Aesthetics of Negativity

Blanchot, Adorno, and Autonomy

William S. Allen

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780823269280
• eBook ISBN: 9780823269303
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: History of Modern Art

Maurice Blanchot and Theodor W. Adorno are among the most difficult but also the most profound thinkers in twentieth-century aesthetics. While their methods and perspectives differ widely, they share a concern with the negativity of the artwork conceived in terms of either its experience and possibility or its critical expression. Such negativity is neither nihilistic nor pessimistic but concerns the status of the artwork and its autonomy in relation to its context or its experience. For both Blanchot and Adorno negativity is the key to understanding the status of the artwork in post-Kantian aesthetics and, although it indicates how art expresses critical possibilities, albeit negatively, it also shows that art bears an irreducible ambiguity such that its meaning can always negate itself. This ambiguity takes on an added material significance when considered in relation to language as the negativity of the work becomes aesthetic in the further sense of being both sensible and experimental, and in doing so the language of the literary work becomes a form of thinking that enables materiality to be thought in its ambiguity.In a series of rich and compelling readings, William S. Allen shows how an original and rigorous mode of thinking arises within Blanchot's early writings and how Adorno's aesthetics depends on a relation between language and materiality that has been widely overlooked. Furthermore, by reconsidering the problem of the autonomous work of art in terms of literature, a central issue in modernist aesthetics is given a greater critical and material relevance as a mode of thinking that is abstract and concrete, rigorous and ambiguous. While examples of this kind of writing can be found in the works of Blanchot and Beckett, the demands that such texts place on readers only confirm the challenges and the possibilities that literary autonomy poses to thought.

PART I

Contre-Temps

I am reminded of a line by Gertrude Stein: A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose. Why does this trouble us? Because it is the site of a perverse contradiction. On the one hand, it says of the rose that one can say nothing but itself and that it thus declares itself to be more beautiful than if one called it beautiful; but on the other hand, through the emphasis of reiteration, it withdraws itself from even the dignity of its unique name that claimed to maintain it in its beauty of essential rose. The thought, thought of the rose, here quite resists any development, it is even pure resistance; a rose is a rose: this means that one can think it, but one can represent nothing of its subject and not even define it (to the point that, as has been suggested, tautology may be no more than the stubborn refusal to define). But a rose is a rose is a rose … comes in its turn to demystify the emphatic character of nomination and the evocation of being; the “is” of the rose and the name that glorifies it as rose are both forever uprooted and fall into the multitude of chatter, chatter that in its turn arises as the manifestation of every profound speech, speaking without beginning or end. [EI: 503–4/343]

To understand what is at stake in the question of autonomy it is necessary to follow its development as an issue in the thought of Kant, Schiller, and Novalis, especially in regard to the peculiar temporal mode in which autonomy emerges. The unstable nature of the autonomy that arises from this account is exemplified in the position of prose in post-Kantian thought, which is understood by Hegel as part of the secularization of the absolute and by Benjamin in his readings of Goethe and the Romantics as an actualization of the relation between the truth-content and the material-content of the work, a disparity that is central to Adorno’s understanding of the artwork.

At this point I will then introduce and respond to a particular criticism of this conception of literary autonomy that has arisen in the work of J. M. Bernstein. This critique usefully brings together the works of Blanchot and the early Romantics, but misreads the material nature of literature developed in their works and the manner in which it exists by contesting its own time. By responding to this critique it is possible to draw out the continuity between the post-Kantian generation of thinkers and writers and Blanchot’s works by addressing the material basis of aesthetic autonomy, which is then developed further by showing how Adorno’s work on aesthetics is oriented around a complex dialectics of form and material that emerges from his early studies of music.

1

Autonomous Literature

The Manifesto and the Novel

Modernism in its fullest sense does not just refer to a mode of aesthetics but to a broader set of interconnected technological and sociopolitical issues. As such, it may be understood as the prevailing mood of a certain phase of industrial capitalism, which in turn can be characterized by the prevalence of certain contradictions: on the one hand, there is the modernist current that is optimistic about technological change and its social implications in terms of transport, communication, and leisure; on the other hand, there is the modernist strand that is very anxious about these technological changes and the increasing pace and uniformity of urban existence. On another level, but related to these responses, there is the attempt in certain modernist currents to reposition art as a secular religion, granting to it the role and significance of a normative hegemony, while, conversely, there is another strand of this current that seeks to reposition art within the apparently privileged sphere of natural experience and thus subordinates it to folk methods and practices. Accompanying these attempts to find a new place for art is the further distinction arising from political activism, which fuels the debates about the relation between modernism and the avant-garde, for it is a question of whether the art that wishes to express innovation and bring about changes to society should work within the structures of the existing culture or should reject them and try to reconceive culture from without. Each of these aspects of the modernist mood is thus coupled with its inverse, suggesting that the mood as a whole consists in this instability and lack of harmony. It is because of this inner discord that the issue of modernist aesthetics remains pertinent, for in its broadest sense it is an attempt to come to terms with a world that is fundamentally riven with contradictions and lacks a secure unifying meaning.1 It is as it was described by The Communist Manifesto in 1848:

Continual revolution in production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, rusted conditions with their train of venerable ideas and intuitions are swept away, all newly formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air [Alles Ständische und Stehende verdampft: everything fixed and upright evaporates], all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to view with sober eyes his position in life and his mutual relations. [CM: 6]

Art is then torn between seeking to change its situation and seeking to express it, as there is a fundamental uncertainty about the place of truth: does it lie in the discordancy of the fractured world or in imposing a new unifying sense upon it? And it may be the case that these two aspects cannot be separated. Thus modernism does not just arise out of the technological and sociopolitical changes of industrial capitalism but is also an expression of the disoriented secular world, which, following the Enlightenment and Romantic periods, for the first time fully experiences itself as without any foundation that it does not provide for itself. Modernism is thus the name for the mood in which the crisis of self-determination fully experiences itself. As a result, there are two sides to this mood—that of autonomy, which is concerned with the mode and form of this determination, and that of materiality, which is that existence of the “self” both before and after its determination—along with the dialectic that both brings them together and holds them apart. Broadly speaking, the central question of this book is that of how this relation between autonomy and materiality occurs in the experience of literature and how it is affected by it.

If literature enables us to approach the materiality of language, then it only does so insofar as it allows materiality to speak, which has an impact on our understanding of materiality per se in that it is no longer mute. That is, the role of literature in its exposure of the materiality of language is not to indicate how things could be otherwise by offering edifying examples or escapist allegories, but by objectively presenting those linguistic relations in which there is another way of living. It is this idea that is behind the use of formal innovation in literature, as the fact of such experimentation indicates that there is a belief that literature can respond to the times, and it is only because of the material and cognitive valences of literature that such a belief can arise, for what this duplicity reflects is that literature is both of the times and yet outside them and thus can speak both from them and to them. The way that early avant-garde movements like Futurism and Dada made use of the manifesto is exemplary in this regard, for these manifestos operated under the belief that their words could bring about actual change; that they were not just texts but a direct intervention in the world whose proclamations initiated a radical break with tradition. For Futurism in particular, as has been shown by Marjorie Perloff in her pioneering study, the manifesto was the primary mode of literary expression, and the art manifesto was Marinetti’s most successful invention, launching an entirely novel literary form that would encapsulate much of what was most significant about the formal innovations of modernist literature. It is for this reason that I will begin this inquiry into literary negativity with the relation between autonomy and materiality in the manifesto, as it makes clear the peculiar nature of such experiments—their nature as artefacts that yet appear to be self-generating and thus somehow go beyond the status of what is.

A number of elements combined to make the Futurist manifesto so successful in its innovations, for if it were to realize itself as an avant-garde expression then it needed to show that its proposals were not simply theoretical but were already in operation through the act and fact of the manifesto itself. Thus Marinetti’s first Futurist manifesto starts with a narrative, which is then explicated by the theses that the new movement proclaims such that the proclamations can then take this narrative as their own legitimizing instance, much as Marinetti’s model, The Communist Manifesto, had done before him, as will shortly be shown. A second aspect of this theatrical positioning is the fact that the manifesto speaks not from the lyrical “I” of the personal subject but from the disparate and impersonal voice of a community, a new “we” that the manifesto grounds and speaks from and thereby manifests. Together these two aspects serve to bring its theoretical concerns into practice, and one of the formal corollaries of this is that the writing of such manifestos operates across any generic division between poetry and prose and instead exhibits a dynamic heterogeneity that cannot be limited to a purely artistic sphere. But of equal significance, as Perloff points out, is that the manifesto articulates itself according to a new material medium: “the page supplants the stanza or the paragraph as the basic print unit,” which becomes explored through the typographical collages and ephemeral publications so distinctive of the movement. These tactics not only grounded the texts in the everyday materiality of language (newspapers and advertising) but also indicated how this materiality itself spoke through juxtaposition and nonharmonious simultaneity, the dissonance that, as Perloff continues, “was to call into question the integrity of the verse line itself.”2 Such notions would be key to the development of Benjamin’s thought in his desire to construct a work entirely of quotations that would present its dialectical theses through its textual-historical juxtapositions, and the equally weighted chunks of Adorno’s prose, in which large paragraphs or short fragments follow each other in a nonhierarchical or paratactical manner that expresses their focus through their arrangement as constellations.

Understanding the avant-garde manifesto requires more than an analysis of the intentions and rhetorical tactics of its writers, for these approaches do not address the underlying fact that the manifesto actualizes its desire for innovation by its very form. It does so because materially it is already part of that world, which is what is actualized as its form presents or manifests itself—that is, the manifesto exists primarily as a novel textual formation. Aside from its contents, what the manifesto presents is itself as a new material conjugation of thought and the world. The performative or rhetorical analysis of the language of manifestos may help with indicating how a certain use of language engages with the world, but these approaches do not explain what makes this engagement possible in the first place. Only by appreciating the fact that language is of a kind with the things of the world is this possible, in that it is not only affected by its historico-material context but also affects it in turn, as is apparent in the way that it primarily operates by affecting itself. Language is subject to the changes that are underway in its historico-material context, and by formally realizing these changes in itself it reveals the modes by which it is able to affect the world. This understanding of language operates according to a speculative logic in which thought engages with the things of the world, but it does so from a materialist rather than an idealist perspective so that there is a perpetual inadequation between thought and materiality. The philosophical background to this form of material speculation can be traced back from Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach to the question of autonomy in Kant’s aesthetics via Novalis and Schiller, and it is this connection that provides the basis for the work to come, as it is fundamental to Adorno’s understanding of philosophy that it works endlessly to uncover problems and riddles by creating images that seek to dissolve them and itself into actual change, and to Blanchot’s understanding of literature as a mode of contestation, in which the act of writing inextricably combines the artistic and the political insofar as it exposes the relation between writing as an experience of literary space and writing as a mode of intervention in the world.

The key work in the history of the manifesto is the Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei of 1848. Although social and political proclamations had been made since the early days of the Reformation and came to fruition during the English Revolution, it was only with the appearance of The Communist Manifesto that the form of the genre became established. Several important aspects contributed to this, but they fundamentally orient themselves around the question of history. The manifesto as a form of writing that seeks to make manifest a particular set of beliefs, to proclaim them such that they are no longer beliefs but are to be made actual, already begins to complicate its form by insisting on the fact that its written appearance is merely propaedeutic to its actualization in the real world. In this way its performative language takes on an even more powerful role, as it is not just the case that these words are to be seen as making a certain state of affairs real, since it is only able to create this state of affairs by wiping away all that previously existed through its declarations, which necessarily includes the words of the manifesto itself. So while it proclaims the new as hereby manifest, the manifesto removes itself from this revelation. Thus the early proclamations of the English Revolution were colored by an apocalyptic zeal in which the entrance of the newly manifest could only occur alongside the destruction of the old, and so the manifestos’ words were displaced from that which they were proclaiming just as it was being proclaimed. This issue was seemingly apparent to Marx and Engels, for in seeking to draft a credo for the newly established Communist League they sought to resolve this problem by situating their proclamations within a narrative history that would then provide a context for their announcements.

While this does not change the fact that the words of the manifesto are displaced from that which it proclaims, what it does is invert this relation by situating the proclamation within the framework of the manifesto’s narrative: as they composed their work, the proletariat, for whom they were writing, did not exist as a self-conscious body within European society, thus Marx and Engels first had to indicate its existence through their narrative history of the class struggle, which not only showed how it had developed, but how it should make itself appear to itself and so become a self-conscious revolutionary force. Furthermore, they did not just indicate the past and the present of the proletariat but also its future by showing how it would eventually take over the means of production within society and become autonomous, self-governing. Thus the appearance of the Manifesto also announced the appearance of the proletariat to itself as a novel revolutionary force with its own history and future. In appearing to speak for the proletariat, as its internal voice externalized, the manifesto in fact creates the proletariat through its appearance as the manifesto of the proletariat, which is to say that the contemporaneity of the document is continually reaffirmed by its own proclamations, countering the risk of its displacement. Thus it manifests itself as an essential part of its proclamations about the proletariat, rather than being obliterated by its own utterance as was the case for the religious pamphlets of the apocalyptic tradition. It is this aspect that enabled the genre of the manifesto to achieve such a potent degree of vitality for political and artistic movements ever since. But this does not undo the fact that the document removes itself from the time of its own utterance and thus cannot itself participate in the revolution, for although it creates the proletariat and in a sense embodies its history, it is nevertheless not the actual coming to self-consciousness of the proletariat as a revolutionary force itself; instead, it holds this place provisionally by enacting what the proletariat would be were it to appear: as its hope and its challenge.

The document of the Manifesto constructs the proletariat so that in its proclamation it will have existed and will exist, but in the meanwhile the Manifesto holds its place open for it. Thus the manifesto ushers itself onto the stage of history instead, seeking to effectuate its own words, to somehow make them real. As we are told on its opening page, two things result from the “fact” that the spectre (Gespenst) of communism is haunting Europe: first, that “communism is already acknowledged … to be a power”; and second, that communists should openly publish their views and aims in order to “confront this story [Märchen] of the spectre of communism with a manifesto of the party itself” [CM: 2]. In place of the fictions that purport to be about it, but that paradoxically register its power as a fact, albeit a ghostly one, communism needs to present its own manifesto. So the document presents itself as not just a text but as a means of redefining reality by replacing what is unreal with what is real, but what it presents is itself: not the actuality of communism but its manifesto. On behalf of the not-quite-real-yet status of the party, it exhibits an impatience with its own status as a text and seeks to assert itself as an actual state of affairs, a new reality.3 But it can only do this by actualizing its own status as a manifesto, which includes its perpetual reaffirmation of itself, such that it appears to be more than what it is, for that is what its peculiar relation to time brings about: a manifestation of its own excess as that which manifests itself, which is the only way in which the authority for its statements can be (autonomously) generated.

It is not a surprise that the first edition appeared anonymously and that, due to its international distribution over the following years, the preface added to the 1872 re-edition should contain a remark from its authors stating that the Manifesto “has become a historical document that we no longer have any right to alter.” Which is not to say that it had become outdated; rather the reverse, for “however much the state of things has changed during the last twenty-five years, the general principles laid down in this manifesto are, on the whole, as correct today as ever. Here and there some detail might be improved. The practical application of the principles will depend, as the Manifesto itself states, everywhere and at all times, on the historical conditions for the time being existing” [CM: 40–41]. The Manifesto had taken on a life ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Announcement Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Epigraph
• Introduction: Abstract and Concrete Modernity
• Part I: Contre-Temps
• Part II: Negative Spaces
• Part III: Material Ambiguity
• Part IV: Grey Literature
• Appendix: Thomas l’Obscur, Chapter 1
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Series Page