'We cannot know what the author's intentions were'
Espen Hammer, Adorno's Modernism: Art, Experience, and Catastrophe
Cambridge University Press, 242pp, £64.99, ISBN 9781107121591
reviewed by Stuart Walton
The verdict passed on culture by the historical catastrophes of the twentieth century, that it had failed in its innermost core by failing to reach the innermost core of human beings, was one of Theodor Adorno's most non-negotiable contentions. What was left of culture after Auschwitz was pure ideology, or else the delusive puerility of the culture industry. It had failed according to its own criteria. Not only had it not exorcised the demons of social turbulence according to the Aristotelian model, but it had fallen hopelessly short in the programmatic task ratified by Romantic aesthetics, to contribute to the philosophical education of humankind. It had proved helpless against mass murder, in the face of which its obdurate persistence added ideological insult to world-historical injury.
In a society that had achieved a functionally complete dominance over its members, works of art – even the classics – could only help fill a leisure time now reconceived as nothing other than the preparation for more work. Even where art fancied itself as an oppositional force to prevailing alienation – in the didactic theatre of Brecht, the prose texts and plays of post-war Absurdism, the calculated outrages of the Vienna Actionists, the glossolalia produced under the influence of psychedelic intoxicants, bebop jazz – all it did was confirm the victory of total administration, while total administration itself had produced its own cultural apparatus in the form of popular entertainments like Hollywood films, soap operas, hit-songs, radio stations that played extracts of classical music. If the products of the culture industry were what played on the cinema screen of post-war society, then what was once high culture had become the detritus swept from the floor after the audience had left.
A dialectical aesthetics informed the correspondence between Adorno and Walter Benjamin in the 1930s, forming one of the richest meditations about the aspirations and function of art since Kant's Critique of Judgment. It was a theme that Adorno declined to relinquish throughout his career, as is attested by the monumental character of what became his final work, the not-quite-finished Aesthetic Theory, published in a speculatively reassembled form by his widow Gretel and Rolf Tiedemann. Behind this stands a massive corpus of musicological writings and literary essays, all of which represent ceaseless accretions of the critique of triumphalist rationalism inaugurated in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, co-written with Max Horkheimer out of the exigencies of wartime exile.
If Adorno notoriously refused legitmacy to overtly politically engaged art, he nonetheless saw the chance of a genuine, spiritually authentic response to reified social relations in certain tendencies in high modernism, from the free atonal compositions of Schönberg in the period before the first world war, to the deconstructive paintings of Picasso, Kafka's bleak parables, and the anti-novels and autistic dramatic works of Beckett. Espen Hammer's new work on Adorno's aesthetics is a patiently attentive, but not uncritical, attempt to reconstruct the polemical currents that underpin this body of work, posing along the way the vital question of what becomes of a modernist aesthetics once the artistic tendencies that sustained it have been brushed aside by a postmodernism throwing open its embrace to virtually everything except modernism itself.
Hammer traces the contours of Adorno's various engagements: with natural beauty and other questions from the legacy of Kantian aesthetics, his encounter with Beckett and the search for a non-discursive, rather than predicative, truth-content of artworks, as well as the dialectic of autonomy and heteronomy that obtains between an art that keeps its distance from social use-value and the degraded productions of the culture industry. A concluding chapter attempts to ascertain what would seem to be for Adorno the true contemporary artwork: an entity that reflects what both art and society have objectively become by speaking eloquently of human suffering, the registering of which is what has happened to artistic mimesis, when neither shouting angrily about unhappiness nor trying to drown it in laughter is to be tolerated. On this last point, Hammer expresses a Wittgensteinian scepticism: can suffering be expressed after all by something that cannot itself suffer?
As the author's earlier study, Adorno and the Political (2006), indicated, Hammer is a sensitively attuned reader of Adorno, whose frequent challenges to the Frankfurt thinker's propositions issue from a properly articulated grasp of their complexity, rather than the shallow misreadings all too typical elsewhere in the Anglophone tradition. He does not, for example, consider that Adorno quite convincingly dismisses existentialist readings of Beckett in the famous essay on Endgame. He seizes, as others have, on Beckett's bemused correction of Adorno's suggestion in that essay that one of the derivations of Hamm's name is Hamlet, the first fully dramatic hero of the theatre, now grown old and even more impotent than he was at Elsinore. Adorno's riposte, to the effect that no artist can control all the semantic ramifications of a work once it has become public, gets shortish shrift from Hammer, who feels that if an artist says that something isn't what somebody else said it was, that probably ought to decide the matter.
The tale told of Beckett supervising a production of Waiting for Godot at the Riverside Theatre, London, in 1984, in which he is said to have told the actors, in response to a specific interpretative query, 'We cannot know what the author's intentions were', would scarcely seem to decide the matter belatedly in Adorno's favour, since Beckett was saying not that the author's intentions do not signify, but that it is precisely impossible to know them. This point, though, is just what the existence of the artwork itself, and its relation to truth, stand in defiance of. Of all the various ways in which one might seek to conceal one's intent, writing, composing and painting are among the least efficient, not least because their products, even if not precise articulations of authorial intention, turn out to have intentions of their own.
With forensic precision, Hammer identifies what he considers a lacuna in the theory of the culture industry, in which Adorno tended to see social heteronomy incarnate: 'Is the claim that the judgments we make are adopted from a heteronomous source, leaving the content of experience untouched? Or is it that what we perceive in the “real” world is continuous with the perception we have of persons and objects via the industry?' In other words, have the discursive and emotional protocols of the culture industry marginalised modern experience, or have they displaced it entirely by substituting themselves for it? The answer, for Adorno, was undoubtedly the latter. There is no modern experience worthy of the name, which is why the culture industry achieves such an easy sell in providing the semblance of it.
Attempts to subject Adorno's more untrammelled pronouncements to the decorum of an analytical approach will nearly always be blown on to the rocks by his rhetorical tempests. In the Minima Moralia, he declares that, 'In psychoanalysis, nothing is true except the exaggerations', a proposition that he carried over into much of his philosophical and aesthetic writing as a way of blasting open the sclerotic thought-forms of bourgeois conformism and its mantras. This is not to suggest that, like some latter-day overpaid opinion columnist, he is prepared to argue a case that he doesn't believe for the sheer aggravating hell of it, but that a thought that remains bound to the consensual forms of instrumental rationality will stand no chance of prising apart the frozen layers of an irrational society.
The book's concluding remarks give some disappointing succour to the caricature of Adorno's post-war thought as representing an 'elitist withdrawal' from social responsibility, even the very 'resignation' that a late essay of that name, one of his last, confronted head-on. When official culture tends only to affirmation of the existent, artworks that implicitly refuse it by taking on its own deformations as their own, giving the lie to the consoling function of art, and revoking Hegel's case that art was over because history was already well on the way to realising human freedom, represent a way of resisting resignation too. The accusation of elitism is the recourse of a temperament that thinks that popular cultural forms, precisely by virtue of their being popular, speak the language of the people, as opposed to subserving an ideology that everywhere speaks untruths to the powerless. Elitism is the very charge that the spokespeople of a predatory culture in full cry, from tabloid editors to reactionary comedians and mass media micro-celebrities, level against those who scruple to join the pack.
In a society that had achieved a functionally complete dominance over its members, works of art – even the classics – could only help fill a leisure time now reconceived as nothing other than the preparation for more work. Even where art fancied itself as an oppositional force to prevailing alienation – in the didactic theatre of Brecht, the prose texts and plays of post-war Absurdism, the calculated outrages of the Vienna Actionists, the glossolalia produced under the influence of psychedelic intoxicants, bebop jazz – all it did was confirm the victory of total administration, while total administration itself had produced its own cultural apparatus in the form of popular entertainments like Hollywood films, soap operas, hit-songs, radio stations that played extracts of classical music. If the products of the culture industry were what played on the cinema screen of post-war society, then what was once high culture had become the detritus swept from the floor after the audience had left.
A dialectical aesthetics informed the correspondence between Adorno and Walter Benjamin in the 1930s, forming one of the richest meditations about the aspirations and function of art since Kant's Critique of Judgment. It was a theme that Adorno declined to relinquish throughout his career, as is attested by the monumental character of what became his final work, the not-quite-finished Aesthetic Theory, published in a speculatively reassembled form by his widow Gretel and Rolf Tiedemann. Behind this stands a massive corpus of musicological writings and literary essays, all of which represent ceaseless accretions of the critique of triumphalist rationalism inaugurated in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, co-written with Max Horkheimer out of the exigencies of wartime exile.
If Adorno notoriously refused legitmacy to overtly politically engaged art, he nonetheless saw the chance of a genuine, spiritually authentic response to reified social relations in certain tendencies in high modernism, from the free atonal compositions of Schönberg in the period before the first world war, to the deconstructive paintings of Picasso, Kafka's bleak parables, and the anti-novels and autistic dramatic works of Beckett. Espen Hammer's new work on Adorno's aesthetics is a patiently attentive, but not uncritical, attempt to reconstruct the polemical currents that underpin this body of work, posing along the way the vital question of what becomes of a modernist aesthetics once the artistic tendencies that sustained it have been brushed aside by a postmodernism throwing open its embrace to virtually everything except modernism itself.
Hammer traces the contours of Adorno's various engagements: with natural beauty and other questions from the legacy of Kantian aesthetics, his encounter with Beckett and the search for a non-discursive, rather than predicative, truth-content of artworks, as well as the dialectic of autonomy and heteronomy that obtains between an art that keeps its distance from social use-value and the degraded productions of the culture industry. A concluding chapter attempts to ascertain what would seem to be for Adorno the true contemporary artwork: an entity that reflects what both art and society have objectively become by speaking eloquently of human suffering, the registering of which is what has happened to artistic mimesis, when neither shouting angrily about unhappiness nor trying to drown it in laughter is to be tolerated. On this last point, Hammer expresses a Wittgensteinian scepticism: can suffering be expressed after all by something that cannot itself suffer?
As the author's earlier study, Adorno and the Political (2006), indicated, Hammer is a sensitively attuned reader of Adorno, whose frequent challenges to the Frankfurt thinker's propositions issue from a properly articulated grasp of their complexity, rather than the shallow misreadings all too typical elsewhere in the Anglophone tradition. He does not, for example, consider that Adorno quite convincingly dismisses existentialist readings of Beckett in the famous essay on Endgame. He seizes, as others have, on Beckett's bemused correction of Adorno's suggestion in that essay that one of the derivations of Hamm's name is Hamlet, the first fully dramatic hero of the theatre, now grown old and even more impotent than he was at Elsinore. Adorno's riposte, to the effect that no artist can control all the semantic ramifications of a work once it has become public, gets shortish shrift from Hammer, who feels that if an artist says that something isn't what somebody else said it was, that probably ought to decide the matter.
The tale told of Beckett supervising a production of Waiting for Godot at the Riverside Theatre, London, in 1984, in which he is said to have told the actors, in response to a specific interpretative query, 'We cannot know what the author's intentions were', would scarcely seem to decide the matter belatedly in Adorno's favour, since Beckett was saying not that the author's intentions do not signify, but that it is precisely impossible to know them. This point, though, is just what the existence of the artwork itself, and its relation to truth, stand in defiance of. Of all the various ways in which one might seek to conceal one's intent, writing, composing and painting are among the least efficient, not least because their products, even if not precise articulations of authorial intention, turn out to have intentions of their own.
With forensic precision, Hammer identifies what he considers a lacuna in the theory of the culture industry, in which Adorno tended to see social heteronomy incarnate: 'Is the claim that the judgments we make are adopted from a heteronomous source, leaving the content of experience untouched? Or is it that what we perceive in the “real” world is continuous with the perception we have of persons and objects via the industry?' In other words, have the discursive and emotional protocols of the culture industry marginalised modern experience, or have they displaced it entirely by substituting themselves for it? The answer, for Adorno, was undoubtedly the latter. There is no modern experience worthy of the name, which is why the culture industry achieves such an easy sell in providing the semblance of it.
Attempts to subject Adorno's more untrammelled pronouncements to the decorum of an analytical approach will nearly always be blown on to the rocks by his rhetorical tempests. In the Minima Moralia, he declares that, 'In psychoanalysis, nothing is true except the exaggerations', a proposition that he carried over into much of his philosophical and aesthetic writing as a way of blasting open the sclerotic thought-forms of bourgeois conformism and its mantras. This is not to suggest that, like some latter-day overpaid opinion columnist, he is prepared to argue a case that he doesn't believe for the sheer aggravating hell of it, but that a thought that remains bound to the consensual forms of instrumental rationality will stand no chance of prising apart the frozen layers of an irrational society.
The book's concluding remarks give some disappointing succour to the caricature of Adorno's post-war thought as representing an 'elitist withdrawal' from social responsibility, even the very 'resignation' that a late essay of that name, one of his last, confronted head-on. When official culture tends only to affirmation of the existent, artworks that implicitly refuse it by taking on its own deformations as their own, giving the lie to the consoling function of art, and revoking Hegel's case that art was over because history was already well on the way to realising human freedom, represent a way of resisting resignation too. The accusation of elitism is the recourse of a temperament that thinks that popular cultural forms, precisely by virtue of their being popular, speak the language of the people, as opposed to subserving an ideology that everywhere speaks untruths to the powerless. Elitism is the very charge that the spokespeople of a predatory culture in full cry, from tabloid editors to reactionary comedians and mass media micro-celebrities, level against those who scruple to join the pack.