theories of absolute music ignore the fact that the same bourgeois society they turn their backs on constitutes the very condition of their resignation. Moreover, it cannot be said that the doctrine of l’art pour l’art and the theories of absolute music are completely disconnected from morality or politics. These ideas object not to functions per se, but rather to specific functions; not to morality and politics as such, but to specific forms of morality and politics. As Benjamin argues in his essay on surrealism, ‘“art for art’s sake” was scarcely ever to be taken literally; it was almost always a flag under which sailed a cargo that could not be declared because it still lacked a name’ (SW 2, 211-212; II/1, 301). In other words, even for someone as radical as Gautier, art never exists solely for its own sake. It wants something, it opposes something, it takes a certain stance towards society. For certain nineteenth-century European artists, especially after 1848, art and the idea of its autonomy did indeed have a specific function, namely that of resignation from bourgeois society and politics. The idea of pure art allows artists to turn their backs on society, and to be concerned with nothing other than with the laws and techniques of the art form. Art, the realm of the beautiful, becomes the only way to escape the foul world of bourgeois society. This is probably what Flaubert meant when he equated the beautiful with the moral: that it is only possible to live a good life outside existing society, namely in the realm of artistic beauty.106 One can understand this idea of art as a ‘kingdom not of this world’ in a way that is similar to how Karl Marx understood religion. His famous characterization of religion as ‘the opiate of the people’ implies that it contains both a reactionary and a utopian moment. It is reactionary because people are made to cherish an illusion and project onto an afterlife what they really yearn for in present life. But from this it follows for Marx that religion is also an expression of an authentic utopian desire for a different society. The same can be said about the nineteenth-century notion of pure art. Artists turn their backs on a degenerate society, in a genuinely critical gesture, only to become utterly impotent – ‘quite useless’. In this way, an initially critical and anti-bourgeois gesture plays into the hands of bourgeois society after 105 Bürger (1984), 46. 106 ‘That which is beautiful is moral. That is all, nothing more’ (in a letter to Guy de Maupassant dated 26 October 1871).

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all: since happiness and beauty are realized in the imaginary world of art, one finds oneself absolved of the duty to realize it in real life. This is what Herbert Marcuse characterizes as ‘the affirmative character’ of the separate cultural sphere.107 The problematic relationship between art and society was to become the single most important theme of early twentieth-century art and art theory, to which I turn in the last section of this chapter.

1.4

Art versus society

The anti-bourgeois sentiments of art reach a climax at the dawn of the twentieth century, which witnesses an overall feeling of alienation and pessimism among artists and intellectuals, and a shared sense of nervous anticipation of change that would bring about the self-destruction of Western bourgeois culture, which, as they saw it, had become decadent and was bound to collapse under its own weight, and whose once promising values had become pale and rotten. The Viennese poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal wrote in 1905: ‘We must take leave of a world before it collapses. Many know it already, and an indefinable feeling makes poets out of many.’108 This collapse eventually occurs in the shape of the First World War, which in the eyes of many definitively confirmed the bankruptcy of bourgeois values. It was not freedom and forbearance, or – as Kant and Hegel had envisioned – ‘perpetual peace’ that turned out to be the goal of Europe’s bourgeois societies, but a brutal fight over power and land that cost the lives of millions. Technological progress had resulted, not in the emancipation of humanity, but in a fatal cocktail of machine guns, tanks, fighter planes and poison gas. Europe had turned into a wasteland, and the ideals of the enlightenment lay buried in the trenches. In this crisis, the function of art once more came into question. Had art not provided a realm in which the bourgeois individual could turn their back on life, thus precipitating the alienation and atomization of society? Was art’s claim to freedom and independence not simply an excuse for its impotence, and an all-too-easy escape from its responsibilities? Was beauty not in some way an accessory to these horrific events? Art had lost its natural raison d’être, and along with all the other bourgeois values, the autonomy of art had become suspect. Every artist in the first decades of the twentieth century had to somehow reckon with the problem of art’s relationship to 107 In Marcuse (1968), 88-133. 108 Quoted in Schorske (1981), 8.

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society. By discussing once more Parisian literature and Viennese music, we will see how the foundations of art were stirred yet again. 1.4.1

Paris revisited: Surrealism

One can long argue about which of the historical avant-garde movements – futurism, Dadaism, or surrealism – had the greatest impact. Futurism, with its fascination for war, destruction, and ‘the machine’, was soon surpassed by the passage of time, although it continued to be highly influential in the course of the history of art. Dada’s nonsensical anarchism was, from the beginning, bound to have a short lifespan, and was already pronounced dead in 1922 by one of its founders, Tristan Tzara. Nevertheless, it had its revivals in movements such as Lettrism, the Situationist International, Fluxus and the neo-avant-garde, all of which drew inspiration from Dada as well as from Surrealism. Dada was also the basis for Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917), which is generally regarded as one of the most important works of the twentieth century. Surrealism, however, can be argued to have had the greatest lifespan as not just an artistic but also a social movement. In the first half of the twentieth century, it outlasted both futurism and Dada, and also outdid them in terms of diversity of styles, conceptual wealth, and international character. Paris was the cradle of surrealism, but its roots lay in Zürich in neutral Switzerland, where artists of different nationalities had gathered and, on 5 February 1916, had founded the Cabaret Voltaire, a ‘centre for artistic entertainment’. Dada becomes the nonsensical name of the nonsensical art performed and produced there, in forms varying from poems to plays, and from drawings to costumes. Hans Arp, who was among the first Dadaists, later wrote: In Zürich in 1915, losing interest in the slaughterhouses of the world war, we turned to the Fine Arts. While the thunder of the batteries rumbled in the distance, we pasted, we recited, we versified, we sang with all our soul. We searched for an elementary art that would, we thought, save humankind from the furious folly of these times.109

The search for a new kind of art results in anti-art. So much is clear from the setting: a bar instead of a theatre, and ‘entertainment’ instead of ‘high’ art. The Dadaists did not aim for beauty, nor did they want their performances to have ‘meaning’. They deliberately crossed the line into the realms of the 109 Quoted in Edwards and Wood (eds., 2004), 340.

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unintelligible and nonsensical. For Richard Huelsenbeck’s poem ‘The Admiral is Seeking a House to Rent’, for instance, three performers simultaneously chant in three different languages. Dadaist ‘works’ depended on spontaneity and chance. Their collages consisted of ‘found objects’ – train tickets, grocery lists, pieces from posters and magazines –, while their so called Wortsalat poems were made up of randomly shuffled newspaper scraps. Dadaist performances were mostly improvised, the performer saying or chanting the first thing that would come to their mind. Tzara wrote that ‘the thought is made in the mouth’, and argued against the bourgeois myth of the artist as the creative genius, and the work of art as their most personal and authentic expression.110 According to the Dadaists, the only antidote to the hypocrisy of bourgeois art is the banality of such anti-art. For that reason, as Bürger argued, Dada cannot be conceived of as a ‘style’ or ‘school’ in the same manner as, for example, impressionism. Dada marked, in Bürger’s terms, the transition from a system-immanent critique to a self-critique, meaning that it does not merely criticize and reform a preceding style, but questions and contests the validity of the art institutions (the theatre, the museum) and the function of art in bourgeois society.111 As Huelsenbeck states: The Dadaist considers it necessary to come out against art, because he has seen through its fraud as a moral safety valve. Perhaps this militant attitude is a last gesture of inculcated honesty, perhaps it merely amuses the Dadaist, perhaps it means nothing at all. But in any case, art (including culture, spirit, athletic club), regarded from a serious point of view, is a large-scale swindle.112

The Dadaists’ contempt for art is expressed, for instance, in their behaviour towards their audiences, which they mock, shout at and scold, and which in turn treat them with hissing, booing, and throwing eggs and tomatoes. The activities of the Dadaist movement in Zürich lasted for only a few months. In 1917 its members spread out and organized Dadaist activities in Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States. Tristan Tzara went to Paris, where he met the future founder and leader of the surrealist movement, André Breton. In 1919, Breton, together with Phillippe Soupault and Louis Aragon, founded the literary magazine Littérature, as the Parisian platform for Dada. 110 Quoted in Edwards and Wood (eds., 2004), 342. 111 Bürger (1984), 22. 112 Huelsenbeck in Harrison and Wood (eds., 1992), 261.

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By the time Tzara arrived in Paris in 1920, however, Breton was no longer convinced of the critical force of Dada. Nonsense for the sake of nonsense, he thought, would eventually turn out to be as impotent as art for art’s sake. What needed, he believed, was ideas and convictions.113 What had initially attracted Breton to Dada was its emphasis on the subconscious and the coincidental. While working with shell-shocked soldiers in the Centre Neurologique in Nantes during the war, Breton had become intrigued by the power of the subconscious. This fascination was stimulated by the work of Freud, whom he deeply admired. Breton came to believe that the only path to a radical change in the social order was through a liberation of the subconscious. Hence, from the beginning Breton was concerned not merely with a revolution in art, but also with the functioning of the human mind. In 1919, he and Soupault experimented with ‘automatic writing’, the scribbling down of anything that comes to one’s mind, without the intervention of conscious critical reflection. The principle underlying automatic writing was, like the Dada performances, directed against notions such as autonomy, authenticity, and genius. Breton wrote: ‘We have no talent […]. [W]e have made ourselves, in our works, the deaf receptacles of so many echoes, the modest recording devices that are not hypnotized by the designs they trace.’114 The surrealists did not consider the products of these experiments as works of literature or art, but thought they were valuable to the extent that they provided new insights into the functioning of the mind. It is this non-aesthetic interest that Breton found lacking in Dada. A public confrontation between the Dadaists and the Littérature group took place during a performance, in July 1923, of Tzara’s play Coeur à gaz, which Breton and his friends came to disrupt. A fistfight broke out, Tzara called the police, and the intruders were forced to leave. This incident marked the definitive break between the Dadaists and the group surrounding Breton, which had already begun to call itself ‘surrealist’, after a term coined by a friend of Breton, the poet and critic Guillaume Apollinaire. About a year later, the Bureau of Surrealist Research opened its doors at 15 rue de Grenelle. This quasi-scientific institute intended to ‘gather all the information possible related to forms that might express the unconscious activity of the mind.’115 Advertisements encouraged everybody to enter the building and tell their secrets, their dreams, hopes and ideas. By December 113 See Seigel (1986), 374. 114 Quoted in Nadeau (1973), 97 (original italics). 115 Quoted in Durozoi (2002), 63.

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1924 the Bureau had its own journal, La Révolution surréaliste, which published drawings, photographs, dreams, poems, and automatic texts by the surrealists. In that same year Breton published the Surrealist Manifesto, in which he formulated the concept of surrealism and its aims: the reconciliation of dream and logic, private and public, consciousness and the subconscious: ‘Why should I not expect from the sign of the dream more than I expect from a degree of consciousness which is daily more acute? Can’t the dream also be used in solving the fundamental questions of life?’116 According to Breton, the only way to change society was to move away from the well-worn paths in the regular sciences, which with their narrow concept of mind had neglected all aspects of human consciousness that appeared alien and hostile: the subconscious, the accidental, the primitive, the childlike, the dream. He wrote: ‘I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak.’117 The manifesto gave a definition of surrealism in the form of an encyclopaedia or dictionary entry: SURREALISM, n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express – verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner – the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.118

Vague as this definition may be, it is remarkable that there is no mention of art or poetry. The surrealists did not consider themselves to be primarily an artistic movement. Literature, to them, was of minor importance, and on several occasions they even expressed their contempt for it. Breton repeatedly announced his intention to give up writing poetry once and for all: ‘I’ve never strived for anything else, I repeat, than to ruin literature. Poetry? There’s no poetry where we think there is. Poetry exists outside words, style, and so on, and that’s why I’m delighted when I read a book that is really badly written.’119 The group’s contempt for literary writing is particularly aimed at the novel form – the most popular literary form by far, and, as Hegel already noted, the 116 117 118 119

Breton in Harrison and Wood (eds., 1992), 449. Ibidem, 450. Ibidem, 452. Quoted in Durozoi (2002), 54.

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bourgeois genre par excellence. Whereas courtly and religious literature necessarily contained a collective element in its production and reception (because it was embedded in festivities or ritual), the novel is produced by an individual, expresses individuality in its form, and is typically consumed in solitude.120 It is, in other words, completely detached from public life. Moreover, it satisfies the reader’s need for a logical and organized structure, thus, according to the surrealists, restricting their imagination. This suspicion of the novel form went quite far: Aragon succumbed to pressure from the group to burn the manuscript of his three-volume novel Défense de l’infini, for which he had already signed a contract, and Soupault – a surrealist from the beginning – was expelled from the group in 1926 because of his literary activities.121 Although the novel form was held in contempt by the surrealists, their attitude towards literature was ambivalent. Words, Breton argued, have a life of their own: they ‘command thought’ and are ‘creators of energy.’122 Only by liberating this energy, he thought, could literature, as an exploration of the subconscious and an instrument for revolt, hold any significance for the surrealists. In the Declaration of 27 January 1925, we read: We have nothing to do with literature. But when necessary we are as capable as anyone else of making use of it. [...] SURREALISM is not a poetic form. It is a cry of the mind as it turns back towards itself and is determined to smash its fetters, if necessary with material hammers.123

This declaration again emphasizes the spiritual and political, rather than the artistic, aims of the group. But what to think then of surrealist ‘novels’ passed down to us: Aragon’s Paris Peasant (1926) and Breton’s Nadja (1928), to name only the most famous ones? Although we consider these works to be novels, the surrealists certainly did not. And given the typical novel back then, there was certainly something to be said for this view. The reason why we conceive of these works as ‘novels’ today has much to do with the expansion of the term ‘novel’ by the avant-gardes. Given the scientific ambitions of the surrealists described above, Breton’s Nadja can perhaps best be understood as a ‘case study’: it records ‘surreal’ 120 Typically, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, the story of a man stranded on a desert island, is often referred to as the first novel (see, for instance, Watt (1957)). 121 Nadeau (1973), 113 and 148. 122 Quoted in Nadeau (1973), 92. 123 In: Richardson and Fijalkowski (eds., 2001), 24.

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episodes in the life of the author, and associations in his mind. Photos and illustrations have replaced the naturalistic description one would expect in a novel. Nadja is the report of a ten-day liaison Breton had with a mentally ill woman he encounters on the streets of Paris and whom he coincidentally meets several more times. In her naïveté and non-conformism, Nadja seems to make a better surrealist than even Breton himself, as he has to confess. Finally, Nadja is a critique of modern society and the way it deals with people such as Nadja, putting them away in mental institutions instead of learning from them. Similarly, Aragon’s Paris Peasant cannot be called a traditional novel, but is rather a montage. The style ranges from essay to poem and from dream protocol to philosophical treatise. Aragon wanted to write a ‘modern mythology’, in which Parisian city life was viewed in a radically new manner. He included found objects such as advertisement plates, street signs, and menu cards, aiming, as he himself put it, to destroy the novel by its own means.124 The surrealists valued art and literature only insofar as they were of service to a spiritual revolution and a social revolution, which they saw as mutually dependent. After 1925 the group became more explicitly political, and most members joined the French Communist Party. This did not mean that they subjected themselves to the Party’s will, but merely that the goals of the surrealist group and the Communist Party ran parallel to one another for the moment. For Breton, Party membership was all the more reason to emphasize the group’s independence. The Party officials, for their part, looked Argus-eyed at the surrealists, because of their refusal to follow the Party line and produce functional (that is to say propagandistic) art. In 1931, after having visited Moscow, Aragon declared that in order to become a communist, he would have had to renounce surrealism. Soon afterwards, the Communist Party declared that socialist realism was the only official communist art form, and Breton and the other remaining surrealists were expelled.125 According to Breton, the revolution in society and the revolution in the mind were mutually dependent. The value of surrealist works for the revolution, therefore, lay not in its propagandistic content but in its revolutionary form.126 This made the surrealists’ stance towards the autonomy 124 See the epilogue by Hofstede in Aragon (1998), 199. 125 Nadeau (1973), Chapters 14 and 16. 126 Breton’s conception of the relation of art and politics is close to that of Leon Trotsky (whom he admired and later visited in Mexico). In his essay Literature and Revolution Trotsky writes: ‘As far as the political use of art is concerned, or the impossibility of allowing such use by our enemies, the party has sufficient experience, insight, decision and resource. But the actual

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of art highly ambivalent. On the one hand, they rejected the autonomy of art as a bourgeois institution, detached from life and functioning as a hideout for beauty and consolation, from which one could momentarily ignore the horrors of reality. The surrealist, by contrast, wanted to reconcile art and life, dream and action. However, as Bürger stresses, the surrealists wanted to connect art, not with actual life, with the status quo, but only with a revolutionary praxis and with a thoroughly transformed society.127 In that sense, the autonomy of art was the necessary condition of its political utilization. I shall come back to this later. To summarize the surrealist critique of the function of art in society, we can distinguish three main points. First, the surrealists broke radically with the nineteenth-century conception of art as a divine creation and an other-worldly realm of beauty. This realm, they argued, functions as an ideologically derived defence for political resignation. Instead of soothing the public by offering them beauty, the surrealists wanted to shock and provoke it. Art, in their view, should not be detached from but connected to life, and should foreshadow a different life. Second, they argued that this revolutionary goal demanded a new mode of literary production. Automatic writing, free association, and found objects were, they thought, literary forms destined for new, collective ways of production and reception. Finally, art was for them not an end in itself. Works of art were experiments, carried out in order to document and eventually change the functioning of the human mind. As such they simultaneously functioned instrumentally within a social struggle. 1.4.2

Vienna revisited: Arnold Schoenberg

Fin-de-siècle Vienna was drenched in art: feuilletons in the newspapers, fancy Jugendstil decorations in upper-class bourgeoisie interiors, and a booming concert life. Art was the main status symbol, and devoting oneself to it the primary means of emphasizing one’s cultural distinction.128 In findevelopment of art, and its struggle for new forms, are not part of the party’s task, nor is it its concern. The party does not delegate anyone for such work’ (Trotsky in Harrison and Wood (eds., 1992), 444). 127 ‘The praxis of life to which Aestheticism refers and which it negates is the means-ends rationality of the bourgeois everyday. Now, it is not the aim of the avant-gardistes to integrate art into this praxis. On the contrary, they assent to the aestheticists’ rejection of the world and its means-ends rationality. What distinguishes them from the latter is the attempt to organize a new life praxis from the basis in art’ (Bürger (1984), 49). 128 See Janik and Toulmin (1973), 44.

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de-siècle Vienna, culture was indeed, Marcuse put it, ‘affirmative’, affirming instead of contesting existing social relations, and veiling the political inequality, moral duplicity, and stifling social atmosphere of the Habsburg society. The taste of the bourgeoisie was conservative, seeking comfort in the classics and frowning upon the latest artistic schools and styles. This conservatism provoked the Viennese artists to adopt a militant hostility towards their public. Charles Rosen writes: ‘If the pastime of shocking the bourgeois took on at times a playful aspect in Paris and London, in Vienna it was carried on with a bitter seriousness only occasionally masked by wit. […] For the Viennese artist and musician, the public was the enemy.’129 The warlords in the battle against bourgeois aestheticism, or what counted as ‘good taste’, were the literary critic, poet and playwright Karl Kraus and the architect Adolf Loos. Kraus, who considered Vienna the ‘research station for the Apocalypse’, targeted the degenerate literary style of the popular feuilletons in the Neue Freie Presse. For him, the authors of these feuilletons commit not merely an offence against literature. Since language, he argued, is the very constitutor of our thoughts, not a mere medium, the degeneration of language entails the moral degeneration of Viennese culture. Adolf Loos, founder of a journal entitled, The Other: Journal for the Introduction of Occidental Culture in Austria, fought a similar battle against Jugendstil. In his seminal essay, ‘Ornament and Crime’ (1908), he expressed his contempt for the bourgeois’ decoration of everything – doorknobs, ashtrays, banisters, the entire interior – and he equated this over-ornamentation with tattoos worn by barbarians and criminals, and with the graffiti on lavatory walls. He also made a sharp distinction between objects of use, which were there to increase human comfort, and objects of art, which were supposed to be purposeless, disquieting, and were such that they would ‘tear people from their comfort.’130 Either way, in the functionality of the house or in the disturbing nature of art, beauty was to become superfluous, according to Loos. Bourgeois conservatism dominated Vienna’s musical life, too. The concert and opera houses staged popular classics, while contemporary works were seldom performed. The official music practice lives in and off the past. Although Gustav Mahler was esteemed as a conductor at the Court Opera, his own compositions were regarded as barely excusable eccentricities. One victim of this conservatism was Mahler’s young friend, the composer Arnold Schoenberg. While Schoenberg was still able to please the audience with 129 Rosen (1975), 9. 130 Quoted in Janik and Toulmin (1973), 100.

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the Wagnerian style of the Gurrelieder, the reception that greeted moreadventurous compositions such as the song cycle Das Buch der hängenden Gärten (1908) and the one-act opera Erwartung (1909) was nothing if not chilly. A 1913 performance of works by Schoenberg and his pupils Alban Berg and Anton von Webern infuriated the public, who staged a riot that matched the famous premiere of Stravinsky’s Sacre du Printemps in Paris that same year. Like Kraus and Loos, both of whom he admired, Schoenberg wanted to shatter the system of worn-out aesthetic standards and expurgate musical language of ornamentation to the point where it became a force for pure expression. In music, it was tonality that determined this system of standards. Ever since the Renaissance, compositions had been built around a central triad. The primary means of expression in Western music consisted in the departure from this central triad (the tonic) to dissonant tones and triads, thereby creating harmonic tension, which was eventually to resolve again in consonance through a return to the tonic. Consequently, the tonal system creates a hierarchical relation between tones: dissonant tones and triads are suspended and transitional, thus demanding resolution, unlike consonant ones, which are resolved by definition. Carl Schorske argues that, for Schoenberg, this systematic hierarchy paralleled the hierarchy of Habsburg society: ‘The tonal system was a musical frame in which tones had unequal power to express, to validate, and to make bearable the life of man under a rationally organized, hierarchical culture.’131 In nineteenth-century compositions, most notably in Wagner’s ‘unending melodies’, the return to the tonic had already been almost endlessly postponed. According to Schoenberg, it is just a final step to get rid of tonality altogether and to ‘emancipate’ the dissonant, as he calls it in his essay ‘Opinion or Insight?’ (1926).132 The emancipation of dissonance means its emancipation from the obligation to resolve in consonance: ‘The individual parts proceed regardless of whether or not their meeting results in codified harmonies.’133 Schoenberg names his new anti-systematic system ‘free tonality’ or ‘pan-tonality’, but it is better known by the name given by an unsympathetic critic: atonality. It was never Schoenberg’s intention or ambition to single-handedly overthrow the tradition of Western music. Rather, he considers his own work as only the final and inevitable phase of the destruction of a system already doomed. His biographer Willi Reich strikingly characterizes 131 Schorske (1981), 346. 132 Schönberg (1975), 258. 133 Quoted in Rosen (1975), 35.

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him as a ‘conservative revolutionary’.134 Indeed, Schoenberg regarded his revolution, not as the negation of the work of his great predecessors (Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Wagner), but as its continuation. But it was a revolution nonetheless. After finishing Das Buch der hängenden Gärten, one of the first works in which he made use of free tonality, Schoenberg wrote in a letter: But now that I am conscious of having broken through every restriction of a bygone aesthetic; and though the goal toward which I am striving appears to me a certain one, I am, nonetheless, already feeling the resistance I shall have to overcome; I feel now how hotly even the least temperaments will rise in revolt, and suspect that even those who have so far believed in me will not want to acknowledge the necessary nature of this development […]. I am being forced in this direction…. I am obeying an inner compulsion which is stronger than any upbringing.135

Schoenberg, in other words, conceives of himself as an inevitable historical force, unstoppable even by his own will. The artist’s will, he writes in the essay ‘Problems of artistic education’, has nothing to do with art. Artists do not will; they must.136 Music, according to Schoenberg, is a question of truth rather than beauty. It develops autonomously, propelled by its inner logic, as Hanslick had already argued. Consequently, the composer does not need to take the public into account. Whether the public enjoys their compositions should not be a matter of concern to them. The artist answers to no one but art itself. Schoenberg once said that the only advantage of having an audience is that it improves the acoustics of the concert hall. Though it cannot be said that Schoenberg produced anti-art in the way the Dadaist did, he certainly was critical of the bourgeois institution of art, which in his view functioned as an entertaining and pleasant way to escape reality. Like his friend Adolf Loos, he argued that art should be uncomfortable and revolutionary: it should speak the truth, even if this truth is awful. The question was, however, whether art was wholly up to this task. Did art, and perhaps music in particular, not have the inherent tendency to please, to be beautiful? 134 Reich (1968). 135 Quoted in Rosen (1975), 7. 136 ‘Ich glaube: Kunst kommt nicht von können, sondern vom Müssen. Der Kunsthandwerker kann. Was ihm angeboren ist, hat er ausgebildet; und wenn er nur will, so kann er.… Aber der Künstler muß. Er hat keinen Einfluß darauf, von seinem Willen hängt es nicht ab’ (Schönberg (1976), vol. 1, 165).

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Schoenberg tackled this problem in the opera Moses and Aaron, which he started between 1930 and 1932 but never finished. The libretto, written by the composer himself, is about the conflict between truth and beauty. Moses is burdened with the divine task of leading the people to the Promised Land, but he lacks the rhetorical power to convince the people of God’s plan. Having been given this task by God, Moses replies: ‘But my tongue is not flexible: thought is easy; speech is laborious.’137 God replies: ‘Aaron will be enlightened, he shall be your mouth.’138 Aaron, however, though a skilled orator, is unable to grasp Moses’ abstract thoughts and wishes. One way in which Schoenberg expresses this discrepancy between the divine idea and its verbal or artistic expression is by having Moses speak but not sing, while the role of Aaron is sung by a lyrical tenor. From the outset, then, the brotherhood is doomed to end tragically. Aaron’s faith in God, like the faith of the people of Israel, depends on outward signs: a rod that turns into a snake, a hand that becomes leprous only to heal miraculously seconds later. Neither he nor they can understand the true meaning of the divine, and Moses cannot make them understand, because, as Schoenberg presents it, the idea is by its very nature abstract and inexplicable. The climax of the opera takes place in the second act, after Moses has ascended Mount Sinai to receive the Ten Commandments from God. The people grow restless during Moses’ absence, demanding a sign from God. Aaron orders them to collect all their gold and says: O Israel, I return your gods to you, and also give you to them, just as you have demanded. Leave distant things to One infinite, since to you the gods have ever-present and always-common substance. You shall provide the stuff; I shall give it a form: common and visible, imaged in gold forever.139

And so, a calf is built and presented by Aaron to the people of Israel. In the third scene of act two, Schoenberg stages the worshipping of the idol as a delirious religious event escalating into an orgy. People slaughter animals, tear them apart and devour raw meat. They get drunk, there is extravagant dancing, and finally even human sacrifice and ritual suicide. Moses, descending from the mountain carrying the stone tables, beholds the scene and is enraged. He calls Aaron to order, but the latter defends 137 Wörner (1963), 115 138 Ibidem, 115-116. 139 Ibidem, 163.

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himself and the people: ‘No folk can grasp more than just a partial image, the perceivable part of the whole idea. Be understood by all the people in their own accustomed way.’140 But Moses will not have it. He is unwilling to compromise the idea just to make it more understandable. In rage, he smashes the tablets with the Ten Commandments. At the same time, however, he becomes aware of the tragic fact that any expression of the idea must result in both an incomplete image and a damaged idea. Therefore, he cries out in despair: Inconceivable God! Inexpressible, many-sided idea, will you let it be so explained? Shall Aaron, my mouth, fashion this image? Then I have fashioned an image too, false, as an image must be. Thus I am defeated! Thus, all was but madness that I believed before, and can and must not be given voice. O word, thou word, that I lack!141

In this opera, then, Schoenberg gives expression to his conviction that a work of art is by its very nature inadequate, for it tries to explicate the inexplicable truth. The words of Aaron, and the idol he builds, can merely hint at the truth, but can never fully grasp it. Again, this does not mean that for Schoenberg art is utterly without value, as it was for the Dadaists. It can have great value, but only on condition that it is as uncompromising and rigorous in its logic as possible, and does not yield to the whims of the public. Schoenberg is often associated with the doctrine of l’art pour l’art, because of his uncompromising attitude towards the public and his emphasis on the autonomous development of the logic of the art form. Indeed, in some of his writings he mentions the doctrine approvingly.142 Nevertheless, we have seen that Schoenberg’s notion of art has its roots in the critique of Viennese bourgeois culture, voiced by Kraus and Loos. According to these critics, art should renounce its function in this particular culture and this particular society; but that does not imply that it should strive to have no function at all. Schoenberg’s contribution to a project devised by his friend Adolf Loos is instructive in this regard: After the fall of the Habsburg Empire in 1919, Loos wrote ‘Guidelines for an Office of Support for the Arts’, in which he proposed a reformation of art practices for the benefit of a new democratic society. Loos, like the surrealists, wants to bridge the gap between art and 140 Wörner (1963), 189. 141 Ibidem, 195. 142 See for instance the essay ‘Neue Musik, Veraltete Musik, Stil und Gedanke’, in: Schönberg (1976), 34.

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life, though not through a revision of the arts, but through improvements in art education. He asked Schoenberg to write the section on music. In the resulting contribution, we read: ‘Art education should improve the moral qualities of the pupil.’143 For Schoenberg, in other words, music did not resist all functionality, but primarily a specific function it had in bourgeois culture, namely to be pleasing to the individual. Instead, he regarded music as the bearer of truth and argued that, only if this truth could be expressed in all its rigor could art have a moral and critical function. 1.4.3

Avant-garde and modernism

Both the surrealists and Schoenberg struggled with the heritage of the autonomous sphere of art in bourgeois society, and both tried to find appropriate responses to a culture that had become ‘affirmative’, to use Marcuse’s term. Nineteenth-century aestheticism and the cult of pure beauty had, by the turn of the century, become a mere excuse for political indifference and impotence. The autonomy of art, according to these artists, functioned as a nature reserve in which the bourgeois individual could momentarily take leave of the worries of everyday life. Both the surrealists and Schoenberg regarded themselves as surgeons of society. And since desperate ills call for desperate remedies, art as it had been conceived of up until then had to be radically altered. They denounced the function of art within society, and questioned the art forms that tradition had bequeathed to them. Schoenberg deconstructed the tonal system, which he saw as subjecting the individual tone to the hierarchy of harmony. The surrealist group revolutionized poetry, and rejected the novel form and sometimes even literature itself. There are some notable differences between the two cases, too. Schoenberg’s work, like that of the whole Vienna movement, was primarily about honesty and authenticity. Stripping art from false pretences was part of a critique of social and moral hypocrisy. Nevertheless, while Schoenberg was critical of the aesthetic tradition and explored the laws of the entire artistic medium all the way to its boundaries, he never actually crosses these boundaries. He and his pupils still produced ‘art’, which was performed in a concert or opera hall. The surrealist group, by contrast, did cross these boundaries: they mocked the ‘divinity’ of art and they looked down with contempt on the notion of genius and artistic creativity. While Schoenberg and the Viennese movement looked for a moral truth, the surrealists were 143 ‘Entwurf zu Richtlinien für ein Kunstamt’, in: Schönberg (1976), 462 (original italics).

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after an epistemological and political truth. They refused to be conceived of as artists, regarding themselves as scientists and explorers of the subconscious. One would find them, not in the traditional theatres or literary salons, but rather in bars or vaudeville-theatres. This difference between criticizing art from within and criticizing it from without marks, according to Bürger, the boundary between (high) modernism and the historical avant-garde.144 High modernism explores the boundaries of the medium to the verge of incomprehensibility, but – since this exploration takes place within the autonomous sphere of art – it still accepts the institution of art in bourgeois society. Conversely, the historical avant-gardes (futurism, Dadaism, surrealism, and constructivism) criticize the institution itself, and make the place of art in society their target. Their primary objective is the reconciliation of art and life. From this follows an alternative aesthetic that entails collective production and reception in the shape of performances and manifestoes, and the denunciation of the very notion of the ‘work’ of art, as an organic whole, similar to nature. Although Bürger’s distinction is interesting, I think that it overlooks certain important similarities between high modernism and the historical avant-garde, and, furthermore, that his concept of avant-garde is too narrow.145 Contrary to what Bürger argues, high modernism incorporates a moment of anti-art as well. Its autonomy, especially in the case of Schoenberg, flows from a deep pessimism and is compelled by necessity. It emerges from the presumption that anything outside art is complicit with a false world. But since art by its very nature is ‘false’, namely illusory, it has to come out against itself. By ridding itself of falseness, it simultaneously expresses the wish that its own moral honesty might be part of the world too. As Jay Bernstein writes: ‘The anti-art moment of modernist works […] enacts art’s desire to be world and not art; but only as art, as semblance, can art evince that desire, perform it.’146 This dialectical movement of modernist art will be extensively discussed once we turn our attention to Adorno’s work. 144 Bürger (1984), Chapter 2. 145 For some interesting critiques of Bürger, see Lüdke (ed., 1976), Foster (1996) (most notably Chapter 1), and Murphy (1999) (most notably Chapter 1). For a different attempt to distinguish modernism from the avant-garde see Raymond Williams’ essay ‘The Politics of the Avantgarde’ (in Williams (1989), 49-63). According to Williams, the difference between modernism and avant-garde lies, not in the content of their attack on bourgeois society, but rather in the greater hostility and militancy of the latter. Rosalind Krauss (1985), finally, argues that the avant-garde, in emphasizing the importance of originality and the ‘new’, remains confined within the paradigm of modernism. 146 Bernstein (2006), 247.

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Furthermore, in focusing on the institutional aspect of the avant-garde, Bürger misses the fact that, for instance, the socialist-utopian programme of the surrealist group brings it much closer to certain modernists than to other avant-garde groups, such as the Dadaists (who were to a large extent apolitical) or the Italian futurists (most of whom were Mussolini enthusiasts).147 Finally, there are a lot of artistic currents and individual artists that are not easy to place in either of Bürger’s categories. It is not always that easy to determine in which cases an artist touches upon the boundaries of their art form, and in which cases they cross them.148 These remarks are not meant, however, to reject Bürger’s distinction, merely to demonstrate that it should not be made as absolute or simple as he makes it.149 Since the positions of Benjamin and Adorno are sometimes said to parallel the avant-garde and high modernism respectively, we shall return to this issue in later chapters.

1.5 Conclusion In the introduction to this chapter, I quoted Jameson: ‘Always historicize!’ Why is it necessary to historicize? Why is it so important to be aware of the contingency of our understanding of art? One important reason is that through historicization one absolves oneself of the duty of answering the question of what art is. One stops looking for a constant, transhistorical essence shared by all works of art, of all kinds and from all moments in history. The moment one realizes that one’s concept of art is historically contingent, one will stop searching for a definitive answer to the question of what art is, and start asking: what is the place of art in our contemporary society? 147 See Egbert (1970) and Gay (2008). 148 Consider, for instance, the case of Alexander Rodchenko, who, in 1921 presents three monochrome paintings in the primary colours. He later commented: ‘I reduced painting to its logical conclusion and exhibited three canvases: red, blue, and yellow. I affirmed: this is the end of painting. These are the primary colours. Every plane is a discrete plane and there will be no more representation’ (quoted in Foster (1996), 17). Is this an example of a quasi-Dadaist ‘performance’ or the presentation of three monochrome paintings, that is of a ‘work’ of art? Is Rodchenko a modernist, taking the tradition and the artistic medium to its ‘logical conclusion’, or an avant-gardist, crossing the boundaries of the ‘institution’ of art? 149 I am more sympathetic to Hal Foster’s distinction between a ‘formal modernism plotted along a temporal, diachronic or vertical axis’ and an ‘avant-garde modernism that […] favored a spatial, synchronic, or horizontal axis’ (Foster (1996), xi). The advantage of this model is the possibility of crossover and hybrid forms, for which Bürger leaves very little room.

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The cases discussed in this chapter exemplify some crucial changes in the way art and artists have been conceived of in Western culture, in particular within the discussion of the autonomy or critical potential of art and the artist. More specifically, the cases illustrate the following two points. First, both the institution and the concept of art we know and take for granted, are relatively young, and have their origins in specific historical (social and economical) circumstances. Kant’s and Schiller’s theories of the ideal of an autonomous art emerged at a moment in history when the autonomy of art also became a social fact. The decline in the power of the church and of aristocratic patronage released art and the artist from their servile role. Art entered the free market, giving artists the opportunity to experiment with form, but also presenting them with the necessity of reckoning with a public with which they shared neither taste nor tradition. This new social situation of the arts found its expression and justification in aesthetic notions such as the doctrine of l’art pour l’art and the theory of absolute music. Furthermore, it brought about the romantic cult of the genius; the notion that the artist was somehow elevated above the people and could see more and farther than ordinary folk. At the beginning of the twentieth century, this aesthetic discourse of pure art was challenged by the avant-garde and certain high modernists. The autonomy of art was itself unmasked as ideological and as ‘affirmative’ of bourgeois society. This did not mean, however, that the autonomy of art, in the sense of a distinct sphere in society, was seriously threatened by these challenges.150 Rather, the critique of the ideology of pure art made use of this autonomy. This brings me to the second point I wanted to make in this chapter, namely that the notions of artistic autonomy and artistic critique, or of pure and committed art, were not simply opposed to each other, as is often assumed. The ideas of artistic autonomy and artistic critique emerged at more or less the same time in history, and have continued to exist side by side since. Schiller argued that art can be moral or political only as long as it is autonomous. The rejection by the doctrine of l’art pour l’art and of pure art of any function can itself be understood as a critical gesture towards the bourgeois principle of utility and the dominant logic of instrumental 150 As Schmidt writes in the case of literature: ‘Gegen das Literatursystem wie im Literatursystem sind nur Revolten möglich, die das System durch Anwendung seiner Grenzoperationen entweder zu “Literatur” macht oder als Nicht-Literatur ausscheidet. Eine Revolution wäre nur möglich bei gleichzeitiger Umwandlung der Organisationsform der Gesamtgesellschaft, die dann einen anderen Typ von ‘Literatur’ hervorbringen könnte, über den sich unter den heutigen Bedingungen aber nichts sagen läßt. Die Abschaffung des Literatursystems ist so wenig intendierbar, wie es seine Entstehung im 18. Jahrhundert gewesen ist’ (Schmidt (1989), 442).

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rationality. Conversely, the avant-garde’s rejection of autonomy and its call for a reconciliation of art and life, are possible only from the standpoint of an autonomous domain of art.151 In short, the relation between artistic autonomy and artistic critique is understood properly only when we conceive of it as a historical and dialectical relation – historical because both positions have their roots in a specific socio-historical situation, namely the emergence of an autonomous sphere of art in society, and dialectical because each position depends and is premised on the other. We have traced the roots of the modern concept of art and artists up to the beginning of the period between the two World Wars. As such, this chapter is also meant to situate and contextualize the debates between Benjamin and Adorno that take place in this period. To be sure, this does not mean there are no developments in the concept of art and the social situation of artists after that period. Still, I believe that several issues that I discuss here and that have emerged at the end of the eighteenth century and continued to haunt us ever since, are typical of modernity. Let me conclude this chapter by briefly pointing to three of them. The f irst issue concerns the relation between artist and public. As soon as the artist became autonomous, towards the end of the eighteenth century, their relation to their public grew problematic. They could no longer count on the security of a tradition and taste they still shared with their aristocratic or clerical patrons. The new middle-class audience was anonymous, fickle, and uneducated. The artist might choose to serve this mass audience, or search for the favour of the elite market of aristocratic connoisseurs. Either way, the relation between the artist and his public was no longer self-evident. We can see this time and again. Schiller went from considering the public his ‘trusted friend’ to seeing it as his enemy. We also find this hostility in Baudelaire, who compared his audience to a dog; and in Schoenberg, who conceived of his audience as little more than furniture in the concert hall. Alban Berg, Schoenberg’s pupil, was rather worried about the successful premiere of his opera Wozzeck in 1925: if the public liked it that much, something had to be wrong with it.152 The idea that public success was a sign of artistic failure is still an important part of the discourse on art and artistic identity. It involves the dialectic of the increasing ‘autonomization’ of art and the growing appeal of mass culture, which will be the topic of 151 Of course, this is true only from the observer’s perspective. As I have discussed, the avantgarde movements themselves had the destruction of the autonomous artwork as their objective. 152 This anecdote is told by Adorno (16, 86).

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the next chapter. It is an issue that today leaves its mark even on so-called ‘popular culture’ (for instance in the contempt for pop musicians who are said to turn ‘commercial’). Surrealism wanted to reconcile art with life, but not with this life. The surrealists’ audience – an audience emancipated both psychologically and politically – did not yet exist, in fact. Still, part of avant-garde art entails involving of the audience in the work, in the performance. This involvement increases with the possibilities of technological reproducing artworks (photography and film), and with new art forms such as performance art, installation art, community art, and interactive art – forms that thematize the inherently problematic relationship between the artist and the audience. The second issue is the relation between the ‘new’ and the ‘ever-thesame’. Modern art is dominated by what Heinich calls the ‘regime of singularity’.153 Instead of following the rules dictated by the ancients, as artists up until the eighteenth and well into the nineteenth century did, the modern artist is aware of his autonomy – in the artistic rather than the social sense. Emancipation from court and church grants the artist the freedom to experiment, to explore the boundaries of the given medium. The ‘new’ becomes the number-one aesthetic value, voiced in Rimbaud’s famous imperative: Il faut être absolument moderne. Simultaneously, the identity of the artist shifts, as we have seen in the case of Beethoven, from the able craftsman to the divine genius. And a genius, as Kant writes, does not follow rules, but dictates them. In Romantic discourse, the notion of the genius came to stand for unbridled subjectivism and the expression of the most authentic and the deepest feelings. The avant-gardes, as we have seen, challenged these pretensions, and emphasized the banal, the everyday and the vulgar. Avant-garde artists proudly declared themselves to be talentless, and let their works depend on the subconscious, on coincidence and on repetition. Originality, creativity, and authenticity were regarded as part of a bourgeois aesthetic and were therefore rejected. The third issue is the relation between beauty and truth. Art was not the only domain to become autonomous in the eighteenth century. Law, economics, science, politics, and so on also gained their independence. ‘Autonomization’ is the very ‘grammar’ of modernity, as Kant, Max Weber, and Jürgen Habermas have argued. Modernity is characterized by the differentiation of society into separate and relatively autonomous value spheres. While the Ancients had identified the beautiful with the true and the good, 153 Heinich (1996a), Chapter 3.

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Kant separated it from utility, morality, and truth. Nineteenth-century aestheticism took things a step further by identifying utility with ugliness and rejecting any art that has an obvious political, moral, or pedagogical function. One might still argue, however, that aestheticism identified beauty with truth, although not a scientific but a ‘higher’ truth, a truth not of this world. This has consequences for the kind of beauty that is valued. Increasingly, the ideal of classical harmony gave way to a kind of beauty that was unsettling, disorderly, and awe-inspiring: the sublime, as described by Burke and Kant. Whereas the beautiful, according to Kant, pleases directly, and produces ‘a feeling of life’s being furthered’, the sublime involves ‘a momentary inhibition of the vital forces’ and pleases only indirectly.154 Kant associated the sublime primarily with natural phenomena, but modern art adopted it as the dominant aesthetic idea. Beauty itself became suspect, and this negative attitude was radicalized by twentieth-century high-modernism and the historical avant-garde. Instead of being a symbol of truth, beauty was not only considered inferior to the sublime, but was even opposed to truth. Beauty, on this view, is ‘affirmative’, a capitulation to a false world. This view resonated in Dadaist anti-art, in Breton’s preference for bad writing, and in Schoenberg’s portrayal of the conflict between the rhetorically skilled Aaron and the truth-bearing Moses. Beauty as harmony was replaced by an image that was considered to be more truthful: the imperfect, the fragmentary, the dissonant, the atonal, the absurd, the uncanny, and the grotesque.

154 Kant (1987), 244-245: 98.

2.

Ends of Art Its twilight can last more than the totality of its day, because its death is precisely its inability to die. ‒ Giorgio Agamben, The Man Without Content

2.1 Introduction Many of the issues I have discussed in Chapter 1 concerning art in modernity – the relation between artists and the public, the new and the ever-thesame, beauty and truth – are present, explicitly or implicitly, in Benjamin’s essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility’ (1936). This essay, as Howard Caygill remarks, is both the most influential and least understood text in Benjamin’s oeuvre.1 But, as others have argued, it might be the case that the essay owes its popularity and influence precisely to its ambivalent position and to the vast range of potential (mis)interpretations resulting from that position.2 Almost as famous as Benjamin’s essay is Adorno’s criticism of it, and just as often is it, too, misunderstood. The difference between Adorno’s and Benjamin’s positions is often presented in terms of a conflict between ‘high’ art versus mass culture, between thoroughly dialectical philosophy and Brechtian ‘blunt thinking’, or between autonomous art and politically committed art. And, while all these factors certainly play a role, what is really at stake in this debate, as will be argued in this chapter, is the end of art. Adorno, in his letter to Benjamin of 18 March 1936, noted the continuity of the work-of-art essay with Benjamin’s project of the ‘dialectical selfdissolution of myth’, here presented as the ‘disenchantment of art’; and he continued by saying that ‘the question of the “liquidation” of art has been a motivating force behind my own aesthetic studies for many years’ (ABC, 127-128; ABB, 126). What do Benjamin and Adorno mean when they speak about the ‘disenchantment’ or ‘liquidation’ of art. To f ind out what is at stake in the work-of-art essay, we need first to take a closer look at Benjamin’s aesthetic project, by discussing his interpretation of the Baroque mourning play and Baudelaire’s poetry. Next, we will see how Adorno takes up this 1 2

Caygill (1998), 82. See Hennion and Latour (2003) and Geulen (2006), 76.

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notion of the liquidation of art in his analyses of the culture industry and modernist art.3

2.2

Annihilation of semblance: Baroque allegory Majesty of the allegorical intention: to destroy the organic and the living – to eradicate semblance. ‒ Walter Benjamin, ‘Central Park’4

According to Benjamin, the historian should be fully aware of their own present, for ‘it is the present that polarizes the event into fore- and afterhistory’ (AP, 471; V/1, 588). History, in his view, is a construction and therefore depends on the historical situation and cultural context of the historian.5 This view of history also influenced his historical studies of art. Benjamin’s artistic present consisted of the modernist literature of Kafka, Döblin and Proust, the experiments of Dadaism and Surrealism, Bertolt Brecht’s post-dramatic theatre, and Russian avant-garde cinema, to name those figuring most prominently in his writings on contemporary art. What these schools and artists have in common is that each of them challenges the definition of the work of art as an organic and self-sufficient whole – a view that had been dominant in modern idealist aesthetics. The work of art, as Kant had argued in his Critique of Judgment, had to resemble living nature, its parts and whole interacting in harmony.6 This ideal of harmony (and its function as consolation) was, as we have seen, challenged by twentieth-century artists, because it was incongruent with the horrors they had witnessed. The above-mentioned artists consciously refrained from producing organic wholes, instead exposing the brokenness or artificiality of the work of art through shock (Dada and surrealism), interruption and estrangement (Brecht, Kafka), or montage (Döblin’s novels and Russian avant-garde film by Eisenstein and Vertov).7 3 Neither Adorno nor Benjamin uses the concept ‘modernist art’. In using it I follow Jay Bernstein, who considers modern art as autonomous art, and modernist art as art that critically reflects on its own autonomy (see Bernstein (1992), 196). 4 SW 4, 172; I/2, 669-670. 5 Benjamin’s philosophy of history will be further discussed in the next chapter. 6 Kant (1987), 306-307: 173-174. 7 For some of Benjamin’s writings on the mentioned artists, see ‘Surrealism. The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia’ (SW 2, 207-221; II/1, 295-310), ‘Commentary on Poems by Brecht’ (SW 4, 215-250; II/2, 539-572.), ‘The Crisis of the Novel’ (SW 2, 299-304; III, 230-236).

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If we look at Benjamin’s historical studies on art, we can discern a similar fascination for, and focus on, the broken and fragmentary: the late work of Friedrich Hölderlin, the work of the early German Romantics, and the poetry of Baudelaire. All these figures, in their own way, deviated from the dominant idealist aesthetic. It it as though Benjamin wanted to write the history of art and aesthetics à rebours, unveiling a ‘secret’ history that was characterized, not by wholeness and harmony, but by brokenness, incompleteness, and failure. This was nowhere as clear as in his Origin of German Tragic Drama (1925). While in the other studies he discusses figures – Hölderlin, the Romantics and Baudelaire – whose works, despite their idiosyncrasies, were nevertheless part of the canon, in this work he set out to ‘redeem’ an episode of literary history that had been all but forgotten. The German Baroque tragic drama or ‘mourning play’ (Trauerspiel) had a negative reputation. In Benjamin’s time, the plays of authors such as Gryphius, Lohenstein, Hallmann and Opitz were ignored by literary history and were hardly ever performed. The dominant opinion, grounded in the criticism of classicist writers such as Goethe and Schopenhauer, was that these plays were failed imitations of Greek tragedies that did not live up to the criteria of theatre dictated by Aristotle in his Poetics. The language of the Baroque plays was deemed too artificial and ornamental, so these critics argued, mostly because of its extensive use of allegory. The characters in these plays were unable, so it seemed, to utter a single sentence without interspersing it with emblems and images. Goethe and Schopenhauer considered allegory an unartistic trope. Allegory, so they argued, is the expression of a concept, while the work of art is the expression of an idea. The former was conceived of as the product of human convention; the second, as a transcendent truth. This negative attitude towards Baroque art in general, and towards its use of allegory in particular, was dominant up until Benjamin’s time.8 According to Benjamin, the critics of the mourning play missed the point when they evaluated it according to the same (Aristotelian) criteria as Greek tragedy. Tragedy and mourning plays, he argued, were completely different phenomena, each belonging to a specific cultural and historical context.9 8 Heinrich Wölfflin, one of Benjamin’s professors in Munich, first used the term ‘baroque’ to designate a period in the history of literature, in his Renaissance and Baroque (1888). Others, such as the influential Italian philosopher and critic Benedetto Croce, preferred to use the term as a pejorative for ‘a form of artistic ugliness’, the latter going so far as to say that ‘art is never baroque and baroque is never art’ (quoted in Wellek (1963), 94). 9 Benjamin f irst reflected on this difference in two short pieces written in 1916, entitled ‘Trauerspiel and Tragedy’ (SW 1, 54-58; II/1, 133-137) and ‘The role of Language in Trauerspiel and Tragedy’, (SW 1, 59-61; II/1, 137-140).

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Moreover, history, in Benjamin’s view, was the content of the mourning play, whereas the content of tragedy was myth (O, 62; I/1, 243). Tragedy takes place within an inherently meaningful cosmic hierarchy. Conversely, in the mourning play we are confronted with a world deprived of meaning: history itself is presented as a mourning play. The cosmic hierarchy is broken, making all earthly hierarchies seem contingent. The world portrayed in the mourning play, in contrast not only to the ancient world but also to the Middle Ages, is purely immanent, lacking any eschatology or hope of salvation. Benjamin argued that, ‘whereas the middle ages present the futility of world events and the transience of the creature as stations on the road to salvation, the German mourning play is taken up entirely with the hopelessness of the earthly condition’ (O, 81; I/1, 260). This explains, according to Benjamin, why the struggle for earthly power is a central motif of the mourning play. In tragedies, the noble rank of the tragic hero is of secondary importance: his struggle is with the gods. The rank of the king in the mourning play is, by contrast, what is at stake. The reign of the king is no longer guaranteed and justified by God or tradition and therefore has become contingent and contestable. Consequently, in the mourning play the king is portrayed either as a tyrant or a martyr. He reigns by decision, and in a permanent ‘state of exception’.10 This absolute but unjustifiable power paralyzes him: overwhelmed by doubt, he endlessly postpones his decisions. Sloth or acedia is the cardinal sin characteristic of the king in the Baroque play. In the meantime the courtier – the other important rôle represented in the mourning play – plots intrigues in order to seize power. History is the content of the mourning play. However, Benjamin stresses that this is not a history subject to human action, but rather a history flowing according to the natural laws of growth and decay – a natural history (Naturgeschichte): ‘For the decisive factor in the escapism of the Baroque is not the antithesis of history and nature but the comprehensive secularization of the historical in the state of creation’ (O, 92; I/1, 270-271). Consequently, Benjamin argues, tragedy and mourning play are ruled by two different kinds of temporality, exemplified in the protagonist’s death. 10 ‘The function of the tyrant is the restoration of order in the state of emergency: a dictatorship whose utopian goal will always be to replace the unpredictability of historical accident with the iron constitution of the laws of nature’ (O, 74; I/1, 253). It is not hard to see that Benjamin is also talking about his own time. His reflections on the role of the tyrant in the mourning play are inspired by Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology (1922). For an elaborate discussion on the relation between Benjamin and Schmitt, see Agamben (2005) and De Wilde (2011) (based on his 2008 dissertation, Verwantschap in extremen. Politieke theologie bij Walter Benjamin en Carl Schmitt).

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In the death of the tragic hero, the rule of the gods is both manifested and interrupted, heralding a new temporal order of ‘fulfilled’ time.11 By contrast, the death of the king at the end of the mourning play resolves nothing. Time in the mourning play is spatialised, turning the scenes on stage into mere fragments of an endless and empty continuum. Prince Hamlet’s death is exemplary, having neither necessity nor consequence (O, 136-137; I/1, 315).12 Death in the mourning play has no moral value or deeper meaning, apart from vanitas: the bare fact that death will come to all. Once death has taken place, and the stage is covered with corpses, the play can start over again. The temporality of the mourning play consists of this hellish repetition – the eternal recurrence of the same. After thus having determined differences between the tragedy and the mourning play, Benjamin seeks to explain these differences. The conceptions of history, power, death, and time, with which we are confronted in the mourning play, are grounded, he argues, in Baroque melancholy. Baroque melancholy maintains a dialectical relation to the world of things, moving between the poles of ‘devaluation’ (Entwertung) and ‘sanctification’ (Erhebung).13 The melancholic can no longer see the ‘natural’ meaning of things: the natural world is devalued. Under their gaze, things are more than themselves, turning into the signs of a deeper and hidden meaning, for which the code, however, is lost. The melancholic ponders over this lost meaning, losing themselves in endless contemplation and mourning over a world of meaningless rubbish. On the other side, however, the melancholic never ceases to ascribe new meanings to dead objects, thereby ‘sanctifying’ them as the potential key to eternal knowledge, and granting them the opportunity of a new life. Melancholy is traditionally considered to be the cause of sloth, gloominess, and indecision, as well as genius in science and art. In premodern science and medicine, melancholy was associated with Saturn, the ‘slowest’ planet with the longest orbit, and the god of time (Chronos in Greek mythology), with the harvest, and the ‘natural history’ of the passing seasons. Melancholy was also associated with impotence, since 11 In the fragment ‘Trauerspiel and Tragedy’ (1916) Benjamin argues that the tragic hero’s death is ‘ironic’, because he dies of immortality. The sacrificial death of the hero proves him superior to the gods. But, since no one can live on Earth in ‘fulfilled’ time, he must die (SW 1, 56; II/1, 134-135). 12 Benjamin repeatedly refers to mourning plays by Shakespeare and Calderón. He argues, however, that, exactly because of the artistic genius of these playwrights, the allegorical nature of the mourning-play genre was missed in their work. Conversely, the German mourning play, because it is an artistic failure, reveals the true nature of the Baroque. 13 See Menninghaus (1980), 109.

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Saturn, the father of the gods, was dethroned and punished with infertility by Jupiter for having devoured his own children (O, 150; I/1, 327).14 Of course, melancholy was not unique to the Baroque. The idea of melancholy has been a constant medical, theological and aesthetic trope in Western civilization.15 Benjamin’s point, however, was not to ground the mourning play in the melancholic humour of its writers, but rather in the melancholic character of the time. He wrote: ‘Every feeling is bound to an a priori object, and the representation of this object is its phenomenology’ (O, 139; I/1, 318). In other words, he conceived of melancholy not as a mere subjective feeling, but also as an objective condition of an epoch, shaped by the aftermath of the religious and political struggles of the CounterReformation and the Thirty Years’ War. The mourning play, in his view, was the ‘phenomenology’ of this epoch. The German Baroque poets, Benjamin remarks, were Lutherans. The Lutheran doctrine of predestination taught that all earthly dealings are devoid of meaning and that salvation awaits only after death. This doctrine drew its inspiration from Saint Paul’s letter to the Ephesians: ‘For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast’ (Ephesians 2:8). This doctrine resulted in resignation, a strict sense of duty, and a distrust of ‘good works’ among the common people. People of higher spirits – poets and kings – were suffering from melancholy, because of the utter senselessness of their deeds. The king’s melancholy and acedia in the mourning play exemplified the position of humanity in the Baroque world: people used to be sovereign creatures in a cosmic hierarchy, but now they endlessly ponder the meaning and justification of their own actions and existence. This is why Benjamin argued that the mourning play was not so much a play that made one mournful, but rather a play for the mournful (O, 119; I/1, 298). Allegory is connected precisely to this melancholic and mournful worldview. In the second part of Origin of German Tragic Drama, Benjamin demonstrates that, rather than being a contingent technique, a ‘mere mode of designation’ that the Baroque poets happened to make use of, allegory is inherently connected with the plot, tone and idea of the mourning play, as well as with the worldview in which these were conceived: ‘Allegory […] is 14 Benjamin draws from Erwin Panofsky’s and Fritz Saxl’s work on melancholy, which was later published in the famous study Saturn and Melancholy. Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion and Art (1979). 15 For a comprehensive overview of the different meanings of melancholy in Western culture, see Pensky (1993), 20-35.

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not a playful illustrative technique, but a form of expression, just as speech is expression, and, indeed, just as writing is’ (O, 162; I/1, 339). The point is, in other words, that through allegory the entirety of the content of the German Baroque mourning play is expressed in its language, form and technique. Benjamin quotes several classical and romantic authors who contrast allegory with the artistic symbol. While allegory, as Friedrich Creuzer argued in his Symbolic and Mythology of Ancient People (1819), is the mere replacement of one thing for another, or the mere signifier of an idea, the artistic symbol is the embodiment of an idea, and the presence of something transcendent and beyond expression. According to Benjamin, this conception of the difference between allegory and symbol is based on a confusion of the work of art with the theological symbol. In the theological symbol, signifier and signified are one: crucifix and the cross of Christ are the same, as are bread and the body of Christ.16 In the artistic symbol, this relation is distorted into one of essence and appearance, a distortion which, in Benjamin’s view, ‘preceded the desolation of modern art criticism’ (O, 160; I/1, 337).17 According to Benjamin, the difference between allegory and symbol lies not merely in the different relations between signifier and signified, but also, more importantly, in different kinds of temporality, which are analogous to the temporalities of mourning play and tragedy discussed above. While the time of the symbol is the mystical ‘instant’ (Nu) in which eternity is grasped in a single image, allegory is the presentation of neverending decline. Benjamin writes: Whereas in the symbol destruction is idealized and the transfigured face of nature is fleetingly revealed in the light of redemption, in allegory the observer is confronted with the facies hippocratica of history as a petrified, primordial landscape. Everything about history that, from the very beginning, has been untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful, is expressed in a face – or rather in a death’s head (O, 166; I/1, 343).

The symbol, in other words, is the expression of transcendence, whereas allegory is the expression of immanent ‘natural history’, of the sorrowful state of nature after the fall, and of the transience and contingency of all earthly things, relations, and meanings. As Susan Buck-Morss writes, 16 See the fragment, ‘Outline for a Habilitation Thesis’ (1920-1921) (SW 1, 270; VI, 21-22). 17 As an example of this transition from religious to artistic symbol, one can think of Hegel’s definition of beauty as the ‘sensuous semblance of the idea.’

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allegory can be characterized as ‘eternal fleetingness’, as opposed to the ‘fleeting eternity’ of the symbol.18 In allegory, everything revolves around change, especially the change of meaning. The ‘original’ meaning of a phenomenon is of no importance to the allegorist: phenomena gain new meaning according to their arbitrary will. Benjamin speaks of the ‘Midas-hand’ of the allegorist: everything they touch changes and is filled with meaning. Everything can become a sign for anything else, sometimes turning into its exact opposite – a crown becomes a funeral wreath and an angel’s harp turns into an executioner’s axe (O, 231; I/1, 405). Allegory, Benjamin argues, is therefore a form of writing with images: In [the allegorist’s] hands the object becomes something different; through it he speaks of something different and for him it becomes a key to the realm of hidden knowledge; and he reveres it as the emblem of this. This is what determines the character of allegory as a form of writing (O, 184; I/1, 359).

Benjamin points out that this allegorical juggling with meanings and writing with images is inherently connected to the melancholic world-view of the Baroque. Allegory, he argues, consists of the same dialectical movement of devaluation and sanctification characteristic of melancholy (O, 175; I/1, 351). The allegorist’s search for divine truth and meaning urges him to consider even the most trivial object as a potential key to the knowledge of God’s plan (hence, sanctification). However, in order to function as a potentially meaningful object and to enter the continuum of meanings, the object must be torn out of its original context and deprived of its ‘natural’ meaning (devaluation). This is also the reason why, according to Benjamin, the most important Baroque emblems are the ruin, the corpse and the skull. One could even say these are allegories of allegory. Ruins, corpses and skulls are already dead: their original meaning has withered away. As empty shells, and markers of natural decay, they are available for the allegorist to fill with new meaning. The allegorist does realize, however, the arbitrariness of their own enterprise. Their melancholy consists in the fact that all meaning they assign to things is temporary and transient. As Benjamin so brilliantly puts it: ‘The allegory of the seventeenth century is not convention of expression, but expression of convention’ (O, 175; I/1, 351). In other words, allegory is not an 18 Buck-Morss (1989), 166-167.

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arbitrary literary technique or trope, but the only adequate way to express the melancholy of the Baroque world, which is itself haunted by arbitrariness. Turning things into signs is not only what the allegorist does (i.e., producing a form) but also what allegory is about (i.e., the content). Seventeenth-century Germany, with its religious conflicts, power struggles and bloody wars, was an allegorical epoch. The Baroque poets considered their own time a ‘station of decline’, which therefore called for allegorical poetry. Let us now recapitulate the classicist critique of the mourning play, which was considered a failed imitation of Greek tragedy, where the characters spoke an unnatural language, because of the extensive use of allegory. Benjamin countered this critique, as we have seen, by pointing to the fact that tragedy and mourning play are altogether different literary forms, and by arguing that the latter is the most adequate literary expression of an age pondering the loss of natural meaning. The characters in the mourning plays indeed spoke an ‘unnatural’ language, but this was the stigma of their fallen state and their melancholic character. In view of the historical, political, cultural, and theological context of the mourning play, Benjamin argues, the use of artistic symbol would be ill-suited. Once worldly life has been excluded from God’s plan, the symbol as the instantaneous appearance of the transcendent becomes meaningless. Allegory, which Benjamin characterises as the fragment, the splinter, the torso, and the ruin, is an adequate expression of meaninglessness. In the following passage, Benjamin makes the antithesis clear: It is not possible to conceive of a starker opposite to the artistic symbol, the plastic symbol, the image of organic totality, than this amorphous fragment which is seen in the form of allegorical script. In it the baroque reveals itself to be the sovereign opposite of classicism, as which hitherto, only romanticism has been acknowledged (O, 176; I/1, 351-352).

Moreover, he continues, Baroque allegory is a corrective not merely to classicism as an artistic movement but even to art itself. The view of the work of art as a self-sufficient whole and harmonic totality (as in Moritz and Kant) has been dominant throughout the Western history of art and aesthetics. In the face of permanent catastrophe, as was the conception of history of the Baroque poets (and, as we will see, of Benjamin himself), this totality became a lie. Brokenness, suffering, and disorder could not, he thought, be adequately expressed by classical art. It could be expressed, however, by the fragmented nature of allegory: ‘In the field of allegorical

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intuition the image is a fragment, a rune. […] The false appearance of totality is extinguished’ (O, 176; I/1, 352).19 Of course, the rehabilitation of the mourning play was not the sole concern of Benjamin’s Origin of German Tragic Drama, and not even its most important objective. The work is extremely dense and rich, containing reflections not only on aesthetic theory, but also on the nature of literary criticism, the theory of experience, political theology, and philosophy of history. It is impossible to do justice to these issues within the scope of this chapter, and we will return to several of them in the following chapters. For now, what is important to note is that Benjamin’s analysis of the use of allegory by the poets of the mourning play functions as a critical reflection on the nature of the work of art. The classicist conception of the work of art as a self-sufficient whole and as a semblance of life is challenged by allegory. The ‘liquidation’ of art, in this sense, means the dissolution of the semblance of the work of art of an organic totality. Allegory, according to Benjamin, declares itself ‘beyond beauty’ (O, 178; I/1, 354), but precisely because of that, it can be the bearer of truth. This truth, in the case of the mourning play, consists in the expression of the meaninglessness of the Baroque world, and in the witnessing of the horrors of religious and political struggle of the Thirty Years’ War. But for Benjamin, who in the prologue connects the Baroque to German expressionist literature, the mourning play also lays bare a truth about Europe in the aftermath of the First World War and the bankruptcy of bourgeois culture and politics. Several authors have suggested that Benjamin’s theory of allegory can be used as a model for analyzing avant-garde or postmodern art.20 Allegorical art, as Rosalind Krauss and Craig Owens argue, expresses the fundamental emptiness, and hence arbitrariness, of the sign. We must remember, however, that Benjamin’s book on the mourning play is as much a critique of allegory as it is a theory of it. One might say that he mourns the lost meaning of the sign as the theological symbol, and criticizes allegory’s fundamental emptiness and arbitrariness.21 Furthermore, to regard allegory, by itself, as a certain artistic style or technique, leads to making exactly the mistake Benjamin accuses the mourning play’s classicist critics of themselves: such 19 One should keep in mind that Benjamin’s reading of the Baroque mourning play is inspired by the art of his own time. The precise nature of this retrospective reading of art history will be the subject of Chapter 3. 20 See Bürger (1984), 68-73, Krauss (1974) and Owens (1980). 21 Benjamin Buchloh remains closer to Benjamin’s intentions when he distinguishes between cynical and critical allegory in art, the f irst merely replicating, the other emphasizing and critically addressing, reification and commodification (Buchloh (1982), 44).

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an attempt would have to neglect the historical specificity of allegory that Benjamin emphasizes in his own study, that is, the fact that the mourning play and the allegory are embedded in the cultural-historical and theological context of the Baroque.22 This connection between literary technique and historical context is even more explicitly dealt with by Benjamin in his writings on yet another allegorist, Charles Baudelaire.

2.3

Allegory and commodity

Charles Baudelaire plays an important part in Benjamin’s oeuvre. In 1921 Benjamin published his translation of Baudelaire’s Parisian Scenes, and Baudelaire was one of the protagonists of the unfinished Arcades Project. During the last years of his life, Benjamin was planning a book on the French poet, which was to consist of three parts, entitled ‘Baudelaire as Allegorist’, ‘The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire’, and ‘The Commodity as Poetic Object’ (I/3, 1064-1065). He lived to finish only the second part, which was meant to be published in the journal of the Institute for Social Research, but was rejected. He then rewrote it as an essay, ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’ (1939). Although Benjamin never fully developed his interpretation of Baudelaire’s use of allegory, we can get a fairly good idea from the Konvolut on Baudelaire in the Arcades Project and from the notes for the Baudelaire book that were later published as ‘Central Park’.23 In Benjamin’s time, Baudelaire was considered primarily as a forerunner of symbolist poetry and decadent literature. Benjamin, by contrast, understood Baudelaire as a straggler (Nachzügler) of allegorical poetry (SW 4, 191; I/2, 690). The shocking nature of The Flowers of Evil, he argued, lay not in the expression of Baudelaire’s personal resentment of bourgeois morality, but in an allegorical juxtaposition between the divine and the vulgar, the ancient and the modern, and the erotic and death. As in the mourning play, Baudelaire’s images are turned upside down in the blink of an eye; a muse becomes a prostitute (‘The Venal Muse’), a sunset watched from a balcony in Paris turns out to be the glow of heavy industry (‘The 22 See Witte (1976), 123, and Foster (1996), 88-90. 23 There has been on ongoing debate on how the Arcades Project and the Baudelaire book relate to one another, especially since Agamben retrieved the missing notes of the Baudelaire book from the Bibliothèque National in 1981. These were later partly included in the Gesammelte Schriften, and were first published only in 2012 in an Italian translation (a French translation followed one year later). I believe, however, that this debate is not so relevant to the concerns of the present study.

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Balcony’), and a beautiful woman elegised in an exalted hymn appears to be a rotting carcass (‘Danse Macabre’). Decay, the unnatural, and the infertile are the central motifs of The Flowers of Evil; he praises women, for him the most natural creatures, only if they are, as he sees it, unlikely or unable to produce offspring – prostitutes, lesbians (‘Lesbos’), or corpses. Baudelaire’s melancholic gaze registers a world devoid of meaning. He was, Benjamin notes, the first poet to describe a starless night (‘Obsession’) – an allusion to the emerging gaslights in the arcades and streets of Paris, as well as the godforsaken world of modernity (I/3, 1152). Melancholy, in Baudelaire’s poetry, returns in the shape of the boredom of the modern city dweller. As a flâneur he walks about town, wasting time taking notice of anything that happens around him, and trying to make sense of it all. This melancholy or spleen is mirrored by what Baudelaire calls ‘the ideal’ (Idéal). The first part of The Flowers of Evil, ‘Spleen and the Ideal’, can therefore be read as the presentation of two extremes: on the one side, spleen, with allegory at its centre and characterized by loss of meaning; on the other side, the utopian ideal, which is ruled by what Baudelaire calls ‘correspondences’, which mark the naturally given meanings from days of yore and are thus the exact opposite of allegory. Baudelaire writes: Nature is a temple, where the living Columns sometimes breathe confusing speech; Man walks within these groves of symbols, each Of which regards him as a kindred thing.24

These lines, taken from the poem ‘Correspondences’, were an important source of inspiration for symbolist poetry, and were the main reason why Baudelaire was to be considered its forerunner. According to Benjamin, however, Baudelaire realized that the experience he describes has become problematic, if not impossible, in modernity. Spleen and ideal are extremes, but relate dialectically: the one cannot (or no longer) exist without the other.25 Instead of opposing the decline of experience by retreating to the fortress of pure art, Baudelaire seals a pact with it, giving expression of his epoch by means of allegory. 24 Baudelaire (1993), 19. 25 This is supported by Baudelaire’s definition of beauty in his essay ‘The Painter of Modern Life’. Beauty, he says, consists ‘on the one hand, of an element that is eternal and invariable, though to determine how much of it there is is extremely difficult, and, on the other, of a relative circumstantial element, which we may like to call, successively or at one and the same time, contemporaneity, fashion, morality, passion’ (Baudelaire (1972), 392).

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In contrast to the Baroque period, however, allegory was not a dominant style in the nineteenth century. Benjamin remarks that ‘as an allegorist, Baudelaire was isolated’ (SW 4, 191; I/2, 690). Furthermore, while in the Baroque the view that the world was in a state of decay enjoyed wide support, nineteenth-century Europe was characterized by collective dreams of social and technological progress. Allegory, in other words, was in no way an obvious choice for Baudelaire, and probably the reason why the allegorical nature of his poetry was misunderstood or ignored by his contemporaries (AP, 338; V/1, 426). Why was it, Benjamin asks, that Baudelaire used allegory to describe the urban dream-landscape of nineteenth-century Paris? For Baudelaire, as well as for the Baroque poets, allegory is not merely an arbitrary literary technique. It is, on the contrary, inherently connected to the subject of his poetry, namely modernity. While for the Baroque poets, according to Benjamin, Lutheranism, political struggle and religious wars formed the socio-historical background of the sense of both the meaninglessness of the world and of permanent catastrophe, for Baudelaire, it was nineteenth-century capitalism, massification, urbanization and the industrial production of commodities. This is not to say that Baudelaire explicitly thematized these things; neither capitalism nor the commodity is mentioned in his poems. Rather, capitalism appears to Baudelaire as a force of nature, which he fights as desperately as someone who fights against rain and wind. Unconsciously, like a seismograph, his poetry registers the shocks coming from the deeper layers of the urban landscape. The commodity was to have a central place in Benjamin’s analysis of modernity in the Arcades Project. Like Marx and Lukács, he conceived of the commodity not merely as an economic form, but as something that permeates the lives and minds of people. As we come to express everything in terms of its exchange value, this changes the way we perceive our world and each other. The commodity, as Marx had already argued, is exchangeable for any other commodity through the medium of money, and thus the commodified object is deprived of its specific meaning. Benjamin writes: ‘The meaning of the commodity is its price; it has, as commodity, no other meaning’ (AP, 369; V/1, 466). Herein lies the affinity between commodity and allegory, which similarly sucks the life out of any object: ‘The commodity has taken the place of the allegorical mode of apprehension’ (SW 4, 188; I/2, 686). Although Benjamin never says so explicitly, we can translate the dialectical poles of allegory, devaluation and sanctification, into the Marxian terms ‘reification’ (Verdinglichung) and ‘fetishism’. As objects enter the market and become commodities, their original meaning is stripped from them and replaced by their price. Or, to put it in Marx’s terms, their use value is

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eclipsed by their exchange value. Benjamin states: ‘The devaluation of the world of things in allegory is surpassed within the world of things itself by the commodity’ (SW 4, 164; I/2, 660). Adorno, in a letter to Benjamin, remarks that reification is a form of forgetting, and in the case of the commodity it is the social basis (labour) that is forgotten (ABC, 321; ABB, 417). The commodity is a human product, but no longer recognized as such, and taken for a nature-like thing: natural history. Life is drained from the object and what remains is an empty shell, similar to the Baroque emblems of the ruin, the skull, and the corpse. However, the other pole of the allegory – sanctification – is equally present in commodification. New meanings are granted to commodities; social relations are projected onto them. This is what Marx described as commodity-fetishism: when we ascribe exchange value to objects, social relations are projected onto relations between commodities. Benjamin quotes Marx: ‘Value […] converts every product into a social hieroglyphic’ (AP, 657; V/2, 807).26 The exchange value of the commodity is regarded as a force of its own, a force beyond man. Hence the reference to the fetish: as with an idol or a totem, power is ascribed to an object, which is subsequently worshipped.27 This worshipping of the commodity had a very specific location in nineteenth-century Paris, namely the shopping windows in the arcades. This seemingly trivial fact marks an important difference between Marx and Benjamin. The latter focused on the commodity-on-display rather than on the commodity-in-the-market.28 In the Parisian arcades, Benjamin suggested, commodities became fetishes in the most literal sense. They were put on edifices or in alcoves and worshipped as relics, the crowd passing by them as in a religious procession. Although the worshipping of commodities in consumer capitalism, of which the Paris arcades are the cradle, is clearly ideological, Benjamin 26 To be sure, for Marx the social meaning projected onto the commodity as fetish is never a mere projection. Differences in the exchange value of commodities also refer to real differences in hours of wage labour, which in turn point to class relations. This connection tends to be blurred by Benjamin’s consumption-oriented approach. 27 In the famous section of Capital on the fetish character of the commodity, Marx already speaks of its ‘theological niceties and metaphysical subtleties’. 28 See Buck-Morss (1989), 81. Next to the arcades, the exemplary place for the commodityon-display, according to Benjamin, is the World Exhibition. He points out that, for the 1889 Paris exhibition, the French government provided free tickets for working-class people. Thus the workers marvelled at the reified products of their own labour. The commodity-on-display, according to Benjamin, is the purest form of reification, since it turns the commodity into pure exchange value: ‘World exhibitions glorify the exchange value of the commodity. They create a framework in which its use value recedes into the background’ (AP, 7; V/1, 50).

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refuses to reject it as mere false consciousness. He was fascinated by these new meanings, the collective dreams and fears, which were projected onto objects. This epoch, he argues, was witnessing the dawn of a new mythology (AP, 391; V/1, 494). Myth, according to Benjamin, consists in the transformation of history into nature. In mythology, contingent historical phenomena are represented as necessary and inevitable. However, commodity-fetishism, taken to its extreme, makes the opposite movement. This movement finds its expression in the souvenir: ‘The key figure in early allegory is the corpse. In late allegory, it is the “souvenir”. The “souvenir” is the schema of the commodity’s transformation into an object for the collector’ (SW 4, 190; I/2, 689). The figure of the collector has all the ambiguities of the allegorist: they take the object from its original context (the reification of a memory), but also fill it with new meaning, turning the object into a ‘souvenir’ and thereby rescuing it from economic exchange. According to Benjamin, the commodity was a model for Baudelaire (SW 4, 188; I/2, 686), not merely for his allegorical poetry, but for his very life as a poet. His failure on the literary market, which I discussed in the preceding chapter, taught him the true situation of the poet. Baudelaire empathized with what Marx once called the ‘soul of the commodity’: ‘The intoxication to which the flâneur surrenders is the intoxication of the commodity immersed in a surging stream of customers’ (SW 4, 31; I/2, 558). Like a prostitute, Baudelaire considered himself both seller and commodity, playing any role that was asked of him: flâneur, dandy, or rag picker. In other words, Baudelaire was not only an allegorical poet; rather, he knew what it was to be an allegory, changing his own meaning in the blink of an eye. Courbet, who painted his portrait, complained that he even looked different every day (SW 4, 61; I/2, 601). The doctrine of art for art’s sake, as we have seen in the preceding chapter, expresses the wish to resist the modern status of the arts and the hostile market. However, as Benjamin makes clear, it can do this only by mimicking the very reification and fetishization it seeks to resist. The work of art is turned into a self-enclosed entity, isolated from its socio-political context: ‘In art for art’s sake, the poet for the first time approaches language like the buyer approaches the commodity on the free market’ (I/3, 1168). Its use value nullified, the work of art indeed exudes exchange value down to its core. The only value left for art is that of ‘novelty’, the theme of the last poem of The Flowers of Evil, ‘Voyaging’: ‘And plunge to depths of Heaven or of Hell / To fathom the Unknown, and find the new!’29 Benjamin writes: 29 Baudelaire (1993), 293.

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‘Newness is a quality independent of the use value of the commodity. […] It is the quintessence of that false consciousness whose indefatigable agent is fashion. This semblance of the new is reflected, like one mirror in another, in the semblance of the ever recurrent’ (AP, 11; V/1, 55). Fashion, according to Benjamin, exemplifies modernity’s ‘temporality of hell’, the mythical ‘eternal recurrence’ of the punishments suffered by Sisyphus and Tantalus in the underworld (AP, 66 and 119; V/1, 115 and 178). Baudelaire’s melancholic gaze registers this temporality as he ponders the seconds of the clock as they tick away (‘The Clock’) or the disjointed actions of the gambler (‘Gaming’). The gambler carries out a potentially infinite series of actions that are identical and that therefore exhibit no development or have no overall meaning. Each new game has the same chances, so experience counts for nothing. Thus, while the Baroque poets focused on the transience of physical life, Baudelaire also gave expression to the decay of mental life, namely the dissolution of experience: ‘Baroque allegory sees the corpse only from the outside. Baudelaire sees it also from within’ (SW 4, 186; I/2, 684).30 Baudelaire’s use of allegory has a violent character (AP, 329; V/1, 414). Benjamin argues that he wants to rip away the harmonic façade of the world that surrounds him, thus revealing the harsh reality belying modernity’s utopian dreams: a city in ruins (‘The Swan’). His deepest intention is to ‘interrupt the course of the world’, like Joshua. This is the source of ‘his violence, his impatience, and his anger’ (AP, 318; V/1, 401). This ‘heroic’ melancholy marks a second distinction from Baroque melancholy, which is, in the final instance, idealistic. As Benjamin notes in the concluding sections of Origin of German Tragic Drama, the Christian Baroque poets eventually betray the ruinous world of things. In their allegorical play of counterparts, the most sorrowful image – that of the place of skulls (Golgotha) – turns into the precondition for the resurrection. As Lohenstein writes: ‘Yea, when the Highest comes to reap the harvest from the graveyard, then I, a death’s head, will be an angel’s countenance’ (quoted in O, 232; I/1, 406). In other words, the entire earthly world of suffering and despair is eventually not ‘real’, but is nothing more than an allegory for the afterlife. The knowledge of evil turns out to be the mere subjective gaze of the melancholic. Benjamin could not endorse this perfidy on the part of the Baroque poets. In Baudelaire’s universe, by contrast, there is no final salvation, but only the eternal recurrence of the same. However, Baudelaire’s mistake, according to Benjamin, consists in his ontologizing this eternal recurrence, thus making it as mythic as the idea of historical progress (AP, 119; V/1, 178). He does not 30 The crucial theorem of the decay of experience will be further discussed in the next chapter.

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realize that ‘eternal recurrence’ is exactly what is ‘new’ in modernity, that this hellish time is the result of industrial capitalism and consumer culture. His mythical ontology – shared, as Benjamin notes, with Nietzsche – must result in political resignation, as is clear in the poem ‘St Peter’s Denial’: ‘Believe it, as for me, I’ll go out satisfied / From this world where the deed and dream do not accord.’31 It is the reason why Baudelaire, too, eventually ‘missed out on reality – though just by a hair’ (AP, 347; V/1, 439). In Benjamin’s writings on Baudelaire, we again encounter the ‘liquidation of art’ in the shape of an eradication of semblance by means of allegory. Baudelaire’s poetry, in Benjamin’s reading, resists the notion of the work of art as an organic and self-sufficient whole, typical of classicist aesthetics and the art-for-art’s-sake doctrine. His shocking images interrupt the classic harmony of the sonnet, thus preventing it from being a source of consolation. But his writings on Baudelaire also make clear that, for Benjamin, more is at stake than just correcting a certain aesthetic, or even ‘art itself’ (as Benjamin had written in Origin of German Tragic Drama). Art’s mythical semblance of life is a mere epiphenomenon of the phantasmagorias of modern capitalism and the myth of historical progress. Allegory, according to Benjamin, functions as the ‘antithesis’ or even ‘antidote’ to myth (SW 4, 179 and AP, 269; I/2, 677 and V/1, 344).32 Benjamin, who once remarked that he was ‘born under the sign of Saturn’, knew the risks of melancholy all too well (SW 2, 713; VI, 521). It was not enough to ponder the ruins of history and wallow in sorrow: one had to search for a revolutionary, or messianic, breakthrough. For this, he had to distance himself from both the idealist melancholy of the poets of the mourning play and the cynical melancholy of Baudelaire. He searched for a different ‘end of art’, outside the confines of artistic expression itself, and found it in the potentially revolutionary consequences of new means of technological reproduction.

2.4

Proliferation of the aesthetic: technological reproducibility

In a letter dated 16 October 1935, Benjamin wrote to Max Horkheimer about an essay he had recently written and that offered a ‘materialist theory of art’: 31 Baudelaire (1993), 267. 32 How the concept of myth functions in his philosophy of history will be the subject of Chapter 3.

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If the pretext of the book [on the arcades] is the fate of art in the nineteenth century, this fate has something to say to us only because it is contained in the ticking of a clock whose striking of the hour has just reached our ears. What I mean by that is that art’s fateful hour has struck for us, and I have captured its signature in a series of preliminary reflections entitled ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’ (CWB, 509; BB 2, 690).

The essay, as Benjamin wrote in the first section, would contribute to political struggle by neutralizing several traditional concepts ‘such as creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery’ that were at risk of being put in the service of fascism (SW 3, 102; VII/1, 350).33 In the essay, Benjamin describes how new modes of technological reproduction, most notably photography and film, problematize the traditional function of both the aesthetic experience and the work of art in society. Through new technologies, certain features of the work, imperceptible to the naked eye, can be brought to the fore, for instance through the use of close-up or slow motion. Furthermore, the work of art can be placed in different contexts: a picture of an altarpiece, for instance, can be printed in a magazine, and the recording of an orchestra can sound through one’s living room. The victim of the possibility of technological reproduction, he argues, is the ‘aura’ of the artwork, which Benjamin defines as ‘a strange tissue of space and time: the unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be’ (SW 3, 104-105; VII/1, 355) – a definition clearly inspired by the notion of the theological symbol. He proceeds to link the aura to religion and tradition. The aura of the work of art, he argues, is the residue of its function in the practices of religious cults. It has its exemplary place in the religious icon that is on display only once a year. The ‘distance’ of the cultic image is its ‘inapproachability’ (Unnahbarkeit); in other words, it remains distant even if it is close at hand. Once this religious function withers, it is replaced by the ‘authenticity’ and ‘uniqueness’ of the work of art. The ritualistic basis, Benjamin argues, is still recognizable in secular cults of beauty up until the doctrine of art for art’s sake, which he calls a ‘theology of art’ (SW 3, 106; VII/1, 356).34 33 I will quote from the second German version of the artwork-essay (SW 3, 101-133; VII/1, 350384), because this is the version Adorno comments on in his letter of 18 March 1936. Furthermore, this version contains important passages on the distinction between semblance and play and between ‘first’ and ‘second’ technologies, which were left out in the final, 1939, version. 34 For the relation between beauty and tradition, see also an important note in the essay ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’: ‘On the basis of its historical existence, beauty is an appeal to join

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The cult value (Kultwert) of the work of art is inversely proportional to its exhibition value (Ausstellungswert). As public museums replace the annual display of the icon, we witness a decrease in cult value and an increase in exhibition value. The picture exhibited in the museum, however, still has only one unique and authentic ‘original’ (this uniqueness is also a defining feature of the aura). Technological reproduction, Benjamin argues, has the potential to ‘drive back cult value on all fronts’ (SW 3, 108; VII/1, 360). Technologically reproduced art, in contrast to traditional ‘auratic’ art, is characterized by repeatability, seriality, and nearness. In the cases of photography and film, it no longer makes sense to speak of an ‘original’. Reproduction and ubiquity belong to the very nature of these technologies. This could have tremendous consequences: ‘As soon as the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applied to artistic production, the whole social function of art is revolutionized. Instead of being founded on ritual, it is [to be] based on a different practice: politics’ (SW, 106; VII/1, 357).35 The relation between aesthetics and politics in Benjamin’s essay – most prominently formulated in the opposition between the fascist ‘aestheticization of politics’ and the communist ‘politicization of art’ in the last section – has both fascinated and puzzled many readers. What does he mean by it? Firstly, the sheer ubiquity of technologically reproducible art means that it can be viewed by many at once. In the case of film production, mass reception even becomes a necessary condition. According to Benjamin, this has a democratic potential, since it gives the masses access to works of art that were traditionally reserved for a select few. The political element in technological reproduction, however, is not a mere question of increasing the size of the audience. It also has to do with the nature of the relationship between the audience and the artist. Benjamin, who during his visit to Moscow had familiarized himself with Russian cinema, believed that Russian documentary films, such as those by Vertov and Eisenstein, heralded a shift in this relationship. Ordinary people could now become part of artworks, and look at their own world in the cinema. In the work-of-art essay, those who admired it in an earlier age. Being moved by beauty means ad plures ire, as the Romans called dying. According to this definition, “semblance of beauty” means that the identical object which admiration is courting cannot be found in the work. This admiration gleans what earlier generations admired in it’ (SW 4, 352; I/2, 638-639). 35 Note that the English translators make the mistake of conflating the ‘actual’ and the ‘potential’ in Benjamin’s text. The German text reads: ‘An die Stelle ihrer Fundierung aufs Ritual hat ihre Fundierung auf eine andere Praxis zu treten: nämlich ihre Fundierung auf Politik’ (my italics). Neglecting this formulation as a ‘potentiality’ precisely provokes the accusation against Benjamin of ‘technological determinism’ that I will seek to counter in what follows.

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he therefore writes that ‘any person today can lay claim to being filmed’ (SW 3, 114; VII/1, 371).36 This also means that the traditional hierarchy between artwork and audience is dismantled. Secondly, Benjamin argues that film departs from the notion of ‘eternal beauty’. The technology of Greek culture determined the notion of eternal value, of which sculpture – consisting of one piece – is exemplary. A finished film, by contrast, is the result of a selection and montage of an abundance of filmed material, and therefore ‘the exact antithesis of a work created at a single stroke’ (SW 3, 109; VII/1, 362). Likewise, the actor playing in front of the camera does not need to give a single and unified ‘performance’, since his role in the film consists of a series of discrete moments. In film, Benjamin argues, ‘art has escaped the realm of “beautiful semblance”’ (SW 3, 113; VII/1, 368). The traditional relations of authority are reversed, placing the audience in control. The camera for which the actor is playing is in fact the invisible eye of the masses. They control him, ‘test’ him, as it were, and their ‘invisibility heightens the authority of their control’ (SW 3, 113; VII/1, 370). Finally, film makes the traditional, contemplative mode of reception problematic. Like the Dadaists, who had turned the work of art from ‘an alluring visual composition or an enchanting fabric of sound’ into ‘a missile’, film launches a barrage of images and sounds at the audience, thus causing ‘a physical shock effect’ (SW 3, 119; VII/1, 380). The ‘distracted’ and ‘tactile’ mode of perception needed for film, Benjamin argues, has more in common with architecture – the oldest of art forms – than with painting, taking the form of ‘casual noticing, rather than attentive observation’ (SW 3, 120; VII/1, 381). By thus acquainting us with a different mode of perception – one suited to modernity – art fulfils its most important social function, namely ‘to establish equilibrium between human beings and the apparatus’ (SW 3, 117; VII/1, 375). Once again, this point has to do with the breaking down of a traditional hierarchy. Sergei Eisenstein, the foremost Russian filmmaker, had located the shift in relations of authority precisely in the principle of montage: ‘The strength of montage resided in this, that it includes in the creative process the emotions and mind of the spectator. […] The spectator is drawn into a creative act in which his personality is not subordinated to the author’s intentions.’37 One might say that Benjamin transposes 36 This line has often been taken to anticipate Andy Warhol’s famous quote that ‘in the future, everybody will be world-famous for 15 minutes.’ In a sense, however, Benjamin’s point is even more radical: when the difference between artist and audience dissolves, fame itself becomes meaningless. 37 Quoted in H. Gumbrecht and M. Marrinan (eds., 2003) Mapping Benjamin. The Work of Art in the Digital Age, 50.

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the Marxian ideal of placing the means of production in the hands of the proletariat to the realm of art, although in this case production also involves the question of who decides what becomes an artwork and how an artwork is to be perceived.38 Following Eisenstein, Benjamin considered cinema as a political act. Many objections can be raised to Benjamin’s arguments in the work-ofart essay. But before we come to these, let us take a look at an often-heard critique, namely that the essay’s argument espouses a form of ‘technological determinism’,39 – the belief that technological developments determine socio-historical developments. In this case, it would be the belief that the technological reproducibility of art is inherently a politically progressive phenomenon. Some commentators have discerned a contradiction between this belief within the work-of-art essay and Benjamin’s rejection of ‘progress’ in ‘On the Concept of History’ (1940). 40 I believe, however, there is no such contradiction. Eva Geulen has pointed to the importance of the reference in the introduction to Marx, who, in Benjamin’s words, ‘adopted an approach which gave his investigations prognostic value’ (SW 3, 101; VII/1, 350). 41 By arranging (einrichten) and presenting (darstellen) his historical material in a certain way, Marx was able, so Benjamin argues, to give history critical force. 42 This is exactly what Benjamin attempts to do in the work-of-art essay. In a letter to his friend Werner Kraft dated 28 October 1935, Benjamin writes that he is ‘attempting to direct my telescope through the fog of blood toward a mirage of the nineteenth century, which I am trying to paint in the strokes that it will have for a future state of the world, one freed from magic’ (CWB, 516; BB 2, 698). The work-of-art essay, he adds, is meant to be this telescope. In other words, the essay is the attempt to rewrite the past and the present, from the perspective of a redeemed future. It is not a ‘description’, as Habermas claims, or a ‘prediction’ (Gumbrecht and Marrinan) – which would indeed imply a straight line of historical progress. The work-of-art essay is essentially messianic. Benjamin did not believe that the new means of 38 See also Lijster (2011). 39 There are numerous examples of this accusation in the literature. Some are: Agamben (1999), 105-106; Bürger (1984), 27-34; Habermas (1972), 182; Jameson (1981), 25; and Gumbrecht and Marrinan (eds., 2003), xiii. 40 Rochlitz (1996), for instance, writes: ‘“The work of art” stems from the ideology of progress denounced in Benjamin’s late works: from an idea of the “wind of history” blowing toward technical development’ (161). 41 See Geulen (2006), 78-79 and Caygill (1998), 98-99. 42 I shall return to Marx’s historical method in Excursus II.

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technological reproducibility would necessarily bring about social progress or a definitive ‘liquidation of art’; rather, inspired by the example of Russian cinema, he believed that these technological developments constituted a unique historical opportunity. 43 To understand the messianic character of the essay, we should investigate what Benjamin means, in his letter to Kraft, by a world ‘freed from magic.’ In the work-of-art essay he makes a distinction between a technology based on magic and a technology based on play.44 In both cases, technology mediates between humanity and nature. The first technology, which was ‘magical’, seeks to master nature. However, in that process it makes maximum use of human beings, thus culminating in sacrificial death. Conversely, the second technology ‘aims rather at an interplay between nature and humanity’ (SW 3, 107; VII/1, 359). It is thus not mastery over nature, but rather mastery over the relationship between nature and humanity. 45 Art, according to Benjamin, is part of both the first, magical, and the second, playful, technology. The aura of the work of art, its enchanting semblance, and its uniqueness and inapproachability, subject the beholder to the authority of tradition. On the other hand, the ability of the work of art to create or facilitate new and different forms of perception comprises its playful side. Film, according to Benjamin, constitutes a potential breakthrough for the latter: ‘In film, the element of semblance has yielded its place to the element of play, which is allied to the second technology’ (SW 3, 127; VII/1, 369). But for Benjamin this was, again, a mere potentiality, not the actual situation, and not something that was likely to happen. Even the most advanced human technologies could be employed to master nature, and subsequently result in great loss of human life – World War I was proof enough. Likewise, 43 Consequently, one could consider the artwork essay, in Irving Wohlfarth’s words, ‘a historical gamble’ (Wohlfarth (1978), 60). 44 This distinction is often overlooked in the literature, since it is left out of the third version of the essay from 1939, the one first translated into English (in Illuminations) and therefore the more familiar version. 45 See also the last fragment of One Way Street, entitled ‘To the Planetarium’: ‘The mastery of nature (so the imperialists teach) is the purpose of all technology. But who would trust a cane wielder who proclaimed the mastery of children by adults to be the purpose of education? Is not education, above all, the indispensible ordering of the relationship between generations and therefore mastery (if we are to use this term) of that relationship and not of children? And likewise technology is the mastery not of nature but of the relation between nature and man. Men as species completed their development thousands of years ago; but mankind as a species is just beginning his. In technology, a physis is being organized through which mankind’s contact with the cosmos takes a new and different form from that which it had in nations and families’ (SW 1, 487; IV/1, 147). For an elaborate interpretation of this fragment, see Wohlfarth (2002).

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‘magical’ practices threatened to absorb film. The Western film industry recreated the false aura of the movie star outside the studio to compensate for the actor’s loss of aura and authority inside the studio, while fascist politics responded to the withering of aura with the cults of the leader and the masses. The cult of the masses meant the glorification of the masses as a purely aesthetic phenomenon (as Volk), without consideration of their political interests as a class. This went hand in hand with futurism’s glorification of modern warfare: ‘All efforts to aestheticize politics culminate in one point. That point is war. War, and only war, makes it possible to set a goal for mass movements on the grandest scale while preserving traditional property relations’ (SW 3, 121; VII/1, 382). Benjamin’s point in the work-ofart essay is by no means to claim that the technological reproduction of art necessarily resists this process. Rather, and as he makes clear in the introduction, he is keen to point to the historical and dialectical relationship between the aforementioned first and second technologies, and to position the new technologies within this relation, so as to endow them with critical force. In other words, the essay is an attempt at a performative enactment of a politics of art, not at a description of that politics. That is not to say, of course, that there are no objections to be raised to Benjamin’s essay. In the first place, the misreading of it as either a description or a prediction can largely be traced to Benjamin himself, who alternately uses formulations in the present and future tenses. Sometimes he seems to be writing about things to come, while the next moment he is ascribing emancipatory potential to contemporaries as unlikely as Walt Disney. Gershom Scholem was among the first to point to the clash of materialism and messianism in Benjamin’s work-of-art essay. When he brought this to his friend’s attention, Benjamin answered that ‘the philosophical unity you deem lacking between the two parts of my essay will be more effectively provided by the revolution than by me’ – an unsatisfactory response, to say the least, and not just for Scholem. 46 Furthermore, one can argue that, generally speaking, Benjamin’s seemingly straightforward opposition between auratic and reproduced art is at times rather confusing. First, the withering of the aura of the work of art (which he equates with the dissolution of its semblance) seems to take place at two different levels, namely on the level of its distribution (the ubiquity of aesthetic phenomena in society) and of its form (the impossibility of a contemplative reception of film). It is not entirely clear whether an image that is mass produced can still have cultic value, because of the aura of 46 Quoted in Scholem (1982), 207.

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its original (as Benjamin sometimes seems to suggest), or that its aura is shattered by the very fact of its reproduction. Two processes bearing the name ‘the end of art’, namely the (inner-artistic) dissolution of beautiful semblance and the (extra-artistic) proliferation of the aesthetic, are implicitly aligned, if not equated. Of course, this is a problem only as long as we consider the work-of-art essay at a descriptive level. Once we regard it as dealing with a ‘potentiality’, it is clear that Benjamin argues that the technological reproduction bears with it the chance of ridding art of beautiful semblance and the traditional hierarchies that go along with it, thus opening a space for a new political art. Benjamin’s concept of aura nevertheless remains quite confusing, since it is laiden with several different meanings. It refers to the uniqueness of the work of art, its embeddedness in ritual or magical practices, and its authority over the viewer (which Benjamin associates with the cult of the fascist leader). But it also refers to the tradition of German idealist aesthetics, namely the idea of the artwork as a semblance of life, a harmonious totality of whole and parts. Conversely, the technological reproducibility of the work of art is regarded as the result of its industrialization and commodification, but also as offering the chance of emancipating the work of art from its traditional ritual context and as reinstating its use value as a playful medium between humankind and nature. Both aura and technological reproduction, in other words, refer to very different things, and this makes their opposition confusing. This confusion only increases once we recognize its relation to the dialectical structure of devaluation and sanctification, which I mentioned when discussing the concept of allegory in Benjamin’s book on the mourning play. Technological reproducibility, after all, rips the artwork out of its context much as allegory does. Simultaneously, however, the object is granted new meaning, through its juxtaposition with other objects from different contexts. Benjamin implicitly relates montage, the assemblage of different fragments opposing the semblance of an organic whole, to allegory. One can ask, however, whether that is entirely justified. Allegory is an artistic or literary technique, present in certain artistic phenomena, such as the German mourning play and Baudelaire’s poetry. Writing about literature, Benjamin sometimes uses the concept of montage in a similar vein, for instance to analyze Brecht’s theatre and Döblin’s novel Berlin Alexanderplatz. In the work-of-art essay, however, he seems to use the concept of montage in a somewhat different sense, namely to describe the technology of film in general. However, one could argue that in film there are artists who try to conceal this technology, giving the movie a semblance of a whole, and others who emphasize montage and raise it

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to the level of artistic expression. The latter artists, of whom the Russian directors Eisenstein and Vertov are exemplary, are clearly in the back of Benjamin’s mind, though he pretends his concepts apply to film in general. This distinction of the possible different usages of montage tends to get blurred in Benjamin’s essay. 47 The connection between the concepts of allegory and montage raises another question. Bernd Witte argues that Benjamin’s own method of literary criticism and historiography is allegorical, taking elements from literary or world history out of their context, reading them against the grain and providing the ‘trash’ of history with new meaning. 48 In the methodological notes of the Arcades Project Benjamin characterized his method as ‘literary montage’ (AP, 460; V/1, 574). But if this is so, then one can criticize his method in the same way as he criticizes the Baroque poets: namely that the new meanings he grants to objects are completely arbitrary, or, in Witte’s words, ‘absolutely subjective.’49 This objection is very important, and it touches upon the very heart of Benjamin’s (and to a certain extent also Adorno’s) enterprise. It is a central problem, not only of his aesthetics, but also of his philosophy of history and his theory of art criticism. Since it exceeds the scope of the present chapter, I will deal with this further on. Finally, one can object that, if the concept of allegory is used to analyze such culturally and historically diverse phenomena as the German mourning play, Baudelaire’s poetry, expressionism, the avant-gardes of the early twentieth century, and film, it threatens to lose much of its historical specificity. Nevertheless, I think we should understand this problem, too, in light of Benjamin’s philosophy of history, which calls for history to be written from the perspective of the present. In this way, then, all the historical phenomena analyzed in terms of the ‘liquidation of art’ become, in the language of the theses on the concept of history, ‘Messianic splinters’ that anticipate a future art emancipated from magic. For Benjamin, the reproducibility of art offers the chance to seize a unique historical opportunity. The magical aura of the work of art, analogous to the theological symbol and Baudelaire’s ‘correspondences’, has entered a stage of crisis. But, precisely at the moment of its imminent dissolution, its truth comes to the fore. The outcome of this process is uncertain. In Benjamin’s view, 47 One might say the same about the concept of distraction, which both refers to the multiplicity of reproduced images in everyday life, and to the reception of the visual bombardment of the individual film. 48 Witte (1976), 127. 49 Ibidem, 26.

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two responses are possible: either one holds onto the decaying aura, trying to preserve or construct its ‘eternal value’ and turning it into a ‘cultural good’ – this is what fascism does; or one can, as Nietzsche says, push what is already falling, and nihilistically affirm the destruction of the aura. This ‘active’ nihilism for Benjamin functions as an antidote to melancholy: both to the idealistic melancholy of the Baroque poets and to Baudelaire’s cynical melancholy.50 In his view, the technological reproducibility of the work of art offers a unique historical opportunity, with the possibility of aligning the dissolution of semblance and the proliferation of the aesthetic. The essay on the work of art shows that Benjamin’s aesthetics, and the whole of his philosophy, are under the sign of hope.51

2.5

Adorno’s dialectic of semblance

Several of the objections raised to Benjamin’s essay and that I have mentioned above are present, in some cases implicitly, in Adorno’s letter to Benjamin of 18 March 1936. Adorno characterizes his criticism as ‘immanent’, in the sense that he uses arguments of his friend’s earlier writings, most notably the essay on Goethe and the book on the mourning play, against the essay on the technological reproducibility of art. Most importantly, he notes that, while Benjamin in these other writings describes how the work of art has the ability to critically interrogate its own ritual character, in the present essay he has ‘rather casually transferred the concept of the magical aura to the “autonomous work of art” and flatly assigned a counterrevolutionary function to the latter’ (ABC, 128; ABB, 169). According to Adorno, the semblance of the work of art is in itself dialectical, containing both an element of magic and an element of freedom. He agrees that ‘the auratic element of the work of art is in decline’, however, ‘not merely on account of its technological reproducibility […] but also because of the fulfilment of its own “autonomous” laws’ (ABC, 129; ABB, 171). What Adorno means by this is that the modern work of art, by focusing on and bearing witness to its own material and its production process, tends towards a disruption of the magical character of art. As an example, he points to one of Benjamin’s favourite poets, Mallarmé, who shatters the illusion of poetry’s immediacy by drawing attention to the ‘materiality’ of poetry as words and sounds. 50 See Caygill (1998), 117. 51 I will return to this in later chapters.

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Adorno argues, furthermore, that Benjamin not only underestimates the technical character of autonomous art, but also overestimates that of mass art. In Adorno’s view, film production generally makes very little use of the formal possibilities of its technology, but rather seeks to magically construct the illusion of reality: ‘if anything can be said to possess an auratic character now, it is precisely the film which does so, and to an extreme and highly suspect degree’ (ABC, 130; ABB, 172). According to Adorno, then, Benjamin’s essay lacks dialectics, insofar as it fails to recognize the magical moment in reproduced art and, conversely, the emancipatory moment in autonomous art.52 Adorno’s comment on the auratic character of film makes clear that he has not fully understood the messianic perspective of the essay. Benjamin nowhere denies the fact that a false aura can be constructed in films, but focuses on the emancipatory possibilities of technological reproduction. It also makes clear Adorno is less interested in the hopeful potential of mass culture than in the question of what will become of art under advanced capitalism. Benjamin’s historical gamble tends, as Adorno later formulates it in Aesthetic theory (1970), towards ‘identifying with the aggressor’ (AT, 392; 7, 460) and he warns that ‘the condemnation of aura easily becomes the dismissal of qualitatively modern art that distances itself from the logic of familiar things’ (AT, 72-73; 7, 89-90). Adorno’s letter to Benjamin contains, in a nutshell, the two important branches of his own aesthetics: on the one hand a relentless critique of the reproduction of social semblance through the aestheticization of everyday life in what he comes to call the ‘culture industry’; on the other, an analysis and defence of modernist works of art as the arena where semblance critically reflects upon itself, thereby simultaneously opening up a perspective beyond semblance. Both branches stand under the same banner of the liquidation, or ‘de-artification’ (Entkunstung) of art – one of his few neologisms, as Alexander García Düttman has noted.53 In the next sections, I will 52 Adorno’s criticism is not, as has sometimes been suggested, directed against photography and film as art forms. In Aesthetic Theory he praises Benjamin’s essay ‘A Small History of Photography’ (1931) exactly because it makes the dialectical movement that the artwork essay lacks, discussing both the emancipatory and ideological possibilities of photography (AT, 72; 7, 90). Furthermore, in the essay ‘Transparencies on Film’ (1966) Adorno investigates the possibilities of film as a medium for ‘serious’ art (CI, 178-186; 10/1, 353-361). For a comprehensive account of Adorno’s criticism of film, see Früchtl (2015). 53 García Düttmann (2000), 59. Hullot-Kentor, whose translation of Aesthetic Theory is superior to Lenhardt’s in many ways, translates Entkunstung as ‘deaesthetization’. In my view, however, Adorno’s point is not that art loses its aesthetic qualities. On the contrary, de-artification goes hand in hand with the becoming-aesthetic of the social whole. His point is rather that art ceases

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discuss the two sides of Adorno’s ‘end of art’, after which we can compare them with Benjamin’s version.

2.6

Culture industry: the social liquidation of art

Adorno’s notion of the culture industry has its origin in his debate with Benjamin. Two essays on popular music published in the Institute’s journal during the 1930s, ‘On Jazz’ (1936) and ‘On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening’ (1938), can be regarded as direct reactions to Benjamin’s work-of-art essay. ‘On Jazz’ is Adorno’s attempt to unmask jazz music by arguing that its seemingly progressive elements are in fact reactionary (ABC, 132; ABB, 175). Jazz music pretends to emancipate primitive and irrational forces from the straightjacket of bourgeois morality, and to unleash sexual energy. According to Adorno, however, it does nothing of the sort. Its references to black music are ideological, a dubious marketing trick to present as ‘spontaneous’ what is in fact completely administered. Insofar as it has any relation to black culture, he argues, it refers to slavery rather than some ‘primitive’ freedom. Nothing is spontaneous in jazz; according to Adorno, it is ‘a commodity in the strict sense’: [I]ts suitability for use permeates its production in terms none other than its marketability, in the most extreme contradiction to the immediacy of its use not merely in addition to but also within the work process itself. It is subordinate to the laws and also to the arbitrary nature of the market, as well as the distribution of its competition or even its followers (EM, 473; 17, 77-78).

Adorno’s point here is not to criticize the fact that the work of art has entered the market – as we saw in the preceding chapter, the free market forms the necessary condition for art’s emancipation from church and state, and hence for the birth of modern art. His point is rather that market mechanisms invade the very structure of the work of art, and increasingly determine its production as well as its reception. To become a ‘hit’, the jazz composition to be art, i.e., that it becomes indistinguishable from other things. Lenhardt’s translation, as ‘desubstantialization’, comes closer, but lacks specificity. Therefore, I have chosen to translate Entkunstung as ‘de-artif ication’, which, although admittedly less elegant, catches Adorno’s term more adequately.

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‘must unite an individual, characteristic element with utter banality on every other level’ (EM, 479; 17, 85). It must be ‘different’ and ‘original’, but also easy to consume and recognizable, in order to ensure public success. The taste of the listener gradually becomes as standardized as the music they listen to. According to Adorno, this market dialectic of the new and the ever-thesame determines the musical structure of jazz music, as his analysis of syncopation makes clear. Syncopation, he argues, is the basic rhythmic principle of jazz and seems to provide it with unprecedented melodic freedom. He argues, however, that the relative freedom of the syncope is in fact always subordinate to the strict and standard rhythm of the whole, marked by the base drum. The syncope is but an insignificant and temporary deviation from the norm, dialectically affirming and underlining the latter. It is ‘not […] the expression of an accumulated subjective force which directed itself against authority until it had produced a new law out of itself. […] It leads nowhere and is arbitrarily withdrawn by an undialectical, mathematical incorporation into the beat’ (EM, 490; 17, 98). Contrary to the idea, voiced by its advocates, that jazz liberates repressed sexual energies, Adorno considers syncopation the sign of impotence expressed in a premature and incomplete orgasm – the anxious spasm of a subject weakened by administered society (EM, 490; 17, 98). The deviation from the norm – both in the shape of the syncope deviating from the beat, and in the shape of jazz deviating from the dominant social norm – are mere forms of ‘pseudo-individualization’, illusory expressions of protest that actually confirm the norm. Obviously, Adorno did not do justice to the wide variety of jazz music which existed even in his day, and of which he hardly took notice. That is not the point here. What is still interesting about his essay on jazz is that it is an early illustration of his investigation of the extent to which commodification infects the work of art, and not merely its reproduction and distribution, but also its production and reception. As can be seen in the essay, his analyses of popular music and of music in general are informed by a critique of what he would later call ‘identity thinking’. Identity thinking is the subsumption of a particular under a given universal (i.e., what Kant in Critique of Judgment called ‘determinative judgment’). This principle is embodied in the law of exchange value governing the modern world: everything is reduced to the number of labour hours determining the exchange value of the commodity. To be sure, regarding different things as equal is a basic act of thought – without this operation, thinking itself would be fruitless. The point of Adorno’s critique of identity thinking is not, then, that experience and

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thinking, objects and concepts, or particular and universal, are fundamentally different and separate. Against both nominalists and realists, he argues that ‘fact and concept are not polar opposites but mediated reciprocally in one another’ (AT, 425; 7, 510). Contrary to identity thinking, which ignores and abstracts the specificity of phenomena and tends towards their full integration in the concept, genuine thinking maintains a reflective moment in which the particular also resists subsumption under the universal – affirming its ‘non-identity’, as Adorno calls it. But this kind of dialectical thinking is under pressure in a world that is governed by exchange. The production of standardized jazz ‘hits’, in which the new equals the everthe-same, is only one among many manifestations of the social domination of identity thinking. In ‘On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening’, Adorno widens his scope to the entire music industry. As the title indicates, his analysis makes use of both Marxist and Freudian terminology. The ‘fetish character’ of music means several things. Firstly, it refers to the lack of a real relation, as Adorno sees it, on the part of the contemporary listener to the musical work itself. The listener instead shifts their attention to things surrounding the work that are of minor importance to it but that are nevertheless worshipped as fetishes. He mentions, for example, the star performer, the Stradivarius of the famous soloist, and the perfection of the musical performance. Secondly, fetishized music is no longer, as is the bourgeois work of art according to the theories of Moritz and Kant, an organic unity in which the whole and parts interact in harmony; rather, it has been devalued and has become a fragmented series of effects. Both parts and whole have to yield to the demands of consumption. This fetishization, he argues, not only determines ‘light’ music and the production of hit songs, but also affects traditional ‘serious’ music. A single movement from a Beethoven symphony is taken on board by the music industry, disintegrated into a series of reified moments evaluated for their dramatic effect, and added to the ‘pantheon of bestsellers’ (CI, 36; 14, 22). Finally, the fetish character of music refers to Marx’s theory of the fetish character of the commodity. In Capital, Marx argues that the object, upon entering the market, turns into a ‘mysterious thing’, appearing to have a life of its own. The exchange value of the commodity appears to us as being independent from its producer. The success of the hit song, Adorno argues, is similarly alienated from the consumer. The consumer of music is attracted to and derives pleasure from the success of the hit song, without being aware that this success can be traced to a system of consumption of which they are themselves part. According to Adorno, contemporary

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music consumption is actually the consumption of this success – caused by consumption itself – rather than that of the actual product: If the commodity in general combines exchange value and use value, then the pure use value, whose illusion the cultural goods must preserve in a completely capitalist society, must be replaced by pure exchange value, which precisely in its capacity as exchange value deceptively takes over the function of use value (CI, 38-39; 14, 25).

In other words: the fetish character of music implies that the exchange value of the musical commodity is that which is consumed. Adorno mentions the example of a visitor to a Toscanini concert who enjoys the mere fact that they will experience the performance of a world-famous conductor more than they do the actual music performed. Since this very fame, however, is based on market success, this visitor is really enjoying the money they have spent for the concert. According to Adorno, the commodification and fetishization of music make the concentrated reception of musical works increasingly impossible, leading to what he calls a regression in listening. As Freud argued, regression is the result of neurosis and the frustration of one’s desires, existing in a relapse into an infantile state reminiscent of a time when all desires were still satisfied. In the case of music consumption, Adorno argues, it is listening in general that has regressed, and not the individual listener, who may never have had a proper perception of music.54 The contemporary listeners, products of the fetishization of music, are childish (which, he emphasizes, is something other than being childlike): ‘their primitivism is not that of the undeveloped, but that of the forcibly retarded’ (CI, 47; 14, 34). Adorno’s notion of regression makes clear that he is criticizing the music industry not for actually offering only pleasure and enjoyment, but rather for merely claiming to do so (and with quite some success). Like the sexual energy of jazz music, the pleasure of the entertainment industry is a sham: ‘the pleasure, the enjoyment it promises, is given only to be simultaneously denied’ (CI, 30; 14, 15). What Adorno means is that this kind of entertainment pretends to offer freedom, transgression and the ‘new’, 54 The concept of ‘regression’ might imply a certain historical teleology, which, as I will explain more fully in the next chapter, contradicts Adorno’s suspicion of the notion of progress. As Hullot-Kentor argues, however, regression in the Freudian sense has a different meaning: ‘Regression […] is not to be understood concretely, as traveling back to an earlier period, but as the manifestation of conflicts that were never solved in the first place’ (Hullot-Kentor (2006), 9).

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but only in the straightjacket of the formula, the package, and the everthe-same: transgressions are allowed only insofar as they are thoroughly administered, and hence they are denied from the outset. Even more than in the jazz essay, Adorno here implicitly argues against Benjamin’s work-of-art essay, and makes clear that he has difficulties finding any progressive elements in today’s regressive listening: One might be tempted to rescue it if it were something in which the ‘auratic’ characteristics of the work of art, its illusory elements, gave way to playful ones. However it may be with films, today’s mass music shows little of such progress in disenchantment. Nothing survives in it more steadfastly than the illusion, nothing is more illusory than its reality (CI, 56-57; 14, 46).

Precisely those aspects in which Benjamin discerns the kernel of emancipation – reproduction and mass distribution, the ubiquity of aesthetic phenomena, and distracted perception – are for Adorno sources or signs of regression. But again, Benjamin’s enterprise was not to give a sociological description and critique of the contemporary film industry, as Adorno’s objective seems to be with regard to music. In a letter to his friend of 1 February 1939 Adorno apologizes for his own ‘tendency to indulge in Jeremiads and polemics’, and adds that the only question one should pose is ‘an experimental one: what will become of human beings and their capacity for aesthetic perception when they are fully exposed to the conditions of monopoly capitalism’ (ABC, 305; ABB, 398). This is indeed the question of the analysis of the ‘culture industry’, a term first used in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944). To properly understand Adorno’s analysis of the culture industry, we have to consider its relation to the central argument of Dialectic of Enlightenment. In their collaborative study, Adorno and Horkheimer argue that myth, as the attempt to soothe and control the forces of nature, is already a form of enlightenment, while enlightenment reason, in its one-sided use as the instrument to rule over nature and man, betrays its utopian promises of freedom and happiness and relapses into myth. Nature is disenchanted and turned into a mere instrument for social reproduction. Precisely in its quest to master nature (Naturbeherrschung), however, enlightenment reason remains stuck in nature’s logic of the blind reproduction of life, as the mere prolongation of the will to survive. Identity thinking, or ‘instrumental reason’ as the authors later called it, subsumes the object under the concept in order to master and control it, thereby stripping it of its particularity, its individuality – in short, of anything that does not ‘fit in’. This should not be conceived of as

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a mere intellectual process. Adorno and Horkheimer draw on the work of Max Weber, who described modernity as a process as social and intellectual rationalization, and Georg Lukács, who connected ‘reification’ to the capitalist principle of exchange.55 The principle of identity is the law of exchange value, which places qualitatively different things under the same banner. Furthermore, commodity production under capitalism must proceed as rationally and efficiently as possible in order to create a maximum of surplus value. Hence, as capital expands its influence over all social strata, science, morality, politics, and culture are distorted by the commodity structure. The chapter ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’ investigates what happens to culture under these circumstances. In the later essay ‘Culture Industry Reconsidered’ (1963), Adorno writes that he and Horkheimer preferred the term ‘culture industry’ over ‘mass culture’, in order to emphasize the fact that the culture they are talking about does not arise spontaneously from the masses, but is thoroughly administered from above (CI, 98; 10, 337). The term ‘culture industry’ is often misunderstood. It does not mean a certain genre or type of product (even though Adorno sometimes speaks of ‘the products of the culture industry’). Rather, it means to capture the ways in which the commodity form enters culture in all its facets: the structure of the work of art, its production as well as its reproduction, distribution, and reception. Its ‘industrial’ character, then, is not so much the fact that cultural commodities are industrially produced, but rather that the products themselves, even if they are individually produced, are increasingly governed by the (industrial) demands of standardization and pseudo-individualization. Contrary to what is often assumed, Adorno’s critique of the culture industry cannot be equated with a critique of mass or ‘lowbrow’ culture in favour of traditional ‘high’ art. So-called ‘classical music’, for instance, is evenly absorbed within and affected by the culture industry. Furthermore, and as noted above, Adorno does not see the culture industry as creating the culture of the masses. Authentic popular culture had a subversive character, directed against official culture, and accompanying it as its ‘social bad conscience’: ‘Light’ art as such, entertainment, is not a form of decadence. Those who deplore it as a betrayal of the ideal of pure expression harbor illusions about society. The purity of bourgeois art, hypostasized as a realm of 55 Adorno’s friend Alfred Sohn-Rethel might also be mentioned as a source of inspiration, although his work Geistige und körperliche Arbeit was published only later.

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freedom contrasting to material praxis, was bought from the outset with the exclusion of the lower class (DE, 107; 3, 157).

In an earlier chapter, Adorno and Horkheimer illustrate this with the Sirens episode from Homer’s Odyssey. Odysseus, tied to the mast, is able to enjoy the Sirens’ song, which usually lures any sailor to their hazardous cliffs, while his men, their ears filled with wax, bring him to safety: ‘In this way the enjoyment of art and manual work diverge as the primeval world is left behind’ (DE, 27; 3, 51-52). For Adorno and Horkheimer, the episode of the Sirens demonstrates not only that the ‘autonomy’ of art depends on the division of mental and physical labour, but also that the enjoyment of official culture is possible only at the price of asceticism. Again, the point here is not that culture industry gives mindless pleasure, but that it actually does not give enough of it. Popular culture is stripped of its subversive elements and turned into a formula: rationalized pleasure. Amusement takes on the shape of the industry the worker in his spare time is attempting to flee through amusement (DE, 109; 3, 158). Escapism is not the issue for Adorno; rather the fact that any attempt to escape is blocked, until the very desire to escape is eradicated, since ‘the culture industry presents that same everyday world as paradise’ (DE, 113; 3, 154).56 The connection of the culture industry to the dialectic of enlightenment is clear in the authors’ remarks about style. They disagree with those cultural critics who lament the lack of style in mass culture. Style, defined by Adorno and Horkheimer as the subsumption of authentic expression under artistic rules, is regarded in Hegelian terms as the reconciliation of the universal and the particular. In every work of art, style constitutes a ‘promise’ that such reconciliation is actually possible between individual and society (DE, 102-103; 3, 151). However, this promise is ideological as long as the social reconciliation of particular and universal remains impossible. That is why, in Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s view, great artists are ‘those who adopted a style as a rigor to set against the chaotic expression of suffering, as a negative truth’ (DE, 103; 3, 151). Expressionism sought to emancipate the expressive detail from the rigor of style in classicist harmony, all the while still realizing that expression is noticeable only within the context of style. Culture industry takes both style and the suspicion of it to its 56 See also Adorno’s remark in Minima Moralia: ‘It is not because they turn their back on washed-out existence that escape-films are so repugnant, but because they do not do so energetically enough, because they are themselves just as washed out, because the satisfactions they fake coincide with the ignomy of reality, of denial. The dreams have no dream’ (MM 202; 4, 230).

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extreme: administered by the demands of profit, it is nothing but effect, neglecting the demands of the whole and the part of the work evenly. It forces its schemas upon each and every phenomenon. Hence, Adorno and Horkheimer argue, the culture industry is both the negation of style and style in its purest, most brute form: ‘Being nothing other than style, it divulges style’s secret: obedience to the social hierarchy’ (DE, 103-104; 3, 152). The culture industry is indeed a ‘schema’ in the Kantian sense of the word: a mechanism pre-forming empirical data for human understanding. In the same manner, ‘the whole world is passed through the filter of the culture industry’ (DE, 99; 3, 147). The genuinely new or different is increasingly made impossible. The culture industry, Adorno and Horkheimer argue, aims for total integration. Anything deviant is either absorbed and neutralized, or banned and cast into oblivion. This concerns not least of all the work of art, which is traditionally conceived of as different from empirical reality through its aesthetic semblance. In the process of total integration, the work of art constitutes the nagging reminder of what does not ‘fit in’. Consequently, as Adorno argues in Aesthetic Theory, we presently witness a ‘de-artification of art’: ‘The humiliating difference between art and the life people lead, and in which they do not want to be bothered because they could not bear it otherwise, must be made to disappear’ (AT, 22; 7, 32). The culture industry turns the work of art into a mere thing among things, an ordinary commodity and consumer good. Ironically, it thereby fulfils the historical avant-garde’s dream of reconciling art and life, albeit not, as the avant-gardists wished it, through a utopian transformation of society that would make the semblance of the work of art obsolete, but by cynically transferring the beautiful semblance of the work of art to the whole of society. According to Adorno, however, an aestheticist retreat into high art as into a nature reserve, lavishing on oneself the eternal beauty of the masterpieces of the West, is not an option, for the autonomous work of art is not as pure and pristine as aestheticism pretends it to be. He argues that ‘it is impossible to insist on a critique of the culture industry that draws the line at art’ (AT, 23; 7, 34). The autonomy of art, as his remarks on ‘light’ art and style make clear, is itself heteronomous: entwined within the modern logic of authority, alienation, and social inequality. That is why he understands the modernist work of art as much as a self-critique of art as he understands it as a social critique and a resistance to the culture industry. This will be further discussed in the next section. Adorno’s theory of the culture industry has given rise to a lot of criticism – so much, in fact, that it has become the butt of attacks from almost every subsequent analysis of mass culture. Especially during and after the 1960s,

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when popular culture and, most notably, youth culture were increasingly considered a serious object of scholarship, his theory was found lacking, mostly because he presents mass culture as one monolithic force without appreciating the huge differences within it. Ironically, then, Adorno is blamed for a kind of ‘identity thinking’, the subsumption of different particulars under a dominant universal, which he himself so vehemently criticizes. We should keep in mind, however, that, like Benjamin, Adorno does not pretend to provide an objective sociological description. As Jay Bernstein notes, ‘the question of the culture industry is raised from the perspective of its relation to the possibilities of social transformation’ (CI, 2). What keeps Adorno’s theory interesting, in other words, is that he analyzes how a capitalist mode of production changes our culture, not only by making aesthetic phenomena ubiquitous, but by infecting their very form, and consequently the structure of our experience and our social reality.57 More recently, cultural theorists and sociologists such as Paolo Virno, Luc Boltanski, and Eve Chiapello have argued that Adorno and Horkheimer’s analysis and critique of the culture industry have been superseded by the developments of capitalism itself.58 The theory of the culture industry is informed by the Marxist economic theory of monopoly capitalism, which claims that the capitalist market will crystallize into a small cartel of big businesses, eventually even fusing with the government of the nation state (as in Friedrich Pollock’s theory of ‘state capitalism’) – a theory that has lost much of its plausibility. Furthermore, the culture industry’s mechanism of standardization, in Adorno and Horkheimer’s theory, is modelled after Fordist industrial production.59 As Virno, Boltanski, and Chiapello argue, in contemporary capitalism Fordist industrial production gives way to so-called ‘post-Fordist’ production, in which the focus of production is on immaterial goods (services, communication, ideas) rather than on material goods, while a new work ethic prescribes and demands flexibility, creativity, and authenticity, rather than fixed working hours and a strict division of (mental and physical) labour. I believe these objections are interesting and important and of some consequence for whether Adorno’s work might be of value today. I will return to this question in the conclusion of this 57 Gerhard Schweppenhäuser (1996) is therefore correct when he says that the critique of the culture industry is not primarily a form of cultural criticism but a critique of the commodity form (160). 58 Virno (2004), 58-59; Boltanski and Chiapello (2005), 440. 59 ‘The Ford model and the model hit song are all of a piece’ (CI, 79; 3, 318).

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book. For now, I merely want to note that Adorno’s theory of the culture industry captures at least some of the mechanisms contemporary theorists claim to be typical of present-day consumerism, such as the ‘demand for authenticity’ and the ‘commodification of difference’.60 As Adorno writes in the essay ‘The Schema of Mass Culture’ (1942), every hit song claims to be ‘especially for you’, since the culture industry’s standardized products ‘even standardize the claim of each one to be irreplaceably unique’ (CI, 79; 3, 317).

2.7

Modernism: self-critique of semblance The question of all music is: how can a whole exist, without harm being done to the parts? ‒ Theodor W. Adorno, Beethoven. Philosophie der Musik61

As is the case with his writings on the culture industry, Adorno’s writings on modernism start off with the case of music, the medium he was most acquainted with. Although Adorno himself does not actually speak of ‘modernist’ art, I follow Jay Bernstein’s use of the term ‘modernism’ in relation to his work, where modern art is understood as autonomous art, while modernist art is art that reflects on this autonomy and its place within modernity.62 Adorno maintains that modernist art, like the products of the culture industry, can be understood only in its relation to capitalism. This is already clear in the essay ‘On the Social Situation of Music’ (1932), his first publication in the Institute’s journal, which already contains many themes of his later writings on art. Here he writes: ‘The role of music in the social process is exclusively that of a commodity; its value is that determined by the market. Music no longer serves direct needs nor benefits from direct application, but rather adjusts to the pressures of the exchange of abstract units’ (EM, 391; 18, 729). Music, he argues, has lost its immediate social function (which it still had, for instance, in Bach’s time) and has reached a point at which it is completely alienated from human life. Any use value that is imposed upon it from above can only be the culture industry’s ‘consumption of the exchange value’ or political propaganda. Music cannot undo this alienation by itself; according to Adorno it is ‘able to do nothing but portray within its 60 Boltanski and Chiapello (2005), 438-451. 61 ANS 1, 62. 62 Bernstein (1992), 196.

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own structure the social antinomies which are also responsible for its own isolation’ (EM, 393; 18, 731). It is important to fully appreciate the dialectical character of Adorno’s understanding of the commodification of the work of art. As discussed in the first chapter, the autonomy of art was expressed in a new discourse on art on the one hand, and was conditioned by its commodification on the other. Similarly, Adorno notes in Aesthetic Theory that the category of ‘the new’ – the demand of originality quintessential for art in the bourgeois society – is the ‘aesthetic seal’, in the culture industry and modernism alike, of a world dominated by the industrial production of commodities. Baudelaire’s poetry, he argues, is the first testimony to that. Thus, for Adorno the modern situation of art entails that ‘the absolute artwork converges with the absolute commodity’ (AT, 28; 7, 39).63 Both share the ‘new’ as a sole value, and both are suffused by exchange value. Furthermore, like the commodity, the bourgeois work of art has a ‘fetish character’, in the sense that it obscures the traces of its own production, presenting itself as sui generis.64 The work of art must, according to idealist aesthetics since Kant, resemble living nature, in the sense that even if we know it to be a human product, it must not appear that way. Both the fetish character of the work of art and its relation to the commodity touch, in other words, on the basic problem of Adorno’s aesthetics, or, for that matter, of Western aesthetics in general, namely the problem of semblance.65 The work of art unites its parts in the semblance of a unified whole. It aims, in Hegel’s terms, for the full integration of the particular under the universal. Semblance, as it is understood in idealist aesthetics, is art’s forgetfulness of being merely art and not a really existing thing. As soon as the production of semblance is obscured, however, the particular comes under the threat of domination by 63 Elsewhere in Aesthetic Theory, Adorno states that originality ‘is enmeshed in historical injustice, in the predominance of bourgeois commodities that must touch up the ever-same as the ever-new in order to win customers’, adding, however, that ‘with the growing autonomy of art, originality has turned against the market where it was never permitted to go beyond a certain limit’ (AT, 226; 7, 257-258). 64 In his In Search of Wagner (1952), Adorno argues that Wagner’s music is exemplary for this: ‘The occultation of production by means of the outward appearance of the product – that is the formal law governing the works of Richard Wagner. The product presents itself as self-producing’ (ISW, 74; 13, 82). 65 According to Bürger, Adorno’s concept of Schein is too rich in meaning and eventually becomes ‘blurry’ (unscharf ) (Bürger (1983a), 60). I think, however, that Adorno merely wants to do justice to the rich meaning the concept has of itself, and which it owes not only to the philosophical tradition, but also to its double Latin root of videtur (to seem) and lucet (to shine) (see also Agamben (1995), 125).

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the universal, and, consequently, the work of art risks relapsing into identity thinking, turning into the analogy of the culture industry and administered society. Adorno’s remark that ‘the utmost integration is utmost semblance’ therefore works both ways (AT, 56; 7, 73). Aesthetic semblance is a form of integration, while full integration of the parts into the whole under present social conditions remains, and must remain, mere semblance. For Adorno, the fetish and semblance character (Scheincharakter) of art also has a positive moment. Only through its fetish character, he argues, ‘does the work transcend the spell of the reality principle’ (AT, 432; 7, 506). Likewise, only by being mere semblance, and not world, can the work of art critically dissociate itself from the world. Art – especially modernist art – posits (setzt) itself as semblance, and ‘to this extent it sabotages the false claim to reality of a world dominated by the subject, the world of the commodity’ (AT, 361; 7, 417). The semblance character of the work of art, in other words, determines its autonomy, and consequently prevents it from being fully integrated into a false totality. Furthermore, in being a fetish, a thing obscuring its production by human subjectivity, the work of art also constitutes the image of an object that is valuable and meaningful in itself, as a mere thing. It shows the ‘more’ (Mehr) that is actually part of any object. This ‘more’ is, in Adorno’s view, the essence of the concept of natural beauty in traditional aesthetics, and the moment in which artistic beauty might once more be grounded in natural beauty (AT, 104; 7, 122). It is the excess of value and meaning beyond the object’s usefulness for, and availability to, the subject – its ‘meaningfulness without meaning’.66 Through it, the work of art becomes a semblance of what any object might be: a sensuous particular. This term, which is not Adorno’s but Hegel’s, is used by Jay Bernstein to point to the irreducibility of sensuous experience into an overarching structure or schema. Under the pressure of identity thinking, this kind of experience finds its refuge in art.67 Adorno writes: ‘Artworks are plenipotentiaries of things that are no longer distorted by exchange, profit, and the false needs of a degraded humanity’ (AT, 298; 7, 337).68 Still, as 66 I owe this Kantian formulation to Jay Bernstein. 67 As Bernstein (2004) writes in his essay on Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory: ‘If, by its own concept, art is bound to sensuousness, if art-making is, even in its representational phase, the accounting of the world in accordance with the material possibilities of a medium (stone, bronze, paint and canvas, sounds words, etc.), then in the context of Western rationalization art becomes, increasingly, the marginalized habitat for the sensory-bound aspects of experience’ (145). See also Bernstein (1992), 198. 68 Here Adorno’s understanding of the work of art, as the restoration of an object’s sensuous particularity, is similar to the Benjaminian figure of the collector. Like the artwork, the collector

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Adorno emphasizes repeatedly, we must always remember that they are mere plenipotentiaries, as they are mere semblances and not the things themselves. Artworks, he argues, have to exist because the world they stand in for does not. Because of the dialectical nature of semblance, as both the ideology of integration into the universal and the emancipation of particularity, works of art must relate critically to it. While bourgeois art from the nineteenth century obscures the traces of its own production, modernist art rebels ‘against the semblance of a semblance that denies it is such’ (AT, 135; 7, 157). In other words: in emphasizing the fact they are mere semblance, modernist works break through the semblance of being real (i.e., being non-semblance). Consequently, Adorno argues, they are all the more real. Paraphrasing Hegel, he calls this reversal the ‘cunning’ of art – Homer’s Penelope, misleading the suitors by unravelling at night the weaving she has made during the day, is an allegory for it (AT, 245; 7, 278). This has consequences for the way in which Adorno conceives of the category of the ‘work’ of art. He regards the unity of the work of art, as Britta Scholze points out, as analogous to the totalitarian character of society.69 The category of the ‘work’, as the subsumption of particulars under the universal, is under the spell of identity thinking. Modernist works of art protest against it. In Philosophy of New Music (1949), Adorno argues that these works ‘challenge the concept of achievement and work’, adding that ‘today, the only works that count are those that are no longer works’ (PNM, 30; 12, 36-37). Similarly, in Aesthetic Theory, he states that ‘modern art […] is the critique of traditional works, which in so many ways are stronger and more successful: it is the critique of success’ (AT, 209; 7, 240). Drawing attention to the traces of their own construction, these new works criticize the bourgeois notion of the work of art as an organic unity and a semblance of life. The alternative structure of modernist works resists the enjoyment traditionally offered by works of art. For Adorno, the notion of ‘enjoyment’ of art in general is highly suspect, since it is complicit with a bourgeois mindset based around property and exchange. According to this attitude, artworks are valuable only once you get something out of them (AT, 16; 7, 27). The subject uses the work of art as a projection screen for their own private feelings, as the mere vehicle for emotions, which can be cast aside once they have had their fill. The negation of art’s use value in modernist art, frees the object ‘from the drudgery of being useful’ (AP 9; V/1, 53), stripping it from both use and exchange value, and redeeming its particularity at the very moment of its obsolescence. The figure of the collector will be discussed in Chapter 4. 69 ‘Beide sind falsche, zwanghaft hergestellte Einheiten’ (Scholze (2000), 106).

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however, leaves us with the pressing question of what art is for. According to Adorno, the enjoyment of art, as a form of ‘devouring’ by the subject, is to be contrasted with a mode of reception in which the subject disappears into the work. Modernist works, such as Kafka’s novels and Schoenberg’s music, ‘shoot toward the viewer as on occasion a locomotive does in a film’ (AT, 15; 7, 27). The shocks delivered by these works make impossible both traditional enjoyment and Kantian ‘disinterestedness’: ‘For the sake of happiness, happiness is renounced. It is thus that desire survives in art’ (AT, 15; 7, 26).70 The development of modernist art has a dialectic of its own, however, as Adorno makes clear in his discussion of montage. Montage in works of art disrupts the semblance of life through the presentation of discrete particulars, without forcing them into a unity. Within a world devoid of meaning, the work as montage resists any superimposed meaning, breaking the hierarchy of parts and whole, and presenting the details in their naked particularity. Unconsciously it thereby ‘takes its lead from a nominalistic utopia’ (AT, 203; 7, 232). To this extent, Adorno argues, all modern art has a moment of montage. However, the primacy of construction over a ‘natural’ unity of meaning, which is the point of departure of montage, threatens to create a second order of lawfulness, recreating the lawfulness of nature it was attempting to shake off: ‘Absolute determination – which stipulates that everything is important to an equal degree and that nothing may remain external to the inner nexus of the work – converges […] with absolute arbitrariness’ (AT, 205; 7, 234). In this regard, modernist art is both the antithesis and prolongation of bourgeois art. This can be illustrated by Adorno’s analyses of the work of Beethoven and Schoenberg, who to him are the pinnacles of bourgeois and modernist music respectively. As he argues in Introduction to the Sociology of Music (1962), Beethoven’s music confronts us with the spirit of the revolutionary bourgeoisie. Not as an image, and not even merely because of its pathos; Adorno argues instead that the values of the early bourgeoisie resound throughout Beethoven’s compositional technique, most notably in the development of the sonata form (ISM, 62; 14, 411). Adorno conceives of the sonata form in Hegelian terms, as a relation between the particular (the theme) and the universal (the overall structure). In Beethoven’s music, in contrast to the music preceding him, the theme is as much determined by the whole as the other way round. The extent to which he thus succeeds in reconciling the particular and the universal connects him to Hegel, and, 70 In the impossibility of enjoyment, as Adorno notes in ‘On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening’, Schoenberg’s music and culture industry converge (CI, 33; 14, 19).

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according to Adorno, even exceeds Hegel insofar as Beethoven provides a mere semblance of reconciliation without positing its actuality.71 Still, even Beethoven, in his middle period, is under the spell of identity thinking, as he constructs his melodic themes to fit the functional demands of the form to the point that they, like the subjects in bourgeois society, tend ‘toward amorphousness’ (AT, 243; 7, 276). The eventual failure of the bourgeoisie to reconcile particular and universal, marked by the failed revolution of 1848, is expressed, in Adorno’s view, in Beethoven’s late style. In the essay ‘Late Style in Beethoven’ (1937), he argues that the predominant psychological and biographical interpretations of Beethoven’s late piano sonatas and string quartets, which search for a sign of the composer’s awareness of imminent death, are inadequate. These works, he argues, are characterized, rather, by the absence of the composing subject than by its presence. While in middle Beethoven the sovereign composer governs the form and breaks conventions as it suits him, the late works ‘are full of decorative thrill sequences, cadences and fiorituras. Often convention appears in a form that is bald, undisguised, untransformed’ (EM, 565; 17, 14-15). Psychological interpretations of late style look for subjectivity in the wrong place, for, according to Adorno, the subject expresses itself exactly in its absence. The naked presentation (Darstellung) of meaningless conventions is the trace left behind by the meaning-giving subject who has already abandoned this world. Adorno writes: The power of subjectivity in the late works of art is the irascible gesture with which it takes leave of the works themselves. It breaks their bonds, not in order to express itself, but in order, expressionless, to cast off the semblance of art. Of the works themselves it leaves only fragments behind, and communicates itself, like a cipher, only through the blank spaces from which it has disengaged itself (EM, 566; 17, 15).72

Adorno, in other words, interprets Beethoven’s late style as the herald of modernist art. His late works, with their caesurae and disruptions, have abandoned the ideals of unity and reconciliation, they have cast off their 71 See Leppert’s commentary in EM, 521. For Adorno’s view on the sonata form see also Witkin (1998), 28-49. 72 Adorno owes the term ‘the expressionless’ from Benjamin’s essay on Goethe’s Elective Affinities, which will be discussed in Chapter 4. The influence of Benjamin’s book on the mourning play also is apparent here, in Adorno’s take on musical conventions. Consider again the lines from Origin of German Tragic Drama quoted earlier: ‘The allegory of the seventeenth century is not convention of expression, but expression of convention.’

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beautiful semblance, and are therefore ‘relegated to the outer reaches of art’ (EM, 564; 17, 13). The process Adorno refers to as the ‘disintegration of the musical material’, set in motion by Beethoven, is brought to a climax by Schoenberg, to whose work Adorno devoted many essays and the first part of his Philosophy of New Music.73 The development of Western music takes part in enlightenment’s disenchantment of nature, as seemingly necessary or natural relations and hierarchies are unmasked as being ‘merely’ conventional. Schoenberg’s ‘emancipation of the dissonant’ deconstructs the apparent natural order of the tonal system, which traditionally demanded that compositions be in a dominant key, thus creating a division and hierarchy of consonant and dissonant tones. As Adorno argues, however, with Schoenberg’s free tonality the tendency of the musical material turns ‘against the closed work and everything it implies’ (PNM, 34; 12, 42). In Hegelian terms: ‘His music repudiates the claim that the universal and the particular are reconciled’ (PNM, 36; 12, 44). In free tonality, the technical mastery over the musical material reaches a point where the bourgeois ideals of harmony, unity, and integration become impossible. Hence, integration dialectically turns into disintegration. Yet the development of music makes another dialectical turn. The wish to avoid even the slightest suggestion of a dominant key forces Schoenberg to invent a strict system in which no tone is allowed to recur before the twelve-tone row has passed: the so-called twelve-tone technique or dodecaphony. Absolute freedom turns into its opposite: absolute determination. According to Adorno, the development of music thus mimics the dialectic of enlightenment: ‘Music, in thrall to the historical dialectic, participates in this dialectic. Twelve-tone technique is truly its fate. It subjugates music by setting it free. The subject rules over the music by means of a rational system in order to succumb to this rational system itself’ (PNM, 54; 12, 68). The disenchantment of the natural order of tonal relations subsequently leads Schoenberg to reify these relations into a ‘second nature’ which exceeds the first in its rigidity.74 73 In his preface Adorno writes that Philosophy of New Music should be considered as ‘a detailed excursus to Dialectic of Enlightenment’ (PNM, 5; 12, 11). Chronologically, however, it is rather the other way around. The first part of the book, the essay on Schoenberg, was written between 1940 and 1941. Horkheimer, after having read it, responded enthusiastically, proposing to Adorno that he extend his reflections on music to a broader socio-cultural context in a joint study. Horkheimer writes: ‘This work [i.e., the essay on Schoenberg, TL] will to a great extent constitute the foundation of our joint efforts’ (quoted in Müller-Doohm (2003), 420). 74 This criticism proves wrong those who consider Philosophy of New Music as merely a eulogy to Schoenberg. The latter certainly did not see it that way. After having read the book, Schoenberg

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Modernist art threatens to fall prey to this fatal dialectic. It rebels against beautiful semblance, against the ornament, against anything overabundant in art. It wants to destroy the sacred status of the work of art, thus making its forms functional or objective (sachlich), or turning itself into a mere thing among things, into the most banal of objects – a urinal, a soapbox, a can of excrement. However, in making itself merely an object, Adorno argues, the new art becomes positivistic, identifying with the world it opposes. Still in discussion with Benjamin, Adorno writes in Aesthetic Theory: The allergy to aura, from which no art today is able to escape, is inseparable from the eruption of inhumanity. This renewed reification, the regression of artworks to the barbaric literalness of what is aesthetically the case, and phantasmagorical guilt are inextricably intertwined. As soon as the artwork fears for its purity so fanatically that it loses faith in its possibility and beings to display outwardly what cannot become art – canvas and mere tones – it becomes its own enemy, the direct and false continuation of purposeful rationality (AT, 136; 7, 158).

Adorno’s point here is not to deny the importance of materiality for the work of art. On the contrary, the work of art is more thing than ‘normal’ things, since its resists the universal fungibility of commodity exchange. However, the ‘thing character’ (Dingcharakter) of the work of art is in itself dialectical (AT, 129; 7, 153), and does not completely coincide with its material bearer. As a thing, as a sensuous particular, the work of art always points beyond itself. Alluding to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, Adorno states: ‘What is essential to art is that which in it is not the case [was an ihr nicht der Fall ist]’ (AT, 426; 7, 499). The situation of modernist art in contemporary society is, in other words, deeply problematic. We can discern three aporias or antinomies that art faces, according to Adorno. The first concerns its autonomy. Art since the early twentieth century has protested against the doctrine of l’art pour l’art. This doctrine can be criticized not only as bourgeois ideology, a means to neutralize the political potential of art, but also, as both Adorno and Benjamin make clear, as a reflection of the commodity form. On the other hand, however, if art, attempting to resist fetishization and commodification, denounces its autonomy and presents itself as ‘useful’ or ‘functional’, it falls prey to instrumental rationality, bows to the demands wrote to a friend: ‘He attacks me quite vehemently in it…Now I know that he has clearly never liked my music’ (quoted in Hullot-Kentor (2006), 57).

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of the existing world and forfeits its possibilities to criticize it (AT, 310; 7, 352-353).75 The second aporia, concerning the semblance of the work of art, has been discussed in detail in this section. To summarize: modernist art rebels against the bourgeois notion of the work of art as the semblance of an organic whole. Wresting itself from natural bonds, however, it recreates a second nature as rigid as the first. Criticizing semblance, it turns itself into a mere thing, succumbing to the universal semblance of society. Adorno writes: ‘The dialectic of modern art is largely that it wants to shake off its semblance character like an animal trying to shake off its antlers’ (AT, 136; 7, 157). This is exactly the reason why in his view it is of paramount importance for aesthetics to ‘redeem’ semblance. The absolute form of semblance is the semblance that denies the fact that it is semblance. Only by presenting itself as semblance, as something that is not real, can the modernist work point to the fact that what it stands for – a world wherein sensuous particularity may exist – is not real either. This is the crucial difference between modernist art and the culture industry, which denies its semblance character and pretends to offer happiness in the here and now.76 For the sake of truth, therefore, modernist art has to hold onto its semblance, not as a mere illusion but as the necessary condition for its ability to point beyond the existing world, and to be a plenipotentiary of a better one. This brings us to the third antinomy, concerning art’s utopian character. In Aesthetic Theory Adorno repeatedly refers to Stendhal’s dictum of art as a promesse du bonheur, a promise of happiness.77 Art, in his view, has a double function. First, it expresses the contradictions and tensions of existing society. Referring to the title of a novel by Samuel Beckett, Adorno argues that art shows comment c’est: how it is. Secondly, through this negative presentation of society, it represents the interests of that which has no place in it. Hence, art’s promise exists in providing a refuge for the repressed in society, for the sensuous particular. Nevertheless, it is still merely a promise, and not happiness itself. On the basis of this utopian character, we can think of different scenarios for the ‘end of art’. First of all, as Adorno sometimes suggests, a better world would have no need for art: ‘If the utopia of art were fulfilled, it would be art’s temporal 75 More will be said about Adorno’s critique of commitment in the next chapter. 76 As Jameson (1990) writes, ‘Both [art and culture industry] raise the issue and the possibility of happiness in their very being, as it were, and neither provides it; but where one keeps with it by negation and suffering, through the enactment of its impossibility, the other assures us it is taking place’ (147). 77 For instance, 7, 461. Actually, Stendhal defined beauty, and not art, as a promise of happiness.

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end’ (AT, 41; 7, 55). Obviously, in a state of happiness, a promise of happiness is superfluous.78 But this positive end of art does not correspond with our actual world. Adorno does not share the optimism of Hegel, who in his view betrayed utopia by locating it in his own time. The end of art that Hegel was the first to conceive of is prohibited by his own definition of art as the ‘consciousness of need’. With this definition, Adorno argues, Hegel ‘named the most compelling reason for art’s continuation: the continuation of needs, mute in themselves, that await the expression that artworks fulfill by proxy’ (AT, 437; 7, 512). Art, like philosophy according to the famous opening lines of Negative Dialectics (1966), continues to exist because the moment to realize it was missed. This does not mean, however, that art must necessarily exist. According to Adorno, the existence of art is nowhere chiselled in stone; it is, in other words, deeply contingent (AT, 348; 7, 399). As we have seen above, Adorno argues that the de-artification of art by the culture industry brings about the false reconciliation of art and life, thus threatening art’s survival. Modernist art protests against this false reconciliation by rebelling against its own semblance character. However, by eradicating semblance altogether, it also destroys the last remnants of utopia. It must therefore hold onto semblance for the sake of utopia. As Adorno writes in Philosophy of New Music: ‘The destruction of art is wrong in a world that is wrong’ (PNM, 88; 12, 108). The tension between the positive/utopian and the negative/ cynical end of art determines what for Adorno is the central antinomy of art, namely that it ‘must be and wants to be utopia, and the more utopia is blocked by the real functional order, the more this is true; yet at the same time art may not be utopia in order not to betray it by providing semblance and consolation’ (AT, 41; 7, 55). In Adorno’s view, art cannot solve these antinomies; they are the epiphenomena of contradictions in society and can therefore be solved only through social change. Therefore, artworks must maintain themselves as semblance, while at the same time bearing the guilt that they are merely semblance, and not world. All they can do is bear witness to this antinomy in their very structure. For Adorno, therefore, all genuine art is dissonant. Dissonance is the stigma of art’s antinomies, of the fact that it can no longer exist but cannot be allowed to die either. For him, the work of Beckett is exemplary. He argues that ‘Beckett’s plays are absurd not because of the absence of meaning, for then they would be simply irrelevant, but because they put meaning on trial’ (AT, 201; 7, 230). They are, in other words, about meaninglessness, and this is the 78 Although Adorno in some places argues that even then art would be necessary, in order to remember the suffering of the past.

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reason why they tend towards silence. The meaninglessness of today’s world is their meaning. According to Adorno, only as a negative image of meaning, as a remnant of lost meaning, can the work of art redeem meaning in art.79 The relation between the latter two ‘ends of art’ – the first brought about by the culture industry; the second, by the tendency of modern art itself – is thus not one of simple opposition, but is dialectical. The culture industry brings the commodification of art – which lies at the basis of the bourgeois ideal of autonomy – to the point that the commodity form infects the very structure of the work. Modernist art, rebelling against commodification, locks itself into the artistic form and strives towards an absolute integration, but eventually turns its own radical freedom into radical domination. As Adorno famously wrote in a letter to Benjamin: ‘Both bear the stigmata of capitalism, both contain elements of change […]. Both are torn halves of an integral freedom, to which, however, they do not add up’ (ABC, 130; ABB, 171). This is also why these two halves, in Adorno’s analysis, have more than one thing in common: both the culture industry and modernist art are characterized by disintegration and fragmentation, both are unable to provide pleasure, and both are suspicious of utopianism. The crucial difference, of course, is that, while the culture industry pretends to provide pleasure and locates utopia in the here and now, modernist art withholds pleasure for pleasure’s sake, and presents utopia as a negative image of reality. Without a doubt, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory is one of the most refined and challenging contributions to aesthetics in the twentieth century. Still, according to some, Adorno’s magnum opus was already outmoded the moment it was published. The two main reasons are its negative attitude towards mass culture and its failure to comprehend the full extent of the avant-garde. With regard to mass culture, I have already alluded to the critique of the concept of the culture industry above. One can add to that, however, that Adorno’s negative evaluation of mass culture is undialectical according to his own standards. If, indeed, both modernism and mass culture are the torn halves of an ‘integral freedom’, it should be possible to detect both negative and positive moments in both. But while Adorno’s understanding of modernism does just that, and is thoroughly dialectical, his account of mass culture lacks dialectics, focusing solely on the negative content and impact of mass culture. Although he points to the subversive origin of light art, he is unable to detect any of it in the present, save for 79 Note the similarity betweenn Adorno’s interpretation of Beckett and Benjamin’s interpretation of the mourning play. This similarity is also evident in the essay, ‘Trying to understand Endgame’ (1961), where Adorno writes that Beckett’s Endgame parodies the artistic symbol by presenting a sign that refuses to provide meaning (11, 292).

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some passing remarks on kitsch and the circus. Several cultural theorists who are sympathetic to Adorno’s theory, such as Fredric Jameson and Simon Frith, have pointed out that mass culture too, has both ideological and utopian, conservative and radical, or affirmative and critical moments.80 To emphasize this, Frith introduces the oxymoronic notion of the ‘unpopular popular’, adding that ‘the utopian impulse, the negation of everyday life, the aesthetic impulse that Adorno recognized in high art, must be part of low art too.’81 The second strand of critique accuses Adorno of not fully appreciating or comprehending the challenges of the historical avant-garde. Peter Bürger goes so far as to accuse Adorno of ‘anti-avant-gardism’, arguing, first, that his theory misses the institutional criticism of the avant-garde; second, that he rejects avant-gardist techniques such as montage and shock, and third, that he eventually holds onto the outmoded categories of ‘work’, autonomy and semblance.82 With regard to the last two points, we have seen that Adorno himself criticizes these categories, that, while he in fact does appreciate and comprehend avant-gardist techniques, he argues all the same that they have a tendency to dialectically turn into their opposite, thus becoming counterproductive and putting the very existence of art at risk. If Bürger rejects Adorno’s attempts to redeem both the ‘work’ category and the semblance character of art, this begs the question of how any art, avant-gardist or not, is imaginable without them.83 Bürger has a point when he argues Adorno did not appreciate fully the institutional critique of the historical avant-gardes. For Adorno, the autonomy of the institution of art is inseparably connected to the ontological autonomy of the work of art as semblance. In his view, one cannot destroy the first while holding onto the latter; and destroying the latter for him equals the false liquidation of art. One can argue, however, that there are more ways to reflect on semblance than extending the rules of the form as modernism does. To this extent, Adorno indeed failed to comprehend the ‘Duchampian challenge’, which not only questions the concept of art but also the institutional valorisation of the work of art by critics, museums, audiences and the like. 80 Jameson (1992), 11-14, and Frith (1996). 81 Frith (1996), 20. 82 See Bürger (1983a), 31-47. 83 This debate remains topical up until today – for instance, in discussions concerning installation art. Juliane Rebentisch (2012) argues, contrary to many theorists and critics, that an apology for installation art (which evidently falls outside the traditional category of ‘work’) does not necessarily entail a renunciation of aesthetic autonomy. Her argument is both sympathetic to, and critical of, Adorno.

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It is true, finally, that Adorno in his Aesthetic Theory generally displays little sympathy for contemporary developments in art. In several passages he jeers at action painting, happening, serialism, and aleatory music. Developments in the visual arts seem to be mostly beyond his scope: no mention is made, for instance, of either abstract expressionism or pop and fluxus, Picasso and Klee being his primary examples.84 Art in general seems to become increasingly impossible for him, with only few exceptions such as the late modernist Beckett. In this way, however, Adorno threatens to violate his own imperative for any materialist aesthetics, namely that ‘art can be understood only by its laws of movement, not according to any set of invariants. It is defined by its relation to what it is not’ (AT, 3; 7, 12).

2.8 Conclusion According to Bürger, the difference between Benjamin’s and Adorno’s ends of art is analogous to the difference between the avant-garde and modernism.85 While Benjamin criticizes the category of ‘work’ on the basis of an analysis of allegory and pleads for the dissolution of the boundary between art and life, Adorno holds onto traditional aesthetic concepts, attempting to redeem the categories of autonomy and semblance. His concept of a redeemed semblance in the context of modernist art cannot be identified, however, with the concept of a ‘reconstructed’ aura in Benjamin’s work-ofart essay (which the latter relates to fascism). It is rather, as Shierry Weber Nicholsen argues, ‘aura that is one step further in its evolution, aura in the era of the crisis of illusion, [that] now becomes a para- or counter-aura.’86 Furthermore, we have seen that Adorno criticizes as much as Benjamin traditional aesthetic concepts, preferring the fragment over the whole work and the allegory over the artistic symbol.87 Conversely, in his notes for the 84 For an elegant attempt to use some of Adorno’s concepts to intervene in contemporary debates in the visual arts, see Hartle (2015). 85 See Bürger (1983a). 86 Weber Nicholsen (1999), 211. 87 Nonetheless, of course, Adorno always considers the fragment in its dialectical relation to the whole. With regard to allegory and symbol, Adorno obviously does not have a ‘theory’ of allegory in the same sense as Benjamin does. Nevertheless, Britta Scholze argues that Adorno’s critique of semblance can be understood as a critique of the symbol, which would indeed bring him closer to Benjamin’s book on the mourning play: ‘Moderne Kunstwerke sind für Adorno Allegorien, weil sie keine vollwertigen Symbole sein können. Ihr allegorischer Charakter macht das Scheitern des ästhetischen Scheins als Symbol kenntlich und zeigt, daß zumindestens in der Gegenwart zwischen Immanenz und Symbol keine symbolische Beziehung steht’ (Scholze

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book on Baudelaire, Benjamin reflects on the possibility of ‘redeeming’ the aura of the work of art and suggests that ‘it might be necessary to attempt to formulate a concept of aura purged of cultic elements. Perhaps the dissolution of aura is a mere intermediate stage, in which it secretes its cultic elements in order to approach other, as yet unknown ones’ (VII/2, 753). This might be precisely the kind of redemption of semblance Adorno envisions. The important difference between Benjamin and Adorno is, in my view, the way they conceive of the end of art. If one distinguishes two meanings of the end as, in the first place, the inner-aesthetic dissolution of magical semblance, and, in the second place, the extra-aesthetic ubiquity, its dissolving into society, as a consequence of technological reproduction and the culture industry, one can see that, while Benjamin aligns these two ends, Adorno conceives of them as opposing forces. For Benjamin, technological reproduction makes the work of art ‘ordinary’, thus destroying its magical semblance and autonomy from the outside, as much as the Baroque’s and Baudelaire’s allegory did inner-aesthetically, by altering the structure of the work of art. That he not only aligns, but at some moments even confuses or equates these two ends, is clear in the work‑of‑art essay, where distraction and montage refer both to the film on the screen (i.e., the work of art) and to the ubiquity of images (i.e., the distribution of the work of art).88 This is different in Adorno. Modernism responds to and rebels against the commodity character of art in the culture industry. And although modernist art tends towards the same result as the culture industry – namely the ‘ordinariness’ of the work of art as a mere thing among things – the nature of this liquidation is completely different, and, for Adorno, eventually forbids art from ending. As he wrote to his friend, for him modernism and culture industry do not ‘add up’. In noting this difference, we must keep in mind the temporal difference between their approaches. The point of departure, in other words, of their evaluation of technological reproduction is not the same: while Benjamin considers tendencies in mass culture from the perspective of a ‘future state, freed from magic’, Adorno considers culture in its present state, and on (2000), 240). Of course, one should not equate their attitudes towards the artistic symbol, either. While Benjamin contrasts symbol and allegory, Adorno considers their relation dialectically. For him, the allegorical work of art continues to have a symbolic moment, insofar as it symbolizes the emptiness of the symbol (AT, 125; 7, 147). 88 See, for instance, Benjamin’s remark in ‘Central Park’: ‘The dissolution of semblance and the decay of the aura are identical phenomena’ (SW 4, 173; I/2, 670). This important remark also refutes Georg W. Bertram’s claims that ‘the concept of aura is not primarily a concept concerned with the illusion of autonomy’, and that Benjamin is not at all concerned with the notion of the end of art (in Ross (2015), 7-8).

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the basis of the traditional function of art and culture. Benjamin in fact points to this difference when he responds, in a letter of 30 June 1936, to Adorno’s essay on jazz. While this essay, as discussed above, at some points contradicts the work-of-art essay and implicitly criticizes it, Benjamin writes that he is delighted ‘to discover such a profound and spontaneous inner communication between our thoughts’: In general, it seems to me that our respective investigations, like two different headlamps trained upon the same object from opposite directions, have served to reveal the outline and character of contemporary art in a more thoroughly original and much more significant manner than anything hitherto attempted (ABC, 144; ABB, 190).89

The two ‘headlamps’, the two perspectives Benjamin mentions, are his own, anticipatory perspective from a redeemed future, and Adorno’s standpoint from the perspective of an unfulfilled promise of the past. One can also formulate it like this: while Benjamin’s analysis of the end of art has the temporal structure of hope, anticipating a different yet indeterminate world, Adorno’s has the temporal structure of promise, a demand from the past unfulfilled in the present. The former considers mass-reproduced art in terms of a pure potentiality, in terms of what it can possibly mean for a future state, while the latter considers it in terms of the repressed particularity in the present state of the world. This difference also plays a crucial role in Benjamin’s and Adorno’s philosophies of history, which are the subject of the next chapter. For both Benjamin and Adorno, art has a double function. First, it is an expression of historical experience, which, in their case, means the experience of life under the conditions of capitalism and modernity. Second, it is the place where things that do not ‘fit into’ the history of modernity can emerge, things that otherwise remain invisible. It is, in Benjamin’s words, the place where a non-dominant relation between humankind and nature is made possible.90 With regard to the second point, however, one might 89 One might argue, of course, that Benjamin’s compliments are diplomatic, namely directed to an editor of the Institute’s journal and a confidant of Horkheimer, then his only source of income. In my view, however, such a reading, which has sometimes been suggested, does insufficient justice to Benjamin’s intellectual integrity, or to the nature of the intellectual exchange between Benjamin and Adorno. 90 In the letter about the artwork essay, Adorno writes to Benjamin that his ‘emphatic endorsement of the primacy of technology, especially in music, must be understood strictly […] in the sense of your second technology’ (ABC, 128 (where it is wrongly translated as ‘your second piece on technology’); ABB, 168).

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note another difference between them, which again can be characterized as one between hope and promise. For Benjamin, the work of art is a place of experimentation of possible relations between humankind and nature (which, for Benjamin, includes technology), and of potential ways in which technology can alter human experience.91 Potential technologies that are not actualized (for instance, because of relations of production under capitalism) find their place in art. Adorno’s aesthetic theory, however, is concerned with the possibility, or rather the impossibility, of sensuous particularity in a fully rationalized society, which is not the central issue for Benjamin. The work of art, Adorno argues, resists and temporarily suspends identity thinking, thus acting as the plenipotentiary of this sensuous particular, of what otherwise remains unseen and unheard. Sensuous particularity is realized in art, albeit as mere semblance. The work of art therefore can be regarded, in Bernstein’s words, as ‘the return of the sensory repressed.’92 This is also why Adorno deems it necessary to hold onto artistic semblance. As important as these differences between them are, however, it is equally important to realize what they have in common, namely, that neither of them regards the end of art – its disenchantment, its emancipation from magical practices – as a fait accompli, as corresponding to the actual state of things. Uwe Steiner argues that the end of art for Benjamin (and, we can add, for Adorno) is not so much the conclusion of the development of art. Rather, it is what is at stake in every work of art, and – as I will argue in the following chapters – in every work of art criticism.93 This is what distinguishes them from more-recent heralds of the end of art – a point I will discuss in the following excursus.

91 This take on Benjamin’s artwork essay draws on Caygill’s compelling reading of it (1998, Chapter 3). Caygill also argues that, for Benjamin, the city is the other exemplary place where humanity and technology meet. Benjamin’s Arcades Project, therefore, should be read as an archeology of potential but unrealized technologies emerging in nineteenth-century Paris. 92 Bernstein (2004), 145. See also Bernstein (1992), Chapter 4. 93 ‘The liberation of art from myth, as Benjamin sees it, was not a historically singular process limited to antiquity. On the contrary, criticism concerns itself anew in every work of art that it analyzes with the problematic relationship of art and myth. It is only through the entanglement of art with myth in beautiful semblance (Schein) that criticism becomes necessary; and only the irreconcilable tension of both aspects in the work of art makes criticism possible’ (Steiner (2012), 61).



Excursus I – The (N)everending Story Perhaps art has never before been comprehended so profoundly or with so much feeling as it is now, when the magic of death seems to play around it. ‒ Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

Perhaps the last decades of the twentieth century will go down in history as the age of ‘endism’. There was hardly an institution or idea of which the end was not sooner or later proclaimed. Daniel Bell announced the end of ideology in 1960, as Michel Foucault did the end of man as well as politics in 1966. Roland Barthes wrote his essay on the death of the author in 1967, while Jean-François Lyotard proclaimed the end of ‘grand narratives’ in 1979, the same year in which Richard Rorty argued that philosophy had ended. Some years later, in 1989, Francis Fukuyama published an essay entitled ‘The End of History’. Art, of course, could not lag behind. In the early eighties, the end of art seemed to be somehow ‘in the air’, as three authors published about it independently of each other: the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo in ‘The Death and Decline of Art’ (1980), the German art historian Hans Belting in The End of Art History (1983), and the American philosopher and art critic Arthur C. Danto in ‘The End of Art’ (1984). To be sure, the idea of an end of art was by no means a novelty at the end of the twentieth century, and neither was the end of philosophy or history for that matter. Each of the authors writing about the end of art refers back to Hegel, who is often argued to have already predicted the end of art in the Lectures on Aesthetics he gave between 1817 and 1829. However, although the literature often speaks of Hegel’s ‘end of art thesis’, the exact phrase is nowhere to be found in his work. The end of art is therefore, as Eva Geulen calls it, a ‘rumour’, which nevertheless turned out to have a significant impact, that has left its traces in the work of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Benjamin and Adorno, and in the writings of philosophers and critics up until this day.1 How should we understand the renaissance of the rumour of the end of art in the last decades of the twentieth century? How do these authors 1 Geulen (2006), 1. Apart from the above- mentioned authors, some examples of literature from the past two decades concerning the end of art, or variants thereof, are Jameson (1998), Garcia Düttmann (2000), Shusterman (2000), Doorman (2003), Foster (2003), 123-144, and Kuspit (2004). 2. Apart from these theorists, several artists, such as Joseph Kosuth and Hervé Fischer, have also proclaimed the end of art.

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understand the end of art? To answer these questions, I will first turn to the source of the rumour, namely Hegel’s aesthetics, and the question of what Hegel meant by the ‘end of art’. Next, I will discuss the end of art in the work of what I take to be the most interesting contributors to the debate at the end of the twentieth century, namely Danto and Vattimo. I believe, however, that their theories are inadequate and unsatisfactory for two reasons. First, they both highlight just one of the two dimensions of the end of art discussed in the preceding chapter. Second, by regarding the end of art as an accomplished fact, these authors neglect the enduring need for art and jeopardize any potential critical programme of art.

Hegel and the beginning of the end According to Hegel, the history and development of art do not stand on their own, but have to be considered in the context of the history and development of what he calls ‘spirit’ (Geist), which is the principle of rationality realizing itself in history. In Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) he argues that spirit externalizes itself in nature, only to return to itself (i.e., reflect on itself) in the shape of human subjectivity. This return is not a coming full circle, but rather, as in a Bildungsroman, a process of becoming self-conscious through a confrontation with the outside world. The highest stage in the development of spirit is what Hegel calls ‘absolute spirit’, marked by the moment in which humanity becomes conscious of its own place within the history of spirit. One could understand Hegel’s term ‘absolute spirit’ as a synonym for culture, consisting of art, religion and philosophy. In other words, art for him is a stage in the self-consciousness of spirit and ‘one of the ways to […] bring to consciousness and expression the deepest interests of humanity and the all-embracing truths of the spirit.’2 He defines artistic beauty, consequently, as ‘the sensuous semblance of the idea [das sinnliche Scheinen der Idee].’3 This definition needs some explanation, for each of its three parts is of importance. First, Hegel points to the sensuousness of the idea in art, suggesting that the idea can be expressed in alternative, non-sensuous ways, namely in religion and philosophy. Second, artistic beauty is defined as a form of semblance. Contrary to Plato, however, Hegel understands semblance not negatively, as mere illusion, but positively, as an appearance. In other words, 2 3

Hegel (1970), I, 21. Ibidem, I, 151.

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the idea appears – becomes present – in artistic beauty.4 Finally, what appears in art is the idea, referring, in Hegel’s philosophy, to the unity of concept and reality or the reconciliation of spirit and matter. Consequently, Hegel rejects mimetic theories of art that claims that art represents other objects, or the beauty of nature. Together with Schelling, he is among the first to place artistic beauty above natural beauty, since only in art does spirit meet its equal: ‘Art [is] nearer to spirit and its thought than mere external spiritless nature; in art products, it [i.e., spirit, TL] only deals with its own.’5 Artistic beauty, in other words, is the sensuous appearance of the principle on which history is grounded – rationality realizing itself in the world – and hence the most perfect art is that in which form and content, and matter and spirit, are in harmony. As spirit develops throughout history, different expressions of the idea are to be found in different stages of development. Contrary to Kant, who defines beauty as that ‘which pleases universally without a concept’, Hegel’s understanding of art is emphatically historical. Because every culture reflects upon itself in a different way, every cultural and historical epoch has its unique expression in art. Art, in other words, is a succession of Weltanschauungen, of worldviews. Hegel distinguishes three main stages in the history of art, namely the symbolic (Egyptian, ‘Oriental’), the classical (Greek, Roman), and the romantic (Christian) stage, based on the way in which spirit and matter relate.6 These stages, he says in summary, correspond to the ‘pursuit, the achievement, and the exceeding of the ideal as the true idea of beauty.’7 In the symbolic stage, the expression of the idea is inadequate, because material form dominates spiritual content. The abstract mathematical shape of the pyramids, Hegel argues, as well as their sheer size, gives inadequate expression to the idea they are to convey: the immortality of the human soul. Contrastingly, Greek sculpture exemplifies the perfect harmony of form (the human figure) and content (human self-consciousness), expressing the reconciliation of matter and spirit. According to Hegel, this second, classical stage constitutes the climax of art’s possibilities: ‘Nothing can be or become more beautiful.’8 4 ‘Far from being mere illusion [bloßer Schein], the apparition [Erscheinung] of art is to be attributed, in comparison to common reality, the higher reality and the more truthful being’ (Hegel (1970), I, 22). 5 Hegel (1970), I, 27. 6 Hegel’s notion of the ‘romantic stage’ might lead to confusion. In this case, he does not refer to the romantic period we have come to associate with Schiller, Novalis and the Schlegel brothers, but to what he sometimes calls ‘Christian’ art, that is, all art after the ancients. 7 Hegel (1970), I, 114. 8 Ibidem, II, 128.

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Thus the third stage of romantic art has to be a mere ‘epilogue’. The harmony between matter and spirit, pursued by symbolic art and achieved by the classics, is again broken by romantic art. But while the inadequacy of the symbolic stage came about because matter dominates spirit, the romantic stage is characterized by spirit’s dominating matter. In romantic art, spirit turns away from matter and towards itself. We can understand this movement by looking at the different art forms that were dominant in the subsequent stages. The art form that exemplifies the symbolic stage is architecture, which, according to Hegel, may be governed by certain rational laws but is inadequate for expressing the idea of rationality. Sculpture, the canonical form of classical art, expresses human individuality and rationality in an immediate and transparent way. The romantic art forms, f inally, are painting, music, and poetry. Hegel argues that these forms withdraw from the sensuous domain. In painting, although it is a visual art like sculpture, the visual itself is what is at stake, which makes it more ‘spiritual’ than sculpture. Unlike sculpture, painting merely suggests the three dimensions of space. Furthermore, the typically romantic subject matter is not the human form but the landscape, which Hegel interprets not as attention returning to nature but as an expression of spirit’s self-recognition in nature. Music is an even more suitable expression of human spirit that, although still sensuous, is without a material bearer. Poetry, finally, connects the sensuous experience of the tone in music to the word (the concept), thus marking the moment art transcends itself.9 As noted earlier, absolute spirit consists of three stages, namely art, religion and philosophy. Each of these is an expression of the idea, but in a different way: art through the senses (sinnlich), religion through representation, and philosophy through concepts. In poetry, the exemplary form of romantic art, the idea is expressed in concepts, and this brings it much closer, as Hegel sees it, to philosophy than to traditional art. And thus we come to what is usually referred to as his ‘thesis’ of the end of art. According to Hegel, the romantic stage of art is, as art, inferior to the classical stage, because it lacks the harmony of material form and spiritual content of classical sculpture. This does not mean, however, that romantic art is inferior per se: in romantic art, spirit turns towards itself and becomes less and less dependent on the senses. According to Hegel, romantic art marks the point at which art has completed its historical task and is succeeded and surpassed by philosophy. 9

Hegel (1970), I, 123.

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Although Hegel nowhere uses the exact phrase ‘the end of art’, he does state that art is ‘with regard to its highest intentions for us a thing of the past.’10 Repeatedly he stresses that in our times we no longer worship art. We might still enjoy it and decorate our lives with it, but it cannot (and should not) have the same meaning to us as it still had for our ancestors: One might hope that art will still continue to raise and complete itself, but its form has ceased to be the highest necessity of spirit. As excellent as we might find the Greek statues of the gods, as stately and perfect we might judge the presentations of God, Christ and Mary – it does not matter, we no longer kneel before them.11

Here one can recognize the ambivalence of Hegel’s posture towards the end of art. On the one hand, he seems to mourn the loss of the unity of material form and spiritual content (characteristic of Greek sculpture), as well as our dwindling admiration for it. The time in which we could express our highest spiritual vocation in the sensuous form of art is irretrievably lost. On the other hand, however, he regards romantic art as a step forward in the ascent of spirit, as a prelude to the higher stages of absolute spirit, namely religion and philosophy. Once art starts, in the form of poetry, to make use of concepts, it ceases to be art in the strict sense and is transfigured into philosophy. The decrease in beauty is compensated for by an increase in freedom. The end of art, in other words, is, for Hegel, also humanity’s emancipation from art’s magic. The disenchantment of art is an integral part of the general disenchantment of the world, the death of God, and the primacy of human consciousness. Consequently, the view of Hegel as the ‘prophet’ of the end of art is incorrect. Hegel’s aesthetics is rather an obituary for art than a prophecy or a prediction of what is going to happen to it. The end of art, he argues, is already behind us, marked by the transition from the classical to the romantic stage. Obviously, this does not mean that he thinks there have not been works of art since the classical stage, or that works of art will not continue to be produced. When Hegel argues that art is ‘a thing of the past’ he means that it is no longer adequate to fulfil a certain function, namely, to contribute to the self-consciousness of spirit. On a purely descriptive level, it is hard to disagree with Hegel. Art, and, more generally, the ‘sensuous’, has indeed decreased in importance since 10 Hegel (1970), I, 25. 11 Ibidem, I, 142.

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the dawn of modernity. As Bernstein writes: ‘what has been excised from the everyday is the orientational significance of sensory encounter, sensory experience as constitutive of conviction and connection to the world of things.’12 Disenchantment of nature entails, among other things, that we no longer derive meaning from the sensuously given. The enlightenment concept of experience values the sensory only to the extent in which it can be subsumed under rational concepts, thus functioning as the source of scientific knowledge. Immediate bodily and sensory experience is categorically downgraded throughout the history of modern thought, from the epistemologies of Descartes and Kant up until our day.13 However, the disenchantment of nature and the rationalization of the world did not have quite the consequences that Hegel, in his optimistic view of history, envisioned and desired. As theorists in the wake of Hegel – most notably Marx, Weber, and Lukács – argued, the means of enlightenment are raised to the level of ends, eventually turning against enlightenment itself. Instead of providing humankind with freedom, equality, and happiness, disenchantment and rationalization result in alienation and a reified view of nature and other people. They turn society, in Weber’s famous words, into an ‘iron cage’. Precisely for this reason, art could not be superseded by philosophy: its historical task was not quite over. Instead, art and aesthetics, as the plenipotentiaries of sensory experience, became one of the most prominent topics of post-Hegelian philosophy, most notably in the early twentieth century when enlightenment’s promises seemed to have been definitively betrayed. Furthermore, as Fredric Jameson argues, ‘a new and different kind of art suddenly appeared to take philosophy’s place after the end of the old one, and to usurp all of philosophy’s claims to the Absolute […]. This was the art we call modernism.’14 The Hegelian end of art should be understood as the end of beautiful art: with regard to beauty, Hegel argues, art will not get any better than Greek sculpture. What he could not foresee, however, was the emergence of another art, modernism, as a consequence of philosophy’s failure to realize itself. The aesthetic of modernism, as Jameson argues in line with philosophers such as Lyotard and Lacoue-Labarthe, is an aesthetic not of the beautiful but of the sublime.15 Like philosophy according to Hegel, 12 Bernstein (2006), 3. 13 See also Bernstein (2001), Chapter 2; Jay (1993) and (2005). Benjamin’s and Adorno’s concepts of experience will be discussed in Chapter 3. 14 Jameson (1998), 83. 15 Lyotard (1991) and Lacoue-Labarthe (1993).

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modern art gestures towards the absolute. However, as Lyotard argues with Kant, the absolute is by definition unrepresentable, since representation always implies relativizing and contextualizing. One can, nevertheless, represent that there is an absolute by presenting the fact that there is something unrepresentable. One can ‘evoke’ the absolute by means of what Lyotard calls ‘negative presentation’, and which he describes as ‘the sign of the presence of the absolute, [which] is or can only make a sign of being absent from the forms of the presentable.’16 In other words, that which cannot be presented, the absolute, can nevertheless become a presence in its absence, because of the very failure of presentation. According to Lyotard, this negative presentation is the only way we can become aware of the absolute. This is not the place for an extensive discussion of the aesthetics of the sublime, for we are concerned here with the end of art. The emergence of modernist art after Hegel’s end of art, however, can give us a hint of why the ‘end of art’ thesis reappears in debates on aesthetics during the second half of the twentieth century. For the recent ‘end of art’ debates concern, not the Hegelian end of beautiful art, but an alleged end of modernism, or, as Jameson puts it, ‘the end of the Sublime, the dissolution of art’s vocation to reach the Absolute.’17 In other words, the dawn of postmodern art, and, more importantly, of a postmodern culture, forces us once more to reflect on the history of art, and to rethink the function of art in society. This, then, is what is at stake in the debates concerning the end of art.

Danto’s post-historical pluralism The developments in art in the course of the twentieth century have often been put forward as counter-evidence to Hegel’s ‘end of art’ thesis. Art, so it seemed, had not ended at all, but was, on the contrary, more vital 16 Lyotard (1994), 152. In the essay ‘Newman. The Instant’ Lyotard argues that the work of Barnett Newman is exemplary of this negative presentation of the absolute: ‘The message is the presentation, but it presents nothing; it is, that is, presence’ (Lyotard (1991), 81). Only by presenting nothing, he argues, can painting fully turn the attention to what matters most, namely the nature of presentation, the act of presenting, the act – that is, of painting. The loss of meaning first allows us to experience the true wonder, namely that presentation is possible. And only through this experience can we realize that which is not presentable – the absolute. The only thing Newman’s pictures express, therefore, or what they bear witness to, is that there are things that cannot be expressed. 17 Jameson (1998), 84.

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and dynamic than ever before. Especially in the visual arts, new styles, schools, and -isms shot up like mushrooms, succeeding each other with ever-increasing speed. According to Arthur C. Danto, however, this diversity of -isms is not actually an argument against Hegel, but rather a sign of directionlessness that confirms Hegel’s thesis. Being an analytic philosopher, Danto is first and foremost concerned with the question of what a work of art is, and how it differs from ‘mere real objects’.18 This question gains urgency when we are confronted with contemporary art. Danto was first prompted, he tells us, to think about this question during a visit to the 1964 exhibition of the work of pop-artist Andy Warhol in the New York Stable Gallery, when he was confronted with Warhol’s Brillo Box. In his essay ‘The Artworld’ (1964), Danto asks why this object is a work of art, while ordinary Brillo cartons in the supermarket, visually indistinguishable from it, are not. Neither the material of Warhol’s Brillo Box, nor the fact that it was handcrafted is a sufficient reason, he argues, for making this distinction. If Warhol had made his box out of carton instead of plywood, it would probably still be considered a work of art. Neither can the difference consist in craft, for sheer labour does not turn a thing into a work of art. According to Danto, there are no material or visual qualities whatsoever that distinguish the work of art from the mere real object. Consequently, he argues, the difference has to be found elsewhere: ‘To see something as art requires something the eye cannot decry – an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld.’19 Danto’s point is not primarily that the distinction between art and nonart is socially constructed, although the concept of ‘artworld’ was adapted to this meaning by George Dickie in his ‘institutional theory of art’. According to Dickie, an object is a work of art if it is regarded as such by a certain influential group of experts – museum directors, curators, critics, fellow artists. But Danto’s point, as he presents it in his The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (1981), is rather that the work of art actually has a set of qualities quite different from those of the mere object, even if these qualities are neither material nor visual. Duchamp’s Fountain, for instance, is ‘daring, impudent, irreverent, witty, and clever’, qualities an ordinary urinal lacks.20 Furthermore, countering Dickie’s institutional theory, Danto reminds us of Socrates’ argument against the moral authority of the gods in Eutyphro.21 18 19 20 21

We should be mindful that Danto writes primarily about visual art. Danto (1964), 580. Danto (1981), 93-94. Ibidem, 200. See also Danto (1992), 39.

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One can ask whether an object is a work of art because the experts like it, or the experts like the object because it is a work of art. If it is the former, they are authorities only on what they like, which we all are when it comes to what we each like. If it is the latter, there must be a different reason why the thing is a work of art. Either way, Danto argues, appealing to the views of a group of experts is not in itself enough to make an object a work of art. The concept of the ‘artworld’ as Danto understands it, refers not to a group of experts but to a discourse consisting of aesthetic theories, interpretations, and art history. Qualities distinguishing artworks from mere objects, therefore, are neither material, nor visual, nor institutional, but ontological. Danto argues that ‘learning [that something] is a work of art means that it has qualities to attend to which its untransfigured counterpart lacks, and that our aesthetic responses will be different. And this is not institutional, it is ontological. We are dealing with an altogether different order of things.’22 Being a work of art means, he argues, to be interpreted: a work of art is ‘embodied meaning.’23 Nothing is a work of art without being identified as such, and there is an internal relationship between the status of a work of art and the language with which it is identified. This does not mean that every representation, or any meaningful object, is a work of art: a diagram or a map is not necessarily a work of art (although, according to Danto, it could be). The work of art is an extraordinary representation, in that it both represents and at the same time represents the way in which it represents. Or, as Danto puts it, works of art ‘use the means of representation in a way that is not exhaustively specified when one has exhaustively specified what is being represented.’24 Since, according to Danto, the difference between art and non-art is connected to theory and history and is inseparable from the interpretation of the work of art, not every object could become a work of art in every stage of history. Malevich’s Black Square, for instance, could become a work of art in 1915, because of a complex constellation of ideas that existed at the time on representation and abstraction. A hundred years earlier, however, it might have been taken for a sign, or for the background for what was to become a work of art, but certainly not for a work of art itself. Danto agrees with the art historian Heinrich Wölfflin, who wrote that ‘not everything is possible at any time’, and he adds that ‘certain artworks simply could not be inserted as artworks into certain periods of art history, though it is 22 Danto (1981), 99. 23 Danto (1992), 41. See also Danto (1997), 195. 24 Danto (1981), 148.

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possible that objects identical to artworks could have been made at that period.’25 The dependence on history of what can count as art is at the centre of Danto’s reflections on the end of art. In ‘The End of Art’, Danto discusses three models for the concept of art and its relation to art history. The first, dominant up until approximately 1900, is the representational model according to which works of art function as representations of objects in the world. This is the paradigm of what art historian Ernst Gombrich calls ‘making and matching’: the quality of the work of art is measured by the extent to which it resembles the really existing object. One of the advantages of this model was the fact that it allowed thinking in terms of representational progress in the history of art. Had Giotto lived to witness Dutch realism, for instance, he would probably have acknowledged its superiority in representing objects. This history reaches its climax, however, once photography and film are invented and qualitatively outdo painting and sculpture in naturalistic representation. At the end of the nineteenth and the dawn of the twentieth century, artists start producing works that can no longer be judged in terms of representation. The green stripe on the nose of Madam Matisse, for instance, has no equivalent in the objective world of things. New theories had to be developed to talk about the new art, and one of the most successful was Benedetto Croce’s theory of expression. According to expression theory, a work of art is not primarily a representation of an object in the world, but rather an expression of the artist’s feelings (and not necessarily their feelings towards the object or the person depicted). This theory has several advantages over representation theory: first, it provides a more adequate framing for new artworks that cannot be evaluated in terms of representation, and second, it provides a framework not only for the visual arts (as representation theory did) but also for other art forms such as music and literature. The theory of expression, however, brings with it several problems of its own. As Danto argues, it cannot account for the historical developments in twentieth-century art, most notably for the way in which schools and -isms reacted to each other. In Croce’s model, art cannot have a historical development, since artworks concern only the individual feelings of individual artists. Thinking about art history in terms of development, let alone progress, is impossible within the framework of expression theory. Moreover, Danto argues, twentieth-century art displays an increasing 25 Danto (1981), 44.

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dependence on theories, while the importance of the actual physical object of art tends to diminish. What we need, in Danto’s view, is a model that allows us to think in terms of the development of the history of art, as representation theory does, but that also includes non-representational art (abstract visual art, music, and literature), as expression theory does. According to Danto, Hegel’s theory of art, which conceives of art history in terms of cognitive progress, provides such a model. Hegel regards the history of art as a process of increasing self-consciousness that culminates in the moment that art becomes its own philosophy. Following the American art critic Clement Greenberg, Danto argues that modernist painting is about painting itself: it questions the medium of painting.26 Similarly, every work of art can be regarded as a step in the process of answering the question of what art is. However, Danto continues, if we view art history as a process of cognitive progress, and if we regard a work of art as answering the question of what art is, then we must conclude that this history is over and done with. Once artists reach the conclusion that anything can become a work of art, and that, consequently, there are no material or visual qualities distinguishing the work of art from the real thing, the question of art is answered. According to Danto, therefore, Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box marks the end of art in the Hegelian sense.27 Brillo Box constitutes, in other words, the moment at which art becomes self-consciousness and hence marks the conclusion of art’s historical quest for the knowledge of its own essence. Obviously, works of art will still be produced after the end of art. According to Danto, however, this art is of a different nature than ‘historical’ art. Artists living in what he calls the ‘post-historical’ period of art ‘will bring into existence works which lack the historical importance or meaning we have for a very long time come to expect. The historical stage of art is done with when it is known what art means.’28 After the end of art, in other words, any style, school, or -ism is as important as the next one. Paraphrasing Marx, Danto argues that, from now on 26 For the pervasiveness of the notion of medium-specificity in the wake of Greenberg, see Rebentisch (2012), 79ff. 27 Danto is unclear about whether Duchamp’s ready-mades already mark the end of art. In some essays, such as ‘The End of Art’, he considers Duchamp in the same way as Warhol, while in others, such as ‘The Philosopher as Andy Warhol’, he distinguishes between their projects. Then again, it might just be an example of philosophical nationalism. See Danto (1986), 81-115, and (1999), 61-83. 28 Danto (1986), 111.

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you can be an abstractionist in the morning, a photorealist in the afternoon, a minimal minimalist in the evening. Or you can cut out paper dolls or do what you damned please. The age of pluralism is upon us. It does not matter any longer what you do, which is what pluralism means.29

Both Danto’s so-called indiscernibility thesis (the idea that we can no longer visually distinguish a work of art from a real thing) and his ‘end of art’ thesis have been the source of much debate.30 Some theorists argue that while Danto claims to be speaking about all art forms, his arguments actually apply only to the visual arts. Although there are examples of indiscernibility in music (such as Cage’s 4’33”) and in literature (new journalism), in most cases it is perfectly clear on the basis of the material product which objects are works of art and which are not. A second strand of criticism argues that, even with regard to the visual arts, Danto’s story of cognitive progress is limited, and still too much caught up in Greenberg’s paradigm of medium-exploration. These critics argue that, in several forms of contemporary visual art (such as performance art, land art and conceptual art), it is not even immediately clear what the material bearer of the work of art is, exactly – the product, the production process, or the documentation? Contemporary art, therefore, has not become ‘theoretical’, as Danto argues, but relates differently to perception than traditional visual art does.31 Finally, some critics argue that Danto underestimates the importance of the sensuous and hence of the aesthetic experience by limiting the discourse of art to semantics and conceptual interpretation, in other words to cognitive functions. Furthermore, they argue, his distinction between ‘pure’ perception and interpretation is far too rigid.32 Although all these points are interesting, I want to focus on a different problem in Danto’s theory, one that has received less attention in the literature. This problem concerns Danto’s adoption of Hegel’s theory of art. According to Danto’s reading of Hegel, art reaches its climax and ends at the moment it becomes completely self-conscious – that is, when the work of art raises and eventually answers the question of the definition of art. Danto summarizes Hegel’s philosophy of art in the following way: ‘The historical importance of art then lies in the fact that it makes philosophy of art possible and important.’33 However, as I have argued in 29 30 31 32 33

Danto (1986), 114. Some of these have been collected in Rollins (ed., 1993). See Veldeman (2010). See Schusterman (2000). Danto (1986), 111.

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the first section, this is not exactly what Hegel says. According to Hegel, art, like religion and philosophy, is a stage in the development of the selfconsciousness not of art but of humankind. For Hegel, art ends not because art itself becomes self-conscious, but because the self-consciousness of humankind reaches a stage in which it is no longer satisfied by art, and it turns its attention to, and expresses its highest insights within, philosophy instead. My point is not that Danto should not use Hegel for his theory – as far as I am concerned, everyone can do with Hegel whatever they please. Rather, I would point up the implications of Danto’s reading. For Hegel, art is an integral part of the historical development of spirit, and hence the expression of a certain world view. Just as philosophy is, according to Hegel’s definition, ‘its own time raised to the level of thoughts’, art is its own time raised to the level of images, tones, words, and so on. Consequently, art allows us to see how a society looks upon itself. This socio-cultural dimension is completely neglected by Danto, who views the history of art as being about nothing but art. All art is conceptual in his story of art history. Moreover, all works of art entail the same concept, namely the concept of art. But if this is the case, the following question forcibly raises itself: what is so important about the concept of art that would make us interested in art in the first place? Or, as Karol Berger more sharply formulates it: ‘Why should this sort of narcissistic navel-gazing be of interest to anyone other than those concerned with the ontology of artworks?’34 This question becomes all the more pressing once art’s historical quest is over, as Danto claims it is. He writes that ‘whatever comes next will not matter because the concept of art is internally exhausted.’35 Consequently however, he is unable to (and does not seem to want to) answer the question: Why art? He seems to deny that there might be a lasting need and necessity for art in society. This denial of need, however, contradicts his idea of the work of art as ‘embodied meaning’, as Jay Bernstein points out: ‘The philosophical transparency of the definition of art appears to stand in direct opposition to what that definition specifies, namely, that art addresses some absence that cannot be made present, and hence cannot be represented.’36 Bernstein’s point is, in other words, that if we consider the history and development of art in purely conceptual and philosophical terms, we miss out on what culturally motivates this development, namely 34 Berger (2002), 89. 35 Danto (1986), 84. 36 Bernstein (2006), 232.

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the disenchantment of nature, and consequently the need for art to express what is repressed in the world outside art. Danto does seem, sporadically, to grant cultural and political meaning to artworks after the end of art. In the conclusion of The Transfiguration of the Commonplace he argues that Brillo Box does what works of art have always done, by ‘externalizing a way of viewing the world, expressing the interior of a cultural period, offering itself as a mirror to catch the conscience of our kings.’37 The mirror of art, as he has earlier explained, is not Plato’s mirror, simply duplicating the world of objects, but rather the mirror of Hamlet’s play performed for King Claudius, confronting the latter with his crimes. This remark would imply that Danto does ascribe a critical function to works of art. Likewise, in After the End of Art he exclaims: ‘How wonderful it would be to believe that the pluralistic art world of the historical present is a harbinger of political things to come!’38 Relating artistic to political pluralism, Danto resembles that other author concerned with the end of art, Gianni Vattimo.

Vattimo’s weak reality Vattimo thinks of the end of art in the context of the end of modernity, metaphysics, and humanism. He understands modernity as the epoch in which progress – scientific, technological, and social – becomes a value, or rather, ‘becomes the value to which all other values refer.’39 Modernity, in other words, is the philosophical as well as the cultural idea of history as a unity, developing towards a certain goal. The concept of progress, Vattimo argues, is increasingly secularized, transforming itself from Christian eschatology into enlightenment’s idea of ‘perpetual peace’, and from scientific progress finally into consumer society’s need to produce ever ‘new’ commodities in order to survive: progress for the sake of progress. Vattimo regards Nietzsche and Heidegger as the first critics of the idea of modernity, the first to detect flaws in the European metaphysical tradition of foundationalism and progress. They refuse, however, to conceive of themselves as critically ‘overcoming’ modernity, or as adopting a position beyond it, for according to them, ‘overcoming’ and ‘beyond’ are part of the modern discourse of progress. Their answer, instead, is nihilism, which 37 Danto (1986), 208. 38 Danto (1992), 37. 39 Vattimo (1988), 99.

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in Vattimo’s view entails accepting that there is no final basis for one’s beliefs, but only the multitude of contrasting and conflicting interpretations and perspectives. These conflicts cannot be reconciled or aufgehoben in Hegelian fashion. To characterize Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s relation to modernity, Vattimo points to the latter’s notion of Verwindung, meaning ‘an overcoming which is in reality a recognition of belonging, a healing of an illness, and an assumption of responsibility.’40 Inspired by Nietzsche and Heidegger, Vattimo def ines postmodernity as the Verwindung of modernity: not a position beyond modernity but the awareness that we are resigned to modernity. This insight, however, also provides the possibility of a ‘deepening’ of our experience of modernity, namely as the acceptance of the death of God without the nostalgic hope for reconciliation. This nostalgia, as well as the critique of ‘alienation’, was still central to Western humanistic Marxism, in the work of Lukács, Bloch, and the Frankfurt School. According to Vattimo, however, the experience of modernity that these thinkers def ined and criticized as ‘alienation’ is itself our best hope for a Verwindung of modernity: it is not what we must overcome in a reconciliatory utopia, but what we must accept as the symptom of the ‘weakening’ of our sense of reality and identity. 41 In his view, postmodern ‘weak thought’ is our best chance against the totalitarian threat that always lurks within the modern discourse of progress. In The Transparent Society (1992) Vattimo argues that one of the driving forces of the weakening of reality is the mass media. Marxist critics, and most notably Adorno, have pointed to the homogenizing effects of mass media, and predicted their eventual culmination in a totalitarian, fully administered, and ‘transparent’ society. In Vattimo’s view, however, mass media have not made our society increasingly transparent, but rather increasingly complex and chaotic: ‘What actually happened, in spite of the efforts of the monopolies and major centres of capital, was that radio, television and newspaper became elements in a general explosion and proliferation […] of world views.’42 The mass media, he argues, have become a caricature of the Hegelian absolute spirit: instead of reaching full selfconsciousness, humanity has reached the point at which self-consciousness as an ideal is abandoned and replaced by the sober acceptance that ‘the television always lies’. Similarly, the Marxist ideal of a world emancipated 40 Vattimo (1988), 40. 41 Ibidem, 28. 42 Vattimo (1992), 5.

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from ideology should be replaced by a notion of emancipation not based on transparency, but on ‘oscillation, plurality and, ultimately, on the erosion of the very “principle of reality”.’43 In Vattimo’s view, the plurality of the mass media affirms the postmodern as a world of infinite interpretability. According to Vattimo, the ubiquity of the mass media has resulted in the end of art. In The End of Modernity he identifies three different ends of art. In the first place, the end of art of the strong utopian historical avant-gardes, who envisioned the destruction of art as an isolated institution in society and the reintegration of the aesthetic experience in everyday life. For the avant-gardists, art functions as a model for a new society, one that would make the existence of art obsolete. The second end of art is its ‘suicide’ in high modernism, that which gestures towards silence in the face of the omnipotence of kitsch and mass culture. Late-modernist artists refuse to provide pleasure and, in Vattimo’s view, eventually even refrain from communication tout court. The third version of the end of art is what Vattimo calls the ‘weak’ and ‘real’ end of art, which is a consequence of the omnipresence of the mass media. These, he argues, contest traditional art’s exclusive right to aestheticization and bring about an ‘explosion of aesthetics.’44 As ‘the aesthetic’ is everywhere today, art has been dissolved in the complex fabric of images, words and sounds that make up our everyday lives. Like Danto, Vattimo regards this end of art as an accomplished fact: ‘The death of art is not only what will result from the revolutionary reintegration of existence; it is that we are already living in a mass culture, for such a culture produces a generalized aestheticization of life.’45 Vattimo’s postmodernism, of course, does not allow him to speak of the end of art in the sense of an ‘overcoming’ of art. The end of art is rather the Verwindung of art, that is, the acceptance of its perpetual decline. He regards contemporary works of art as involved in an interplay of the three above-mentioned ends of art: These products are the place in which – in a complex system of relations – the three different aspects of the death of art (as utopia, as Kitsch, and as silence) are brought into play and come into contact with each other. The philosophical description of this situation could f inally become complete through the recognition that the key element in the persistent 43 Vattimo (1992), 7. 44 Vattimo (1988), 54. 45 Ibidem, 55.

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life of art and in its products […] is precisely this interplay of the various aspects of its own death. 46

The question of how such diverse and conflicting ends of art could be gathered in a single work has to be left aside for now. Rather, I want to ask, with regard to Vattimo, the same question we asked above, regarding Danto: Is there still a need for art after the death of art? In contrast to Danto, Vattimo answers in the affirmative, formulating two answers to this question: first, in terms of the aesthetic experience as ‘oscillation’, and second, in those of art as a model for a pluralistic society. In The Transparent Society, Vattimo argues that within a postmodern world the aesthetic experience is no longer the locus of harmony, consolation, security and Geborgenheit, but rather the cause of oscillation. The aesthetic experience is an ‘experience of estrangement’, but one that rather than asking us to return to ourselves, demands that we endure this estrangement and consequently redefine ourselves. 47 Vattimo refers both to Benjamin’s concept of shock, from the work-of-art essay, and to Heidegger’s concept of Stoss, from The Origin of the Work of Art, in pointing up an experience typical of human life in an advanced technological society. In the contemporary mass-mediated world, he argues, our senses are continually stimulated, making our experience superficial and estranged. According to Vattimo, this should be positively evaluated: what we tend to see as a regression – superficial, shallow experience, or the ‘society of the spectacle’ as the International Situationists called it – contributes to a ‘weakening’ of our thought. Contemporary works of art, he argues, similarly estrange us by refusing to provide eternal beauty and authentic experience: ‘Art is constituted as much by the experience of ambiguity as it is by oscillation and disorientation. In the world of generalized communication, these are the only ways that art can […] take the form of creativity and freedom.’48 For his second point that art is the model for a pluralistic society, Vattimo draws on Kant and Heidegger. Kant argues in the second moment of the Analytic of the Beautiful from Critique of Judgment that a judgment of beauty makes a claim to universal assent: since our judgment is devoid of all interest, we presume that it is shared by all. After all, every human being is endowed with the same mental faculties. Consequently, aesthetic experiences and judgments appeal to a sensus communis and refer to the 46 Vattimo (1988), 59. 47 Vattimo (1992), 51. 48 Ibidem, 60.

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subject as belonging to a community, which for Kant means humanity as a whole. Likewise, Heidegger in The Origin of the Work of Art argues that the work of art is an exhibition of a world (Welt), which Vattimo understands as ‘the place where a sense of membership in a group is made recognizable and is intensified.’49 The difference between Kant and Heidegger on this score, then, is that, according to the former, the aesthetic experience refers to membership of the universal community of humankind, while according to the latter it refers to one specific community among many. A characteristic of the postmodern aesthetic experience, Vattimo argues, is that it expresses a plurality of possible ‘worlds’. A mass medium, in other words, is not a medium of the mass, but the medium constituting the mass – or rather, in Vattimo’s view, a variety of different masses. The experience of one’s membership in one of those worlds immediately implies, in his view, the experience of, and an opening up to, other worlds. Hence the aesthetic experience provides us with a sense of contingency and pluralism. Kant’s ideal of the beautiful as the experience of one’s membership in the community of humankind is, according to Vattimo, realized at the moment when this sense of belonging can no longer be universalized. Therefore, he writes, ‘aesthetic utopia comes about only through its articulation as heterotopia.’50 Vattimo’s reflections on the function of art in contemporary society raise several questions. We should note beforehand that his focal point is not the work of art, but rather the aesthetic experience. Consequently, however, it is not entirely clear whether we still need works of art for the kind of experiences he is talking about. Mass media, he argues, also provide us with a sense of estrangement, oscillation, and a ‘weakened’ sense of reality. Why then, do we still need works of art? In the essay ‘The Museum and the Postmodern Experience of Art’ (1992) Vattimo explicitly deals with the question of whether there is still a function for a work of art when postmodern aesthetic experience is present in the everyday experiences of spectacles in show business, pop music and advertising.51 He argues, however, that ‘“the death of art” is [not] a threatening possibility. We are confronted with the fact that, despite the pluralization of codes and styles, the aesthetic nature of the products of mass media is 49 Vattimo (1988), 62. 50 Vattimo (1992), 69. 51 This essay was published in La revista di estetica (nr. 37, 1992, 3-11). It is included in the Dutch translation of La società transparente, entitled De transparante samenleving (1998), but to my knowledge there is no English translation available.

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still rather “classical”.’52 By this he means that, generally speaking, products of mass media are dominated by the classicist ideal of perfection, which is exactly what makes them kitsch. Works of art, by contrast, have abandoned this aesthetic long ago; they do not long for perfection and refuse to provide pleasure. Consequently, they are more diverse than the products of the mass media and hence have the potential to bring pluralism to its extreme: ‘They investigate, perhaps because they do not have to present themselves as commodities, the consequences of the diffusion of reality in interpretations.’53 The postmodern aesthetic experience, Vattimo concludes, has its locus in the museum of contemporary art, where one is confronted with a multitude of possible worlds. One can recognize the ambiguity of Vattimo’s position. On the one hand, he contrasts the ‘classical’ aesthetic of mass culture with the diversity of traditional high art. On the other, he regards this diversity of art as an extension of the pluralism of the mass media. Vattimo’s difficulties in distinguishing between mass culture and art originate, in my view, in his notion of the aesthetic experience. That experience, as he argues following Heidegger, refers to our membership in a certain community. However, for this function, which one could label a ‘ritual’ function, there is no need to take into account the aesthetic quality of the work of art in question. Products of mass culture can also have this function, and indeed are even more likely to have it considering their range. Furthermore, Vattimo’s notion of the postmodern aesthetic experience raises the question of what exactly is experienced. In his essay on the museum, he seems to suggest that it is our confrontation with a variety of works, rather than the confrontation with the individual work of art, that provides us with the feeling of oscillation and estrangement. In this he is diametrically opposed to Adorno, for whom our encounter with the individual work is of central importance. In Minima Moralia, Adorno argues that each work of art makes a claim for absolute truth and consequently seeks the annihilation of all other works (MM, 75; 4, 84). Thus we see an 52 Vattimo (1998), 100. 53 Ibidem, 101. Moreover, in an interview I had with him together with René Gabriëls, Vattimo acknowledged that his analysis of mass media in The Transparent Society had been overly optimistic: ‘When I wrote The Transparent Society I expected that technology would bring a sort of transformation in society, an opportunity for more plurality. If I have only one TV channel, I believe everything it says, but if I have hundred, my thought will ‘weaken’ as a consequence of the different world views expressed. But when Berlusconi won the elections, I realized that these hundred TV channels could be owned by one man’ (Gabriëls and Lijster (2013), 53).

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important distinction between the two thinkers: while for Adorno every work of art is a plenipotentiary for a better world, Vattimo regards the variety of different works as a model for the pluralistic society. Two more questions arise that also involve Danto’s interpretation of the pluralistic world of contemporary art as a model of pluralistic society. In the first place, when Vattimo and Danto abandon utopian modernism, herald the end of art, and praise the diversity of postmodern (or in Danto’s words post-historical) art, they tend to neglect the fact that social heterotopia is itself a utopian ideal and not an accomplished fact. Vattimo argues that utopia is realized only as heterotopia, but one might add that heterotopia is realized only as utopia. As Adorno writes in Aesthetic Theory, the new in art ‘is the longing for the new, not the new itself: that is what everything new suffers from’ (AT, 41; 7, 55). In the terminology of Adorno and Benjamin, one could accuse both Vattimo and Danto of not thinking through the dialectic of the new and the ever-the-same, and of ascribing emancipatory power to sheer difference. Second, as several theorists have argued, difference itself has become suspect. Jonathan Rutherford argues that ‘capital has fallen in love with difference’, as consumer society provides each of us with our own unique identity.54 Similarly, sociologists such as Richard Sennett and Boltanski and Chiapello have analyzed the way in which contemporary capitalism raises flexibility, authenticity and difference to its primary values, both in work relations and in consumer culture.55 For his part, Hal Foster argues that the ‘end of art’ thesis that postmodern theorists espouse is ‘benignly liberal – art is pluralistic, its practice pragmatic, and its field multicultural – but this position is also not-so-benignly neo-liberal, in the sense that its relativism is what the rule of the market requires.’56 Considering this ideological function, we might once more ask: Is there still a need for art? I believe Benjamin’s and Adorno’s reflections on the end of art can help us ask this question in the right way.

Conclusion The theories of the end of art discussed here are so diverse that it seems difficult to compare them. While Hegel writes on the end of beautiful art, Danto and Vattimo (implicitly) discuss the end of modernist art. 54 Rutherford (2003), 11. 55 Sennett (2006) and Boltanski and Chiapello (2005). 56 Foster (2003), 125.

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Furthermore, their theoretical backgrounds differ greatly: while Danto is an analytic philosopher (although he has a keen interest in continental thinkers), Vattimo sees himself working along the lines of the ‘nihilistichermeneutical’ programme of Nietzsche and Heidegger. If we put their theories, in turn, alongside Benjamin’s and Adorno’s reflections on the end of art, we are again confronted with considerable differences, not only because of the different theoretical frameworks involved, but also because several decades separate them. Nevertheless, one can distinguish several interesting similarities and differences between them. First of all, Danto’s theory of art history as cognitive progress bears some similarities to what Benjamin and Adorno call the self-annihilation of semblance. Like them, Danto thinks art tends towards its own end: throughout history, art disposes of all elements that are not essential to its definition, up to the point where the work of art becomes indiscernible from a ‘mere real thing’. In his view, works of art are embodied meaning, and, most importantly, interrogate their own meaning as well as the way in which they bear that meaning. Like Adorno, Danto does not think that the work of art is just like other things: what is important in the work is ‘what is not the case’, that which is not immediately present. There is, however, an important difference, too. For Danto, the end of art means that the sensuousness has lost its importance for art, which now involves only theories and interpretations surrounding the work. For Adorno, by contrast, the sensuousness is what art is all about. The end of art, in his view, would mean the loss of our last contact with sensuous particularity.57 Furthermore, we have seen that Danto’s view on what is at stake in art is somewhat limited. He believes that all art is essentially about the definition of art. Consequently, when this quest has ended – at the moment where anything can become a work of art – there is no longer any historical need for art. We may still adorn our surroundings with art, but apart from this, art has no function. Neglecting the cultural contexts of art and its end, Danto excludes the possibility that there may still be a need for art in contemporary society. This distinguishes him not only from Benjamin and Adorno, but also from Hegel, for whom the end of (beautiful) art was possible only given certain socio-historical conditions. Vattimo, contrary to Danto, does engage explicity with Benjamin and Adorno, although he focuses primarily on the other dimension of the end of art: the proliferation of the aesthetic. He criticizes Adorno’s view of mass culture as a homogeneous and homogenizing force, regarding it instead 57 See Bernstein (2006), 225-226.

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as a complex and hybrid network of voices and worldviews. Drawing on Benjamin’s work-of-art essay, he regards mass culture as a source of emancipation, since it ‘weakens’ our sense of reality, estranges us from our familiar setting, and hence opens up our minds to different worldviews. What he leaves out, however, is that, for Benjamin, the technologies of mass culture could be a source of emancipation only given a revolutionary moment in society. In regarding contemporary mass culture as an emancipatory force, Vattimo neglects the messianic and political character that is so crucial to Benjamin’s work-of-art essay. Vattimo remains ambivalent about the end of art. While he sometimes regards the death of art as real, he prefers to speak of its ‘decline’, thus calling to mind Benjamin’s and Adorno’s view of the modernist work as a ‘ruin’. Nevertheless, there is an important difference. Vattimo sees meaning only in the pluralism of artworks, which together express the pluralism of postmodern society. The only truth they express, in other words, is that there is no truth. In the aesthetics of Benjamin and Adorno, by contrast, the work of art is an expression of suffering, of repression, and makes an appeal not only to truth but also to reality. The work of art wants to belong to the world, be it in the shape of the unfulfilled potential of technology (Benjamin), or the repressed sensuous particular (Adorno). Either way, the work of art for them is an expression of an absence, not a symbol or symptom of actually existing cultural pluralism. Drawing on Benjamin’s and Adorno’s reflections on the end of art discussed in the second chapter, my criticism of Danto and Vattimo comes down to two points. In the first place, both consider the end of art onedimensionally: one could argue that, while Danto’s view of the end of art is purely internalistic with regard to art’s own history, Vattimo’s view is primarily externalistic.58 Danto focuses exclusively on the autonomous conceptual development of art, neglecting the cultural context of these developments and the relation between the work of art and society. Vattimo, by contrast, takes into consideration only the impact of the mass media on the arts, and views the latter en bloc as a reflection of pluralistic society. He thus loses track of the meaning and the significance of individual works of art. Formulating this point in terms of my second chapter, I would say that, while Danto takes into consideration only the self-annihilation of 58 To characterize Danto’s position as ‘internalistic’ may cause confusion, since, in a different context, he counted among the ‘externalistic’ camp, namely those theorists who believe that what is essential to a work of art is external to it (in Danto’s case: its interpretation) (see Veldeman (2010), 790-791).

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semblance, Vattimo has an eye only for the proliferation of the aesthetic. This marks an important distinction from the position taken by Benjamin and Adorno, who, despite their mutual differences, take into account both dimensions of the end of art. Only if we view the end of art in this way – stereoscopically, as it were – do we realize that the end of art is not an accomplished fact, but an historical possibility. This brings me to the second point of criticism: the end of art, proclaimed by Danto and Vattimo, comes too early. Both fail to indicate whether there is still a need for art. Although they are reluctant to affirm the utter uselessness of art that their own theories point to, Danto argues that art’s historical function is over, while Vattimo is unable to distinguish art’s ‘oscillatory’ function from that of the mass media. In this way, however, they write off the potentially critical function of art in contemporary society. Their conviction that, in Danto’s words, ‘it does not matter any longer what you do’, is seemingly progressive and liberal but in fact tends towards repressive tolerance. If everything is allowed, nothing is important. Insofar as they do ascribe political meaning to the art world as a reflection of social and cultural pluralism, they are referring only to the sheer diversity of aesthetic phenomena and not the specific meaning of individual works of art. Moreover, they seem to hold the view that this pluralistic utopia has already been achieved.59 This, again, distinguishes these recent heralds of the end of art from Benjamin and Adorno, for both of whom there is still a need for art, both as a critical reflection on mythical practices and as a plenipotentiary for what has no place in society. For this reason, art cannot yet end even though it has to stage its own end by interrogating its own semblance character art and bearing the scars of its own decaying aura. As Giorgio Agamben puts it, ‘Its twilight can last more than the totality of its day, because its death is precisely its inability to die.’60 For Benjamin and Adorno, the end of art means, among other things, the ongoing interrogation of art and the criticism of its own tradition – artistic and socio-historical. The need for this interrogation is not gone, and therefore the proclamation of the end of art is premature. Let me conclude this excursus by briefly returning to postmodern ‘endism’ in general. One might extend the scope of my criticism of the 59 Thus resembling Gerard Reve’s Peter B., who suggested ‘that perhaps the Kingdom of God had already dawned, without our having noticed it; we had, as it were, stumbled into it unknowingly’ (Reve (2000), 126; my translation). 60 Agamben (1999), 56.

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prematurity of claims about the end of art to several of the other ends I mentioned in the introduction. Proclamations of the end of ideology, history, and ‘grand narratives’ may have had a critical impetus, but they risk becoming an apology for what already exists. For, as Jameson points out, the ideology of neo-liberalism consists precisely in the idea that it is not ideology, thereby enabling it to nip in the bud any discussion about its justification.61 The end of ideology, then, also means the end of any attempt to look beyond the socio-economic system in place. In a similar, albeit more provoking, vein, Slavoj Žižek has argued that we are all Fukuyamians now, since almost nobody, not even leftwing political theorists, still believes that there is a reasonable alternative to global capitalism.62 Consequently, one could argue, history, understood as humanity’s active intervention in the natural course of things, has indeed ended. Taking into account these remarks, I propose to consider endism in two ways. On a purely descriptive level it hits the mark: indeed, discussions on the ‘grand narratives’ of liberalism and socialism have ended, ideological debates and political action have been replaced by ‘piecemeal engineering’ (Popper), and social utopianism has been banned as totalitarian and declared bankrupt. But postmodern endism has an ideological aspect too, namely as the ban on the critique of capitalism, and on thinking about alternative ways to organize society.63 Returning once more to the end of art, we might add that art’s historical significance lies precisely in the presumed end of its historical development: the ever-the-same is the expression of the lack of historical development in contemporary society, and of the idea that all ideological debates are behind us. The work of art, however, as the self-criticism of its own semblance, also bears the traces of a rupture with this mythical natural history.

61 ‘The postmodern is in that sense the fulfillment and abolition of liberalism as well, which, no longer tenable as an ideology and as a value any more than traditional conservatism, can function more effectively after its own death as an ideology, realizing itself in its most traditional form as a commitment to the market system that has become sheer common sense and no longer a political program’ (Jameson (1990), 249). See also Jameson (1991), most notably Chapter 6. 62 Žižek (2009), 88. 63 See also Fisher (2009).

3.

Experience, History, and Art In that single gigantic instant I saw millions of acts both delightful and awful; not one of them amazed me more than the fact that all of them occupied the same point in space, without overlapping or transparency. What my eyes beheld was simultaneous, but what I shall now write down will be successive, because language is successive. ‒ Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph

3.1 Introduction One of the central questions in aesthetics since Hegel has been: How does the work of art relate to history? What is its relation, if any, to the social, economic and political circumstances that surround it? This question becomes all the more pressing in modernity. As long as the work of art still has a clear institutional or ritual function, the relation between the work of art (if one can even speak of it that way) and history is clear. As soon as art becomes autonomous, however, this relation is no longer obvious. Is the work of art somehow ‘symptomatic’, is it a ‘reflection’ of its time, or an expression of it? Is it part of a dominant ideology, or, conversely, does it offer a critique of such an ideology, and if so, how should we understand this critique? Some would argue that, in a postmodern society, these questions have become less urgent again, since art has ‘ended’ and has once again been thoroughly embedded in daily life. If art, indeed, has completely dissolved into society, the question of its relation to society becomes meaningless. But if one argues, as I have done in the preceding sections, that art has not ended yet, and that it still has social and historical significance, this raises the question of what this significance is. For both Benjamin and Adorno, the answer to this question is that the work of art has significance as a repository and medium of experience. By ‘experience’ however, they mean neither the life-experience of the individual artist, nor some religious or mystical experience. I will argue in this chapter that their concept of experience is supra-individual and socio-historical, and that it should be seen in relation to the history of production and reproduction of human life in society. The work of art, as a ‘seismograph’, registers structural shifts in the mode of experience. Both Benjamin and Adorno argue that in modernity we witness a decline of experience. Modernist works of art, in their view, express the experience

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of the impossibility of experience. The diagnosis of the decline of experience forces us to reformulate the question of the relation between art and history. For, according to Benjamin and Adorno, the decline of experience distorts our very conception of historical time, transforming historical events from a living experience into a reified fact. This means that one should ask not only how art relates to history, but also how the experience of historical time is expressed in the work of art. Both in Benjamin’s and in Adorno’s cases, a philosophy of history that conceives of history as a construction provides the key to the relation between art and history. History, in their view, ‘crystallizes’ in the work of art, turning it into a ‘monad’ that grants us a momentary glimpse of the whole. There is a subtle difference, however, between how the work of art relates to history and how art history does so. In the latter case, one already assumes the existence of a relatively autonomous history of art, running parallel to ‘world’ history. I will argue that Benjamin denies the existence of such an art history. The notion of an autonomous development in the history of art, he argues, ignores the social origin of the work of art and threatens to make it insignificant for later generations. In Adorno’s view, by contrast, art history does have a dynamic of its own, which he considers in terms of what he calls the ‘tendency of the artistic material’. But this raises the question how this seemingly teleological notion of art history relates to the conception of history as a construction.

3.2

Benjamin’s concept of experience

Experience is one of Benjamin’s central themes and most constant concerns, figuring prominently in his writings from his first publication ‘Experience’ (1913) to the last text published during his lifetime, ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’ (1939). In an early programmatic text, he distances himself from the ‘hollow’ concept of experience emerging in the Enlightenment, of which Kant’s concept of pure apperception is symptomatic and which still dominates the philosophical schools of his day. The dominant philosophy, he argues, considers experience in mechanistic and mathematical terms, valuing it only insofar as it stands in the service of scientific knowledge. It thus systematically ignores the ‘singularly temporal’ side of experience, reducing it ‘to a nadir, to a minimum of significance’ (SW 1, 101; II/1, 159). The extension of the Kantian concept of experience can be considered one of Benjamin’s central objectives.1 But although in this early text he still searches for the justification of ‘religious’ 1

See Caygill (1998), xiii-xiv.

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or ‘true’ experience, he later criticizes authors with similar aims, such as Wilhelm Dilthey, Ludwig Klages, and Carl Jung. These theorists, he argues, search for ‘authentic’ experiences in poetry or myths, but have no eye for the more common, sober experience of everyday life (SW 4, 314; I/2, 608). To find out what, according to Benjamin, is left out by these different concepts of experience, we should first take another look at the concept of aura. In the work-of-art essay, Benjamin presents the aura as the magical semblance and the cultic residue of the work of art, and applauds its destruction by technological reproduction. There is, however, another side to aura in his work.2 Aura is not merely the (false) claim to authority and authenticity of the work of art, but also the mark of a traditional reciprocal relation between an object and its beholder. To describe this side of the aura, Benjamin refers to the experience of natural beauty. In ‘Little History of Photography’ (1931), he enigmatically defines the aura as follows: ‘While at rest on a summer’s noon, to trace a range of mountains on the horizon, or a branch that throws its shadow on the observer, until the moment or the hour become part of their appearance – this is what it means to breathe the aura of those mountains, that branch’ (SW 2, 518-519; II/1, 378). The experience of aura, in other words, means to contemplate the uniqueness in time and space of an object, and to attribute to it a kind of meaning that exceeds conceptual knowledge, a meaning that the object has on its own, independently of its meaning for the knowing subject. To see the object in this way means, furthermore, to grant it subjectivity, or, as Benjamin formulates it, ‘to invest it with the ability to look back at us’ (SW 4, 338; I/2, 646).3 In the gaze of a portrait we experience this in a very literal sense: it stares back at us. Once it is technologically reproduced, however, it loses its authority and becomes a mere object. 4 The withering of aura in photography, however, is only one aspect of ‘a perception whose sense for the sameness of things has grown to the point where even the singular, the unique, is divested of its uniqueness’ (SW 2, 519; II/1, 379). 2 Bernstein points to two different accounts of Benjamin’s concept of the aura, while Fürnkäs even distinguishes three different uses of the concept (Bernstein (2001), 113; Fürnkäs in Opitz and Wizisla (eds., 2000), 95-145. 3 This characterization of the experience of ‘natural’ aura is likely to be inspired by Baudelaire’s poem ‘Correspondences’: ‘Man walks within these groves of symbols, each / of which regards him as a kindred thing’ (Baudelaire (1993), 19). 4 Early-nineteenth-century portrait photography, Benjamin argues in the ‘Little History of Photography’, still has aura, because of the long exposure times. Because of the ambivalence of this essay towards the decline of the aura, Adorno preferred it to the artwork essay (AT, 72; 7, 90).

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This side of aura, as the reciprocal relation between the subject and his surroundings, is part of the complex of Benjamin’s understanding of experience. Other aspects are the connection of experience to human praxis, the collective and cultural character of experience, and the fact that experience is subject to historical change. With regard to praxis, we should note that the concept of experience refers not only to ‘having an experience’, but also to ‘being experienced’. Experience in this sense is, for instance, the experience of the master artisan who passes on practical knowledge to their pupil (SW 3, 144; II/2, 440). This example already points to the fact that experience is valuable only if it is shareable and transferable – in other words, if it is embedded in a collective.5 Benjamin underlines this collective character of experience when he writes: ‘Where there is experience in the strict sense of the word, certain contents of the individual past combine in the memory [Gedächtnis] with material from the collective past’ (SW 4, 316; I/2, 611). Experience, in other words, consists in collective practices and knowledge, passed on from one generation to the next and articulated in traditions and folk stories.6 Experience understood in this way – as the reciprocal relationship between people and their surroundings, consisting of, and expressed in, collective cultural practices – is subject to historical change. Benjamin even argues that, in his time, experience is threatened with extinction: ‘This much is clear: experience has fallen in value’ (SW 2, 731; II/1, 214). In the essay ‘Experience and Poverty’ (1933), he points to the First World War and its collateral economic and humanitarian crises as an immediate cause of the contemporary ‘poverty’ of experience. Soldiers returning from the front, he argues, have no coherent stories to tell. They are not richer but poorer in experience: For never has experience been contradicted more thoroughly: strategic experience has been contravened by positional warfare; economic experience, by the inflation; physical experience, by hunger; moral 5 Benjamin already points to the relation between education and tradition in a 1917 letter to Scholem: ‘Tradition is the medium in which the person who is learning continually transforms himself into the person who is teaching, and that this applies to the entire range of education’ (CWB, 94; BB 1, 145). 6 The articulative aspect is emphasized by Thomas Weber: ‘Erfahrung ist ein Artikulationsbegriff, wobei Artikulation im doppelten Sinne als Verknüpfung und als Ausdruck zu verstehen ist. Erfahrung ist eine Dimension menschlicher Praxis, in der Selbst- und Weltverhältnis derart artikuliert sind, daß das Weltverhältis als Selbstverhältnis und umgekehrt das Selbstverhältnis als Weltverhältnis artikulierbar wird’ (Weber in Opitz and Wizisla (eds., 2000), 236).

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experiences, by the ruling powers. A generation that had gone to school in horse-drawn streetcars now stood in the open air, amid a landscape in which nothing was the same except the clouds and, at its center, in a force field of destructive torrents and explosions, the tiny, fragile human body (SW 2, 732; II/1, 214).

The shock of the First World War, however, cannot be said to have set in motion the decline of experience; it is rather the culmination of a train of events. In later essays, of which ‘The Storyteller’ (1936) and ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’ are the most notable, Benjamin argues that this decline was already in preparation during the nineteenth century. Written as an essay on the Russian writer and collector of folk tales Nicolai Leskov, ‘The Storyteller’ is in fact much more than that: it is a history and theory of storytelling and a reflection on the decline of experience and aura. In a letter to Scholem, Benjamin describes it as ‘a new theory of the novel that lays claim to […] a place beside Lukács’ (CWB, 342; BB 1, 482). Georg Lukács, in his Theory of the Novel (1916), conceives of the emergence of the novel as the expression of spiritual life in modernity. The main opposition in Lukács’ theory is between the epic poem and the novel. The epic poem, he argues, gives expression to the ‘totality’ characterizing Greek society (which he presents in a highly romanticized version), in which there was no conflict between public morality and private inclination, or between duty and will. Consequently, the main character of the epic poem is not the private individual as such, but rather the community he stands for. In modernity, Lukács argues, this totality is shattered, as people are torn between their private desires and their social duties. Humankind in modernity suffers from what he calls ‘transcendental homelessness’, because of the disenchantment of nature and the death of God. According to Lukács, the novel, which Hegel had said was the typical bourgeois art form, expresses life in a meaningless world. The form of the novel is determined by its longing for the totality presented in epic poetry, which is, however, never achieved. The contingency of the world order coincides with the desperation and confusion of the protagonist in the novel. Don Quixote, protagonist of what might be called the first novel, is its exemplary hero. ‘The novel’, Lukács argues, ‘is the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God.’7 Benjamin adopts Lukács distinction between epic poetry and the novel, but adds a third form, the story. Novel and story both have their origin in epic poetry, but unlike the novel, the story remains embedded in collective 7

Lukács (1971), 88.

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consciousness. Traditionally, the storyteller is a person of authority, because of his travels or his age. Hence, the exemplary storytellers are the trading seaman and the settled tiller (SW 3, 144; II/2, 440). Note that both of these figures embody a distance, in either space or time, or, in other words, the aura: appearance of a distance, however close it may be. The storyteller draws authority from his experience: he has weaved the stories he has heard into the narrative of his own life, and passes them on to his listeners, thus providing them with advice and moral lessons: ‘Experience, which is passed from mouth to mouth is the source from which all storytellers have drawn’ (SW 3, 144; II/2, 440). By contrast, the novel, according to Benjamin, neither originates in nor results in experience. What separates the novel from the story (and, for that matter, from the fairytale, the saga, and lyric poetry) is not only its lack of moral advice and the desperation of its hero, but also its isolation from oral tradition, from which it has been cut loose. It depends on the book, and consequently has been both conceived and received in solitude: ‘The birthplace of the novel is the individual in its isolation, the individual who can no longer speak of his concerns in exemplary fashion, who himself lacks counsel and can give none’ (SW 3, 146; II/2, 443). The novel, in other words, marks the decline of the authority of the storyteller as well as the rise of the isolated reader, and hence the end of the collective and practical nature of experience. Unlike Lukács, who in Theory of the Novel considers the history of literature in terms of an autonomous spiritual development, Benjamin aims to locate the decline of storytelling within shifts in modes of production, and to relate literary production to craftsmanship. He calls storytelling ‘an artisanal form of communication’, arguing that it does not aim to convey the pure ‘in itself’ or gist of a thing, like information or a report. It submerges the thing into the life of the storyteller, in order to bring it out of him again. Thus, traces of the storyteller cling to a story the way the handprints of the potter cling to a clay vessel (SW 3, 149; II/2, 447).

The image of the potter and the vessel is no mere metaphor. Storytelling is not ‘like’ handicraft, it is handicraft.8 Literature, in other words, is for 8 He emphasizes this by noting the importance of gestures in storytelling: ‘After all, storytelling, in its sensory aspect, is by no means a job for the voice alone. Rather, in genuine storytelling what is expressed gains support in a hundred ways from the work-seasoned gestures of the hand’

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Benjamin a form of production, and hence changes along with other forms of production in other spheres of labour. In ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’ Benjamin cites Marx as he reflects on the transformation of labour in the nineteenth century. Traditionally, work was organized as craftsmanship, as practical knowledge transferred from master to pupil and acquired in a slow and gradual process of learning, practice and exercise. The nineteenth century witnessed the emergence of a different organization of labour based around the work of machines. Marx argues that, in the case of this work, the working conditions make use of the worker instead of the other way around. Drilling (Dressur) replaces practice (Übung), as the worker conforms his own body to ‘the uniformly constant movements of an automaton’ (SW 4, 328; I/2, 631). Resembling the punished in the ancient underworld, the factory worker on the assembly line performs the exact same distinct action over and over again. Like the seconds on the clock, his actions are ‘reified’, having no connection to each other. According to Benjamin, this excludes him from experience in the traditional sense: ‘The unskilled worker is the one most deeply degraded by machine training. His work has been sealed off from experience; practice counts for nothing in the factory’ (SW 4, 329; I/2, 632). Benjamin tells us that machine work has its literary counterpart in journalism, and that the massive circulation and commodif ication of information that emerged in the nineteenth century dealt a death blow to storytelling. The paradoxical consequence of the spread of newspapers is, Benjamin argues, that we hear ‘new’ things every day even as we become poorer when it comes to the experience of storytelling. The conditions of useful and ‘newsworthy’ information – brevity, topicality, and accessibility – prevent this massive load of reified facts from being absorbed by tradition or into experience. Furthermore, news always has to be verifiable, discrediting both the natural authority and the appearance of ‘distance’ of the storyteller. A story, after all, is not at all concerned with current events, but instead aims at making the past actual (in the sense of the German verb aktualisieren). It consists, as Philippe Simay comments, of ‘an answer found in the past to a question formulated in the present.’9 Storytelling, in other words, aims at the construction of a relation of continuity with the past, a relation jeopardized by the masses of reified facts provided by the information industry. I will argue in some detail below that the (SW 3, 162, II/2, 464). This, furthermore, explains Benjamin’s interest in gestures in the work of writers such as Brecht and Kafka, both of whom he considers ‘epic’ writers. 9 Simay (2005), 140.

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impossibility of constructing a historical continuity is the central concern of Benjamin’s philosophy of history. If experience is the mode of apprehension suited to an age of craftsmanship and storytelling, what will replace it in the age of machine work and information? According to Benjamin, Baudelaire’s poetry provides the answer. Like the story, lyric poetry has its roots in an oral tradition and hence in collective experience. Baudelaire, however, was well aware that his contemporaries were no longer able to digest lyric poetry, as is evident from the first poem of Flowers of Evil, entitled ‘To the Reader’ (SW 4, 313; I/2, 607). Benjamin reads Baudelaire’s allegorical poetry as the registration of a shift in the structure of experience: traditional, continuous experience (Erfahrung) makes way for isolated experience (Erlebnis).10 Drawing on Freud, Benjamin argues that the most important function of human consciousness is not the reception of, but rather protection against, stimuli, especially those that are likely to shock and cause trauma: ‘The more readily consciousness registers these shocks, the less likely they are to have a traumatic effect’ (SW 4, 317; I/2, 613). Consciousness, in other words, parries and cushions shock experiences, preventing them from entering one’s memory by bracketing them and turning them into reified, isolated experiences. In the nineteenth century, shock experiences become the norm. The shifts from craftsmanship to machine work and from storytelling to the information age have already been mentioned. Benjamin, in the Baudelaire essay as well as in the Arcades Project, discusses various other sources of shock experiences, for instance technological inventions and improvements such as the match, the telephone, and photography, all of which reduce a series of formerly complex actions to a single instant. These ‘haptic’ shocks are complemented by ‘optic’ ones, not only because of advertisement and the newspapers but also because of the chaos of big-city traffic and overcrowded streets. As Baudelaire writes, one has to become a ‘kaleidoscope endowed with consciousness’ to elbow one’s way through the streets of Paris (SW 4, 328; I/2, 630). Industrialization, modern technology, urbanization and massification together constitute the conditions of the shift in the structure of experience, from experience proper to isolated experience. Benjamin writes: 10 English translators struggle with these terms. Erlebnis is translated as ‘lived’ or ‘immediate’ experience, or as ‘lived instant’; Erfahrung as ‘true’, ‘long’ or ‘cumulated’ experience. I will translate Erlebnis as ‘isolated experience’, following the translators of the Selected Writings (although even they use different translations within a single text). For Erfahrung I will use just ‘experience’, as I have done up until now (instead of ‘long experience’, which is the translation given in the Selected Writings).

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The greater the shock factor in particular impressions, the more vigilant consciousness has to be in screening stimuli; the more efficiently it does so, the less these impressions enter experience and the more they correspond to the concept of isolated experiences (SW 4, 319; I/2, 615).

Benjamin reads Baudelaire’s poetry as the expression of the increasing impossibility of experience in modernity. Although Baudelaire has neither knowledge of machine work nor a particular interest in the social conditions of the workers, he nevertheless catches their experience in other images, such as the figure of the gambler (‘Gaming’) and the eyes of big-city dwellers. In Chapter 2 I mentioned the ‘hellish’ time to which the gambler is subjected. Like the worker on the assembly line, the gambler carries out a potentially infinite series of insignificant, unrelated, but identical actions. Therefore, ‘the character type that learns by experience is the exact opposite of the gambler as type’ (SW 2, 553; VI, 88). Time, for the gambler as well as the worker, becomes hollow and meaningless – eternal recurrence of the same.11 Baudelaire’s melancholy catches the experience of this mythical temporality of modernity. Similarly, his portraits of the people in the crowds register the loss of aura. The experience of aura, it should be recalled, exists in the expectation that one’s gaze will be returned. Baudelaire catches the loss of aura not only in his mourning over the impossibility of the ‘correspondences’ mentioned in Chapter 2, but also in his observation that, as a rule, people in big-city crowds, do not return your gaze. Baudelaire, Benjamin argues, ‘describes eyes that could be said to have lost the ability to look’ (SW 4, 339; I/2, 648). Each time there is a mention of eyes in his poems, they are ‘mirror-like’, ‘glassy’, or like ‘shop windows’, marked by ‘self-protective wariness’ – in short, ‘eyes-without-a-gaze’ (SW 4, 340; I/2, 649). In Baudelaire’s poetry we already find a description of what sociologist Georg Simmel, in his seminal essay ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ (1903), was to call the ‘blasé attitude’ of the modern city dweller, who is both hyper-attentive to the constant stream of internal and external stimuli and necessarily indifferent towards his fellow city dwellers.12 The work of art, as we have seen, is the traditional repository of experience. As experience descends into isolated experience, traditional art forms such as the story and lyric poetry become increasingly problematic. 11 As I have pointed out in the preceding chapter, another important aspect of modern life that is equally governed by hellish repetition is fashion (cf. AP, 62-81; V/1, 110-132). 12 See Simmel (1969).

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Baudelaire, Benjamin argues, ‘holds in his hands the scattered fragments of genuine historical experience’ (SW 4, 336; I/2, 643). The strength of his poetry, however, lies in his making the impossibility of experience, and thus of lyric poetry, the theme of poetry. Baudelaire registers the shock caused by a lost or missed experience – for instance in the poem ‘To a Woman Passing By’, in which the poet falls in love with a woman in the street, only to lose sight of her immediately, as she disappears into the anonymous masses. The aspects of urban life Baudelaire is writing about – love at last sight, anonymity, heavy traffic, prostitution, poverty and so on – contrast sharply with the form of lyric poetry. According to Benjamin, Baudelaire aims at ‘the emancipation of isolated experiences (Erlebnisse)’, rescuing them by granting them ‘the weight of experience (Erfahrung)’ (SW 4, 318/343; I/2, 615/653). In other words, Baudelaire’s poetry allows for the experience of the impossibility of experience, thus interrupting the natural history of its decay. Contrary to what might be expected (based on the above), and again unlike Lukács, Benjamin refuses to regard the decline of experience and storytelling merely as a ‘symptom of decay’ (SW 3, 146; II/2, 442). In a note for ‘The Storyteller’ he explicitly distances himself from nostalgia: ‘Don’t whine. The nonsense of critical prognosis. Film instead of storytelling’ (II/3, 1282). The reference to film recalls the ‘historical gamble’ of the work-of-art essay. Indeed, as was the case with the liquidation of art, Benjamin forced himself to regard the decline of experience as a historical opportunity. According to Benjamin, the destruction of experience has a positive side. It refers not only to our dwindling capacity to experience natural ‘correspondences’ and to our disconnection from collective memory, but also to the potential of an emancipation from bourgeois culture, which in his view has created a false tradition by effacing the traces of its violence. In this latter sense we should read Benjamin’s eulogy on the ‘destructive character’, who ‘knows only one watchword: make room’ and ‘only one activity: clearing away’ (SW 2, 541; IV/1, 396). The destructive character, he argues, is the enemy of the ‘étui-man’, the bourgeois individual hiding out in his art-nouveau interior in which everything has to bear his signature.13 Bertolt Brecht and Adolf Loos, who want to ‘erase the traces’, rid themselves of the heritage of a foul culture and start afresh, are examples of such a destructive character. Likewise, in the essay ‘Experience and Poverty’ Benjamin reflects on a ‘new, positive concept of barbarism.’ The poverty of experience, he argues, forces the new barbarian ‘to start from scratch; to make a new start; to make a little go a long way; to begin with a little and build up further; 13 See Lijster, Devisch and Van Rooden (2009).

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looking neither left nor right’ (SW 2, 732; II/1, 215). The decline of experience, conceived of in this way, consists in the liberation of the burden of a culture and a history that has become meaningless in the present. It is questionable, to be sure, whether we can take Benjamin’s affirmation of the destructive character and the new barbarian seriously after his sympathetic reading of the storyteller. Irving Wohlfarth reads Benjamin’s nihilistic affirmation of a new ‘barbarism’ as ‘an attempt to wrest the solution from the very givens of the problem by giving a further twist to an already devious turn of phrase.’14 The destructive character, in other words, identifies with the aggressor, namely bourgeois culture, only to bring its violent and destructive character out in the open, to feed on its force and turn it against itself. For it should be noted that, just as it is not the aura of nature that is to be liquidated but rather its false reconstruction in an ‘aestheticization of politics’, in the same way it is not traditional experience that has to yield to a new barbarism – Benjamin considers this experience already doomed. What needs to be destroyed are isolated experiences masking themselves as tradition, as experience proper.15 Furthermore, the relation between Benjamin’s distinctions in the work-of-art essay (between aura and reproduction, or contemplation and distraction), and that between experience proper and isolated experience, can sometimes be confusing. In ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’ and ‘The Storyteller’, he aligns experience and aura, arguing that isolated experience marks the decline of both. However, the primary characteristics of experience – duration and continuity – seem to contradict the definition of aura as a ‘unique appearance’. This contradiction comes to light in ‘The Return of the Flâneur’ (1929), a review essay on Franz Hessel’s On Foot in Berlin, where Benjamin writes: ‘Isolated experience craves the unique, the sensational, experience seeks out eternal sameness’ (SW 2, 266; III, 198). Here he surprisingly connects isolated experience with the uniqueness of the aura, while experience is linked to the eternal recurrence he will later hold responsible for its demise. There is, I think, no easy solution to this problem, which lies in Benjamin’s sometimes frustrating ambivalence towards each of his concepts. Both experience proper and isolated experience are evaluated differently in different contexts: experience (Erfahrung) is both the traditional interaction of humanity and nature, which he considers forever lost, and the false construction of history as a totality, which is to be destroyed; while isolated experience (Erlebnis) signifies on the one hand 14 Wohlfarth (1978), 60. 15 This will be discussed in further detail when we turn to Benjamin’s critique of historism.

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the hyper-alertness of the alienated worker or the blasé inhabitant of the metropolis and, on the other, the shock experience deployed by Baudelaire to destroy the phantasmagoria of capitalism.16 Questions might be raised, finally, concerning the historical and psychological adequacy of Benjamin’s concept of experience. The Freudian foundation of his theory is obviously insufficient. More important, however, than the exact details of his answer is, in my opinion, Benjamin’s concern for the disenchantment of nature and the decline of experience in modernity, which he shared with contemporaries as diverse as Dilthey, Dewey, Heidegger, and Musil. Unlike most of these authors, however, Benjamin analyses these problems by turning his attention to everyday life: labour conditions, interactions with technology, encounters on city streets, and domestic life. But what is most significant for the present study is the way in which Benjamin regards art as a privileged medium of experience. Just as storytelling conveys historical experience throughout generations, Baudelaire’s modernist poetry registers the crisis in experience. It raises the impossibility of experience to the level of experience. Baudelaire’s work, Benjamin thus argues, ‘cannot be categorized merely as historical, like anyone else’s, but it intended to be so and understood itself as such’ (SW 4, 318; I/2, 615).

3.3

Experience and history

In recent philosophy of history, there has been a renewed interest in the concept of experience.17 Many publications on historical experience draw on Benjamin’s work, which is not surprising given his highly original and multifaceted contribution to debates on the concept. However, while his concept of experience is eagerly adopted, his own philosophy of history is approached with a good deal more caution. This is no less surprising if one considers the esoteric and theological nature of his philosophy of history. Several theorists sympathetic to Benjamin express their unease with the connection he makes between historical experience and ‘messianism’, and many try to separate the former from the latter.18 16 Baudelaire’s shocks are, Benjamin argues, in the first place meant to dodge shocks. Similarly, Benjamin values the destructive character because he destroys something that was itself a destructive force. 17 See for instance Ankersmit (2007) (an extended Dutch version of his 2005 book Sublime Historical Experience), Carr (2009) and Clark (2013). 18 See Ankersmit (2007), Caygill (1998), and Jay (2005).

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Experience and messianism, however, are inseparably connected in Benjamin’s philosophy: his critique of historiography aims not only at a more adequate involvement with, and description of, historical experience, but also seeks to alter history by means of political intervention in the present. He proposes no less than a ‘Copernican revolution in historical perception’: Formerly it was thought that a fixed point had been found in ‘what has been’, and one saw the present engaged in tentatively concentrating the forces of knowledge on this ground. Now this relation is to be overturned, and what has been is to become the dialectical reversal – the flash of awakened consciousness. Politics attains primacy over history (AP, 388389; V/1, 490-491).

For most of us, the idea of altering history will seem, at best, to be a fantasy, and at worst as a falsification. Benjamin’s intention, however, is not to alter the events of history (insofar it is possible in any case to grant these an independent ontological status), but rather our experience of history. History, in his view, is always a matter of construction, of selection and interpretation, and consequently the actual situation of the historian is as important as the events they describe. For Benjamin, experience and history have their converging point in memory. Memory, however, like experience, is subject to change. In ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’ Benjamin analyses the development of memory by referring to Marcel Proust, who in his novel In Search of Lost Time makes the distinction between voluntary and involuntary memory. The first consists of memories obeying ‘the call of conscious attention’, but which for that very reason wear down, as it were, and lack vivacity: ‘Its signal characteristic is that the information it gives about the past retains no trace of that past’ (SW 4, 315; I/2, 610). When Proust’s narrator laments the sorry state of his childhood memories, he is talking about this voluntary memory. Involuntary memory, by contrast, consists of lively images of one’s past, the sudden recollection of a forgotten experience. In In Search of Lost Time, the taste of a ‘madeleine’ cake that has been dipped in lime-blossom tea plunges the narrator into an unexpected stream of images from his youth in Combray, where his aunt treated him to these delicacies. Paradoxically, these memories can exist only because they refer to events that have been forgotten, and therefore have not been called upon repeatedly by consciousness. The problem for this form of memory, however, is precisely that it

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is involuntary: whether one attains access to it is, according to Proust, a matter of chance. Benjamin considers Proust’s individual difficulties in gaining access to his childhood memories to be part of a collective problem, namely the shift in the structure of experience from experience proper to isolated experience. Following Freud and his student Reik, he argues that consciousness and memory are mutually exclusive. Consequently, the heightened consciousness and isolated experience characteristic of modern life leave genuine memory empty, turning it instead into a reservoir of reified facts. Furthermore, Benjamin argues, Proust’s work shows us that memory has become particularized. While the concept of experience points to the shareability and transferability of meaning, the involuntary memory of Proust’s narrator has meaning only for himself. The reification and particularization of memory (and, consequently, of history) make the task of the historian precarious. Benjamin’s most elaborate reflections on the philosophy of history can be found in his last text, ‘On the Concept of History’ (1940). Here he criticizes the concept of a historical continuum, that is, history understood as a unified whole and a naturally evolving process. One may think here of Hegel’s account of the developing spirit, but Benjamin’s primary targets are the social-democratic thinkers of his day, who believed that technological developments would, in the long run, necessarily bring about social emancipation – hence the dictum of the famous social democrat Joseph Dietzgen: ‘We bide our time’ (I/3, 1249). Like Marx, Benjamin regards technology as an extension of nature. However, while as a consequence nature (as technology) develops historically, he disagrees with Dietzgen’s idea that history develops naturally. For Benjamin, this optimistic faith in the natural course of history implies a dangerous form of political resignation, fostering ‘the illusion that the factory work ostensibly furthering technological progress constituted a political achievement’ (SW 4, 393; I/2, 698-699). But there is an even greater problem. Benjamin accuses these thinkers of regarding present suffering as a mere stepping stone to a utopian goal (classless society) that is endlessly postponed. As he sees it, they regard this suffering at best as a necessary evil and at worst as irrelevant. Benjamin argues that a critique of the concept of progress should address the notion of time that lies at its basis: ‘The concept of mankind’s historical progress cannot be sundered from the concept of its progression through a homogeneous, empty time. A critique of the concept of such a progression must underlie any criticism of the concept of progress itself’ (SW 4, 394-395; I/2, 701). Underlying the concept of progress, in his view, is a mythical notion of time that is reproduced in modernity. Myth, in

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Benjamin’s view, is antithetical to history. There is no history in myth, for myth turns history into nature – or as he sometimes calls it, into ‘natural history’ (Naturgeschichte). The concept of progress, as the natural development of history, belongs to myth no less than does the idea of the eternal recurrence of the same (AP, 119; V/1, 178). A critique of the concept of progress, in other words, involves a critique of mythical time, that is, of any understanding of history in terms of an organic whole. Thus Benjamin’s critique is directed not only at teleology as prospective continuity (that is, continuity towards a certain goal), but also at retrospective continuity (continuity of a certain tradition).19 That is why Benjamin takes issue not only with social democrats but also with historism, the nineteenth-century school of historiography that believed in the possibility of gaining objective knowledge about the past (SW 4, 396; I/2, 702).20 Historism, according to Benjamin, has ‘no theoretical armature’, and its procedure is purely ‘additive’: ‘It musters a mass of data to fill the homogeneous, empty time’ (SW 4, 396; I/2, 702). The historist, as Leopold von Ranke once formulated it, wants to know ‘how it actually was’, and they must therefore strip themselves of their knowledge and consciousness of the present in order to ‘empathize’ with the past. Benjamin has several objections to this notion of history and historiography. First, historism suffers from a reified consciousness of history, seeing historical events as facts or ‘goods’ that can be passed on from one generation to the other as loot in a triumphal procession. It thus neglects the fact that the meaning of historical events is subject to change, and that the way in which an historical event is passed on influences the image we have of it. Past and present, in other words, have a reciprocal relationship. Secondly, and precisely for the reason mentioned above, one must ask: with whom does the historist ‘empathize’ exactly? The answer, according to Benjamin, is ‘with the victor. And all rulers are the heirs of prior conquerors. Hence, empathizing with the victor invariably benefits the current rulers’ (SW 4, 391; I/3, 696). Why is this so? In a letter to Horkheimer, Benjamin says that he has long wondered what it meant to ‘lose’ a war. We have to realize, he argues, that the war is really ‘finished’ only for those who are conquered. 19 As Scholem (1972) notes, Benjamin’s two enemies in ‘On the Concept of History’ can be considered to represent Stalinism and National Socialism, which, shortly before he wrote the text, had sealed their monstrous alliance: the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (129). 20 I prefer to translate Historismus as ‘historism’ instead of ‘historicism’ (as do the translators of the Selected Writings) to avoid confusion with the understanding of ‘historicism’ as a teleological philosophy of history, i.e., the way Karl Popper uses the term in his The Poverty of Historicism (2002).

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They lose the opportunity to prolong their history and their tradition. For the conqueror, by contrast, the conquest continues in history, as they pass on their tradition. The reified cultural goods that tradition demands we honour each bear the traces of previous conquests and thus the scars of the suffering they caused. Hence Benjamin’s famous lines: ‘There is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is never free of barbarism, so barbarism taints the manner in which it was transmitted from one hand to another’ (SW 4, 392; I/3, 696). Historical continuity is constructed in retrospect by those who write history, that is, by the ruling classes, and a historian who is not fully aware of this and treats history in terms of this continuity is necessarily, therefore, conformistic. As Benjamin writes in his essay on Eduard Fuchs, the purely ‘additive’ procedure of historism ‘may augment the weight of the treasure accumulating on the back of humanity, but it does not provide the strength to shake off this burden so as to take control of it’ (SW 3, 268; II/2, 478). Resonating in these lines is the voice of Friedrich Nietzsche, who in his second untimely meditation entitled On the Advantages and Disadvantages of History for Life (1874) warns of the ‘historical disease’, the paralysis in present life caused by the accumulation of historical data. Benjamin uses a motto from Nietzsche in ‘On the Concept of History’: ‘We need history, but our need for it differs from that of the jaded idlers in the garden of knowledge’ (SW 4, 394; I/2, 700). Like Nietzsche, Benjamin wants a history that has an immediate impact on practical life, initiating action and interrupting the continuum constructed by the rulers, from whom even the dead are no longer safe. This is why the strategy of the critical historian – Benjamin calls him ‘historical materialist’ – is diametrically opposed to the historist method. Instead of removing himself from his contemporary situation, as Ranke suggested, he is fully and acutely aware of his own historical and political situation: The historical materialist cannot do without the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time takes a stand and has come to a standstill. For this notion defines the very present in which he himself is writing history. Historism offers the ‘eternal’ image of the past; historical materialism supplies a unique experience with the past (SW 4, 396; I/2, 702).

The historical materialist is aware that each present might change the past. This does not mean that one can or should describe the past exclusively in

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terms of the present (i.e., anachronistically), but rather that, in light of the present, certain historical moments gain a new sense of urgency. This is what Benjamin means with his concept of ‘now-time’ (Jetztzeit) or, as he sometimes calls it, the ‘now of recognizability’ (Jetzt der Erkennbarkeit): certain historical images are ‘legible’ or ‘recognizable’ only in specific synchronic moments: ‘Every present day is determined by the images that are synchronic with it: each “now” is the now of a particular recognizability’ (AP, 462-463; V/1, 578). A moment in the present may bring into remembrance an image of the past, to which it corresponds. Past and present collide, as it were, and together form what Benjamin calls a ‘dialectical image’, ‘wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation’ (AP, 462; V/1, 578). The ‘image’-character of Benjamin’s historical method was likely inspired by photomontages by surrealists like Man Ray and John Heartfield – he sometimes used the term Überblendung (I/3, 1074).21 Just as two images collide and change each other’s meaning in a montage (or, as one might add, in an allegory), two historical events collide in a dialectical image. But why is this image dialectical? How can an image even be dialectical, assuming that an image is static, whereas dialectics implies movement? Benjamin is aware of the paradoxical nature of his concept, and even emphasizes it in speaking of image as ‘dialectics at a standstill’ (AP, 463; V/1, 578). He conceives of dialectics not in terms of a (Hegelian) process, but indeed as an image, in which counterparts are placed next to each other.22 The simultaneity of ideology and its negation, of dream image and critique, is what his dialectics is all about. In the Arcades Project he writes: ‘The realization of dream elements in the course of waking up is the canon of dialectics’ (AP, 464; V/1, 580). In other words, only through the dream images of mythic history can we awake from the latter. This is why Benjamin does not denounce the phantasmagorias of capitalism as mere forms of ‘false consciousness’. Rather, he brings out the utopianrevolutionary core and authentic demand for happiness that lay dormant in them. In ‘On the Concept of History’ Benjamin provides the following example: ‘To Robespierre ancient Rome was a past charged with now-time, a past which he blasted out of the continuum of history’ (SW 4, 395; I/2, 701). The French Revolution, in other words, ‘quotes’ the republic of Rome to 21 Benjamin was a friend of Heartfield’s brother, and had met the artist in Paris in 1935. See Eiland and Jennings (2014), 500-501. 22 Allegory, for Benjamin, is the Ur-form of this kind of pre-Hegelian dialectics.

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legitimize itself, thereby creating its own (discontinuous) tradition. With this particular example Benjamin implicitly addresses Marx, who in The Eighteenth Brumaire (1852) ridicules the historical dressing up of previous revolutionary movements, arguing that the coming proletarian revolution should derive its poetry from the future instead of the past.23 Benjamin disagrees: in his view, revolutionary force is ‘nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than by the ideal of liberated grandchildren’ (SW 4, 394; I/3, 700). Interestingly the historian, in Benjamin’s description, adopts several characteristics of the storyteller. Like the storyteller, the historical materialist delves into the past to find answers for problems in the present. For a storyteller, tradition is not a collection of reified historical facts, but a reservoir of experience and a guide for the present.24 The way of the traditional storyteller, however, is cut off for the contemporary historian, because of the decline of experience. The historist remains unaware of this, and precisely because they presume the possibility of an objective and ‘natural’ continuum of history, they unwittingly empathize with the rulers, who decide over what is to be remembered and forgotten. The objective of Benjamin’s historian is to ‘blast out’ of this continuum, through the remembrance of past dreams that have been forgotten. Only through these dreams might it be possible to gain an image of those who were not able to create a tradition, to write history: ‘The history of the oppressed is a discontinuum. – Task of historiography is to get hold of the tradition of the oppressed’ (I/3, 1236). Benjamin was well aware of the aporetic nature of this task, which demands no less than the construction of a discontinuous tradition. To be sure, the ‘quoting’ of history cannot be a mere arbitrary procedure. As we have seen, certain historical images become legible or recognizable only at a certain time. Benjamin thus argues that ‘the true image of the past flits by’ (SW 4, 390; I/3, 695), and whether the historian is able to seize this image is a matter of chance. All one can do is practice with some ‘presence of mind’ (Geistesgegenwart) (I/3, 1244). We can hear the echo of Proust’s reflections on involuntary memory: Proust’s narrator tells us that, although images from memory may come involuntarily, one is able to ‘train’ oneself to at least recognize them, and hold onto them, when they do come.25 One could argue that Benjamin tries to turn a collective form of involuntary 23 Marx (1978). 24 See Simay (2005). 25 See De Wilde (2008), 142-147.

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memory into the method of historiography and a form of politics. The name of this method is ‘remembrance’ (Eingedenken).26 Benjamin reflects on remembrance in reaction to a letter from Horkheimer, which he included in the notes of the Arcades Project. Horkheimer had criticized Benjamin’s notion of the ‘incompleteness’ of history, which he considered idealistic, since ‘past injustice has occurred and is completed. […] If one takes the lack of closure entirely seriously, one must believe in the Last Judgment’ (AP, 471, V/1, 598). According to Benjamin, however, history is not merely a science but also a form of ‘remembrance’ that has the ability to modify what science has determined: Such remembrance can make the incomplete (happiness) into something complete, and the complete (suffering) into something incomplete. That is theology; but in remembrance we have an experience that forbids us to conceive of history as fundamentally atheological, little as it may be granted us to try to write it with immediately theological concepts (AP, 471; V/1, 578).

Here, Benjamin underlines the theological character of his concept of remembrance. In ‘On the Concept of History’ he connects it with the Jewish mystical tradition, for instance in the famous image of the ‘angel of history’ who is facing the past and tries to close its wings in order to ‘awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed’ (SW 4, 392; I/3, 697). According to Scholem, this allegory refers to the concept of Tikkun from the Lurianic Kabbalah, the restoration by the Messiah of the broken vessels that after the creation contained the sacred light.27 But how can it be the task of the historian to undo the suffering of the past? How would such a thing be possible if, indeed, one agrees with Horkheimer that ‘the slain are really slain’? To answer these questions and to find out the relation 26 Benjamin himself draws the parallel between Proust’s involuntary memory and his philosophy of history in the notes of ‘On the Concept of History’: ‘The image of the past flashing up in the now of recognizability is […] an image of memory. It is similar to the images of one’s own past that one recalls in a moment of danger. These images approach us, as we know, involuntarily. History in the strict sense is therefore an image from the involuntary memory, an image that suddenly flashes up before the subject in a moment of danger’ (I/3, 1243). 27 Scholem (1972), 132-133. Tammy Lynn Castelein (2006) notes an interesting shift in Scholem’s interpretation of Tikkun. While in Zur Kabbala und ihrer Symbolik (1960) he argues that humankind through its actions can bring about Tikkun, in the 1972 essay on Benjamin he argues that only the Messiah is able to do this. This shift might be informed by Scholem’s conviction that the ‘theological’ Benjamin is the true one, and that Benjamin’s Marxism was a betrayal of his original intentions.

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between remembrance and politics, we must dwell a little longer yet on Benjamin’s messianism. In the extremely hermetical ‘Theological-Political Fragment’ (1921 or 1938), Benjamin writes: ‘Nothing that is historical can relate itself, from its own ground, to anything messianic. Therefore, the Kingdom of God is not the telos of the historical dynamic’ (SW 3, 305; II/1, 203). In other words, no politics should have a theological notion of redemption as its goal. The profane order, he argues, should rather be directed at the idea of happiness. However, Benjamin goes on to say that the profane, ‘though not itself a category of this kingdom, is a decisive category of its most unobtrusive approach’ (SW 3, 305; II/1, 203). Political change, directed towards happiness, can, in other words, contribute to the arrival of the Messiah, even if this cannot be directly aimed for. This relation between the sacred order (directed at redemption) and the profane order (directed at happiness) returns in ‘On the Concept of History’: There is happiness – such as could arouse envy in us – only in the air we have breathed, among people we could have talked to, women who could have given themselves to us. In other words, the idea of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the idea of redemption. The same applies to the idea of the past, which is the concern of history. The past carries with it a secret index by which it is referred to redemption (SW 4, 389-390; I/2, 693).

When Benjamin speaks about happiness that is bound up with redemption, he means not the happiness that once was ours and was lost, but rather the happiness that we did not have, but that could have been ours.28 Remembrance is directed, as mentioned above, not at liberated grandchildren but at enslaved ancestors and therefore redemption appears in history only ex negativo. Insofar as Benjamin’s philosophy of history is theological, it is negative-theological. Consequently, ‘now-time’ and remembrance cannot, as some critics would have it, be understood as moments of reconciliation, but consist, rather, in the experience of failed historical chances at reconciliation and emancipation.29 This does not mean, however, that remembrance 28 As Werner Hamacher (2005) writes in an insightful essay, this happiness ‘is not, however, experienced in a past reality, but in the irrealis of its non-actualized possibility’ (38). 29 This contradicts Ankersmit, who opposes his own concept of sublime historical experience, as an experience of loss, to Benjamin’s notion of ‘now-time’, which he considers an experience of reconciliation (Ankersmit (2007), 185n).

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is nothing but the melancholic pondering of the ruins of history. In the Jewish tradition, the imperative of remembrance (Zakhor) also implies an ‘actualization’: at Pesach one should remember one’s ancestors in Egypt as though one were a slave oneself.30 The same form of remembrance is present, according to Benjamin, in the work of Proust, whose ‘method is actualization [Vergegenwärtigung], not reflection’ (SW 2, 244; II/1, 320). The Arcades Project was an attempt to make visible, as the Surrealists had tried to do, the revolutionary energies in the ‘outmoded’. By delving into the trash of history, into technologies, commodities and ways of living that did not ‘make’ it – the panorama, the commune, the flâneur, the arcades – Benjamin lays bear the utopian dreams and wishes of the past generation. Exactly because the history of these phenomena is discontinuous, broken off, it contains the involuntary memory of the oppressed. The historian who instructs their contemporary of these missed opportunities and never-actualized potentialities ‘does not cause him sorrow, but arms him’ (AP, 481; V/1, 603). By showing the failed chances of happiness and emancipation of earlier generations, the historian ignites political action. This is what Susan Buck-Morss calls Benjamin’s ‘materialistic pedagogy’.31 Let us take an illustrative example. In his notes for the Arcades Project, Benjamin quotes Leonardo da Vinci, who wrote that man, once he would be able to build an airplane, could ‘seek snow on the mountaintops and bring it back to the city to spread on the sweltering streets in summer’ (AP, 486; V/1, 609). This hopeful image forms the dialectical antithesis of contemporary bomber planes, which have turned it into a failed opportunity. The collision of past and present, which, as a montage, form a ‘dialectical image’, confronts the contemporary with the extent to which the utopian dream images that past generations entertained for the future (that is, the time in which the contemporary is living) have been betrayed. At the same time, the contmporary is called upon to put right the injustice done to their ancestors, which they can do by staying true to those utopian dreams and by attempting to fulfil them in the present. The slain do indeed remain slain, but the fulfilment of their claim to happiness will alter history, in the sense that they will not have suffered in vain. This is what Benjamin means by the ‘weak messianic power’ (SW 4, 390; I/2, 694) with which we are endowed and to which the past can lay claim.32 30 See Löwy (2005), 91. 31 Buck-Morss (1989), 287. 32 In this way, for Benjamin, melancholy and revolutionary force are not mutually exclusive, but strengthen each other. This idea is adopted by Slavoj Žižek (2008): ‘Is not revolutionary

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This connection between remembrance and politics contradicts Habermas’ claim that Benjamin’s philosophy of history is ‘conservative’.33 In his essay on Benjamin, Habermas makes a distinction between ‘consciousnessraising’ and ‘redemptive’ critique. The former entails ideology critique in the Marxist sense of laying bare hidden structures of power, and is, according to Habermas, inherently political, having social emancipation as its goal. This is not true, in his view, of Benjamin’s ‘redemptive’ critique, which is exclusively directed towards the past and therefore lacks an ‘immanent relation to political praxis.’34 However, Benjamin’s notion of ‘remembrance’ may be directed towards the past, although it is equally aimed at political intervention in the present. ‘Redemption’ of the past and the raising of consciousness are, in his philosophy of history, mutually dependent. Our adoption of past hopes will first redeem the oppressed ancestors, while an adequate understanding of the past is possible only from the perspective of our current political task.35 Politics, in Benjamin’s view, exists first and foremost in the interruption of a historical process, an interruption he considers both in theoretical and in practical terms. For him, remembrance and political action cannot be severed.36 To be sure, this raises the important question of how Benjamin sees the relation between the theoretical enterprise of the historian and the political work of the revolutionary. It remains unclear, in other words, how the historian’s construction of dialectical images should result in the political ‘awakening’ of the ‘dreaming collective’, which, after all, was how he distinguished his own project from the reveries of the surrealists.37 I do not believe there is an adequate solution to this problem in his writings. Then again, one might argue that the answer to this question is the ‘philosopher’s stone’ for critical theory per se. orientation towards the future the very opposite of melancholic attachment to the past? What if, however, the future one should be faithful to is the future of the past itself, in other words, the emancipatory potential that was not realized due to the failure of the past attempts and that for this reason continues to haunt us’ (393-394). 33 Habermas (1972), 186. Habermas’ use of the term ‘conservative’ with regard to Benjamin is, as Lieven de Cauter (1994) notes, not only confusing, considering Benjamin’s progressive political inclination, but also misleading, since Habermas uses the same term to characterize an author such as Ernst Jünger, who should be considered a political antipode. 34 Ibidem, 212. 35 For criticism of Habermas’ distinction, see also Bürger (1979), 170-171. 36 This also relates to the connection between Marxism and theology in Benjamin’s work, which is one of the oldest problems in his reception history. I will return to this issue in Chapter 4. 37 ‘Delimitation of the tendency of this project with respect to Aragon: whereas Aragon persists within the realm of dream, here the concern is to find the constellation of awakening’ (AP, 458; V/1, 571). See also Laermans (1995).

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Although art has not been a central topic of consideration in this section, Benjamin’s philosophy of history is of great consequence for the way in which we might consider works of art. In the first place, it implies that we approach with suspicion any attempt to consider works of art in terms of ‘eternal beauty’ or as ‘cultural goods’. Works of art, like all documents of civilization, are for Benjamin at the same time ‘documents of barbarism’. This means, in the second place, that we should regard them as repositories of historical experience, bearing the traces of socio-historical shifts and ruptures. In our confrontation with works of art, we might ask how these experiences relate to our own. The stakes for our interpretation of works of art are considerable: an adequate understanding of our own time may depend on it. Benjamin’s philosophy of history has, in fine, implications for our view of the history of art, for it forbids us to regard this history as a continuum.

3.4

Art history and monadology

In a 1923 letter to his friend Florens Christian Rang, Benjamin wrote that it is evident for him ‘that there is no such thing as art history’ (CWB, 223; BB 1, 322). What does he mean with this bold yet enigmatic statement? How can one deny the existence of art history? I take it to mean two things. First, that there is no autonomous history of art, independent of other social spheres. Second, that there is no universal history of art, no ‘logical’ development of art. First of all, it does not make sense for Benjamin to study art without taking into consideration its socio-historical context. In Origin of German Tragic Drama, for instance, his primary objective is not the investigation of a certain artistic genre or trope (mourning play and allegory), but rather the historical experience of modernity. The experience of living in a Godabandoned and purely immanent world, he argues, is expressed in the content as well as in the form of the mourning play. In a curriculum vitae from 1928 he writes that in his work he has ‘directed [his] efforts at opening a path to the work of art by destroying the doctrine of the territorial character of art’ (SW 2, 78; VI, 219). By this he means that he denies the possibility of studying art exclusively in terms of art. Instead, Benjamin regards the work of art ‘as an integral expression of the religious, metaphysical, political, and economic tendencies of its age’ (SW 2, 78; VI, 219). In his view, the notion of an autonomously developing realm of art is misleading. Given this conviction, it is not surprising that Benjamin found his view on art to be perfectly compatible with Marxism. Marx, after all, argues that the

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cultural, political and juridical superstructure is governed by the economic base. Consequently, one will not be able to understand the history of art without taking into consideration the history of economics and politics.38 Benjamin disagreed, however, with orthodox Marxists who regarded the superstructure as the ‘reflection’ of the base, which immediately and causally determined it. Rather, he argued that the superstructure is the expression of the base: ‘The economic conditions under which society exists are expressed in the superstructure – precisely as, with the sleeper, an overfull stomach finds not its reflection but its expression in the contents of dreams’ (AP, 392; V/1, 495). With this simile, he implicitly refers to Freud. The understanding of the superstructure, in other words, is similar to the interpretation of dreams, albeit at the level of a ‘collective unconscious’. Causal reduction is impossible, since the dream is always determined by processes of condensation and displacement that Freud referred to as the ‘dream work’. Benjamin’s most elaborate discussion of the methods of art history can be found in the essay ‘Eduard Fuchs, Collector and Historian’ (1937). He argues that neither Fuchs’s idealistic notion of a ‘mood of the times’, nor Heinrich Wölfflin’s contextless formalism, which describes developments in art history in terms of shifts in ‘artistic vision’, can satisfy a historical materialist,39 who can nevertheless find such shifts useful: ‘For it is precisely historical materialism that is interested in tracing the changes in artistic vision not so much to a changed ideal of beauty as to more elementary processes – processes set in motion by economic and technological transformations in production’ (SW 3, 270; II/2, 480). Benjamin argues that, instead of contrasting materialism with formalism, we should rather embed formalism in historical materialism, tracing formal shifts back to shifts in the way society perceives itself and the world. Although he does not mention him here, it is clear that Benjamin has in mind the work of the Viennese art historian Alois Riegl, whose work made a lasting impression on him. Benjamin shared Riegl’s preoccupation, especially in Late Roman Art Industry (1901), with periods in art history that were considered ‘marginal’, as well as his interest in collective and anonymous production. 40 Riegl’s method can be understood as a synthesis 38 In the notes for the Arcades Project, Benjamin includes the following quote from Marx and Engels: ‘There is no history of politics, law, science, etc., of art, religion, etc.’ (AP, 467; V/1, 584). 39 In 1915 Benjamin attended Wölfflin’s course on the history of art. He expected much of it, but later wrote to Scholem that this course had been ‘the most disastrous activity I have ever encountered in a German university’ (quoted in Levin (1988), 79). 40 See Levin (1988), 80. See also Steinberg (1996) and Jennings (1987), most notably Chapter 4.

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of Kantian formalism and Hegelian historicism. Artistic styles, as he sees it, are based upon ‘principles of form’ (Gestaltungsprinzipien), which in turn are grounded in the way the world is perceived in a certain epoch. This idea is contained in Riegl’s important concept Kunstwollen (desire for art), which he defines as ‘the relation of man to things as they appear to the senses: the manner in which man wishes to see each thing shaped or colored thereby comes to expression.’41 The idea that artistic styles express shifts in perception and cognition was very important for Benjamin. 42 Riegl’s Hegelianism, however, consisted in his belief that this history developed according to an evolutionistic logic. Benjamin, by contrast, rejects any theory that considers art history in terms of a continuum. This brings us to the second meaning of Benjamin’s remark that there is no such thing as art history. In the essay on Fuchs, as well as in two important review essays, ‘Literary History and the Study of Literature’ (1931) and ‘Rigorous Study of Art’ (1932), he turns against the ‘false universalism of the methods of cultural history’ (SW 2, 460; III, 285). His objections against it run parallel to the argument in ‘On the Concept of History’. On the one hand, he rejects a teleological account that reduces the individual work of art to a link in a naturally evolving developmental history. On the other hand, he rejects a historist or museological account that reduces art history to a series of reified ‘cultural goods’, honouring great ‘masterpieces’ as in a pantheon. Both accounts fail to do justice, in his view, to the singularity of the work of art, which in itself should be regarded as an ‘organon of history’ (SW 2, 464; III, 290). To do this, however, implies that one must not only understand a work of art as a ‘reflection’ of its time, but must also consider it in its relation to one’s own time, ‘to represent the age that perceives them – our age – in the age during which they arose’ (SW 2, 464; III, 290). According to Benjamin, a work of art has a ‘life’, which is not, however, like human life, determined by superseding generations and ancestral relations. Rather, the life of the 41 Riegl quoted in Jennings (1987), 157. 42 We can recognize Riegl’s influence, for instance, in Benjamin’s remark on impressionism in ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’: ‘The daily sight of a lively crowd may once have constituted a spectacle to which one’s eyes needed to adapt. On the basis of this supposition, one may assume that once the eyes had mastered this task, they welcomed opportunities to test their newly acquired ability. This would mean that the technique of Impressionist painting, whereby the image is construed from a riot of dabs of color, would be a reflection of experiences to which the eyes of a big-city dweller have become accustomed. A picture like Monet’s Cathedral of Chartres, which looks like an image of an ant-hill of stone, would be an illustration of this hypothesis’ (SW 4, 350; I/2, 628).

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work of art is determined by interpretation, criticism, and translation. At first glance this conception may seem similar to Gadamer’s notion of Wirkungsgeschichte (effective history), which thrusts the work of art forward in history. For Benjamin, however, our understanding of a work of art is not exclusively dependent on its history. It might also work the other way around: newer works of art force us to revalue and reinterpret art history. The meaning of earlier works of art might sometimes be determined only in light of new phenomena, even if these are in no way influenced by the earlier ones. This is what he means when he writes that ‘it is the present that polarizes the event into fore- and after-history’ (AP, 471; V/1, 588). Our present is not necessarily determined by the past, as Gadamer believes. Rather, it alters the way we conceive of the past: expressionist literature changes our understanding of the Baroque mourning play, while glass architecture by Gropius and Le Corbusier forces us to rethink the meaning of the Parisian arcades. Benjamin’s research on the history of art is never after the ‘authentic’ meaning of a work of art, its causal traces or influences on, Rather, it is after, precisely, forgotten and neglected prefigurations. In his view, the historian might not only give new life to old phenomena (thus ‘redeeming’ them) but also shed a different light on the new ones. 43 As Benjamin writes in the essay on Fuchs, a theory of art that proceeds in this way: blasts the epoch out of its reified ‘historical continuity’, and thereby the life out of the epoch, and the work out of the lifework. Yet this construct results in the simultaneous preservations and sublation of the lifework in the work, of the epoch in the lifework, and of the course of history in the epoch (SW 3, 262; II/2, 468).

In Origin of German Tragic Drama he refers to this procedure with the category ‘origin’ (Ursprung), which is, he stresses, not to be confused with genesis (Entstehung). While the concept of genesis entails the emergence of the object from history, origin refers rather to the disruption of historical continuity by an object. ‘Origin is the eddy in the stream of becoming’ (O, 45; I/1, 226). In other words, it describes the movement of an object against the current of history. It is the Ur-sprung, the primal leap, from history. To 43 As Jennings (1987) writes: ‘The prehistorical object reveals its character – its place in the constellation – only retrospectively, in light of the later, monadologically charged text. Similarly, we achieve full recognition of the object at hand only through the deepest penetration into the mysteries of its precursor’ (179).

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think of an artistic phenomenon as ‘origin’ means that its meaning is not fixed but changes over time and is never complete. Thus the work of art becomes a reservoir of endless potential meanings that lay dormant until they are awoken at the moment in which they become legible. 44 The concept of ‘origin’ in this usage is inspired by the Goethean concept of the ‘ur-phenomenon’ (Urphenomen) (I/3, 953-954). In the ur-phenomenon lies the potential of a whole spectrum of phenomena derived from it. Goethe speculated, for instance, about the existence of an ur-plant, which would contain within itself the entire physiognomy and developmental history of plant life (and would hence be the empirical embodiment of botanical theory, crystallized in an individual exemplar). Similarly, Benjamin’s concept of ‘origin’ implies that an entire history is folded into the life of a single work. Hence it would be possible to ‘discover in the analysis of the small individual moment the crystal of the total event’ (AP, 461; V/1, 575). The individual work becomes a ‘microcosm’ or, as he sometimes calls it, a ‘monad’. 45 According to the seventeenth-century philosopher Leibniz, monads were the ‘simple’ substances of which the universe consists. Although, according to Leibniz’s metaphysics, there are an infinite number of monads, each one is a multiplicity in unity and a ‘living mirror of the universe.’46 Benjamin adopts Leibniz’s monad as a metaphor, expressing the idea, already discussed above with regard to the dialectical image, that a new light is shed on the totality of history through the close analysis of its tiniest fragments: Where thinking suddenly comes to a stop in a constellation saturated with tensions, it gives that constellation a shock, by which thinking is crystallized as a monad. The historical materialist approaches a historical object only where it confronts him as a monad. In this structure he recognizes the sign of a messianic arrest of happening, or (to put it differently) a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past (SW 4, 396; I/2, 702). 47 44 See Caygill (1998), 57. 45 Benjamin’s ‘micro-philological sense’, as Ernst Bloch once called it, was not restricted to theory. He collected miniatures, toys and dolls, and was fascinated by miniature handwriting. Scholem (1965) writes how, one time when he was visiting his friend in Paris, he was dragged along to an exhibition, where a ‘kindred soul’ had inscribed the complete Shema Israel (an important Jewish prayer) on two grains of wheat (121). 46 Rescher (1991), § 56. For an extensive discussion of Benjamin’s monadology in relation to Leibniz, see Weber (2008), Chapter 16. 47 Benjamin sometimes uses the monad as a synonym for the dialectical image. Compare, for instance, the quoted passage from ‘On the Concept of History’ with the following formulation

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To regard the work of art as a monad means, in other words, to regard it as a constellation in which dialectical counterparts – past and future, dream and awakening, melancholy and activism – collide. In the monad, an historical experience that up until then had been suppressed becomes ‘legible’ or ‘recognizable’ for the first time. The metaphor of the ‘constellation’ is also of importance here, for it points to the idea of a non-subsumptive, non-hierarchical and non-causal ordering of phenomena, a mode of cognition that is not, in Kant’s terms, ‘determinative’. 48 It refers, furthermore, to the concept of montage we saw earlier. Thinking in constellations means extracting an object from its place in the historical continuum (i.e., from causal relations) and placing it into a new context, thus resulting not only in a new meaning for the object but also in a different understanding of the whole. The connection of the concepts of monad and dialectical image with the method of montage, however, also raises the question already touched on in the preceding chapter. For if, indeed, the monad and the dialectical image depend on the ‘construction’ of the historian, how are we to know whether we are indeed dealing with an ‘objective historical constellation’, as Rolf Tiedemann formulates it?49 How do we know we are not dealing with a purely arbitrary heap of images of the kind produced by the allegorist? How can Benjamin guarantee that his constellations are more truthful than the Baroque poet’s juxtaposition of counterparts? One can doubt whether such a guarantee can in fact be found in Benjamin’s work. The only guarantee that there is a difference between the arbitrariness of the allegory and the messianic objectivity of the constellation seems to be, as Max Pensky puts it, Benjamin’s own conviction that ‘this distinction does and must exist.’50 Benjamin seems to think that the success of the (art) historian, like that of Proust’s involuntary memory, depends on chance. Although the historian’s constructive activity, as well as his ‘presence of mind’, is a necessary condition for a truthful image of history, it is not a sufficient condition. When and whether a certain phenomenon becomes legible lie beyond his power to discern. The question of whether from the Arcades Project: ‘Where thinking comes to a standstill in a constellation saturated with tensions – there the dialectical image appears’ (AP, 475; V/1, 595). 48 As Benjamin states in Origin of German Tragic Drama: ‘Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars. This means […] that they are neither their concepts nor their laws’ (O, 34; I/1, 214). 49 ‘Daß jedes Gewesene erst in einer bestimmten Zeit erkennbar wird, ist nicht der Willkür des Historikers anheimgegeben, sondern stellt eine objective geschichtliche Konstellation dar’ (Tiedemann in the editor’s introduction, V/1, 33). 50 See Pensky (1993), 138. See also Chapter 6.

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the dialectical image is subjective or objective therefore remains undecided, or at least suspended. The problem of subjectivity is already expressed in the passage from ‘On the Concept of History’ quoted above, where the historian is both attempting to actively construct the monad (his thinking ‘gives a shock’) and passively waiting for it (the object ‘confronts him as a monad’). Here we see Benjamin’s messianism at work once more. In his view, ‘every second [is] the small gateway in time through which the Messiah might enter’ (SW 4, 397; I/2, 704). However, one cannot enforce his arrival, only hope for and anticipate it. Or, formulated in materialist terms: the objectivity of the construction produced by the materialist historian is guaranteed only by the revolutionary moment that brings the historical continuum to a halt and hence crystallizes it into a monad. However, this brings us right back to the problem of the relation between the historian and the politician. A truthful image of history seems dependent upon the revolutionary moment, while the revolution seems dependent upon the ‘consciousness-raising’ work of the materialist historian. One might nevertheless point to a notable difference between dialectical image and allegory. While the allegorist (or the historist) considers themselves capable of being objective, and for this reason falls prey to arbitrariness, the historical materialist is aware of the impossibility of intentional objectivity. Unlike the historist, they respect the authority of the object itself, the sedimented experience present in it. This receptiveness towards the object, which is nothing other than the ‘presence of mind’, gives them at least the opportunity of capturing an objective image of history.51 To be sure, this remains a mere chance: the materialist historian bets on the weak messianic force that is granted to us by past generations. Indeed, Benjamin’s distinction between allegory and dialectical image is quite subtle, and it is not certain it will hold in specific situations. I will come back to this issue in the next chapter, where I discuss the difference between the allegorist and the ‘collector’. One might say that Benjamin belongs, as he himself writes of Goethe, ‘to the family of great minds for whom there is basically no such thing as art separated from life’ (SW 2, 173; II/2, 720). However, his assertion that there is no such thing as art history in no way implies that he thinks of works of art as ahistorical or atemporal.52 Rather, it means that he wants to revolutionize 51 The ‘death of intention’ is a recurring idea in Benjamin’s work, and lies at the basis of his principle of montage (cf. O, 36; I/1, 216 and AP, 463; V/1, 578). 52 See Wohlfarth (1996).

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art history through his monadological and messianic understanding of the work of art. To conceive of art history in terms of an autonomous development means to neglect the monadological character of the work of art, which entails, in his view, that the work of art in itself contains the shards and traces of an entire epoch. The work of art, in other words, is a source of historical knowledge, a seismograph of shifts in experience caused by new technologies, new modes of production, and new ways of living. Moreover, to think of art history as an organic whole and a continuum is to regard the meaning of a work of art as fixed once and for all, while for Benjamin works of art, old and new, bear the potential for an infinite number of experiences, depending on what constellations they enter into with other historical moments and other works of art. An organic view of art history neglects, most importantly, how a work of art might have the potential to interrupt historical continuity: In every true work of art there is a place where, for one who removes there, it blows cool like the wind of a coming dawn. From this it follows that art, which has often been considered refractory to every relation with progress, can provide its true definition. Progress has its seat not in the continuity of elapsing time but in its interferences – where the truly new makes itself felt for the first time, with the sobriety of dawn (AP, 474; V/1, 593).

However, despite Benjamin’s sound critique of historism and historicism, and despite the quality of his own analyses of art works, he does not elaborate a theory of the relation of art and society.53 Adorno was probably the first to point this out, when, in his infamous letter on Benjamin’s essay ‘The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire’, he criticizes the ‘asceticism’ of his friend’s method. Benjamin, in his view, presents ‘impenetrable layers of material’ (ABC, 281; ABB, 265) concerning the social context of Baudelaire’s poetry. Although he suggests a relationship between them, he never actually spells out the exact nature of this relationship. His writing thus tends, according to Adorno, towards the ‘wide-eyed presentation of mere facts […]. If one wanted to put it rather drastically, one could say that your study is located at the crossroads of magic and positivism. This spot is bewitched. Only theory could break this spell’ (ABC, 283; ABB, 368). A discussion of this critique of ‘asceticism’ will have to wait until the conclusion of this chapter. If I now turn my attention to Adorno, however, the fact is that this 53 See Tiedemann (1973), 125.

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‘theory’ on the relation between art and history, which he found lacking in Benjamin’s work, is one of the primary objectives of his own aesthetics. It remains to be seen whether Adorno succeeds where Benjamin, at least in Adorno’s eyes, fails.

3.5

Adorno: experience and mimesis

Adorno fully endorses Benjamin’s diagnosis of the loss of experience. In his Minima Moralia (1951), his reflections on ‘damaged life’, as the subtitle reads, he relates the precarious state of experience to the Second World War, describing it in terms reminiscent of his friend’s essays ‘Experience and Poverty’ and ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’: The Second War is as totally divorced from experience as is the functioning of a machine from the movements of the body, which only begins to resemble it in pathological states. Just as the war lacks continuity, history, an ‘epic’ element, but seems rather to start anew from the beginning in each phase, so it will leave behind no permanent, unconsciously preserved image in the memory. Everywhere, with each explosion, it has breached the barrier against stimuli, beneath which experience, the lag between healing oblivion and healing recollection, forms. Life has changed into a timeless succession of shocks, interspaced with empty, paralyzed intervals (MM, 54; 4, 60).

But although the loss of experience might have its climax in the Second World War, Adorno believes, again like Benjamin, that it was long prepared for in history. In Dialectic of Enlightenment he even goes as far back as Homer’s Odyssey, whose protagonist for him becomes the ‘image’ of the dialectic of myth and enlightenment, hence therefore also showing the first signs of the decay of experience. Myth, according to Horkheimer and Adorno, is the result of people’s fear of the forces of nature. By attributing human or animal qualities to them and by soothing them with sacrifices, humankind seeks to eliminate this fear. Insofar as it is aimed at negotiating with nature and liberating humanity from nature’s blind course, ‘myth is already enlightenment’ (DE, xviii; 3, 16). Sacrifice, they argue, is already a primitive form of rationality, an attempt to increase one’s fortune through trade: the hind for the daughter, the lamb for the first-born (DE, 6; 3, 26). Myth, however, proves inadequate for the domination of nature, since it still subjects people to the whims of the gods,

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and therefore cannot take away fear completely. Odysseus embodies the first step out of myth and towards enlightenment. He is the first human who does not stand powerless against the forces of nature, but overpowers and outwits them instead. He does it, furthermore, not through brute strength, but with ‘cunning’, as the epithet of Homer reads. Odysseus constantly discovers the secret clause in the contract between man and the gods. This enables him to avoid sacrifice, for instance in his voyage past the Sirens. The gods demand that he pass the island of these creatures, which lure sailors to the cliffs with their seductive songs. Stuffing his oarsmen’s ears with wax and letting himself be tied to the mast, he manages to survive the voyage past the Sirens, while still fulfilling the demand of the gods. But according to Horkheimer and Adorno, Odysseus’s escape from sacrifice means the prolongation of sacrifice, albeit to a new god, namely the ‘self’: ‘The identical, enduring self which springs from the conquest of sacrifice is itself the product of a hard, petrified sacrificial ritual in which the human being, by opposing its consciousness to its natural context, celebrates itself’ (DE, 42; 3, 71-72). The modern self emerges, the authors argue, from the disciplining, suspension and denial of one’s immediate urges. In several scenes of the Odyssey – for instance the one in Polyphemos’ cave, the seduction of the goddess Circe, or the confrontation with the disloyal maidens of Ithaka – Odysseus pains himself to refrain from immediately acting on his emotions, only to strike with even greater violence at a well-chosen moment. In order to survive, he has to become ‘nobody’, as he introduces himself to the Cyclops. The origin of the unity of the subject is thus the sacrifice of the present self to a future one, and the suppression of one’s inner nature. Enlightenment rationality, of which Odysseus is the urform, is an instrument against fear and an extension of the will to survive. The transition from myth to enlightenment, therefore, involves neither a linear process nor straightforward progress. Myth and enlightenment, according to Adorno and Horkheimer, relate dialectically: ‘Just as myths already entail enlightenment, with every step enlightenment entangles itself more deeply in mythology’ (DE, 8; 3, 28). Following Max Weber, the authors understand modernity as the process of rationalization and disenchantment. In the course of this process, human reason develops one-sidedly into identity thinking – what Jay Bernstein calls the ‘rationalization of reason’.54 Identity thinking has eyes only for those aspects of an 54 ‘Because demythologisation not only overturns beliefs and eliminates a certain range of objects, but equally destroys the forms which had mediated subject and object, then the disenchantment of nature is at the same time a rationalization of reason’ (Bernstein (2001), 33).

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object that are calculable, and subsumable under the concept, and thereby ignores and abstracts from its particularity. Reason, to become legitimate universally, succumbs to the ‘principle of immanence’, which demands that the intellectual action of subsumption is repeatable. It thus becomes the weapon against the anthropomorphism and animism of myth, but at the same time reproduces the ‘eternal recurrence’ characteristic of mythical time (DE, 8; 3, 28). The authority of experience, dependent on the encounter with sensuous particularity, falls victim to the rationalization of reason. According to Adorno and Horkheimer, however, this results in an intellectual regression too: The standardization of the intellectual function through which the mastery of the senses is accomplished, the acquiescence of thought to the production of unanimity, implies an impoverishment of thought no less than of experience; the separation of the two realms leaves both damaged (DE, 28; 3, 53).

Their point is, in other words, not that rationality damages experience, but rather that a form of rationality from which experience is abstracted is no longer fully rational. Rationality is entangled in nature, as a mere instrument of the will to survive, precisely in its attempt to move away from and gain full control over nature. It remains part of nature’s blind logic of domination. Reason’s utopian promises of happiness and freedom from fear, voiced by enlightenment philosophers, are thereby betrayed. In a fully rationalized and administered world, Adorno and Horkheimer argue, relations between human beings and between humankind and nature have become as rigid as the rule of the gods once was; the next financial crisis lurking around the corner has come to replace the wrath of Zeus as the object of our foreboding. As has often been noted, Adorno reads Marx through Weber’s analysis of modernity and Lukács’s critique of reification.55 The alienation of the worker from nature, from labour and from themselves (through wage labour), the domination of people by technology (through industrialization and machine work) and the commodification of all aspects of human life are understood from the perspective of the disenchantment of nature, the rationalization of society, and the reification of consciousness. Like Weber, Adorno believes that there is ‘a convergence between the intellectualist 55 See Bernstein (2001), 7, and Zuidervaart (1991), 72.

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disenchantment of the world and societal rationalization which tendentially subjects institutions to the norms of instrumental rationality.’56 This is also why Adorno, like Benjamin, accuses enlightenment philosophy, and most notably philosophical idealism, of fostering an impoverished concept of experience. Although Adorno’s critique of idealism, found in some of his most important philosophical writings such as Kierkegaard (1933), Against Epistemology (1956) and Negative Dialectics (1966), is more extensive and complex than Benjamin’s, I can discuss it only very briefly here.57 Adorno primarily targets the role of the subject in idealism. The subject in the idealistic system absorbs nature only insofar as it is of use to it as empirical data – Adorno calls it the ‘belly turned mind’ (ND, 23; 6, 34). As Kant tells us, intuitions are ‘blind’ unless they are subsumed under the categories of cognition. Sensuousness, in other words, has meaning only when this is granted to it by the subject, while the object is known only insofar as it can be manipulated: it is reduced to spiritual content. This reification of experience has consequences for both the object and the subject. The object is conceived of as a fixed entity, its sensuous particularity destroyed through its subsumption under a priori schemas of knowledge. Consequently, however, the object also loses its ability to act as a source for human creativity and spontaneity. The subject, after all, loses its chance at encountering something new and different, something alien to itself, something that could alter the structures of its thought. The world becomes but a mirror of the subject itself. By consequence, Adorno argues, philosophical idealism not only has a poor conception of experience, but eventually also stands in contradiction with itself: it cannot live up to its own claim of objectivity, since everywhere it looks it sees only itself (ND, xx; 6, 10). Adorno’s critique of idealism is, in other words, also an immanent critique. What, then, would a concept of full and unreduced experience be according to Adorno? Such an experience has, as Brian O’Connor formulates it, ‘a structure of reciprocity and transformation.’58 In other words, experience entails a non-dominant interaction between subject and object, in which each has the ability to transform and be transformed by the other. It is this notion of experience that Adorno sets out to ‘redeem’ in his philosophical project. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, we already encounter 56 Bernstein (2001), 9-10. 57 For an elaboration on Adorno’s critique of idealism, see O’Connor (2005). See also Lijster (2017). 58 O’Connor (2005), 3.

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a concept of experience characterized by reciprocity and transformation: mimesis.59 The concept of mimesis, central both to Adorno’s aesthetics and his theory of experience, is quite complex. Benjamin refers to it in his short essay ‘On the Mimetic Faculty’ (1933), where he writes that the gift people have for ‘seeing similarity is nothing but a rudiment of the once powerful compulsion to become similar and to behave mimetically’ (SW 2, 720; II/1, 210).60 Mimesis, as both Benjamin and Adorno conceive of it, is in other words not mere imitation – as Plato understood the term – but a way of relating to one’s environment both receptively and actively. This primordial mode of interaction with the world, Benjamin argues, can still be recognized in the child at play, who adapts to its surroundings even as it transforms them in its play. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer understand mimesis as the ‘remembrance of nature within the subject’ (DE, 32; 3, 58). What they mean by this is that only as soon as the subject remembers that it is itself part of nature will it cease its destructive attempts to control nature in order to take away fear. The dialectical ‘answer’ to the dialectic of enlightenment, then, is that only the subject’s acceptance of the impossibility of emancipating itself from nature will allow it to interrupt the blind course of nature. It is only through this ‘remembrance of nature within the subject’, the authors argue, that ‘enlightenment is opposed in principle to power’ (DE, 32; 3, 58). This dialectical connection between mimesis and enlightenment already counters Habermas’ criticism, that mimesis is ‘the bare opposite of reason’ and a mere ‘impulse.’61 According to Habermas, Adorno and Horkheimer, in their total critique of reason, cut off the path to a positive concept of it. Mimesis, he argues, fails as the grounding concept of a theory of experience, 59 The concept of mimesis is strangely missing in O’Connor’s study, although I believe it to be crucial to his concept of experience. But perhaps this omission is not that strange after all, considering that O’Connor conceives of Adorno’s project as a ‘transcendental’ (xi) one. Mimesis, however, is as much the result of the subject’s encounter with the object, as it has the subject as its basis. Thinking of it as a ‘transcendental’ category therefore raises several problems. The concept of mimesis, in other words, could jeopardize O’Connor’s interpretation of Adorno’s philosophy as transcendental. 60 Benjamin’s essay is not the only source for Adorno’s concept of mimesis (he even fails to mention it). In Dialectic of Enlightenment, the authors refer, for the concept, primarily to the French anthropologist Roger Callois, who was also affiliated with the Surrealist group and the group surrounding Georges Bataille, which Benjamin also frequented. The most elaborate study on the sources and meaning of the concept of mimesis in Adorno remains Früchtl (1986). For a recent account, see Hulatt (2016). 61 Habermas (1981), vol. 1, 522.

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for it is the mere mirror-image of reason, and consequently cannot be theorized. Adorno’s later ‘resignation’ into art, Habermas argues, only proves the impotence of his concept of mimesis.62 Habermas’ criticism, however, does justice neither to Adorno’s aesthetics nor to the concept of mimesis. First of all, Adorno never considered ‘cognition itself […] an expression of social control’, as Richard Wolin suggests in line with Habermas.63 This would imply, after all, that Adorno is pleading for a form of irrationalism, from which however he and Horkheimer distance themselves explicitly (DE, 71-72; 3, 110-111). The philosophical schools of irrationalism, according to the authors, make the same mistake as logical positivism (which they consider one of the pinnacles of identity thinking), namely that of the separation of crucial elements of human experience – sensuousness, bodily experience, emotions, aesthetic experience, and so on – from knowledge and cognition. The only difference is that positivism considers the first category an invalid source of knowledge, while the schools of irrationalism disqualify rational thought. Adorno’s concept of experience, unlike those of Bergson and Heidegger, for instance, is not prereflexive or non-conceptual: concept and object are mediated through each other in a reciprocal relation. Mimesis, therefore, is not opposed to thinking, cognition, or conceptualization per se, but only to identity thinking, and to what Bernstein calls the ‘simple’ concept.64 Mimesis and rationality, like myth and enlightenment, relate dialectically, according to Adorno. ‘The constellation under which sameness is established’, he and Horkheimer write, ‘remains terror’ (DE, 148-149; 3, 205). Mimetic behaviour that is controlled by fear takes the shape of ‘false projection’: If mimesis makes itself resemble its surroundings, false projection makes its surrounding resemble itself. If, for the former, the outward becomes the model to which the inward clings, so that the alien becomes the 62 ‘Erst die Ästhetische Theorie besiegelt dann die Abtretung der Erkenntnis-Kompetenzen an die Kunst, in der das mimetische Vermögen objektive Gestalt gewinnt. Adorno zieht den theoretischen Anspruch ein: Negative Dialektik und Ästhetische Theorie können nur noch hilflos aufeinander verweisen’ (Habermas (1981), 514-515). 63 Wolin (2006), 53. Wolin by and large shares Habermas’s criticism: ‘Once one cedes “knowledge” to the terrain of the enemy – the forces of domination – outlets for critical thought remain negligible or few. Consequently, Adorno’s philosophy risks becoming a quirky profession of intellectual impotence’ (Wolin (2006), 53). 64 The ‘simple’ concept, in Bernstein’s view, is the Kantian concept, that is, the a priori category under which intuitions are subsumed. It is ‘the concept conceived as wholly independent from its mediations’, and therefore ‘the bearer and medium of rationalized thought’ (Bernstein (2001), 33).

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intimately known, the latter displaces the volatile inward into the outer world, branding the intimate friend a foe (DE, 154; 3, 211-212).

In this characterization one can recognize the physiognomy of identity thinking as well as philosophical idealism. According to Adorno and Horkheimer, false projection is ‘the reverse of genuine mimesis and has deep affinities with the repressed’ (DE, 154, 3, 211). It is, in other words, not merely the negation and mirror-image of mimesis, but also its pathological excess. Fear of animated nature results in a mode of thinking that is as cold and calculative as the disenchanted world it creates: ‘The reason that represses mimesis is not merely its opposite. It is itself mimesis: of death’ (DE, 44; 3, 75-76). Identity thinking, as the mimesis of death, turns itself against anything animated in nature, and therefore also against mimesis itself. The subject comes to regard itself as the sole producer of meaning and hence becomes forgetful of the surplus of meaning in the object, that is, the object’s meaning beyond the meaning projected onto it by the subject. The impoverishment of experience, in Adorno’s view, consists exactly in this forgetfulness. The disenchantment of nature is expressed in the suspicion philosophy has had, ever since Plato, of sensuousness, and therefore of art. In the process of rationalization, sign and image, which in primordial understanding form a unity, are separated: ‘As sign, language must resign itself to being calculation and, to know nature, must renounce the claim to resemble it. As image it must resign itself to being a likeness and, to be entirely nature, must renounce the claim to know it.’ (DE, 13; 3, 34). Adorno and Horkheimer argue, however, that the extremes touch: science as understood by logical positivism becomes a form of aestheticism devoid of the urge to transcend what already exists – a science for science’s sake – while art, most notably in realism, becomes the mere duplication of the world. The possibility of changing that world is lost along the way. Art, according to Adorno, is a ‘refuge for mimetic comportment’ (AT, 69; 7, 86). The aesthetic experience for him functions as the model of a full and unreduced experience, consisting in a relation of reciprocity and transformation between subject and object. The subject is confronted with an object he does not understand but which nevertheless calls upon his understanding. The object carries with it a meaning of its own, a meaning not ascribed to it by the subject. In the case of art, this incomprehensibility arises from the functionlessness of the work of art: because the work lacks a purpose, the subject cannot understand what it is for. In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno writes that ‘the mimesis of artworks is their resemblance to themselves’ (AT, 137;

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7, 159). It is not clear what kind of object the artwork is, and hence it refuses to be reduced to some a priori category of cognition. It is identical only to itself, which is another way of saying that it is a sensuous particular. Again, this does not mean that Adorno argues that art is irrational. Rather, ‘art is rationality that criticizes rationality without withdrawing from it’ (AT, 71; 7, 87). It does not withdraw from rationality, but is mindful of rationality’s rootedness in nature and sensuousness, respecting and recognizing ‘the delicacy and richness of the outer perceptual world’ (DE, 156; 3, 214). As such it is the model of a reconciliation of mimesis and rationality.65 Let us now take another look at Habermas’ criticism of Adorno and his concept of mimesis. On closer inspection, mimesis turns out neither to be the mere reverse image of rationality nor to aim at a total critique of rationality, as Habermas claims. Rather, Adorno argues that enlightenment’s conception of rationality, as identity thinking, is too narrow and should be expanded.66 Only when we are mindful of the dialectic of mimesis and rationality will we be able to interrupt the one-sided conception of rationality as domination. The false projection of identity thinking, Adorno argues, should be opposed by ‘conscious projection’, in which the subject ‘has the external world within its own consciousness and yet recognizes it as other’ (DE, 156; 3, 214). Furthermore, Adorno’s concern for art and aesthetics does not mark, as Habermas argues, a ‘resignation’. Obviously, one can consider aesthetic theory a resignation only if one accepts the strict distinction between knowledge and aesthetic experience, as Adorno certainly does not. Such a distinction, in fact, is itself part of the rationalization of reason which bans from the realm of cognition anything that does not fit into neat categories. In that way, art is reduced to a ‘Sunday’s delight’ (ANS, 22), as happens in the culture industry. The hypostasized distinction between art and cognition, or between art and society, has its source not in Adorno but in Habermas himself, who uncritically accepts and hypostatizes the Kantian/ 65 Andreas Pradler (2003) writes: ‘Im Kunstwerk gelingt im Gegensatz zur Gesellschaft der Ausgleich im Verhältnis von Mimesis und Rationalität. Das Kunstwerk kann daher für Adorno als Paradigma der Versöhnung von Rationalität und Mimesis gelten’ (171). One should note, however, that, according to Adorno, this reconciliation is possible only in its failure. As he writes in Aesthetic Theory: ‘The aporia of art, pulled between regression to literal magic or surrender of the mimetic impulse to thinglike rationality, dictates its law of motion; the aporia cannot be eliminated. The depth of the process, which every artwork is, is excavated by the unreconcilability of these elements; it must be imported into the idea of art as an image of reconciliation. Only because no artwork can succeed emphatically are its forces set free; only as a result of this does art catch a glimpse of reconciliation’ (AT, 71; 7, 87). 66 See Bernstein (2001), 31-32.

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Weberian division of the value spheres. By contrast, Adorno regards the work of art as the place where full experience is still possible and hence as the model of what an expanded form of reason and cognition might look like.67 However, if the work of art is the locus of full experience, this raises the next question of how the work of art relates to the process of rationalization and disenchantment, and, moreover, of how it is possible that the work of art is the expression of this process, or, in Adorno’s words, a ‘seismogram of reality’ (14, 379). The answer lies in his dialectical understanding of the artwork, as a mediation of the whole in the parts. In Hegel: Three Studies (1963) Adorno writes that, in Hegel, ‘nothing can be understood in isolation, everything is to be understood only in the context of the whole, with the awkward qualification that the whole in turn lives only in the individual moments’ (HTS, 91; 5, 328).68 The same applies to Adorno’s conception of the work of art as part of the social whole. However, because Adorno does not regard the social whole as the reconciliation of its parts, as Hegel does, but rather as their forced subsumption and false sublation, the work of art for him is not merely the expression of the whole but also a criticism of it, or, in Adorno’s terms, its ‘determinate negation’ (bestimmte Negation). By determinate negation he means that the particular constitutes itself through a negation of what it is not, namely the (negative) whole. The whole is present in the work of art as a negative imprint, but the work of art, as a negation of the negative, sides with the particular, thus bearing the traces of its suffering and repression. This dialectic of parts and whole, or of particular and universal, can be recognized on different levels. In the first place, art expresses the process of rationalization and disenchantment (and hence the impoverishment of experience) through its very autonomy. Adorno writes: ‘Art is the social antithesis of society’ (AT, 9; 7, 19). In other words: art’s very opposition to society, the fact that it has no social function and has been driven out of society, is itself a social fact. The separation and alienation of art from society is, in Adorno’s view, a sign of suffering, for it signifies that the nondominative relation between parts and whole that is characteristic of art is not part of the world. In its very functionlessness and meaninglessness, 67 For a detailed criticism of Habermas, see Lijster (2015), Bernstein (1993), most notably 246, and Hullot-Kentor (2006), 32. 68 Adorno’s interpretation of Hegel is strongly influenced by Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness (1929). Lukács (1977) writes: ‘Das Hinausgehen über die Empirie kann […] nur soviel bedeuten, daß die Gegenstände der Empirie selbst als Momente der Totalität, d.h. als Momente der sich geschichtlich umwälzenden Gesamtgesellschaft erfaßt und verstanden werden’ (346).

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therefore, the work of art gives voice to what is repressed by identity thinking. Hence it constitutes an ‘outrage’ (AT, 75; 7, 93) for society.69 Because Adorno regards the work of art as the social antithesis of society, he is deeply suspicious of so called ‘committed’ art. Committed art – for instance the political theatre of Brecht and Sartre – implies that the artwork is able to transmit a clear and unambiguous political message. In Adorno’s view, such a view can only result in bad politics as well as bad art. Committed art reduces the work to an instrument and therefore is the mere extension of identity thinking, as well as the covert expression of the bourgeois ideology that one should ‘get something out of it’. In his essay ‘Commitment’ (1962) Adorno writes: ‘This is not the time for political works of art; rather, politics has migrated into the autonomous work of art’ (NL 2, 92-93; 11, 430). On yet a different level, art constitutes within itself the dialectic of mimesis and rationality. While the post-1848 bourgeois ideology likes to regard art as a nature reserve for the irrational, art’s immanent movement follows the social process of rationalization. Like Weber in his sociology of music, Adorno considers rationalization the central category for understanding the development of art, although he adds that art is also the placeholder for what falls victim to this process (16, 13-14). The development of Western art, in his view, tends towards increasing control over the artistic ‘material’, an ever-increasing primacy (and visibility) of technique and construction, terminating in modernism’s fully constructed works. This process of rationalization, however, functions differently in art than in society. In art, it results in works that refuse to provide immediate pleasure, thus becoming all the more functionless.70 In this way, art simultaneously makes the countermove against rationalization by becoming a place for sensuous particularity to exist without the necessity of being functional. Through the process of rationalization, therefore, art creates the possibility of escaping social rationalization, namely its reduction to a function. This is art’s cunning, through which it smuggles mimesis, like a Trojan horse, into rationality: 69 Habermas’ criticism of Adorno’s aesthetics as ‘romantic’ therefore also misses the point. While the romantics consider the work of art to be the place where ‘we are able to think and to couple together even what is contradictory’ (Schelling), Adorno regards it rather as the expression of the contradiction itself. It is, in other words, not the plaster but the wound (7, 353). See also Menke (1999), 249. 70 This is, as I noted in the preceding chapter, the point of convergence of the absolute artwork and the absolute commodity. Because the fully constructed work lacks a purpose, it is exchange value throughout. Adorno’s concept of the artistic ‘material’ will be discussed at length below.

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The opposition of artworks to domination is mimesis of domination. They must assimilate themselves to the comportment of domination in order to produce something qualitatively distinct from the world of domination. […] Aesthetic rationality wants to make good on the damage done by nature-dominating rationality (AT, 470; 7, 430).

According to Adorno, the most rational, ‘objective’ (sachlich) and most thoroughly constructed works of art (he mentions the examples of Schoenberg, Kafka and Picasso) are at the same time the most expressive.71 At a third level, art relates to society as a form of labour. Since thinking about the relationship between art and society can easily lead to ‘historicophilosophical mystification’ (AT, 308; 7, 350), Adorno argues that we should consider this relationship in strictly materialist terms. In his view, the work of art is not external to society and somehow ‘reflecting’ it, but is, as a product of labour, part of the social process. As if to emphasize the materialist nature of this relationship he uses Marxist terminology: ‘Social forces of production, as well as relations of production, return in artworks as mere forms divested of their facticity because artistic labor is social labor’ (AT, 308; 7, 350-351). Relations of production in the arts entail the relation of artist and public (patronage or the anonymous market), while artistic forces of production, in Adorno’s view, consists of both technological means of (re)production and the artistic mastery over the material (technique).72 He argues, furthermore, that forces and relations of production relate dialectically. While shifts in relations of production influence productive forces (for instance, the style galant as a result of the emerging middle-class audience), shifts in productive forces also influence relations of production (for instance, the ‘regression’ of listening because of reproduction technologies).73 Consequently, Adorno argues that the social nature of art is not to be found in its subject matter (as in committed art) but rather in its technique. Artistic technique, he writes in Introduction to the Sociology of Music, is the tertium comparationis between base and superstructure: ‘What it embodies in art as something commensurable to the human subjects and at the same time independent of them is the social state of the productive forces in an 71 Adorno’s dialectical pairing of ‘construction’ and ‘expression’ runs parallel to ‘rationality’ and ‘mimesis’ (Cf. AT, 55-57; 7, 72-74). 72 Adorno makes use of the double sense of the German noun Technik as technology and technique. 73 See Zuidervaart (1991), Chapter 5.

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epoch’ (ISM, 216; 14, 418). The development of technique, or what he calls the ‘tendency of the artistic material’, runs parallel to rationalization in society. The rationalized work of art, thus gives expression to the crisis in experience and hence is able to provide us with the experience of the impossibility of experience. This means that the social import of the work of art is independent of the social consciousness of the artist. According to Adorno, society is present in the technical problems the artists encounters and in their attempts to resolve them. Despite Adorno’s attempts to avoid ‘historicophilosophical mystifications’, it has been precisely this notion of the ‘tendency of the material’ that has raised many questions. Apart from his somewhat strained translation of art history in terms of ‘forces’ and ‘relations of production’, many theorists have had difficulties with Adorno’s alleged Hegelianism, expressed in a teleological conception of the history of art. This suggestion of teleology is most prominent in his Philosophy of New Music, where Adorno seems to presume a universal and teleological history of music that forms the basis for his harsh attacks on the allegedly ‘regressive’ composer Stravinksy. Edward Said, although sympathetic to Adorno, calls him ‘a creature in the Hegelian tradition, which presumes an inescapable historical teleology that incorporates everything in its relentless forward path.’74 Adorno’s Hegelian view on the history of art is often contrasted with Benjamin, who, as we have seen, rejects the concept of progress and the universality of the historical continuum.75 If, however, Adorno’s philosophy of music is teleological, that would contradict not only Benjamin’s philosophy of history, but also his own. Before turning to his theory of the artistic material, we should therefore take a look at Adorno’s philosophy of history, which he first developed in the essay ‘The Idea of Natural History’ (1932), and later in Negative Dialectics. In these texts he distances himself from the idea of a telos of history. Rather, he believes that history takes a necessary course only as long as it remains entangled in the domination of nature (Naturbeherrschung). This entanglement itself, however, is contingent. As long as we do not realize this, there can be neither history nor experience in the strict sense, for as Bernstein writes: ‘There cannot be historical life without experience; only lives articulated through experience can be fully and self-consciously historical.’76 If we subsequently read Adorno’s philosophy of art history 74 Said (1991), xvi. 75 See, for instance, Jennings (1987), 43. 76 Bernstein (1997a), 203.

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through the lens of his reflections on ‘natural history’, a Hegelian reading of it becomes problematic.

3.6

Natural history

It must be an irony of intellectual history that there has emerged a caricature of Adorno as an ‘inverted’ Hegel who regards history as an unstoppable process of decline – and who can therefore be lumped together with other famous cultural critics of the twentieth century such Oswald Spengler and Jose Ortega y Gasset – since he always argued against such views of history as a natural process.77 This distorted image comes primarily from Dialectic of Enlightenment, which is counted among the ‘blackest’ books of modernity, as Habermas puts it.78 The alleged pessimism of Adorno’s work in general, and of Dialectic of Enlightenment in particular, is often attributed to the fact that it was written during, and in the wake of, the darkest epoch of Western history, if not human history. Adorno’s view of history, however, is informed primarily by philosophical rather than biographical motives. His suspicion of the notion of ‘progress’, which he shared with Benjamin, was already developed in the early 1930s and in close correspondence with the latter’s work. Moreover, the image of Adorno as a cultural pessimist is wrong, since his philosophy of history cannot be understood as teleological.79 Adorno’s philosophy of history can be captured by the term ‘natural history’ (Naturgeschichte), which he first used in a 1932 lecture, ‘The Idea of Natural History’.80 His use of the concept, as he underlines, has nothing to do with its customary meaning in the natural sciences. Nature, as he defines it, is ‘closest to the concept of myth’, namely to that ‘what has always been, what as fatefully arranged predetermined being underlies history’ (INH, 253; 1, 345-346). History, by contrast, he defines as ‘that mode of conduct established by tradition that is characterized primarily by the occurrence 77 See for instance his essay ‘Spengler after the Decline’ (1941) (P, 51-72; 10.1, 47-71). 78 Habermas (1985), 130. 79 Arguing against Habermas, Hullot-Kentor (2006) remarks that ‘the charge of pessimism is more pessimistic than the pessimism it claims to perceive. Even pessimism is dialectical, and especially in Adorno’s case the relentlessness of his life’s work can hardly be attributed to a lack of hope for change, but only to the most naïve optimism, which was continually transformed – by the refusal to compromise – into an instrument of cognition’ (29). 80 One of the main objectives of this lecture is to respond to Heidegger’s concept of ‘historicity’, which Adorno criticizes as the reduction of history to nature. Since this critique is not relevant for my present purposes, I will not discuss it further. But see O’Connor (2005), 161-164 and Hullot-Kentor (2006), 234-251.

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of the qualitatively new’ (INH, 253; 1, 346). History and nature are, in other words, opposites, characterized respectively by the new and the ever-thesame. According to Adorno, however, their relation is dialectical, and by introducing the term ‘natural history’ he wants to catch this dialectic in a single word, Naturgeschichte. Moreover, the term is programmatic for Adorno, as it points to the necessity ‘to comprehend historical being in its most extreme historical determinacy, where it is most historical, as natural being’ while comprehending ‘nature as a historical being where it seems most deeply in itself as nature’ (INH, 260; 1, 354-355). To explain what he means by this, he refers to the work of Lukács and Benjamin. Lukács, in his Theory of the Novel, argues that we are living today in a world of meanings, social structures and conventions that have been created by people but nevertheless confront us as though they are nature: lawful and necessary. These meanings, although historically produced, become for us a ‘second nature’. The problem raised by this second nature, and for which the idea of natural history is to provide the key, is how nature might be transformed back into history, or as Adorno puts it: ‘how it is possible to know and to interpret this alienated, reified, dead world’ (INH, 261; 1, 356). Although Adorno adopts Lukács’ formulation of the problem, he disagrees with his solution. Lukács envisioned a resurrection of the alienated world, either in a metaphysical sense (in Theory of the Novel), or in a political sense (in History and Class Consciousness), namely through the proletariat as the subject of history. Adorno turns to Benjamin’s book on the Baroque, where he approaches the problem in a more contemplative way, namely as a problem of ‘philosophical interpretation’. In allegory, as Benjamin had argued in Origin of German Tragic Drama, nature is conceived as eternal transience, which means that it has a history. The Baroque emblems of the skull, the ruin, and the corpse present nature as temporary and in flux. This ‘eternal fleetingness’, however, becomes a sign of hope when the allegorical gaze is directed towards history: ‘In the language of the Baroque, the fall of the tyrant is equivalent to the setting of the sun’ (INH, 264; 1, 360). As Adorno points out, ‘the deepest point where history and nature converge lies precisely in this element of transience’ (INH, 262; 1, 357-358). The idea of natural history, in other words, marks the dialectical movement in which the polar opposites of nature and history are considered in terms of each other. It points, first, to the reification of historical phenomena and their transformation into mythic nature, that is, into something which seems unchangeable by human intervention. This reified ‘second’ nature, however, is then considered in terms of nature’s transience, which points to the temporariness of all earthly powers. Hence the idea that natural history

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denies history’s necessary course and points to the possibility of something genuinely new and truly historical. It is therefore clear that, as Roger Foster remarks, ‘one of the main intentions of the idea of natural history is to resist the teleological reading of history.’81 Adorno remains true to this early text in later writings on the philosophy of history, not only in Dialectic of Enlightenment but also in the essay ‘Progress’ (1962) and in Negative Dialectics.82 How is it possible, then, that Adorno is so often suspected of being a crypto-Hegelian and accused of considering history in terms of a natural process? Several passages in his work fuel this misunderstanding. Consider, for instance, an often-quoted passage from Negative Dialectics: ‘No universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leading from the slingshot to the megaton bomb’ (ND, 320; 6, 314). How should we understand this ‘universal’ history, which indeed seems to imply a teleological movement and hence an inversion of Hegel? In the dialectic of universal and particular, as Adorno argues, Hegel chose the side of the universal, that is, of the world spirit that moves over the heads of the individual actors (ND, 327; 6, 321). Hegel’s affirmation of the actual course of history, and his reduction of suffering to some kind of collateral damage in the historical ascent of spirit is, in Adorno’s view, not only ‘objectively’ wrong, but also wrong according to the premises of Hegel’s dialectics. Dialectical thought, he argues, forbids sacrificing the particular to the universal unless the former can be wholly sublated into the latter. Such a sublation, however, would entail a non-dominative totality, in which particularity is not subjected to the demands of the universal. A non-dominative totality would cease to be a totality in the strict sense, as Adorno explains for the concept of ‘humanity’: ‘If humanity were a totality that no longer held within it any limiting principle, then it would also be free of the coercion that subjects all its members to such a principle and thereby would no longer be a totality: no forced unity’ (CM, 145; 10.2, 619). Since such a totality is not actual, philosophy’s true interest lies with ‘nonconceptuality, individuality, and particularity’ (ND, 8; 6, 20), in short with those things that Hegel labelled faule Existenz. Still, Adorno argues, the idea of universal history has in it a moment of truth as well as of untruth. History up until now has in fact been a 81 Foster (2007), 28. 82 This fidelity to the idea of natural history can also be recognized in the lectures on history and freedom (Zur Lehre von der Geschichte und von der Freiheit (1964/65) (ANS 13). I will not discuss these lectures here, since most of their content can already be found in ‘Progress’ or later found its way to the second ‘model’ of Negative Dialectics, which treats the philosophy of history.

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continuum, insofar as it has been governed by humankind’s domination over nature, which is extended, as he argues in Dialectics of Enlightenment, to the domination of some people by others, and by people of their own inner nature. As long as history is ruled by the urge to control nature, it remains under nature’s spell as the continuation of domination and the blind will to survive. The moment of untruth in universal history, however, lies in the idea that this process is as inevitable and unstoppable as a law of nature. Adorno summarizes this dialectic as follows: ‘The thesis that society is subject to natural laws is ideology if it is hypostatized as immutably given by nature. But this legality is real as a law of motion for the unconscious society’ (ND, 355-356; 6, 349). The idea of universal history, therefore, does not simply contradict Adorno’s anti-teleological view of history, but it is a moment in the dialectic of his idea of natural history. Even if the actual course of history up until now has been a history of domination, this does not mean that history must necessarily be so. It does not presume, in other words, an ontology or telos of history. One should note, furthermore, that Adorno is here in full agreement with Benjamin, whose angel of history perceives a ‘permanent catastrophe’ where we see progress. In the very phrase, ‘permanent catastrophe’, continuity and discontinuity of history collide, which is why Adorno adopts it as his alternative definition of the world spirit (ND, 320; 6, 314). And, again like Benjamin, Adorno believes that this false continuum of history is to be shattered. Consequently, Adorno can hardly be accused of pessimism if this means the belief that disaster is inevitable. In ‘Progress’ he argues that ‘progress should be no more ontologized, unreflectedly ascribed to Being, than should decline’ (CM, 147; 10.2, 622). He even proceeds to defend the idea of progress against sceptics and pessimists, since the fact that progress up until now has not taken place does not mean that it is impossible. Furthermore, the undeniable progress of technology, which has led us from the slingshot to the atomic bomb, also harbours the possibility of real progress. Once technology has reached a certain stage, deprivation, inequality, and war can no longer be regarded as products of nature: ‘In the age of the bomb a condition can be envisaged for the first time in which violence might vanish altogether’ (CM, 153; 10.2, 629). Progress, in other words, is neither necessary nor impossible. According to Adorno, true progress would entail precisely our emancipation from the necessary course that history has taken thus far: Progress means: to step out of the magic spell, even out of the spell of progress that is itself nature, in that humanity becomes aware of its own

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inbred nature and brings to a halt the domination it exacts upon nature and through which domination by nature continues. In this way it could be said that progress occurs where it ends (CM, 150; 10.2, 625).

Only once we become aware of history as the universal history of the domination over nature, are we able to bring it to a halt, turning it in a different direction. In Adorno’s view, this is possible only through reason, ‘the principle of societal domination inverted into the subject’ (CM, 152; 10.2, 626). To be sure, Adorno has in mind here a form of reason that is richer than identity thinking (which is, after all, the sheer extension of domination), a kind of reason that reflects upon itself and recognizes within itself a moment of nature. In spite of the oft-heard accusation against Adorno’s thought of the infinite mirroring of the thinking subject, he conceives of this self-reflection of reason as a ‘transition to praxis’: ‘The anti-mythological element in progress cannot be conceived without the practical act that reins in the delusion of spirit’s autarky. Hence progress can hardly be ascertained by disinterested contemplation’ (CM, 153; 10.2, 628). In order to break the spell by which history confronts us as mythic nature, we have to see through it: as in a fairy tale, we have to call it by its name. This also means that, as long as we regard history as a meaningless succession of facts – positivistically – we remain blind to its fatal course as well as to the significance and structures of historical events. Adorno writes: ‘Universal history must be construed and denied’ (ND, 320; 6, 314). This is precisely how one should understand his and Horkheimer’s dark presentation of Western history in Dialectic of Enlightenment: as the construction of a universal history, whose universality is subsequently denied. Therefore, Adorno’s view of history might be read not in terms of a teleology of decline or as an inversion of Hegel, but rather, as Axel Honneth puts it, in terms of a radical redescription of history that discloses and criticizes the ‘pathologies’ of society.83 The theory of history, in Adorno’s view, has a performative dimension: the presentation of history as nature and of enlightenment as myth is to nourish the urge to break out of it. By consequence, the theory of history also has an aesthetic or rhetorical moment. Without a doubt, Dialectic of Enlightenment is exaggerated, but only because it is its authors’ conviction that ‘only exaggeration is true’ (DE, 92; 3, 139). One might call this the ‘cunning’ of Adorno’s philosophy of history. Only by first constructing a necessary history can history be emancipated from this necessity. 83 Honneth (2007), 57. In recent years, more attention has been paid to the rhetorical aspect of Dialectic of Enlightenment. See, for instance, Geulen (2006), 90-111, and Helmling (2009).

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To be sure, this still leaves open the question of whether the view of history in Dialectic of Enlightenment is a useful construction, and whether it actually contributes to our understanding of history. I believe it does, insofar as it sheds light on such important concepts as ‘progress’ and ‘enlightenment’ that up till today are often used carelessly, and sometimes even in politically dubious ways. Nevertheless, we should also take seriously the criticism by Slavoj Žižek, who argues that Horkheimer and Adorno, by translating ‘class struggle’ and ‘capitalism’ into ‘rationalization’ and ‘instrumental rationality’, perform a ‘shift from concrete socio-political analysis to philosophico-anthropological generalization.’84 Adorno’s historicophilosophical concepts, in other words, are not historically specific enough. The Hegelian pairing of universal and particular, which dominates his work, often causes his analyses to remain stuck on the level of the ontological. The constant ‘detour’ of mediation makes it difficult for him to get more specific than the ‘history of the West’ or suffering per se. Benjamin’s writings, which lack this omnipresence of mediation, generally exceed Adorno’s in historical specificity. Adorno, however, repeatedly criticized his friend’s vulgar-Marxist reduction of superstructural phenomena to the base, which was precisely the result of this lack of mediation. This difference of approach is further discussed in the conclusion of this chapter.

3.7

The tendency of the material and the crystallization of the monad

The idea of the ‘tendency of the material’ occupied Adorno starting from the late 1920s, when he developed it in dialogue with his friend and fellow composer Ernst Křenek, although it was not brought to full fruition until Philosophy of New Music.85 There it became part of Adorno’s attempt to think through the mediation between the work of art and the social whole in thoroughly materialist terms. In his view, society is ‘inscribed’ in works of art neither through their subject matter nor through the intention of the politically committed artist, but through the way in which parts and whole relate to each other within the work of art itself (12, 39-40). 84 Žižek (2000), 112. This strand of critique is already expressed by Adorno’s former mentor, Siegfried Kracauer, who, in a protocol of a ‘Talk with Teddie’ in 1960, writes: ‘His sociological concepts are much too wide to be able to characterize any social reality’ (Adorno and Kracauer (2008), 516). 85 See Adorno’s and Křenek’s 1930 dialogue, ‘Arbeitsprobleme des Komponisten’ (19, 433-439). For an elaborate discussion of the developmental history of Adorno’s theory of the musical material, see Paddison (1993), Chapter 2.

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‘Material’ should not be read here as the ‘raw’ materials that the artist has at their disposal, for instance the sum of all tones or sounds in the case of composing, or the colours and canvas in the case of painting.86 Adorno’s use of the term ‘material’ is both broader and stricter than this – broader, because for him material also includes historical genres, styles and forms. Musical material, for instance, contains melody and rhythm, but also the fugue, rondo and sonata forms. At the same time, Adorno conceives of material as determining what is artistically possible at a certain moment in history. Unlike the composer and theorist Paul Hindemith, who believes the musical material is a natural given, Adorno argues that material develops historically and has a certain ‘tendency’. Consequently, the composer is restricted in their possibilities by the historical state of the material. The tendency of the material entails several things. In the first place, it refers to the idea that the history of art is part of the dialectic of enlightenment, in the shape of the progressive rationalization of the artistic ‘means of production’. Perspective in painting and polyphony in music are two historical examples of artistic ‘mastery of nature’ mentioned by Adorno (AT, 276; 7, 313). Secondly, Adorno believes that tradition passes on certain technical problems, with which artists find themselves confronted. These problems bear within themselves their ‘objective solutions’, so that the minimal task of the artist is ‘that of mediating between the problem that confronts him and is already determined, and the solution, which is itself similarly lodged in the material as a potential’ (AT, 219; 7, 249). Although works of art, in Adorno’s view, do not succeed each other continuously, he does believe that they stand under ‘the unity of the problem posed’ (AT, 274; 7, 312). This also means that, once a certain problem is solved, its solution ‘ages’. According to Adorno, the tendency of the material produces what he calls a ‘canon of prohibitions’. By this he means, not that styles and genres run out of fashion, but rather that solutions create new problems for which they themselves cannot provide the solution. Furthermore, old solutions become unfit for contemporary expressive needs and are therefore, in his view, objectively untrue. It is easy to see why Adorno’s philosophy of music might be accused of harbouring a Hegelian teleology, in which art cunningly passes over the heads of individual artists and works its way towards its ultimate resolution. Indeed, Adorno seems to presume a dominant tendency in the history of art, and, furthermore, criticizes artists who do not follow this tendency as ‘conservatives’. There is, however, another strand of reasoning in Adorno’s 86 When referring to these ‘raw’ materials, Adorno uses the term Stoff.

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philosophy of art history, which runs counter to a teleological reading of it. In Aesthetic Theory Adorno argues that the history of art is ‘inhomogeneous’ (AT, 273; 7, 310). Continuities in its history are constantly affected and interrupted by shifts in society. The emergence of a bourgeois audience in the eighteenth century, for instance, brought along a whole new set of demands and rules; composers have to take into account new standards of taste, but also such a seemingly trivial thing as the size of an audience (think, for instance, of the invention of the grand piano). These interruptions, in turn, generate new problems and new material. Problems can also be repressed and forgotten, or even consciously ignored, as is the case for avant-garde artists who reject tradition. For Adorno, finally, progress in achieving control over the material does not necessarily entail progress in the quality of artworks (AT, 276; 7, 313). Although composing without a central key, for example, offers more technical possibilities, it does not necessarily lead to better compositions. On the contrary, indeed: as we have seen, Adorno conceives of the emergence of serialism in terms of ‘disintegration’.87 The emancipation of music from ‘natural’ tonal relations dialectically turns into a reified ‘second nature’. In his essay ‘The Aging of New Music’ (1955) Adorno warns of the ‘danger of dangerlessness’ (EM, 181; 14, 143) lurking in serialism.88 The new generation’s tendency towards ‘total rationalization’ (EM, 191; 14, 155), which follows the course set out by Schoenberg, threatens to eradicate the moment of subjective expression in music, without which it would be nothing but a mathematical equation. This critique of serialism resembles Adorno’s interpretation of the Odyssey in Dialectic of Enlightenment. Like Odysseus, it survives and escapes from nature only by sacrificing the part most valuable to itself. The answer to this fatal dialectic is to be found, once more, in the idea of natural history. In music, too, Adorno argues, second nature should be transformed back into history: the musical material cannot speak for itself, but must stand in a reciprocal relationship to the composing subject. In the essay ‘Vers une musique informelle’ (1961), he further pursues this ideal of what can be considered a ‘mimetic’ mode of composing, in which the subject is neither extinguished in a preordained system, nor forces upon the musical material its arbitrary will. ‘Informal’ music, for Adorno, would be such that ‘the ear eagerly hears the material, what has become of it’ (16, 87 See Chapter 2.7. 88 For an excellent discussion of this essay, see Hullot-Kentor (2006), 169-179, who draws an interesting parallel between Adorno’s critique of serialism and Benjaminian ‘antisubjectivity’. I will come back to this critique in the conclusion to this chapter.

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538). And as Robert Witkin notes, the model for this ideal of an ‘informal’ music is not Schoenberg, but rather Gustav Mahler – a composer who is famous for his redemption of forgotten folk and kitsch tunes rather than for his great technical innovations.89 Adorno’s interpretation of Mahler, which will be discussed in the next chapter, would henceforth place the alleged teleology of his philosophy of music in a different light. At the very least, it points to an ambivalence in his view of the history of art. Even if the teleology of Adorno’s philosophy of music cannot be the whole story, one might still question whether Adorno’s theory of material succeeds in clarifying the mediation between the work of art and society. Max Paddison mentions the ‘relative obscurity’ of Adorno’s theory of material, while Rose Rosengard Subotnik speaks of the ‘indirect, complex, undocumented, and rather mysterious process of mediation.’90 The obscurity of his theory contrasts with the far-reaching conclusions Adorno himself sometimes draws from it, such as his conviction that tonal composing and figurative painting are no longer possible, as well as with his harsh judgment on composers such as Tchaikovksy, Stravinsky, and Sibelius. Obviously, Adorno considers the history of music from the perspective of the posteighteenth-century Western music tradition, and more specifically the Austro-German line that leads from Bach and Beethoven to Wagner and Schoenberg. Especially today, such a one-dimensional development of art is hardly convincing. It would probably be more plausible to presume that different tendencies and several materials can exist next to each other, as Peter Bürger, for instance, has suggested.91 An evaluation of all works of art by the standard of one dominant tradition would not only be insufficient in light of actual art history, but would also fail according to the standards of Adorno’s own aesthetic theory, which demands that each work be treated as a sensuous particular. Once we keep in mind, however, that for Adorno the universality of history is both to be constructed and to be negated, it might be possible to understand the theorem of the ‘tendency of the material’ in a different way. History, as a universal, is a construction that can be changed with every particular work of art.92 This is why Adorno, like Benjamin, conceives of 89 Witkin (1998), 110. 90 Paddison (1993), 149, and Rosengard Subotnik (1991), 38. 91 Bürger (1979), Chapter IV. 92 As Roger Foster (2007) writes, ‘The universal is not brought to bear as a classification of the particular (where this implies the abstraction of a common property), it is rather constructed; the universal is simply the totality formed by the different chains of relational significance that make the object intelligible as the kind of object that it is’ (2).

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the work of art as a monad: ‘The artwork is both the result of the process and the process itself at a standstill. It is […] a monad: at once a force field and a thing. Artworks are closed to one another, blind, and yet in their hermeticism they represent what is external’ (AT, 237; 7, 268). In other words, the whole history of art, and through it the history of the world, is present in the singular work. Unlike Benjamin, however, Adorno considers the artistic monad in terms of the mediation between universal and particular. Society is present in the work of art as the whole is present in its parts, which is why he conceives of artworks as the ‘self-unconscious historiography of their epoch’ (AT, 240; 7, 272). However, as Adorno’s Benjaminian characterization of the work of art (as the ‘result of the process and the process itself at a standstill’) signifies, the individual work can also bring the historical continuity to a halt, thus granting us the opportunity to see, and criticize, the whole: ‘The explosion of appearance blasts open the continuity of this inner temporality’ (AT, 112; 7, 132). This is why Adorno calls it a ‘principle of method’ that ‘light should be cast on all art from the vantage point of the most recent artworks, rather than the reverse’ (AT, 454; 7, 533). The history of art, in other words, is to be read against the grain. For instance, Adorno argues that one understands Bach only if one understands Schoenberg. The latter took seriously Bach’s promise of a truly polyphone music, one that reconciles the horizontal (successive) and vertical (simultaneous) dimensions of music. This problem had been forgotten by classicism, with its primary focus on the vertical dimension (harmony). These kinds of unfulfilled promises, and not some ‘Hegelian plotline’, are what determine the ‘necessity’ of history for Adorno, as Claudia Brodsky points out.93 If we adopt this alternative reading of Adorno’s philosophy of art history, the accusation that he regards the entire history of music as teleologically tending towards the Second Viennese School misses the point. Schoenberg, then, is not the telos of history, but functions as an extreme case that enables Adorno to retrospectively reread the history of music as a history of increasing rationalization. The question is, however, whether this somewhat Benjaminian reading of Adorno proposed here can succeed entirely. There remains a tension between the idea that works of art are ‘windowless’, sealed off to one another, and the idea that there is a tendency in the artistic material to relate works to each other. It seems as though Adorno wants to do for the theory of art history what Schoenberg did for music, namely to reconcile the horizontal axis (connecting the work of art to art history) with the vertical 93 Brodsky (2010), 87.

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axis (connecting the work of art to society), while simultaneously respecting the ‘sensuous particularity’ of the singular work. Such an enterprise can only lead to contradictions. Adorno’s disclaimer that ‘a noncontradictory theory of the history of art is not to be conceived’ because ‘the essence of its history is contradictory in itself’ (AT, 275; 7, 313) can hardly make up for this. The tensions in his theory are to be resolved only if one considers the ‘unity of the problem’ and the ‘tendency of the material’ as non-dominative constructions. This does not mean that the history of art becomes entirely subjective or arbitrary, or completely fictitious. After all, the concept of the monad, in both Adorno’s and Benjamin’s philosophy, entails the reciprocal (or ‘mimetic’) relationship of subject and object as well as of past and ‘now’.94 The subject may construct history, but it can only do this with the fragments that lie before it.

3.8 Conclusion Experience, for both Benjamin and Adorno, is the reciprocal and transformative relation between subject and object, humankind and nature, or individual and tradition. This relation is jeopardized in modernity, because of the rationalization of the production and reproduction of human life under capitalism. The work of art, which they conceive of as a repository for, and medium of, experience, registers the waning of experience. Benjamin traces the loss of experience in the decline of storytelling and in the poetry of Charles Baudelaire. In Benjamin’s reading of it, Baudelaire marks the shift from experience proper to isolated experiences. For Adorno, the very alienation of art from society registers the repression of ‘mimetic’ experiences outside the realm of art. Hence the autonomy of art is the ‘wound’ giving evidence of the suffering of sensuous particularity in a fully rationalized world. Both Benjamin’s and Adorno’s understanding of works of art is materialist, although not in the sense of a causal reduction of art to history. Rather, they read the work of art as a physiognomist does a face: society is inscribed on its very surface. The decline of experience, they further argue, distorts our conception of historical time. Capitalism, in Benjamin’s words, reproduces mythical time, by which he means that it turns history into a necessary and inevitable train 94 ‘Der Geschichtsphilosoph errichtet qua Eingedenken und qua Konstruktion neuer geschichtlicher Anordnungen ein Konstrukt, daß es der Wahrheit ermöglicht, als selbsttätige Macht aufzutreten’ (Scholze (2000), 42).

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of events. Effacing the traces of its violence, it retrospectively produces an historical continuum, reducing all of history to the necessary process from which it emerges. This forces us to reframe the question about the relation between art and history. Instead of reducing the work of art to its place in history (as the historist does), one should ask how the work of art relates to one’s own place in history. Both Benjamin and Adorno propose an alternative approach to history: as a construction. For Benjamin, the historian is to construct a ‘discontinuous tradition’ of the oppressed, digging out the failed possibilities of emancipation from the ruins of history. According to Adorno, the historian is to construct a universal history of domination over nature. By simultaneously regarding history as natural (second nature) and nature as historical (transient), he points to the possibility of historical change. The work of art, for both, harbours the possibility of this alternative approach to historical experience. Giving evidence of forgotten suffering and unfulfilled promises, it forces us to consider the totality of history in a different light. Conceived of as a ‘monad’, the work of art breaks the spell of historical progress, brings it to a halt, and therefore provides the potential for real progress. The similarities between the ways Benjamin and Adorno consider the relations between experience, history, and art are evident. In the literature, however, their differences have drawn more attention. Habermas’s distinction between critique directed at unveiling hidden structures of power (consciousness-raising) and critique aimed at the conservation of lost and forgotten forms of life (rescuing) has already been mentioned. Richard Wolin adopts this distinction to point at a fundamental difference between Benjamin and Adorno: ‘For Benjamin theory possesses an inalienable constructive or redemptive function; for Adorno its task is to aid in the ideology-critical unveiling of socially engendered false consciousness.’95 Although there is certainly some truth in this distinction, I disagree with Wolin that this is more than a difference in emphasis. We have already seen that Benjamin’s notion of ‘redemption’ presupposes a ‘conscious-raising’ moment, in the sense that we have to become conscious of the unnecessary suffering of past generations in order to ‘redeem’ their suffering through a political intervention. Conversely, Adorno’s dialectical thinking contains an undeniably ‘redemptive’ moment: if enlightenment is myth, and the new is the ever-the-same, this also means that for him our only hope of breaking the spell is contained in myth and the ever-the-same, namely in nature. This is what the idea of natural history is all about: discovering nature, as 95 Wolin (1994), 182.

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transience, in history as second nature.96 It is, moreover, the very reason why Adorno ‘rescues’ semblance. In the self-conscious semblance of the modernist work of art, myth becomes enlightened. There is a difference, however, between their rescue attempts, in terms of the nature of each. Benjamin points to the positive dimensions of the decline of experience; for him the poverty of experience not only signifies the loss of authentic tradition, but also the emancipation from a false tradition. The construction of the discontinuous tradition of the oppressed is to be prepared for by the work of the ‘destructive character’. From this historical ‘gamble’ speaks the hope that something good might arise from the destruction of something bad. There is no guarantee that it will, however – it remains a mere potentiality – and for this very reason Adorno could not endorse Benjamin’s decisionism. Benjamin, as he writes in the letter about the work-of-art essay, responds to his fear of barbarism by ‘elevating the feared object with a kind of inverse taboo’ (ABC, 130; ABB, 171). Here Adorno definitely has a point when he accuses Benjamin of ‘anarchism’. Conversely, however, Adorno sometimes tends towards nostalgia, in spite of his justified suspicion of it.97 Notwithstanding his scorn for the Heideggerian ‘jargon of authenticity’, Adorno’s own reflections on ‘damaged’ life raise the question of whether life was ever undamaged. Another aspect of this difference concerns the question of what exactly is to be rescued. The material in Benjamin’s Arcades Project – flâneur, rag picker, panorama, arcade – contains, in his view, the experience of a form of life that has become obsolete, but that carries within it the potential of a new form of life. Furthermore, this potential is visible only at the moment in which it becomes obsolete. This is why that moment is precisely the ‘now’ in which the potential should be actualized; an actualization that would simultaneously entail the redemption of ‘pre-history’. The work of art, in Benjamin’s view, is thus concerned with alternative technologies and forms of life that did not find, or have not yet found, their way into the world, which is why he emphasizes the element of ‘play’ in the work-of-art essay. Adorno considers the work of art primarily in terms of semblance, namely the semblance of sensuous particularity. Sensuous particularity, repressed in a world governed by identity thinking, is ‘rescued’ in the work of art, which is why he considers it a ‘promise of happiness’. While Benjamin considers the work of art primarily in terms of a hopeful anticipation of future happiness, Adorno sees in it, rather, the mark of a failed chance. 96 See Hullot-Kentor (2006), 248-249. 97 See Jay (2005), 360.

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A second difference often discussed in the literature is the role of the critical subject. The absence of subjectivity is one of Adorno’s central concerns about Benjamin’s work, as he writes in a response to the 1935 ‘Exposé’ for the Arcades Project: ‘The subjective side of the dialectic vanishes before an undialectically mythical gaze, the gaze of the Medusa’ (ABC, 110; ABB, 146).98 Adorno was under the impression that his friend’s unfinished work ‘was to consist solely of quotations’ (P, 239; 10.1, 250) and was very sceptical of Benjamin’s theoretical ‘asceticism’. The mere juxtaposition of facts, the mere montage of material, is insufficient, in his view, to break the spell of mythical natural history. The attempt to let the material speak entirely for itself, which Adorno recognizes in Benjamin no less than in serialism, will damage both theory and the material itself.99 One can question, however, whether Adorno’s criticism, which is often uncritically adopted in the literature, does justice to Benjamin’s method.100 This is not the place to go into detail about the place of the first Baudelaire essay within a planned book on Baudelaire, of which the other parts would perhaps have met Adorno’s demand for theory, or into speculations about what the Arcades Project might have looked like if Benjamin had found the ‘philosopher’s stone’ (ABC, 118; ABB, 156) that he needed for the construction of his study.101 Taking into account Benjamin’s concept of experience and his philosophy of history, it is clear that it was never his intention to get rid of the subject. There remains an undeniably ‘subjective’ moment in his work, insofar as the ‘constellation’ depends on the historian’s constructive work as well as on his own historical experience.102 The historian, Benjamin argues, has to be fully aware of his own historical moment, which consequently is written in his work with ‘invisible ink’ (AP, 476; V/1, 595). The collision of past and ‘now’, of thinking and thought object, is what Benjamin’s monadology is all about, as he points out in a response to Adorno: The appearance of closed facticity which attaches to philological investigation and places the investigator under its spell, dissolves precisely to the 98 He uses a similar formulation in the essay ‘A Portrait of Walter Benjamin’ (1950): ‘Between myth and reconciliation, the poles of his philosophy, the subject evaporates. Before his Medusan glance, man turns into the stage on which an objective process unfolds. For this reason, Benjamin’s philosophy is no less a source of terror than a promise of happiness’ (P, 235; 10.1, 246). 99 See Hullot-Kentor (2006), 176. 100 Authors adopting Adorno’s criticism are for instance Jay (2005), 357 and Honneth (2009), 57. 101 For this discussion, see Buck-Morss (1989), 205-215. 102 See Pensky (1993), 223.

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degree in which the object is construed from a historical perspective. The base lines of this construction converge in our own historical experience. In this way the object constitutes itself as a monad. And in the monad everything that formerly lay mythically petrified within the given text comes alive (ABC, 292; ABB, 380).

The monad, as Benjamin stresses, depends on the historian’s ‘presence of mind’. The ‘death of intention’ concerns the impossibility of willed objective meaning, but this does not mean that this meaning can exist without the work of the critical subject. The latter, in other words, does not dissolve or vanish in the monad, but is placed in a reciprocal and transformative, or in other words a dialectical, relation with its object, much as is the case in the experience of (natural) aura, or, for that matter, in Adorno’s concept of mimesis. The latter concept, after all, also contains the crucial moment of the subject’s readiness to be absorbed by its surroundings, and hence the willingness to conceive the object in its own terms. A third difference concerns their views on the relation between (material) history and the work of art, or, in Marxist terms, between base and superstructure. As we have seen, Benjamin argues that there exists an ‘expressive’ relationship between the two. This theory, however, is hardly developed. Furthermore, Benjamin’s notion of the ‘base’ is quite idiosyncratic, consisting not only of industrialization and technology, but also of life in the metropolis, the emergence of big-city masses, and the poet’s ‘empathizing’ with the commodity. Adorno, criticizing the lack of theory in Benjamin’s essay on Baudelaire, writes to him to say that he considers it ‘methodologically inappropriate to give conspicuous individual features from the realm of the superstructure a “materialist” turn by relating them immediately, and perhaps even causally, to certain corresponding features of the substructure’ (ABC, 283; ABB, 367). This accusation of vulgar materialism, of a causal reduction to the base, clearly misses the point, as Benjamin does not fail to reply (ABC, 292; ABB, 380). Benjamin does not reduce elements of the superstructure to elements in the base, but rather juxtaposes these different elements in a ‘constellation’. Here, however, lies the crucial difference with Adorno, who understands Marx’s base-superstructure model from the perspective of Weber’s concept of rationalization and Lukács’ concept of reification. The rationalization of Western society entails the differentiation of relatively autonomous value spheres, while the concept of reification implies that art becomes alienated from life. Adorno adopts, furthermore, Lukács’ ‘re-Hegelization’ of Marx, which entails that the universal (the social whole) and the particular

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(the individual) are mediated through each other and relate dialectically. Adorno, like Hegel and Lukács, conceives of society as the ‘totality’, although, unlike Hegel, he uses totality as a critical concept.103 The work of art, in his view, is the negative imprint of the false totality of history, rather than the expression, reflection, or effect of some specific social-historical fact. The historical process of the rationalization of society finds its way into art only through technique, and expresses itself in the ‘tendency of the artistic material’. This mediation between particular and universal is missing in Benjamin, as Adorno is right to note, which is also why Benjamin, unlike Adorno, argues that there is no such thing as art history. There is, in Benjamin’s view, an immediate relation between art and history. Such immediacy can only seem ‘vulgar’ to Adorno, who argues instead that ‘the materialist determination of cultural traits is only possible if it is mediated through the total social process’ (ABC, 283; ABB, 367). Adorno’s continual demand for more ‘mediation’ in Benjamin’s work, however, raises the question of whether his own aesthetic theory really benefits from the omnipresence of mediation. The universality of mediation between parts and whole results in a tension in his theory between the ‘unity of the problem’ and the ‘tendency of the material’ on the one hand, and sensuous particularity and the ‘windowlessness’ of the artistic monad on the other. To resolve this tension, I have proposed a ‘Benjaminian’ reframing of Adorno that regards the ‘tendency of the material’ as a retrospective construction from the perspective of the individual work of art. The stress on mediation, however, tends to distort the historical specificity of Adorno’s analyses, which threaten to relapse into generalizations. It often seems as though Adorno wants to reduce everything to a problem of ‘whole’ and ‘parts’. In this regard, he indeed remains a ‘creature’ of Hegel, as Said put it. One could say that while Adorno might be the better dialectician, Benjamin appears to be the better materialist. Giorgio Agamben writes: ‘The only true materialism is one which radically abolishes this separation [of base and superstructure], never seeing in concrete historical reality the sum of [the two], but the direct unity of the two terms in praxis.’104 However, in his defence of Benjamin and his vehement attack on Adorno, Agamben fails to see that, for Adorno, the distinction between (and hence the mediation of) base and superstructure is not an ontological invariant but a historical given. The ‘spiritualization’ (Vergeistigung) and alienation 103 See Jay (1984), 266. 104 Agamben (1993), 133.

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of art from life, in Adorno’s view, are neither to be hypostasized nor to be denied. Agamben’s proposal, in line with Benjamin, that we think the relation between base and superstructure neither as ‘one of causal determination nor one of dialectical mediation, but one of direct correspondence’ is therefore equally insufficient, for it neglects the relative autonomy of art as a historical truth.105 We are, therefore, left with a problem. While Benjamin lacks a theory of the mediation of art and society, since he considers their relation as one of ‘direct correspondence’, Adorno does have such a theory in the shape of the mediation between particular and universal, of which, however, the Hegelian logic is unsatisfactory. I believe, however, that even if one refuses to embrace either Benjamin’s ‘direct correspondence’ or Adorno’s ‘universal mediation’, it might be possible to adopt their idea of the work of art as ‘monad’ as a heuristic principle, namely, as the catalyst of a reframing and retrospective construction of history from the perspective of the present. This idea is pursued further in the second excursus.

105 Agamben (1993), 132-133.



Excursus II – Base and Superstructure Reconsidered History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. ‒ James Joyce, Ulysses

We sometimes say that certain works of art capture the ‘essence’ of their time. Either because of their innovative technique, or because of a certain theme or story, these works are said to ‘resonate’ with the world outside, as if they are an expression or crystallization of social forces in an historical epoch. But what exactly does it mean to say that? What is the relation between the work of art and the age it is supposed to ‘express’, and how does such a relation come about? Can we even think of a ‘time’ apart from all the cultural expressions constituting it? Questions such as these arose during the nineteenth century, when philosophers began to concern themselves with the differences between specific epochs, peoples, and cultures, and began to regard works of art as symbols or symptoms of those epochs, peoples, and cultures. Herder argued, for instance, that through art we are able to gain knowledge of the ‘spirit of the age’, of the way a culture (either ancient or contemporary) looks at itself and the world. Likewise, Hegel claimed in his Lectures on Aesthetics that the fine arts are an important source for our understanding of the wisdom and religion of earlier peoples, and hence of the developmental history of ‘spirit’.1 According to the nineteenth-century French critic Hippolyte Taine, it would be possible to ‘map’ seventeenth-century France by drawing parallels and analogies ‘between a hedge at Versailles, a philosophical and theological argument of Malebranche, a prosodic rule prescribed by Boileau, a law of Colbert on mortgages, a compliment in the waiting room of the king at Marly, a statement of Bossuet about the kingship of God.’2 Art, according to these thinkers, resonates with the dominant cultural, ideological and religious beliefs of a certain age, and hence provides the key to understanding a culture. One of the most influential paradigms of cultural analysis has been Marxism. Karl Marx’s views on art and culture are in line with these 1 2

Hegel (1970), I, 21. Quoted in Jameson (1972), 324-325.

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nineteenth-century conceptions, with the crucial difference that, whereas the above-mentioned authors regard human consciousness or ‘spirit’ as the driving force of history, Marx argues that this force is in fact the material (re) production of social life: ‘It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.’3 To explain this, he uses his famous metaphor, already mentioned in the preceding chapter, of base and superstructure, in which the socioeconomic base ‘determines’ the political and ideological superstructure. As Raymond Williams remarks, this metaphor ‘has been commonly held to be the key to Marxist cultural analysis.’4 From the start, however, it raises several questions. How does the base ‘determine’ the superstructure? Should we conceive of their relation as a causal, an expressive, or a functional one? Does the metaphor imply that the superstructure has no influence on the base? How can the base be said to determine the superstructure when it seems evident that in all strata of society altogether different laws are active? Today, many theorists believe that the problems of the base-superstructure metaphor are so extensive that it has lost all plausibility. I believe, however, that postmodern culturalism, in rejecting the Marxist framework, has jeopardized the critical potential of cultural analysis. Drawing on Benjamin’s and Adorno’s monadology, as well as on theories of Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek, I suggest an alternative path to understanding the base-superstructure metaphor.

Struggling with a metaphor In spite of Marx’s tremendous influence on and interest in cultural analysis, he himself wrote very little on the methodology of studying art and culture. His famous metaphor of base (sometimes also referred to as ‘structure’ or ‘infrastructure’) and superstructure is not systematically elaborated upon anywhere in his work. In consequence, we have little more to work with than these few, but very famous, lines from his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859): In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material 3 4

Tucker (1978), 5. Williams (1973), 3.

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productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general.5

The socioeconomic ‘structure’ or base, according to Marx, consists of forces of production, such as raw materials, tools and technologies, and relations of production, such as the relation between master and slave, feudal lord and serf, or capitalist and worker. The superstructure, Marx argues, consists of the political and legal system, religion, and other forms of dominant ideology. The problems begin, however, once we want to know what the relation between base and superstructure precisely entails. Some Marxist theorists argued that this relation was a causal one, which meant that political and cultural developments are caused by economic and technological developments. This would be in line with another Marxian notion, namely that history is thrust forward by the economy, developing according to iron laws. Consequently, the superstructure has no history of its own, but is at any given time caused by the economic base. In The German Ideology (1845–46), Marx and Engels argue that ‘morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness thus no longer retain the semblance of independence.’6 The problem with this line of reasoning is that it fails to do justice to developments in the superstructure, which can never be merely explained by economic developments. Moreover, this simplistic economic reductionism implies that political and ideological struggles play no important role in the course of history; they are, after all, determined by the economy. Such a view is not only in contradiction with Marx’s own conception of history, as the history of class struggle, but it is also politically dangerous, since it implies that human agency per se should be regarded as irrelevant. If history progresses towards emancipation and freedom in accordance with economic laws that are as rigid as natural ones, there is no reason to actively engage in history. Then we can indeed ‘bide our time’, as the social democrat Joseph Dietzgen said. A different reading of the base-superstructure model regards the superstructure as the ‘representation’ of the base. Class relations are then thought to be ‘reflected’ in the superstructure, for instance, in the dominant ideas 5 Tucker (1978), 5. 6 Ibidem, 154-155.

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of an epoch. This would mean, for instance, that works of art produced in a bourgeois society necessarily reflect bourgeois values. This reading of the metaphor also brings with it several problems. It is obviously absurd to believe that the meaning of a work of art can be reduced to its ‘class interests’: even if one were to presume, for instance, that Shakespeare’s portrayal of Richard III is determined by his allegiance to (and dependence upon) the Tudor house, it is evident that this fact does not exhaust the meaning of the play. Moreover, an interpretation of the superstructure as the base’s reflection implies that one regards the superstructure as somehow less ‘real’ than the base. Ideology, politics, and religion, in this reading, are mere derivatives or epiphenomena, relating to the base as shadows are to the objects carried around in Plato’s cave. Nevertheless, it was this interpretation of the base-superstructure metaphor that was at the basis of the Soviet Party’s rejection of all ‘bourgeois’ art in the 1930s, and its implementation of ‘socialist realism’ as the official Soviet culture. Both of these lines of reasoning met with criticism, especially in the field of aesthetics and cultural analysis. For surely it was highly problematic to causally reduce works of art to the socioeconomic situation in which they came into being, or to explain the content of a work of art solely from the class to which its producer belonged? Works of art had to be more than mere ideological justification of the ruling class or ‘reflections’ of a dominant form of (false) consciousness. Had not Marx and Engels themselves used literary works of Cervantes, Balzac and Heine – none of them particularly proletarian authors – in their critique of capitalism? How was that even possible if it is asserted that the tune is exclusively determined by whoever paid the piper? Furthermore, this mechanistic reading was in contradiction with some passages in the work of Marx and Engels themselves. In the Grundrisse, for instance, Marx argues that ‘in the case of the arts, it is well known that certain periods of their flowering are out of all proportion to the general development of society, hence also to the material foundation, the skeletal structure as it were, of its organization.’7 Engels, in a famous 1890 letter to Joseph Bloch, writes that his and Marx’s The German Ideology had to be understood as a polemical attack on the primacy of consciousness in the philosophy of the left Hegelians. He warns that neither he nor Marx had ever meant to argue that economy was the only determining factor for superstructural phenomena. The superstructure, Engels argues, has a ‘relative autonomy’, for which the base is only ‘the 7

Marx (1981), 110.

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ultimately determining factor in history.’ 8 This hardly made matters easier, however, for it left unclear when one could ‘ultimately’ leave the ‘relative’ autonomy of the superstructure for what it was, and proceed with a deduction to the base.9 The insufficiency of Marxian cultural theory was one of the central concerns of the thinkers that we have come to know as the Frankfurt School. They rejected the vulgar mechanistic interpretation of the basesuperstructure metaphor, which in their time was dominant among both Russian Marxists and German social democrats. Their revision of Marxist cultural analysis emerged from the fact that many of Marx’s predictions about the development of capitalism had proven to be wrong. Marx had argued that the workers in the Western European industrialized countries would grow increasingly poor, up to the point that they would have nothing to lose but their chains, after which they would start the revolution.10 World War I had shown, however, that even though all the ‘structural’ conditions for a socialist revolution were in place, the workers massively and enthusiastically followed their national leaders into a destructive war, fighting each other rather than the capitalist system. The only revolution had occurred in a country that, up until then, was mostly still governed by feudal laws. Moreover, the economic crises that struck Germany after World War I in the 1920s, turned out not to be the harbinger of revolution, but rather the catalyst of fascism and nationalism, growing in popularity precisely among the members of the working class. In light of these developments, the Frankfurters argued, Marx’s theory had to be revised. Marx’s failure, they claimed, had to do, not so much with his economic theories, but rather with his underdeveloped theory of ideology and consciousness. In their view, the fact that the revolution had not taken place in Western Europe had nothing to do with the absence of ‘objective’ economic conditions, but rather with a distortion of consciousness. This implied that an interpretation of the relation between the base and superstructure metaphor as causal or ‘reflective’ had to be wrong; the relation was rather a reciprocal one. This is why social psychology and cultural theory became the primary research interests of the Frankfurt 8 Tucker (1978), 760. 9 Louis Althusser (1969), referring to the Engels quote, remarks: ‘In History, these instances, the superstructures, etc. – are never seen to step respectfully aside when their work is done or, when the Time comes, as his pure phenomena, to scatter before His Majesty the Economy as he strides along the royal road of the Dialectic. From the first moment to the last, the lonely hour of the “last instance” never comes’ (113). 10 Tucker (1978), 500.

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Institute, especially during the 1930s, after Max Horkheimer became director.11 The institute’s studies of the terrain of mass media, mass culture, and the ‘authoritarian personality’ lie at the basis of Marxist cultural analysis. The Frankfurt School alters the traditional reading of the basesuperstructure metaphor in four respects. The f irst concerns the fact that they complement Marx with Max Weber. Weber had argued that capitalism should not merely be conceived of as an economic structure, but also as a ‘spirit’. This spirit is not a mere epiphenomenon of the economic base, but motivates actors to become engaged in capitalism and legitimizes their participation in it. In Weber’s view, Protestantism with its crucial notion of a ‘calling’ (Beruf ) had functioned as such a spirit. Protestantism promoted conscientious work, prof it-making and ‘this-worldly’ asceticism – which up until the sixteenth century had been looked upon as morally neutral or even sinful – to the level of moral values. 12 The protestant ethic and the process of rationalization that went along with it, Weber argued, were in no way ‘caused’ by capitalism. The relation between Protestantism and capitalism was contingent, but, once aligned with it, Protestantism propelled the capitalist logic to everhigher levels. Complementing Marx with Weber, the Frankfurt theorists presumed that the relation between base and superstructure is not causal or reflective, but functional. The superstructure is not a derivative or epiphenomenon of the base, but functions as a necessary condition to reproduce the socioeconomic relations that form the base. There is, in other words, no hierarchy between them.13 Second, the Frankfurt School argued that Marx himself had to be further ‘historicized’. Marx might have been correct in noting the primacy of the economic base in nineteenth-century market capitalism, but this primacy was itself a historical phenomenon. The situation at the beginning of the twentieth century revealed a different kind of capitalism, in which politics and ideology suddenly gained a power that Marx could not have foreseen. In the theory of ‘state’ or ‘monopoly’ capitalism it was expected that a few big corporations would destroy smaller companies, eventually merging with the state apparatus. The contours of such a capitalism came into view during the 1930s, not only in fascist countries but also in Stalin’s planned 11 Jay (1973), 21. 12 See Weber (2009). 13 This means that the standard ‘architectural’ reading, of superstructure and base as a building and its fundament, is incorrect. In a conversation, Jay Bernstein proposed the metaphor of a table and its legs: the legs support the table, but the table provides the legs with stability.

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economy.14 The financial crises occurring every few decades could no longer be regarded as a sign of the fact that the system was running on its last legs, as Marx still believed. Capitalism evolved itself along ever-new lines, which meant that the historical ‘progress’ that social democrats were expecting would not come about naturally. Benjamin’s and Adorno’s critique of the concept of progress has been extensively discussed in the preceding chapter, so I will not repeat it here. Third, the Frankfurt School rejected the simplistic concept of ideology resulting from a ‘vulgar’ reading of the base-superstructure metaphor. Orthodox Marxists regarded ideology as a ‘ref lection’ of relations of property, and as a form of ‘false’ consciousness. Adorno, Benjamin and other Frankfurt theorists (such as Horkheimer, Marcuse and Löwenthal) agreed that ideology is ‘aff irmative’ insofar as a false presentation of happiness (in religion or culture) prevents social change from happening. However, they also argue that ideology contains a utopian moment, insofar as it expresses a genuine desire for social change. It is worth noting that they are here in full accord with Marx, who famously called religion the ‘opium of the people’, but who also argued that it was ‘an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering.’15 Recall the double movement present in Adorno’s and Benjamin’s philosophy: for Adorno, all art is ‘semblance’, but because of that it also provides us with the opportunity to think about alternatives. Similarly, Benjamin attempts to use the very elements of the ‘dream sleep’ of capitalism to awaken us from that dream. Finally, they oppose the idea of orthodox Marxist theory that art belongs purely to the superstructure. As we have already seen in the preceding chapter, both Benjamin and Adorno argue that art is both base and superstructure. From this it follows that the question of how a work of art ‘reflects’ the base is of no concern to them: it is always already part of the base – not only, as Adorno stresses, as a commodity, but also, as Benjamin emphasizes, as a form of labour and of production, within which one can distinguish between relations and means of production.16 14 See Jay (1973), 53. Jay also shows, however, that there was hardly any consensus about the monopoly capitalism thesis, which was developed by Friedrich Pollock, among the Frankfurt theorists. While Horkheimer and Adorno embraced it, other members of the institute, such as the economic theorist Franz Neumann, were very critical of it (see also Walter-Busch (2010), Chapter 9). Benjamin did not really take sides in this debate, for the simple reason that he was just not very interested in these matters. 15 Tucker (1978), 54. 16 Lijster (2011).

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In short, the Frankfurt School cultural theorists, and Benjamin and Adorno primarily, criticized Marx’s metaphor of base and superstructure in several ways. They struggled with it and transformed it, but without losing sight of the fundamental Marxist insight, namely that cultural phenomena are to be seen in their relation to the reproduction of social life. For them, the Marxian concepts for cultural analysis are, in the words of Karl Korsch, which Benjamin quoted approvingly, ‘not intended as new dogmatic fetters, as pre-established conditions which must be met in some particular order by any “materialist investigation”’, but rather ‘a wholly undogmatic guide to research and action’ (AP, 484; V/1, 607).

A farewell to Marx Whatever happened to Marxist cultural analysis? Are there still theorists who would dare to associate themselves with it? Although the series of financial crises starting in 2008 have led some people to reconsider Marx’s economic theories, almost everyone seems to agree that Marxist aesthetics and Marxist cultural analysis are now hopelessly outdated. As Terry Eagleton writes, the group of people ‘who still believe that the base/ superstructure model has something valuable to say […] is nowadays a proportion smaller than those who believe in the Virgin Birth or the Loch Ness monster, and positively minuscule in comparison with those who believe in alien abductions.’17 Why is this so? Why has an intellectual tradition that has brought forth some of the most fascinating and sophisticated theories on the relation between art and society, between aesthetics and politics, suddenly fallen out of fashion? I can think of two reasons, one historical and one theoretical. The first, historical, reason is the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, which, according to Fukuyama and many others, signalled the historical victory of capitalism. Many agreed that the collapse of the Soviet Union and of ‘really existing socialism’ also necessarily meant the theoretical bankruptcy of Marxism as a theoretical framework. Especially when one considered the atrocities committed by the regime, to call oneself a ‘Marxist’ seemed almost to implicitly endorse the Gulag and the Stasi, and, in consequence, to place oneself outside the arena of rational debate. Ironically, however, this historical reason reflects ‘just the kind of mechanistic view of the relations between culture and politics of which “vulgar” 17 Eagleton (2000), 237.

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Marxism itself has so often been guilty’, as Eagleton is right to note.18 The hidden presumption is, after all, that certain historical circumstances, in this case the victory of capitalism, make a certain mode of thinking, namely Marxism, impossible. If one stops to think about it, however, it is quite strange that precisely at the moment at which capitalism prevailed, becoming almost ‘transcendental’, as Lieven de Cauter once put it, the theoretical framework that had most vehemently criticized it was pronounced dead.19 Of course, the fact is that this theoretical framework had been long hollowed out from the inside. The second, theoretical, reason for the dwindling of Marxist cultural analysis concerns the advent, in the 1970s, of a great variety of culturalanalytic subdisciplines, from media studies and postcolonial studies to gender and queer studies. These emerging disciplines, which in the AngloSaxon world are usually simply referred to as ‘theory’, drew inspiration from structuralism and post-structuralism and from Marxism, but argued that the traditional Marxist focus on production and class divisions had been far too narrow. Louis Althusser severed the concept of ideology from production, while other theorists, inspired by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, proposed to replace the concept with that of ‘hegemony’.20 Gramsci argued that ideology was not a static ‘reflection’ of the base, but itself the site of constant struggle over intellectual and cultural hegemony, in which control over schooling, media, and cultural institutions was at stake. For cultural analysis, this implies that one regards a cultural phenomenon, not as simply part of a dominant ideology that in turn refers to a mode of capitalist production, but instead as located in an arena of struggle among a plethora of ideologies. While the Marxist cultural theorist Raymond Williams still distinguished between ‘dominant’ and ‘residual’ or ‘emergent’ ideologies, later post-Marxist theorists deny or ignore any such relation between the struggle for political or ideological hegemony and economic production.21 Many cultural theorists, furthermore, drew on the work of Michel Foucault, who taught us that there is not a single, central locus of power (the state, capitalism), as Marx had led us to believe, but that domination 18 Eagleton (2002), viii. 19 De Cauter (2004), 41. 20 See, among others, Althusser (1969), Gramsci (1971), Williams (1973) and Hall (1986). 21 See Williams (1973), 10. In their Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985), Laclau and Mouffe use the concept of hegemony to develop a discursive approach to class (class as constructed through discursive articulations), which means that the concept of class is also detached from production.

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is everywhere and prevails among all of us. This meant that Marx was wrong to focus exclusively on divisions between classes. Other oppressive dichotomies – between First and Third world, West and East, black and white, man and woman, hetero- and homosexual, mad and sane, sick and healthy and so on – had to be taken into account. What was at stake in these kinds of struggles had nothing to do with means and relations of production, but depended entirely on the context. The issue at stake might be the freedom of religion, to speak one’s language, to perform one’s rituals, to be who one was, and so on. Concepts such as commodity, capitalism and class struggle, which had played such a central role in Marxist cultural analysis, gradually moved to the background, while concepts such as gender, ethnicity, and ‘identity politics’ came to the fore and took their place.22 There is no doubt that these new forms of cultural theory have disclosed sites of struggle and sources of indignation that had been hitherto overlooked by Marxist cultural analysis. However, there also lurks a threat of political resignation in rejecting the Marxian legacy. The irony of the new cultural theories lies in the fact that, while having drastically rejected the base-superstructure metaphor, they seem to have hypostasized the distinction between base and superstructure instead. Refusing to consider cultural phenomena in their relation to the ‘big picture’ of the capitalist system, these theorists tend to regard ideological struggles as nothing but ideological struggles. Thus they make the same mistake as the ‘German ideology’ that Marx and Engels opposed, and against which the metaphor of base and superstructure was aimed in the f irst place. This mistake consisted in the belief that a critique of consciousness (in the case of the left Hegelian: a critique of religion) was a sufficient condition for social transformation. By contrast, Marx conceived of cultural issues never as merely cultural issues. In his view, they could not be properly understood as long as we ignored their relation to the material (re)production of social life.23 Post-Marxist cultural theory, however, has an allergy to such a ‘totalizing’ view of culture or society. From its perspective, characterizations of capitalist society as ‘totally administered’ (Adorno) or ‘mythic’ (Benjamin), fail to do justice to the variety of cultural forms. Postmodern philosophy has told us that there is no ultimate reality behind the masks of ideology, but only 22 For a critical as well as humorous discussion of the rise and fall of ‘theory’, see the first three chapters of Eagleton (2003). 23 See also Žižek’s critique of Laclau in Žižek (2008), 276ff.

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other masks. We learned that we should not regard our globalized world as a closed ‘totality’, but rather as an open ‘network’.24 I believe, however, we should not give up on ‘totalizing’ views too quickly. Post-Marxist cultural theorists tend to forget that perspectives on culture or society as a ‘totality’ are never merely descriptive, but also have a critical and performative function. In Adorno’s writings, for instance, the concept of totality refers to the experience of overwhelming social forces, confronting the individual as a second nature. Totality, for him, is in the first place something threatening. Replacing it with the euphemistic ‘network’ means also to lose sight of that threat, which is still quite real. As has been noted by several critics, the idea of the ‘network society’ has itself an undeniably ideological touch to it. 25 It hides the fact that only a minority of people actually profit from the new mobility and flexibility of our global ‘connectionist’ world (tourists, multinationals, finance capitalism), while the larger part finds itself confronted with problems far exceeding their control. For the majority of the world’s population, ‘mobility’ means being forced to leave one’s home because one is deprived of income or dispossessed of land. Likewise, the ‘flexibility’ of the network society for most people stands for insecurity and the devaluation of one’s abilities and experience.26 The ‘network’ society thus creates a new class division, between the ‘mobile’ and the ‘immobile’ (Boltanski and Chiapello), or between ‘tourists’ and ‘vagabonds’ (Bauman). If one belongs to the latter class, society is still very much the monolithic totality Adorno described, ominously hanging over one’s head and ready to crush one at any moment. One could argue, furthermore, that globalization and all sorts of ‘network’ phenomena have not made the Marxian concept of ‘totality’ obsolete, but have rather made it all the more topical. The ecological, humanitarian and financial crises we are facing today demonstrate how interlocked our contemporary world is.27 The very fact that everything is connected in a ‘network’ forces us always to conceive of cultural problems as economic

24 As Boltanski and Chiapello (2005) observe, the metaphor of the ‘network’ was, up until the 1980s, primarily used to refer to criminal activities and only gets its positive connotations with the rise of the Internet (141-142). 25 See Bauman (1998), and Boltanski and Chiapello (2005). 26 This point will be further discussed in the conclusion. 27 As Bowie (2013) writes: ‘Adorno’s connection of philosophy to the idea that modern capitalism makes the world into a totality, in which systemic factors deeply affect aspects of everyday life all over the globe, has become hard to ignore’ (vii).

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ones, too, and vice versa.28 Obviously, this does not mean that we can uncritically adopt Marxist concepts. The concept of totality that we can no longer accept is what Martin Jay calls an ‘expressive’ totality, where some group or entity is considered the ‘subject of history’.29 There is no one behind the ‘wheel’ of history; but this very presumption might also be the reason why we are heading for disaster. Adopting a ‘soft’ concept of totality, as Jay proposes, might help us regard contemporary forms of suffering and injustice not as isolated phenomena but as part of, and symptomatic of, a pathological socioeconomic whole. In contemporary cultural theory, however, the fear of economic reductionism seems to have led us rather to a form of cultural reductionism, in which every social problem is brought down to an issue of ‘identity’. This is of consequence for the critical potential of cultural analysis vis-à-vis capitalism. Proclaiming the diversity of possible identities, post-Marxist cultural theories are in full accord with the ideology of contemporary consumer culture, which tells us that we can be whoever we want to be, if only we buy the right commodities. Capitalism, conversely, has never had much diff iculty with ‘difference’. As Eagleton puts it: ‘capitalism is an impeccably inclusive creed: it really doesn’t care who it exploits.’30 But is a return to Marxist cultural theory possible, considering its theoretical pitfalls? Can we think of ways to ‘rescue’ Marxism? To discuss these questions, let us take a look at the work of some latter-day Marxist theorists.

A parallax view on historical materialism Perhaps the last great attempt to use the metaphor of base and superstructure in a Marxist analysis of culture is Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) by Fredric Jameson. Jameson attempts to make sense of a variety of contemporary phenomena – artistic, cultural, theoretical, social – that fall under the ‘postmodernism’ rubric. The main thesis of his book is that postmodernism is not merely an artistic or cultural style, 28 See also Toscano and Kinkle’s Cartographies of the Absolute (2015): ‘[C]apitalism as a totality is devoid of an easily grasped command-and-control centre. That is precisely why it poses an aesthetic problem, in the sense of demanding ways of representing the complex and dynamic relations intervening between the domains of production, consumption and distribution, and their strategic political mediations, ways of making the invisible visible’ (24-25). 29 See Jay (1984). See also my interview with Jay in Lijster (2010). 30 Eagleton (2003), 19.

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or a theoretical framework, but a ‘cultural dominant’: ‘this whole global, yet American, postmodern culture is the internal and superstructural expression of a whole new wave of American military and economic domination throughout the world.’31 Postmodernism refers, he argues, to a certain mode of capitalist production, which he calls, following the Marxist economist Ernest Mandel, ‘late capitalism’. As noted earlier, Marxist economic theorists distinguished between two phases of capitalism. While the first, market capitalism, is characterized by the growth of industrial corporations in local markets, the second, state or monopoly capitalism, refers to the process in which a few big corporations put smaller companies out of trade and fuse with the state apparatus. This eventually leads to colonialism, imperialism and world wars. In his Late Capitalism (1972) Ernest Mandel complements these two phases with a third one, namely late capitalism. This third stage, commencing after the Second World War, is characterized by international markets, multinational companies, a consumer society, and the predominance of financial capitalism. These three stages, Mandel argues, are marked by ‘three general revolutions in technology engendered by the capitalist mode of production since the “original” industrial revolution of the later 18th century.’32 The first, around 1848, is machine production of steam-driven motors; the second, around the 1890s, is machine production of electric and combustion motors; the third, in the 1940s, is machine production of electronic and nuclear-powered apparatuses. The plausibility or historical accuracy of Mandel’s theory is not the issue here.33 Most important is the fact that Jameson links Mandel’s periodization to corresponding phases in the superstructure, which can be conceived of as the ‘culture dominants’ of the respective stages. These corresponding phases, he argues, are realism, modernism, and postmodernism. Realism corresponds to the bourgeois individual in the market, expressing the subject’s sense of being the ultimate point of reference of the world. The early bourgeois individual is still convinced of his authority and ability to realistically represent that world. This sense crumbles with the emergence of state capitalism. The modern (late nineteenth and early twentieth-century) individual is alienated from the world, finding himself confronted with market forces and a bureaucratic system beyond his control (Max Weber’s 31 Jameson (1991), 5. 32 Mandel (1999), 118. 33 In the conclusion, I will return to some theories concerning the developments of capitalism after the Second World War.

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‘iron cage’). Modernist art expresses this sense of alienation and this crisis in modern subjectivity. As Adorno wrote, this art is as abstract as social relations have become. According to Jameson, the modernist anxiety and sense of alienation have disappeared in postmodern culture. In his view, postmodern culture, like late capitalism, is characterized by a dissolving of borders. Not only spatial, national, and cultural borders (fusion and eclecticism), but also borders between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. This dissolving, Jameson argues, also takes place with regard to the subject, who no longer has a clearly delineated ‘inside’ and ‘outside’. According to Jameson, postmodernism marks the moment in which the subject stops to think of itself as an identity. In consequence, alienation is no longer possible, since there is nothing to be alienated from. But this also means that the subject itself, in the strict sense, ceases to exist. Illustrating the difference between modernism and postmodernism, Jameson compares Edward Munch’s famous painting The Scream with Andy Warhol’s celebrity portraits. Munch’s painting is full of expression, while at the same time signifying the failure of expression because of the individual’s fundamental solitude and the essential muteness of painting. There is a huge tension between what the individual feels on the inside – his deepest fears, hopes and desires – and the impossibility to act on these feelings in the world. The inability to express one’s anxiety colours one’s view of the world, which the painting expresses in the way the landscape surrounding the screaming figure matches its colours and shapes. Warhol’s portraits, by contrast, are marked by an utter absence of expression, or by what Jameson calls a new ‘flatness’ or ‘depthlessness’. Commodification and reproduction seem to have deprived the individual’s image of an ‘inside’. The individual ego, secured within realism, plunged into crisis during modernism, is now scattered among an abundance of images and a cacophony of voices. According to Jameson, ‘this shift in the dynamics of cultural pathology can be characterized as one in which the alienation of the subject is displaced by the latter’s fragmentation.’34 The two central concepts Jameson uses to characterize postmodern culture are ‘pastiche’ and ‘schizophrenia’. Pastiche, he argues, is not to be confused with parody. The latter is a pre-eminently modernist procedure, consisting in the self-conscious deviation from a norm, for instance by taking in an extreme shape of it. Obviously, this presupposes that the norm is given. One might therefore even say that a parody affirms the existence 34 Jameson (1991), 14.

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of the norm rather than seriously jeopardizing it. Pastiche, however, is what parody becomes when there are no norms to refer to. With pastiche it is clear that something is ‘quoted’, but it is no longer clear what this something is. In Jameson’s view, it is the expression of postmodernism’s waning sense of historicity. Examples are what he calls ‘nostalgia’ films, such as George Lucas’s American Graffiti and Roman Polanski’s Chinatown.35 In his view, nostalgia films are not parodies, since the ‘norm’ they refer to is absent. Neither are they, nor do they pretend to be, ‘representations’ of past epochs of American history. Rather, nostalgia films refer to the way we today conceive of these epochs, by ‘quoting’ from the earlier Hollywood movies which for most people are the only point of reference to history. They express our desire to re-experience a certain golden age of our culture, by bringing it to the present.36 Jameson’s second central concept is ‘schizophrenia’. Following Jacques Lacan, he defines schizophrenia as ‘a breakdown in the signifying chain’, that is, the detaching of the ‘natural’ connection between signifier and signified, between a word or name and the concept it refers to.37 If this chain breaks down, Jameson argues, we are left with nothing but a series of unrelated signif iers. This linguistic breakdown is of immediate consequence to the (socio)psychological integrity of the subject and the community. Personal or collective identity, which depends on the narrative relation between one’s memory of the past, one’s consciousness of the present, and one’s expectations of the future, becomes impossible. Therefore schizophrenia, like pastiche, involves a waning sense of historicity. The postmodern subject, Jameson argues, lives in an eternal present. However, this experience is expressed not with (modernist) anxiety, but rather with euphoria, as ‘an intoxicatory or hallucinogenic intensity.’38 It cannot be said that Jameson uncritically adopts Marx’s base-superstructure metaphor. He does not argue that postmodern culture is causally ‘determined’ by multinational capitalism. Nor does he regard ideology as a unity. Although postmodernism, in his view, is the ‘cultural dominant’ of late capitalism, there certainly exist other ‘residual’ or ‘emergent’ cultural forms. He adopts the Marxian theorem that base and superstructure 35 As Jameson (1998) notes, nostalgia films need not be historically situated films. Even a sci-fi movie such as Star Wars can be considered a nostalgia film, satisfying our deep longing to experience ‘alien villains, true American heroes, heroines in distress’ (8) and so on. 36 Jameson points up similar tendencies in literature (E. L. Doctorow’s ‘historical’ novel Ragtime) and architecture (Frank Gehry’s architecture of ‘wrapping’). 37 Jameson (1991), 26. 38 Ibidem, 28.

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develop unevenly, so that different ideologies can coexist next to each other. Finally, Jameson does not claim that postmodern culture ‘reflects’ the idea of the ruling class.39 Rather, he argues that the relation between postmodern culture and late capitalism is a functional one, insofar as the postmodern breakdown of borders between personal and collective identity, history and tradition constitutes an ideological legitimization of this new mode of production. Even so, Jameson was much criticized for his ‘totalizing’ views on culture and history and his failure to do justice to differences between phenomena within postmodern culture. Some argued that his attempts to develop an all-encompassing framework of postmodern culture resulted in generalizations and gross exaggerations, while others argued that, by drawing on Mandel’s schema, he had fallen into the pit of Marxist economism, reducing superstructural phenomena to a specific stage in the capitalist mode of production. 40 To be sure, Jameson’s Postmodernism is a tour de force if there ever was one. The scope and ambition of his analysis of postmodern culture, which attempts to capture developments in economy, technology, architecture, philosophy, art and mass media in a single narrative, match that of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Marx’s Capital, and Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. Jameson had already expected and anticipated the kind of criticism he received. In his conclusion, he tries to counter it by arguing that the ‘war on totality’ is itself a pre-eminently postmodern or late capitalist phenomenon, inherently connected to our loss of historicity. Postmodern culture, he argues, resists being theorized in a ‘totalizing’ narrative, which is precisely why we should attempt to do so. Jameson’s book serves here as merely one example of the sort of allencompassing theory that has fallen out of fashion in philosophy, aesthetics, and cultural analysis. What if, however, we read works like Postmodernism in the same way as I have proposed to read Dialectic of Enlightenment in the previous chapter, namely, not as an attempt to describe history ‘as it actually was’, but rather as an attempt to throw a radically different light on a phenomenon by considering it in a way and in terms which, at first glance, might seem highly inappropriate. In this case, that would involve analyzing postmodern culture in terms of an economic mode of production. Some of Jameson’s own remarks point in the direction of such a reading. In the conclusion of his book, Jameson calls it his ‘rhetorical strategy’ ‘to 39 As Jameson remarks, businessmen probably have something better to do with their time than be involved in postmodern culture (407). 40 See Flax and Jay (1993) and Gartman (1998).

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see whether by systematizing something that is resolutely unsystematic, and historicizing something that is resolutely ahistorical, one couldn’t outflank it and force a historical way at least of thinking about that.’41 Cultural analysis, conceived of in this way, would then mean that by placing seemingly distinct phenomena into one constellation, one creates a radical reframing of the way we ‘normally’ conceive of history or society. Considering cultural analysis in this way, however, namely as a rhetorical strategy, also means that one has to take into account the viewpoint of the observer, who, after all, is the ‘strategist’ and the one constructing the constellation. This brings us all the way back to our question of the ‘arbitrariness’ of the historian’s view, or, in the terms of Benjamin’s philosophy, the problem of the difference between allegory and the dialectical image. But before returning to these questions in the fourth chapter, I want to dwell on Slavoj Žižek’s proposal for reframing the base-superstructure metaphor in terms of what he calls the ‘parallax view’. In its standard definition, parallax means the apparent displacement of an object because of the ‘actual’ movement of its observer. When it comes to history, such a parallax view entails that our past always depends on the way we ‘frame’ it in the present. Adding a reflexive and dialectical ‘twist’ to this concept, Žižek argues however that the displacement of the object in parallax can never be entirely ‘subjective’, since the alternative viewpoint of the observer must already be inscribed in the object observed. The epistemological shift of the subject hence necessarily involves an ontological shift of the object: ‘Sure, the picture is in my eye, but I, I am also in the picture.’42 Furthermore, by a parallax view Žižek does not mean a mere pluralism of possible perspectives. He argues that it involves the radical incommensurability of two different perspectives on one object, which can be considered each other’s ‘blind spots’. According to Žižek, there is such a parallax in the heart of Marxism, namely between socioeconomic base and ideological-political superstructure. 43 Marx’s social theory is governed by two opposing logics which have been adopted by two opposing schools. On the one hand, orthodox Marxists argued that everything – politics, law, religion, culture – can be reduced to the economic base: politics and culture do not play a ‘real’ part in history, since history is only the history of production. On the other hand, however, Marx argued that the economy is governed by class struggle and revolution, which are ideological and 41 Jameson (1991), 418. 42 Žižek (2006), 17. 43 See Ibidem, 55 and Žižek (2008), 291-293.

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political through and through. Hence, post-Marxist theorists have argued that one can conceive of ideological struggles in isolation from the economy. According to Žižek, these two readings of Marx relate to one another in parallax. Both of them are ‘transcendental’, insofar as they claim to provide a framework to which all other phenomena are reduced and from which they receive their meaning. Both, however, contain the other viewpoint as a blind spot: the politico-ideological in the heart of the economy, the economic in the heart of culture and politics. In consequence, Žižek argues, ‘vulgar economism and ideologico-political idealism are two sides of the same coin.’44 What makes such an all-encompassing logic work in the first place is the ‘bracketing’ of the other perspective. 45 According to Žižek, this is precisely why Marx’s theory has so often been criticized for lacking a theory of power and state: writing the history of capital, he brackets the history of politics. Marx’s alleged ‘determinism’, therefore, is the result of his theoretical and strategic perspective on history. Now Žižek’s point is neither to discredit either of these two perspectives – economism or idealism. Nor is it to attempt to find some meta-perspective in which both could be synthesized. The philosophical lesson to be learned, he argues, is that we cannot see the one while seeing the other: we cannot see the rabbit and the duck at the same time. But this also means that it is worthwhile to look for the ‘parallactic’ counterpart of dominant views of history and society. This, then, precisely marks the contribution of Marx’s ‘reversal’ of Hegel, as well as that of Jameson’s reading of postmodernism as an economic form. It does not mean that such a view is the only ‘true’ one. Rather, it implies that one’s view of history is always framed, and that one should at least be aware of it. Note that this presupposes the dialectical relationship between past and present that is at the centre of Benjamin’s and Adorno’s monadology. Žižek throws new light not only on the ‘vertical’ determinism of Marx’s metaphor of base and superstructure, but also on its ‘horizontal’ determinism, namely Marx’s allegedly teleological view of history. As is well known, Marx has been often criticized for conceiving of history as a one-way street in which economic modes of production lawfully supersede each other. Once again, however, one should keep in mind that, for Marx, writing the history of capitalism is a theoretical enterprise, in which our frame of reference in the present and our hopes and expectations about the future are as important as the ‘actual’ past. In the Grundrisse he writes: 44 Žižek (2008), 293. 45 Žižek (2006), 56.

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Bourgeois society is the most developed and the most complex historic organization of production. The categories which express its relations, the comprehension of its structure, thereby also allow insight into the structure and the relations of production of all the vanished social formations out of whose ruins and elements it built itself up, whose partly still unconquered remnants are carried along with it, whose mere nuances have developed explicit signif icance within it, etc. Human anatomy contains a key to the anatomy of the ape. The intimations of higher development among the subordinate animal species, however, can be understood only after the higher development is already known. 46

What Marx means is that the concepts and theoretical framework according to which one reads earlier social formations are first provided by the later ones. He argues, in other words, that the ‘development’ of history towards a certain goal can only be recognized in hindsight, which, according to Žižek, means that Marx’s alleged teleology is a ‘strictly retroactive’ one.47 To be sure, this is not that far removed from the Hegelian idea that the owl of Minerva begins her flight at dusk. The Benjaminian point to be added here, however, is that the meaning which is retroactively attributed to history is not fixed for all time. According to Žižek, the view of history as a retroactive construction forces us to rethink our by-now-familiar question of whether the past was ‘really’ the way one conceives of it – in other words, whether it is a ‘mere’ historical construction or objectively true. Here, too, we must be aware of the parallax between viewing the present from the perspective of the past and viewing the past from the perspective of the present. Žižek writes: ‘The properly dialectical solution of the dilemma of “Is it really there, in the source, or did we only read it into the source?” is thus: it is there, but we can only perceive and state this retroactively, from today’s perspective.’48

Conclusion Monadology, for both Benjamin and Adorno, means that the analysis of the tiniest fragment grants us a view of the whole. The artistic monad is, in Leibniz’s words, a ‘living mirror of the universe’, in which social history is 46 Marx (1981), 105. 47 Žižek (2010a), 197. 48 Žižek (2008), 312.

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inscribed. How can we account for such a view of the work of art, without relapsing into mysticism? Benjamin and Adorno took great pains to epistemologically ground their monadology. In Benjamin’s case, it is ultimately the revolutionary moment which grants the constellation of the ‘historical materialist’ its objectivity and ‘crystallizes’ it into a monad. For Adorno, it is the Hegelian schema of particular and universal that allows him to regard the work of art as the ‘negative imprint’ of a false totality. Neither of these solutions is fully satisfactory. What if, however, we conceive of the monad not, in Tiedemann’s words, as an ‘objective historical constellation’, but rather as a heuristic principle? What Benjamin calls ‘telescoping of the past through the present’ (AP, 471; V/1, 588) then means that, through the lens of a phenomenon in the present, the past is radically reframed and redescribed: progress becomes catastrophe, enlightenment becomes myth, nature becomes history. Such an alternative view of history will never be completely objective, since it depends on the reciprocal and dialectical relationship of historian and material, and of present and past. But at least it is aware of it, unlike ‘off icial’ history, the history seen from the perspective of the ‘victor’, as Benjamin would say – to which the radical redescription relates as a parallax view. Neither is this redescription a ‘mere’ arbitrary construction, since it presumes that the object bears meaning of its own, exceeding the meaning projected onto it by the subject. If such an alternative view puts the way we ‘normally’ look at history and society out of joint, disclosing its barbaric or pathological side, it will already have proven its value. Furthermore, as Benjamin and Adorno tell us, it is only once we regard history and society as a totality – as a chain of catastrophes, as a ‘natural history’ – that we realize its contingency and imagine ourselves breaking away from it. Does such a conception of the relation between art and society, or between art and history, still allow room for Marx’s base-superstructure metaphor? I believe it does – and, at the same time, that it does not. It does not, because regarding a work of art as a monad involves rejecting any kind of determinism, whether this be the vertical determinism between economy and culture, or the horizontal determinism of the iron laws of history. But, as we have seen, the metaphor does not need to be read in a determinist way. One might also read Marx as providing, not a description of history as it actually was, but rather a theoretical reframing that throws an altogether different light on our society. This is in fact precisely the way Benjamin reads Marx, as he writes in the notes to ‘On the Concept of History’:

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He [Marx, TL] realized that the history of capital could be constructed only with the broad, steel framework of a theory. In Marx’s theoretical sketch of labor under the dominion of capital, humanity’s interests are better looked after than in the monumental, longwinded, and basically lackadaisical works of historism. […] The historical construction is dedicated to the memory of the anonymous (SW 4, 406; I/3, 1241).

Benjamin and Adorno hint at a productive and non-dogmatic perspective on the relationship between base and superstructure, which avoids economism and thus does justice to the specificity of cultural phenomena, without relapsing into culturalism. They refuse to regard culture as a ‘functional lie’, as orthodox Marxists did, but neither do they isolate questions of culture from production, as post-Marxist cultural theorists tend to do. Their theories of art and culture are thoroughly materialist, in the sense that they are concerned with the question how art and culture relate to what Marx once provocatively called ‘the language of real life’, that is, the production and reproduction of society. 49 Within that materialist aesthetic, the base-superstructure metaphor is regarded, as Jameson puts it in his book on Adorno, ‘not as a full-fledged theory in its own right, but rather as the name for a problem, whose solution is always a unique, ad hoc invention.’50 For Benjamin and Adorno, the name of this unique, ad hoc invention is art criticism.

49 Tucker (1978), 154. 50 Jameson (1990), 46.

4. The Art of Critique What happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. ‒ T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood

4.1 Introduction If one conceives of the work of art as a monad, one has to attach extreme importance to art criticism, since it not only becomes the nexus for a thorough understanding of the work of art, but might also be conceived as the medium through which a historical experience becomes – in Benjamin’s terms – ‘legible’ for the first time. The critic, according to this view, is an interpreter, in the precise sense that they translate the language of art into (or back into) the language of history. Art criticism is crucial to both Benjamin and Adorno. First of all, both were practicing critics. After the rejection of his habilitation, which meant the end of his academic career, Benjamin worked as a literary critic for several newspapers and journals, and also repeatedly made plans to found a journal of literary criticism of his own. In a letter to Gershom Scholem, he expresses his wish to be considered the ‘foremost critic of German literature’ (CWB, 359; BB 2, 505). Some argue that he did indeed satisfy that ambition, albeit posthumously. There has been some discussion about whether we should even regard Benjamin as primarily a philosopher, and not rather as a historian or (literary) critic.1 Up to this day, Benjamin’s work is read rather in the circles of literary, media and cultural studies than in philosophy departments. But for Benjamin, art criticism is not only an important practice; it is also an object of philosophical theory. Like one of his heroes, the romantic philosopher and critic Friedrich Schlegel, he believed that every critical review should be at the same time a philosophy of criticism. The concept 1 See, for this discussion, Arendt (1968), Adorno’s essay ‘A Portrait of Walter Benjamin’ (P, 227-241), Witte (1976), 1-6, Buck-Morss (1989), 216-252. I consider this question to be of minor importance, for it is evident that his major critical essays (on Goethe, Kraus, Baudelaire, and Kafka, just to name a few) are at the same time philosophical treatises.

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of criticism held by the early German Romantics, most notably the Schlegel brothers and Novalis, was the subject of his dissertation, with which we will begin our discussion. Although Benjamin’s concept of criticism differs significantly from the Romantics’, he nevertheless adopts several of their most crucial insights. I will point to both continuities and discontinuities between the early and the late work, and between the ‘theological’ and ‘materialist’ dimensions of his concept of criticism. Adorno, too, was a critic. As a student he already published music criticism, and in 1928, at the age of 24, he became the editor of Anbruch, a reputable Austrian journal of modern music. Although eventually his professional career was in philosophy and sociology, he never ceased to be a critic. Music criticism makes up more than half of his collected works, while from the 1950s on he published several essays on literature (which were later collected in Notes to Literature (1958-1965)). Some of these, such as the essays on Beckett and Kafka, remain compulsory reading for discussions on these authors. For Adorno, criticism is an essential part of the very existence of works of art, and he believes that the work of art cannot genuinely be experienced without it. In the sections on Adorno, I will first discuss his programmatic essay ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’, in which he sets the parameters for a dialectically ‘immanent’ criticism. According to Adorno, criticism is deeply aporetic, insofar as it is both necessary and impossible. Criticism, in his view, aims at the ‘truth content’ of the work of art, but has to stop short of the work’s ‘enigmatic character’. As an example of Adorno’s music criticism, I will discuss his interpretation of Gustav Mahler’s music.

4.2

Benjamin’s reading of the early German Romantics

Benjamin’s dissertation The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism (1919) is a philosophical-historical work, but is at the same time ‘a contribution to an investigation into the history of a problem’ (SW 1, 116; I/1, 11). For Benjamin, this problem, of the status of art criticism, is still very urgent. In several essays he lamented the sorry state of German art criticism, which was grounded in fixed genre rules or in the personal opinion of the critic. He believed that a revival of criticism would be possible through a revaluation of the Romantics. Friedrich Schlegel had argued against the classicist idea of timeless artistic rules and norms, and stated that the romantic work of art ‘carries its own judgment within it.’2 Moreover, criticism, for the Romantics, 2

See Schlegel in Bernstein (ed., 2003), 275.

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is not a mere evaluation or exposition of a work of art, but an artistic genre in its own right. Benjamin’s dissertation can, furthermore, be itself read as a ‘rescuing’ critique. While the Romantics, in his time, were regarded as the source of the cult of genius, of the return to nature and the ideology of the Volk, Benjamin instead stresses their ‘sober’ and ‘prosaic’ character. The Romantics’ interpretation of the Kantian concept of ‘critique’ as infinite reflexivity served for him, finally, as a fruitful correction to the Neo-Kantian’s narrow concept of experience.3 Benjamin’s reading of the Romantics, in other words, has a clear strategic intention, functioning as a prolegomenon for his own concept of criticism. 4 As Benjamin argues in his dissertation, the romantic conception of art criticism is grounded in an epistemology that can be traced back to Fichte. Fichte distinguished between thinking (about an object) and reflecting (on thought itself). In his view, only the latter provides unmediated (nonempirical) knowledge, since in reflection the ‘I’ is both the subject and the object of knowledge. But reflection – thinking on thinking – opens up the threat of an infinite regress into the thinking of thinking of thinking, and so on.5 Fichte cut short this movement of regress by positing an ‘absolute I’. The Romantics, however, did not share Fichte’s horror infinitatis and considered his absolute I the premature death of reflection. They argued that knowledge was not to be grounded in self-consciousness, but rather in ‘pure thought’, that is, in the infinite form of reflection which they named the ‘absolute’. Thus, Romantic epistemology centres on pure thought rather than the thinking subject. This implies that knowledge does not belong primarily to the subject. Benjamin writes that, according to the Romantics, ‘all knowledge is self-knowledge of a thinking being, which does not need to be an “I”’ (SW 1, 145; I/1, 55). This idea grounds the Romantics’ notion of the ‘experiment’, which means that reflecting on an object is inciting this 3 See Caygill (1998), 35. 4 As a consequence, Benjamin’s reading of the Romantic philosophers is quite idiosyncratic, and his use of source materials is sometimes unorthodox. Gasché (2002) writes that Benjamin ‘makes such free use of citations that they are made on occasion to say the exact opposite of what they say in their original context’ (51). The discussion of whether Benjamin’s interpretation of the Romantics is sound, however, lies outside the scope of this chapter. 5 Benjamin quotes Fichte: ‘Thus we shall continue, ad infinitum, to require a new consciousness for every consciousness, a new consciousness whose object is the earlier consciousness, and thus we shall never reach the point of being able to assume an actual consciousness’ (SW 1, 125; I/1, 24).

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object with self-knowledge. The work of art, so they argued, is the privileged medium of the infinite process of reflection. Consequently, art criticism concerns not merely or primarily the consciousness of the observer, but rather regards a work of art as something that can become conscious of itself: ‘Criticism is, as it were, an experiment on the artwork, one through which the latter’s own reflection is awakened, through which it is brought to consciousness and to knowledge of itself’ (SW 1, 151; I/1, 65). For the Romantics, in other words, criticism is ‘immanent’, which means that it consists not in judging or evaluating the work of art by means of some external criterion, but rather in reflecting on the work of art by means of elements it contains within itself. The critic’s opinion or judgment, in this view, is irrelevant, since immanent criticism means that the work of art, though incited by the critic, brings about its own criticism. According to Benjamin, this idea of immanent criticism should be considered the ‘cardinal principle’ (SW 1, 155; I/1, 72) of Romantic aesthetics. The Romantics considered the individual work of art, like Fichte’s ‘I’, to be limited and therefore necessarily unfinished and fragmentary. By pointing to the contingency of its form, they aimed to bring the work of art beyond its own limits and thus in closer proximity to what they called the ‘idea of art’. Benjamin writes: The immanent tendency of the work and, accordingly, the standard for its immanent criticism are the reflection that lies at its basis and is imprinted in its form. Yet this is, in truth, not so much a standard of its judgment as, first and foremost, the foundation of a completely different kind of criticism – one which is not concerned with judging, and whose center of gravity lies not in the evaluation of the single work but in demonstrating its relations to all other works and, ultimately, to the idea of art (SW 1, 159; I/1, 77-78).

Art criticism, in Benjamin’s reading of the Romantics, is therefore not so much a matter of judgment, but aims, rather, at the ‘completion’ of a work of art (SW 1, 153; I/1, 69). Thus, while earlier generations regarded art criticism as inferior to the work of art itself, the Romantics granted it a status equal, or even superior, to the work being critiqued. Friedrich Schlegel, for instance, referred to his essay on Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship as the ‘Übermeister’ (over-master). According to Benjamin, the Romantic concept of art criticism forces us to reconsider romantic irony. Romantic irony has often been criticized for its subjectivism, and for being nothing but the navel-gazing of the

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self-sufficient subject.6 Benjamin, however, distinguishes between this subjectivist irony, which indeed is dominant in the late work of Friedrich Schlegel, and another, objective irony, which is the irony of early German Romanticism, and which has been neglected in the literature. Objective irony, he argues ‘is a question not of subjectivism and play but of the assimilation of the limited work to the absolute, of its complete objectivation at the price of its ruin. This form of irony stems from the spirit of art, not from the will of the artist’ (SW 1, 164; I/1, 85). Irony, then, is not the self-reflection of the sovereign and self-absorbed subject, but rather its participation in an immanent criticism of the work of art. Benjamin’s description of objective irony furthermore tells us that the ‘completion’ of the work of art comes at the ‘price of its ruin’. Only the ‘destruction of form’ (SW 1, 164; I/1, 85) will allow the idea of art to appear. Schlegel writes that art criticism should be considered in terms of a ‘progressive, universal poetry’ (SW 1, 168; I/1, 91), that is, the progression of poetry towards the idea of poetry. What does this ‘progression’ mean, and what is the ‘idea’ of art, or of poetry? According to Benjamin, this progression is not ‘a progress into the void, a vague advance in writing ever-better poetry, but of a continually more comprehensive unfolding and enhancement of poetic forms’ (SW 1, 168; I/1, 92).7 In other words, for the Romantics the idea of poetry is neither something to which individual works correspond, nor something the history of poetry moves towards. Rather, the idea of poetry is present within the totality of individual poetic forms, and their ‘progression’ towards it happens through self-reflection. Consequently, their completion through reflection is at the same time their destruction or dissolution (Auflösung). Progressive poetry, or ‘poetry of poetry’ (SW 1, 170; I/1, 94) as Schlegel also names it, is self-reflective poetry, dissolving itself in the absolute. According to the Romantics, the idea of poetry is prose, and finds its most adequate expression in the novel. Benjamin explains this enigmatic statement: 6 See, for instance, Hegel’s criticism, in his Lectures on Aesthetics, on ‘the ingenious [genial] and divine irony, as this concentration of the I on itself, for which all bonds are broken, and who wants only to live in the bliss of self-enjoyment’ (Hegel (1970), I, 95). 7 Here one can easily recognize the kernel of Benjamin’s critique of progress in ‘On the Concept of History’. In a footnote to this sentence he adds: ‘This follows from Romantic messianism and cannot be substantiated here’ (SW 1, 196; I/1, 92). As he confides to his friend Ernst Schoen, however, he considers this messianism to be the ‘heart of romanticism’, but unfortunately unfit as a topic of an academic dissertation: ‘Had I attempted to get to the heart of romanticism, I would have cut myself of from any chance of achieving the expected complicated and conventional scholarly attitude that I personally distinguish from the genuine one’ (CWB, 140; BB 1, 208).

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[A]rt is the continuum of forms, and the novel, in the interpretation of the early Romantics, is the comprehensible manifestation of this continuum. It is this thanks to prose. The idea of poetry has found its individuality […] in the form of prose […]. In this seemingly paradoxical but in truth very profound intuition, they find an entirely new basis for the philosophy of art. On this ground rests the entire philosophy of art of early Romanticism, especially its concept of criticism (SW 1, 173; I/1,100).

The novel, for the Romantics, is the most self-reflective literary form, which allows poetry to observe its own observations, and to describe its own descriptions.8 Therefore, they regard the novel not so much as a genre among genres or a form among forms, but rather as the continuum of forms, and hence as the idea of poetry: ‘The reflective medium of poetic forms appears in prose; for this reason, prose may be called the idea of poetry’ (SW 1, 174; I/1, 102). Prose, then, is the immanently existing repository of all poetic forms.9 The immanence of the poetic idea is one of the reasons why, according to Benjamin, we should not regard German Romanticism as a mystical or irrationalist school, as was the dominant interpretation in his time – and, arguably, still is in ours.10 The thesis of the idea of poetry as prose, he argues, is not a mystical thesis, because it is concerned not with an idea that can be somehow ‘intuited’ (angeschaut), but with one that has to be constructed. The idea is present in prose, and is therefore ‘prosaic’ in the familiar sense of the word. Benjamin argues that the romantic idea of reflection is ‘the antithesis of ecstasy’ (SW 1, 175; I/1, 104). The Romantics, in his view, regarded the author as a ‘manufacturer’ (Fabrikant) rather than a creative genius, and appreciated, not the sentimental and ecstatic works, but the ‘mechanical’ and ‘made’ ones. With Hölderlin they shared the principle of the ‘sobriety’ of art. For the Romantics, the classicist understanding of beauty, ‘as an object of “delight”, of “pleasure”, of taste […] seemed incompatible with the austere sobriety that, according to the new conception, defines the essence of art’ (SW 1, 177; I/1, 106). If one compares Romantic aesthetics as discussed by Benjamin with his own theory of art as discussed in the previous chapters, one can recognize several similarities. First, romantic ‘objective’ irony resembles the reciprocal 8 According to Schlegel, outstanding examples of self-reflective prose are Denis Diderot’s Jacques the Fatalist and his Master (1765) and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759-1767). 9 On this romantic idea, Benjamin grounded his own messianic idea of an ‘integral prose’ (I, 1238), which states that the past ‘becomes citable in all its moments’ (SW 4, 390) for a redeemed humankind. For a detailed discussion of this, see De Cauter (1999), 354-366. 10 See Gasché (2002), 65.

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and transformative relation between subject and object in the experience of aura, as well as in the relation between historian and historical object that constitutes the monad. Second, the ‘destruction of form’ as well as the thesis of the ‘sobriety of art’ reminds us of Benjamin’s suspicion of the classicist concept of beauty and his positive evaluation of the destruction of the false aura of the work of art through technological reproducibility. Finally, the notion of the artwork as a fragment, which is to be completed by the critic, bears similarities to Benjamin’s principle of montage and the idea of the ‘constellation’. This is not to say, however, that Benjamin’s concept of criticism can be equated with the romantic concept. There are some important differences, too. First, Benjamin is critical of the grounding of Romantic criticism on an idealist epistemology ‘which in [its] pure form certainly would not completely satisfy any contemporary thinker’ (SW 1, 155; I/1, 72). Second, Benjamin’s understanding of infinity differs from that of the Romantics. In the epilogue to his dissertation, he contrasts the early German Romantics with Goethe. While the Schlegels and Novalis conceive of the work of art as a medium of its immanent idea, Goethe believed that every work of art was the imperfect shadow or ‘torso’ of the transcendent ideal. Benjamin writes: ‘The Romantics define the relation of artworks to art as infinity in totality – which means that the infinity of art is fulfilled in the totality of works. Goethe defines it as unity in plurality – which means that the unity of art is found again and again in the plurality of works’ (SW 1, 183; I/1, 117). Although he does not present his own alternative in the dissertation, one could argue that Benjamin’s monadology differs from the approach both of the Romantics and of Goethe, insofar as it constitutes the inf inite in the f inite. The individual work of art (and not, as the Romantics had it, the continuum of works), is the momentary crystallization of all history.11 From this there follows a third difference, namely Benjamin’s modification of the romantic notion of completion-through-criticism. For the Romantics, he argues, ‘the work of art cannot be a torso; it must be a mobile transitory moment in the living transcendental form’ (SW 1, 182; I/1, 115). The Romantics understood criticism as the completion of the fragmentary work through its progression towards the absolute, and therefore as the ‘overcoming of […] the torso character of works’ (SW 1, 182; I/1, 115). This means, however, that their notion of the idea of art as the continuum of 11 Although Benjamin’s and the Romantics’ concept of infinity are thus quite similar, they are not ‘formally the same’, as Howard Caygill argues (1998, 44).

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forms remains entangled in the classicist idea of beauty as the semblance of life. Benjamin, by contrast, remains faithful to the fragment. Although for both the Romantics and for Benjamin, criticism involves a ‘destruction of form’, it is only for the latter that this destruction results not merely in the appearance, but also in the shattering of totality. And this is because, according to Benjamin, the critic pursues not the idea of art, but rather a philosophical truth. Only by shattering the totality can he disclose the ‘truth content’ (Wahrheitsgehalt) of the work of art. In Origin of German Tragic Drama he calls this the ‘mortification’ of the work of art: ‘Not then – as the romantics have it – awakening of the consciousness in living works, but the settlement of knowledge in dead ones’ (O, 182; I/1, 357). I will discuss presently what he might mean by this. Despite these differences, Benjamin considers Romanticism a crucial step in the development of art criticism, if only because of its ‘cardinal principle’ of immanent criticism. This principle, which he once described as ‘the birth of criticism from the spirit of art’ (I/3, 952), lies at the basis of his own concept of criticism.

4.3

Revolutionary criticism

Is it even possible to speak of Benjamin’s concept of criticism, considering the development of his thinking and its many seemingly contradictory dimensions – theological and messianic, materialist and Marxist, ‘redemptive’ and destructive? Since the publication of his writings in the 1950s there has been much debate which of the two Benjamins, the early ‘theological’ or the late ‘materialist’ one, should be deemed the most ‘authentic’. Since the 1990s, this debate has somewhat waned, because of the publication of the Gesammelte Schriften, of which the diversity forbids any simple division, as well as because of some excellent studies pointing to the continuity in Benjamin’s oeuvre.12 There is hardly anyone who still believes that somewhere in the mid 1920s, between writing Origin of German Tragic Drama and One Way Street ‘his entire philosophical perspective was overturned’, as Rainer Rochlitz argues.13 Ironically, however, this means that there is now an opposite tendency to regard the work of Benjamin, the thinker of discontinuities, as a continuum. Today, therefore, one should be equally mindful of not ironing out the undeniable differences between his early 12 For instance, see Buck-Morss (1990), Caygill (1998), De Cauter (1999), and Steiner (2012). 13 Rochlitz (1996), 115.

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and late work. Considering the concept of criticism in his two ‘stages’, we can discern its continuities as well as its discontinuities. Benjamin’s adoption of the romantic principle of immanent criticism can first be found in the essay ‘Two Poems by Friedrich Hölderlin’ (1914). There he argues that the task of criticism is the disclosure of ‘the poetized’ (das Gedichtete) in a work. Thus, he argues, ‘the truth of the poem shall be opened up’ (SW 1, 19; II/1, 105). What Benjamin calls the poetized should not be confused either with the poet’s personal experience expressed in the poem, or with his world-view.14 Rather, what he means by it is the ‘idea’ that is present in the poem. One could think of the poetized as a ‘potentiality’ of which the actual poem is but one possible manifestation. The poetized, as Benjamin writes, is ‘at once the product and the subject’ (SW 1, 18; II/1, 105) of the critic’s investigations. In other words, the perspective from which the work is criticized can only be derived from the work itself. The essay ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities’ (1919-1922) is Benjamin’s most elaborate attempt to ‘cast light on a work by confining […] attention purely to the work itself’ (SW 2, 77; VI, 218). Since a discussion of his precise reading of Goethe’s novel takes place in the next section, here we only look at his programmatic reflections. Benjamin begins his essay by distinguishing between commentary and criticism, which respectively aim for the ‘truth content’ (Wahrheitsgehalt) and the ‘material content’ (Sachgehalt) of a work of art. Remarkably enough, he nowhere bothers to define these crucial concepts, and hence is never entirely clear what he means by them. One might think of them as the philosophical ‘idea’ of the work of art and its manifest subject matter. These are not neatly separated, however. According to Benjamin, the truth content will come to light only in the course of a work’s life, as its subject matter becomes strange to us. This is why he argues that a critic is first of all concerned with the way a work has been passed on to him, that is, the way in which the work has been commented upon through the years. Like a palaeographer working with a palimpsest, he has to work backwards through layers of text, starting with the most recent. Since the truth content of the work of art, in Benjamin’s view, is only accessible by means of its material content, criticism and commentary should go hand in hand.15 The critic, however, complements the work of 14 Martin Heidegger, in his reading of Hölderlin, also makes use of the term ‘poetized’. Heidegger, however, seems to have in mind the poet’s world-view, which is also why, according to Adorno, he neglects the specific poetic form and considers Hölderlin’s poetry as merely a ‘conveyor’ of a certain message. For this criticism, see Adorno’s essay ‘Parataxis’ (1963) (11, 447-491). 15 Charles Rosen (1988) writes: ‘Without commentary, criticism is self-indulgent revery; without criticism, commentary is frivolous information’ (137).

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commentary. In an intriguing simile, in which he compares the ‘growing’ work of art to a burning funeral pyre, he reflects on their relationship: The commentator stands before it like a chemist, the critic like an alchemist. Whereas, for the former, wood and ash remain the sole objects of his analysis, for the latter only the flame itself preserves an enigma: that of what is alive. Thus, the critic inquires into the truth, whose living flame continues to burn over the heavy logs of what is past and the light ashes of what has been experienced (SW 1, 298; I/1, 126).

This image can be deciphered once we recall Benjamin’s response to Adorno’s charge of a ‘wide-eyed presentation of mere facts’, discussed in the conclusion of Chapter 3.16 Adorno’s words, as Benjamin answers, neatly define mere commentary, or what he calls the ‘proper philological attitude’ (ABC, 291; ABB, 379-380). But although the critic starts out as a commentator and philologist, delving into the material content of a work, his interest is not with dead material (the remaining ashes of what once was living), but with the historical process happening in front of him (the living flame). From the perspective of his own historical experience ‘everything that formerly lay mythically petrified within the text comes alive’ (ABC, 292; ABB, 380). Material content, then, the result of commentary, should be ordered by the critic in such a way that the work’s truth content may appear. Benjamin’s conviction that the critic should take into account former commentary as well as his own historical perspective may seem to contradict the ‘immanent’ nature of his concept of criticism. As he would argue, however, it is rather he who pretends to have immediate access to the work and therefore ignores the way in which it has been passed down to him, who is most affected by this tradition – just as the historist who, ignoring the afterlife of a historical phenomenon, unconsciously conforms to the conqueror’s perspective. For Benjamin, the idea of the autonomy of the work of art does not mean that a work is comprehensible without taking into account its surroundings, but rather means, as Charles Rosen puts it, that ‘no elucidation of the text – not even the author’s own exegesis – can ever attach itself permanently to it.’17 What, then, is the truth content of a work of art? According to Benjamin, the truth content is not immediately accessible, but only through the work’s 16 In fact, Benjamin himself refers to his Goethe essay in his response to Adorno (ABC, 292; ABB, 381). 17 Rosen (1988), 171.

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material content. As the material content becomes ‘strange’, we recognize it as a mere product of social convention, which is another way of saying that we recognize it as ‘myth’. Benjamin describes the relation of truth and myth in the following way: This relation is one of mutual exclusion. There is no truth, for there is no unequivocalness – and hence not even error – in myth. Since, however, there can just as little be truth about it, [...] there is, as far as the spirit of myth is concerned, only knowledge of it. And where the presence of truth should be possible, it can be possible solely under the condition of the recognition of myth – that is, the recognition of its crushing indifference to truth (SW 1, 325-326; I/1, 162).

Insofar as the work of art presents itself as an organic and independent whole, as the semblance of life, it has a mythical moment. The critic, in Benjamin’s view, seeks to expose the mythical aspect of the artwork by presenting it as a contingent product rather than as a creation. Only in this way – ex negativo – should we understand artistic truth. As we will see, Benjamin regards myth as the material content of Goethe’s novel, while its truth content is not some meaning hidden at a deeper level, but rather the way in which the work opposes myth through its own elements, thus opening up the possibility of its negative image. To provide this possibility is the task of criticism. The semblance of the work of art shows itself in the moment of its interruption, the moment that Benjamin, following Hölderlin, calls ‘caesura’ (Cäsur). This interruption draws our attention to the artistic medium itself – to semblance qua semblance – setting in motion the work’s immanent criticism, that is, the criticism of the work through itself. Only through these ruptures and breaches, then, can the truth of art appear, which is itself, as Benjamin argues, ‘expressionless’ (Ausdruckslos) in the precise meaning that it presents itself only in its absence: The expressionless is the critical violence, which […] shatters whatever still survives as the legacy of chaos in all beautiful semblance: the false, errant totality – the absolute totality. Only the expressionless completes the work, by shattering it into a thing of shards, into a fragment of the true world, into the torso of a symbol (SW 1, 340; I/1, 181).

What might Benjamin mean with this paradoxical statement that the expressionless completes the work by shattering it? I take it to mean that

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the work of art is completed only once it is exposed as art. This means that its pretention of being an organic and harmonious whole is unmasked as being merely illusory.18 This exposition is ‘violent’, as Benjamin notes, since it destroys the illusory self-sufficiency of art. This does not mean, however, that criticism destroys the beauty of the work of art. Benjamin considers it a sign of ‘philosophical barbarism’ (SW 1, 351; I/1, 195) to think that the relation between truth and beauty is the same as that between essence and semblance. In his view, beauty is ‘neither the veil nor the veiled object but rather the object in its veil’ (SW 1, 351; I/1, 195). The truth content of art, in other words, can appear only in its veil, that is, its material content. Consequently, ‘the task of art criticism is not to lift the veil but rather, through the most precise knowledge of it as a veil, to raise itself [i.e., criticism, TL] for the first time to the true view of the beautiful’ (SW 1, 351; I/1, 195). Veil and veiled, material and truth content and therefore commentary and criticism, are inseparably connected to each other by beauty, which in Benjamin’s view is the semblance of truth. The task of criticism is therefore indeed a paradoxical one: only shattering the work’s mythical semblance and making it, in Hölderlin’s terms ‘sober’, will make it disclose its true beauty. Similarly, Benjamin argues that the revelation of the truth of the work of art does not destroy its secret – this would mean, after all, that its veil would be lifted. Rather, criticism allows the work to first present itself as an enigma, ‘for beauty makes visible not the idea but rather the latter’s secret’ (SW 1, 351; I/1, 195).19 One could compare this view of criticism with Benjamin’s critique of the Baroque allegorist who either ponders over the dead fragments of the fallen world or who, in one stroke, betrays this world by regarding it as an allegory of the afterlife.20 While in the first case the allegorist proceeds as a commentator, dealing merely with material content, in the second they behave like a ‘philosophical barbarian’ who demands immediate access to the truth. Benjamin rejects both positions and attempts to find the traces of salvation in the fragmentary world itself. This shows again that one should 18 An example may be helpful here. A quintessential case of a self-reflexive work of art is, as Schlegel already noticed, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. In this novel, the storyline is constantly interrupted by trivial anecdotes, jokes, drawings, and even a ‘digression on digressions’. Furthermore, the narrator repeatedly addresses his reader directly, reminding the latter that he is, in fact, reading a novel. Consequently, Sterne’s novel is nothing more (or less) than a long meditation on the question of what it means to tell a story, or to read a novel. 19 As we will see later, the enigmatic character of art is a central theorem in Adorno’s philosophy of criticism, too. 20 See Chapter 2.3.

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be careful not to identify him with the allegorist, for it is his conviction, as he writes in the prologue of the Origin of German Tragic Drama, ‘that truth content is only to be grasped through immersion in the most minute details of material content’ (O, 29; I/1, 208). This ‘grasping’ of truth content, however, is inherently problematic, since it is Benjamin’s conviction that the truth cannot be ‘willed’. He argues that while ‘knowledge is possession’ (O, 29; I/1, 209), and that truth, by contrast, is ‘the death of intention’ (O, 36; I/1, 216). This is in line with the romantic image of the critic, whose personal opinion is irrelevant, since his task is not to judge the work, but instead to set in motion the work’s own criticism. Knowledge, according to this view, would mean the identification of a work as belonging to a certain category. The critic, by contrast, proceeds like Adam in paradise, whom Benjamin calls ‘the father of philosophy’ (O, 37; I/1, 217), because he merely names the things instead of defining them or subsuming them under existing categories.21 This is also why truth, in contrast to knowledge, depends on ‘presentation’ (Darstellung). The critic, in Benjamin’s view, has to arrange and ‘present’ the material content in such a way that its truth content may be grasped.22 In Origin of German Tragic Drama Benjamin characterized criticism as the ‘mortification’ of works. What he means by this is the destruction of the semblance of the work of art of life, through its disclosure of semblance qua semblance. The critic, he argues, shatters the work into ‘a thing of shards’. However, neither in Origin nor in the Goethe essay does Benjamin conceive of this mortification as contradicting beauty. He writes: Philosophy must not attempt to deny that it re-awakens the beauty of works. ‘Science cannot lead to the naive enjoyment of art any more than geologists and botanists can awaken a feeling for the beauty of landscape’; this assertion is as incorrect as the analogy which is supposed to support it is false (O, 182; I/1, 358). 21 Benjamin here implicitly refers to his at that moment unpublished essay ‘On Language as Such and on the Language of Man’ (1916), where he develops a theory of a language of names on the basis of a reading of Genesis. A detailed comparison between his and Adorno’s philosophy of language deserves to be written, but unfortunately falls outside the scope of this book. For a discussion of Benjamin’s philosophy of language, see Menninghaus (1980) and Mosès (1992), 87-111. 22 As I have discussed in Chapter 3, presentation is also the necessary condition for the true image of history. In the Arcades Project, Benjamin writes: ‘Being a dialectician means having the wind of history in one’s sails. The sails are the concepts. It is not enough, however, to have sails at one’s disposal. What is decisive is knowing the art of setting them’ (AP, 473; V/1, 592).

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The ‘naive enjoyment of art’, according to Benjamin, is the very aim of criticism, but, in order for it to be reached, the work has to be stripped of the mythical aura that surrounds it. We should therefore ask what exactly is to be mortified. As Uwe Steiner points out, it is not so much the work of art but rather its specific appearance in history that is destroyed.23 The critic, after all, deals not only with the work, but also with the tradition in which it has been passed down to him, and from which the work is to be redeemed. Therefore, the work’s mortification constitutes the ‘basis for a rebirth’ (O, 182; I/1, 358), that is, for its transfiguration and resurrection in the realm of truth. The contours of Benjamin’s concept of criticism begin to emerge. Four main features can be distinguished. First, criticism is immanent – that is, the work of art is criticized on the basis of elements it contains within itself. Again, this does not mean that one should not take into account the history of its reception, since the work contains in it the potential for its reception. Second, criticism is the at-times violent interruption of semblance. Immanent criticism implies that the work of art contains moments in which it opposes its own mythical character. Drawing on these moments, the critic exposes the artwork qua artwork and destroys its status as necessary and natural (which it enjoys in classicist aesthetics). Third, this interruption or ‘mortification’ is also an intervention in the ‘afterlife’ of the work, that is, in the way it has been passed down to the critic. Finally, the critic aims at the truth content of the work of art, which can, however, be presented only through its material content, and which, moreover, appears only negatively – namely, precisely at the moment at which it points to its own mythical character. Now that we have established the main characteristic of the early Benjamin’s concept of criticism, let us turn to the later work. At first glance, it would seem that a starker contrast could not exist than that between Origin of German Tragic Drama and One Way Street, published in the same year (1928).24 The first is, in all its idiosyncrasy, still an academic book, dealing with an obscure period of German literature and written in an extremely dense and hermetic language. The second has a provocative and associative style, with road signs and advertisement as headings (‘Germans, Drink German Beer!’), and contains aphorisms, observations, dream protocols, instructions (‘How to Write Fat Books’), theses (‘Thirteen Theses against Snobs’) and small essays. The book is dedicated to Asja Lacis, a Latvian revolutionary with whom Benjamin was in love, and who is often said to 23 Steiner in Opitz and Wizisla (eds., 2000), 514. 24 Buck-Morss (1989) beautifully sketches this contrast (8-24).

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have ‘converted’ him to Marxism. Lacis’s collaboration with Brecht and her ideas about revolutionary pedagogy and children’s theatre inspired Benjamin to rethink his ideas on the role of the critical intellectual. This is nowhere as clear as in the passages in One Way Street dealing with criticism. In a section entitled ‘This Space for Rent’, Benjamin writes: ‘Fools lament the decay of criticism. For its day is long past’ (SW 1, 476; IV/1, 131). Criticism, he argues, depends on distance, while the modern gaze demands that things come closer. Anticipating a motif from the work-of-art essay, he states that film and advertisement make contemplative perception impossible and strike the observer in a tactile way. He writes: ‘What, in the end, makes advertisements so superior to criticism? Not what the moving red neon sign says – but the fiery pool reflecting it in the asphalt’ (SW 1, 476; IV/1, 132). Advertisement is, as it were, ‘in the street’ and among the people. It forces itself upon you even if you do not want it or expect it. Obviously, Benjamin does not prefer advertisement, which is affirmative by nature, to criticism. Rather, he seems to argue that criticism should model itself on its opposite; it should adapt its ‘presentation’ to a new time. The space of traditional criticism is indeed ‘for rent’ and open to occupation by a new and different kind of criticism. In another section of One Way Street, entitled ‘The Critic’s Technique in Thirteen Theses’, Benjamin gives an idea of how this critic might look. The critic, he argues, is ‘the strategist in the literary struggle’ (SW 1, 460; IV/1, 108). ‘Slogans’ are their battle cries, while the artwork becomes a ‘shining sword’ for them (SW 1, 460; IV/1, 109). This critic indeed seems far removed from the contemplative scholar of the early work. Still, there is not one element of his early theory of criticism that does not return in the late work.25 In the early 1930s, Benjamin was working to found a journal of literary criticism, entitled Crisis and Criticism, and to write an essay on the task of the critic, which was to function as the introduction to a collection of his essays on literature. Although neither of these projects was eventually realized, his notes and fragments provide insight into his concept of criticism, which bears a striking similarity to the concept as it appears in the early work. First, the idea of immanent criticism returns in his suspicion of the critic’s personal opinion or judgment: ‘Honest criticism from the standpoint 25 Similarly, Buck-Morss (1989) argues that, although the style of Origin and One Way Street is ‘antithetical, the content of the old-fashioned work maintains a striking aff inity to the new one’, since in the latter ‘not the allegorical object (tragic drama), but the allegorical practice is redeemed’ (18). Just as the Baroque poet uses images from nature to provide meaning, Benjamin uses the fragments from ‘second nature’, that is, advertisement, journalism, popular sayings, etc.

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of unprejudiced judgment of taste is uninteresting and basically lacking in substance’ (SW 2, 289; VI, 161). In his view, the literary industry’s interest in opinions and critical ‘personalities’ betrays its latent idealist aesthetic. Against it, Benjamin argues that ‘the great critic enables others to form their opinion on the basis of his critical analysis’ (SW 2, 548; VI, 171). Second, the idea of the interruption of semblance, too, survives in Benjamin’s materialist criticism. He writes: ‘The theory of the ruins created by time should be complemented by the process of deconstruction [Abmontieren], which is the task of the critic’ (SW 2, 415; VI, 174). The critic, in other words, abstracts from the work its appearance of nature, exposing it as a thing in and of the world. Here, however, there is also a difference with the earlier writings. In his writings after One Way Street, the interruption of semblance gains a sudden political character. The fact that the work of art is part of the world now also means that it is necessarily complicit in that world. Therefore, it has to take sides in the emerging political conflicts. ‘Especially today’, he writes, the function of criticism is ‘to lift the mask of “pure art” and show that there is no neutral ground for art’ (SW 2, 292; VI, 164). Third, Benjamin continues to argue that criticism is concerned with ‘the life, the ongoing life [Fortleben], of the works themselves’ (SW 2, 372; VI, 177). A metaphor for criticism, he writes, is to ‘take the plants from the garden of art and transplant them to the alien soil of science’ (SW 2, 294; VI, 167). The critic, in other words, intervenes in the ‘afterlife’ of the work of art by ripping it out of the context of its genesis and putting it into a different constellation. Thus he enables potential experiences that lay dormant in the work to bloom. The metaphor of the ‘alien soil of science’ also refers to Benjamin’s refusal to consider works of art only in terms of the history of art. Art, he argues, is merely a ‘transitional stage’ for the great works: ‘They were something else (in the course of their gestation) and become something else again (in the state of criticism)’ (SW 2, 547; VI, 172). Thus, criticism ‘rescues’ the work from being turned into a ‘cultural good’.26 This brings us, finally, to the fourth feature of criticism, namely that it aims for truth. Benjamin writes: ‘Only in the interior of the work, where truth content and material content meet, is the sphere of art definitely left behind’ (SW 2, 408; VI, 179). This remark can be read as a rephrasing of the idea that, once criticism has revealed the true beauty of the work of art, namely at the point where truth content and material content intersect, it confronts us as an enigma. Its truth, after all, cannot be ‘owned’. In other 26 As Heinrich Kaulen notes, ‘redemption’ (Rettung) is the opposite of ‘enshrinement of heritage’ (Würdigung als Erbe) (Kaulen in Opitz and Wizisla (eds., 2000), 633).

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words, the work’s ‘sobriety’ and its ultimate incomprehensibility are for Benjamin one and the same. Notwithstanding the return of the early concept’s main features, there is an undeniable change in Benjamin’s thinking about criticism. This change, or ‘recasting’ as he once put it, involves not so much the theory of criticism but rather the social function of the critic. In the essay ‘Surrealism’ (1929), he speaks of a ‘crisis of the intelligentsia’ which, in his view, is the same as a crisis of ‘the humanistic concept of freedom’ (SW 2, 207; II/1, 295). Confronted with a hostile political situation, the critic must rethink their own position in society. One can distinguish between two implications, which we already encountered in the discussion of One Way Street: first, the critic has to become ‘strategic’ in a new political context, and second, they have to change their ‘presentation’ in order to address a different public. At first glance, the strategic character of criticism seems to contradict the idea of ‘immanent’ criticism, as well as the theorem of the ‘death of intention’. However, this is only partly the case. According to Benjamin’s early work, the critic speaks on behalf of the work of art, redeeming it from its mythical semblance. Once, however, myth prevails in society, it jeopardizes the freedom of art as well as that of the critic, so that the latter is forced to take sides against it. Therefore, when Benjamin explains and justifies the Surrealists’ political orientation, he seems to be talking about himself, too: ‘In this transformation of a highly contemplative attitude into revolutionary opposition, the hostility of the bourgeoisie toward every manifestation of radical intellectual freedom played a leading part. This hostility pushed Surrealism to the left’ (SW 2, 213; II/1, 303). This would mean that Benjamin’s political commitment involves not the abandonment and contradiction of immanent criticism, but rather is, as Uwe Steiner correctly remarks, the immediate consequence of his theory of criticism.27 In the process of recasting, the poetic and work-immanent critique of myth is transposed to a critique of social myth. Though this social critique is already present in the Goethe essay (as we will soon see), in his later work it becomes explicitly political. Second, the critic has to rethink his ‘presentation’ (Darstellung). The problem of presentation is not new in Benjamin’s writings of the 1930s, since it is already part of the theory of criticism developed in Origin of German Tragic Drama. However, like immanent criticism, the problem of presentation is transformed. In the new political constellation, the critic is forced to take their place among the people, not as a leader, but rather as a pedagogue, who provides the audience with thought material, and also 27 Steiner in Opitz and Wizisla (eds., 2000), 518.

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with the space and opportunity to draw its own conclusions from it. This is where Benjamin begins to fantasize about a ‘criticism consisting entirely of quotations [reine Zitatenkritik]’ (SW 2, 290; VI, 162), which is very much in line with Brecht’s and Lacis’s thoughts about theatre. By merely showing contradictory elements (such as a criminal policeman and a righteous criminal) without passing judgment, revolutionary theatre ‘estranges’ the audience in order to incite political awareness. Again, this does not mean that for Benjamin the material can speak entirely for itself, or that it can do without theory. It still needs the constructive work of the critic, which is precisely what the problem of presentation is about. And this became the crucial problem for the Arcades Project.28 In the complex of the Arcades Project, the figure of the critic is nowhere explicitly mentioned, so that one might think that Benjamin no longer considers criticism an important matter. Even though he writes several of his most important literary critiques during this period (on Kafka, Brecht, and Baudelaire), his attempts to formulate a theory of criticism seem to have stopped. At the same time, however, one could argue that the critic is omnipresent in the Arcades Project, whose many curious inhabitants share traces of the critic’s physiognomy: the rag picker who collects obsolete items off the streets and turns them into commodities, the student who collects knowledge, the detective who solves a crime on the basis of the smallest detail, the ponderer (Grübler) who once owned the solution to a great problem and who now seeks to reconstruct it from the fragments of his memory, and the flâneur and the prostitute who are covertly selling on the streets. Let us take a closer look at two prominent figures of the Arcades Project, the allegorist and the collector. The critic is like the allegorist in many ways. For instance, the critic dismantles his object (‘shatters it into a thing of shards’) or rips it out of its original context so that it can be endowed with new meaning – the dual process of ‘devaluation’ and ‘sanctification’, which I discussed in Chapter 2. However, although criticism, like allegory, has a violent character, this violence is of a different order. In allegory, violence is directed at the object itself. Benjamin writes, in Origin of German Tragic Drama, that the arbitrary meaning endowed by the allegorist ‘rules like a stern sultan in the harem of objects’ (O, 184; I/1, 360). The critic, by contrast, does not subsume the object under a predetermined and subjective meaning. His work of stripping 28 One might also recognize features of the critic in the artwork essay: there the critic becomes the director, who uses montage as the primary principle of presentation. By drawing attention to montage, he reveals the constructed and ‘mediated’ nature of visible reality.

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the object of meaning merely enables him to attend to a different or new meaning, which, however, can be neither willed nor owned. This different kind of approach to things distinguishes the critic from the allegorist, and brings him closer to yet another dweller of the Parisian arcades. This is the collector, the nineteenth-century explorer of curiosity shops who is in search of the missing piece for his collection. In the Arcades Project we read that ‘the true collector detaches the object from its functional relations’ (AP, 207; V/1, 274). This seems to be similar to the procedure of the allegorist, but the collector differs from him in some crucial ways. First, as Max Pensky writes, the collector approaches the objects with love instead of spleen.29 The objects ‘strike him’ (AP, 205; V/1, 272), which means that the collector pays attention to their meaning, instead of to the meaning he projects on them. Second, instead of the contemplative perception of the allegorist, collectors are ‘beings with tactile instincts’ (AP, 206; V/1, 274). In order to add to his collection, the collector must have a constant presence of mind, and an almost bodily openness to the object. Third, ‘for the collector, the world is present, and indeed ordered, in each of his objects. Ordered, however, according to a surprising and, for the profane understanding, incomprehensible connection’ (AP, 207; V/1, 274). Here Benjamin’s monadology springs to mind, since the collector pays attention, not merely to the object, but also to previous owners, to its original purchase value, and to where it has been – in short, to the path the object had to travel before it was put in his hands. As such, each object indeed presents an alternative order of history. In Benjamin’s portrait of the collector, one can recognize the main features of criticism, such as its immanence and its intervention in the afterlife of the work of art. The collector, finally, is concerned with truth, which makes him the ‘polar opposite’ of the allegorist: [The allegorist] has given up the attempt to elucidate things through research into their properties and relations. He dislodges things from their context and, from the outset, relies on his profundity to illuminate their meaning. The collector, by contrast, brings together what belongs together; by keeping in mind their affinities and their succession in time, he can eventually furnish information about his objects (AP, 211; V/1, 279).

The problem, of course, is that there is no rule or law to determine ‘what belongs together’. Therefore, the opposition between allegorist and collector 29 Pensky (1993), 243.

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is dialectical: ‘In every collector hides an allegorist, and in every allegorist a collector’ (AP, 211; V/1, 279). Both collector and allegorist regard the world as ruinous and fragmentary. But, although the collector remains hopeful of finding the ‘true’ order of the fragments, the allegorist has given up on the world. The critic, I would argue, moves between these two dialectical poles. He wants to be a collector, but is always in danger of becoming an allegorist. This explains, perhaps, why Benjamin’s critiques are so attractive and fascinating, but also why they sometimes arouse a feeling of unease. Material is ordered in a way that seems self-evident, but that, lacking justification other than the critic’s view, might also appear arbitrary. This discussion of Benjamin’s early and late work has demonstrated that there is indeed considerble continuity over time in his concept of criticism. The four main features of criticism – immanent criticism, interruption of semblance, intervention in the afterlife, and pursuit of truth – remain constant. However, it is also evident that these features undergo a process of ‘recasting’ under the pressure of a changing political constellation. One could say that Benjamin ‘redeems’ his early theory of criticism by adjusting its elements and placing them into a new context, politics, as opposed to academia and hermetic literary scholarship. The question of the relation between the early and the late work is related to the question of the relation between ‘theology’ and ‘materialism’, although they are not identical. There are, after all, many places in the late work where Benjamin uses theological terminology, such as his essay on Kafka and ‘On the Concept of History’. Much has been written about the resemblances between his concept of criticism and the tradition of interpretation in Jewish mysticism.30 Scholem reports, for instance, that the Kabbalist paradigm knew two Torahs, namely the Torah of Exile, which was given to us after Adam’s fall, and the Torah of Redemption, replacing the former once the Messiah arrives. Some mystics believed, Scholem tells us, that the second Torah is different from the first only because of a single letter that is added to the alphabet, or only because the arrangement of letters is altered – a change that results, however, in a completely different meaning.31 From this it would follow that, by reading and interpreting the Torah of Exile ‘against the grain’ and deliberately stretching its words and meanings, a scholar might catch a glimpse of the Torah of Redemption. Other scholars of Benjamin refuse to regard Jewish mysticism as the ‘key’ to his theory of criticism, arguing, as Rosen puts it, that ‘the little 30 See Buck-Morss (1989), 231-237, Eagleton (1981), 114-118, and Wolin (1994), 37-44. 31 Scholem (1960), 101-110, and Scholem (1970), 145.

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that Benjamin found in the Kabbala was only what he had already been looking for.’32 Some argue that his reading of Jewish mysticism is mediated through philosophers such as Humboldt, Hamann and Schlegel. Early German Romantics also had a keen interest in Jewish mysticism, and the idea of ‘redemptive criticism’ can already be found in their works.33 And Pensky points out that almost all of the authors writing on Benjamin’s ‘theological’ criticism use Scholem’s work on Jewish mysticism as their exclusive source. Pensky remarks that nobody seems to take into account the possibility that, conversely, Scholem’s reading of Jewish mysticism might be influenced by his friend’s views on criticism.34 In the Arcades Project, Benjamin writes: ‘My thinking is related to theology as blotting pad is related to ink. It is saturated with it. Were one to go by the blotter, however, nothing of what is written would remain’ (AP, 471; V/1, 588). In other words: even if, at an extreme point, Benjamin eliminates theology from his writings, his thinking remains ‘saturated’ with it. It would therefore be impossible to separate theology and materialism in his philosophy.35 However, like the main features of the theory of criticism, theology undergoes a process of materialist ‘recasting’ in his late writings. ‘Redemption’ is brought about, not by the Messiah, but by the revolution. Truth resides, not in the divine ‘Other’, but in the unrealized potential of obsolete technologies and ways of life. The scholar of the Kabbala, consequently, is transfigured in the Arcades Project into the conspirateur de profession, the ‘alchemist’ (SW 4, 7; I/2, 519) of revolution for whom, as Marx wrote, ‘the only condition for revolution is the effective organization of their conspiracy’ (SW 4, 4; I/2, 514). In other words, for Benjamin, criticism becomes a matter of politics. In my view, the question of whether the ultimate ‘fundament’ of Benjamin’s concept of criticism is theology or materialism is secondary to whether such a fundament would make his philosophy of criticism plausible or satisfactory. A philosophy of criticism that relies on Jewish mysticism would certainly not satisfy contemporary thinkers. Benjamin was well aware of this, and that is probably one of the reasons why he took such great pains to ‘hide’ his theology. In a famous simile in ‘On the Concept of History’, he compares historical materialism with a chess machine that will defeat any opponent, but only because it is operated by a hunchbacked dwarf beneath 32 33 34 35

Rosen (1988), 158. See Kaulen in Opitz and Wizisla (eds., 2000), 625-627. Pensky (1993), 235. See also Chapter 3.3.

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the table, who is hidden from view through an ingenious system of mirrors. This dwarf is theology ‘which today, as we know, is small and ugly and has to keep out of sight’ (SW 4, 389). For the case of criticism, however, one might refer to a similar but slightly different tale, which is not as famous as the one of the dwarf in the chess machine. In ‘Rastelli’s Story’ (1935), a children’s tale written for a Swiss newspaper, he tells us of a master juggler who was able to perform the most wondrous tricks with a ball, but only because his assistant, a boy dwarf, was hiding inside the ball, adjusting its movements to his master’s will by means of a complex system of springs. To keep their secret safe, they made sure never to be seen together. One day, the juggler is asked to perform before a cruel sultan. The juggler and the dwarf rehearse endlessly, to make sure nothing goes wrong. On the day of the performance, the juggler gives the best show of his life, and is highly rewarded for it. However, when after his performance he waits outside the palace doors for his companion to sneak out, a messenger brings him a letter from the dwarf, who had in fact written it before the performance: ‘Dear Master, you must not be angry with me. Today you cannot appear before the sultan. I am sick and cannot leave my bed’ (SW 3, 98; IV/2, 780). What makes this story so nice is the doubling and hence the inversion of deception.36 The juggler thinks he is cheating the sultan and the rest of the audience, but actually he himself is cheated in not being a fraud. The true wonder, then, is that everything is exactly as it seems. For the juggler’s performance, however, it is all the same. If we now think of criticism in terms of this story, one might argue that it does not matter whether Benjamin’s concept of criticism is ‘ultimately’ theological or materialist – in other words, whether the dwarf is hiding in the ball or not. What matters most is the success of the critic’s performance. Of course, it is highly questionable whether such a metaphor can sufficiently account for the considerale epistemological problems at the heart of Benjamin’s theory. But before we turn to that, let us see the critic perform.

4.4

An exemplary piece of criticism: Benjamin’s Goethe essay

It might seem strange to choose Benjamin’s essay on Goethe’s Elective Affinities as an instantiation of his concept of criticism. Can this early essay also function as a model for his later, materialist criticism? It should be 36 For a detailed reading of Benjamin’s children’s tales see Mehlman (1993).

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noted, first of all, that Benjamin’s concept of criticism is not a ‘formula’ for which the work of art serves as mere input. Immanent criticism implies that one meets the work of art on its own ground, that one lets one’s procedure be affected by the work. Benjamin’s characterization of this essay as an ‘exemplary piece of criticism’ (CWB, 194; BB 1, 281) calls to mind Kant’s distinction, in Critique of Judgment, between ‘example’ and ‘exemplary’.37 An example, Kant argues, is an illustration of a rule. But since, in his view, the work of the ‘artistic genius’ is not derived from a rule (it is ‘without concept’), it is not an example but exemplary. And since, in Benjamin’s view, there are no predetermined rules for criticism either, the Goethe essay must count as exemplary. This still does not justify my choice for the Goethe essay, however. The first, and probably least convincing reason, is that the most obvious other candidate, the critique of Baudelaire, has already been discussed in preceding chapters. A second reason is that, although the essay on Goethe belongs to his pre-Marxist work, it already contains motifs that are crucial to his own materialist criticism, and even to materialist criticism per se.38 Even in his last published essay on Baudelaire, Benjamin quotes from the Goethe essay. A final reason is that Benjamin himself considered the essay an ‘exemplary piece of criticism’. This remark can be read in two ways. First, it tells us that the essay can serve as a model of how, in his view, criticism should be practiced. Second, and as we will see, Benjamin reads Goethe’s novel as itself treating the relations among semblance, beauty and truth. That is why he can read the novel as an allegory for criticism itself. The essay on Goethe, in other words, is not merely a critique, but, through its subject, also a meditation on criticism. The essay ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities’ consists of three parts. An outline tells us that the titles of the parts, omitted in the published version, were ‘The Mythic as Thesis’, ‘Redemption as Antithesis’, and ‘Hope as Synthesis’ (I/3, 835-837). These titles point to the dialectical structure of the essay, which, however, is not a Hegelian dialectic but rather, as will be explained, ‘dialectics at a standstill’. Elective Affinities tells of the adulterous relations of an aristocratic couple (Eduard and Charlotte) with two of their visitors (Charlotte’s niece Otillie, 37 Kant (1987), 308: 175. 38 See De Cauter (1999), 227-229. Adorno was well aware of the importance of Benjamin’s early work for Marxism. When he accuses Benjamin of vulgar materialism in ‘Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire’, he writes: ‘Your study of Goethe’s Elective Affinities and the book on the Baroque are better Marxism than your wine tax and your deduction of phantasmagoria from the practices of the feuilletonists’ (ABC, 285; ABB, 370).

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and Eduard’s friend, the ‘captain’). Because of its sad ending, most of Goethe’s contemporaries understood it as an apology for marital faithfulness. Benjamin disagrees with this interpretation, arguing that the real material content of the novel is not marriage, but ‘the mythic’ (SW 1, 309; I/1, 140). Marriage, from the outset, appears in the novel as a destructive force. When it is no longer grounded in love, it shows itself as pure law. Law, however, once it is no longer supported by social cohesion, becomes a convention that presents itself as a force of nature, or as the blind rule of fate. According to Benjamin, we can therefore call it mythic.39 Goethe, in his view, ‘did not want […] to establish a foundation for marriage but wished, rather, to show the forces that arise from its decay. Yet these are surely the mythic powers of the law, and in them marriage is only the execution of a decline that it does not decree’ (SW 1, 301; I/1, 130). The characters in Goethe’s novel are under the spell of myth. Moving blindly through a fallen, guilt-laden world, they are, as Benjamin argues, ‘entirely rooted in nature’ (SW 1, 304; I/1, 133). The novel points to this condition in several ways. First, as we learn from a discussion among the characters, the title Elective Affinities refers to a chemical phenomenon in which two compounds react and exchange ‘partners’: AB and CD become AD and BC. And this is precisely what happens with the two ‘pairs’ in the novel: like the particles in a chemical process, the characters move blindly, without consciously deciding. They merely follow the law of ‘elective affinity’. According to Benjamin, a second sign of the rootedness of the characters in nature is that they show no traces of history and are detached from tradition. The reader knows them only by their first names, for instance, or, in the case of the captain, only by his military rank. In one passage, family gravestones are ruthlessly removed from the estate in order to make a path across the churchyard. In another passage, Otillie loses a necklace containing the portrait of her father when she walks through the forest with Eduard. Finally, the spell of myth takes shape in the novel as the fatal power of nature. Nature appears as a deadly force, most clearly in a passage in which a sudden gust of wind flips the boat in which Otillie and the child Otto are crossing a mountain lake. The child drowns, after which Otillie, filled with remorse, starves herself to death. According to Benjamin, however, nature is 39 The mythical character of the law is the central theme of Benjamin’s essay ‘Critique of Violence’ (1921). There are many connections between the Goethe essay and ‘Critique of Violence, which, however, cannot be pursued here. For a discussion of ‘Critique of Violence’ in relation to Benjamin’s concept of art criticism and his philosophy of history, see Lijster (2012).

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never what it seems in Goethe’s novel. When Otillie and Eduard play music together, for instance, the latter believes there to be a ‘natural’ harmony between them, while in fact Otillie has to constantly adjust the key when Eduard plays out of tune. Benjamin points out that the estate of Eduard and Charlotte does not contain a trace of ‘original’ nature. The landscape is reconstructed, as we gradually learn, including the artificial lake, which is, for Benjamin, thus an allegory for myth: history pretending to be nature. According to Benjamin, the recurring symbols of death in the novel are themselves the sign of myth as the eternal recurrence of the same. Eduard lets his life be determined by the ‘signs’ confronting him, for instance by a crystal glass bearing his and Otillie’s initials. Benjamin argues that ‘once man has sunk to this level, even the life of seemingly dead things acquires power’ (SW 1, 308; I/1, 139). In other words, he alienation of the characters from history puts them at the mercy of the powers of nature. Neither the omnipotence of nature nor the symbols of death were missed by previous critics, as Benjamin notes. On the contrary, they form the centre of an influential biography of Goethe, published by Friedrich Gundolf in 1918. Unlike Gundolf, however, Benjamin denies that the novel affirms the realm of myth. While most critics read Elective Affinities as a moral tale, Benjamin argues that it is rather a tale of morality. It is not the characters’ decisions themselves that are to be judged, but the fact that they lack decisions. Since the characters remain silent on this score, the reader stays in the dark about their motives: ‘So much suffering, so little struggle. Hence the silencing of all affects. They never appear externally as enmity, revenge, envy, yet neither do they live internally as lament, shame, or despair’ (SW 1, 343; I/1, 185). Their actions lack what in Benjamin’s view is the most important element of ethical decision-making, namely language. He distinguishes between choice (Wahl) and decision (Entscheidung). The characters in the novel only choose, and randomly. This is clear from the beginning, when Eduard and Charlotte conclude that it is ‘all the same’ whether or not to invite their guests. While choice is governed by mythic nature (as is the case in ‘elective affinity’), only the outspoken ethical decision can break the shackles of myth: ‘For choice is natural and can even belong to the elements; decision is transcendent’ (SW 1, 347; I/1, 189). According to Benjamin, earlier critics missed the novel’s critique of myth because they failed to notice the importance of the novella inside the novel, ‘The Curious Tale of the Childhood Sweethearts’, recounted by an English nobleman visiting the estate. In the second part of his essay, ‘Redemption as Antithesis’, Benjamin reads the novella as a counterpoint to the novel. The

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same motifs that bring death and destruction in the novel bring redemption and happiness in the novella. The girl’s wedding dress can thus be paired in this connection with Otillie’s shroud; and the still water in which Otto dies, with the wild water in which the sweethearts leap to their deaths, but which eventually transfigures them and seals their bond. Most importantly, however, the characters in the novella differ from those in the novel in that they make a decision. While the couples in the novel move about silently and conform to the law, the ‘childhood sweethearts’ openly defy fate. Benjamin writes: ‘It is the day of decision shining into the dusk-filled Hades of the novel’ (SW 1, 331; I/1, 169). Their decision to leap to their deaths, in other words, interrupts the continuity of myth, which is precisely why they are eventually redeemed. Although he does not say so explicitly, it is clear that Benjamin regards the novella as a ‘caesura’ in the novel (the interruption of the semblance of the artwork discussed in the previous section). The novella is the antithesis of the novel and therefore of myth. Through it, the novel criticizes not only the mythical world depicted, but also the classic novel form – that is, the novel’s own appearance as an organic whole. Benjamin argues, furthermore, that ‘the novella is more prosaic than the novel’ (SW 1, 331; I/1, 169). Its form keeps the reader at a distance, thus preventing them from being drawn into the novel’s interior as into a maelstrom (SW 1, 330; I/1, 168). In the third part of the essay, ‘Hope as Synthesis’, Benjamin focuses on the figure of Otillie. In the literature on Goethe, Otillie is either regarded as a sinner who is punished for transgressing marital bonds, or as a saint who sacrifices herself for her chastity. Gundolf even compares her to the hero in Greek tragedy. According to Benjamin, however, this is ‘the falsest of judgments’ (SW 1, 337; I/1, 176). The Greek hero, he argues, defies the gods and their laws; his violent death marks the constitution of a new order. Otillie’s death, by contrast, is non-violent, a silent fading away. After she has died, nothing changes for those left behind. Anticipating the distinction made between tragedy and mourning play in Origin of German Tragic Drama, Benjamin concludes: ‘Nothing more untragic can be conceived than this mournful [trauervolle] end’ (SW 1, 337; I/1, 177). According to Benjamin, Otillie lacks character. In his Poetics, Aristotle writes that the tragic hero reveals his character (ethos) at the moment of decision. 40 No trace of decision can be found in Otillie. We learn nothing of her inner feelings, and nowhere does she express her emotions. After Otto’s 40 See Leacock (2002). In the essay ‘Fate and Character’ (1919) Benjamin argues that character is antithetical to fate.

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death, Eduard asks her to utter a single word, yes or no, in response to his love. She says nothing, however, and precisely this ‘plant-like muteness’ (SW 1, 336; I/1, 175), as Benjamin calls it, places her outside the ethical sphere. Even as she is dying she stays mute, which is why it cannot count as tragic. According to Benjamin, her death is not the outcome of a decision. It comes as a surprise, not merely to the other characters, but also to herself. Apart from her silence, Otillie’s most important characteristic is her beauty, which Goethe repeatedly emphasizes (but nowhere describes). For this reason, Benjamin reads the figure of Otillie as an allegory of the work of art. In his view, she is not chaste but rather ‘unapproachable [unnahbar]’ (SW 1, 334; I/1, 173), the same predicate he uses some 10 years later to define the aura of the work of art. Here one should recall, however, Benjamin’s conviction that although beauty has a necessary moment of semblance, it is not identical to semblance: ‘No work of art may seem wholly alive […] without becoming mere semblance and ceasing to be a work of art. The life undulating in it must appear petrified and as if spellbound in a single moment’ (SW 1, 340; I/1, 180). From this perspective, Otillie’s silent death takes on a different meaning. Her silence, for Benjamin, is nothing other than the ‘expressionless’, which shatters the mythical semblance of the work of art. Her true beauty, like the beauty of the work of art, is revealed at the moment of her death. In this way, Benjamin redeems the figure of Otillie from moral judgment, while at the same time redeeming the beauty of the work of art from myth. Beauty, in his view, belongs to myth insofar it is semblance. But since it is the semblance of truth, it also refers to redemption. Therefore, the title of the third part of the essay, ‘Hope as Synthesis’, refers to nothing other than beauty. This ‘synthesis’, however, is not a Hegelian sublation, but rather the momentary ‘petrification’ of the dialectical poles of myth and redemption, which become visible in a single image. It is, in other words, what Benjamin later calls ‘dialectics at a standstill’. The novel does not end there, however. Otillie’s corpse, resting in a glass casket, stays beautiful long after her death, and, because of this miracle, her grave becomes a place of pilgrimage. It is not hard to see why Benjamin considers this Christian mysticism ‘out of place’ (SW 1, 355; I/1, 200). Not only does it signal the prolongation of myth, it also resembles what he later criticizes as the false preservation of the aura of the work of art in the idea of ‘eternal beauty’. According to Benjamin, however, the part of the novel to which ‘hope as synthesis’ refers, is not Otillie’s beauty-beyond-death, but rather an earlier passage. When Eduard returns from the war, he encounters Otillie in the woods. Moments before Otto drowns and the novel takes its fatal turn, Eduard expresses his love for Otillie and they embrace for the

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first time. We then read: ‘Hope shot across the sky above their heads like a falling star’ (SW 1, 354-355; I/1, 200). According to Benjamin, this one sentence too is a ‘caesura’ in the work, a moment when everything pauses. Not only because a new word, ‘hope’, is introduced, but also because the reader becomes aware of their own perspective. Benjamin writes: ‘They [Eduard and Otillie, TL] are unaware of it, of course, and it could not be said any more clearly that the last hope is never such to him who cherishes it but is the last only to those for whom it is cherished’ (SW 1, 355; I/1, 200). Much has been written about the motif of the star in Benjamin’s work. 41 In some places, it functions as the sign of the transcendent. In this case, however, it concerns a falling star, and so one might argue that it is rather a sign of transience—a sign that what seems eternal (law, mythic nature) will perish too. Either way, the falling star is a sign of redemption, signalling a love that could have happened but did not. But, as Benjamin notes, the lovers are unaware of it. We are the ones hoping for them: it is a hope for a love that might have been. This is the same hope that, in ‘On the Concept of History’, is cherished for our oppressed ancestors – a hope for the hopeless, indeed, but one that places a debt on our shoulders. This hope runs parallel, moreover, to the hope that the semblance of the work of art entertains of being real. This is why Benjamin writes: ‘Hope justifies the semblance of reconciliation, and Plato’s tenet that it is absurd to desire the semblance of the good suffers its one exception. For one is permitted to desire the semblance of reconciliation – indeed, it must be desired: it alone is the house of the most extreme hope’ (SW 1, 355; I/1, 200). Benjamin’s essay on Goethe is an ‘exemplary piece of criticism’ on many levels. As we have seen, it not only functions as a model for criticism, but also regards Goethe’s novel as an allegory of criticism. Benjamin discusses many motifs in the novel that resonate with his concept of criticism. The novel, in his view, criticizes myth through the novella, and not only the mythical world depicted in the novel, but also the mythical semblance of the novel itself, namely its semblance of being a divine creation instead of a human product. Furthermore, the idea that truth content comes to the fore when the material content becomes ‘strange’ recurs in the novel, insofar as the truth about marriage (namely the fact that it is a convention) shows itself 41 For instance, in ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’ the star functions as the opposite of the game of chance: ‘A wish fulfilled is the crowning of experience. In folk symbolism, distance in space can take the place of distance in time; that is why the shooting star, which plunges into infinite space, has become the symbol of a fulfilled wish. The ivory ball that rolls into the next compartment, the next card that lies on top, are the very antithesis of a falling star’ (SW 4, 331; I/2, 635). For other places see Mosès (1992), 87-111.

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only when its content (namely love) withers. Finally, and most importantly, the redemption of the figure of Otillie coincides with the redemption of the beautiful semblance of the work of art. One might say, therefore, that, in Benjamin’s reading, the novel redeems itself. How do the main features of Benjamin’s concept of criticism function in his essay on Goethe? The first feature, the immanent character of this critique is quite clear. He criticizes the novel as a whole from the perspective of its parts, more specifically of its ‘caesurae’ (the novella and the sentence on hope). Bernd Witte argues, however, that Benjamin’s Goethe essay is not really an ‘immanent’ criticism, since Benjamin refers to concepts such as ‘myth’ and ‘fate’ that are not even mentioned by Goethe. Furthermore, Witte argues that Benjamin’s critique of the ‘mythical’ character of marriage can be understood only if we take into account his own biography, namely the breakdown of his own marriage and his love for the ‘inapproachable’ Jula Cohn, to whom the essay is dedicated. 42 In my view, however, Witte is mistaken about what Benjamin means by immanent criticism. He certainly does not mean that the critic is allowed to use only those concepts that appear in the work. In terms of the Hölderlin essay: the ‘poetized’ is found in the work, but need not be explicitly mentioned. In my view, immanent criticism means that the critic ‘opens up’ the work from within, thus creating the possibility of other meanings, which is why the ‘completion’ of the work is at the same time its shattering. With regard to Witte’s second point, Max Pensky has correctly argued that drawing from one’s own experience is part of Benjamin’s concept of criticism. This is not a matter of ‘projection’ or ‘empathizing’. Benjamin is attempting to understand his world, including his personal confrontation with myth, through the novel, rather than reading the novel through his own private concerns. The second feature is the interruption of semblance. Benjamin goes to great lengths to find the ‘caesurae’ in Elective Affinities. His emphasis on the importance of the novella, as well as the sentence on hope, may seem far-fetched. To the average reader, the novella might appear to fit seamlessly into the structure of the novel, or even, as a counterpoint, to strengthen its classical beauty. In other words, it is not immediately clear why it would be a ‘violent’ interruption. Benjamin is aware of this problem: ‘For semblance in this poetic work is not so much presented as it is in the poetic presentation itself’ (SW 1, 345; I/1, 187). It was Benjamin’s intention, however, to break the spell Goethe held over his generation, by questioning the ‘classic’ beauty 42 Witte (1976), 57 and 63.

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of Elective Affinities. For this reason, Benjamin wanted his critique to be a ‘violent’ one. 43 The third feature of the concept of criticism we can recognize in the essay is that it constitutes an intervention in the ‘afterlife’ of Elective Affinities. Benjamin’s anti-mythical reading of Goethe opposes the dominant reading of his day, represented by the circle around the symbolist poet Stefan George, of which Gundolf, a biographer of Goethe, was a member. George and his followers not only read Goethe’s works as myths, but also regarded the poet himself as a mythical hero, a ‘demigod’, whose greatest work was his life. 44 According to Benjamin, the confusion of work and life in Gundolf’s biographical reading is the sign of mythic thinking. He attempts to ‘redeem’ the novel by respecting the autonomy of the work from the life, as a product (Gebilde) rather than a creation (Geschöpf ). This implies, moreover, that one regards the artist not as a divine creator but rather as a sober producer. Furthermore, as Fredric Jameson notes, Benjamin reads Elective Affinities ‘not as a novel by a symbolic writer, but as a novel about symbolism.’45 In other words, his reading points to the danger of regarding the world as an enchanted forest in which human decision has no say, as the characters in the novel demonstrate. Finally, Benjamin’s intervention concerns the reception of the figure of Otillie. Understanding her as an allegory of the beautiful semblance of the work of art, he breaks from the tradition of morally judging her, either as a sinner or a saint. 46 With regard to the fourth feature of Benjamin’s concept of criticism, it is clear that his immanent criticism is in pursuit of the truth content of the novel. How to describe the outcome of this pursuit is, however, quite difficult. Benjamin writes that ‘the achieved insight into the material content of subsisting things finally coincides with insight in their truth content. The truth content emerges as that of the material content’ (SW 1, 300; I/1, 128). This means that the knowledge of myth as myth, that is, the semblance of the work of art qua semblance, points to the truth as its negative image. This truth cannot be dissected from the work of art, however, since the beauty of the work of art necessarily contains a moment of mythical semblance. One can thus conclude, on the basis of the last section of the essay, that the 43 This anarchist fascination for violence is still present in his last reflections on Baudelaire, where he compares the writer to a swordsman (SW 4, 319; I/2, 616). For the violent character of critique, see also Lijster (2012). 44 Benjamin calls this ‘the most thoughtless dogma of the Goethe cult’ (SW 1, 324; I/1, 160). 45 Jameson (1972), 67. 46 See Leacock (2002), 299.

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truth content of the work of art is its hope for truth, which it embodies as the semblance of reconciliation. Is the Goethe essay ‘exemplary’ of Benjamin’s concept of criticism? With regard to the four features of criticism, it certainly is. Moreover, his critique of myth and of ‘natural history’ resembles a Marxist critique of ideology, which is nothing other than history masquerading as nature. It is not hard to see, therefore, why Benjamin noticed an affinity between his own early writings and Lukács’s neo-Marxist work History and Class Consciousness. However, in contrast to Benjamin’s subsequent writings (including Origin of German Tragic Drama), the Goethe essay seems oblivious to socio-historical context. He later seems to have been aware of this omission, since, in an encyclopaedia article on Goethe (1928), he considers Elective Affinities in the context of ‘a feudal society which, in the shape of the magic forces of fate, finds itself restored to its primordial state’ (SW 2, 182; II/2, 732). Still, the ahistorical character of the Goethe essay is not accidental, but the result of a problem in Benjamin’s thought per se. It is part of the tendency of the theological side of his thought to regard all history after the ‘fall’ as mythical and ruled by fate. Of course, in Benjamin’s later work capitalism is the origin of the reactivation of mythic forces in society. The intervention of the critic, who is now the ‘strategist in the literary struggle’, is charged with political urgency. The truth the critic finds in the work of art no longer offers the semblance of theological redemption, but the potential for political revolution. But even in Benjamin’s late work, for instance in the essays on Baudelaire, it is not always clear whether he reads the poet’s spleen as the expression of commodity fetishism and urbanization or as the disintegration of the paradisiacal unity of name and thing. This jeopardizes the historical specificity of even his most political essays. Thus, although it is indeed impossible to sever the bonds between theology and materialism in Benjamin’s concept of criticism (or rather, precisely because it is impossible), one might say that his materialism sometimes ‘suffers’ from the generality of his theology.

4.5

Adorno’s immanent criticism

The idea of immanent criticism forms the basis for Adorno’s philosophical and social critique, as well as his art criticism. Immanent criticism, as he understands it, could be described as evaluating what something is as compared to what that something pretends to be, given its own goals and norms, or with what that something could be, given its historical possibilities. In his

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critique of philosophical idealism, for instance, Adorno takes seriously its claim to make knowledge possible. In his view, however, idealism’s tendency towards identity thinking – that is, towards the subsumption of the object under given rules and concepts – frustrates genuine knowledge of the world. Therefore, idealism cannot live up to its own claims. Similarly, Adorno’s critique of capitalism proceeds immanently. Much like Marx, he argues that capitalism fails to realize the values it presupposes, such as freedom and justice. Furthermore, he judges capitalism on the basis of the historical possibilities it bears within itself. In Adorno’s view, the present state of the means of production (i.e., technology) carries within it the potential to end human hardship. Society’s failure to actualize this potential functions as an objective criterion with which to criticize it. In his art criticism, too, Adorno, like Benjamin, proceeds immanently. In a letter to his friend he speaks of ‘our old method of immanent criticism’ (ABC, 128; ABB, 169). This means, as we have seen in the case of Benjamin, that one criticizes a work of art according to elements that it carries within itself. Adorno’s ideas on immanent criticism will indeed appear to be quite similar to Benjamin’s, although he departs from Benjamin in certain crucial respects. ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’ (1951) is one of Adorno’s few ‘programmatic’ texts, in which he reflects on the impossible situation of the cultural critic. The cultural critic who criticizes the degeneration of society and culture (Adorno seems to have in mind figures such as Spengler, Ortega y Gasset, and Veblen) considers himself the spokesman of ‘true’ culture. In so doing, however, the critic pretends to be an independent observer, thus obscuring the fact that he is himself part of the social whole. His seemingly autonomous viewpoint is the result of a reification of spirit, and hence part and parcel of rationalized capitalist society: what is ‘Decisive is that the critic’s sovereign gesture suggests to his readers an autonomy which he does not have’ (P, 22; 10.1, 14). According to Adorno, ‘culture’ is not a pristine set of values and ‘goods’ floating above the swamp, as the cultural critic has it, but is rather knee-deep in that swamp. That is why, in his view, intellectuals cannot critique culture without reflecting on their own position. Adorno distinguishes between transcendent and immanent criticism. Transcendent criticism, he writes, ‘assumes an as it were Archimedean position above culture and the blindness of society, from which consciousness can bring the totality, no matter how massive, into flux’ (P, 31; 10.1, 26). The advantage of transcendent criticism, in Adorno’s view, lies in its radical rejection of the social whole. But again, he believes that it is impossible to take such an Archimedean position ‘outside’ or ‘above’ society, since the

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critic owes this position to that very society. Furthermore, by declaring the whole of culture to be ‘ideology’, transcendent criticism ignores those moments within it that are resistant to the whole. He therefore argues that the rejection of culture by transcendent criticism tends towards barbarism. Immanent criticism, confronting culture and society with its own claims and norms, does not rely on such an outside position. This advantage, however, presents at the same time the disadvantage of not being able to question the situation from which one arises: ‘Immanent criticism of culture, it may be argued, overlooks what is decisive: the role of ideology in social conflicts’ (P, 29; 10.1, 23). In Adorno’s view, then, the problem of immanent criticism is therefore similar to the problem of philosophical idealism: presupposing the norms of what already exists, it can never envision something genuinely new. According to Adorno, ‘the alternatives – either calling culture as a whole into question under the general notion of ideology, or confronting it with the norms which it itself has crystallized – cannot be accepted by critical theory’ (P, 31; 10.1, 25). The choice itself is false, for a truly dialectical criticism necessarily includes both elements. Immanent criticism is ‘more essentially dialectical’ (P, 32; 10.1, 27), as he sees it. It regards as false, not ideology per se, as transcendent criticism does, but rather its claim to correspond with the actual situation. This does not mean that culture could not harbour an authentic demand for happiness. But neither can the critic focus their attention solely on the object at hand. According to Adorno, the object itself demands that immanent criticism leave the cultural sphere: ‘Without consciousness transcending the immanence of culture, immanent criticism itself would be inconceivable: the spontaneous movement of the object can be followed only by someone who is not entirely engulfed by it’ (P, 29; 10.1, 23). The object itself, in other words, leads the critic out of a purely immanent criticism of it and forces them to regard it as a part of the social whole. Resistance by the work of art to being a harmonious totality, for instance, can be understood only as the negative expression of the false totality of society. This means that the critic, like Baron Munchhausen, has to pull himself out of the swamp by his own bootstraps. Lacking an Archimedean position to oversee the whole, he has to construct such a position through the analysis of the smallest parts. Gerhard Schweppenhäuser notes that, while many have accused Adorno of adopting a contradictory position, no one was more acutely aware of this than he himself was. 47 Adorno writes: 47 Schweppenhäuser (1996), 50.

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‘The dialectical critic of culture must both participate in culture and not participate. Only then does he do justice to the object and to himself’ (P, 33; 10.1, 29). The critic’s position is aporetic through and through, but in his view, criticism that does not contradict itself is impossible. The only thing the critic can do about it is to be aware of the contradiction. Adorno’s reflections on cultural criticism follow the dynamic of negative dialectics. Immanent criticism presupposes the mediation of the whole through its parts, while the moment of transcendence is guaranteed by the idea that the part is not fully integrated into the whole, therefore providing a glimpse of the latter, if only as its ‘negative imprint’. It should come as no surprise then, that his concept of art criticism too is governed by this negative dialectic. Following Max Paddison, I distinguish among three ‘levels’ of criticism in Adorno, namely immanent analysis, sociological critique, and philosophical-historical interpretation. 48 One should keep in mind, however, that these are not to be regarded as distinct moments in some sort of phased ‘plan’ of criticism. They are, rather, mediated through, and made possible by, each other. In Adorno’s own writings, they exist side by side. At the f irst level of interpretation, the critic questions whether the work is coherent (stimmig) – that is, whether it lives up to its own idea and whether it adequately addresses the problems it has set out to address. To be sure, there is something undeniably and inescapably circular about this, for neither the ‘idea’ nor its ‘problems’ are explicitly spelled out by the work of art. Like Benjamin, Adorno argues that the critic has to extract the ‘poetized’, with which the work is criticized, from the work itself (AT, 199; 7, 227). Unlike Paddison, I do not believe that Adorno conceives of this immanent criticism primarily in terms of technical analysis. Rather, immanent criticism for him is a mimetic activity. In his essay ‘Presuppositions’ (1961), Adorno writes: One does not understand a work of art when one translates it into concepts […] but rather when one is immersed in its immanent movement; I should almost say, when it is recomposed by the ear in accordance with its own logic, repainted by the eye, when the linguistic sensorium speaks along with it (NL 2, 97; 11, 433).

I have argued that, for Adorno, mimesis is the model of full experience, characterized by a reciprocal and transformative relation between subject 48 Paddison (1993), 59-64.

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and object. 49 The work of art is itself the result of such a process. According to Adorno, the mimesis of the work of art consists not in imitation but in the fact that it is identical to nothing but itself (which is the same as saying that it is a sensuous particular). He argues, therefore: ‘If artworks do not make themselves like something else but only like themselves, then only those who imitate them understand them’ (AT, 166; 7, 190). But how should we understand this? How can the critic imitate an artwork? In Adorno’s view, immanent criticism is not modelled after conceptual analysis, but rather after a musical or theatre performance. The observer ‘re-enacts’ the work, and reproduces it in experience as the actor or musician would reproduce a musical score or script. Mimesis, as we have seen, is an ‘openness’ of the subject to the object, a willingness to be ‘assimilated’ by it. Once more, I should stress the difference between mimetic behaviour and ‘empathy’ (Einfühlung), which Adorno criticizes as vehemently as does Benjamin. Empathy, as he understands it, is an instrumental approach to the work of art: the subject seeks to get pleasure or some other feeling from it. In his lectures on aesthetics, he poignantly describes this distinction: ‘Less important than what an artwork “gives” to you, is what you give to the artwork. In other words: whether, in a specific way of active passivity, or endeavoured surrender to the thing, one gives to it what it itself expects’ (ANS IV/3, 190). Immanent criticism, in other words, entails a momentary suspension of subjectivity. However, as Adorno’s paradoxical formulations make clear, it concerns an active following of the object. He calls this ‘participating’ or ‘co-producing’ (mitvollziehen), and compares it with Benjamin’s description of ‘breathing’ the aura (AT, 355; 7, 409). Criticism, however, also depends on reflection: ‘Pure immediacy does not suffice’ (AT, 90; 7, 109). This is not so much a correction of mimetic immanent criticism, as is it already enclosed in it. The work itself demands that one behold it not merely from the inside but also from a distance. One has to understand the work of art as something alien to oneself, and ask questions such as: ‘What are you?’, and ‘What are you for?’ These questions will lead to a questioning of the ontology of the artwork, namely its semblance character. According to Adorno, art is necessarily part of ideology. One could define ideology as a social structure presenting itself as an immutable law, thus legitimizing existing relations of power. There is a strong affinity here with Benjamin’s concept of myth. According to Adorno, the artwork, because of its semblance of self-sufficiency and life, conceals 49 See also Chapter 3.5.

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the fact that it is actually a product of social labour and is to that extent ideological. Sociological critique, however, can ask whether an artwork resists or succumbs to its ideological function. In Adorno’s view, a work that endorses the semblance of being a whole is ideologically false, since it pretends that such a whole could exist under present conditions. He criticizes neo-classicism, for instance, not only for drawing on old musical-technical solutions, but also because it refers to a meaningful community that in fact no longer exists. By contrast, he considers a fragmentary or dissonant work ‘true’. By drawing attention to its own semblance character and exposing the illusoriness of its own wholeness, the work simultaneously criticizes the social whole. Max Paddison points to the difference between the social content of a work of art (i.e., how it points to ideology) and its social function (i.e., how it itself has an ideological function).50 For Adorno, however, these two cannot be separated. A work that presents the semblance of a whole will provide more pleasure and is hence adapted to the demands of the culture industry. Conversely, a work of art that expresses social contradictions is dissonant, hence resisting an affirmative social function.51 Of course, Adorno does not believe that works of art can easily be categorized as ideologically ‘true’ or ‘false’: ‘In art, ideology and truth cannot be neatly distinguished from each other. Art cannot have one without the other’ (AT, 305; 7, 347). One of the most difficult examples is the work of Richard Wagner, to which Adorno devoted a book-length study entitled In Search of Wagner, where he criticizes the false ideology (or ‘phantasmagoria’) in Wagner’s work, but also attempts to redeem its moments of ‘truth’. In Adorno’s view, even a vehicle for anti-Semitism and ‘blood and soil’ ideology could contain such a moment, since ‘great works cannot lie’ (AT, 171; 7, 196). Even the adequate presentation of false consciousness could be called truthful. In fact, one of the central concerns of criticism might be whether an artwork is a mere ‘symptom’ of a social situation, or can also critique it. The third level of philosophical-historical interpretation refers to the mediation between the other two levels. Adorno writes: ‘Art perceived strictly aesthetically is art aesthetically misperceived’ (AT, 7; 7, 17). Note 50 Paddison (1993), 61. 51 With regard to this point, however, one might argue that even Adorno underestimated the absorptive powers of the culture industry. Rush (2010) writes: ‘Atonal music, sometimes of great sophistication, is a staple of horror films. And Beckett’s oeuvre, except perhaps the most obscure later works, has been reabsorbed into the clowning from whence it came. It may be difficult to imagine how Pasolini’s Saló might be made part of the next Volkswagen ad campaign, but that may say more about one’s imagination than about possibility’ (58).

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the dialectical movement of this typically ‘Adornian’ sentence. He writes that, if one considers an artwork in purely ‘aesthetic’ terms, one misses out not only on its socio-historical meaning, but also on the way in which the latter informs its aesthetic meaning. A sound understanding of the work of art, even in artistic terms, in other words, demands that the critic broaden his scope beyond the realm of art. The question of why a work of art finds itself confronted with certain technical problems will lead the critic to consider how these problems relate to social history.52 A music critic, for instance, may ‘immanently’ seek to comprehend the disintegration of musical material. In Adorno’s view, however, they will fully comprehend it only once they consider it in relation to the rationalization of Western society. Asking why a work of art is the way it is means engaging in what Adorno calls ‘second reflection’, which follows the ‘first’ reflection of technical analysis: Philosophical aesthetics, closely allied with the idea of work-immanent analysis, has its focal point where the work-immanent analysis never arrives. Second reflection must push the complex of facts [Sachverhalte] that work-immanent analysis establishes, and in which it has its limit, beyond itself and penetrate to the truth content [Wahrheitsgehalt] by means of emphatic critique (AT, 442; 7, 518).

Second reflection, then, moves between the analysis of the work’s factualness (what is aesthetically ‘the case’) and the critique of ideology (as semblance), in order to reach what Adorno, following of Benjamin, calls the work’s ‘truth content’. I will discuss truth content, one of the most important and most difficult concepts in Adorno’s aesthetics, in the next section. Paddison misses the point, in my view, when he compares the movement of second reflection to ‘the familiar [problem] of the “hermeneutical circle”.’53 The problem of the hermeneutical circle is the idea that the parts can be understood from the perspective of the whole, while the whole can be understood only from the perspective of its parts. While this problem can never be completely solved, it still has a certain progressive dynamic, in the sense that a better understanding of mutually related parts will provide a better understanding of the whole, and that this in turn contributes to one’s 52 See Klein (2004), 172. 53 Paddison (1993), 63.

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understanding of the parts, and so on. Adorno’s idea of second reflection, however, does not work this way at all. Second reflection, he argues, is the opposite of ‘ordinary’ cognition, the subsumption of something under a rule or a concept. Whoever subsumes a work of art under a given category misses its newness and strangeness, and hence the experience of something genuinely different. Second reflection, by contrast, accepts and respects this strangeness – the work’s sensuous particularity – and thereby defies the claims of ‘first’ reflection, namely the claim to full understanding. In line with negative dialectics, second reflection is the movement of thinking against itself. Adorno writes: ‘Second reflection lays hold of the technical procedures, the language of the artwork in the broadest sense, but it aims at blindness’ (AT, 34; 7, 47). As I read it, this ‘blindness’ refers to the second half of Kant’s famous formulation from Critique of Pure Reason, that ‘concepts without intuitions are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind’. The aesthetic experience, as Kant himself was to argue in the third Critique, is precisely that: an intuition without a concept. According to Adorno, however, such a ‘spontaneous’ intuition can be reached only by first going through and against reflection. Second reflection, in other words, demonstrates the insufficiency of concepts by means of conceptual language, and therefore enables us to look at an object as though for the first time, as from the perspective of a child. Such a view, Adorno argues, ‘restores naïveté’ (AT, 34; 7, 47). According to Adorno, then, the naïveté which is so often thought of as the starting point for aesthetic experience is in fact the result it is aiming for. This is, in his view, the meaning of a dictum of Karl Kraus that he often quotes: ‘Origin is the goal.’ Hence, the different levels of Adorno’s dialectical critique not only work simultaneously and interdependently; they also, to a certain extent, work against each other: second reflection attempts, as it were, to undo the results of analysis. Adorno’s own terminology sometimes causes confusion here: when he speaks about the insufficiency of ‘work-immanent analysis’, he means something different than when he understands immanent criticism as a ‘mimetic’ following. Furthermore, there seems to be a tension both in the function, and in the concept, of criticism in Adorno’s philosophy. On the one hand, criticism is a form of reflection, and hence necessarily makes use of conceptual language. On the other hand, the work of art is a sensuous particular, and therefore resists its integration into concepts. How does the naïveté that second reflection aims for relate to that other goal set by criticism, namely the truth content of the work of art?

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The necessity, and impossibility, of criticism

At first glance, there may seem to be a downright contradiction between the necessity of art criticism and the idea of the work of art as a sensuous particular. As we have seen, the work of art is, for Adorno, never a mere thing.54 Precisely because it is a sensuous particular, it carries meaning of its own, which cannot be reduced to a category of objects to which it belongs. This ‘excess’ of meaning, the ‘more’ as Adorno sometimes calls it, makes an appeal to art criticism, since not interpreting the work of art – that is, not understanding it as something inherently meaningful – would place it side by side with ‘ordinary’ and mutually exchangeable objects. Adorno writes: ‘Artworks […] await their interpretation. The claim that there is nothing to interpret in them, that they simply exist, would erase the demarcation between art and nonart’ (AT, 169; 7, 193). One can distinguish three basic reasons why art criticism is essential for Adorno. First, he argues, as we have seen, that works of art cannot even be said to be genuinely experienced without reflection. If one regards the work as a mere thing among things, one cannot have an aesthetic experience. This is why criticism, in Adorno’s view, ‘is not externally added into aesthetic experience but rather is immanent to it’ (AT, 440; 7, 515). Furthermore, the immediate experience of sensuous particularity is no longer possible, since this mode of experience has been repressed by identity thinking. Experiencing sensuous particularity, Adorno argues, is possible only by means of a detour, namely, through mediation by reflection. This is what he means with the restoration of naïveté by second reflection. In the lectures on aesthetics he writes: ‘Only by means of commentary and criticism, that is, only through reflection that brings the artwork in play according to its own logic, is full experience of the work of art actually possible’ (ANS IV/3, 347). Art criticism is also important because of the historical character of the work of art. This character, as Adorno sees it, means not only that works of art are situated in history, but also that they have an internal history: their ‘being’ is a ‘becoming’. The metaphor of the monad refers to the momentary crystallization of this historical process: If finished works only become what they are because their being is a process of becoming, they are in turn dependent on forms in which their process crystallizes: interpretation, commentary, and critique. These are not simply brought to bear on works by those who concern themselves 54 See also Chapter 2.7.

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with them: rather they are the arena of the historical development of artworks in themselves, and thus they are forms in their own right (AT, 254; 7, 289).

Criticism contributes, in other words, to the historical life of the work of art, or to what Adorno calls its ‘unfolding’ (Entfaltung).55 What ‘unfolds’ is not only the aesthetic experience in the present, but also the continued existence of the work in history. ‘Unfolding’ implies that works of art do not remain the same over time; their meaning changes through history. This also means that no criticism or interpretation can be definitive. Adorno, like Benjamin, resists the false monumentalization of alleged ‘classics’ or ‘masterpieces’. For a work to remain alive it needs to be constantly reëvaluated, reinterpreted, and recriticized: ‘The unfolding of artworks is the afterlife of their immanent dialectic’ (AT, 254; 7, 288). Adorno thus ascribes to art criticism, no less than Benjamin does, a ‘redemptive’ power, namely the ability to wrest the work of art from its appropriation by a false tradition.56 Criticism is crucial for a third reason – the most important of the three: it is a necessary condition for the truth content of the work of art to appear. The work’s truth content, Adorno argues, inheres in the work, and cannot exist independently of it. However, since works of art are mute, or at least speak in tongues, truth content needs criticism in order to unfold. Before we can properly understand this, we should first ask what the ‘truth’ of art is, exactly, according to Adorno. This is not a question easily to be answered. Adorno is never very generous when it comes to definitions, but in the case of the concept of truth content, he appears to go to great lengths to leave us in the dark as to its precise meaning. Just as with Benjamin, truth content remains one of the most difficult concepts in his writings. There are several passages where he points out what truth content is not. First, the truth of art is not ‘the reflection of an object’ (AT, 362; 7, 419). In other words, we should not think of artistic truth in terms of a theory or correspondence, according to which a true proposition somehow ‘corresponds’ 55 I prefer ‘unfolding’ to Hullot-Kentor’s ‘development’, since it points to the idea that potential meanings are ‘folded’ into the work. 56 Two good examples of such ‘redemptive’ critiques are ‘Bach Defended against his Devotees’ (1951) and ‘Alienated Masterpiece: the Missa Solemnis’ (1959). In both cases, Adorno is concerned with works that, with regard to their ‘truth content’, go against the official culture into which they are absorbed. Their canonization is possible because they are ill-understood. On the Missa Solemnis Adorno remarks that it ‘offers no justification for the admiration accorded to it’ (EM, 569; 17, 145).

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to an object or state of affairs in the world.57 Second, truth content is ‘neither the work’s factual content nor its fragile and self-suspendable logicality’ (AT, 170; 7, 194). This point refers to Adorno’s conviction, discussed above, that the question of the work’s truth exceeds the question of its inner-artistic consistency. Finally, Adorno argues that truth is not something eternal and fixed, as philosophers since Plato have argued, but rather something ‘which has become [Gewordenes]’ (AT, 3; 7, 12). It is, in other words, the transient and the fleeting that Adorno wants to grant the weight of truth. When it comes to the question of what truth content is, Bernstein correctly remarks that ‘Adorno appears to designate a number of quite different phenomena under the heading of truth content.’58 Bernstein mentions four examples of these phenomena: nature, society, ideology critique and philosophical concepts. Others could be added: beauty, history, happiness, utopia. There is, in short, hardly a concept in Adorno’s aesthetics which is not related to truth content. To get some idea of what this concept means, let us look at four important sources for Adorno’s aesthetics: Benjamin, Hegel, Freud, and Kant. Like Benjamin, Adorno argues that truth ‘is situated in the intentionless’ (AT, 34; 7, 47). The doctrine of intentionless truth, from Benjamin’s Origin of German Tragic Drama, may appear to be mystical, but Adorno reads it in a thoroughly materialist way.59 In his view, the subject is not the only one who has the ability to bear and give meaning, as philosophical idealism (up until Husserl) has it; the object has it too. Mimesis, as noted earlier, refers to a mode of perception in which the subject suspends its own intentionality precisely in order to become sensitive to the object’s meaning. In Negative Dialectics, Adorno puts this point in a way that is reminiscent of Benjamin’s definition of aura: ‘If the thought really yielded to the object, if its attention were on the object, not on its category, the very objects would start talking under the lingering eye’ (ND, 27-28; 6, 38). This implies that, in Adorno’s view, truth cannot be willed, neither by the artist nor by the critic: ‘Truth content cannot be something made’ (AT, 173; 7, 198). The central paradox of aesthetics, he argues, is that something that by definition should be illusory, namely a work of art, can nevertheless be true (AT, 141; 7, 164). The solution of the paradox takes us back to Adorno’s ‘redemption’ of artistic semblance. Adorno regards semblance as a negative category insofar as it obscures the fact that it is semblance. However, as soon 57 See Richter (2006). 58 Bernstein (2004), 157. 59 See Buck-Morss (1977), 77-81.

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as the work of art is self-aware of its semblance-character (Scheincharakter), it provides for the appearance of something different than the actually existing world. Adorno calls this its truth content, which ‘sets reality into relief by the self-positing of semblance. Thus, semblance serves truth’ (AT, 361; 7, 418). This is not to say, however, that works of art are the truth. They are, in Adorno’s view, semblances of non-semblance, that is, semblances of truth. Adorno complements the Benjaminian idea of intentionless truth with the Hegelian dialectic of whole and parts, or universal and particular. But while Hegel sided with the whole, Adorno argues, as he famously puts it in Minima Moralia, that ‘the whole is the false’ (MM, 50; 4, 55). For him this means that truth resides in the particulars, or better put, in that side of the particular that does not fit into the whole and falls victim to sublation. In Aesthetic Theory, he writes that ‘only what does not fit into this world is true’ (AT, 76; 7, 93). As we have seen, Adorno takes sides against Hegel and with what the latter called faule Existenz. In so doing, however, he holds onto the dynamic of the Hegelian dialectic, which dictates that a negation carries within it what it negates as a negative imprint. This allows him to argue that the particular, as the negation of the whole (that is, as the negation of ‘untruth’) is at least a potential locus for truth. It is this dialectic to which Adorno refers when he writes that ‘artworks have no truth without determinate negation’ (AT, 170; 7, 195). This means that, for him, as for Benjamin, truth in art exists only ex negativo. Formulated in the terms of Hegel’s Logic, this sounds highly abstract, if not vague. This is only partly compensated for when Adorno relates truth content to history, defining that content as history’s ‘crystallization in the works’ (AT, 175; 7, 200). Adorno’s philosophy of history, as we have seen, argues that universal history is both true (as the actual course that history has taken thus far, a history of domination) and false (as the ideology that this history is the only possible one, that it cannot be and could not have been otherwise). The work of art, for him, is the plenipotentiary of that what falls outside history, of that which has had no voice in history. Like Benjamin, therefore, Adorno argues that the work of art shows the ‘expressionless’, thereby interrupting mythical ‘natural history’. The interruption of history is simultaneously the momentary ‘freezing’ of its seemingly natural course. Truth content, in other words, has an emphatically historical character: not only because art itself is historical (its ‘being’ is a ‘becoming’), but also because it concerns a truth about history. It should be clear, therefore, that, for Adorno, truth content is not a purely ontological or epistemological concept, but has, rather, social, historical and

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political aspects. The work’s truth content is not what ‘is the case’ but almost entirely the opposite, namely that which remains hidden in history and in society. This is also what relates the concept to Freudian categories such as repression and sublimation.60 In modern society, Adorno argues, nature is repressed. Identity thinking ignores the excess of meaning (natural) objects have over and above the meaning projected onto them by the subject. Moreover, the subject represses its own nature: ‘World domination over nature turns against the thinking subject itself; nothing is left of it except that ever-unchanging “I think”, which must accompany all my conceptions’ (DE, 20; 3, 43). The paraphrase of Kant’s first Critique points to the Enlightenment as the source of an impoverished concept of experience. In Adorno’s view, Freud’s theory of the unconscious has rightfully reminded us of the nature present within the thinking and allegedly rational subject. Freud has also pointed to the ways in which this inner nature is constantly repressed, both by the subject itself (Ego) and by its social milieu (Superego). Adorno’s definition of mimesis as the ‘remembrance of nature in the subject’ clearly has a Freudian touch to it. As mimesis’ harbour of refuge, works of art can be regarded as the return of the repressed. In psychoanalytic aesthetics, the work of art is conceived of as a form of ‘sublimation’, that is, the gratification of desires adjusted according to socially accepted norms. Adorno has several objections to psychoanalysis, however. The first is that it regards works of art as an escape from the ‘reality principle’, without questioning reality itself (AT, 11; 7, 21). The second is that psychoanalysis regards the desires expressed in art as asocial (belonging to the private individual) and ahistorical (part of ‘human nature’). In Adorno’s view, by contrast, the desires expressed in art go beyond the artist’s personal interests, as well as his individual intentions. Art rather expresses ‘the wish to bring about a better world’ (AT, 11; 7, 22). Finally, that the psychoanalytical focus on the psyche of the maker reduces the work of art to a mere document, thereby neglecting not only the ontological status of the work as semblance, but also the importance of its form. Freud is therefore to be confronted with Kant’s aesthetics.61 Kantian formalism follows from the ‘disinterestedness’ of aesthetic judgment (since, in Kant’s view, sensations directed towards the content are part of judgments of the agreeable, and determined by one’s personal interest). 60 See Paddison (1993), 57 and Fornet-Ponse (2000), 101-102. 61 The Kantian elements in Adorno’s aesthetics deserve more attention than I am able to give them here. But see Huhn (1997) and Kaufman (2000).

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According to Adorno, Kantian disinterestedness functions as the corrective of the psychoanalytic idea of the immediate gratification of desire. However, the refusal of the (modernist) work of art to gratify desire is itself the expression of the greatest interest, namely the object’s desire to be more than a ‘function’ for the subject. Adorno therefore argues: ‘Contrary to the Kantian and Freudian interpretation of art, artworks imply in themselves a relation between interest and its renunciation’ (AT, 14; 7, 25). Both Freud and Kant, finally, are oriented exclusively towards the subject, be it the disinterested transcendental subject or the desiring empirical psyche. They are to be dialectically opposed, therefore, to Benjamin and Hegel – and this brings us back to where we started. If this discussion of Adorno’s concept of truth content proves one thing, it is that truth content is not easily defined. One might even argue that truth content by definition defies definition, since it refers to what remains invisible and unheard in history and society, to what is repressed by identity thinking and left out of the concept: the non-identical. Adorno writes: ‘The truth content of artworks cannot be immediately identified’ (AT, 180; 7, 195). This means that it is impossible to understand an artwork completely, to translate its content into discursive language, since it is exactly this kind of language that is resisted by art.62 ‘All artworks’, Adorno argues, ‘are enigmas’ (AT, 160; 7, 182). As an enigma or riddle (Rätsel), the work of art is a peculiar thing.63 A riddle demands a solution, but if a solution is found, the riddle itself dissolves. In other words, if an interpretation completely exhausted the meaning of the work of art, this would mean that the work itself was superfluous. Furthermore, if the key is ready to hand, one can ask why the meaning had to be encoded in an artwork in the first place. In Adorno’s view, this is precisely the problem of hermeneutics. Dilthey, for instance, conceives of works of art as psychological expressions, and therefore believes it is possible to find their original meaning in the subject. Adorno, by contrast, argues that the ‘unintentional’ truth of art defies its full, transparent translation into discursive language: ‘Understanding is itself a problematic category in the face of art’s enigmaticalness’ (AT, 161; 7, 184).64 The enigmatic character of art lies in artworks’ being at the same time completely evident and completely obscure. Adorno uses several metaphors to point to this. Like the ‘purloined letter’ in Edgar Allan Poe’s story, works 62 This is what Christoph Menke (1999) calls ‘aesthetic negativity’ (3-27). 63 See Richter (2006), 123. 64 See Buck-Morss (1977), 77-78.

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of art are visible and invisible at the same time (AT, 161; 7, 185). Or rather, they are hidden precisely because one does not expect the truth to be visible. Furthermore, their truth cannot be translated immediately into concepts: ‘If one seeks to get a closer look at a rainbow, it disappears’ (AT, 162; 7, 185). Finally, works of art ‘speak like elves in fairy tales: “If you want the absolute, you shall have it, but you will not recognize it when you see it”’ (AT, 167; 7, 191). Thus, what Adorno is pointing to is nothing other than what Benjamin in the Goethe essay calls ‘the idea of […] the impossibility of unveiling [Unenthüllbarkeit]’ (SW 1, 351; I/1, 195), which he considers the idea of art criticism. For Adorno, too, truth in art is possible only because and as long as it resides in art. As soon as one tries to wrest the truth from art, it disappears. The task of the critic, then, is ‘not to comprehend artworks as hermeneutical objects’ but is rather one acknowledging that it is ‘their incomprehensibility that needs to be comprehended’ (AT, 157; 7, 179). In contrast to the hermeneutic tradition, therefore, Adorno emphasizes the way in which the work of art frustrates understanding and interrupts communication.65 Criticism, in other words, turns out to be the deeply aporetic procedure of saying the unsayable. This aporia lies at the heart of art, and especially modernist art, itself: ‘The afterlife of artworks, their reception as an aspect of their own history, transpires between a do-not-let-yourself-be-understood and a wanting-to-be-understood’ (AT, 384; 7, 448).66 The work of art is the potential locus of a truth, the truth of that which is repressed and therefore remains invisible in discursive language. As a pursuit of particularity, criticism is a philosophical activity, which also means that philosophy depends on art. On the other hand, however, the truth of art wants to be put into language, for the unseen and unheard desires to be seen and heard. Adorno’s way of formulating the relation between philosophy and art expresses both their mutual dependency and their unsolvable tension: ‘Art requires philosophy, which interprets it in order to say what it is unable to say, whereas only art is able to say it, by not saying it’ (AT, 94; 7, 113).67 Philosophy needs 65 See Bernstein (1992), 195. 66 Christoph Menke (without referring here to Adorno) also points up this central charateristic of ‘aesthetic critique’ ever since Kant. He writes: ‘The aesthetic critique both conceives of and carries out judgment in such a way that it is characterized by an irresolvable contradiction: the contradiction between the sudden act of the intuitive apprehension of an object and the methodological deduction of a judgment from transparent reasons’ (Menke in Birnbaum and Graw (2010), 22). 67 This translation differs slightly, but in my view crucially, from Hullot-Kentor’s. His translation of the last part of the sentence reads: ‘whereas art is only able to say it by not saying it’. By

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art to wrest itself from identity thinking, to focus on sensuous particularity, while art needs philosophy to give a voice to repressed suffering. Some critics have argued that this mutual dependence means that for Adorno philosophy eventually has to turn into art. They argue that this is already implied by the title Aesthetic Theory, which is not merely the name for a theory on aesthetics, but suggests that theory itself becomes aesthetic.68 It is certainly true that, according to Adorno, theory has an aesthetic moment. His philosophical style as well as the juxtaposition of material demonstrates his concern with the problem of ‘presentation’ (Darstellung). Since, in his view, the truth cannot immediately be caught in conceptual language, philosophy has to make a detour by dialectically opposing concepts, so that each discloses the ‘untruth’ of the other. Out of such a ‘constellation’ of concepts, he believes, a negative image of the truth might arise. This is not the same, however, as saying that philosophy should become art. Rather, the mutual dependence of philosophy and art excludes the idea of their identity beforehand. As he writes in Negative Dialectics: A philosophy that tried to imitate art, that would turn itself into a work of art, would be expunging itself. […] Both keep faith with their own substance through their opposites: art by making itself resistant to its meanings; philosophy, by refusing to clutch at any immediate thing (ND, 15; 6, 26-27).

Philosophy, in his view, remains dependent upon concepts, whereas art depends on sensuousness. Precisely because of this, they can complement each other. There has been much discussion about Adorno’s notion of artistic truth. One of its most prominent critics is Albrecht Wellmer, who, in The Persistence of Modernity (1991), raises two objections to Adorno’s concept of truth content.69 First, he argues that artistic truth, as presented by Adorno, has no validity outside the domain of art. The truth of art, in his view, is nothing but a truth about art, namely about the ontological status of art as semblance. He therefore argues that one should understand artistic truth metaphorically, and that one should distinguish, in line with Habermas’s theory of communicative action, between aesthetic validity claims (that is, claims moving the word ‘only’, however, Hullot-Kentor obscures the fact that only art can say ‘it’. 68 See Bübner (1980). 69 Wellmer (1991), especially the f irst essay ‘Truth, Semblance, Reconciliation: Adorno’s Aesthetic Redemption of Modernity’.

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of authenticity) and cognitive truth claims.70 Wellmer’s proposal has been exhaustively debated and criticized in the literature, so I will not discuss it in detail here.71 The most important objection against it is that Wellmer, like Habermas, presupposes a fixed differentiation of value spheres, thus excluding from the outset the possibility that art could be concerned with truth. By contrast, Adorno argues that art affects other value spheres and distorts other domains of discourse. Wellmer is correct in noting that art’s truth is self-reflective, but in Adorno’s view, this is in turn a historical fact: the very isolation of modernist art therefore discloses a truth about modernity. For this reason alone, art’s self-reflection propels it beyond the domain of art.72 The second point Wellmer makes, and which is closely related to the first, is that Adorno considers the truth of art merely in terms of a ‘negation of meaning’. He lumps Adorno’s and Lyotard’s aesthetics together, arguing that both neglect the complex relation of the work of art to reality because they regard it exclusively as a ‘cipher of the Absolute.’73 But again Wellmer has no eye for the social and historical character of Adorno’s concept of truth content. Truth content also refers to the unheard voices of history, to repressed nature, and, arguably, to the politically unrepresented. One might say, furthermore, that these aspects are precisely what distinguishes Adorno from Lyotard. In his essay ‘Adorno as the Devil’ (1974) Lyotard accuses Adorno of ‘nostalgia’ because he conceives of the work of art as a promise of reconciliation.74 One might ask, however, whether departing from this idea, as Lyotard does in this aesthetics of the sublime, does not result in a form of resignation. After all, the sublime, in Lyotard’s philosophy, no longer refers to a historical, and hence contingent, process of rationalization and suppression, but rather to an immutable rift between object and meaning. Jacques Rancière argues that Lyotard, unlike Adorno, thus effaces the political understanding of the aesthetic experience first proposed by Friedrich Schiller. As he poignantly puts it: ‘It is not certain whether this new law of Moses really is so opposed to that of McDonald’s.’75 70 Wellmer (1991), 26. 71 See especially Bernstein (1992), 244-247 and Zuidervaart (1991), Chapter 11. 72 As Menke (1999) argues: ‘The nonaesthetic cognition of negativity [is] the consequence of the aesthetic experience of negativity. According to this reading, that the aesthetic experience of negativity attains nonaesthetic validity means that this experience produces a nonaesthetic insight into the way our discourses function, an insight that is only possible in recourse to aesthetic experience’ (225). 73 Wellmer (1991), 52. 74 See Lyotard (1974). 75 Rancière (2009), 105.

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In his book on Adorno, Fredric Jameson writes: ‘If everything in Adorno leads into the aesthetic, everything in Adorno’s aesthetics leads out again in the direction of history.’76 Wellmer misses this insight when he argues that Adorno’s aesthetics is too far removed from ‘reality’. One could imagine that Adorno would have responded by saying that the problem is rather the reverse, that ‘reality’ is too far removed from the work of art. However, Wellmer and others do have a point insofar as Adorno’s historical criticism is insufficiently specific, because of his adoption of the Hegelian dialectic of universal and particular. I object, therefore, to the idea Christoph Menke’s proposes of ‘freeing […] Adorno’s concept of negativity from its conflation with the negativity of social critique.’77 On the contrary, the historical, social and political dimension of aesthetics is precisely what went missing in philosophical aesthetics after Adorno. We should demand a more specific socio-historical situating of the work of art rather than its position vis-à-vis the ‘whole’. One can recognize the four features of Benjamin’s concept of criticism in Adorno, too. First, according to Adorno, criticism is immanent, meaning that there are no external criteria with which one can evaluate the work of art. Rather, it is to be judged according to its own ‘idea’. This does not mean that the critic pays attention to nothing but the work, since in his view the internal dynamic of the work of art already points beyond its isolated existence. Second, criticism is the interruption of the semblance of the work of art, although this can also mean that criticism discloses the way in which the artwork interrupts its own semblance. This is precisely the moment at which the work breaks through its isolated existence and points to what is outside it, namely history and society.78 Third, like Benjamin, Adorno conceives of criticism in terms of an intervention in the afterlife of the work of art. For the artwork to live on, in other words, it depends on criticism, and sometimes even needs to be ‘rescued’ from its appropriation in a false tradition. Finally, Adorno regards the truth content of the work of art as the objective of art criticism, although this truth content cannot be established once and for all. To be sure, my discussion has also disclosed some important differences between Adorno’s and Benjamin’s concept of criticism. In fact, none of the four features functions precisely in the same way in their work. A discussion of these differences, however, has to wait until the conclusion of this chapter. 76 Jameson (1990), 239. 77 Menke (1999), xii. 78 According to Britta Scholze (2000) we should therefore consider Adorno, like Benjamin, as a ‘Theoretiker des Bruchs’ (227).

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Adorno’s Mahler

Is it possible to regard Adorno’s critique of Mahler, most notably his book Mahler. A Musical Physiognomy (1960), as ‘exemplary’ of his concept of criticism? On the one hand, it certainly cannot, considering its differences with more-famous musical studies such as Philosophy of New Music and In Search of Wagner. The first book has often been criticized for its dogmatic defence of the ‘progressive’ Schoenberg and its vehement attack on the ‘regressive’ Stravinsky. The Wagner book, too, is ‘essentially polemical’ (ABC, 258; ABB, 336), as was first noted by Benjamin, who in a letter to his friend even compared it to a ‘pistol duel’ (ABC, 258; ABB, 335). In his view, polemic as such is not problematic, but in the case of Adorno’s Wagner book, he argues, it is incompatible with the goal of ‘rescuing’ Wagner from the clutches of fascism. According to Benjamin, ‘any such salvation, undertaken from the perspective of the philosophy of history, is incompatible with one undertaken from a critical perspective that is focused upon progress and regress’ (ABC, 258; ABB, 336). He argues, furthermore, that this conflict affects the very form of the study: Salvation is a cyclical form, polemic a progressive one. The ten chapters of your Wagner study appear to me to represent a progression rather than a cycle. And this is the context in which your socio-critical and technical analyses find their sovereign expression. But it is also the context which seems to compromise those other long-standing and highly significant elements in your theory of music – of opera as consolation, of music as protest – which reifies the motif of eternity in its functional connection with phantasmagoria and therefore ignores its affinity with the idea of happiness (ABC, 259; ABB, 337).

What Benjamin is pointing up is nothing other than the tension, which we have noted earlier, between the ‘horizontal’ axis of Adorno’s theory of the tendency of musical material and the ‘vertical’ axis of his monadology. Benjamin rightfully notes that the idea of salvation or redemption from the perspective of the critic’s ‘now’ contradicts a philosophy of history that is grounded in the idea of progress. In contrast to the book on Wagner, Adorno’s Mahler is emphatically ‘redemptive’. For this reason, it perhaps cannot represent the more famous studies, but, as Max Paddison notes, ‘would seem to legitimize as “authentic” a very different relationship to material and a very different conception of form from that suggested by his interpretation of

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Schoenberg.’79 Furthermore, in comparison to other studies, such as the monograph on Alban Berg, the Mahler book contains very little technical musical analysis. Adorno’s Mahler is indeed, as the subtitle reads, a ‘musical physiognomy’, which means that a phenomenon is interpreted on the basis of its surface details. This is what Benjamin already appreciated in the Wagner study, as he wrote in a letter to Horkheimer. Instead of delving into the composer’s psyche, Adorno, in Benjamin’s view, makes ‘socially transparent the state of musical affairs, which could not be any more remote from anyone than it is for me’ (CWB, 549; BB 2, 741). Precisely because the Mahler book stands out because of its ‘redemptive’ and ‘physiognomic’ character, it is presented here as an exemplary piece of criticism, since it shows a different side of Adorno, one that has received little attention in the literature. As Fred Rush writes: ‘The importance of the materials of found, discarded culture is an aspect of Adorno’s aesthetics that is often downplayed or missed.’80 Adorno’s Mahler shows a side of him that is less preoccupied with following the ‘tendency’ of the material and more with saving worn-out material, which brings him closer to Benjamin. Mahler has never been regarded as a particularly progressive composer. On the contrary, his work has been regarded rather as constituting the closing chapter of the great Austro-German symphonic tradition. Although in the conservative climate of Vienna, he was one of the few admirers and supporters of Schoenberg, he himself never departed from the tonal system. Adorno even argues that Mahler’s harmonics ‘stay behind’ those of contemporaries like Richard Strauss and Claude Debussy (18, 245). Already during his lifetime, Mahler was mocked for quoting from obsolete musical forms, such as children’s and folk songs, dances and marches. His melodies were considered banal or even vulgar. According to Adorno, however, it is precisely this ‘provocative alliance with vulgar music’ (M, 35; 13, 184) that demonstrates Mahler’s importance. Adorno does not object, in other words, to the characterization of Mahler’s music as consisting, as a contemporary critic put it, of ‘gigantic symphonic pot-pourris’ (M, 34; 13, 183), but rather argues that this is precisely what points to the music’s truth content. In Adorno’s view, Mahler is aware that traditional musical language has become obsolete, having lost its connection with modern experience. This concerns not only children’s and folk songs, but even the traditional forms of Western art music such as the sonata and the symphony. However, instead 79 Paddison (1993), 263. 80 Rush (2010), 49.

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of discarding these forms altogether, as later generations would, Mahler turned them into the very subject matter of his music. Thus, he managed to do for music what was traditionally thought possible only for literature, namely make it self-reflective, ironic, and ‘able to say no to itself’ (M, 125; 13, 269). Adorno writes: Negativity for him has become a purely compositional category: through the banal that declares itself banal; through a lacrimose sentimentality that tears the mask from its own wretchedness; through a hyperbolical expression in excess of the music’s actual meaning (M, 125; 13, 269).

Mahler’s music, in other words, is not merely banal and vulgar, but is first of all about musical language that has become banal and vulgar. Thus, Adorno argues, ‘the composition passes judgment on its own activities’ (M, 125; 13, 269). The music itself points to the obsolescence of the material and discloses its strangeness to us. As both Peter Bürger and Max Paddison note, Adorno’s interpretation of Mahler’s music as self-reflective, that is as being about music, should also have led him to a more positive evaluation of Stravinsky.81 And indeed, in his essay ‘Stravinsky. A Dialectical Image’ (1962), Adorno offers a more flattering portrait of the composer than the one presented in his Philosophy of New Music. He writes: ‘[Stravinksy] permanently wrote music about music’ (16, 389-390). Still, Bürger and Paddison neglect a distinction that Adorno finds crucial. For, while Stravinsky believes that the composer can govern all the material of the music tradition, Mahler’s music shows the material in its very obsolescence. While Stravinsky, in Adorno’s view, ignores or denies historical time, Mahler discloses it. For Mahler, he argues, musical language has lost its self-evidence, and therefore the ability to speak immediately to the senses: ‘His musical language is consistently fractured. It challenges the conventional belief that music is a pure, unmediated art’ (QF, 83; 16, 325).82 By contrast with Schoenberg’s music, however, the ‘fractured’ character of Mahler’s has less to do with its revolutionary harmonics than with what Adorno calls ‘timbre’ (Ton). By discussing instrumental timbre and orchestral colour, Adorno draws attention to elements of music that, as 81 Bürger (1983b), 179-180 and Paddison (1993), 269-270. 82 This is not to say that Adorno’s judgment of Stravinsky, even by his own standards, is correct. One might as well argue, for instance, that Stravinsky’s music is the expression of a loss of historical time caused by mythic ‘natural history’. Similarly, it is not clear why Stravinsky’s music, most notably Sacre du Printemps, would be an ‘identification with collective violence’ (16, 390) instead of a critique of it.

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John Sheinbaum argues, have been ‘traditionally considered superficial and extraneous to music’s deep structure.’83 This too is an aspect of his ‘physiognomic’ approach, that is, his attention to seemingly insignificant surface details. In Mahler’s music, Adorno argues, ‘the forced tone itself becomes expressive’ (M, 20; 13, 168). Instruments play in registers or dynamics beyond their ‘natural’ reach: basses and bassoons are ‘crowing’, while flutes are ‘huffing’. Adorno writes: ‘Through its troubled contrast to the innocent means it uses, that experience is more compelling than if the complaining dissonance were set completely free and so became the norm’ (M, 21; 13, 169). The expressive force is heightened, in other words, because the ‘stretching’ of timbre is in sharp contrast to the seemingly banal melodies and traditional harmonies. Adorno deduces from Mahler’s music three formal categories that help him understand it, namely ‘breakthrough’, ‘suspension’, and ‘fulfilment’. These categories, he argues, ‘suggest an idea that could contribute, beyond the scope of his work, to endowing music with speech through theory’ (M, 44; 13, 193). Adorno does not provide a systematic discussion of them, discussing only their exemplary places, but it is clear that they all involve a momentary interruption or ‘freezing’ of the music’s ‘logical’ development, thus drawing our attention to the structure as a whole. 84 One of these exemplary places is the fanfare in the first movement of the First Symphony, which appears to come from nowhere with regard both to harmonic structure and orchestration. It is as though the music has suddenly been invaded by an extramusical reality. Although after this ‘breakthrough’ the symphony resumes its former development, its overall structure is somehow disturbed and out of joint. Adorno writes: ‘The recapitulation after the breakthrough cannot be the simple recapitulation formally required. The return that the breakthrough evokes must be its result: something new’ (M, 13; 13, 161). Because of such moments in which new elements are introduced, Adorno compares Mahler’s symphonies to novels, contrasting them with the ‘dramatic’ form of Viennese classicism that has dominated Western art music. ‘Dramatic’ music, in his view, means systematic music – that is, music in which the parts add up smoothly to a seamless whole. This kind of music always threatens to become static, since the main theme already contains within itself its possible developments. The sonata form, the central form of classicism, manipulates, twists and turns the theme, only to finally reinstate 83 Sheinbaum (2006), 38. 84 For an excellent and detailed discussion of the three formal categories, see Sheinbaum (2006).

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it in the recapitulation. Time, in other words, seems to have no effect on it. Adorno writes: Since Kant and Beethoven, German philosophy and music had been system. What it could not embrace, its corrective, took refuge in literature. […] In contrast, the originality of Mahler’s music takes up Nietzsche’s insight that the system and its seamless unity, its appearance of reconciliation, is dishonest (M, 64; 13, 212).

Mahler, in Adorno’s view, is full of surprises, full of new elements and themes that cannot be ‘logically’ deduced from the start. Indeed, as though he were writing a novel, he introduces new characters, which enter into relationships with the older ones, thereby giving a twist to the story as a whole. Like Balzac in his Human Comedy, Mahler turns secondary themes into main themes and vice versa. And, most importantly, as in the case of characters in a novel, time leaves its traces and scars on his musical themes: ‘From the timelessness of the ever-the-same Mahler releases historical time’ (M, 77; 13, 226). According to Adorno, Mahler’s failure (in terms of traditional standards) to produce a reconciliation between parts and whole can be understood only if one takes into account his socio-historical context: ‘The emerging antagonism between music and its language reveals a rift within society. The irreconcilability of the inward and the outward can no longer be harmonized spiritually’ (M, 16; 13, 165). In a lecture on Mahler, he compares his work to Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s famous fictitious letter from Lord Chandos (1902), who argued that it is longer possible to be ‘at home’ in language and therefore decided to be forever silent (16, 327). Thus, Hofmannsthal gave voice to the experience of the modern individual of finding themselves confronted with a society that appears utterly alien to him, and in which his words and deeds are senseless and of no consequence. Mahler raises the insufficiency of musical language to the level of theme. His music, in Adorno’s view, both suggests and withholds social reconciliation, which is why it is an authentic expression of the fact that such a reconciliation is historically, but not ontologically, impossible: ‘Mahler’s music is the individual’s dream of the irresistible collective. But at the same time it expresses objectively the impossibility of identification with it’ (M, 33; 13, 182). Obviously, Mahler, as an assimilated Jew, was all too familiar with the experience of the outcast and the pariah. Adorno, however, objects to a reduction of the work of art to the psyche and biography of its producer. Rather than regarding Mahler’s music as a personal document or confession, he reads it as

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a cipher of the historical experience of late modernity. For the same reason, Adorno is suspicious of interpretations that overemphasize the ‘Jewishness’ of Mahler’s music: ‘The attempt to deny it in order to reclaim Mahler for a conception of German music infected by National Socialism is as aberrant as his appropriation as a Jewish nationalist composer’ (M, 149; 13, 291). To be sure, there is an undeniable ‘exotic’ and even ‘oriental’ element in Mahler; his Jewishness is masked, Adorno argues, by references to China, as is the case in Kafka’s and Kraus’ work. In Adorno’s view, however, these references should be conceived of as pointing to the experience of homelessness, the experience of the outsider, rather than to any fixed religious or ethnic identity. Taking sides with what is repressed in history’s progressive course, Mahler’s music is itself ‘rescuing’. With a fine sense of irony, Adorno remarks that ‘the term socialist realism would fit only Mahler’ (M, 46; 13, 195). Redemption, however, appears only as a negative image, namely as the breakthrough of the false semblance of totality. Adorno writes: Mahler’s primary experience, inimical to art, needs art in order to manifest itself, and indeed must heighten art from its own inner necessity. For the image corresponding to breakthrough is damaged because the breakthrough has failed, like the Messiah, to come into the world. To realize it musically would be at the same time to attest to its failure in reality. It is in music’s nature to overreach itself. Utopia finds refuge in its no man’s land. What the immanence of society blocks cannot be achieved by an immanence of form derived from it. The breakthrough sought to penetrate both (M, 6; 13, 154).

These lines refer to Adorno’s idea of music, and art in general, as a promise of happiness, which, however, is forbidden to provide this happiness itself in order to stay true to its promise. Therefore, its immediacy must be broken. Just like Goethe’s novel in Benjamin’s reading, Adorno’s Mahler speaks only of the happiness that could have been, a happiness, he argues, that was anticipated in childhood, but that was never realized. Only in retrospect do we recognize all the failed chances to fulfil its promises. According to Adorno, the loss of hope is expressed most poignantly in Mahler’s late work, especially in The Song of the Earth. This work, consisting of six orchestrated translations of Chinese poems, has been wrongly taken to be a ‘nature’ symphony. By contrast, Adorno argues that, in The Song of the Earth, the earth is beheld from a distance, from the perspective of someone leaving it behind: ‘It is rounded to a sphere that can be overviewed, as in the meantime it has already been photographed from space, not the center

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of Creation but something minute and ephemeral’ (M, 154; 13, 296-297). In Adorno’s view, however, this abandoning of the earth, and with it of all hope, is, in the final instance, done for the sake of hope. After all, seen from space, the Earth as a whole becomes something transient, and transience, according to the idea of natural history, is always a sign of hope. In an essay on Mahler, Adorno tells us of the f irst time he saw the composer’s death mask. He could not help but noticing, in Mahler’s facial expression, not only suffering but also a ‘hint of cunning triumph’, as if Mahler had fooled us all: Fooled us how? If we were to speculate we might conclude that the unfathomable sorrow of his last works had undercut all hope in order to avoid succumbing to illusion, rather as if hope were not unlike the superstitious idea of tempting fate, so that by hoping for something you prevent it from coming true. Could we not think of the path of disillusionment described by the development of Mahler’s music as no other than as an example of the cunning not of reason but of hope? (QF, 110; 16, 350)

This cunning of hope, then, namely the idea that hope is best served by destroying its illusion, might be called the truth content of Mahler’s late work. Let us now turn to how the four features of Adorno’s concept of criticism, which are shared with Benjamin’s, function in his interpretation of Mahler. First, Adorno’s Mahler critique is immanent, since it attempts to evaluate the music with concepts that one could argue are brought forth by the music itself, such as banality and breakthrough. Obviously, in the case of music this ‘immanence’ is an even more delicate matter than in the case of literature, since music does not make use of conceptual language. It is the responsibility of the critic, however, to translate music into language, thereby understanding it according to its own idea instead of judging it by standards foreign to it, such as, in the case of Mahler, classicism, atonality, or even late Romanticism. In his book on Mahler, Adorno manages to do this perhaps better than anywhere else in his writings on music. He convincingly argues that Mahler’s music is ironic and self-reflective and hence critical of itself. Consequently, as a critic Adorno needs only to set these self-critical moments to work. This brings us to the second feature, which is the interruption of semblance. Adorno points to those moments in Mahler’s music which, in his view, break through or suspend the music’s seemingly natural development. Thus, he argues, do these moments interrupt the semblance of life, and unmask the autonomy of the work as an illusion.

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The third feature, the intervention in the afterlife, is of particular importance in the Mahler book. It has been noted that Adorno’s Mahler is a ‘rescuing’ critique. For us, the idea of rescuing Mahler may seem peculiar, since today he is among the most popular composers, and his work is frequently performed and recorded. This was certainly not the case, however, during and long after Mahler’s lifetime, and up until the 1960s. Even in professional circles, he was considered a rather marginal composer, a lateromantic traditionalist or a transitional figure at best. Adorno attempts to disclose the historical experience in Mahler, which in his view is essentially modern. This does not mean, however, that he regards him as merely a ‘forerunner’ of the Second Viennese School. On the contrary, he argues that the ruthless modernism of Schoenberg and his followers has neglected something valuable, which resides in Mahler’s music, namely a relation with the ‘musical material’ which is antisystematic, spontaneous and free. In the essay ‘Mahler’s Actuality’ (1960) Adorno writes: ‘His true actuality, however, is not to be sought in what he prepared for or anticipated of others. Rather, Mahler is actual [aktuell] as a corrective of the contemporary situation of music’ (18, 241). One could argue that Mahler, more than anyone else, functions as a model for Adorno’s ideal of a musique informelle, providing a potential way out of what he sees as the deadlock of post-war serialism. But this is not all. For not only does Adorno intervene in the ‘afterlife’ of Mahler’s music, he also intervenes in a cultural debate of post-war Germany. Having returned to Germany in 1949, Adorno was one of the fiercest critics of what was called ‘working through the past’ (Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit), which in his view all too often came down to simply ignoring and repressing that past. Public life in West Germany took its normal course as if nothing had happened. Adorno argued, however, that the top-down implementation of democracy did not mean that antidemocratic sentiments had vanished too. On the contrary, people were hardly aware of the social psychology that had made them follow Hitler. Social research from the Frankfurt Institute had demonstrated that peace had done little to change the hearts and minds of the German people overnight, and no more than had knowledge of the horrors of the camps: the ‘authoritarian personality’ as well as anti-semitism, were still omnipresent. Within this context, Mahler needed to be rescued from his canonization in the great German music tradition, as well as from the rejection for being ‘too Jewish’. Against this, Adorno’s interpretation of Mahler’s music as the expression of the repressed particular, as the cry of the homeless outcast, was to function as a cultural-political intervention. In his view, Mahler’s music was a j’accuse, not only against Mahler’s society, but also against his own. The Mahler book

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therefore should be regarded as an integral part of what Adorno called ‘education after Auschwitz’. Finally, with regard to the fourth feature of the concept of criticism, we have seen that Adorno’s Mahler is a pursuit of the truth of Mahler’s music. It is not easy to pin down what this truth content is, precisely, since it is not to be separated from the way it is embodied in the music. Moreover, truth for Adorno ‘does not fit in this world’, which therefore makes it particularly difficult to describe in non-artistic language. Even art cannot immediately be true, but can only present the semblance of truth. He therefore writes that ‘it is only in the moment of inauthenticity, which unmasks the lie of authenticity, that Mahler has its truth’ (M, 32; 13, 181).85 One could argue, furthermore, that Adorno locates truth in those moments of interruption, the moments that break through the semblance of totality. These moments, in his view, disclose the truth not only about the work of art as semblance, but also about society as a false whole: ‘His fractures are the script of truth. In them the social movement appears negatively, as in its victims’ (M, 166; 13, 309). Let us return, then, to the question of whether Adorno’s interpretation of Mahler is exemplary for his concept of criticism. It is unusual in its appreciation of the use of obsolete and worn-out material in Mahler. This does not so much contradict Adorno’s idea of the tendency of the material, but puts it in a different light, namely, as the seemingly natural history, which is in fact contingent. Through Mahler’s work, Adorno focuses his attention on what falls victim to this history, to that what becomes obsolete. Mahler thus shows a side of Adorno that is quite different from the champion of modernist ‘progression’ he is sometimes taken to be. More than any other of his critical writings, the Mahler critique is a ‘rescuing’ critique instead of a polemic against false consciousness, if only because truth and phantasmagoria cannot easily be divided in Mahler’s music. For this reason, the Mahler book, perhaps more than any of his writings, shows his proximity to Benjamin. In yet a different, negative way, the Mahler book is exemplary of Adorno’s critical work. I have mentioned the lack of historical specificity in his concept of criticism. In his fear of vulgar materialism, Adorno regards every particular as dialectically related to and ‘mediated’ by the whole. The Hegelian dialectic of parts and whole figures prominently in the Mahler book too, sometimes threatening to undermine the ‘immanent’ as well as the historical character of Adorno’s criticism. To be sure, there are passages where Adorno discusses Mahler in relation to his specific spatio-temporal 85 For the concept of authenticity in Adorno, see Jay (2006).

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and socio-historical context, and this brings Mahler close to contemporaries and countrymen such as Hofmannsthal, Kafka, Kraus, and Schoenberg, and there are other places where he emphasizes the importance of Mahler for Adorno’s own time. But the dialectic of whole and parts, of universal and particular, constantly threatens to turn the social antagonisms Adorno is hinting at into metaphysical ones. This is nowhere clearer than in his interpretation of The Song of the Earth as a farewell to the Earth. In moments such as these, Adorno comes dangerously close to the perfidy of which Benjamin accused the Baroque poets, namely the conviction that the world as a whole is ‘sinful’ or ‘fallen’, while salvation resides only in its complete allegorical reversal.

4.8 Conclusion The similarities between Benjamin’s and Adorno’s concepts of criticism are striking. With regard to the ontology of the work of art, both regard it as unfinished and fragmentary, and therefore in need of criticism. In the case of works of ‘classical’ beauty, this means that the critic first needs to disclose the ruptures hidden in the artwork, and to approach it, not as a creation, a semblance of life, but as a product. He needs, in Benjamin’s words, to turn it into a ‘thing of shards’. In so doing, they emphasize the ‘sobriety’ of art as well as the artist; instead of pointing to eternal beauty, they conceive of it as emphatically historical. In the case of works of modernist art (or of protomodernist art, such as the Baroque mourning plays), the work already shows itself as a ruin. The task of criticism, then, is neither to reject nor to cover up the ruinous character of the work of art, but rather to understand it as the expression of historical experience. This means that criticism makes the reverse movement of myth: while myth turns history into nature, criticism turns what seems natural back into history. What seemed self-evident in the work of art suddenly becomes strange to us; what seemed eternal, transient. For both Benjamin and Adorno, art criticism attempts to disclose the truth of the artwork. They are concerned, not with a propositional truth, but rather with a negative truth, that is, truth as the opposite of myth. The beauty of the work of art, they argue, partakes both in myth (as beautiful semblance) and in truth (as the hope of reconciliation). Furthermore, Benjamin (in the Goethe essay) and Adorno believe that art can present this truth only qua art, that is, qua beauty. The truth of art cannot be unveiled, completely ridden of semblance. This means not only that art depends on philosophical criticism to disclose its truth, but that philosophy depends on

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art as a privileged locus of truth. For both Benjamin and Adorno, criticism and art are mutually dependent and of equal importance.86 Adorno’s and Benjamin’s concepts of criticism converge in the way they each conceive of the relation between semblance (or myth), truth (or redemption) and beauty (or hope). One could argue that Adorno’s aesthetics remains faithful to the dialectical schema of Benjamin’s essay on Goethe. It would therefore be interesting to compare this schema to the dialectical stages of his concept of criticism. Immanent analysis, then, would function on the level of myth (as thesis) – that is, with what Benjamin calls the commentator’s concern for the material content, the mere factualness of the work. Ideology critique would function on the level of redemption (as antithesis), since it makes a gesture towards total rejection of the falseness of semblance. Philosophical criticism, finally, would function on the level of hope (as synthesis), since it is concerned with the way in which the work of art, as semblance, nevertheless points negatively towards the truth. Although it is indeed tempting to draw parallels such as these in order to bring Benjamin and Adorno closer together, one has to keep in mind two objections. The first is that, for Adorno, the three levels of criticism are not discrete but interdependent and mediated through each other in Hegelian fashion. Precisely this element of ‘mediation’ was what Adorno thought was lacking in Benjamin’s critical writings. Second, and more importantly, one can question whether Benjamin himself remained faithful to the concept of criticism outlined in the Goethe essay. We have seen how his thought underwent a process of ‘recasting’. Although all aspects of his early theory of criticism return in the later work, they return in adapted form. Benjamin deemed this necessary because of the changing political constellation. As we can read in their correspondence, Adorno did not always understand this recasting, and if he did, he could not always endorse it. Starting from these two objections, one can formulate the differences within the shared features of their concepts of criticism, which, to restate, were immanent critique, the dissolution of semblance, intervention in the afterlife, and the pursuit of truth. For both Benjamin and Adorno, art criticism is immanent criticism. This means two things: first, that the work of art is criticized on the basis of elements it carries within its own structure; and second, that society is inscribed in the work of art, so that the critic criticizes society from within it, instead of rejecting the work as ideological from an external perspective. According to both, the critic draws the idea (or the ‘poetized’) from the work, 86 See Scholze (2000), 281.

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so that art criticism is in fact performed by the work itself, on itself: this is the birth of criticism from the spirit of art. In Adorno’s philosophy, however, the possibility of immanent criticism is guaranteed by the Hegelian dialectic of whole and parts. Because the whole and the parts are mediated through each other, the particular carries the whole within itself as its negative imprint. This enables Adorno both to criticize the artwork (as a whole) through its details (parts), and to criticize society (as a whole) through the work of art (now functioning as a part). However, the Hegelian schema jeopardizes the historical specificity of Adorno’s critique. Furthermore, and not altogether unimportantly, the Hegelian dialectic threatens to make his critical writings, which detect a ‘whole’ behind every tree, somewhat predictable. There is an undeniable schematism to his rejection of schemas, a system in his suspicion of systems. More convincing is the epistemological foundation of art criticism in the possibility of a genuine confrontation with the work of art itself, in other words, the possibility of experiencing sensuous particularity. This is not a mere intellectual exercise, in his view, but a bodily experience, an experience of suffering. Suffering, as he argues in Negative Dialectics, is what eventually grounds the possibility of art criticism, and critique per se: ‘The physical moment tells our knowledge that suffering ought not to be, that things should be different’ (ND, 203; 6, 203). In Benjamin’s case, it is not entirely clear what justifies immanent criticism. On the basis of his dissertation, one could argue that he rejects the Hegelian dialectic on the basis of the Romantic theory of infinite reflection. Indeed, the ‘direct correspondence’ with which Agamben labelled Benjamin’s philosophy to contrast it with Adorno’s ‘dialectical mediation’, might be informed by Romantic ‘objective irony’, that is, the subject’s and object’s shared participation in the absolute. Benjamin, however, makes clear that he finds the Romantics’ idealist epistemology far from satisfactory. Then again, it is questionable whether he himself ever developed a fruitful alternative to it, a satisfactory epistemological grounding of criticism. One might say that Benjamin’s immanent criticism is, in the last instance, theological, as the allegory of the dwarf in the chess machine implies, but which can hardly be called a solution. This brings us back to the problem with which we ended the third chapter, namely that Adorno has a theory of mediation, but an unsatisfactory one, while Benjamin lacks a theory of the relation between art and society. What, then, is the foundation for the kinds of criticism Benjamin proposes? Inspired by Benjamin’s story of the dwarf and the master juggler, one could leave the foundation question aside altogether, and instead judge

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criticism solely by its performance. The epistemological grounding would then be indefinitely ‘suspended’. Of course, the question then remains of whether the work of either the historian or the critic can ever become something other than an arbitrary construction. I do not believe a definitive answer to this question is to be found in Benjamin’s writings.87 The second feature of Benjamin’s and Adorno’s concept of criticism is the dissolution of semblance. Benjamin’s Goethe essay is in part a meditation on the ontology of the work of art, its beauty being both part of myth and referring to redemption. On the basis of Adorno’s attempt to rescue semblance in Aesthetic Theory, one can conclude that he remained faithful to this ontology throughout his life. Benjamin, arguably more than Adorno, is also concerned with the content of myth. In the case of the Goethe essay, this is marriage and law, as conventions that first reveal themselves as such at the moment of their obsolescence. This attention to the specific material content of mythology, or as Benjamin later sometimes calls it, phantasmagoria, explains the richness of the Arcades Project. One could argue that Benjamin, again more than Adorno, is increasingly interested in the representational side of the work of art, namely in the way in which forms of life are represented in it (for instance, the way in which Paris is depicted in Baudelaire’s poetry). Although this obviously has to do with the art forms informing their concepts of criticism (namely literature in the case of Benjamin and music in the case of Adorno), at least in principle it makes Benjamin’s concept of criticism potentially more historically specific than Adorno’s. Benjamin and Adorno regard criticism as an intervention in the afterlife of a work of art. The work of art is in need of criticism to bring it back to life, or, in some cases, to rescue it from its appropriation within a false tradition. For instance, Benjamin rescues both Goethe and Baudelaire from what he considers to be a false neo-romantic interpretation. Likewise, Adorno rescues Mahler’s music, by objecting to his rejection as a traditionalist (by serialism) as well as to his assimilation as a German ‘classic’. In these cases, the intervention in the afterlife of the work of art is at the same time an intervention in the cultural and political situation of the critic. Benjamin’s Baudelaire essay is full of passages referring, implicitly as well as explicitly, to the political situation of the late 1930s, while Adorno’s Mahler emphasizes the importance of experiencing the ‘non-identical’ in post-war Germany. There is a difference, however, between the ways in which Benjamin and Adorno think the critic should intervene, and this difference points directly 87 In one of our many fruitful conversations, Rudi Laermans spoke of the ‘terrible epistemological void’ in Benjamin’s writings.

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to Benjamin’s materialist ‘recasting’. Benjamin, in One Way Street, proposes a new kind of criticism, namely a ‘strategic’ criticism, which is, as it were, modelled after advertising. One might also call it a tactile criticism, which attempts to affect the senses of the audience immediately, by circumventing reflection and intellect. Several of the key terms in his late work, such as shock, distraction and montage, point in this direction. Adorno was, to say the least, sceptical of this development in Benjamin’s thought, behind which he (rightly) suspected the figure of Brecht. In a famous passage in the letter on the work-of-art essay, he accuses Benjamin of crediting the audience ‘directly with an achievement which […] it can only accomplish through the theory introduced by intellectuals as dialectical subjects’ (ABC, 129; ABB, 170). In Adorno’s view, Benjamin wrongly presumes he has immediate access to revolutionary praxis. For him, by contrast, criticism, both art criticism and social critique, is possible only through contemplation. As Bernstein writes, for Adorno ‘art can secure its moment of resistance; but that resistance is necessarily reflective, not praxial.’88 One can indeed question whether a tactile criticism is possible, and, if so, whether Benjamin’s later writings are adequate examples of it, for surely these cannot speak to a mass public. Nevertheless, even if his solution is insufficient, it is clear that Benjamin is acutely aware of the problem, namely the question of how the critic or intellectual should address his public in a new political constellation. Benjamin argues that, if the critic still wants to play an important role, they can no longer proceed in the traditional way. They must adapt their strategy as well as their mode of presentation in order to appeal to a new public. Even though Adorno was sceptical of a ‘practical’ criticism, one might say that, after the war, he put into practice at least some of Benjamin’s proposals. He became one of the most influential critics of post-war Germany, regularly writing in newspapers and journals, and giving lectures and interviews on national radio and television. To say that Adorno modelled, in Benjamin’s spirit, criticism after advertisement would be overstretching it, but he certainly acted as a ‘strategist’ in the social struggle with art and culture. Finally, both Benjamin and Adorno regard the work of art as a bearer of truth, a truth however, that the artwork can point to only ex negativo. In Benjamin’s Goethe essay, the work’s truth content is its interruption of mythical semblance, not only of the mythical world depicted in the novel (interrupted by the novella in the novel), but also of the semblance of the novel itself as an organic totality. As Benjamin argues, the novel’s 88 Bernstein (1997b), 97.

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interruption of its own mythical semblance exposes its enigmatic character, thus constituting its true beauty (it is completed by its shattering, as he puts it). Beauty, the work’s fundamental un-understandability or un-unveilability (Unenthüllbarkeit), also marks the hope of reconciliation. To a certain extent, Adorno remained true to this schema, although he complemented it with the Hegelian dialectic. The enigmatic character of the work of art, in his view, is the result of sensuous particularity, which prevents it from being subsumed under some concept. The hope the work of art expresses is the hope that such a sensuous particularity, of which the artwork is the mere semblance, would actually be possible. Here too, however, we have to take into account the recasting undergone by Benjamin’s concept of criticism, which gives the concept of truth a slightly different meaning in his later writings. The revolution takes the place of truth in his work after One Way Street, and this raises the question of what the critic is actually working in the service of. For Adorno, it is obviously the work of art, as the plenipotentiary of sensuous particularity. For Benjamin, however, the critic is working in the service, not of the work of art, but of the revolution, as the ‘strategist in the battle for literature’. Nevertheless, one could argue that Benjamin would not subscribe to this distinction. After all, in the final sentences of ‘The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire’, he argues that ‘Blanqui’s action was the sister of Baudelaire’s dream’ (SW 4, 63; I/2, 604). In other words, in his view the interests of art and revolutionary practices are aligned, hopelessly naïve as this may sound. This alignment is again the result of what I have referred to earlier as Benjamin’s historical gamble. Adorno, obviously, did not agree. To be sure, he did believe art and politics to be one, but for him this meant that art was the Ersatz of an absent politics.89 Determining the difference between Benjamin and Adorno, one might argue that, while for Benjamin criticism anticipates revolutionary praxis, for Adorno it mourns its failed chance. For the Benjaminian critic, ‘every second [is] the small gateway in time through which the Messiah might enter’ (SW 3, 397), while for the Adornian critic ‘the image corresponding to breakthrough is damaged because the breakthrough has failed, like the Messiah, to come into the world’ (M, 6; 13, 154). This points to the subtle but crucial difference between a philosophy under the sign of anticipating hope and one under the sign of failed promise.

89 See Bernstein (1992), 269.



Excursus III – Where is the Critic? Of all the cants which are canted in this canting world, – though the cant of hypocrites may be the worst, – the cant of criticism is the most tormenting. ‒ Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman For the true critic, the actual judgment is the ultimate step – something that comes with a struggle after everything else, never the basis of his activities. In the ideal case, he forgets to pass judgment. ‒ Walter Benjamin, fragment written in 1931

In 1910, the Salon des Indépendants in Paris exhibited a painting by a mysterious young Italian painter named Joachim-Raphael Boronali. Nobody had ever seen him or heard of him before. The painting, entitled Et le soleil s’endormit sur l’Adriatique, was a brightly coloured and abstract work. In an accompanying manifesto, Boronali named his new style ‘excessivism’. Critics debated the quality of this new work, and discussed whether it could indeed be the next step in painting. In the meantime, newspaper reporters went looking for the ‘man behind the work’. When they eventually found him, however, the man behind the work turned out to be a donkey, who went by the name of Lolo. Its owner, the novelist Roland Dorgelès, had attached a brush to the donkey’s tail in order for it to create its masterpiece. In this way, Dorgelès wanted to unmask the empty rhetoric of art criticism. Art critics traditionally enjoy a bad reputation. The critic is considered an elitist, a mandarin and a know-it-all. He is the sour-puss who spoils the festive premiere or exhibition. Especially among artists, the critic stands in low esteem. Their opinion of critics, expressed in Dorgelès’ practical joke, is perhaps most waspishly formulated by the Irish playwright Brendan Behan: ‘Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how it is done, they’ve seen it done every day, but they’re unable to do it themselves.’1 Consequently, artists usually ignore critics, or, at times, fear them. Who will mourn the extinction of these armchair experts? This is, after all, what we increasingly hear: that the critic is moribund. Academic and magazine critics, and critics from both of the visual arts, the performing arts, and literature, have it that there is a crisis. In recent years, numerous 1

Quoted in McDonald (2007), 9.

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publications have proclaimed or heralded the ‘end of’ or a ‘farewell to’ criticism, or the ‘death’ of the critic.2 Art critic Hal Foster notes the anxiety ‘about a loss of function and power.’3 French literary critic William Marx argues that we ‘live in a time in which criticism has lost its public.’4 Eleanor Heartney states that art criticism is ‘in trouble’, because ‘it is being fired on from all sides these days.’5 Film critic Jim Hoberman characterizes his colleagues as ‘underpaid cheerleaders’, while his colleague in the theatre world Arlene Croce writes that she can ‘not remember a time when the critic has seemed more expendable than now.’6 Who killed the critic? Like detectives, sociologists and historians have searched for clues to find out who or what could be held responsible for the death of the critic. Meanwhile, another question forces itself upon us: Is the death of the critic a blessing or a curse? Should the death of the critic be mourned or celebrated? Do we still need critics?

Rise and fall of the critic At f irst sight, it seems absurd to state that art criticism is faced with extinction. Are not newspapers filled daily with reviews of exhibitions, performances, and movies? Is art criticism not practiced in catalogues, in glossy magazines, and, last but not least, on innumerable blogs on the internet? James Elkins, in his pamphlet What Happened to Art Criticism? (2003), agrees that much is written about art, but in his view this massively produced art criticism is also massively ignored: Art criticism is in a worldwide crisis. […] But its decay is not the ordinary last faint push of a practice that has run its course, because at the very same time, art criticism is also healthier than ever. Its business is booming: it attracts an enormous number of writers, and often benefits from high-quality color printing and worldwide distribution. In that sense art criticism is flourishing, but invisibly, out of sight of contemporary intellectual debates. So it’s dying, but it’s everywhere. It’s ignored, and yet is has the market behind it.7 2 3 4 5 6 7

See Berger (ed., 1998), Elkins (2003), Rubinstein (ed., 2006) and McDonald (2007). Foster (1996), xv. Marx (2005), 196. Heartney in Rubinstein (ed., 2006), 101. Hoberman and Croce in: Berger (ed., 1998), 89 and 28. Elkins (2003), 2.

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Catalogues are skimmed through during a visit to a museum; reviews are read half-asleep over breakfast. In Elkins’s view, little of what is written really impresses its audience, while the chances that art criticism will penetrate academic discussions of art history or aesthetics are slim. The reason for this, he argues, is the lack of a common ground for art criticism: critics throw around predicates such as ‘deep’, ‘disturbing’, or ‘Lacanian’, but behind this jargon there seldom is a real theoretical paradigm or foundation. Present-day art critics, Elkins argues, are reluctant or unwilling to take a step back from the here and now, as famous critics from the past still dared to do. Elkins points up an interesting problem in his pamphlet, but he does not really answer the question posed in the title. Although he sketches a convincing image of the situation of present-day (visual) art criticism, he does not tell us how art criticism has ended up in this awkward situation.8 Many theorists have thought about this problem. One might divide their arguments into three possible answers. First, there are those who explain the death of the critic within the much broader context of the decline of the public sphere, which is the cradle and natural habitat of the critic. Then there is a second category of authors who relate the disappearance of the critic to the depoliticization and self-devaluation of art, which, they argue, was obligingly followed by criticism. Finally, there are those who argue that the critic is dying because of a rupture in criticism itself, between academic and journalistic criticism. One of the canonical works on the subject of the public sphere remains till this day Jürgen Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962). Habermas describes how the public sphere, as a realm between state authority and private interest, originated in English coffee-houses and French salons. He analyses how the idea of a public sphere, as well as the institutions that bolster it (the rise of the newspaper being one of the most important) developed throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In this sphere, the modern figure of the critic was born. The birth of the critic is conditioned by an important shift in the aesthetic theory of the eighteenth century, namely from an idea of beauty based on rules (which were prescribed by the classics and represented by the academy) to an idea of beauty grounded in taste.9 To be sure, these paradigms coexisted for a while (i.e., good taste is determined by the rules), but the idea of taste gradually replaced rule-based aesthetics. This was essential for the rise of 8 But see also Elkins and Newman (eds., 2008) for a far more elaborate account of the crisis of criticism. 9 See also Chapter 1.

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the critic, who is primarily defined, not by their knowledge of the rules, but by their taste. The ‘logical peculiarity’ of taste was discussed by Kant in his Critique of Judgment, where he argues that a judgment on the beautiful is both subjective and universal10 – subjective, because it cannot be deduced from rules or concepts, and cannot be grounded in reason. Nevertheless, so Kant argues, a judgment of taste lays claim to universality, since one makes one’s judgment on the basis of the interplay of the faculties with which every rational being is gifted. Everyone making an aesthetic judgment refers to, and partakes in, what Kant called a sensus communis. In Habermas’s view, Kant’s argument shows the crux of the enlightenment idea of taste, namely that it is not an exclusive talent (traditionally reserved for the nobility), but something that is a priori accessible for every human being (i.e., any being gifted with reason). The idea of taste, Habermas argues, also defines the ‘dialectical task’ of the modern critic.11 On the one hand, they are the educator of the public, but on the other hand, they speak on the public’s behalf, since their judgment of taste has universal claims. The critic emerging from the bourgeois public sphere can thus be said to be both megalomaniac (‘my judgment is universal’) and humble (‘I am merely a man among men’). As Peter Uwe Hohendahl writes: ‘He spoke for others because he was better informed; thus, he claimed a right to be heard. His judicial and pedagogical powers were limited, however, by the general consensus that public opinion should be the ultimate judge.’12 This a priori egalitarian and democratic notion of criticism contains, from the beginning, an emancipatory political impetus. In principle, everyone can have, and should be allowed to develop, an adequate judgment of taste. This meant that the classical rules of beauty, personified by the taste of nobility, lost their force of law. Hohendahl argues: Literature served the emancipation movement of the middle class as an instrument to gain self-esteem and to articulate its human demands against the absolutist state and a hierarchical society. Literary discussion, which had previously served as a form of legitimation of court society in the aristocratic salons, became an arena to pave the way for political discussion in the middle class.13 10 Kant (1987), 281-283: 145-146. 11 Habermas (1962), 57. 12 Hohendahl (1982), 53. 13 Ibidem, 52. See also Habermas (1962), 69-75, as well as the difference between Kultur and Zivilization discussed in the first chapter.

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In other words, art criticism is, from the outset, a political phenomenon. It both presupposes and stimulates a public sphere where individuals can meet as equals. It is suspicious of authority – that is, of any kind of authority whose source is not available to all (rational) creatures. As several theorists, such as Habermas and Richard Sennett, have argued, the public sphere disintegrates in the nineteenth century.14 The same free market that once conditioned the public sphere now turns against it, as private interest and consumption take the upper hand over public discussion and emancipatory ideals. Habermas argues that the pseudo-public sphere of cultural consumption replaces the ‘artistic public sphere’.15 Art becomes, on the one hand, a leisure activity that is dominated by the culture industry, while on the other hand the artistic avant-gardes turn it into a domain that is accessible only to a select group of connoisseurs. The public, he argues, is thus split ‘into minorities of non-publically reasoning specialists and the big mass of publically receiving consumers.’16 Habermas and Sennett regard the death of the critic as an epiphenomenon of this decline of the public sphere. The critic loses his public, which increasingly prefers consumption above critical judgment and raisonnement. Moreover, with the rise of mass media, the critic loses their traditional mediating function: in a mass-mediated society, no one can claim to be ‘better informed’ than anybody else. Not everyone agrees that we can blame the market and mass media for the death of the critic. In l’Adieu à la litterature (2005) the French theorist William Marx blames the artists and critics themselves. 17 In this controversial work he asks how it is possible that literature, which was once held in such high regard, could have become so marginalized. Voltaire, for instance, was considered a hero by the public. When in 1778 he visited Paris after having been banished for years, he was carried through the streets by an enthusiastic crowd of thousands. Today, Marx argues, literature plays no important role within public debate and is even cut out of school programmes. To account for how things could have come to this, he divides the history of literature after 1700 into three phases, which he labels ‘expansion’, ‘autonomization’ and ‘devaluation’. 14 Habermas (1962) and Sennett (1977). 15 Habermas (1962), 193. 16 Ibidem, 210. Terry Eagleton (1994) writes that this split ‘between an inchoate amateurism and a socially marginal professionalism was inscribed within [criticism] from the outset’ (69). 17 A similar position in the Dutch discussion was taken by Thomas Vaessens, in his De revanche van de roman (2009).

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The first phase, expansion, is propelled by the nineteenth-century Romantic notion of the ‘sublime’, which has its origin in eighteenth-century philosophy of art (e.g., Burke and Kant). According to this theory, the poet is not merely a craftsman, but rather some sort of high priest who has access to a higher truth by means of the magical forces of language. And while the poets are considered priests, the critics become their temple guards. Famous critics began to judge works of art not merely by the extent to which they followed the rules of the classics, but also by the extent to which they expressed a moral and social meaning.18 Art criticism is therefore of vital importance, as not merely pertaining to art, but as a form of criticism of life itself. The second phase begins with a farewell to precisely this idea of the moral and social relevance of literature, most notably in the doctrine of l’art pour l’art that has already been extensively discussed here in the first chapter. According to Marx, 1857 marks a turning point in literature, a crucial step in its process of ‘autonomization’. In this year, trials began both against Flaubert, for Madam Bovary, and against Baudelaire, for The Flowers of Evil. While nowadays these trials are often considered to have emerged from a primitive form of state censorship and petit-bourgeois moralization against art, Marx argues that in fact the prosecutors attached more importance to literature than did the accused. While the prosecutors still considered art to be a gateway to a higher truth or a better world, the authors and their defenders had erected a wall between beauty on the one side and truth and morality on the other. This wall only got higher and higher towards the end of the nineteenth century. The authors of the so-called decadent movement, such as Wilde and Huysmans, even regarded art as hostile to life. This is where, Marx argues, the third phase sets in: devaluation. Exemplary of this phase are Monsieur Teste in an 1896 story from the French poet and critic Paul Valéry, and Lord Chandos from the fictitious letter published in 1902 by the Austrian poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Both of these authors lament the utter senselessness and powerlessness of poetic language, and its inadequacy to express human experience and feelings. The conclusion of both Valéry and Hofmannsthal is that one should learn how to be silent. In Marx’s view, this essentially comes down to poetic suicide. Where were the critics when this happened? Marx describes how criticism, which in his view should have distanced itself from literature when it committed suicide, instead imprisoned itself, together with literature, 18 In the nineteenth century, one can think of Sainte-Beuve in France, and Matthew Arnold and F. R. Leavis in Britain.

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into the poetic form. By consequence, it too lost its relationship with the world outside. Roland Barthes, the famous French critic, once wrote that criticism is essentially equal to art, but while this statement was applauded as criticism’s emancipation from its parasitical status, Marx argues that it in fact meant that criticism had chained itself to a sinking ship. Marx provides an interesting perspective on the development of the history of literature and criticism, and the way their social function and position changed throughout the past centuries. One of the strengths of his arguments is that he does not point to the ‘usual suspects’ of youth culture, television or the internet to explain the devaluation of criticism, but blames the artists and critics themselves for this marginalization. If they cannot or will no longer explain what their function and importance are, why should the public bother to listen? The strength of this original and controversial position is at the same time, however, a weakness. One could argue that Marx himself makes the mistake he accuses literature of: he has too little attention for the outerliterary reality. Neither the elevation of the poet as priest, nor the doctrine of l’art pour l’art, can be solely explained from the writings of Kant. These are not purely inner-literary developments. To understand them, one has to consider the social, political, economic, and technological contexts – the fall of the Ancièn Regime, the rise of the middle class, the invention and development of the printing press. Similarly, to understand what Marx calls the ‘devaluation’ of literature one cannot ignore the introduction and increasing democratization of new media.19 This brings us to the third explanation for the disappearance of the critic, namely a schism in criticism itself. Rónán McDonald, in his The Death of the Critic (2007), observes that the public critic as described by Habermas has been ripped apart. The two halves consist of a specialized, but also obscure, impenetrable and non-evaluative, academic criticism on the one hand, and an accessible but superficial journalistic criticism on the other. Adopting Adorno’s simile, one might say that these are the two ‘torn halves’ of criticism that do not add up. McDonald accuses both the ivory tower of academia and the ‘slums’ of journalism and the ‘blogosphere’ of killing off the critic. Academic criticism, as some theorists argue, is the result of the critic’s shift in allegiance, which occurred in the nineteenth century. While the 19 Apart from this, William Marx is very selective in his use of examples. Twentieth-century authors that clearly do not fit into the third phase of ‘devaluation’, such as Breton, Brecht or Solzhenitsyn, are neglected or only mentioned in passing.

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critic in Habermas’s public sphere represents f irst and foremost (or at least claims to) the sensus communis of the public, or even of the entire community of humanity, the later critic’s loyalty lies primarily with the work of art. The conflict between loyalty to the work and loyalty to the public is already present in the writing of Schiller.20 The German Romantics argue that criticism has no goal or purpose outside the realm of art itself, while in Britain, the public critic is transformed into the figure of the ‘sage’, a prophet-like man of letters speaking from transcendent heights.21 The historical avant-gardes, as Boris Groys argues, are still concerned with their public but no longer speak directly to it. Rather, they address the public as they believe that public should be: Now it is not the observer who judges the artwork, but the artwork that judges – and often condemns – its public. […] Every individual is free to place himself, against the rest of the public, on the side of the artwork – to number himself among those constituting the new humanity. Several art critics of the historical avant-garde did just that. In place of the critic in the name of society arose social critique in the name of art: The artwork doesn’t form the object of judgment but is instead taken as the point of departure for a critique aimed at society and the world.22

The critic, in other words, sides with a future humanity. They are no longer the spokesperson for the public, but rather regard the public as their enemy. This is no less the case for the avant-garde critic than it is for the conservative critic, who regards the general public as barbarians standing at the gates of culture, threatening the precious goods of art. While cultural mass-consumption is on the rise, the critic increasingly focuses on a small circle of kindred spirits. During the nineteenth century, the university formed an important condition for this shift in loyalty.23 National awareness stimulated the founding of departments of national cultural and literary history, thus creating a 20 ‘The Schillerean critic has the task of guarding the level of literary discussion, which has been endangered by new, less critical groups of readers. This function separates him from the general reading public. When the general public is considered to have an inadequate aesthetic sense and only the minority is viewed as a deserving partner for discourse, the general validity of literary criticism can no longer be legitimated by the literary public sphere’ (Hohendahl (1982), 55). See also Chapter 1.2. 21 Eagleton (1984), 39 ff. 22 Groys (2008), 112. 23 See Hohendahl (1982), Eagleton (1984), Marx (2005), and McDonald (2007).

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harbour where the critic could take refuge. There they could safely neglect the public, leaving contact with the public to newspapers and magazines. But this independence and emancipation came at a price: isolation and alienation. In leaving the public sphere behind, the critic also lost the political function they had had in the eighteenth century. Terry Eagleton writes: The academicization of criticism provided it with an institutional basis and professional structure; but by the same token it signalled its final sequestration from the public realm. Criticism achieved security by committing political suicide; its moment of academic institutionalization is also the moment of its effective demise as a socially active force.24

Even within the walls of academia, however, criticism was not safe for long, as both William Marx and McDonald observe. In the second half of the twentieth century, academic art criticism came under fire from cultural studies. This new branch within the humanities stretched the traditional concept of culture: suddenly, one was able to research, for example, corporate culture, street culture, or gastronomic culture, to name but some diverse areas. The research interests of cultural studies blurred traditional boundaries of high and low culture. Cultural phenomena were treated as social documents. Instead of concerning themselves with the quality of a work of art, as critics traditionally did, the new generation of cultural theorists was primary interested in culture as an arena of ideological struggle: e.g., sexism in detective novels, or racism in cereal commercials. Although this opened up whole new fields of research, and although it clearly reestablished the broken bond between the ‘textual’ and the ‘social’, there was also an important drawback as far as criticism was concerned. Since quality is of no importance to cultural studies, Proust was treated in the same way as a television advertisement. From the perspective of traditional criticism, cultural studies ‘desublimized’ its subject, to use a Marcusian term. Although this certainly had a liberating effect, it also raised the question of why one should be concerned with art in the first place.25 In the meantime, the position of the remnants of criticism in journalism did not go unquestioned, either. The newspaper, traditionally the home of 24 Eagleton (1984), 65. 25 Referring to a famous essay by Raymond Williams, McDonald (2007) asks: ‘If the arts are so “ordinary”, why should the public – in whose name the arts are being reclaimed – be interested in them? Why should art or literature get more respect or attention than any other form of entertainment?’ (137).

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the critic, was challenged by other mass media. Art criticism was hardly considered a form of entertainment by the general public, and publishers increasingly favoured interviews with artists over critical essays.26 This tendency was related to a breakdown in the traditional division of labour between artist and critic. The historical avant-gardes heralded the ‘age of manifestoes’, during which artists themselves provided the theoretical framework for their artistic practice, and, with the dawn of conceptual art in the 1970s, criticism was all but absorbed by artistic practices themselves.27 Finally, and most importantly, democratization and egalitarianism (which in the eighteenth century, as we saw, made modern criticism possible in the first place) gradually led to a fundamental distrust of anybody who attempted to impose standards with which to evaluate art and culture for the public. Nobody has to be told what they should like or dislike; everybody considers themselves entitled to their own opinion. Of course, such an environment is fatal for the traditional role of the critic, who, after all, pretends to be better informed than the average person, and hence better equipped to make judgments of taste.

Why criticism? Art criticism is indeed in a paradoxical situation, because although many agree that criticism is in crisis, it also seems to be thriving. Art not only appears in the traditional media (journals, magazines and newspapers), but is also widely discussed on the internet. There are numerous weblogs where anyone interested in art and culture can share their tastes and opinions. Should we not conclude that the death of the critic is a mere symptom of the increased democratization of taste? Should we not say, paraphrasing Joseph Beuys, that today everyone is a critic? The importance and indisputability of the public’s taste, once expressed in the phrase ‘fifty million Elvis fans can’t be wrong’, is now more than ever a force to be reckoned with. Some argue that it is impossible to distinguish between tastes and values. The British literary critic John Carey, for instance, claims that nobody can tell another person what to like or dislike, or what should 26 Gwen Allen (2006) writes that ‘the age of criticism gave way to the age of interviews’. 27 See also Newman ‘The Specificity of Criticism and Its Need for Philosophy’ in Elkins and Newman (eds., 2008), 29-60. Moreover, as Newman argues, the kinds of (poststructuralist) theory adopted by critical art practices, undermined the possibility of universal judgment that is connected to the traditional figure of the critic. I will come back to that in the final section of this excursus.

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be regarded as art. In his view, something is (good) art as soon as someone regards it as such.28 One should always be suspicious of hymns to ‘the people’s power’. McDonald rightfully argues that an increase in public participation in discussions on art and culture is not necessarily as democratic as it might seem. To be sure, criticizing a seemingly democratic development always puts the critic on thin ice. Many an intellectual cannot resist the temptation to lapse into hysterical lamentations over ubiquitous dumbing-down and to wailingly digress upon the ‘eternal standards’ of beauty. Such warnings of the vulgarization and corrosion of aesthetic standards should equally be resisted. The figure of the public critic itself, as we have seen, was born out of resistance to an elite culture that opposing traditional that culture’s standards of perennial and classic beauty. The critique of vulgarization, moreover, ignores the fact that today there is actually a lot of high-quality art criticism on the internet. The divide between traditional and blog criticism is not the same as that animating the old discussion of high versus low culture. Furthermore, there is no reason why a serious criticism of what used to pass for ‘low’ culture – pop music, movies, comics, television series, and so on – should not be possible. The question, then, is not one of distiguishing between high and low culture, but of whether the judgment of the critic, as a skilled, trained and experienced observer, is more legitimate or valuable than the opinion of any other average person. Or is beauty and aesthetic quality in the eye of the beholder? These are ancient philosophical questions to which there is no definitive answer, but they have renewed urgency, since everyone in the debate gives answers to them, explicitly or implicitly. McDonald argues that the democratic aura that glows around the dictum that ‘everyone is entitled to their own opinion’ is false. Internet criticism, he argues, has to cope with the practical problem that the Internet is incredibly vast. Therefore, artistic and literary blogs have to specialize and become subdivided into innumerable little niches, each covering a part of the artistic field. But because of that, people roaming the Internet are often searching for, and confronted with, a reflection and affirmation of their own tastes and opinions. This, McDonald argues, is the exact opposite of the traditional role of criticism, which disputes prejudice and threadbare standards of taste, and shed light on the new, the strange and the unfamiliar.29

28 See Carey (2005). 29 Scott (2016) makes a similar point.

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McDonald’s point seems to be confirmed by the fact that the traditional authority of professional critics has largely been taken over by celebrities. A now-famous example is that of Oprah Winfrey, who managed to take Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina to the top of the New York Times Bestseller List in 2004, after having praised and recommended it in her talk show and ‘book club’.30 To be sure, it is quite an accomplishment to get millions of people to read (or at least buy) a classic nineteenth-century novel of nearly a thousand pages. Still, the aesthetic quality of the novel is clearly not what is at stake here (since with the same ease, Oprah turns the next New Age self-help book also into a bestseller). The point is that the public would rather take the advice of a ‘personality’ or ‘celebrity’ it feels comfortable with, than that of a professional critic. Seen in this way, the idea that everyone can be a critic does not have the emancipatory or democratizing effect ascribed to it. If we are searching only for the affirmation of our own likes and dislikes, if we listen only to those with whom we already agree, this leads to conservatism and dogmatism rather than to emancipation and democratization. Equally disturbing in the recent debates over the death of the critic is that there is little reflection on the social function of the art critic. No one seems to know precisely what the task of the critic is. In these debates the critic is presented, as the German author Martin Walser once said, as ‘a bit of doctor, a bit of Moses, a bit of traffic cop, a bit of world spirit, a bit of Aunt Lessing, a bit of Uncle Linnaeus.’31 Many theorists lamenting the decline of criticism argue that the critic should once more be thoroughly critical, in other words, that they should once more dare to make value judgments. McDonald, for instance, argues that we should be reminded of the Greek root kritos, which means judge or judgment. He concludes: ‘If criticism is to be valued, if it is to reach a wide public, it needs to be evaluative.’32 Likewise, critic Raphael Rubinstein, in his essay ‘A Quiet Crisis’ (2003) mentions the result of a questionnaire among critics, of whom 75 percent considered value judgments the least important of their tasks as a critic. Rubinstein expresses his amazement at this outcome and argues ‘that it’s not enough to simply present the things you like in isolation, that even in a radically multipolar artistic environment, value judgments must somehow be made and articulated.’33 He does not tell us, however, how these value judgments should be made (his ‘somehow’ has an almost desperate 30 31 32 33

See Collins (2010). Quoted in Hohendahl (1982), 79. McDonald (2007), 149. Rubinstein in Rubinstein (ed., 2006), 33.

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undertone), nor does he show how this would help lift the critic out of their marginal position. The ‘solution’ of making value judgments cannot match the compelling way in which theorists such as Habermas, Eagleton and McDonald himself have illustrated the crisis of criticism. The way they have defined the problem of the decline of criticism rules out such an easy solution in advance. Obviously, the marginal position of the critic has come about not merely because of their lack of evaluative judgment, but is entangled in the very structure of society. The critic can judge all they want, but if no one listens to them, that will certainly not help. If the critic’s judgments are to be of any consequence, they will have to tackle that problem first. In order for that to happen, we have to realize once more that the art critic should be considered first and foremost in their public role, or more specifically, in their role as an intellectual. Neither the work of art nor the aesthetic experience is for them a private affair. According to the theories of Benjamin and Adorno, works of art are repositories of experience, and as such they form the nexus between private experience and the public sphere. For this reason, art criticism for them can never be a mere ‘culinary’ matter. The personal opinion or private taste of the critic is of no importance to the public: what matters is whether the critic is able to recognize the sedimented experience in the work, and whether they are able to ‘translate’ that back into their own socio-political context. This implies that the critic is not, and should not be, as is sometimes suggested, the guardian of the artistic canon. A canon or tradition, conceived of as a pantheon of ‘masterpieces’, resembles a butterfly collection: it might be beautiful, but it is still dead. We have seen that Benjamin and Adorno were highly suspicious of the notion of ‘cultural heritage’ or ‘cultural goods’. To them, these notions were epiphenomena of commodity fetishism, of a conception of culture and history as a series of reified facts or products. In their view, art criticism makes the exact contrary movement: it breathes life into a reified object, by confronting the work of art with artistic, social and political problems of our own age. As Benjamin rhetorically asks in ‘Experience and Poverty’: ‘For what is the value of all culture if it is divorced from experience?’ (SW 2, 732; II/1, 115). In their view, the function of the critic is not conservation but actualization. This is what they call an intervention in the ‘afterlife’ of a work, which means not only an intervention in the reception history of the work, but also an intervention of social, cultural or political debates by the critic himself. It seems, however, we have only moved our question around without actually solving it. If we are to conceive of the critic as an intellectual,

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then what is an intellectual? Antonio Gramsci already argued that being an intellectual has nothing to do with one’s intellectual capacities. In the same way that not everyone who fries an egg now and then is for that reason a cook, everyone may have certain intellectual capacities, but ‘not all men have in society the function of intellectuals.’34 The intellectual, in other words, is a social role certain individuals take upon themselves, and which in turn is attributed to them by the public. This implies that an intellectual is an intellectual only if they are recognized as such. This, of course, is precisely the problem of the contemporary critic. In the eighteenth-century coffee houses and salons, as we are told by Habermas and Sennett, the critic still had authority, representing the sensus communis, and spoke on behalf of all and to all. Are there still critics today who are able to claim such an authority, and are recognized as such? One should be wary, however, of the scent of nostalgia that tends to cling to eulogies of the eighteenth-century public sphere. Obviously, the critic who spoke on behalf of all and to all never existed in the first place. They spoke primarily on behalf of the other visitors to the salon, not for dockworkers and dairy maids. If there is one thing to learn from critical theory, it is that there is no such thing as a free-floating intellectual. There are many ways in which a critic might relate to their public. A return to the times in which the taste of the many was dictated by the few is neither possible nor desirable. But neither am I convinced that everybody should be their own critic, an idea which, as we have seen, is only seemingly democratic. Let us finally look at ways in which the intellectual might today relate to their audience, drawing in the process on some ideas from Michel Foucault and Luc Boltanski.

The critic as intellectual What is the role of the intellectual? In an interview in 1977, Michel Foucault introduces a distinction between the ‘universal’ and the ‘specific’ intellectual.35 The universal intellectual is the type of intellectual that has been dominant throughout Western history. It is the intellectual inhabiting Habermas’s coffeehouses: the prophet or homo universalis who speaks on behalf of everyone and in everybody’s interest. According to Foucault, this intellectual had their source in the law: ‘The “universal” intellectual 34 Gramsci (1971), 9. 35 Foucault (1980), 126ff. See also Hendricks (2012).

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derives from the jurist or notable, and finds his fullest manifestation in the writer, the bearer of values and significations in which all can recognize themselves.’36 Even the Marxist intellectual, though they act as the representative of a certain class (an ‘organic’ intellectual, in Gramsci’s terms) claims such a privileged access to universal values. The proletariat, after all, was in Marx’s view the bearer of the universal interest of humankind, and the intellectual (or the party) spoke on its behalf. Foucault argues that the late twentieth century witnesses the disappearance of the figure of the universal intellectual – even though in some circles there still exists a certain desire for prophets – and the dawn of a different kind of relationship between theory and praxis. This relationship is embodied by the figure of the ‘specific’ intellectual. Unlike the universal intellectual, the specific intellectual does not pretend to be a neutral bystander, but is conscious of their involvement in a system of power – the laboratory, the university, the hospital, the asylum, etc. They are a specialist, but a specialist who is aware of the social, moral or political impact of their field of research: ‘“specific intellectuals” might […] use their position within this system to reveal and question some of the particular ways in which truth, knowledge and power are currently connected.’37 As Foucault tells us, the atomic scientists after the Second World War (e.g., Oppenheimer, and Einstein) can be regarded as the first examples of this new intellectual.38 They intervened in a public debate about nuclear weapons, and could do this only because of their highly specialized scientific knowledge and their unquestioned authority in their field of research. But one might also think of Foucault himself as a specific intellectual who intervenes in a specific regime of truth, namely psychiatry. The specific intellectual, in short, is not the one who judges on behalf of humanity as a whole, but the one who transposes their specialized knowledge to debates in the public sphere. Many contemporary public discussions on urgent questions such as climate change, humanitarian and financial crises, and genetic research, indeed ask for intellectuals who have specialized knowledge in these fields. Foucault is right to note that the position of universal intellectuals, the category to which the art critic traditionally belonged, is increasingly 36 Foucault (1980), 128. 37 Hendricks (2012), 214. 38 This is not to say that the specific intellectual did not exist before. According to Foucault, Darwin can be considered a nineteenth-century example of the specific intellectual who used his biological research to intervene in socio-political and religious debates. His point is, however, that, after the Second World War, the specific intellectual increasingly replaces the universal intellectual in the public sphere.

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contested. Does this mean we should think of the critic as a specific intellectual instead? At first sight this seems implausible, since, as Foucault argues, biology and physics are the privileged fields of the specific intellectual. Still, the art critic is a specialist too, namely in the field of art. This may seem as a field where matters less urgent than nuclear power, climate change, and genetics are at stake. However, the domain of art should be regarded as an arena where artists experiment with, and raise questions about, matters concerning values, traditions, identity, and culture. Artworks address and raise questions that concern us all, even though for most of us this is not immediately clear. The art critic, as a specific intellectual, mobilizes their expertise on the context, concepts, and/or history of art to facilitate the place of art in the public sphere. Foucault, however, points to a danger faced by the specific intellectual, namely ‘of remaining on the level of conjectural struggles, pressing demands restricted to particular sectors.’39 Indeed, if specific intellectuals are concerned only with (political) issues concerning their own fields of research, more-general and more-structural problems might be neglected. This is precisely the reason, one might add, why there are still many intellectuals who claim to speak on behalf of some universal, which makes Foucault’s claim that the universal intellectual has disappeared at least empirically contestable.40 Rather, intellectuals intervening in public debates have to act both as specific and as universal intellectuals. They mobilize the specific knowledge of their fields, but also claim to represent universal human values, acting both as translators and as judges. We might think of the figure of the art critic as such a combination of specific and universal intellectual: they have a specialized knowledge of a certain field of research, namely the field of art, that is nevertheless particularly concerned with human values, self-reflection and culture. Nevertheless, the privileged viewpoint, or the alleged ‘bird’s-eye view’ of the intellectual, will continue to be a point of discussion. The epistemological issues in the work of Adorno and Benjamin have been extensively discussed. Adorno argues in his essay ‘Culture Criticism and Society’ that the cultural critic must do the impossible, namely take in a perspective of society as a ‘whole’, while at the same time acknowledging the fact that they are part of that society. Benjamin, on the other hand, experimented with what one might call a ‘horizontal’ criticism, avoiding the traditional authoritative stance by ‘merely showing, not saying’. Both seek to steer a 39 Foucault (1980), 130. 40 See Gabriëls (2001), 236, and Laermans (2001).

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way between the Scylla of authoritative judgment and the Charybdis of merely registering the cacophony of existing voices. Perhaps here the art critic could learn something from critical social theory, where debates on the status, authority, and task of critique have gained a new urgency in recent years. One of the most promising contributions to this debate is Luc Boltanski’s On Critique (2011). Boltanski makes a distinction between a ‘critical sociology of domination’ and a ‘pragmatic sociology of critique’. The programme of a critical sociology of domination presumes that the sociologist can give an adequate description of power relations within society. 41 Critical sociology, furthermore, believes that social theory poses a challenge to forms of domination. It attributes to itself, in other words, an emancipatory potential and task. Boltanski argues that a critical sociology of domination faces several problems. First, the actors figuring in critical sociology might themselves be utterly oblivious to the forms of domination described by the sociologist. To account for this possibility, the critical social theorist assumes that these actors are being deceived (i.e., that they subject to ‘false consciousness’). This means, however, that the sociologist necessarily underestimates, or even ignores, the critical capacities of the actors they are analysing. There is, in other words, an ‘asymmetry between the sociologist enlightened by the light of his science and ordinary people sunk in illusion.’42 This asymmetry underlies a second problem. In Boltanski’s view, critical sociology not only overestimates its own range of vision, claim to know people better than they know themselves, but also overestimates its own emancipatory potential, which contradicts its utter contempt for people’s critical capabilities. The programme of a pragmatic sociology of critique responds to the asymmetry present in the programme of critical sociology. 43 A pragmatic sociology of critique is primarily interested, not in its own critical perspective, but rather in ‘observing, describing, and interpreting situations where people engage in critique.’44 This means observing the way in which actors find themselves confronted with indignation, stress, and social tests, of how they deal with these and how they justify their actions. Critique, in this view, is not a meta-perspective, but is what is happening in people’s everyday lives. This approach, however, has several drawbacks, too. Placing 41 Boltanski identifies this programme with the work of Pierre Bourdieu, of whom he was a student. 42 Boltanski (2011), 23. 43 This programme was introduced by Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot in On Justification (1991). 44 Boltanski (2011), 24.

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the actors’ own critique at the centre, the pragmatic sociology of critique depends on what Boltanski calls the actors’ ‘sense of reality’. Actors have a sense of what they consider ‘normal’, and this sense will determine the extent to which they experience feelings of indignation and anxiety, and hence the extent to which they are tempted to criticize what they regard as the sources of these feelings. Indeed, a pragmatic sociology of critique might be right in arguing that critique is happening all the time, but its scope is often quite local. Boltanksi argues that, with the exception of revolutionary situations, ‘ordinary people rarely call into question […] the general framework in which the situations that provoke their indignation and protests are inscribed.’45 What is lacking in a pragmatic sociology of critique, then, is what Boltanski calls a ‘sense of totality’, or in other words, a perspective from which the general framework can be questioned and criticized.46 This is where a pragmatic sociology of critique could learn from the tradition of critical sociology. Hence, Boltanski argues that a new framework of critical social theory should take into account both the ‘overarching’ perspective and the ‘pragmatic’ perspective: From the overarching programme this framework would take the possibility, obtained by the stance of exteriority, of challenging reality, of providing the dominated with tools for resisting fragmentation […]. But from the pragmatic programme such a framework should pay attention to the activities and critical competences of actors and acknowledgement of the pluralistic expectations which, in contemporary democraticcapitalist societies, seem to occupy a central position in the critical sense of actors, including the most dominated among them. 47

I will not elaborate here on Boltanski’s proposal concerning critical social theory. I merely want to note that his line of reasoning might also be fruitful for our discussion on the public role of the critic of art and culture. Drawing a parallel with Boltanski’s distinction between a critical sociology and a pragmatic sociology of critique, we can distinguish between two ways in which the critic can relate to their public. On one side we have the authoritative critic of yore, who autonomously passes their judgment on the work of art, and foists their taste and opinions on the public as the only viable and 45 Boltanski (2011), 32. 46 Ibidem, 33. 47 Ibidem, 48.

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reasonable views. On the other side is the cultural theorist who is merely interested in how people engage with art and culture, and who refuses to discuss the value of these kinds of practices. Within the latter framework, the judgment of the critic is as viable as anybody else’s. Following Boltanski, we might imagine a form of criticism that draws from both frameworks. Such a form of criticism would know that there is no Archimedean point outside culture or society from which to criticize it. It would be aware of the fact that it is itself thoroughly embedded in that culture, and therefore takes into account the place of cultural phenomena in social institutions as well as in people’s everyday lives. But such a criticism might also draw on the imaginative realm of the artwork so as to pretend as if a meta-position was possible. 48 From that position it can develop a ‘sense of totality’, in Boltanski’s terms. By means of the artwork, the art critic is able to question that totality, to ‘challenge reality’ and to open up a perspective from which the social whole might be criticized.

Conclusion It is sometimes argued that, because there are no longer any fixed artistic rules or values, judgments or opinions concerning art are completely subjective and art criticis is, in turn, no longer possible. This is a non sequitur: an actual debate on art is possible only once we have dispensed with an aesthetics of rules, as Kant already saw. And even if we agree that artistic values are historical, transient and contingent, it does not follow that we live in an aesthetic ‘vacuum’. Such a line of reasoning degrades our ‘personal’ opinions about art to a mere private matter. It fails to appreciate the public character of our views on art and culture – not only the extent to which these views are constituted by public discussions, but also the extent to which we generally desire to make these views public. Art criticism is the name for the public exchange of aesthetic experiences and aesthetic judgments. Stressing the importance of criticism might be thought to imply that art is something for the happy few. The opposite, however, is true. Art criticism has its birth in the modern public sphere. It does not presume fixed hierarchies or relations of authority, but rather starts from the premise that anyone can marvel over, reflect upon, and argue about, art. It is an emphatically democratic institution. But from this it does not follow that the critic’s views are ‘just’ another opinion: as a specialist of 48 See Laermans (2001).

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art, they function as a mediator between the individual aesthetic experience and the public sphere. They lay bare the historical and social experience that lies hidden in historical as well as contemporary works, connecting it to the experiences of their public. Drawing on specific works of art, they reflect and comments on questions of culture, identity and tradition – questions that have, to a certain extent, always existed, but which gain urgency in the light of present-day debates. The critic, then, is a medium in the strict sense: they stand on the threshold between past and present, private and public, the artistic domain and the public sphere. Benjamin already noted that the space of the critic was ‘for rent’, by which he meant that traditional criticism would no longer do for a public sphere that is subject to drastic transformations. The contemporary critic can neither rely on eternal values nor on a sensus communis. Rather, they have to create their public as well as shape their authority for each of their interventions. Like Benjamin, I believe that it is useless to lament the decline of criticism. Rather, one should think about new ways in which, and new ‘spaces’ from which, the critic might address their public. This is the great challenge of the contemporary debate on art criticism – a debate instigated by Benjamin and Adorno. 49 Finally, some might fear that an emphasis on the public role of the art critic might jeopardize the autonomy of art. My point is not, however, that artists should be engaged in social and political debates. Commitment is here expected not primarily from the artists, but from the spectator, insofar as they should recognize the work of art as always already involved in these debates. Works of art are mediums of experience that have something valuable to say about his world. Today, the distance of art from the public sphere has reached a point where Plato’s dream of banishing art from the polis has all but come true. The function of the art critic today is to make the aesthetic experience a matter of public concern once again.

49 See also: Lijster et al (2015).

Conclusion Criticism is not a passion of the head, but the head of passion. ‒ Karl Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right

This book has discussed the question of the function of, and the need for, art in society, by means of a systematic comparison between the aesthetic theories of Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno. As soon as we see the major similarities between their theories, the differences, however subtle, also come to light. I will not repeat all the specific differences discussed in the conclusions of the separate chapters, but will restrict myself to what I consider the three most important ones. These concern the role of subjectivity, the meaning of truth, and the difference between hope and promise. Next, we will turn to the question of the ‘actuality’ of their theories.

‘A distance, however close’ Many theorists have argued that Benjamin attempts to eliminate subjectivity from his philosophy, while Adorno desperately holds onto it. In fact, as we have seen, it was Adorno himself who was the first to point to this difference in his essay on Benjamin. However, this distinction cannot be made as sharply as Adorno and other theorists have claimed. Benjamin’s philosophy, in all its facets – aesthetics, theory of criticism, theory of experience, and philosophy of history – does in fact allow room for, and even presupposes, subjectivity. The experience of the aura supposes a relation of transformation and reciprocity between an object and its observer; in this regard, it is indeed quite similar to Adorno’s concept of mimesis, which also presumes a subject who is both receptive and creative. The theory of art criticism, although revolving around the Romantic idea of the auto-critique of the artwork, still presumes a critical subject who first sets in motion this auto-critique. Even Benjamin’s method of historiography, according to which he claims to have ‘nothing to say, only to show’, presumes the presence of the subject. The ‘historical materialist’, as Benjamin calls his historian, is to construct a constellation of material on which their image of history will depend. Obviously, the kind of subjectivity Benjamin has in mind is quite different from traditional philosophical subjectivity. His subject – as historian, critic, or ‘collector’ – is a distracted one.

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Conversely, Adorno’s philosophy cannot be reduced to a philosophy of the subject, as has been argued by later critics.1 After all, the very concept of mimesis implies a ‘decentring’ of subjectivity. Instead of considering itself, in Kantian fashion, as the highest authority, the subject allows itself to be assimilated by its surroundings. Notions such as ‘remembrance of nature in the subject’, which is the definition of mimesis in Dialectic of Enlightenment, and the ‘primacy of the object’ in Negative Dialectics, are clear attempts to balance the hierarchy. If Adorno stresses, contra Benjamin, the importance of subjectivity, this should not be read as an apology for the traditional authority of the transcendental subject. Adorno’s concern, rather, is the fragility of the particular, both as inherently meaningful objecthood and as spontaneous and creative subjectivity.2 The latter, in his view, is threatened with absorption by Benjamin’s nihilistic affirmation of the destruction of tradition. As he writes to his friend in response to an outline of the Arcades Project: ‘The “individual” is a dialectical instrument of transition which must not be mythicized away, but can only be superseded’ (ABC, 113; ABB, 149). Nevertheless, Benjamin and Adorno differ in the way they conceive of the subject’s relation to praxis, and this difference is directly connected to the role of the intellectual. Adorno considers this relation in terms of the dialectic of particular and universal: the critical subject, as he argues in ‘Culture Criticism and Society’, is part of the social whole but also not part of it, and precisely because of this relative autonomy, they are able to oversee and criticize the whole. In Benjamin’s view, by contrast, the critic has, or should have, a far more immediate relation to praxis. In his view, the political constellation they see dawning makes it impossible for the critic to stand aside. Adorno was not completely wrong when he remarked that Benjamin’s political commitment almost seemed to go against his own better judgment, or, as he put it, that Benjamin turned his fear of the masses into an inverse taboo. But such a psychological reduction does not disqualify the point Benjamin is trying to make, namely that the intellectual can no longer take their social position for granted – they first have to earn their authority. It is within this situation that we should understand Benjamin’s ‘historical gamble’ (Wohlfarth): his affirmation of the ‘destructive character’ as well as his hopes for an emancipatory mass culture. 1 Rush (2010), 51. 2 At several points, Adorno links his ideal of unreduced experience and spontaneous subjectivity to the image of childhood: the child who has not been reified to a secure ‘self’ and hence still has the ability to interact with objects in a non-dominant way. Here there might be yet another parallel with Benjamin, who also refers to child’s play in his reflections on the ‘mimetic ability’.

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A second difference concerns the way Adorno and Benjamin conceive of artistic truth. Their conviction that artworks are bearers of truth is what distinguishes them from most contemporary aesthetic theoreticians. In their view, truth can be reached only ex negativo, namely as the interruption or negation of what Benjamin calls ‘myth’ and Adorno calls ‘totality’. However, there is a difference between the way each conceives of truth. Adorno thinks of artistic truth as the recognition of sensuous particularity. As the semblance and promise of sensuous particularity, the work of art interrupts and frustrates the subsumption of the particular under the universal, which is the basic procedure of identity thinking. This means that truth, for Adorno, is primarily a question of disclosure. Of course, there is a practical moment to this, insofar as the inability to experience sensuous particularity, in his view, lies at the basis of the suppression of particularity in society. Truth is more immediately related to praxis in Benjamin’s philosophy. In the work-of-art essay, for instance, he points to this relation through the notion of play, which for him means that the work of art is the laboratory for new ‘forms of life’, new technologies and ways of interaction between humankind and nature. In the Arcades Project, too, Benjamin is concerned with technologies (the panorama, the arcades) and modes of behaviour (the flâneur) in which a future form of social life is anticipated and experimented with. These phenomena, in his view, disclose their true meaning only in the moment of becoming obsolete. On the threshold of obsolescence, they become strange to us, and for this exact reason, we see them anew and recognize the unfulfilled potential still lying dormant within them. Benjamin’s philosophy revolves around the question of how this potential might be ‘redeemed’ – that is, how it might contribute to new forms of social life. While for Adorno, then, truth is disclosure, Benjamin’s concept of truth has a clear practical and pragmatic dimension that refes to a potential form of social life. This distinction seems similar to, but is in fact somewhat different from, Shierry Weber Nicholsen’s claim that Adorno’s philosophy revolves around the ‘visual’, while Benjamin is concerned with the ‘tactile’.3 Although there are such passages supporting this claim, I do not believe it to be entirely correct. After all, I have shown that, for Adorno, the experience of artistic truth is also an experience of suffering, namely the suffering of sensuous particularity. Adorno would not agree that the confrontation with particularity is a mere visual experience, since suffering for him has 3

Weber Nicholsen (1999), 224.

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an emphatically bodily dimension. In Benjamin’s philosophy, conversely, the visual plays an extremely important part next to the tactile, as should be clear from my discussion of concepts such as ‘dialectical image’ and ‘constellation’. 4 The third difference, to which I have alluded several times, is between hope and promise. This difference is quite subtle. Both hope and promise, after all, refer to an attitude towards something that exceeds one’s own temporal presence, something that exists only as a potentiality or as a memory. The difference lies in the direction of one’s temporal orientation. Hope, in Benjamin’s philosophy, is oriented towards the future, even if this future is utterly indeterminate. For Benjamin, notions such as the ‘dissolution of semblance’, the ‘interruption of myth’, and the ‘exploding out of the continuum’ mean nothing more (or less) than the possibility of something genuinely new. What this ‘otherness’ is, is indeterminate; and it must be indeterminate precisely because it is not already enclosed in what precedes it. It does not evolve out of the past as in a causal chain of progress, but is a pure ‘potentiality’, creating the space for something new, thus of the truly historical.5 For Adorno, by contrast, truth is a promise of sensuous particularity, which, for him, refers to the non-exchangeability and the non-reducibility of an object – its excess of meaning or its non-identity. Happiness, in his view, is nothing other than the possibility that such sensuous particularity can exist in the world. Enlightenment thought once made the promise that this would be the case, but according to Adorno, this promise has been broken. It might be argued, therefore, that his philosophy is temporally oriented towards the past, that is, towards the missed chance of Enlightenment thought. Hence the famous opening lines of Negative Dialectics: ‘Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realize it was missed’ (ND, 3; 6, 15). Although certainly the figure of the ‘missed chance’ is also present in Benjamin’s philosophy, namely in the shape of the ‘enslaved ancestors’ from ‘On the Concept of History’, there appears to be a difference in emphasis, the difference between a philosophy of ‘not yet’ and a philosophy of ‘too late’. Although this difference has undoubtedly 4 This importance of the visual in Benjamin’s work has long been underestimated, not only in comparison to the tactile, but also with regard to the linguistic. Most particularly, Susan Buck-Morss and Howard Caygill have contributed to the idea that ‘the model of experience informing Benjamin’s work emerges from the visual rather than the linguistic field’ (Caygill (1998), ix). 5 The concept of ‘potentiality’, which is not used by Benjamin himself but which has a long history in philosophy, is discussed by Agamben (1999).

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something to do with the fact that the greatest catastrophe in the history of humankind separates their mature works, it cannot be reduced to their biographies, since it is already present in their dispute on the work-of-art essay. Without wanting to explore this matter in more detail, I want to add that the subtle difference found here between hope and promise contradicts those theorists who argue that Adorno’s philosophy, in contrast to Benjamin’s, lacks a messianic dimension. The theological dimension of Adorno’s work has only in the past decade received proper attention.6 One could argue that his theology is even more hidden than that of Benjamin’s dwarf in the chess machine, and hardly ever out in the open.7 It is the result of what Adorno calls the ‘cunning of hope’, which means that hope always risks taking the place of the object of hope. The ‘cunning of hope’, then, is one of banning hope in order to remain true to its object, namely happiness. The work of art, Adorno argues, is the plenipotentiary of a Messiah who failed to arrive. Only by expressing the idea that our situation is hopeless does it keep alive our desire for happiness. There is a danger, however, residing in the messianic character of both philosophies, which has been stressed by Albrecht Wellmer. 8 The risk is that the theological dimension of the work of art might obscure its socio-historical meaning.9 One could point out, by way of objection, that Benjamin’s and Adorno’s theology is emphatically ‘this-worldly’, insofar as messianic salvation is meant not as divine intervention but as social emancipation. But even such a this-worldly reading of Benjamin and Adorno might, in Wellmer’s view, overburden the artwork to such an extent that it loses its relation to everyday praxis altogether. It is clear that we should not expect too much from the work of art. Examples of actual contributions by works of art to immediate social emancipation are sparse. Still, functioning as a source and repository of radically different views of our world, as well as a laboratory for new modes of experience, the work of art is of crucial importance. Responding to Wellmer’s critique, one might distinguish between a ‘strong’ and a ‘weak’ 6 See Vries (2005), Richter (2006) and Brittain (2010). 7 His most explicit messianic text is probably the last aphorism of Minima Moralia, which opens with the following lines: ‘The only philosophy which can be responsibly practiced in face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption’ (MM, 247; 4, 283). For a detailed reading of this fragment, see Richter (2006). 8 See Wellmer (2007). 9 In my view, this is precisely the problem with Lyotard’s aesthetics.

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reading of Benjamin’s and Adorno’s messianism, and argue that the weak version can still be a viable impetus for critique.10 In the case of Benjamin, the strong reading of his messianism would be salvation, be it through a divine intervention that makes things ‘whole’ again (Tikkun) or through a political revolution. A weak reading would point to the emergence of a form of life that is not already enclosed in what precedes it. Similarly, a strong reading of Adorno’s messianism would aim for universal happiness, while a weak reading would begin with the recognition of particularity, that is, the recognition of an excess of meaning in the object that cannot be reduced to the meaning provided for it by its observer. Such a nonreducing or ‘mimetic’ relation might be imagined between the subject and its inner nature (as a body), between humankind and nature, or among people. Considering our present political constellation, in which global economic, ecological and humanitarian crises are still often presented as quasi-natural and inevitable disasters, while politics is reduced to piecemeal engineering and administration, even these modest proposals following from such a weak messianism seem quite ambitious. Benjamin writes: ‘As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth’ (AP, 400; V/1, 505). We could add to that: as long as there is myth, there will be need for a critique of art.

The ‘actuality’ of Benjamin and Adorno Over the years, a lot has been written about the ‘actuality’ of Benjamin and Adorno.11 As Max Pensky notes, the word ‘actuality’ is a meagre translation for the German Aktualität, which can mean both ‘in fashion’ and ‘relevant for the present’.12 With regard to the first meaning, it is safe to say that the reception history of their theories is considerably different. Since this is not the place for a detailed discussion of their respective reception histories, some brief remarks will have to suffice, before I turn to the second meaning of the word ‘actuality’. In many ways, Adorno’s philosophy had already grown ‘out of fashion’ during his lifetime. In the late 1960s a fruitful reception of his work was 10 I owe this suggestion to Jay Bernstein. 11 For Benjamin, see Unseld (ed., 1972), Marcus and Nead (eds., 1998), and Gumbrecht and Marrinan (eds., 2003). For Adorno, see Pensky (ed., 1997), Ette et al (eds., 2004), Köhler and Müller-Doohm (eds., 2008), Bernstein et al (2010), and Quent and Lindner (eds., 2014). 12 Pensky (1997), 1.

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frustrated by his painful conflicts with the Frankfurt student movement.13 Initially the students had looked upon the Frankfurt Institute and its members as a source of inspiration. However, it soon became clear that Adorno was reluctant to become a protest leader, and that he did not consider the student protests as the genuinely revolutionary movement which they thought themselves to be. By consequence, the students accused him of resignation and disrupted his courses. Especially in comparison with his former colleague Marcuse, Adorno was labelled a reactionary. Moreover, the work of Benjamin, the memory of whom Adorno had made much effort to keep alive, was now used against him. Essays such as ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’ and ‘Critique of Violence’ resonated with the students’ demand for revolutionary praxis.14 But it was not just Adorno’s practical decisions and political orientation that were subject to critique. Adorno was also criticized by cultural theorists, most of all because of his alleged elitism and his negative attitude towards mass culture. Although Adorno, together with Benjamin, had been among the first to regard mass culture as an object of serious philosophical and sociological research, he was often treated as a villain in this regard rather than as a source of inspiration. Ironically, in the 1980s it was less his conservatism than the remnants of his Marxism that made Adorno unfashionable.15 On the one hand, he was criticized by the second-generation Frankfurt School, most notably Habermas and Wellmer, for his alleged ‘irrationalism’ and for the fact that his utopian ideals were too demanding. The critiques of Habermas and Wellmer, as well as my responses to them, have already been discussed in Chapters 3 and 4, so I would simply refer the reader to those passages. On the other hand, Adorno is overshadowed by French postmodern and post-structuralist philosophers such as Lyotard, Foucault and Derrida, who not only shun big metaphysical words such as ‘truth’ and ‘totality’ but also refrain from Marxist terminology. To be sure, there are many similarities between the French thinkers and Adorno: the questioning of the primacy of rationality, the suspicion of conceptual thinking (subsumption) as a source of repression, the temporariness and arbitrariness of meaning, the attention to ‘otherness’ and ‘difference’, and the understanding of the work 13 For a detailed discussion of this conflict, see Wiggershaus (1986, 676-705, Müller-Doohm (2003), 679-706, and Walter-Busch (2010), 218-225. 14 As Irving Wohlfarth (2008) tells us, even Andreas Baader referred to Benjamin’s writings in order to legitimize his actions. 15 See Jameson (1990), 229.

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of art as a refuge for this difference.16 Nevertheless, the view of Adorno as unfashionable stemmed from what Lyotard called his modernist nostalgia for wholeness and reconciliation.17 Since the 1990s, there has been renewed interest in Adorno’s work, especially because of new and improved English translations, which have stimulated Adorno scholarship in the Anglo-Saxon world. One should note, however, that the larger part of the research into his work is philosophicalhistorical, with an emphasis on aesthetics, metaphysics and, for the last few years, moral philosophy, rather than on his social philosophy or cultural critique.18 The Adorno centennial in 2003 witnessed a remarkable abundance of Adorno ‘festivals’ and a renewed interest in his writings, especially in Germany. The level of self-congratulation that sometimes accompanied this endorsement, however, would probably have aroused his suspicions had he still been alive.19 The reception of Benjamin’s work developed quite differently. His writings were first made available to a larger audience ten years after the Second World War, with a two-volume selection edited by Adorno and Scholem, and only much later to an English audience through the publication of Illuminations (1968), a collection of essays selected by Hannah Arendt. The publication between 1974 and 1989 of his Gesammelte Schriften, which also contained the notes for and fragments from the Arcades Project, generated a surge in detailed Benjamin scholarship, a trend that has continued to this day. Benjamin was, as noted above, posthumously adopted as a godfather of the German student revolts, much to Adorno’s chagrin. Cultural and media theorists, who had rejected Adorno because of his elitism, considered Benjamin to be their precursor, because of his analysis and positive evaluation of mass culture. Benjamin’s appreciation of film in the work-of-art essay, and his historical research into nineteenth-century entertainment in the Arcades Project, fitted well with the postmodern credo of dissolving boundaries between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. Similarly, while deconstructionist thinkers largely ignored Adorno because of his traditional philosophical terminology, they embraced the work of Benjamin. As the deconstructionist critic Harold Bloom wrote in Deconstruction and Criticism: ‘The great modern critic […] foreshadowing the Deconstruction 16 See Zima (2002). 17 See Lyotard (1974). 18 Hammer (2005) and Holloway et al (eds., 2009) are notable exceptions. 19 That this interest could come from very unlikely quarters is demonstrated by Pope Benedict XVI, who quotes from Negative Dialectics in the encyclical letter Spe Salvi (2007).

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of Derrida and even more of de Man, is Walter Benjamin.’20 These theorists especially appreciate Benjamin’s ideas about the constitutive and creative force of language, the interruption of the text by the linguistic ‘caesura’, and the elimination of subjectivity.21 This adoption, however, often came at the price of Benjamin’s reflections on revolutionary politics, which were recast in terms of some ill-defined ‘difference’.22 This brings me to the second and far more interesting meaning of the word Aktualität, distinguished by Pensky, namely whether Benjamin and Adorno are relevant to our time. In his book on Hegel, Adorno famously criticizes the ‘loathsome question of what in Kant, and now in Hegel as well, has any meaning for the present’, arguing that we should instead ask the reverse question of ‘what the present means in the face of Hegel’ (HTS, 1; 5, 251). If we formulate the question like this, their ‘actuality’ might perhaps be located precisely in those aspects of their thinking that have long been rendered unfashionable, such as their radical critique of the capitalist logic, the way in which this critique is connected to aesthetics, and the emancipatory force they attribute to art and art criticism. In the literature, their critique of capitalism and its concept of progress have often been placed against the background of the period before or shortly after the Second World War. Richard Wolin, for instance, writes that, while ‘political messianism’ and an ‘apocalyptic philosophy of history’ might have been appropriate ‘for the interwar generation of Central European Jews that had all but abandoned prospects for gradual and progressive historical change, it remains drastically out of step with the justly chastened demands of the political and historical present.’23 Such a statement betrays an utter contempt for a position that ‘we’ have allegedly ‘outgrown’, thus showing the worst side of enlightenment thinking. Moreover, Wolin makes precisely the mistake that Benjamin and Adorno accuse historism of. By reducing a philosophical position to its time in history, one turns it into a historical curiosity or, even worse, to a ‘cultural good’, thus neutralizing its critical potential. Conceived of in this way, their writings become mere documents, added to the pantheon of philosophy like stuffed mastodons to a museum of natural history. I do not believe that we have ‘outgrown’ Benjamin and Adorno. On the contrary, there is still much to learn from them. Christoph Menke, 20 Bloom et al (1979), 25. 21 See, for instance, Gasché (1986). 22 For an early attempt to ‘rescue’ Benjamin from deconstructionism, cf. Eagleton (1981). 23 Wolin (2006), 44.

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attempting to bring Adorno’s aesthetics of negativity closer to Derrida, argues that Adorno’s work ‘can be stripped of its historico-philosophical language.’24 I would argue, on the contrary, that it is precisely Benjamin’s and Adorno’s ‘historico-philosophical language’, as Menke scornfully calls it, which deserves our renewed attention. What makes their theories urgent and relevant for contemporary philosophy is their combination of aesthetics and social theory. Sociologists of art, some of whom I have mentioned, have contributed to our understanding of shifts in the social status of artists and art institutions. However, they tend to ignore the way in which these shifts relate to the specific ontology of artworks, and how this ontology distinguishes them from other social facts. Conversely, philosophers of art on both sides of the Atlantic have paid much attention to the ontology of artworks, but have often failed to connect it to social theory. The writings of Benjamin and Adorno are on the crossroads of philosophical aesthetics and social theory. Tracing social shifts within the structure of the work of art, they argue that the ontology of contemporary art is a specifically modern one. In their work, aesthetic categories such as work, aura, semblance, and montage are placed next to social categories such as rationalization, reification, commodity, and fetish. Furthermore, they emphasize the importance of art criticism as a condition for the very ‘criticality’ of art itself. Because of that, they continue to function as an important source of inspiration for contemporary art criticism, such as Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton, Hal Foster, Benjamin Buchloh and others.25 To better understand their relevance for art criticism, let us take a look at how we might position them in relation to some other trends in twentieth-century criticism.

Critical models Psychoanalysis and Marxism were highly influential as theories of criticism in the first half of the twentieth century.26 Despite their apparent differences, these frameworks share, in their rudimentary forms, a concern for 24 Menke (1999), 77. 25 A detailed account of how Benjamin’s and Adorno’s ideas were appropriated by the critics of the October group falls outside the scope of this study. But see Noortje de Leij’s article ‘Art Criticism in the Society of the Spectacle. The case of October’, in Hartle and Gandesha (eds., 2017), as well as her forthcoming dissertation on this subject. 26 For this section I have drawn on the extremely helpful theoretical and methodological introductions by Hal Foster, Benjamin Buchloh, Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss, in their

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the hidden content of the work of art. Psychoanalytic criticism probes the work for traces of the psyche of its maker, which it believes to be expressed in the work. The classical and, at the same time, most notorious example is Sigmund Freud’s book on Leonardo da Vinci, in which he reads the Mona Lisa as the result of Da Vinci’s mother complex. Within this framework, the work of art is not that different from the dream, namely a mere projection of unconscious desires. Similarly, orthodox Marxist aesthetics analyses how a work of art ‘reflects’ the consciousness of a certain class. For Georg Lukács, for instance, the work of Thomas Mann is an example of ‘critical realism’, providing the most complete picture of bourgeois society.27 For both of these frameworks, then, the artwork qua artwork, that is, the specific artistic form carrying the (psychological or ideological) meaning, is of secondary importance. What the critic is really after is the ‘true’ meaning behind the artwork: the psychological, biographical or socio-historical context. Artistic form, in other words, is conceived of as the conveyor of this meaning. Formalist criticism objects to this presumption, drawing inspiration from Kant’s statement that ‘the basis of any involvement of taste is not what gratif ies us in sensation, but merely what we like because of its form.’28 Formalism rejects the ‘biographism’ of psychoanalytic and Marxist theory, as well as their view on (artistic) language as a neutral medium. For the twentieth-century variants of formalism, the point of departure is Ferdinand de Saussure’s semiotics. From his theory of the sign it follows that there is no ‘natural’ relation between sign and referent, but that this relation is in fact arbitrary. For the formalist critic, this means two things. First, language neither ‘corresponds to’ nor ‘reflects’ reality, but is rather constitutive of the way in which we experience reality. Second, since there is no immediate relation between sign and referent, the formalist critic allows himself only to talk about texts and signs, and their relations to other texts and signs. In the words of Harold Bloom: ‘Words […] refer only to other words.’29 Art Since 1900. Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism (2004), 14-48, as well as on Richter (ed., 1989). 27 Eagleton (2002), 49. Note that I am talking here of the later Lukács, who renounced Theory of the Novel and History and Class Consciousness, both of which allow for a more subtle approach to art. 28 Kant (1978), 225: 71. 29 Bloom et al (1979), 7. One can argue whether deconstructionism is in fact a kind of formalism. Peter V. Zima (2002) argues that, while the Anglo-Saxon deconstructionists such as Bloom and Hillis-Miller can indeed be considered formalists, things are more complicated with regard to De Man and Derrida.

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Despite formalism’s opposition to psychoanalysis and Marxism, it shares with these frameworks one basic presupposition: that the work of art is first of all a hermeneutical object – that is, an object of analysis. In the course of the twentieth century, this presupposition has been questioned by several authors, who argue that the work of art is primarily an object of experience rather than of analysis. These theorists have accused hermeneutics of ignoring – if not destroying – the ‘immediacy’ and ‘spontaneity’ with which people usually encounter works of art. Concepts and analysis, they argue, distort the aesthetic experience, placing themselves between the work of art and its beholder. Susan Sontag argues in her famous essay ‘Against Interpreation’ (1964) that ‘criticism is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world – in order to set up a shadow world of “meanings”.’30 In the conclusion to her essay, she therefore pleads for an ‘erotics’ instead of a hermeneutics of art. While Sontag and others place special emphasis on the aesthetic experience of form, later theorists have also pointed to the importance of the experience of content. In the case of literary criticism, for instance, the theories of so-called ‘reader-response criticism’ argue that psychoanalytic, Marxist and formalist critics alike have neglected the vital role of the reader. These schools have forgotten that art, for most people, is not something one coldly analyses, but rather something that plays a vital part in one’s life. It is, in Wayne Booth’s terms, the ‘company we keep’.31 Precisely because of the idea that our relation to artworks is a form of ‘friendship’ rather than a form of science, several theorists championing this approach also believe that works of art, most notably literary works, should be regarded as a part of our moral education. Martha Nussbaum, for instance, argues that novels by Henry James are as important for ethical theory as the writings of Aristotle or Kant.32 Similarly, Richard Rorty has argued that reading Nabokov (himself an advocate of art for art’s sake) will contribute to the recognition of cruelty.33 These are just some of the major trends in twentieth-century art criticism. To determine their strengths and weaknesses as well as their mutual similarities and differences, one might imagine a diagram in which a 30 Sontag (1987), 7. Apart from Sontag, one might think of John Dewey’s pragmatist aesthetics, which has recently received renewed attention through the work of Richard Shusterman. 31 See Booth (1988). For a similar position with regard to the visual arts, see Nehamas (2007). 32 Nussbaum (1990). 33 Rorty (1989), Chapter 7.

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horizontal axis runs from form to content, crossed by a vertical axis running from analysis to experience: experience

form

content

analysis In this schema, psychoanalysis and Marxism, being primarily interested in the content of the work of art, are the polar opposites of formalism. Both, however, are at the bottom end of the vertical axis (the f irst in the bottom right, the latter in the bottom left), opposed to both Sontag’s ‘sensualism’ and ethical criticism. Of these two, the first is located in the upper left corner, while the second stands opposed to it in the upper right corner. To be sure, such a schematic approach cannot do full justice to the subtleties of any of these theories, and obscures certain hybrids. Nevertheless, the proposed schema makes clear that each of the above-mentioned trends in art criticism has its centre of gravity, which simultaneously discloses the weaknesses of other positions and its own blind spots. As discussed in the third excursus, many theorists today believe that art criticism can no longer be divided into certain established systems, methodologies, or paradigms. By consequence, there are no big controversies or arguments among competing ‘schools’ of criticism either. Art criticism, as Hal Foster puts it, is stranded in a ‘paradigm of no-paradigm.’34 Critics are usually ‘zapping’, as it were, between the great historical frameworks and theories, and this often results in the bandying about of received ideas and vague jargon.35 Art theorist Benjamin Buchloh speaks of ‘an increasingly complex weave of methodological eclecticism.’36 To be sure, eclecticism has the benefit of being anti-dogmatic and of providing a great deal of freedom. To paraphrase Arthur Danto (paraphrasing Warhol paraphrasing Marx), it allows one to be a formalist in the morning, a psychoanalyst in 34 Foster in Foster et al (2004), 679. 35 See Vande Veire (2002), 9. 36 Buchloh in Foster et al (2004), 22.

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the afternoon, and to use art for ethical guidance in the evening. Still, this aimlessness is also a source of frustration. The theories of Benjamin and Adorno raise questions that involve each of the four previously mentioned poles of form, content, analysis, and experience. Of course, this is not to say that theirs is a kind of ‘super-theory’ synthesizing all existing paradigms, nor should they be conceived of as providing the ‘golden means’. Rather, for them, les extrêmes se touchent. The formalist paradigm does not contradict a socio-historical reading of art.37 Rather, they presume that formal changes in art are the result of changes in human experience, which is historically formed. In his book on the Baroque, for instance, Benjamin argues that certain formal choices of Baroque poets, such as the use of allegory and their deviation from Aristotelian rules of theatre, are to be understood as part of a historical constellation involving economic deprivation and religious and political conflict. Likewise, Adorno argued that avant-garde art was not an empty play of forms (as Lukács had objected), but an expression of the emptiness of human life in modernity. Furthermore, both Benjamin and Adorno believe that the specific form of works of art might be the source of a certain mode of experience. For both, then, the extremes touch: a formalist reading must eventually ask why an artistic form is the way it is, and asking that means it has to turn its attention to society. Conversely, a socio-historical reading misses structural changes in experience if it focuses exclusively on content. The same applies to the opposite poles of analysis and experience. Benjamin and Adorno respond to the hermeneutical tradition by emphasizing the enigmatic character of the work of art and its un-understandability. Pierre Bourdieu, in The Rules of Art, wonders why certain philosophers ‘take such satisfaction in professing that the experience of a work of art is ineffable, that it escapes by definition all rational understanding; why they are so eager to concede without a struggle the defeat of knowledge.’38 An answer to this question from the perspective of Benjamin and Adorno might be put in two ways. First, if an artwork could indeed be made completely transparent – that is, if it could be translated into discursive language and conceptual knowledge – there would no longer be any need for art. Once the message has been extracted from the work, one can throw it aside like an empty husk. Furthermore, one might wonder why one should ‘encrypt’ the message in the first place, if it can also be communicated in a transparent and effortless way. Benjamin and Adorno draw our attention 37 See Chapter 3. 38 Bourdieu (1996), xvi.

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to the specific way in which the artwork communicates, which resists precisely the demand for transparency expressed by Bourdieu. Second, Benjamin and Adorno underline the ineffability of the truth of the work of art because, historically, it has become a refuge for what falls victim to discursive language and a narrow, scientific understanding of experience that aims for identity and abstraction. However, although Benjamin and Adorno would agree with Sontag’s statement that experience is more important than analysis, they would probably object to her presumption that such an immediate experience is still possible today. In their view, experience has become a problem in contemporary society, as our perception is increasingly ‘mediated’ by commodity production. Our experience has become reified and ‘formatted’, transformed, as Benjamin puts it, into ‘isolated experience’ (Erlebnis). Adorno argues that the immediacy and naïveté of the aesthetic experience, championed by Sontag, have today been colonized by the culture industry, which claims to provide immediate pleasure without the interference of reflection (ANS IV/3, 24). Furthermore – and on this point they would agree with Bourdieu – the emphasis on the ‘ineffability’ of art threatens to hypostasize the rift between the rationality of science and the irrationality of art, which can only result in isolating the latter further as some kind of conservation park for irrationality. For this reason, both Benjamin and Adorno argue that neither the enigmatic character of art nor the naïveté of the aesthetic experience can be the starting point of aesthetics. Rather, experiencing the object on its own terms, as a sensuous particular, can only be the result of the most thorough analysis. For both of them, ‘origin is the goal’. Thus, Benjamin and Adorno take into account artistic form, sociopsychological content, critical analysis, and aesthetic experience. Moreover, they do not obscure the tensions between these poles, but fully expose them and dialectically play one extreme against the other. What allows them to do this is their conviction that the work of art should be regarded in relation to the commodity form; for Adorno it even touches on the ‘absolute commodity’. The commodity, as Marx already saw, should be conceived of as a form – that is, as a specific way in which an object appears to us. The capitalist logic of commodification, by consequence, influences the way we see and encounter our surrounding world. Art provides us with a self-reflection of this form, and hence not only with knowledge of the socio-historical context of the artwork (namely, how it relates to a mode of capitalist production), but also with an experience: namely the experience of how our experience is distorted by commodification. Again, however, this

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experience is the result, not of a spontaneous encounter with the artwork, but rather of the closest scrutiny. An ‘actualization’ of Benjamin and Adorno along these lines would, however, meet with several obstacles, because of the simple fact that neither society nor art have remained the same since they conceived their theories. These obstacles would deserve detailed exploration, which, unfortunately, falls outside the scope of the present study. To conclude, let me merely pose two problems faced by contemporary theories on the relation between art and society.

Post-Fordism and the new spirit of capitalism The cultural analyses of Benjamin and Adorno depend on the concepts of capitalism and commodity production developed by Marx and Weber. Adorno once accused Benjamin of using too general a concept of commodity in his outline of the Arcades Project: ‘The specific commodity character of the nineteenth century, in other words, the industrial production of commodities, would have to be developed much more clearly and substantively’ (ABC, 108; ABB, 143). Today, both of their theories should be confronted with a similar demand. For, although Benjamin and Adorno are among the first to detect the shift from a form of capitalism focused on production to one that addresses us primarily as consumers, their concept of commodification nevertheless still largely depends on a theory of industrial and monopoly capitalism. Adorno’s critique of the culture industry, for instance, is primarily a critique of standardization, which is a characteristic of ‘Fordist’ production. Neither Benjamin nor Adorno could have foreseen the extent to which ‘postFordism’ would embrace their critique of standardization and reification. In recent decades, many theorists have argued that there has been a shift in capitalist production from ‘Fordism’ to ‘post-Fordism’.39 Fordism refers to a production process that is ‘rationalized’ in the Weberian sense. This means that it depends on a strict division of labour, a clear hierarchy on the workfloor, and fixed contracts and working hours. Fordism originated in large-scale industrial companies, but this does not mean it is restricted to these kinds of companies. Rather, it refers to a mode of production and organization of labour that was hegemonic for a certain time. As Marx argues, the laws of industrial production already began to govern other domains of production, such as agriculture, when industry was still a minor segment of the economy. The same idea is behind Adorno and Horkheimer’s 39 See Harvey (1990) and Jameson (1991).

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concept of the ‘culture industry’. This concept does not imply that cultural commodities are actually industrially produced, but rather that their production is governed by industrial, that is, Fordist laws of production, (i.e., standardization, mass production, division of labour, and so on). 40 Post-Fordism, by contrast, refers to an organization of production and labour in which flexibility and fluidity are the highest values. While Adorno and Horkheimer believed that art and culture were among the final social spheres to be absorbed by Fordism, recent theorists have argued instead that the creative industries were the birthplace of a whole new type of production. Since the Second World War, capitalist production has increasingly depended on information, communication, ideas, and knowledge. 41 Both its resources and its products consist less and less of material goods, but rather of codes, services, interactions, information, and social relations. This implies that the Fordist division of intellectual and physical labour gets blurred. Paolo Virno argues that it is now language that is at the centre of capitalist production: Thirty years ago, in many factories there were signs posted that commanded: ‘Silence, men at work!’ Whoever was at work kept quiet. One began ‘chatting’ only upon leaving the factory or the office. The principle breakthrough in post-Fordism is that it has placed language into the work-place. Today, in certain workshops, one could well put up signs mirroring those of the past, but declaring: ‘Men at work here. Talk!’42

Obviously, this shift from Fordism to post-Fordism does not mean that the production of material goods ceases to exist, or that it will cease to form a substantial part of the world’s economy. It means, rather, that post-Fordist ‘immaterial’ production has become ‘hegemonic’, meaning that it now is the primary driving force of capitalism, as well as the standard for how we think of labour and production in other domains. Because of their sheer size, most typical Fordist companies are sitespecific, and for that reason depend on the nation state (hence the idea of ‘state capitalism’). The typical post-Fordist company, by contrast, is lean and internationally oriented both with regard to its market and its production. It must always be ‘on the move’ and hence it has few steady employees, making use of outsourcing and subcontracting instead. With the rise of 40 See Chapter 2.6. 41 Harvey (2003), Boltanski and Chiapello (2005) and Hardt and Negri (2009). 42 Virno (2004), 91.

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post-Fordism, the regular working day loses its self-evidence, while parttime jobs, temporary contracts, and irregular hours become the norm. This results in a new kind of work ethic, as has been argued in one of the most original contributions to the recent analysis of capitalism. In The New Spirit of Capitalism sociologists Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello draw on Weber in regarding capitalism not primarily as an economic form but rather as a ‘spirit’. Like Weber, they believe that capitalism is essentially an ‘absurd’ system, which deprives workers of the fruits of their labour while condemning capitalists to a life of never-ending and inherently meaningless accumulation. For this reason, capitalism depends on a ‘spirit’, a set of (spiritual and moral) reasons for people to be engaged in it, be motivated by it, and to generally justify it in terms of the common good. Weber argued that for some time Protestantism had functioned as such a spirit, by turning conscientious work, profit-making, and this-worldly asceticism into virtues. Following Weber, Boltanski and Chiapello take this spirit to be not merely a ‘superstructure’ added on top of the system, but also an essential element and a necessary condition for the reproduction of the system. In Boltanski’s and Chiapello’s view, the social and cultural turmoil that the Western world witnessed during the 1960s resulted from the decay of the ‘old’ spirit of capitalism. The increased standard of living after the Second World War made the private world of leisure increasingly ‘hedonistic’. This hedonism collided with the world of work which was still determined by a puritan ethic. 43 As this ‘old’ spirit of capitalism lacked motivational and justificatory power, the critique of capitalism entered a golden age. Boltanski and Chiapello distinguish between two different types of critique. The first is a ‘social’ critique that focuses on capitalism as a source of poverty, inequality and injustice, while eliciting opportunism and egoism. The second is an ‘artistic’ critique that regards capitalism as the source of disenchantment, inauthenticity, and oppression of personal autonomy. 44 Traditionally, social movements had primarily depended on the first form of critique. The second form, which belonged to the discourse of a minority group of bohemian artists and intellectuals, played a rather marginal role. This radically changed in the 1960s, when artistic critique became the focal point of a large-scale social and cultural movement. Artistic critique now attracted a mass audience and became of substantial consequence, even to the point that it eventually eclipsed social critique. 43 See also Bell (1976), Chapter 1. 44 Boltanski and Chiapello (2005), 38.

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The May 1968 movement, on which Boltanski and Chiapello focus their attention, was not merely a workers’ revolution. On the contrary, it was first of all led by students and higher-educated youth, whose primary critique of capitalism was that labour conditions lacked room for freedom, personal autonomy, creativity, and authenticity. Although they were in solidarity with striking workers, their critique was ‘artistic’ rather than ‘social’. The remarkable thesis of The New Spirit of Capitalism is that capitalism, in the course of the 1970s and 1980s, actually acknowledged their demands, thus becoming attractive again to what the authors call the cadres: managers, engineers and other high-skilled workers. The ‘new spirit of capitalism’ that thus came into being no longer consists of Protestant values such as austerity, asceticism, and sense of hierarchy, but rather of ‘artistic’ values like flexibility, autonomy, anti-authoritarianism, and creativity. From this spirit emerged the ideal type of the ‘neo-manager’, a figure of which Boltanski and Chiapello make a close study. The neo-manager, they argue, has absorbed artistic critique to such an extent that they resemble the bohemian artist of yore: A creative f igure, a person of intuition, invention, contacts, chance encounters, someone who is always on the move, passing from one project to the next, one world to another […], freed from the burdens of possession and the constraints of hierarchical attachments, of the signs of power – office or tie – and also, consequently, of the hypocrisies of bourgeois morality. 45

For the neo-manager, work consists of a series of projects that demand creative solutions. He even regards his very life, his career, as a project. He does not acknowledge the distinction between labour and leisure, which was central to Fordism: neo-management depends on personal contacts, non-authoritarian relations, off-hour and casual meetings, ‘networking’ and so on. In the eyes of his employees, the neo-manager is not the (Fordist) paternal boss, but rather the visionary granting them chances and opportunities to grow. As Boltanski and Chiapello argue, however, the new spirit of capitalism provides autonomy not merely to those that demand it (the students, or future cadres), but also to those who do not, namely the blue-collar workers. As artistic critique obscured traditional social critique, the interests of the cadres eclipsed those of the workers. Thus, collective demands were traded off for individual benefits: ‘Measures aimed at giving wage-earners greater 45 Boltanski and Chiapello (2005), 312.

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security were replaced by measures directed towards relaxing hierarchical control and taking account of individual “potential”. In a political reversal, autonomy was, as it were, exchanged for security.’46 For these workers, however, the new spirit of capitalism has an essentially different meaning than it has for the cadres: for them it is not primarily a source of challenges and excitement, but rather of anxiety and insecurity. This new ‘network-style’ capitalism creates a class division between the mobile and the immobile. The new dictum of the new capitalism is: ‘Great men do not stand still. Little people remain rooted to the spot.’47 In the contemporary world of work all that counts is where you will be next, while experience counts for nothing.48 Traditionally, artistic critique was aimed not only at labour conditions, but also at consumer culture. This first took the shape of a critique of mass production and standardization as the source of a loss of individuation among human beings and a standardization of consciousness. As was the case with the organization of labour, capitalism responded by internalizing this critique. The demand for authenticity, for more variation, for something quite ‘personal’, the suspicion of the ever-the-same – these are now part of every advertisement campaign. Consumption, like production, becomes increasingly ‘immaterial’, revolving around symbolic value rather than use value. Advertisement and marketing draw our attention primarily to what a product ‘tells’ about us instead of what it does. These changes in capitalist production, organization of labour, and consumer culture, raise the question of whether we are still in need of the ‘critique of art’ that has been described in the present study. Many values formerly presented as in opposition to the bourgeois and capitalist world, such as autonomy, authenticity, attention to particularity and the ‘new’, now belong to the very fabric of that world. It should go without saying that this is not to say that capitalism actually meets these demands. As Boltanski and Chiapello argue, self-management, anti-authoritarianism, and teamwork should be regarded as new but covert methods of controlling and disciplining workers, while autonomy and flexibility are often synonymous with temporary contracts – meaning insecurity for the worker, while granting the employer the opportunity to easily rid themselves of employees. Similarly, the commodification of authenticity that occupies such a central place 46 Boltanski and Chiapello (2005), 190. 47 Ibidem, 361. 48 Boltanski’s and Chiapello’s analysis of the devaluation of work experience is very similar to Richard Sennett’s in The Corrosion of Character (1998) and The Culture of the New Capitalism (2006).

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in contemporary consumer capitalism brings with it, in their view, ‘new forms of anxiety about the authenticity of things or persons; one no longer knows if they are “authentic or inauthentic”, spontaneous or re-engineered for commercial ends.’49 The anxiety and distress caused by living in this network-society, in this new era of suspicion, calls for a revival of artistic critique. What is clear, however, is that the traditional artistic critique of standardization, reification, and lack of authenticity, will no longer suffice, since its rhetoric has been internalized and colonized by capitalism. Slavoj Žižek argues that ‘we can no longer talk about “reification” in the classic Lukácsian sense. Far from being invisible, social relationality in its very fluidity is directly the object of marketing and exchange.’50 Although Adorno and Benjamin were among the first to recognize the way in which modernist and avant-gardist values of originality and the ‘new’ are adopted by commodity production, they conceived of the demand for authenticity as a last spasm of a fading spontaneity. It has, however, turned out to be the core idea upon which contemporary capitalism depends. Critique has responded by deconstructing the very idea of authenticity, the idea of some ‘real’ core behind either the commodified object or the standardized and alienated subject. As Boltanski and Chiapello argue, however, the new spirit of capitalism, in some perverse double bind, has even absorbed this postmodern critique of authenticity and the ironic stance towards this concept by replacing it with the metaphor of the ‘network’, while simultaneously feeding on the demand for authenticity.51

Becoming life versus resistance It is not just the place of creative practices and ‘artistic critique’ in society that have changed. The social role and practice of the artist has altered 49 Boltanski and Chiapello (2005), 447. 50 Žižek (2010b), 221. 51 ‘Hence it can be said, without exaggeration or paradox, that if capitalism attempted to recuperate the demand for authenticity underlying the critique of the consumer society (by commodifying it, as we have seen), in another respect – and relatively independent – it has, with the metaphor of the network, assimilated the critique of this demand for autonomy, whose formulation paved the way for the deployment of reticular or rhizomorphous paradigms’ (Boltanski and Chiapello (2005), 452). Actually, Adorno notes a similar movement in his essay ‘Culture Industry Reconsidered’, where he writes that the culture industry presupposes that one does not take it entirely seriously. Adopting an ironic stance towards it will not suffice, since this irony is already internalized. The attraction of the culture industry, he argues, exists precisely in a ‘deception which is nonetheless transparent’ (CI, 103).

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too. Contemporary art practices involve copying, appropriation, pastiche, quoting, and the montage of fragments from earlier works of art, as well as from the world of ‘ordinary’ things. Boris Groys argues that today the artist has to be both creator and selector. The artist’s selection is his creation, but what he creates has to be first selected to become a work of art. Groys writes: [T]he creative act has become the act of selection: since Duchamp, producing an object is no longer sufficient for its producer to be considered an artist. One must also select the object one has made oneself and declare it an artwork. Accordingly, since Duchamp there is no longer any difference between an object one produces oneself and one produced by someone else – both have to be selected in order to be considered artworks. Today an author is someone who selects, who authorizes. Since Duchamp the author has become a curator. The artist is primarily the curator of himself, because he selects his own art. And he also selects others: other objects, other artists.52

One of the most important sources for artistic appropriation has been the artist’s own life. The figure or identity of the artist has taken on a central place within contemporary art, hence traditional aesthetic categories such as ‘work’ and ‘oeuvre’ have lost their self-evidence. Marcel Duchamp was among the first to present his own person as a work of art, playing chess in the museum or figuring as his female alter ego Rrose Sélavy (who claimed to be the true heir to the French crown). But while Duchamp still allows one to distinguish between the artist and their ‘performance’, this no longer seems possible in the case of Andy Warhol. With Warhol, the boundary between art and life dissolves. His appearance, his blasé attitude, his extravagant parties, rumours about his personal life, and even the fact that he was shot at by an actress starring in one of his movies – all these things are part of his identity as an artist, no less than of his oeuvre. This is perhaps not so surprising if we consider that Warhol’s fame coincides with the emergence of television as the most important mass medium. Warhol, it could be argued, was the first to fully exploit the possibilities of television for the artist’s identity. Fascinated by fame and iconography, he became a celebrity and an icon himself. This is by no means exclusively the case for the visual arts. Bret Easton Ellis, Dave Eggers and Michel Houellebecq are some examples of writers that cultivate and mystify their own lives, making their person part of their 52 Groys (2008), 93-94.

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work. This does not simply mean that these writers figure as protagonists in their own work. It works the other way around, too. For instance, Bret Easton Ellis started to behave like the characters in his books in ‘real life’, a development that in turn became the topic of a later novel. As Josef Früchtl argues, we should understand these phenomena in terms both of a demythologization and a remythologization of the artist.53 On the one hand, these artists abandon the claim to being agonized geniuses or Byronic heroes. They are, by contrast, hyper-self-conscious and ironic, fully aware that they are playing a role in front of an audience. But this act also involves a remythologization, insofar as the ‘agonized genius’ becomes one of the roles the artist is expected and prepared to play. To be sure, this dialectic is not completely new for post-war art. Self-cultivation and irony are crucial aspects of the way in which, for instance, Baudelaire conceived of himself as a poet.54 However, the crucial difference between Baudelaire and Warhol and the other examples mentioned earlier is that for artist today this self-cultivation has become mass-mediatized. In the meantime, of course, both artists and art theorists have argued that there is a certain danger in the postmodern practice of irony and self-mystif ication. For as soon as it becomes impossible to distinguish between art and life, between work and person, as soon as the boundaries of art are completely permeable and art dissolves into society like an ‘effervescent tablet in a glass of water’ (Enzensberger), this also means there is no longer a space from which to reflect upon, and hence criticize, life. The postmodern practices of self-creation and self-cultivation, and the attitude of ironic distance are hard to distinguish from, and in any case are completely compatible with, the ideology of contemporary consumer society, which dictates that we should ‘invent ourselves’ by dressing, eating, or behaving in a certain way, that is, by buying certain commodities. Recent publications express the yearning for a revival of political commitment in art.55 At the same time, however, the question is often raised of whether such a commitment is still a viable option for contemporary art and artists. The problem is not merely the democratization of the arts, and the fact that, for contemporary artists, the role of the intellectual is hardly as self-evident as it was for say, Zola and Sartre. The contemporary artist depends for their very existence on the ‘network’. As a creative worker, he is himself an 53 See Früchtl (2008). 54 See Seigel (1986). 55 See Aarsman et al (2005), De Cauter et al (eds., 2010), and Klanten (ed., 2011).

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integral part of the new spirit of capitalism. Boltanski and Chiapello argue that while the neo-manager has come to resemble the bohemian artist of yore, contemporary artists increasingly resemble managers: Is not today’s artist […] likewise a network creature in search of producers, the realization of whose projects demands costly, heterogeneous and complex arrangements, an ability to arrive at an understanding with distant, multiple actors who hold very different positions – from the local elected official, to the head of a firm, via an attaché from the ministry – and whom he must interest, persuade, win over?56

This relates immediately to another problem recent theorists have addressed, that, within the domain of art and cultural marketing, the artist’s political commitment has become a highly successful and profitable marketing strategy.57 This means that all forms of resistance are immediately commodified and ‘packaged’ as spectacles and media events, and put to the use of city marketing and the culture industries. Today, political commitment has become salon-fähig and conformist. The postmodern cult of self-creation and the recent call for its refusal can be said to represent two competing positions within the politics of art. Jacques Rancière distinguishes two political strategies that have existed in art and aesthetics since the time of Schiller, and that he labels ‘becoming life’ and ‘resistance’.58 The strategy of ‘becoming life’ refers to art’s attempt to create new forms and technologies of social life. Its goal is that of the historical avant-gardes, namely to reintegrate art and life. Other prominent examples have been the Arts and Crafts movement, Bauhaus, and Joseph Beuys’ ‘social plastic’. Resistance, by contrast, consists of the radical rejection of existing society. Its aims are to secure a domain outside society in which it can have no function at all. L’art pour l’art, Flaubert and Beckett have been famous examples of artists or schools using this strategy. As Rancière summarizes it: The first identifies the forms of aesthetic experience with the forms of an other life. The finality it ascribes to art is to construct new forms of life in common, and hence to eliminate itself as a separate reality. The second, by contrast, encloses the political promise of aesthetic experience in art’s 56 Boltanksi and Chiapello (2005), 312. 57 See Gielen (2009), especially 49-54 and 140-151, and BAVO (2010), especially 51-70. 58 Rancière (2009).

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very separation, in the resistance of its form to every transformation into a form of life.59

Rancière adds that it is precisely the tension between these two strategies that makes the opposition productive. Only by noticing the way in which they relate to one another historically can we understand the ‘paradoxical constraints’ that come with any demand for a ‘critical’ or ‘political’ art, which brings us back to the problem discussed in the first chapter. Here one might add that both strategies suffer from the threat of making art completely invisible in society. Art that ‘becomes life’ risks ending up being indistinguishable from it and hence affirmative. Resistant art, by contrast, runs the danger of becoming mute. In order for it to be not utterly impotent, art still needs to be recognized as a form of resistance. These then, are two challenges faced by any critical theory of art today, any theory of art that believes it is necessary to consider art and aesthetics in its relation to social theory and the reproduction of social life. The first challenge consists in the question of how one can formulate and perform an ‘artistic’ critique that will not be immediately absorbed by the new capitalist logic, which itself revolves around creativity, authenticity, and autonomy. The second consists in the question of how one can define the artist as having a distinct social role, and how one might (re)think the artwork as a political act. Without a doubt, there are many more challenges, but these are two that are particularly urgent from the perspective of the critical theories discussed in this study. One can debate whether it makes sense to draw on the works of Benjamin and Adorno when faced with problems such as these, situated in, and emerging from, a different historical and artistic constellation than the one in which they formulated their theories. Furthermore, this study has shown that their work contains several epistemological problems, some of which will make it difficult for contemporary readers to accept them. Nevertheless, I believe that many of the questions raised by Benjamin and Adorno in their works are still important for our current situation. These concluding remarks as well as the excurses can be regarded as attempts to show this relevance, sketched-out and preliminary as they may be. If their theories teach us one thing, it is not to conceive of history as a linear and straightforward process – and that also means that nothing should ever be considered outmoded once and for all. At the very least, their writings provide us with a ‘critical model’ – to quote a book title by Adorno – for 59 Rancière (2009), 44.

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understanding the relations among philosophical aesthetics, social theory, and art criticism. Adorno once wrote that, ‘among the dangers faced by new art, the worst is the absence of danger’ (AT, 38; 7, 51). This danger should be taken into account not merely by the new art, but also in our way of reading and interpreting that art – in other words, by art criticism. If we cease to understand works of art as expressions of suffering, as a j’accuse against our contemporary world, in short as forms of critique, we sentence them to insignificance. Art should be politicized once again. And for a truly critical art, art criticism is indispensable.



Appendix – Notes on a Camp1 The inhumanity of art must triumph over the inhumanity of the world for the sake of the humane. ‒ Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of New Music

The discussion about whether design is art has long been overtaken by developments in the art world. Chairs, tables, lamps, couches, are no longer fremdkörper in museums of modern art. More and more artists refer to themselves as designers, and vice versa. They cooperate with companies, making their ‘products’ available for larger audiences of costumers. A few years ago, Damien Hirst opened his own store in London, selling both his art and all kinds of merchandise (mugs, T-shirts, etc.). And, as is the case with this merchandise, Hirst’s most famous artworks – the dotted paintings, the animals in formaldehyde, the diamond skull – may have been ‘designed’ by the artist himself – but he did not manufacture them. Even if the question of whether design is indeed art has become moot, we might still ask the reverse question – as Benjamin did in the case of photography: How has design altered our understanding of art? The answer to this question should be: drastically. Design has turned the art world on its head, or rather, to paraphrase Friedrich Engels, it has put an art world that was standing on its head back on its feet. For, although we often tend to take the autonomy of art for granted, it has been rather an historical anomaly. The period during which the useful was considered ugly, as Théophile Gautier put it in the prologue of Mademoiselle de Maupin, has turned out to be merely a short interval in an overall situation, that obtained before him and that has persisted since, in which art is conceived of as thoroughly embedded in a practice, whether this is ritual, religion, politics, economics, or everyday life. If we consider our contemporary preoccupation with design, the dream nurtured by the historical avant-gardes of reconciling art and life appears to have been realized. Today we surround ourselves with objects whose use value is overshadowed by their symbolic value. To be sure, every functional 1 This essay, of which an earlier version was published as ‘De grote vlucht inwaarts’ (2010) in the Dutch magazine De Groene Amsterdammer, is included as an appendix to this book, because it provides an example of what a piece of art criticism inspired by the work of Benjamin and Adorno might look like.

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object is, and has always been, ‘designed’ to a certain extent, but today we expect an object not only to function properly, but also to tell us something about ourselves. Hal Foster, in his pamphlet Design and Crime (the title of which recalls Adolf Loos’ famous association of ornamentation and cultural degeneration), argues that today ‘the aesthetic and the utilitarian are not only conflated but all but subsumed in the commercial, and everything – not only architectural projects and art exhibitions but everything from jeans to genes – seems to be regarded as so much design.’2 By ‘aestheticizing’ every element of our surroundings, we are at the same time aestheticizing ourselves. A brief look at the history of modern design might give us some leverage on how to understand this development. Although design had always played a considerable role in aristocratic life – it is no coincidence that so many styles are named after royals – it could be argued that modern thought on design started with the nineteenth-century Arts and Crafts movement. Drawing inspiration from the writings of John Ruskin, this movement hardly considered itself ‘modern’. On the contrary, Arts and Crafts consisted of a critique of the ruthless rationality and standardization of industrial production. The artists of the Arts and Crafts movement strived for a harmony between ornamentation and functionality, which in their view had existed in the Middle Ages. William Morris, the most important artist of the movement, produced objects of old-fashioned craftsmanship: stained-glass windows, woodcuts, old methods and styles of printing. A not-insignificant fact of this movement was that both Ruskin and Morris were socialists. Paralleling their critique of the industrial style was a social critique of industrial society. They believed that a form of art that was reintegrated into craftsmanship and communal life would contribute to the creation of a better society. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Ruskin’s and Morris’s ideas were adopted on the continent by the many ‘new’ movements in design and architecture, such as Art Nouveau, and Jugendstil. Excessive ornamentation and organic shapes were designed to resist the monotony of industrial design. Every object, from doorknobs to ashtrays, had to bear the ‘signature’ of its owner. The social project of the Arts and Crafts movement, however, receded into the background. Benjamin, in ‘Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century’, argues that, in Jugendstil, the interior becomes ‘the asylum of art’ (AP, 9; V/1, 53). Style no longer contributes to communal life, but is the expression of the individual. According to Benjamin, the Jugendstil interior 2

Foster (2003), 17.

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was the evidence of the political resignation of the late nineteenth-century bourgeoisie. ‘To live in these interiors’, he writes, ‘was to have woven a dense fabric about oneself, to have secluded oneself within a spider’s web, in whose toils world events hang loosely suspended like so many insect bodies sucked dry’ (AP, 216; V/1, 286). Bauhaus, the school of architecture and design that has left its mark on contemporary design perhaps more than any other movement, was born from Jugendstil. The Jugendstil architect Henry Van de Velde was its first director. But while Van de Velde was still attracted to Morris’ utopian socialism and romantic anti-capitalism, from the nineteen-twenties onwards the Bauhaus, now led by Walter Gropius, turned its attention from crafts to design, and from ornament to functionalism. Gropius agreed with Adolf Loos that form should follow function. Industrial design and means of production were no longer criticized, but now functioned as an important source of inspiration. Nevertheless, the Bauhaus under Gropius was still led by a socialist agenda, namely by the idea that reshaping (public) life would contribute to a different organization of society. This was the main reason the Bauhaus was closed in 1933 after the Nazis seized power. These are the paradoxical roots of contemporary design. On the one hand, it attempts to create harmony between aesthetic and functional qualities, which was the ideal of the Arts and Crafts movement. The nostalgia for the communal life of the Middle Ages, however, is utterly absent from contemporary design. It rather resembles Jugendstil in producing objects that somehow express the ‘individuality’ of its owner. By surrounding themselves with idiosyncratic furniture, cutlery and decoration, the latebourgeois individual demonstrates self-expression. On the other hand, however, the resistance against industrial reification and standardization that so characterized both Morris’s work and the Jugendstil has been removed – in this regard designers have followed the path set out by the Bauhaus. Contemporary design, as Foster puts is ‘delights in post-industrial technologies, and it is happy to sacrifice the semi-autonomy of architecture and art to the manipulations of design.’3 In contrast to the Bauhaus, however, the embrace of serial and industrial production is bereft of any social-utopian programme. Contemporary design now serves nothing more than the individual, which means that the life with which art is reconciled is none other than private life. A recent exhibition of a leading Dutch designer, Maarten Baas, was tellingly entitled Making Things Personal. According to contemporary design, every object needs 3

Foster (2003), 18.

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to be given a subjective touch. Hence one could argue that, today, design combines the negative sides of its roots: like Jugendstil, it functions primarily to aestheticize the private individual without, however, resisting serial production as Arts and Crafts and Jugendstil still did; like the Bauhaus, it rather embraces industrialization, while abandoning Gropius’s utopian programme. It has positioned itself in the ideal place on the crossroads of standardization and individualization. As Henk Oosterling puts it: ‘Within hyperconsumentism, product design positions itself on the threshold of abundance and scarcity. Practically, it depends on abundance (serial production), but ideologically it feeds on scarcity (uniqueness).’4 To be sure, our preoccupation with design is not isolated. As a move away from public life and a focus on individuality and interiority, it runs parallel to the advance and increased popularity of an amalgam of new-age, eastern philosophies and new religious movements, which is sometimes referred to as ‘new spirituality’. What distinguishes these movements from traditional religion is the emphasis on personal experience (instead of communion), and the importance of being in touch with one’s ‘inner self’. Ironically, then, while this kind of spirituality claims to provide a way out of our contemporary ‘individualized’ society, it is in fact perfectly in sync with it.5 Like contemporary consumer culture, which increasingly revolves around the production of immaterial goods and the ‘political economy of the sign’ (Baudrillard), new spirituality promises a shortcut to happiness by choosing and buying one’s own identity or lifestyle. Nowhere are the connections among spiritual awakening, consumer culture, and design better expressed than in the quasi-Nietzschean slogan of a well-known Swedish furniture company: design your own life. Erich Fromm writes of the modern individual: ‘A person and the property he owned could not be separated. A man’s clothes or his house were parts of his self just as much as his body. The less he felt he was being somebody the more he needed to have possessions.’6 Following Fromm, one might argue that the less people experience their actual ability to design their own lives, the more they feel the urge to do so by means of their possessions. The designed object becomes a fetish in the precise Freudian sense: since reality is too painful to acknowledge, all attention is focused on a side-issue. But this also means that the advertisement slogan indeed contains an authentic utopian moment, namely the desire to be able to form one’s own 4 Oosterling (2009). 5 Simon (2008). 6 Fromm (2001), 104.

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life in freedom. This utopian moment is often overlooked in diatribes against consumerism. Anthropological speculations on ‘resentment’ or ‘mimetic desire’ do not sufficiently answer the question of why people would want to consume. This might not be exclusively because of the influence of advertising or the urge to ‘keep up with the Joneses’. Rather, it may also be because only by consuming do people still have the idea that they are in control of their own lives – an experience that has become sparse in a globalized world governed by invisible and incomprehensible powers. The ideological moment, of course, is contained in the promise that designing our own lives by buying a new sofa or kitchen is actually possible. As is well known, utopianism has fallen out of fashion at the end of the twentieth century, both in theory and in art. The seriousness and gloominess of modernism had to give way to postmodern irony and frivolity. Popular culture, advertising and design were no longer conceived of as the antithesis of art, but rather as a source of inspiration. That is why museums became cluttered with soup cans, cartoons, balloon animals, sport items and advertisements. One might think of this development in terms of the way of the Gnostic, or of Sabbatai Zevi, who argue that one should take the shape of one’s adversary in order to survive. The downside of this strategy is, however, that one risks forgetting one’s secret identity. Where should one draw the line between art about kitsch and art that is itself kitsch, or between advertisements-as-art and art-as-advertisements? But do designers today even ask these kinds of question? What began as ironic flirting with commerce and industry has turned into a firm embrace. Contemporary design is trapped within an ideology that worships the interior and the private individual. And when it still crosses the threshold of the interior – in the shape of city design or city branding – it mostly concerns an ‘interiorization’ of public space. In the service of the creative and tourist industries, it seeks to provide public spaces with their own ‘unique’ character. How might design be redeemed from the suffocating grip of private life, entertainment, and commerce? Is there still a way out? In recent years, many artists and theorists have called for a return to craftsmanship. Careful and patient interaction with complex materials regains its place in the artist’s vocabulary, while even ceramics and embroidery return to museums. Other artists have attempted to resist both the commercialization and the individualization of contemporary art by engaging in so-called ‘community art’ projects, re-positioning art back in the public (or ‘common’) sphere.7 7

De Bruyne and Gielen (2011).

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But perhaps the only way out is by going even deeper inside and bringing the identification with the aggressor to its extreme consequences. This is precisely what seems to be happening in SlaveCity, the ambitious artand-design project by the Rotterdam-based Atelier Van Lieshout (AVL). Established in 1995 by Joep van Lieshout, Atelier van Lieshout is a collective of artists and designers producing sculptures, furniture, architectural objects and prototypes. Their artistic practice and the works they produce challenge both the commercialization of the contemporary art world and the myth of the individual creator.8 SlaveCity, which started in 2005 and is still being developed, is a plan for a contemporary work camp, inhabited by slaves, or ‘participants’ as they are euphemistically referred to. Consisting of maps, drawings, sculptures, paintings, installations, and scale and full-size models, it provides us with an impression of a production facility in which everything is designed to be as efficient and profitable as possible. The detailed business plan perfectly mimics the jargon of contemporary commerce: ‘SlaveCity is […] designed to fit in with today’s norms and insights concerning the realm of organization, cost-effectiveness, technology and ecology. The camp is designed for approximately 200,000 participants who are operating in IT, helpdesk and telemarketing.’9 The participants live according to a strict daily schedule, spending seven hours at work in the call centre, seven hours on other tasks such as agriculture and food processing, and seven hours sleeping. The remaining three hours of the day the slaves may spend as they please. SlaveCity contains a fully equipped urban infrastructure, with its own airport, hospitals, shopping malls, libraries, brothels (for men and women), cinemas, museums and even universities. The business plan gives an overview of the costs and benefits of realizing the SlaveCity project. To build one such camp, an investment is needed of approximately 770 million euro. Apart from real estate and building costs, money needs to be reserved to provide sufficient medical care for the participants, and of course security personnel to prevent them from escaping. This investment, however, is negligible in comparison with the yearly average net profit of 7.5 billion euro with which SlaveCity will provide its future owner. The premises will cover about fifty square kilometres, ‘which implies that there are sufficient sites even in the Netherlands that would be adequate.’ Furthermore, the production facility ‘can operate independently 8 9

See Laermans (2007). All quotes from the business plan are from the attachment of Atelier Van Lieshout (2008).

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of any existing infrastructure’, since it fulfils its own need for transportation, energy, water and food. SlaveCity might be built anywhere in the world. Perhaps most striking of all is the fact that ‘SlaveCity will be the first CO2 poor, zero-energy city of the world.’ Human and other kinds of waste are recycled into biogas, which forms the facility’s main source of energy. Slaves who are not (or no longer) suitable for work are recycled too, in numerous ways. A diagram tells us that, for instance, those slaves that are ‘healthy but stupid’ are re-used for organ transplantation and food preparation, while those who are ‘unhealthy, stupid, and untasteful’ are processed into fertilizer for the land, and into biogas. In several sketches and paintings, Atelier van Lieshout gives us a glimpse of what goes on in departments like the ‘selectionCenter’ and the ‘slaughter and dissection units’. SlaveCity is, in other words, completely self-sufficient and, once established, needs no energy, food or materials from outside. It is indeed a small self-enclosed city, functioning independently of the outside world. In this way, the business plan tells us, SlaveCity provides an answer to the ‘exploitation of exhaustible raw materials and pollution.’ What should we make of SlaveCity? Is it a work of art, is it rather a form of architecture or design, or is this an irrelevant question? Is it a joke, and if so, is it a good or a bad one? What does it tell us about our own time, and the way in which we deal with problems concerning the organization of labour, ecology and public life? Wouter Vanstipthout argues that SlaveCity is not about our time, but rather about, even an ‘ode’ to, the twentieth century, ‘a century whose passions for classification, obsession with numbers, fury of dissection, love for diagrams and exact tailoring of the social system escaped the utopian fantasies of the few and became the living (and dying) environment of the many.’10 There is certainly some truth in this. With its tight schedules and strict division of labour, SlaveCity describes a Fordist rather than a post-Fordist production process. It recalls dystopian novels such as Zamyatin’s We, Huxley’s Brave New World, and Orwell’s 1984, as well as the utopian project New Babylon by Constant Nieuwenhuys. SlaveCity even seems to provide a sort of counter-image to Constant’s dream of a world in which physical labour would have been abolished and humankind could spend its time playing, which he developed after having read Huizinga’s Homo Ludens. Nevertheless, SlaveCity does not revolve around physical labour: the work on the land operates in the service of the main source of income, which is providing helpdesk and IT services around the clock and around the globe. The fact that the ‘participants’ fill their days with 10 In Atelier Van Lieshout (2008), 70.

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‘immaterial’ labour tells us that SlaveCity is in fact about our contemporary ‘connectionist’ world. Furthermore, what distinguishes SlaveCity from the traditional Fordist production facility is the on-site availability of leisure and entertainment. It bears some similarities to the famous Google Headquarters, which allows the Google employees to eat, workout, go shopping, bring their children, walk their dogs, take a ‘power nap’ – all on the same terrain. This has been presented as the ideal workplace, and indeed Google has ranked number one in several ‘Top 100 employer’ lists. One could also argue, however, that Google deprives its employees of all possible reasons not to be at work. After all, if you have brought your dog to work, there is no reason to leave at the end of the working day because you have to walk or feed it. Google’s strategy, in other words, seems to exist in keeping its employees on-site as long as possible, so that they can relax and communicate with each other (in order to get new ideas), but are ready to return to their desks at any moment. SlaveCity, too, houses a wide range of facilities where one can spend one’s free time: shopping malls, cinemas, bars and restaurants, brothels and universities. The difference between labour time and leisure has no meaning within the boundaries of SlaveCity, since everything the slave does has a purpose for the production process as a whole. The brothels, for instance, are tellingly referred to as ‘inspiration & motivation departments’. From the perspective of the designers, it has a reason to exist as long as it increases the productivity of the slave. Along this line all facets of human life – eating, drinking, relaxation, sex, reproduction, learning, and even defecating – have been put to the service of profit maximization. The city has been designed around the ‘generic human body without a face or particularity’, the body which is reduced to functions.11 Several drawings and models of the SlaveCity project contain the AVL-man, the shapeless and faceless human figure consisting of merely a torso with limbs, which also inhabited earlier projects by Atelier Van Lieshout. But it is not just the inhabitants that are generic. SlaveCity is an example of what Rem Koolhaas once called the ‘generic city’: it shows us what a city would look like once it has become part of a corporate identity.12 Like fast-food chains, hotels and airports, it will look exactly the same no matter where in the world it is established. According to the business plan, however, SlaveCity ‘offers a crucial impulse to cultural life and well-being of the surrounding region.’ Profit will be invested to create prestigious museums, 11 Laermans (2007), 32. 12 See De Cauter (2004), 44.

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called ‘museogestor’ (which have the shape of the human digestive system). Other attractions are restaurants and bars, theatres, and of course a red-light district offering services in several price-ranges (from one-star brothels for the slaves, located in barracks, to five-stars version for the managers). Conflating city life and marketing purposes, it seems to be the perfect incarnation of the ideology of the ‘creative city’. But of course, SlaveCity is part of the ‘public’ sphere only in appearance, just as are most departments of our contemporary generic cities: airports, shopping malls, and amusement parks. Though these may often seem like miniature cities and hence like public spaces, they are in fact private property, which means that some aspects of constitutional law may be suspended there. In SlaveCity this principle has been pushed to its limit, up to the point that the inhabitants of this space are stripped of all rights. Once an individual is deprived of his rights, that is, of his political life, nothing is left of him but biological life, or what Benjamin called ‘bare life’. Insofar as its inhabitants are citizens, SlaveCity is a city. The business plan leaves no doubt, though, that SlaveCity is in fact a camp. Giorgio Agamben writes: ‘The camp is the space that is opened when the state of exception begins to become the rule.’13 Camps are not prisons, for they fall outside the rules of prison and penal law. Only once we regard the camp as a unique juridical form, namely as a space that is excluded from the protection of the law but whose inhabitants are nevertheless fully determined by the law, can we understand what might happen there. Agamben writes: ‘The correct question to pose concerning the horrors committed in the camps is, therefore, not the hypocritical one of how crimes of such atrocity could be committed against human beings. It would be more honest and, above all, more useful to investigate carefully the juridical procedures and deployments of power by which human beings could be so completely deprived of their rights and prerogatives that no act committed against them could appear any longer as a crime.’14 Similarly, the things happening in SlaveCity – forced labour, extermination, cannibalism – are not crimes in the strict juridical sense, for constitutional law is suspended within the borders of the camp. The participants are conceived of as ‘bare life’, and their bodies and biological functions serve only the purposes of the production process. Their lives are completely administered, their bodies reduced to functions, if not to raw material. Atelier Van Lieshout shows us a world where the divide between haves and have-nots is absolute, not merely 13 Agamben (1998), 168-169. 14 Ibidem, 171.

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in economic but also in juridical terms: those who are excluded from the protection of the law stand opposite those who stand above the law. The following lines from J. M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K could function as a motto for Van Lieshout’s recent work: ‘Perhaps the truth is that it is enough to be out of the camps, out of all the camps at the same time. Perhaps that is enough of an achievement, for the time being. How many people are there left who are neither locked up nor standing guard at the gate?’15 To remain ‘out of the camps’ seems to be the goal of the works of Atelier Van Lieshout’s works preceding the SlaveCity project. They express a fascination for mobility, for independence and self-sufficiency. Atelier Van Lieshout designed mobile homes, offices and sanctuaries, where one could withdraw from civilization, if only momentarily. Pioneer Set (1999), for instance, is a shipping container that can be turned into a farm, complete with tools for cultivating land, a barn to keep animals in, and arms for keeping intruders off the premises. It can be unpacked at any uninhabited place in the world, thus allowing one to live independently, from the fruits of one’s own land, without state interference. For some time, Atelier Van Lieshout even attempted to bring into practice its utopia of independence. In 2001 it founded AVL Ville, a ‘Free State’ in the harbour of Rotterdam. Having its own constitution, currency, arms, and infra-structure, it declared itself as a sovereign state. ‘The Free State’s constitution guarantees many of the rights and freedoms guaranteed by the charter of a democratic state. The major difference is that AVL’s founding laws are absolute and without exceptions. By removing the possibility of exceptions, AVL keeps legislation to an absolute minimum.’ Here the members of AVL experimented with processing human waste into bio-fuel and producing energy needed for their production facilities, which produced, among other things, liquor, mobile homes and arms. AVL Ville attracted quite some attention in the media, until it was shut down by the authorities. AVL Ville bears more than a few similarities to SlaveCity: the fact that it produces its own energy and food, its independence from the outside world, the suspension of the law, and, not least, its communal production process. Since Joep van Lieshout established Atelier van Lieshout in 1995, it has challenged the idea of the individual artist. Furthermore, AVL generally does not produce traditional art objects but rather objects of use such as furniture, arms, etc. which makes it, as Rudi Laermans writes, ‘less an artists’ enterprise and more a creative venture.’16 Ironically, then, the 15 Coetzee (2004), 182. 16 Laermans (2007), 31.

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utopian programme of AVL Ville touches upon the dystopia of SlaveCity insofar as both presume the ideal of independence, self-sufficiency, and communal work. But even more than AVL Ville, SlaveCity is self-reflective, not only asking questions about the way we today think about labour, capitalism, public life, and ecology, but also about the relationship between design and architecture on the one hand and the idea of the work of art as a self-sufficient and independently whole on the other. SlaveCity, in other words, questions design as an artistic medium. One might even call this the ‘modernist’ moment in Atelier Van Lieshout’s project. Design is about connecting the aesthetic with functionality. In SlaveCity, purpose and functionality have been taken to their limit. Even human life is completely instrumentalized here: the participants have reason to exist as long as they function as a cog in the production process, and as long as they contribute to its output. They are measured by the criterion of their ‘applicability’ for cost reduction and profit maximization. If they no longer function for immediate profit, they can still function indirectly as a resource for food, fertilizer and energy. The concept of ‘human resources’, which is dubious in itself, is given a new (or maybe its true) meaning in SlaveCity. As a zero-energy city, the project is the capitalist dream come true: a perpetuum mobile of profit. Although the ‘participants’ in SlaveCity generally have better working conditions than a fair share of workers around the globe who reproduce our everyday standard of living – many of whom, after all, are not entitled to spare time, entertainment, healthcare, or education – the recycling and processing of human waste, with the consequence of cannibalism, is probably the element in AVL’s plans arousing the greatest moral repulsion, if not sheer horror. Like Jonathan Swift, who in his ‘Modest Proposal’ (1729) argued that the impoverished people of Ireland should sell their own children as food for the rich, SlaveCity provokes by challenging the taboo on cannibalism. Whereas most of the earlier projects and prototypes of Atelier Van Lieshout, although perhaps absurd or distasteful, still allowed one to imagine their implementation, the grotesqueness of slavery and cannibalism prevents in advance an actual realization of the SlaveCity project. Thus, SlaveCity consciously takes its leave from the paradigm of ‘design’. For while design is indeed ‘applied art’, SlaveCity precludes the possibility of its own applicability by deliberately crossing certain moral boundaries, placing itself on the side of the unimaginable. Indeed, one cannot imagine that the things happening in SlaveCity could actually come true. Imagining the unimaginable, SlaveCity departs from the realm of design and enters the world of art.

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The ironic consequence of the non-applicability of this work of applied art is that the project comes as close as anything to Immanuel Kant’s famous characterization, in Critique of Judgment, of beauty as ‘purposefulness without a purpose’. By this, Kant meant that the beautiful object appears to us to be necessary, and that it thus seems to fulfil a certain function even if we cannot define what that might be. The aesthetic judgment, after all, is ‘without a concept’. Even though the purpose of SlaveCity is clearly formulated in the business plan – namely profit maximization – it is also clear that it could never actually fulfil this purpose. Atelier Van Lieshout has developed its project in remarkable and admirable detail: costs and benefits, scale models, sewer and electricity plans, statistics and so on. But in the end, it serves no purpose whatsoever – that is, no purpose outside the realm of art. Atelier Van Lieshout shows us what design might mean today. It critically reflects upon the commercialization of art, the interiorization of life, and on the limits of exploitation, exclusion, and ecological destruction. But it also questions anew the relation between design and art, between usefulness and purposelessness, by putting them in a dialectical relationship. SlaveCity is ‘anti-design’, applied art which we have to wish and hope will not be applied. Through the ‘digression’ of design, then, SlaveCity returns to the autonomy of art.

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Sontag, S. (1987) Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux Steinberg, M.P. (1996) ‘The Collector as Allegorist’ in: M. P. Steinberg (ed.) Walter Benjamin and the Demands of History. Ithaka: Cornell University Press. 88-118 Steiner, U. (2012) Walter Benjamin. An Introduction to his Work and Thought, transl. M. Winkler. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press Stiller, G. (1970) Johann Sebastian Bach und das Leipziger gottesdienstliche Leben seiner Zeit. Kassel: Bärenreiter Tiedemann, R. (1973) Studien zur Philosophie Walter Benjamins. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Toscano, A. and J. Kinkle (2015) Cartographies of the Abolute. Winchester: Zero Books Tucker, R. (ed., 1978) The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd edition. New York: Norton Unseld, S. (ed., 1972) Zur Aktualität Walter Benjamins. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Veldeman, J. (2010) ‘Is hedendaagse kunst het bekijken waard? Arthur Danto over kunst na de Brillo Box’ in: Tijdschrift voor filosofie, vol. 72, no. 4. 777-802 Vande Veire, F. (2002) Als in een donkere spiegel. De kunst in de moderne filosofie. Amsterdam: SUN Vattimo, G. (1988) The End of Modernity. Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Post-Modern Culture, translated by J. R. Snyder. Cambridge: Polity Vattimo, G. (1992) The Transparent Society, translated by D. Webb. Cambridge: Polity Vattimo, G. (1998) De transparante samenleving, translated by H. Slager. Amsterdam: Boom Virno, P. (2004) A Grammar of the Multitude, translated by I. Bertoletti, J. Cascaito, and A. Casson. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e) Vries, H. de (2005) Minimal Theologies. Critiques of Secular Reason in Adorno and Levinas. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press Walter-Busch, E. (2010) Geschichte der Frankfurter Schule. Kritische Theorie und Politik. München: Wilhelm Fink Watt, I. (1957) The Rise of the Novel. Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. London: Chatto & Windus Weber, M. (2009) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. With Other Writings on the Rise of the West, 4th edition, translated by S. Kalberg. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press Weber, S. (2008) Benjamin’s –abilities. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press Weber Nicholsen, S. (1999) Exact Imagination, Late Work. On Adorno’s Aesthetics. Cambridge MA: MIT Press Wegeler, F. and F. Ries (1987) Remembering Beethoven, translated by F. Bauman and T. Clark. London: Deutsch Wellek, R. (1963) Concepts of Criticism, edited by S. G. Nichols. New Haven and London: Yale University Press Wellmer, A. (1991) The Persistence of Modernity. Essays on Aesthetics, Ethics, and Postmodernism, translated by D. Midgley. Cambridge: Polity Wellmer, A. (2007) ‘Adorno and the Problems of a Critical Construction of the Historical Present’ in: Critical Horizons, vol. 8, no. 2. 135-156 White, H. and C. White (1965) Canvases and Careers. Institutional Change in the French Painting World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press Wiggershaus, R. (1986) Die Frankfurter Schule. Geschichte, Theoretische Entwicklung, Politische Bedeutung. München: DTV

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Wilde, M. de (2008) Verwantschap in extremen. Politieke theologie bij Walter Benjamin en Carl Schmitt. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press Wilde, M. de (2011) ‘Meeting Opposites: The Political Theologies of Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt’ in: Philosophy and Rhetoric, vol. 44, no. 4, 363-381 Williams, R. (1973) ‘Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory’ in: The New Left Review, vol. 82, no. 1. 3-16 Williams, R. (1989) The Politics of Modernism. Against the New Conformists. London: Verso Williams, R. (1995) The Sociology of Culture (new edition). Chicago: University of Chicago Press Witkin, R. W. (1998) Adorno on Music. London: Routledge Witte, B. (1976) Walter Benjamin, der Intellektuelle als Kritiker. Untersuchungen zu seinem Frühwerk. Stuttgart: Metzler Wohlfarth, I. (1978) ‘No-man’s Land. On Walter Benjamin’s “Destructive Character”’, in: Diacritics, vol. 8, no. 2. 47-65 Wohlfarth, I. (1996) ‘Smashing the Kaleidoscope. Walter Benjamin’s Critique of Cultural History’ in: M. P. Steinberg (ed.) Walter Benjamin and the Demands of History. Ithaka: Cornell University Press. 190-205. Wohlfarth, I. (2002) ‘Walter Benjamin and the Idea of a Technological Eros. A Tentative Reading of Zum Planetarium’ in: H. Geyer-Ryan, P. Koopman and K. Yntema (eds.) Benjamin Studies 1. Perception and Experience in Modernity. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. 65-109 Wohlfarth, I. (2008) ‘Walter Benjamin and the Red Army Faction’ in: Radical Philosophy, vol. 152-154 Wolff, C. (2000) Johann Sebastian Bach. Zijn leven, zijn muziek, zijn genie, translated by P. Heijman et al., edited by C. Romijn. Utrecht: Bijleveld Wolin, R. (1994) Walter Benjamin. An Aesthetic of Redemption (2nd edition). Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press Wolin, R. (1997) ‘Benjamin, Adorno, Surrealism’ in: T. Huhn and L. Zuidervaart (eds.) The Semblance of Subjectivity. Essays in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. 93-122 Wolin, R. (2006) The Frankfurt School Revisited and Other Essays. London and New York: Routledge Woodmansee, M. (1994) The Author, Art, and the Market. Rereading the History of Aesthetics. New York: Columbia University Press Wörner, K. H. (1963) Schoenberg’s ‘Moses and Aaron’, translated by P. Hamburger. London: Faber and Faber Zima, P.V. (2002) Deconstruction and Critical Theory, translated by R. Emig. London and New York: Continuum Žižek, S. (2000) ‘From History and Class Consciousness to The Dialectic of Enlightenment… and Back’ in: New German Critique 81. 107-123 Žižek, S. (2006) The Parallax View. Cambridge MA: MIT Press Žižek, S. (2008) In Defense of Lost Causes. London: Verso Žižek, S. (2009) First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. London: Verso Žižek, S. (2010a) Living in the End Times. London: Verso Žižek, S. (2010b) ‘How to Begin From the Beginning’ in: C. Douzinas and S. Žižek (eds.) The Idea of Communism. London: Verso. 209-226 Zuidervaart, L. (1991) Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory. The Redemption of Illusion. Cambridge MA: MIT Press

Index absolute, absolute music, absolute spirit 47-49, 66, 108, 111, 113, 124, 126, 128-129, 137, 141, 231, 233, 235, 239, 273, 275, 288, 327 Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund – Aesthetic Theory 11, 14, 97, 105, 108, 110, 114-115, 117, 119, 142, 183, 196, 270, 274, 289 – Against Epistemology 180 – ‘Commitment’ 186 – ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’ 230, 260 – Dialectic of Enlightenment 102, 104, 113, 177, 180-181, 189, 191, 193-194, 196, 222, 314 – Hegel: Three Studies 185 – In Search of Wagner 108, 264, 277 – Introduction to the Sociology of Music 41, 111, 187 – Kierkegaard 180 – ‘Late Style in Beethoven’ 112 – Mahler. A Musical Physiognomy 277-286 – Minima Moralia 104, 141, 177, 270, 317 – Negative Dialectics 116, 180, 188, 191, 269, 274, 288, 314, 316, 320 – Notes to Literature 230 – ‘On Jazz’ 98-99, 121 – ‘On the Fetish Character of Music and the Regression of Listening’ 98, 100, 111 – ‘On the Social Situation of Music’ 107 – ‘Presuppositions’ 262 – ‘Progress’ 191-192 – ‘Stravinsky. A Dialectical Image’ 279 – ‘The Aging of New Music’ 196 – ‘The Idea of Natural History’ 188-190 – The Philosophy of New Music 48, 110, 113, 116, 188, 194, 277, 279, 339 – ‘The Schema of Mass Culture’ 107 – ‘Vers une musique informelle’ 196 aesthetics 11, 13-14, 21, 23, 25, 36, 72, 79, 87, 89, 94-97, 108-109, 115, 117, 119, 123-124, 127-129, 138, 144, 147, 177, 181-182, 184, 186, 207, 210, 214, 222, 232, 234, 242, 263, 265, 267, 269, 271, 274-278, 287, 295, 311, 313, 320-322, 327, 336-338 aestheticization 89, 97, 138, 157 Agamben, Giorgio 145, 204-205, 288, 347 afterlife (Nachleben) 238, 242, 244, 247-248, 258, 268, 273, 276, 284, 287, 289, 305 alienation 16, 35, 37, 50, 105, 107, 128, 137, 179, 185, 199, 204, 220, 253, 301 allegory, allegorical, allegorist 37, 72-87, 94-95, 110, 119-120, 154, 163, 165, 169, 174, 190, 223, 240-241, 246-248, 251, 253, 255-256, 258, 286, 326 Aragon, Louis 52, 55-56 arcades 82, 84, 167, 172, 247, 315 Arendt, Hannah 320

Aristotle 21, 73, 254, 324 art for art’s sake 23, 26, 31, 36, 38-39, 48-49, 53, 62, 66, 85, 88, 114, 298-299, 324, 336 Arts and Crafts movement 336, 340-342 artworld 130-131 Atelier Van Lieshout 344-350 atonality, atonal 11, 59, 69, 283 aura, auratic 17, 88-89, 92-97, 102, 114, 119-120, 145, 149-152, 155, 157, 203, 235, 242, 255, 263, 269, 303, 313, 322, 346-347 authentic, authenticity 40, 49, 52-53, 63, 68, 88-89, 103-104, 106-107, 139, 142, 149, 163, 172, 201, 236, 261, 275, 277, 281, 285, 330-333, 337, 342 autonomy (of art) 11, 15, 19-69, 104-105, 107-109, 114, 117-120, 185, 199, 205, 210, 211, 238, 258, 260, 283, 312, 314, 330-333, 337, 339, 341, 350 avant-garde 11-12, 37, 41, 48, 51, 55, 63-69, 72, 80, 95, 105, 117-119, 138, 196, 297, 300, 302, 326, 336, 339 Bach, Johann Sebastian 19-21, 45, 60, 107, 197-198, 268 Balzac, Honoré de 31, 34, 210, 281 barbarism 11, 156-157, 162, 169, 201, 240, 261, Baroque 15, 71-86, 95-96, 120, 172, 174, 190, 240, 286, 326 Barthes, Roland 12, 123, 299 base (and superstructure) 18, 170, 187, 194, 203-205, 207-228 Baudelaire, Charles 23, 31-32, 37-41, 67, 71, 73, 81-87, 94-96, 108, 120, 148, 151, 154-158, 199, 246, 251, 259, 289, 298, 335 Baumgarten, Alexander 25 Bauhaus 336, 341-342 Batteux, Charles 24 Beckett, Samuel 115-116, 119, 230, 336 Beethoven, Ludwig van 23, 41-47, 60, 68, 100, 111-113, 197, 281 Bell, Daniel 123 Benjamin, Walter – Arcades Project 17, 81, 83, 95, 154, 163, 165, 167, 201-202, 246, 247, 249, 289, 314-315, 320, 328 – ‘Central Park’ 72, 81 – ‘Critique of Violence’ 319 – ‘Eduard Fuchs, Collector and Historian’ 162, 170-172 – ‘Experience’ 148 – ‘Experience and Poverty’ 150, 156, 177, 305 – ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities’ 96, 237-240, 250-259, 273, 286-287, 289-290 – ‘Literary History and the Study of Literature’ 171

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– ‘Little History of Photography’ 149 – ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’ 32, 81, 148, 151, 153, 157, 159, 177 – ‘On the Concept of History’ 91, 95, 160, 162-163, 165-166, 171, 175, 226-227 248-249, 256, 316 – ‘On the Mimetic Faculty’ 181 – One Way Street 236, 242-245, 290-291 – Origin of German Tragic Drama 72-86, 169, 172, 190, 236, 241-246, 254, 259, 269 – ‘Rastelli’s Story’ 250 – ‘Rigorous Study of Art’ 171 – ‘Surrealism’ 254 – The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism 230-236 – ‘The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire’ 81, 176, 291 – ‘The Storyteller’ 151-153, 156-157 – ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility’ 15, 16, 71, 88-94, 98, 102, 120-121, 139, 144, 149, 156-157, 201, 243, 290, 315, 317, 319-320 – ‘Theological-Political Fragment’ 166 – ‘Two Poems by Friedrich Hölderlin’ 237 Berg, Alban 23, 59, 67, 278 Berger, Karol 21, 135 Bergson, Henri 182 Berman, Marshall 40 Bernstein, Jay 106-107, 109, 122, 128, 135, 178, 182, 188, 269, 290 Beuys, Joseph 302, 336 bohemian 35, 37, 40-41, 330-331, 336 Boltanski, Luc 106, 142, 217, 306, 309-311, 330-333, 336 Bourdieu, Pierre 35, 48, 326-327 bourgeois, bourgeoisie 32-41, 45, 47-50, 52, 55-68, 80-81, 98, 100, 103, 108, 110-117, 151, 156-157, 186, 196, 210, 219, 225, 245, 296, 298, 323, 331-332, 341 Brecht, Bertolt 71-72, 94, 156, 186, 243, 246, 290 Breton, André 52-56, 69 Buchloh, Benjamin 322, 325 Buck-Morss, Susan 14, 77, 167 Bürger, Peter 48, 52, 57, 64-65, 118-119, 197, 279 Burke, Edmund 46, 69, 298

constellation 163, 173-174, 176, 182, 202-203, 223, 226, 235, 244, 274, 313, 316, 326, 337 correspondences 82, 95, 155-156 Croce, Benedetto 132 culture industry 72, 97-98, 102-109, 115-117, 120, 184, 264, 297, 327-329

caesura 112, 239, 254, 256-257, 321 Cage, John 134 capitalism 12, 83-84, 87, 97, 102-103, 106-107, 117, 121-122, 142, 146, 158, 163, 194, 199, 210-224, 259-260, 321, 328-333, 336, 341, 349 catastrophe 79, 83, 192, 226, 317 Caygill, Howard 71 Chiapello, Eve 106, 142, 217, 330-333, 336 collector 85, 175, 246-248, 313 commodity, commodification 34, 40, 47-48, 81-87, 94, 98-109, 114, 117, 120, 136, 141, 153, 167, 179, 203, 213, 216, 218, 220, 246, 259, 305, 322, 327-329, 332-333, 335-336

fascism, fascist 88-89, 93-94, 96, 119, 211-212, 277 fetish, fetishism, fetishized 83-85, 98, 100-101, 108-109, 114, 259, 305, 322, 342 Fichte, J.G. 231-232 flaneur 32, 39, 82, 85, 167, 201, 246, 315 Flaubert, Gustav 35-36, 40, 49, 298, 336 formalism 170-171, 271, 323-325 Foster, Hal 142, 294, 322, 325, 340-341 Foucault, Michel 123, 215, 306-308, 319 Freud, Sigmund 53, 100-101, 154, 158, 160, 170, 269, 271-272, 323, 342 Frith, Simon 118 Fukuyama, Francis 123, 214

Dada 51-53, 60, 62, 64-65, 69, 72, 90 Danto, Arthur C. 18, 123-124, 129-145, 325 De Cauter, Lieven 215 deconstruction 244, 320 Derrida, Jacques 12, 319, 321-322 Descartes, René 25, 128 Dewey, John 158 dialectical image 163, 167-168, 173-175, 223 Dilthey, Wilhelm 149, 158, 272 disenchantment 71, 102, 113, 122, 127-128, 136, 151, 158, 178-180, 183, 185, 330 disinterestedness 25-26, 36, 48, 111, 193, 271, 272 dissonance, dissonant 59, 69, 113, 116, 264, 280 Döblin, Alfred 72, 94 Dorgelès, Roland 293 Duchamp, Marcel 11, 51, 118, 130, 334 Eagleton, Terry 214-215, 218, 301, 305, 322 Eisenstein, Sergei 72, 89-91, 95 Elias, Norbert 29 Eliot, T.S. 229 Elkins, James 294-295 end of art 14-16, 18, 71, 87, 94, 98, 115-116, 120, 122-146 Engels, Friedrich 209-210, 216, 339 enigma, enigmatic character 230, 238, 240, 244, 272, 291, 326, 327 enlightenment 50, 102-104, 113, 128, 136, 148, 177-182, 184, 193-196, 200, 226, 271, 296, 316, 321 exchange value 83-85, 99-101, 103, 107-108 experience 12, 14, 16, 28, 46, 80, 82, 86, 88, 99, 106, 109, 121-122, 126, 128, 134, 137-141, 147-188, 199-203, 217, 229-231, 235, 237-238, 244, 257, 262-263, 266-268, 271, 275, 278, 280-282, 284, 286, 288, 298, 305, 311-313, 315, 317, 323-328, 332, 336, 342-343 expressionism 95, 104, 119

Index

Gadamer, Hans-Georg 172 gambler 86, 155 Gautier, Théophile 34, 36, 39, 41, 49, 339 genius 25, 29, 35-37, 41, 44, 47, 52-53, 63, 66, 68, 75, 88, 231, 234, 251, 335 Geulen, Eva 91, 123 Goethe, J.W.G. 16, 29-30, 73, 96, 173, 175, 232, 235, 237, 239, 250-259, 282, 287, 289 Gramsci, Antonio 215, 306-307 Greenberg, Clement 133-134 Gropius, Walter 172, 341-342 Gundolf, Friedrich 253-254, 258 Habermas, Jürgen 14, 68, 91, 168, 181-185, 189, 200, 274-275, 295-297, 299-300, 305-306, 319 Hanslick, Eduard 47, 60 Hegel, G.W.F. 14, 16, 20-21, 46, 50, 54, 104, 108-113, 116, 123-130, 133-135, 137, 142-143, 147, 151, 160, 163, 171, 185, 188-189, 191, 193-195, 198, 203-205, 207, 210, 216, 222, 224-226, 251, 255, 269-270, 272, 276, 285, 287-288, 291, 321 Heidegger, Martin 12, 123, 136-137, 139, 140-141, 143, 158, 182, 201 Heine, Heinrich 20, 210 Heinich, Nathalie 37, 42, 68 hermeneutics 272, 324 historism 161-162, 176, 227, 321 Hitler, Adolf 284 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von 50, 281, 286, 298 Honneth, Axel 193 Homer 104, 110, 177-178 Horkheimer, Max 87, 102-106, 161, 165, 177-183, 193-194, 212-213, 222, 278, 328-329 Hugo, Victor 31, 36 Husserl, Edmund 269 idealism 180, 183, 224, 260-261, 269 identity thinking 99-100, 102, 106, 109-112, 122, 178, 182-186, 193, 201, 260, 267, 271-272, 274, 315 ideology, ideological 14, 48, 57, 66, 84, 98, 104, 110, 114, 118, 123, 138, 142, 146-147, 163, 168, 186, 192, 200, 207-218, 221-224, 231, 259, 261, 263-265, 269-270, 287, 301, 323, 335, 342-343, 347 immanent criticism 230, 232-233, 236, 239, 242-243, 245, 248, 251, 257-263, 266, 287-288 Institute for Social Research 81, 98, 107, 212, 284, 319 intellectual 12, 18, 20, 27, 32, 36, 50, 243, 260, 290, 303, 305-308, 314, 330, 335 irony (romantic) 232-234, 288 Jameson, Fredric 22, 65, 118, 128-129, 146, 208, 218-224, 227, 258, 276, 322 Jay, Martin 218 judgment (aesthetic) 25-26, 271, 296, 311, 350 Jugendstil 57-58, 340-342

365 Kabbala 165, 249 Kafka, Franz 72, 111, 187, 230, 246, 248, 282, 286 Kant, Immanuel 13, 21, 23, 25-28, 30, 36, 46-47, 50, 66, 68-69, 72, 79, 99-100, 105, 108, 111, 125, 128-129, 139-140, 148, 171, 174, 180, 184, 231, 251, 266, 269, 271-272, 281, 296, 298-299, 311, 314, 321, 323-324, 350 kitsch 118, 138, 141, 197, 343 Kraus, Karl 58-59, 62, 266, 282, 286 Krauss, Rosalind 80 Lacis, Asja 242-243, 246 l’art pour l’art (see art for art’s sake) Le Corbusier 172 Leibniz, G.W. 173, 225 Leskov, Nicolai 151 Lessing, G.E. 24, 28, 30, 304 liquidation of art (see end of art) Loos, Adolf 58, 60, 62, 156, 340, 341 Lukács, Georg 12, 83, 103, 128, 137, 151-152, 156, 179, 190, 203-204, 259, 323, 326, 333 Lyotard, Jean-François 123, 128-129, 275, 319-320 mass culture (see culture industry) Mahler, Gustav 16, 21, 23, 58, 197, 230, 277-286, 289, Malevich, Kazimir 131 Mallarmé, Stéphane 36, 96 Mandel, Ernest 219, 222 Marcuse, Herbert 50, 58, 63, 213, 319 market (art) 23, 30-48, 66-67, 83-85, 98-101, 106-107, 142, 187, 212, 219, 294, 297, 329 Marx, Karl (marxist, marxian) 23, 49, 83-85, 91, 100, 106, 128, 133, 137, 153, 160, 164, 168-170, 179, 187, 194, 203, 207-227, 236, 243, 249, 251, 259-260, 307, 313, 319, 322-325, 327-328 Marx, William 294, 297-299, 301 material (artistic, musical) 16, 96, 113-114, 148, 186, 188, 194-199, 204, 277-279, 284-285 materialism, materialist 18, 87, 93, 119, 162, 164, 167, 170, 173, 175, 187, 199, 203-204, 214, 218, 226-227, 230, 236, 244, 248-251, 259, 269, 290, 313 McDonald, Rónán 299, 301, 303-305 melancholy 75-76, 78-79, 82, 86-87, 96, 155, 174 mediation 27, 46, 185, 194, 197-198, 204-205, 262, 264, 267, 287-288 Menke, Christoph 276, 321-322 Messiah, messianic, messianism 87, 91-93, 95, 97, 144, 158-159, 165-167, 173-176, 236, 248-249, 282, 291, 317-318, 321 mimesis, mimetic 46, 125, 177, 181-187, 196, 199, 203, 262-263, 266, 269, 271, 313-314, 318, 343 modernism, modernist 16, 63-66, 69, 72, 97, 105, 107-120, 128-129, 133, 138, 142, 144, 147, 158, 186, 201, 219-221, 272-273, 275, 284-286, 320, 333, 343, 349

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modernity 12, 16, 35, 39, 67-68, 71, 82-83, 86-87, 90, 103, 107, 121, 128, 136-138, 147, 151, 155, 158, 160, 169, 178-179, 189, 199, 274-275, 282, 326 monad, monadology 18, 148, 169, 173-176, 194, 198-205, 208, 224-226, 229, 235, 247, 267, 277 montage 56, 72, 90, 94-95, 111, 118, 120, 163, 167, 174, 202, 235, 290, 322, 334 Moritz, K.P. 25, 28, 30, 36, 79, 100 mourning play 71, 73-81, 87, 94-96, 169, 172, 254, 286 Mozart, W.A. 14, 23, 42-43, 45, 47 myth, mythic, mythology 12, 52, 56, 71, 74-75, 85-87, 102, 145-146, 149, 155, 160-161, 163, 177-179, 182, 189-190, 193, 199-203, 216, 226, 238-240, 242, 245, 251-259, 263, 270, 286-287, 289-291, 314-316, 318, 335, 344 nature 26, 46, 64, 72, 74, 77, 82-85, 92, 94, 102, 108, 111, 113, 115, 121-122, 124-126, 128, 136, 151, 157-158, 160-161, 177-181, 183-184, 187-190, 192193, 195-196, 199-201, 226, 231, 244, 252-253, 256, 259, 269, 271, 275, 286, 314-315, 318 natural beauty 109, 125, 149 natural history (Naturgeschichte) 74-75, 77, 84, 146, 156, 161, 188-194, 196, 200, 202, 226, 259, 270, 283, 285, 321 Nicholsen, Shierry Weber 17, 119, 315 Nietzsche, Friedrich 87, 96, 123, 136-137, 143, 162, 281, 342 non-identity, non-identical 100, 272, 289, 316 Novalis 230, 235 now-time (Jetztzeit) 163, 166 origin (Ursprung) 172-173, 178 Paddison, Max 197, 262, 264-265, 277, 279 parallax 218, 223-226 Paris 23, 31-35, 38-40, 51-53, 56, 58-59, 81-84, 154, 172, 176, 247, 289, 293, 297 particular (sensuous), particularity 99-100, 102, 104, 106, 108-115, 121-122, 143-144, 179-180, 184-186, 191, 194, 197-199, 201, 203-205, 210, 226, 263, 266-267, 270, 273-274, 276, 284-286, 288, 291, 314-316, 318, 327, 332, 346 Pensky, Max 174, 247, 249, 257, 318, 321 phantasmagoria 87, 158, 163-264, 277, 285, 289 photography 14, 68, 88-89, 132, 149, 154, 339 Picasso, Pablo 119, 187 Plato 17, 124, 136, 181, 183, 210, 256, 269, 312 play (Spiel) 26-27, 92, 181, 201, 315 Poe, Edgar Allen 38, 272 Politicization of art 89 post-Fordism 328-330 postmodern, postmodernism 18, 80, 129, 137142, 144-147, 208, 216, 218-222, 224, 319-320, 333, 335-336, 343 production, means of, relations of 91, 106, 122, 152, 176, 187-188, 195, 208-209, 213, 216, 219, 222, 224, 260, 328-329, 341

progress 16, 35, 50, 83, 86-87, 91-92, 102, 132-134, 136-137, 143, 160-161, 176, 178, 188-189, 191-194, 196, 200, 213, 226, 233, 277, 316, 321 promise 104, 115-116, 121-122, 198, 200-201, 275, 282, 291, 313, 316-317, 336 prostitute 40-41, 81-82, 85, 246 Proust, Marcel 72, 159-160, 164, 167, 174, 301 psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic 18, 271-272, 322-324, 325, public sphere 295-297, 300-301, 305-308, 311-312, 347 Rancière, Jacques 275, 336-337 rationality 67, 114, 124-126, 177-180, 182, 184, 186-187, 194, 319, 327, 340 rationalization 103, 128, 178-180, 183-186, 188, 194-196, 198-199, 203-204, 212, 265, 275, 322 redemption 77, 120, 166, 168, 197, 200-201, 248-249, 251, 253-257, 259, 269, 277, 282, 287, 289 reification 16, 83-85, 100, 103, 114, 153-154, 160-162, 164, 171-172, 179-180, 190, 196, 203, 260, 277, 305, 322, 327-328, 333, 341 reconciliation 54, 64, 67, 104, 112, 116, 125, 137, 166, 184-185, 256, 259, 275, 281, 286, 291, 320 remembrance 163-168, 181, 271, 314 Riegl, Alois 170-171 Rimbaud, Arthur 19, 36, 68 Romantics, romanticism 21, 36, 46, 66, 68, 73, 77, 79, 125-127, 229-237, 241, 249, 283-284, 288-289, 298, 300, 313 Rorty, Richard 123, 324 Rosen, Charles 58, 238, 248 Said, Edward 188, 204 Schelling, Friedrich 21, 125 Schiller, Friedrich 23, 27-30, 34, 36, 66-67, 275, 300, 336 Schlegel, Friedrich 21, 229-230, 232-233, 235, 249 Schoenberg, Arnold 23, 57-64, 67, 69, 111, 113, 187, 196-198, 277-279, 284, 286 Scholem, Gershom 93, 151, 165, 229, 248-249, 320 Scholze, Britta 15, 110 Schopenhauer, Arthur 46-47, 73 second reflection (Zweite Reflexion) 265-267 Seigel, Jerrold 33, 35 Semblance, semblance-character (Scheincharakter) 16, 21, 64, 72, 80, 86-90, 92-94, 96-97, 105, 107-116, 118-120, 122, 124, 143, 145-146, 149, 201, 209, 213, 236, 239-242, 244-245, 248, 251, 254-259, 263-265, 269-271, 274, 276, 282-283, 285-287, 289-291, 315-316, 322 Sennett, Richard 142, 297, 306 sensuous particular (see: particular) Simmel, Georg 155 SlaveCity 344-350

367

Index

Socrates 130 Sontag, Susan 324-325, 327 Stendhal 35, 115 Sterne, Laurence 11, 293 storyteller 151-153, 156-157, 164 Stravinksy, Igor 59, 197, 277, 279 subjectivity 109, 112, 124, 149, 175, 202, 220, 263, 313-314, 321 sublime 25, 46-47, 69, 128-129, 275, 298 Surrealism, Surrealist movement 14, 23, 49, 51-57, 62-65, 68, 72, 163, 167-168, 245 symbol, symbolism 26, 69, 77-82, 88, 95, 119, 125-126, 144, 207, 239, 253, 258, 332, 339 technological reproduction 16, 68, 87-97, 120, 149, 235 theology, theological 17, 76-81, 88, 95, 158, 165-166, 207, 230, 236, 248-250, 259, 288, 317 Tiedemann, Rolf 174, 226 Torah 17, 248 totality 71, 79-80, 94, 109, 145, 151, 157, 173, 191, 200, 204, 217-218, 222, 226, 233, 235-236, 239, 260-261, 282, 285, 290, 310-311, 315, 319 tragedy 73-75, 77, 79, 254 truth content (Wahrheitsgehalt) 230, 236-244, 256, 258-259, 265-266, 268-272, 274-276, 278, 283, 285, 290 twelve-tone music 113 Tzara, Tristan 51-53

universal, universality 26, 99-100, 104, 106, 108-115, 125, 139-140, 169, 171, 179, 185, 188, 191-194, 197-198, 200, 203-205, 226, 233, 270, 276, 286, 296, 306-308, 314-315, 318 urban, urbanization 83, 154, 156, 259, 344 utopia, utopian 12, 14, 34, 39, 49, 65, 82, 86, 102, 105, 111, 115-118, 137-138, 140, 142, 145-146, 160, 163, 167, 179, 213, 269, 282, 319, 341-343, 345, 348-349 Vattimo, Gianni 18, 123-124, 136-145 Vienna 23, 31, 41-44, 57-58, 63, 278 violence, violent 86, 156-157, 178, 192, 200, 239-240, 242, 246, 254, 257-258, 319 Virno, Paolo 106, 329 Wagner, Richard 59-60, 197, 264, 277-278 Warhol, Andy 130, 133, 220, 325, 334-335 Weber, Max 69, 103, 128, 178-179, 185-186, 203, 212, 219, 328, 330 Webern, Anton von 59 Wellmer, Albrecht 274-276, 317, 319 Wilde, Oscar 23, 298 Williams, Raymond 208, 215 Wohlfarth, Irving 157, 314 Wölfflin, Heinrich 131, 170 Wolin, Richard 14, 182, 200, 321 Woodmansee, Martha 28, 30 work category 64, 110, 118-119, 334 Žižek, Slavoj 146, 194, 208, 223-225, 333