Adorno and Performance

W. Daddario, K. Gritzner, W. Daddario, K. Gritzner

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137429872
• eBook ISBN: 9781137429889
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Art General

Adorno and Performance offers the first comprehensive examination of the vital role of performance within the philosophy of Theodor W. Adorno. Capacious in its ramifications for contemporary life, the term 'performance' here unlocks Adorno's dialectical thought process, which aimed at overcoming the stultifying uniformity of instrumental reason.

1

Of Adorno’s Beckett

Michal Kobialka

“Performance” and “performativity” are terms which are not necessarily immediately associated with Theodor W. Adorno, but with John L. Austin’s lectures delivered at Harvard in 1955. However, could Adorno’s philosophical practice and insights of yesteryear, and to be more precise his 1958 essay, “Trying to Understand Endgame,” point to a different trajectory in how we think about “performance” and “performativity” within the rubric of the pragmatics of language, the social sciences, or theatre/performance studies and, as a corollary, open up our understanding of performance and performativity in the present moment? To paraphrase Adorno’s comment made in “Why is the New Art So Hard to Understand?” (1931), I am asking historiographically and sociologically, not aesthetically.

If such a possibility is tangible, then how is it possible to think about the term “performative” without “it” becoming part of the process demanding that we expose its unpleasant implications (gender inequality, identity construction, or our own metaphysical illusions)? How can we avoid the process of abstracting, should I say academic or aesthetic abstracting (a real abstraction, as defined by Alfred Sohn-Rethel in another context) which is blind to that history and those social processes which produce knowledge for the benefit or the self-preservation of academic disciplines and fields? Sohn-Rethel shows that abstraction, other than that of thought, is produced by the social activity linked to market forces rather than induced, historical rather than ahistorical, economic rather than anti-economic, and can be used to account for specific transformations or mutations within philosophical epistemology and for specific transformations or mutations of its practical applications (Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labour).

Following Sohn-Rethel’s insights, let me ask: what is the use (or use value) of the performative today, as opposed to its use (or use value) in speech act theory, science and technology studies, economic sociology, and gender/queer or performance studies in the last decades of the twentieth century? If, as we are told, the goal today is no longer the representation of truth but performativity, how does this input/output equation of capitalist efficiency, advanced by Jean-François Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition (1979), participate in the act of interpellating individuals into subjects and prescribed subject positions? If indeed, as Michel Foucault would have it, representation is inadequate for capturing the contours of, or revealing the truth about, the subject or the object, then should the performative replace it and help us understand a new trajectory in the production of the subject/object in various discursive formations (Foucault, Discipline and Punish)? At the same time, how does the critique of the performative (launched, for example, by Jürgen Habermas, Terry Eagleton, or Slavoj Žižek) transform not only the investigation of the subject or object positioned within the forcible and reiterative practices of regulatory regimes (as noted by Jacques Derrida in Limited, Inc. (1971) and Judith Butler in Excitable Speech (1997)), but also the historiographic encounter with the performative?¹ What is the relationship between power structures and performatives, that is, between power structures and popular or ritualistic acts that are formed by, enhanced by, or resistant to those structures? How does one give voice to the events and activities that maneuver or are maneuvered toward the construction of homogeneous thinking, acting, performing, and doing? And how does one enunciate the ever-present conflict between what is visible and invisible, seen and unseen, speakable and unspeakable and what is permitted, when, by whom, under what circumstances – political, ideological, economic, etc.?

The questions multiply. So do the different trajectories marking the shifts and transformations within the performative – from the avant-garde desire to annex modernist reality to the postmodern condition of Jean-François Lyotard; from the cultural turn of the 1970s to the performative and ethical turn of the 1980s and 1990s; from the reorientation of critical studies after the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989 to the current neoliberal imaginary of the new materialism in the age of interactive media and Web technology. The proliferation of these trajectories unequivocally suggests that, understood historiographically, the performative is produced by social activity, rather than induced; that it is historical rather than ahistorical, economic rather than anti-economic, and has been used to account for specific transformations or mutations within philosophical epistemology since the 1950s and for specific transformations or mutations of its practical applications in the present.²

Let me return to the opening gambit: could Adorno’s philosophical practice and insights of yesteryear, and to be more precise his 1958 essay, “Trying to Understand Endgame,” point to a different trajectory in situating “performance” and “performativity” within the rubrics of the pragmatics of language, the social sciences, or theatre/performance studies and, as a corollary, open up our understanding of performance and performativity in the present moment?

I am motivated by the materiality of the encounter with “performance” and “performativity” and the kind of move one finds in, for example, Walter Benjamin who, while writing critically about the avant-garde and performance some 30 years before the institutionalization of Performance Studies at New York University, exemplifies this materialism by drawing attention to the notion of historical materialism and the object in the state of unrest – that object which exposes itself to reveal what the dominant cultural or ideological formations have submerged in it so that the object could become the narration readable and teachable to all (Benjamin, “Eduard Fuchs”). I am motivated by the idea of the materiality of the encounter with “performance” and “performativity” and the kind of move one finds in, for example, Adorno who, while talking about why new art is so hard to understand makes a clear distinction between art, which possesses a certain immediacy of effect that makes it understandable, and the difficulty of understanding new art.

[N]amely the experience that the production of art, its material, the demands and tasks that confront the artist when he works, have become divorced in principle from consumption, i.e. from the presumptions, claims, and possibilities of comprehension that the reader, viewer, listener brings to the work of art. (Adorno, “Why is the New Art?” 128)

“Trying to Understand Endgame” is dedicated to S.B., in memory of Paris in Fall 1958. It opens with a statement directly inserting Beckett’s oeuvre into the Adorno-Sartre debate about existentialism, which will be continued over the next few years as so poignantly exemplified by Adorno’s 1962 essay, “Commitment.” In the essay on Endgame, Adorno’s encounter with Beckett’s oeuvre takes the form of being

shot through with reminiscences of the categories of absurdity, situation, and decision or the failure to decide, the way medieval ruins permeate Kafka’s monstrous house in the suburbs. Now and then the windows fly open and one sees the black, starless sky of something like philosophical anthropology. (Adorno, “Endgame” 241)

Whereas in Sartre, according to Adorno, the possibility of staring at the black, starless sky of philosophical anthropology does not lead to anything daring because it decays into “cultural commodities,” in Beckett, “the form overtakes what is expressed and changes it” (Adorno, “Commitment” 301; “Endgame” 241).

The impulse to do so operates on two levels simultaneously: on the level of aesthetic production in the present as well as on the level of understanding “absurdity” in a manner which clashes with the Western pathos of the universal. This double operation allows Adorno to access the materiality of reified categories of thought that had served as the basis of knowledge in order to draw attention to Sartre’s failure to see the categories of absurdity, situation, and decision, or the failure to decide, as pieces out of aestheticized reality that Sartre attempts to deaestheticize. This Sartrean de-aestheticization itself is the appearance of form. This form – this presentation itself or appearance itself – is not immediately critical. Indeed, as it has been argued, many artistic endeavors may present the processes of commodification perfectly, but are not necessarily, nor do they have the ability to be, critical of it. As Pedro Rocha de Oliveira insists:

The point of the critical approach that is oriented by the concept of aestheticization of reality is to neither be convinced to follow the example nor compelled to accept the commentary, but rather to intervene in the communication between art and reality and inquire, among other things, what makes it possible. (de Oliveira, “Aestheticization” 276)

Even if this critical approach is followed, one needs to be aware that “the aesthetic representation of hope takes place according to processes that are entirely different from those that bring about real hope in a revolutionary process” (277). That is to say, it may promote confusion between representation and the reality where this hope did not materialize. Thus, an “empowering” ending of a play, a novel, or a devised performance may be nothing more than a pseudo-activity that promotes the importance of keeping good thoughts in one’s mind. Ultimately, the critical approach revealing the social status of the appearing categories is not political action. This stalemate between the critical approach and political action can only be resolved when it is understood that if art is able to criticize itself, it is because society criticizes it. Consequently, “the result of formal criticism of art, therefore, should be concrete criticism of social organizations and of the inner contradictions of that social organization” (279).

Let me substantiate this thought with a statement by Adorno, which not only illuminates de Oliveira’s comment but also shifts the focus toward the technique of the work of art. It may help us to think about a work of art not in terms of representation or presentation, but in terms of an autonomous work of art understood as a determinate negation, pointing to specific contradictions between what art claims to deliver and what it actually delivers. Art, in achieving identity or a certain immediacy of effect that makes it understandable, suppresses differences and diversity producing, as suggested by Adorno in “Resignation” (1968), pseudo-activity – that is, an “action that overdoses and aggravates itself for the sake of its own publicity, without admitting to itself to what extent it serves as a substitute satisfaction, elevating itself into an end in itself” (Adorno, “Resignation” 291). That is, because of capitalism’s structure, and his own insistent emphasis on art’s autonomy in the era of the culture industry, Adorno doubts both the effectiveness and the legitimacy of agitative or deliberately consciousness-raising art. Yet he does see politically engaged art as a corrective to mainstream art. Under the conditions of late (global) capitalism, the politically most effective art is that which so thoroughly works out its own internal contradictions that the hidden contradictions in society can no longer be ignored. Here is Adorno’s statement:

The critical relation to tradition as the medium of preservation is not only concerned with the past but also with the quality of aesthetic production in the present. To the extent it is authentic, this production does not begin cavalierly from scratch, nor does it attempt to outdo one contrived method with another. Rather it is a determinate negation. In Beckett’s plays the traditional form of the drama is transformed in all respects through parody. (“On Tradition” (1966) 80)

In Beckett’s Endgame, the traditional form of drama is transformed in all respects through its inherent structure, in which the relationship between Hamm and Clov cannot be understood or grasped in terms of traditional dramatic structure, because in the most concrete form it shows “nothing.”

At the same time, in Beckett, notes Adorno, “literary method surrenders to absurdity without preconceived intentions” (“Endgame” 241). Thus, absurdity is no longer a doctrinal universality; instead, absurdity is that which “dismisses existentialist conformity, the notion that one ought to be what one is, and with it easy comprehensibility of presentation” (241). Indeed, as Adorno observes in another context, this comprehensibility of presentation is a sign of the reification of art which is the result of a socio-economic development “that transforms all goods into consumer goods, makes them abstractly exchangeable, and has therefore torn them asunder from the immediacy of use” (“Why Is the New Art?” 128). Beckett makes us aware of this phenomenon by reducing to cultural trash whatever philosophy might have provided us with in the past. “For Beckett, culture swarms and crawls” (Adorno, “Endgame” 240). These convulsions in Endgame expose modernism not as a literary movement or condition, not to say, yet another turn, but as what is obsolete in modernity understood most broadly.

What is obsolete in Beckett’s/Adorno’s modernity is revealed both in language and in thought, two of the most prominent qualitative categories of traditional drama. “Language, regressing, demolishes that obsolete material” (241). It annihilates the meaning the culture once had; the events cease to be inherently meaningful and, consequently, perturb the aesthetic substance of what appears and “what was intended becomes an illusion” (242). Similarly,

[t]he shock that accompanied the new artistic movements immediately before the war is the expression of the fact that the break between production and consumption became radical; that for this reason art no longer has the task of representing a reality that is preexisting for everyone in common, but rather of revealing, in isolation, the very crack that reality would like to cover over in order to exist in safety; and that, in so doing, it repels reality. (Adorno, “Why is the New Art?” 142)

Thus, the thought becomes both the means to produce meaning in the work – here, the means to reveal the very crack reality would like to cover over – and the means to repel reality. “There is no longer any substantive, affirmative metaphysical meaning that could provide dramatic form with its law and its epiphany” (Adorno, “Endgame” 242). In Endgame, this explosion of metaphysical meaning, which, in the past, guaranteed the aesthetic unity of the Western work of art, causes drama and, by extension, theatre/performance, to “crumble with a necessity and stringency in no way equal to that of the traditional canon of aesthetic dramatic form” (242). After Endgame, there is no more drama, unless Endgame is commodified, laid to rest, or becomes a real abstraction. Neither can there be a postdramatic theatre, unless of course, the “post” in postdramatic signifies “not a movement of repetition but a procedure in ‘ana-’: a procedure of analysis, anamnesis, anagogy, and anamorphosis that elaborates an ‘initial forgetting’” (Lyotard, Postmodern Explained 80). Assuming that Endgame is not transformed into a real abstraction by the social activity linked to market or academic forces, it bears resemblance to Adorno’s autonomous work of art. As argued by Adorno:

the principle that governs autonomous works of art is not the totality of their effects, but their own inherent structure. They are knowledge as nonconceptual objects. This is the source of their greatness. It is not something of which they have to persuade men, because it should be given to them. (“Commitment” 3...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction to Adorno and Performance
• 1 Of Adorno’s Beckett
• 2 Thoughts Which Do Not Understand Themselves: On Adorno’s Dream Notes
• 3 Performativization and the Rescue of Aesthetic Semblance
• 4 On the “Difference between Preaching an Ideal and Giving Artistic Form to the Historical Tension Inherent in It”
• 5 Cooking up a Theory of Performing
• 6 Thinking Performance in Neoliberal Times: Adorno Encounters Neutral Hero
• 7 Pleasing Shapes and Other Devilry: An Adornian Investigation of La Pocha Nostra Praxis
• 8 Thinking – Mimesis – Pre-Imitation: Notes on Art, Philosophy, and Theatre in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory
• 9 On the Theatricality of Art
• 10 Adorno and Performance: Thinking with the Movement of Language
• 11 What Is Adorno Doing? Immanent Critique as Philosophical Performance
• 12 The Vanity of Happiness: Adorno and Self-Performance
• 13 Writing as Life Performed
• Bibliography
• Index