Abstract
The prevalent view presupposes that Adorno’s uncompromisingly critical thinking about art, culture and society, stands either for a pessimistic and melancholic Spenglerian lament on the decline of Western civilisation, or for a conservative and elitist call to order.1 Far too many otherwise intelligent commentators on Adorno — including his dialectical materialist critics2 — fall prey to such prejudicial misunderstandings.3 Widely repeated errors of judgement, which equate ‘Adorno’s rigorous insistence on the autonomy of modernist art,’ as Andreas Huyssen observes, ‘with a conservative defense of the high cultural canon,’ still stand in need of critique.4
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Notes
In his manifesto on new art, Adorno wrote the following: ‘I have never understood the so-called need for order which has led, if not to the invention of twelve-tone technique, at least to the current apologias for it. It is also worth reflecting on the reasons which lead people, no sooner have they reached open ground, to create the feeling that it’s time for order to be restored, instead of breathing a sigh of relief that such works as Erwartung and even the Elektra could be written, works which are incomparably closer to the actual conscious and subconscious of contemporary listeners than any artificially imposed style. Scarcely any artistic movement has escaped the toils of such impositions. Even the development from Fauvism to neo-Classicism confirms this, as is borne out by Cocteau’s slogan ‘L’ordre après le désorde’ I am unable to discern any guarantee of truth in this eternal recurrence of the need for an order based on known systems; on the contrary, they seem rather to be the symbols of perennial weakness.’ Adorno, T. W. [1961], ‘Vers une musique informelle,’ Trans. Rodney Livingstone, Quasi una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music (London: Verso, 1998), 291–2. ‘Given that the category of the new was the result of a historical process that began by destroying a specific tradition and then destroyed tradition as such, modern art cannot be an aberration susceptible to correction by returning to foundations that no longer do or should exist’ (AT 23).
In an otherwise interesting chapter on Adorno, Terry Eagleton reverts to precisely this stereotype: ‘It is ironic in its turn that this nostalgic haut bourgeois intellectual, with all his mandarin fastidiousness and remorseless tunnel vision, should join the ranks of Mikhail Bakhtin and Walter Benjamin as one of the most creative, original cultural theorists Marxism has yet produced.’ Eagleton, T. The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 363–4.
David Roberts could not be further from Adorno’s championing of the new when, in his Art and Enlightenment: Aesthetic Theory after Adorno, he writes, ‘If Adorno saw himself as the champion of new art, which Lukács unequivocally condemned, neither in reality crossed the divide of the First World War. For both, all that follows stands under the sign of reification; for both, there can be nothing new in the West.’ Roberts, D. Art and Enlightenment: Aesthetic Theory after Adorno (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), 65. Hereafter cited in the text as AE. According to Roberts, Adorno actually had his own theory of decadence. Culture, Roberts makes Adorno say, has gone downhill since 1848 (AE 67). ‘The end of tradition is transformed into the endless crisis of tradition’ (AE 92). But, in his essay entitled, ‘Reconciliation under Duress,’ Adorno heavily criticised Lukács’s use of ‘the term “decadence” [for it] belongs to the vocabulary of conservatism’ (RUD 155). My interpretation of aesthetics after Adorno is antithetical to that offered by Roberts.
Martin Jay offers a more tempered reading: ‘contrary to the image of him as a mandarin elitist, Adorno never considered aesthetic experience, even that engendered by the most advanced modernist art, to be an entirely protected sphere in which the horrors of modern life were somehow successfully kept at bay.’ Jay, M. ‘Is Experience Still in Crisis? Reflections on a Frankfurt School Lament,’ The Cambridge Companion to Adorno, Ed. Tom Huhn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 139. ‘Rather than reduce Adorno to any one star in his constellation, be it Western Marxist, elitist mandarin, aesthetic modernist, or whatever, we must credit all of them with the often contradictory power they had in shaping his idiosyncratic variant of Critical Theory.’
Jay, M. ‘Adorno in America,’ New German Critique, Number 31, Winter 1984, 161 (157–82).
See also: Jay, M. Adorno (London: Fontana, 1984), 22.
Huyssen, A. ‘Adorno in Reverse: From Hollywood to Richard Wagner; Postscript 2000,’ Adorno: A Critical Reader, Eds Nigel Gibson and Andrew Rubin (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 51.
Lukács citing himself in: Lukács, G. [1916/1920], The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, Trans. Anna Bostock (London: The Merlin Press, 1971), 22.
Adorno, T. W. [1963], ‘Culture Industry Reconsidered,’ Trans. Anson G. Rabinbach, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, Ed. J. M. Bernstein (London: Routledge, 1991), 102.
Adorno, T. W. [1967], ‘The George-Hofmannstahl Correspondence, 1891–1906,’ Trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber, Prisms (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1983), 217. Hereafter cited in the text as: GHC.
Lukács, G. [1938], ‘Realism in the Balance,’ Trans. Rodney Livingstone, Aesthetics and Politics: The Key Texts of the Classic Debate within German Marxism, Trans. Ed. Ronald Taylor, Eds Rodney Livingstone, Perry Anderson, and Francis Mulhern (London: Verso, 1977), 47–8.
Read, H. [1935], ‘What is Revolutionary Art?’ Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology, Ed. Frascina, F. and Harrison, C. (London: The Open University, 1982), 126.
It is important to recall that the German word Geist, which is often done into English as ‘spirit’ (as in Zeitgeist or ‘spirit of the times’), can also be translated as ‘mind,’ ‘mindedness,’ and ‘intellect.’ Spirit was not, for Adorno, an immediate divine vision but a privileged mode of human consciousness: ‘the consciousness of people about themselves,’ that is self-consciousness. See: Adorno, T. W. [1963], ‘Why Still Philosophy,’ Trans. Henry W. Pickford, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (New York: Columbia University Press), 324, note 23. ‘Adorno uses Geist and “consciousness” almost interchangeably,’ according to Gillian Rose, ‘although Geist has a higher status than consciousness (q.v.). Geist implies the possibility of self-determination, of freedom. Consciousness which has attained self-determination or freedom would be Geist’ (MS 151).
Jarvis, S. Adorno: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), 109.
Adorno, T. W. [1967], ‘Arnold Schoenberg, 1874–1951,’ Trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber, Prisms (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1983), 154. Hereafter cited in the text as AS.
Osborne, P. Anywhere or Not At All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art (London: Verso, 2013), 50–1.
Adorno, T. W. [1957], ‘On Lyric Poetry and Society,’ Trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, Notes to Literature: Volume One, Ed. Rolf Tiedemann (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 46.
Adorno, T. W. [1967], ‘Is Art Lighthearted?’ Trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, Notes to Literature: Volume Two, Ed. Rolf Tiedemann (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 249.
Bernstein, J. M. ‘Introduction,’ The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture (London: Routledge, 1991), 1.
Adorno, T. W. [1957], ‘On Lyric Poetry and Society,’ Trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, Notes to Literature: Volume One, Ed. Rolf Tiedemann (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 39.
Adorno, T. W. [1967], ‘Veblen’s Attack on Culture,’ Trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber, Prisms (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1983), 84.
Nietzsche, F. [1872/1886], ‘The Birth of Tragedy,’ Trans. Ronald Speirs, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, Ed. Raymond Geusss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 9. Hereafter cited in the text: BT.
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Hellings, J. (2014). Excursus I — The Prevalence of a View: Being Uncompromisingly Critical at the Grand Hotel Abyss. In: Adorno and Art. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137315717_3
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