Theodor Adorno and Film Theory

The Fingerprint of Spirit

B. Wall

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137306135
• eBook ISBN: 9781137306142
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Film & Video
• Index: Social Sciences

What is the fundamental nature of the filmic object: is it a commodity or is it, can it be, art? What would that mean - can it still matter? This book introduces the thought of Theodor Adorno into film studies to repair the schism that characterizes the field, as historical and cultural modes of analysis displace theoretical and philosophical ones.

Chapter 1

The Subject/Object of Cinema

The Maltese Falcon (1941)

Consider two roughly contemporary modernist works: Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, which premiered in 1953, and Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (1951). Both are, for what it’s worth, canonical, and though they differ in their media, how they have been taken up into various economies of culture—the elite and the popular—and many more ways that would be exhausting to detail, what prompts my comparison and what even might be said to permit their alignment under the rubric of modernism has to do with their relation to the object, which then comes to inform their status as aesthetic objects themselves. Godot, as is well known, structures itself around a central absence that can never be redeemed or made good, and Strangers follows the adventures of a lighter. In the former the object’s absence is felt by characters and audience alike as a bewildering loss that undoes the very possibility of meaning itself, and along with that the assumed integrity of character, the possibility of agency, and even the passage of time. In the latter the object’s trajectory, its circulation and exchange, promotes a remarkably similar anxiety; and even if ultimately this object’s presence is less traumatic than Godot’s absence, its status as a McGuffin, as mere pretext, is belied by its elevation to a similarly structural role, in which it determines the network of relations among characters by virtue not just of its ambivalent presence or absence but of this uncanny elevation to a very nearly metaphysical principle. If we worry after the lighter—and such worry is essential to the success of the film itself, a marker of suspense—such unease springs in part from the promotion of a banal, mundane, and contingent commodity to the ultimate determining instance of what will come to be found to be meaningful or even pleasurable about the film as such.

The object is absent; the object is present. Yet one might be forgiven for wondering if in some sense Godot’s absence is finally made good on the larger level of the play, as this absence comes to affirm the singularity—even the presence—of this modernist text itself, with this particularity, then, coming to stand for modernism’s own aspirations to produce the absolutely unique and single thing that resists exchange. Then dialectically the troubling being of Hitchcock’s lighter must also necessarily be marked by a kind of absence, as its own particularity—here, its nominal use value—is rigorously effaced consequential of its elevation into a well-nigh metaphysical principle; and even within the larger frame of Hitchcock’s oeuvre its immanent and scandalous particularity and power wanes by virtue of its alignment with its analogues—the glass of milk in Suspicion (1941), the key in Notorious (1946), and so on—that are so often on offer. Through its repetition the McGuffin also affirms its status as a trope, and even sanctions, at the far end, this mode of cultural production itself, the repetitions and seriality that characterize so much narrative film from before Hitchcock to after.

This is not to uphold heroic modernism over and against the commodities of the Culture Industry but rather to suggest the extent to which they inherit the same problematic. For the problem is not that of the absent and the present but rather of the single and the multiple. We find a quintessentially modernist desire: that the work should be singular, particular; that it is the work and not a work among others; that the singular will trump the multiple, even enfold the multiple, as in Mallarmé’s impossible dream of a “book of the world” or Joyce’s similarly dreamy Finnegans Wake, single works that mean to include all others. We might even include Guy Debord’s Mémoires, notoriously bound in industrial grade sandpaper so as to destroy the adjacent books on the shelf (or the mahogany coffee table beneath), here asserting its singularity via the negation of others; and Godot might fit in here, too, its central absence even more thoroughly negative than sandpaper. Yet even in this minimal list one might discern the impossibility of singularity itself and how it bespeaks its own necessary failure in advance—for there are many modernist monads. Conjoined with the modernist injunction to “make it new,” with its implication of a history that the modernist monad is at once to register and from which it is to separate itself, singularity can only appear as contradiction. Here the aesthetic idealism of modernism shows its basis in the material world; and here modernism’s aesthetic agenda evinces an affinity with the totalizing tendencies of philosophy and theory, under which swarms of particulars are compelled to submit to the concept, the idea. The one, singular, particular artwork seeks impossibly and variously to include, annihilate, transcend, or redeem all others, especially commodified mass culture, with which the modernist work is dialectically at one.1

For Frederic Jameson’s Hegelian-Marxist aesthetics, such a logic speaks to modernism’s desire for a transaesthetic vocation, the desire of art to be more than art, even transcend art, whether as praxis (Marx) or philosophy (Hegel)—but these perspectives imply a future, and a future in which art no longer seems necessary, whether because material exploitation and inequality have been resolved and no one needs a promesse du bonheur any longer (Marx) or because geist has shuffled off its material ballast (Hegel; these may be versions of the same unlikely event, if you ask Žižek; Jameson 1991, xvii). Put slightly differently, this transaesthetic vector points toward the arrival of what Lukács called the subject-object of history—the proletariat—or Hegel’s absolute spirit, an equally contentious sublation of the subject/object division, both of these material or ideal overcomings of oppositions. In this sense modernism is utopian, intimating the world to come; and in this sense, modernism’s agon over the single and the multiple leads to a thinking of how the future might derive from the present.

But Theodor Adorno, who will be much in evidence here, possesses a healthy allegiance to the bilderverbot, and for him there is no room in art or thought for images of a reconciled future, regardless of materialist or idealist inflection, images that can only be as impossible—or as false—as they are desirable. And yet, in one of his most quoted passages, he writes this: “The only philosophy which can be responsibly practiced in the face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption … Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light” (Adorno 1974, 247).

There is much we could discuss about this remarkable passage, but I will restrict myself to two points, one blindingly obvious and one a little less so, hopefully. First, here, as in so much of his thought, Adorno reveals himself as an heir to the Enlightenment and even Romanticism, as the light that the impossible perspective of redemption provides will never be called upon to shine up and reveal the face of God but, pointedly, is invoked to reveal the damaged world below—not the world to come, but the world, finally, as it is. Attendant here is a conception of thought not as that which subsumes the object, leaving no remainder, but rather as that which finally, impossibly, reveals the object. But second, his linking of light with redemption offers a half-rhyme with the thought of a contemporary of his, with whom we may be forgiven for thinking the German philosopher had little enough in common. It is André Bazin, film theorist and founder of Cahiers du Cinéma, anti-Marxist and Catholic, for whom the light passing through the lens and onto the emulsion, the light pouring from the projector and reflected by the screen, promises redemption. In his essay “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” Bazin argues that cinema is—or rather can be—objectivity in time, “change mummified.” A film as a product of mechanical and technological reproduction gives the medium a privileged relation to the real, enabling it to grasp and preserve the real as if without the intervention of a troublesome—interested, limited—subjectivity. And it is this privileged relation, this technical objectivity, that informs what he names the “mummy complex”: an ancient yet intrinsic human desire to step out of time and preserve the moment and duration, the object, real space, and redeem it in and as the image. “Redeem” because every film and photograph potentially bears endless witness to the beauty of God’s creation, a beauty so generous and multiple that it risks being lost without these singular, mechanical traces of its miraculous being and transience (Bazin 1967, 9–16).

It is surely easy enough to criticize Bazin’s explicit program, but any of us with a smart phone and a child or cute pet should probably think twice. More profitable, I think, would be to consider the relation between Bazin and Adorno, to ask after the relationship between the image and its object. Adorno writes, “Duration of the transient, an element of art that at the same time perpetuates the mimetic heritage, is one of the categories that dates back to primeval times … [T]he image itself … is one of regeneration … Yet it is apparent that precisely in the early history the achievement of duration was accompanied by consciousness of its futility, perhaps even that such duration—in the spirit of the prohibition on graven images—was tied up with a sense of guilt toward the living” (Adorno 1997, 280). As in Bazin, art here for Adorno suggests that resemblance—mimesis—is in the service of preservation, a desire to interrupt the flow of history itself and bring the past into the present that it might seem regenerated, its pulse might throb again and not remain merely past, inert, and dead. But unlike Bazin (and shades of Totem and Taboo!), for Adorno such mummification brings not redemption but guilt. The “mummy complex” loses its innocence: “One of the models of art may be the corpse in its transfixed and imperishable form. In that case, the reification of the formerly living would date back to primordial times, as did the revolt against death as a magical nature-bound practice” (Adorno 1997, 281). Art preserves—reifies—the dead at the cost of the guilt of the living, who must then invoke the ban on images to manage that guilt, which is not solely survivor’s guilt but also the guilt that inheres in the willful alchemy of transforming subjects into aesthetic objects, essentially a second murder of the already dead. Thus art derives, too, from sacrifice, as this repetition of death entails the surrender of the dead and their deliverance into the second death of art, their singularity sacrificed so that they might persist as art. This transubstantiation of the dead is also mirrored in the fetish that precedes art, offering a magical connection between the material and its representation. For the fetish must be metonymic rather than mimetic or metaphorical—the doll must include human hair if it is to function—and so the object might persist in and finally by means of its representation. But at the same time, sacrifice and the fetish hint at what is to come: “What is done to the spear, the hair, the name of the enemy, is also to befall his person; the sacrificial animal is slain in the place of the god. The substitution which takes place in sacrifice marks a step towards discursive logic” (Adorno and Horkheimer 2002, 6). Sacrifice, magic, and the fetish may come to lead to what is here labeled discursive logic, but what stands behind that is identity thinking itself, the reduction and imprisonment of subject and object both by the concept. And yet art sits only ambivalently amid this fraught constellation. Deriving from sacrifice, magic, and fetishism it nonetheless remains distinct, even coming to use elements from these to its own ends: “Although magical fetishes are one of the historical roots of art, a fetishistic element remains admixed in artworks, an element that goes beyond commodity fetishism” (Adorno 1997, 227). Crucially, and not incidentally, this will entail for Adorno a refigured concept of mimesis in art, which will in turn demand not this literal preservation or mirror-image identity but rather a playful and nonrepressive transformation of the object in the image—that is, the image, art, shifts from expressing its identity with its object, and thus its guilt-inspiring dominance over it, and becomes something more symbolic—more autonomous.

If for Adorno art’s preservation of the dead entails the guilt of the living that then entails the birth of a mimesis more playful than exact, for Bazin the preservation of the dead, as well as that of the object and real time, demands of the image a scrupulous and exact fidelity to its object. He writes, “If the history of the plastic arts is less a matter of their aesthetic than of their psychology then it will be seen to be essentially the story of resemblance, or, if you will, of realism” (Bazin 1967, 9). Indeed, one of the most striking points that Bazin will make has to do not just with the affinity of the apparatus with the objects of the world but with how this affinity seems to afford to us nothing less than the fulfillment of phenomenology: “Now, for the first time, the image of things is likewise the image of their duration, change mummified, as it were” (Bazin 1967, 15). The image coincides with its object; and indeed Bazin will go on to claim that the image itself is as unique and natural as any object it takes up—images are as natural and thing-like as snowflakes, in his own memorable image. Now we would surely have good reason to ask after the extent to which any film or photograph might truly be an unmediated apprehension of its object; but what might be most radical about Bazin’s claim is this possibility of grasping objects as they are in themselves, apart from the web of perception and consciousness—as they are, perhaps, to God. For Bazin cinema answers the call.

What is at stake here, and what effectively links Bazin with Adorno, is the thinking of a noncoercive relationship between the image and its object—which is another way of expressing a desire for a noncoercive relationship between subject and object. From absence and presence to the one and the multiple to the future and the present; from the living and the dead to the subject and the object, all these oppositions necessarily impinge on our thinking about art and film.

These oppositions and contradictions are only apparently opposed at all. This is not necessarily to say, as in deconstruction, for example, that the priority of the single over the multiple harbors a secret and suspicious metaphysics; nor is it to say that the divide between the living and the dead is to be overcome in a crude dialectical sublation. This is to say that these oppositions must be both true and false: as Adorno writes of the subject and object’s separation, “[t]rue, because in the cognitive realm it serves to express the real separation, the dichotomy of the human condition, a coercive development. False, because the resulting separation must not be hypostatized, not magically transformed into an invariant” (Adorno 1998, 246). That is, descriptively the separation of subject and object is true, and not just in terms of Bazin’s sense of our isolation from the object-world that we desire to overcome with film, but also cognitively, in that our concepts are never identical to the object, just as the object always falls short of our conception of it. Thought and the object do not meet without producing remainders on either side; and it is precisely these remainders that bespeak the falsity of a rationality that is normative, that assumes that the subject’s concept might be equal to the object, that the two correspond—which is really a cover for the subject’s dominance of the object. Thus “[t]he only way to make out objectivity is to reflect, at each historic and each cognitive step, on what is then presented as subject and object, as well as on the mediations” (Adorno 1998, 253). We might do worse than to take this for a description of Adorno’s critical program as such.

Film fits only ambiguously within the modernist program I’ve sketchily outlined here. It offers works that it is inarguably useful to think of as singular, that seek to include or trump all other examples, as in Godard’s delirious, encyclopedic Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–98), an ambitious attempt to “sublate” the medium itself as a kind of class of all classes; or alternately his Weekend (1967), which announces “La fin du cinéma,” a critical gesture that aims to negate the medium’s history in the hope that political praxis might replace consumption. However, such filmic examples must always struggle to assert their singularity over and against their status as film—that is, as mechanically reproduced and irreducibly multiple when not utter commodities. Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility” aims to solve this problem by way of offering a genealogy of this singularity itself, now labeled aura and no longer specifically modernist but rather revealed to be a real illusion, an illegitimate claim of transcendence that masks a history of ritual, discipline, mystification, and manipulation (Benjamin 2002). Aura, less a quality of the work itself, is to be conceived as supplied by the disciplinary and institutional contexts that come to house the work, pointedly to keep it at a distance from the masses, who in their turn can only come to it in reverence or puzzlement if at all. Alternately, for Benjamin, new forms such as film promise the possibility of a more critical approach to the work of art, with consciousness and perception no longer taxed by distance, under the spell of the aura: brought close, the work must submit to a dispassionate gaze of an audience in distraction.

This essay, though, in the authority it still possesses in film and media studies, radiates an aura of its own, and this despite its otherwise tireless if finally ambivalent undoing of the aura as disciplinary and mystifying. This is to wonder after the extent to which modern and modernist texts, a rubric under which we surely must include Benjamin and Beckett, both possess an aura and depend utterly upon their technical reproducibility, existing in innumerable copies, separate from their origins, eluding the division of the manual and the technical and so on, such that, while meeting the criteria Benjamin establishes for the technically reproduced work, Godot’s text and performances cannot be said to be lacking in aura. And so Benjamin’s own text—how distant does it now seem?—itself comes to be characterized by an aura, which, if not the product of the mystifications of church or state, derives from the failure of film to be what he hoped—finally, we must suspect, a problem of the essay as much as the medium.2

For film it seems more productive to consider this dialectic of modernism and mass culture in terms of the necessary relationship between aesthetic technique and industrial technology, particularly in that film’s dependence on industrial technology (as a means of reproduction and circulation) dominates aesthetic technique (as the internal organization of aesthetic material) in a manner distinct from earlier aesthetic modes and forms. For Adorno, again in opposition to Bazin, film as an industrial technology that permits that seemingly objective and redemptive capture of the object-world is constraining in at least two respects: first, its ties to an indexicality or an older mimesis can only be felt as limiting, compromising the artist’s freedom and the possibility of an absolute construction; and second, in its blurring of the former distinction between technique and technology, film comes to side with what Adorno identifies as the inherent tendencies of all technology—that is, the domination of nature. Again, to differentiate this from Bazin, for Adorno the indexical or iconic image under modernity may make for good theology (though that is a loaded question), but it can now only make for bad art, as it limits the artist to that older aesthetic mode of realism while simultaneously concealing a covert agenda—the domination of nature, an assertion of the sovereign distinction between subject and object—even as technology and its attendant rationality makes film ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Fingerprint of Spirit
• 1: The Subject/Object of Cinema: The Maltese Falcon (1941)
• 2: “A Deeper Breath”: From Body to Spirit in Kiss Me Deadly (1955)
• 3: Negative Dioretix: Repo Man (1984)
• 4: “Jackie Treehorn Treats Objects Like Women!”: Two Types of Fetishism in The Big Lebowski (1998)
• Notes
• References