Adorno and Art

Aesthetic Theory Contra Critical Theory

J. Hellings

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137315717
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

A comprehensive, critical and accessible account of Theodor W. Adorno's materialist-dialectical aesthetic theory of art from a contemporary perspective, this volume shows how Adorno's critical theory is awash with images crystallising thoughts to such a degree that it has every reason to be described as aesthetic.

Part I

Messages in a Bottle: Aesthetic Theory Contra Critical Theory

I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness which characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm. I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.¹

Introduction

In Part I I re-evaluate Adorno’s critical theory through a detailed analysis of his image of messages in a bottle. In overturning and displacing the critical genealogy of this image and in anchoring it to the construction of his aesthetic and the work of art, I find myself swimming against the tide of current opinion. I give buoyancy to Adorno’s image by severing it from the dead weight of its traditional, dogmatic, understanding as: (1) the position of the critical intellectual; (2) an (a)political aestheticist standpoint; and (3) a theoretical model for doing and distributing critical theory.

1

Critical Messages in a Bottle and Restoration

Performatively, perhaps, both the source and contents of this image remain enigmatic, fragmented, and difficult to read. Its history provides, as Walter Benjamin once phrased it, a ‘configuration pregnant with tensions.’¹ In this part, and its two excurses, I focus on a number of these antinomies, showing how this image has been used to support and attack the political dimensions of Adorno’s aesthetic and critical theory before subjecting this instrumentalisation to critique.

Recalling an anecdote of Hanns Eisler’s, which offers a clue to the origin of Adorno’s image, W. Martin Lüdke suggested, in conversation with Leo Löwenthal, that,

At the beginning of the war (...) some members of the Institute of Social Research were standing on the shore of the Pacific when suddenly Adorno, seized by melancholy, said: ‘We should throw out a message in a bottle.’ Eisler remarked dryly that he already knew how the message should read: ‘I feel so lousy.’²

The picture painted here expresses something of that subversive intrigue³ seen in Caspar David Friedrich’s earnest, romantic and melancholy Rückenfigur, Monk by the Sea (c. 1809), which was itself reinterpreted in photographic form with a good deal of playful parody, lighthearted caricature, and dry or sardonic humour by Bas Jan Ader in his, Farewell to Faraway Friends (1971). Both images show rearview figures in communion with the sea, lost to the sea. The romantic spirit or motif of being sensitive to and overcome by emotion, of dynamical sublime feeling (as outlined by Kant), of ecstatic encounters wherein ‘the subject becomes conscious of its own nullity and attains beyond it to what is other’ (AT 266), of the proto-religiosity and eternality of ‘oceanic feeling’ (as elaborated by Freud) – the contemplative outsider on the edge of society, alienated and alone, depicted variously by Friedrich and Ader, certainly speaks to the Institute members’ brutal experience of exile and the dark humour that did not escape them.

Stefan Müller-Doohm, in his biography of Adorno, also tracks the first uses of this image back to the early 1940s and implies that it appealed as much to Horkheimer as it did to Adorno as a descriptor for ‘the position of the critical intellectual.’⁴ This lousy-feeling, free-thinking, and solitary figure asks if and how it is possible to think at all amid such barbarism, whether or not the projects of critical and aesthetic theory as containers for truth can sustain the promise – equally interrupted and suspended (lost to the sea, shipwrecked) – of a future, revolutionary and utopian, society replete with emancipated and self-determining, mature and autonomous subjects.

Müller-Doohm cites Horkheimer’s statement of intent, ‘In view of what is now threatening to engulf Europe ... our present work is essentially destined to pass things down through the night that is approaching: a kind of message in a bottle’ (AB 262). This statement supports the familiar narrative whereby the creation, communication, and circulation of critical theory was reconfigured in response to the terror of praxis propagated by the authoritarian personalities and totalitarian regimes of fascism and Stalinism. Critical theory became, in Richard Leppert’s words, ‘an address to an uncertain future – what Adorno called “Flaschenposten,” or “messages in bottles,” tossed out to sea in hope of their later being found.’⁵

Geographically displaced in catastrophically dark times, the exiled scholars of the Frankfurt School may be forgiven a melancholy disposition and romantic sentimentality, imagining themselves shipwrecked or lost to the sea. Cut off from a form of rescue via readership they could only address their texts to an uncertain future, which must have offered little consolation. Müller-Doohm argues that the image ‘provided the underlying motif in the texts [Horkheimer and Adorno] worked on intensively from the beginning of 1942’ (AB 277), which engendered a ‘new conception of philosophy that was conceived as a collection of messages from the shipwrecked – messages that were as shocking in their content as they were fragmented in form’ (AB 278).⁶ Referring here to the coauthored standard-bearer of critical theory, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, first published during wartime, Müller-Doohm warns that although it was originally conceived as messages in a bottle, it ‘was supposed to be found and decoded,’ urgently (AB 334). Adorno and Horkheimer put it thus,

What is suspect is not, of course, the depiction of reality as hell but the routine invitation to break out of it. If that invitation can be addressed to anyone today, it is neither to the so-called masses nor to the individual, who is powerless, but rather to an imaginary witness, to whom we bequeath it so that it is not entirely lost with us. (DE 213)

This urgency of address and transmission to an imaginary witness of an uncertain future has been the source of some dispute. As Martin Jay observes,

Adorno, even in his bleakest moments, thus refused to relinquish Critical Theory’s desire for what Horkheimer called ‘the entirely other’ (...). He continued to defend the importance of critical thinking as ‘bottles thrown into the sea’ for future addressees, whose identity was still unknown. (...) For many activists in the German New Left and elsewhere, however, this ‘strategy of hibernation’, as Habermas dubbed it, seemed woefully deficient. Adorno, hearing many of his more uncompromising criticisms of late capitalist society hurled back at him, plaintively lamented in a widely reported statement that only further infuriated his critics, ‘When I made my theoretical model, I could not have guessed that people would want to realize it with Molotov cocktails.’⁷

Communication in late-capitalist societies was, for Adorno, always in crisis (DE 184 / AT 74), and this was nowhere seen more clearly than in artworks and the thought that accompanies their experience: ‘The communication of artworks with what is external to them, with the world from which they blissfully or unhappily seal themselves off, occurs through noncommunication; precisely thereby they prove themselves refracted’ (AT 5). Communication fails to communicate except indirectly as sealed messages in a bottle, as (philosophical) fragments and fragmentary addresses to and conditioned by indeterminate variables (the imaginary witness of an uncertain future). For, ‘[i]f the subject,’ in such societies, ‘is no longer able to speak directly, then at least it should – in accord with a modernism that has not pledged itself to absolute construction – speak through things, through their alienated and mutilated form’ (AT 118). It was not only the dire world situation that confirmed this belief (i.e., the depiction of reality as hell expressed in first generation critical theory, coupled to the critical theorist’s hope that things could be otherwise), but also aesthetics, music and the work of art, which, as Adorno put it in his Philosophy of New Music

protects its social truth by virtue of its antithesis to society, by virtue of isolation, yet by the same measure this isolation lets music wither. (...) For even the loneliest oration of the artist lives from the paradox that precisely by becoming isolated, by renouncing everyday communication, it speaks to all. (PNM 20)

As is the case for those addressors of messages in bottles – desperate seaman sailing into an uncertain future, shipwrecked desert island castaways, and exiled European scholars in unfamiliar American territories – artists pour contents into containers with conviction and consistency, select and shape materials that give frames and forms to ideas and sensations, before casting their works out into the uncertainty of the world in the hope of making contact with an imaginary witness and effecting a difference to the status quo. All art addresses an uncertain future, all art is dedicated to an unknown. ‘[N]o work of art,’ according to Adorno, ‘regardless what its maker thinks of it, is directed toward an observer, not even toward a transcendental subject of apperception; no artwork is to be described or explained in terms of the categories of communication’ (AT 109). Works of new art (and new music), then, function like messages in a bottle insofar as art ‘communicates through non-communication; it aims to blast away the things blocking mankind’s ears’ and eyes, ‘which they themselves hasten to close once more’ (MNM 265). Critical theory does not have exclusivity over the model of messages in a bottle. In fact, as I will argue, the work of art in Adorno’s aesthetics better expresses the paradox of art’s autonomy, splendid isolation, non-participatory participation and engagement through dis-engagement exemplified by the message in a bottle.⁸

Zygmunt Bauman expresses well ‘the open work’⁹ of this decisively indecisive economy and the amor fati particular to messages in a bottle,

Whoever wrote the message and put it in, sealed the bottle and threw it into the sea had no idea when (if ever) the bottle would be [found]; and whether [the recipient], (...) would be able and willing to read the text, understand the message, accept its content and put it to the kind of use the author intended. The entire equation consists of unknown variables (...). At best, [the author] could, repeat after Marx, Dixi et salvavi animam meam: [he] has (...) done all in his power to save the message from extinction. (...) The message in a bottle is a testimony to (...) the duration of hope, to the indestructibility of possibilities and the frailty of adversities that bar them from implementation. In Adorno’s rendition, critical theory is such a testimony – and this warrants the metaphor of a message in the bottle.¹⁰

The open work’s equation of unknown variables also describes the construction, distribution and reception of artworks ‘as indeterminate, as antithetical to definitions’ (AT 72), which may wordlessly express a lonely language of suffering and despair, but which always address themselves to uncertain futures and imaginary witnesses who may or may not be capable of reading them. As Adorno argued, ‘no artist knows with certainty whether anything will come of what he does, his happiness and his anxiety (...), subjectively registers something objective: the vulnerability of all art’ (AT 353–4). Aesthetics attempts to bring these unknown, but not unknowable, variables to knowledge. Aesthetics attempts answers for the questions enigmatic art poses. This can only culminate in a risky, speculative and inventive science. Perhaps, some critical theorists lack this speculative streak, this vulnerability?

At the end of an interview entitled, ‘Of Barricades and Ivory Towers,’ which examined the practical usefulness and concrete impact of Adorno’s critical theory (of society), in the context of direct political action, Adorno offered the following provocation; ‘I am not in the least ashamed to say quite frankly and openly that I am working on a big book on aesthetics’ (BIT 69). Michael Hirsch speaks for many contemporary commentators on Adorno when he writes that, ‘Adorno’s writings contain no detailed reflection on politics,’ but this judgement misses the mark.¹¹ Adorno’s model or image of messages in a bottle as a form of (non-)communication allows for no such immediate detailed reflection on politics. As Russell Berman and Peter Uwe Hohendahl both pointed out, many years ago, it is not through Adorno’s critical theory of society, but through his aesthetic theory of the work of art, particularly through the latter’s antinomical structure, that one discovers Adorno’s politics.¹² That society (and its politics) appears refracted in art and aesthetics is an idea Jay Bernstein’s book The Fate of Art unfolds:

From Adorno’s perspective, it is evident that art’s political moment resides in its refusal of immersion in given political programmes for cultural reform. Indeed, Adorno’s defense of this refusal, and his dismissal of engage art, has been the most criticized element of his theory. (...) [Art] practice is difficult because it is a stand-in for an absent politics, a placeholder for it, and hence it is always and necessarily less practical, less ‘political’ than the reason and praxis it is exemplifying. To politicize art is to employ the rationality it refuses for the sake of the rationality it enjoins. (...) Only by eschewing an immediate a...