Adorno

Adorno, Theodore. Aesthetic Theory. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Teidemann, Eds. Robert Hullot-Kentor Trans. Minneapolis: U Minn, 2006.

The Frankfurt School and related critics (very very loosely, Walter Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer, and Jurgen Habermas) frustrate me by making very interesting but very broad assertions that they deign neither to support, qualify, or even really define. I am, admittedly, far from having read all of it, and if anyone finds any work that renders these ideas more systematic or rigorous, Let me know.

Meanwhile, the girth of Adorno's posthumous Aesthetic Theory helps. The writing shares the same strengths and weaknesses with his collaborations with Horkheimer, but the extent of the work allows one to contextualize it somewhat, to begin to approach an appreciation of the categories Adorno tosses around.

The following may give an idea of the problems:

"Ever since Attic classicism, the real barbarism of antiquity -- the slavery, genocide, and contempt for human life -- left few traces in art; just how chaste it kept itself, even in 'barbaric cultures,' does not redound to its credit" (161).

What a marvelous feat of misobservation! The entire history of art is constructed of counterexample; the closest thing to a nonviolent epic before Leaves of Grass is probably Paradise Lost. If one doesn't care for epics, let's turn to the mix of perversion and royalty that constitutes tragedy. We and the ancients just take the horror as somehow noble because the art itself is wonderful. But if the Iliad presents war as honorable, that may say something about the nature of ancient Greek and modern Western honor.

Here's another:

"Artworks become nexuses of meaning, even against their will, to the extent that they negate meaning" (154).

This nifty aporia comes without the labor of any definition of meaning and how that one might "negate" it. In some contexts the anthropomorphosization of art makes little difference, but here in a discussion that purports to describe its operation, one should not indulge. The work does not will; the artist likely does. Is the art the artist or the artist-and-work or even the artist-and-work-and-consumer? Maybe, but that's the best I've got here. It seems likely that Adorno himself did not ask. Given these ambiguities, what does one make of negating meaning? Perhaps Adorno means something akin to Kristeva's analysis of chora, but if so, it's not obvious.

Or, on page 31, one finds various that "reality finds entry," there's an "annihiliation of reality," and that Beckett's plays unfold somehow "like forces in infinitesimal physics," by which Adorno may (or may not!) refer to Heisenberg's observations of indeterminate position-movement in certain of what get called "subatomic particles." If so, it's a cool reference except that it's utterly unhelpful. Does Adorno indicate that Beckett's plays function noncausally or that he finds himself unaware of their operation?

Some marvellous observations get tossed about in the same tone. Get this:

From the outset, aesthetic abstraction, which in Baudelaire was a still rudimentary and allegorical reaction to a world that had beocme abstract, was formeost a prohibition on graven images. This prohibition falls on what provincials ultimately hoped to salvage under the name 'message': appearance as meaningful; after the catastrophe of meaning, appearance becomes abstract. From Rimbaud to contemporary avant-garde art, the obstinacy of this prohibition is unflagging. It has changed no more than has the fundamental structure of society. The modern is abstract by virtue of its relation to what is past; irreconciliable with magic, it is unable to bespeak what has yet to be, and yet must seek it, protesting against the ignominy of the ever-same:This is why Baudelaire's cryptograms equate the new with the unknown, with the hidden telos, as well as with what is monstrous by virtue of its incommensurability with the ever-same and thus with the gout du néant" (22).

Whew! To untangle just part of this, let's for the moment set aside the undefined "abstraction" and the nonsense of what consitutes a "world" that has become "abstract" -- if one can. If so, the alignment of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Ezra Pound, Doc Williams, Robert Lowell and so forth with Luther and the Puritans is a real coup, and may account for the some of the distinctions in the modernisms and avant-gardes in the nonprotestant world. That is, Pound's imagism and vorticism and hard language, and Williams' "no ideas without things" show a concern with concepts aligned with what Austin called "constative" language, a concern not reflected in Dada or Surrealism or Martinelli or Apollonaire or Zaum.

Or again,

The processual character of artworks is nothing other than their temporal nucleus. If duration becomes their intention in such a fashion that they expel what they deem ephemeral and by their own hand eternalize themselves in pure impregnanble forms or, worse, by the ominious claim to the universally human, they cut short their lives and assimilate themselves inot the concept that -- as the fixed circumference of shifting contents -- by its form pursues precisely that temporal stasis against which the drawn tension of the artwork defends itself (177).

Again, let's not examine "temporal nucleus" too closely, since we're apt to wonder what would constitute the temporal cytoplasm. And again the "intention" of the works themselves remains unclear, here doubly so because Adorno can't be bothered to articulate whether said work would endure in its creation and/or consumption as a single iteration, physical reproduction and distribution under a given title, or its continued influence as a progeniter of memes. But if we can stomach that, there's something here, just that the attempt to fix inspiration in a form stills the "processual character" intrinsic to artistic experience. And he goes on to discuss Stockhausen and "electronic art," which by Adorno's death in 1969 must have referred to broadcast media.

Altogether, I still find myself looking for a theoretical construction that adequately incorporates formal elements -- semiotics, narratology, formalism, structuralism or poststructuralism -- with socioeconomic and technological factors. So far I have found Derrida and Foucault more useful than the Frankfurt School. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E folks like Charles Bernstein, Lynn Hejinian and Ron Silliman have been at least as useful as anyone, really, though we're only talking about a handful of essays.

Oh well, off to the Auction of the Mind of Man . . . . It would seem we should at least try to know how.

Walter Benjamin

Benjamin the effect on art of the advent of photography:

" With the advent of the first truly revolutionary means of reproduction, photography, simultaneously with the rise of socialism, art sensed the approaching crisis which has become evident a century later. At the time, the right reacted with the doctrine of l'art pourl'art, that is, with a theology of art. This gave rise to what might be called a negative theology in the form of the idea of 'pure' art, which not only denied any social function of art but also any categorizing by subject matter. (In poetry, Mallarme was the first to take this position)" (1237).

Benjamin makes an interesting judgment in calling photos the first "means of reproduction" although printing had reproduced words and their written arrangement for centuries prior. Although he doesn't say so, surely the automation of print in the 1800's and even increased transport and distribution would have contributed to these same effects for similar reasons. Just as painting no longer had to photograph, the novel had less to do with journalism.

". . . for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To an ever greater degree the wo of art reproduced becomes example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the 'authentic' print makes no sense. But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to ritual, it begins to be based on another practice -- politics . . . .

With the emancipation of the various art practices from ritual go increasing opportunites for the exhibition of their products. It is easier to exhibit a portrait bust that can be sent here and there than to exhibit the statute of a divinity that has its fixed place in the interior of a temple. (1237).

Here he begs some questions, but the idea is interesting. Just how does reproduction release art from ritual? Does it remove the necessity of a priesthood to interpret or perform it? Would the term ritual be as meaningful if the statue of divinity were in a secular museum instead of a temple? I wonder whether Benjamin might not mean in part that art can be freed of certain socioeconomic trappings, that reproduction removes the objet d'art from social contextualization or from a contextualization.

If so, this seems opposed to the findings of Horkheimer and Adorno, who insist not many years later (Benjamin 1935, Horkheimer & Adorno, 1947) that capitalism and broadcast technology have rendered artistic production uniform.

Either way, publication in 1935 was rigidly linked to patterns of profit and distribution, broadcast even more so, at least in the US, where public airwaves had been given away to now-familiar broadcast corporations.

Perhaps more important to ritual than the physical mobility of the objet d'art is its social mobility, its usability by different classes. In that event, use must refer to consumption, production, and determining decisions over production and distribution.

There may be a general principle here. Contemporary readers may refer to current debates over intellectual property, .torrent files and filesharing networks. Some will remember how similar the dialog was in the early 1980's when the music industry momentarily crashed or played possum in response to the arrival of recordable cassette tapes. But I suspect that technology has impacted power over information for a long time. Papyrus would have also made writing easier to hide as well as transport. It would have made it possible to view writing without the authority of a temple. The early development of Western monotheism has survived more extensively and securely in the Hebrew texts than in the Egyptian record, not because the Egyptians had no paper or less paper, of course, but because the Hebrews may have known early on that their records had to be moved and stored. The religious texts include documents that are in some ways revolutionary; that may in part be because of the draw of the form.

Well, enough speculation in that quarter. Walter Ong has some interesting things to day on the subject, though, if anyone's interested. Benjamin, meanwhile, goes on with some appreciation of film:

"For the entire spectrum of optical, and now also acoustical, perception the film has brought about a similar deepening of apperception. It is only an obverse of this fact hat behavior items shown in a movie can be analyzed with much more precisely and from more points of view than those presented on paintings or on the stage. As compared with painting, filmed behavior lends itself more readily to analysis because of its incompareably more precise statements of the situation. In comparison with the stage scene, the filmed behavior item lends itself more readily to analysis because it can be isolated more easily. This circumstance derives its chief importance from its tendency to promote the mutual penetration of art and science" (1238).

I find the tone here interesting because Benjamin himself has clearly lived through the change. There's something in it that reminds me of trying to convey to students what it felt like typing papers on an old underwood typwriter and swearing and running to the store for white-out. Awareness of the distinction is lost to the population very quickly.

Ten years ago I read in books that The Book was to come to and end. Now I read in blogs that the book will survive. We ain't in Kansas anymore -- though, for all I know, you might be.

Benjamin, Walter. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." in Rivkin, Julie and Michael Ryan. Literary Theory: An Anthology. 2nd Edition. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.