PART ONE
Adornoâs Keywords
1
Adorno and Beyond
The Modern as Critique of Modernism
Max Paddison
Adorno is often regarded as the protagonist of modernism, even though this is based on a misunderstanding. Adornoâs focus was on a different conceptââthe modern,â and on how Enlightenment rationality and the process of rationalization (with its association with âmodernizationâ) had ended up serving irrational ends. The aim of this chapter is to explore the relationship between these connected but often blurred concepts in the context of Adornoâs thinking and in key debates around the experience of modernity and âthe modernâ in critical aesthetics, cultural theory, and the arts that emerged in the decades following his death in 1969.
Adornoâs concept of âthe modernâ in art can be understood, on the one hand, as a range of different and frequently conflicting responses to a fundamental predicament: an experience of instability, uncertainty, and alienation in the face of constant change and the threat to survival. On the other hand, âthe modernâ also needs to be seen as presenting a critical position in relation to the concept of modernism, and indeed to the concept of art itself. This raises issues of terminology, problems of ideology, and questions of the modernâs relation to modernism, as well as to the avant-garde and the New. It also raises questions regarding artâs relation to the repressed and unresolved contradictions of our experience of modernity. Underlying this argument is the issue that emerges clearly only toward the end: whether the art of âthe modernâ has been able to address Adornoâs famous injunctions regarding the survival of art after Auschwitz.
Concepts of Modernism and the Modern
The first concern is with the problem of terminology, given the general confusion around the terms âmodernism,â âmodernity,â âthe modern,â and, for good measure, âmodernization.â In fact, the word Modernismus rarely appears in Adornoâs writings. A quick search of the DVD (Suhrkamp DB097) containing the entire twenty volumes of Adornoâs collected writings in German, as published in the Suhrkamp Gesammelte Schriften, shows that the word occurs in total only fifteen times.1 It crops up far more frequently in English translations of Adorno, however, because translators have usually chosen to render die Moderne either as âmodernismâ or as âmodernity.â2 To confuse matters even further, âthe modernâ can sometimes embrace both these concepts as an umbrella concept. What is clear, nevertheless, is that Adorno favors the concept of âthe modern,â which in German includes a broader and more far-reaching set of concerns than is implied by the more limited (and mainly Anglophone) term âmodernism,â with its connotations of being an art movement, or at least a portmanteau term for the whole range of modern art tendencies and styles that he calls âthe -ismsâ (die Ismen). The concepts of âmodernism,â âthe modern,â and âmodernityâ also overlap, and a degree of fuzziness pervades attempts at clarification, not helped by the fact that Adorno himself seldom provided clear definitions of the concepts he employed. In view of this I want first to attempt a preliminary differentiation among these related but often opposed concepts, and consider the position of âmodern artâ within this context, before tackling in more detail how Adorno uses these terms.
In general academic usage, the concepts of âthe modernâ and of âmodernityâ are often taken as coterminous, to the extent that they are used to embrace the historical, cultural, social, economic, technological, and political dimensions of modern life. Both terms suggest a process (dynamic and ongoing) and a condition (experiential and existential), rather than something fixed, like a single historical period, specific style, an artistic movement, or pertaining to a particular geographical location. At the same time âmodernityâ also has an association with the application of reason and the process of rationalization, in which respect it connects with the concept of modernization, even though its rationality may be directed toward irrational ends. âThe modern,â on the other hand, as well as meaning âup-to-date,â in tune with the present time, and in conflict with tradition, implies an imperative, in that it calls up Rimbaudâs famous exhortation: il faut ĂȘtre absolument moderne.3 To be âmodernâ in this sense is to push the boundaries of experience, expression, and the latest technical means.
The experience of being âmodernâ is characterized by extremes, all-embracing and inescapable and at the same time fragmentary and without bounds. Much of this is implied in Marshall Bermanâs account, when he writes,
To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the worldâand, at the same time that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are. . . . To be modern is to be part of a universe in which, as Marx said, âall that is solid melts into air.â (Berman 15)
Viewed historically, modernity can be said to have a beginning (the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, perhaps?âor maybe the early modern era going back to the Renaissance in the period from the fifteenth to the early seventeenth centuries, when the word âmodernâ first began to be used to refer to ânow,â the âpresent timeâ in contrast to antiquity?). But modernity appears to have no end (or at least, none is currently conceiv ableâthe advocates of postmodernity notwithstanding). The American sociologist Peter Berger has argued that two things are fundamental to modernity and belong to âthe normative assumptions about itâ (Berger 10): one is the founding myth of modernity, which is that of continuous progress, and the other is that, in spite of appearances to the contrary, modernity is historical.
Modernity and the experience of the modern acquired an affinity with the experience of the sublime that is also historical. It involves the shift from the concept of the beautiful in nature and in art, to the experience of the sublime in nature, via the experience of the sublime in art, toward the experience of modernity as sublimeâthat is, modern urban society has come to appear as opaque and impenetrable to those who live in it. It was the appearance of the âunboundednessâ of modernity and the impossibility of grasping the experience of the modern as a totality, to put it in Kantian terms, which led Jean-François Lyotard to claim that âthe sublime is perhaps the only mode of artistic sensibility to characterize the modernâ (Lyotard 93). But Lyotard owes this insight as much to Adorno as to Kant. In Ăsthetische Theorie (Aesthetic Theory) Adorno writes, âThe more decisively that empirical reality shut itself off from it, the more art was funneled toward the sublime; subtly understood, it was the sublime alone among the traditional ideas of aesthetics that remained for the modern after the fall of formal beautyâ (Adorno GS7, 293â4, my trans.). But Kant points to a further requirement for the experience of the sublime (as opposed to the direct threat posed to oneâs existence by the perils of real life): he says in §28 of the Critique of the Power of Judgment that we can only experience it as the sublime (das Erhabene) âas long as we find ourselves in safetyâ (Kant 2000, 144; Kant 1957, 348). The immediate experience of modernity, however, does not always allow for a safe place from which to measure ourselves against the overwhelming experience of the tumultuous complexity of modern life. âModern artâ (not to be confused with âmodern lifeâ) might therefore be seen as a mediated and parallel sphere of activity, a kind of âsafe placeâ in and from which to contemplate such experiences. Its autonomous forms can be seen as what Umberto Eco called âcomplements of the worldâ (Eco 1997, 50, my trans.),4 but not the world directly. This remains the case, however much modern artâincluding the New and the avant-gardeâattempts either to extend or to break down the boundaries between art and life, or to claim that art has escaped from its parallel sphere into the real world.
The concept of âmodernization,â on the other hand, is associated particularly with the social sciences, where it applies to the shift from traditional semifeudal rural societies to modern industrialized urban societies driven by capitalism. By extension the term can also be defined as the forms taken by rationalization, as organization, as bureaucratic, political, and cultural control, to attempt to shape modernity toward particular ends. I shall not discuss the experience of modernization as âan adventureâ in positive and developmental terms, as Marshall Berman does when he concludes: âThe process of modernization, even as it torments and exploits us, brings our energies and imaginations to life, drives us to grasp and confront the world that modernization makes, and to strive to make it our ownâ (Berman 348). On the contrary, I see modernization (Modernisierung) as a euphemism for rationalization (Rationalisierung) in the sense in which Max Weber uses the term in Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Economy and Society ), as political and cultural control through bureaucratization that leads to alienation. This is also emphasized by S. N. Eisenstadt, who writes,
Both political and cultural processes attendant on modernization have paradoxically enough created, through the very drawing in of broader groups to the center, the potential for alienation of wide groups from the central political and social system, for the development of feelings of anonymity and anomic estrangement from their societies, which became stronger as their expectation of participation in the center . . . grew. (Eisenstadt 21â2)
This wide concept of modernization as drawing everything toward the center, and in the process creating feelings of estrangement from the center as well as relegating traditions to the margins, has a further contradictory manifestation in the arts. It creates powerful urban centers of elite culture and at the same time creates the conditions for the reification of âthe Newâ by the bourgeois cultural institutions that control the arts. These same conditions lead to the constant and continuing revolt by art against reification and institutionalization.
This brings us back to the concept of âmodernism,â so widely used in the English-speaking world, but in a more limited way elsewhere. While in a very general sense the term âmodernismâ can be said to refer to the manifestation of modernity in the aesthetic sphere, particularly during the first half of the twentieth century in the West (in which sense it overlaps with the concept of âthe modernâ), it is nevertheless most often used in a very specific sense to imply a style (e.g., in architecture), or a movement or tendency (e.g., in literature). The most obvious case is the academic study of literature in the English language, which has employed the label âmodernismâ to refer particularly to the experimental use of language and narrative in Anglo-American and Irish writers like Yeats, Woolf, Eliot, Pound, and Joyce in the period 1890â1950.
The term âmodernismâ is intrinsically plural, as represented by the â-ismsâ of which it is constituted (impressionism, symbolism, expressionism, cubism, neoclassicism, and so on), and it has to be admitted that it is a cause of confusion when it is used both as a label for one movement among others in the arts and as the overarching concept that embraces all these movements. Talking of âmodernismsâ (or maybe âmodern-ismsâ) in the plural could e...