Adorno's Poetics of Form

Josh Robinson

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781438469850
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

Adorno's Poetics of Form is the first book-length examination of the elusive deployment of the concept of form in Adorno's writings on art and literature, and the first monograph to offer a comprehensive account of the relation of these writings to his broader philosophical project. It examines form within the constellation of concepts that exist around it, considering how it appears when seen in conjunction with and in opposition to content, expression, genre, and material. Illuminated from these angles, form is revealed as the site of a complex web of dynamic conceptual interactions. The book thus offers a resolution to a problem in Adorno's work that has remained unsolved for several decades, and in doing so sets out the consequences of Adorno's poetics for literary and critical theory today.

1

Form and Content

It is only through the hiatus, the form, that content becomes substance.

—NzL 470/NtL 2: 129

At the beginning of the second half of his essay on Hölderlin’s late hymns, Adorno sets out the basis for his own elucidations of Hölderlin’s poetry, to contrast with those of Heidegger, the object of the critique that constitutes the essay’s first half. Adorno outlines the two schemata in opposition to which he develops his account of poetic form in Hölderlin’s work:

In contrast with the crude textbook separation of content and form, recent poetology has insisted on their unity. But there is hardly an aesthetic object that shows more urgently than Hölderlin that the affirmation of unarticulated unity of form and content is no longer sufficient. (NzL 469/NtL 2: 128)

While the first of these models is something of a caricature, the second, as Gerhard van den Bergh has pointed out, is a pointed critique of Friedrich Beißner’s introduction to Hölderlin’s poetry in the Kleine Stuttgarter Ausgabe, in which he insists that ‘one cannot and must not divide what is at one within the artwork’.1 This raises the question first of how it is that Adorno thinks the relationship between form and content should be configured, and second and more significantly, how he conceives of form and content in relation to one another, how they are to be identified within the artwork, and how their concepts interact.

These questions are the concern of this chapter, which addresses Adorno’s conception of this relationship between poetic form and content, and its implications for the study of poetry. I begin by addressing the polemical aspect of many of Adorno’s discussions of Heidegger, outlining some of the specific charges he raises against Heidegger’s rejection of form. Focusing on the former’s treatment of the latter’s essay on the origin of the work of art, I seek to cut through the rhetorical force of Adorno’s polemic in order to clarify the points of contention and agreement between the two thinkers, and to elucidate the theoretical presuppositions of Adorno’s use of form as an optic to approach poetry. I then discuss some of the background to the work presented in ‘Parataxis’, turning my attention first to the textual history of the essay in order to develop, in dialogue with Adorno, an approach to the analysis of poems that eschews the procedures both of an uncritical philology and of the application to poems of philosophical or theoretical methods that are indifferent to them.

I then turn to discuss different aspects of the construction of form in relation to content. I begin by conceptualizing the relationship between linguistic and poetic form, explicating some of Adorno’s close readings of Hölderlin in ‘Parataxis’ to reveal their intertwinement through the constellation of form, style, and means or technique. I then turn my attention to the implications of Adorno’s resonant formulation that form is the ‘sedimentation of content’, and of his historized reinterpretation of the Kantian purposiveness in general without any particular purpose. By examining Adorno’s discussions in both ‘Parataxis’ and Aesthetic Theory I reveal the nature and extent of the influence on his literary aesthetics of both Kant and Hegel, and formulate the ways in which his analytical and interpretative procedures differ from those of both his predecessors. Finally I expound on the implications of my analysis for our conception of poetry and in particular of poetic language, setting out the role of form in theorizing and accounting for the transformation of the literal, propositional content of poems’ words into their poetic content in the fullest sense.

Adorno and Heidegger: The Form of the Thing

Adorno’s chief objection to Heidegger’s readings of Hölderlin is the way in which Heidegger reduces poetry to its paraphrasable content, on which he then expounds philosophically: ‘Whereas Heidegger accentuates to a great extent the concept of that which is composed, and indeed accords the poet himself the highest metaphysical dignity, his individual elucidations reveal him to be supremely indifferent to what is specifically poetic’ (NzL 452/NtL 2:114). Here the distinction between that which is composed—das Gedichtete, or more literally that which has been poetized or written into poetry—and the specifically poetic—das spezifisch Dichterische, or that pertaining to the poet—contains in condensed form the accusation that Heidegger neglects the implications of the process of composition, of forming into a poem. Heidegger’s indifference, Adorno argues, is a consequence of his approach to poetry, an approach which involves the application of a particular method to the poems under discussion:

Heidegger’s method is false insofar as it, as method, tears itself away from the matter at hand: it infiltrates that which in Hölderlin’s poetry is philosophically lacking with philosophy from the outside. The corrective should be sought at the point at which Heidegger breaks off for the sake of his thema probandum, in the relationship of the content, including the conceptual content, to the form. (NzL 468–69/NtL 2: 128)

Here form—the form that Heidegger is accused of ignoring—is the correlate of the specifically poetic, the technique of poetic composition. Adorno’s objection is not that Heidegger applies the wrong method, but rather that he applies a method at all. In ‘The Essay as Form’, Adorno sets out his objection to what he terms ‘the traditional concept of method’, an invariant set of procedures which is applied unchanged to every object of investigation (NzL 18/NtL 1: 11). Such an approach ends up telling us more about its own presuppositions than about the object on which it is supposed to shed light. For Adorno, this is enough to account for Heidegger’s indifference to the material aspects of a poetic text: the application of even the most dignified philosophical method will elide what is particular about such texts, and simply reveal compatibilities in terms of their paraphrasable content.

However, this critique is at best abbreviated, for it conflates Heidegger’s rejection of form with his the blindness to the specifically poetic that comes about as a result of his application of a method. Indeed, nowhere in his œuvre does Adorno discuss in any detail Heidegger’s explicit rejection of the category of form in ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’:

The tendency to take the matter–form structure as the constitution of every single being receives particular impetus from the fact that on the basis of a belief—namely the biblical belief—that the totality of beings is imagined in advance as something created, and here that means something made. […] The metaphysics of modernity is based on the matter–form structure, coined in the middle ages, which itself only calls to mind in words the buried essence of eidos and hyle. Thus the explication of the thing in terms of matter and form, whether it remains medieval or becomes Kantian–transcendental, becomes prevalent and self-evident. But for this reason it is no less than the other explications of the thingness of the thing discussed above an assault on the thing-being of the thing.2

This complements Heidegger’s rejection of what he considers the other two prevailing conceptions of the thingness of the thing—the first being the thing as bearer of characteristics, the second the thing as the unity of a sensory manifold—his argument being that it is wrong to attempt to answer the question of what an artwork is by asking what kind of a thing it is. In his rejection of the intractability of the ‘prevalent and self-evident’ attempt to comprehend an object according to a preexisting schema, Heidegger takes up a position that shows close affinities with Adorno’s rejection of method.

Adorno never explicitly engaged with the foundation of Heidegger’s rejection of form. While it is not possible to conclude from a lack of annotation that a passage has not been read or thought about, it is nonetheless worth noting that in his copy of Holzwege, Adorno only made scant annotations to ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, consisting of two question marks toward the end of the first paragraph, and a rule down the left-hand margin on each of pages 7 and 29.3 Indeed, Adorno’s engagement with Heidegger’s essay as a whole is limited to a few comments in Aesthetic Theory and the 1967 essay on ‘Art and the Arts’, first given as a talk at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin on June 23, 1966. The ‘Theories on the Origin of Art’ included in the ‘Paralipomena’ to Aesthetic Theory begin with the claim that ‘[a]ttempts to found aesthetics on the origin of art as its essence necessarily disappoint’ (ÄT 480/AT 325), an implicit but pointed rejection of Heidegger’s essay, followed only by a dismissal of its argument in the most general terms—so general, in fact, that it mischaracterizes and neglects the force of Heidegger’s essay, which is less an attempt to found aesthetics on the origin of art than a critique of ‘aesthetics’ itself.

The 1967 essay engages more specifically with Heidegger’s account of the artwork:

The origin of the artwork, he claims emphatically, is art. Origin here should be taken to mean, as always in Heidegger, not the temporal genesis, but the provenance of the essence of works of art. His doctrine of this origin adds nothing to that of something that has emerged, and cannot do so, because it would otherwise stain itself with the same being that the sublime concept of origin would not like to permit. The cost of Heidegger’s salvation of the moment of unity of art, of what is artistic about art, is that theory falls silent, awestruck, in front of what it is supposed to be. (OL 446/COL 381)

Here Adorno is arguing against Heidegger’s prioritizing of the essential origin of art at the expense of attention to the particularities of individual artworks. As such he identifies in Heidegger’s account a systematic indifference to the particular in comparison with the general, insisting against Heidegger that art ‘can no more be boiled down to its pure unity than to the pure variety of the arts’ (OL 447/COL 382). Adorno insists that Heidegger’s concept of origin is one that must remain pure, uncontaminated by the concrete being of any individual work. This effectively neutralizes theory, which such a schema renders blind to differences between artworks. Theory, that is, which takes its cue from the material object which it confronts, adapting itself accordingly, is reduced to a shadow of itself, an invariant method.

While this argument outlines in more detail Adorno’s rejection of Heidegger’s conception of the origin of the artwork in art, and indeed attempts to account for Heidegger’s indifference to the material characteristics of specific works, it nonetheless leaves unaddressed the matter of Heidegger’s rejection of the concept of form. The closest to an engagement with this rejection in Adorno’s work is found in the following long quotation from Aesthetic Theory, in which he addresses Heidegger’s approach to the thing-character of the artwork:

As something essentially spiritual, art cannot be purely intuitable. It must always also be thought: it thinks itself. The prevalence of the theory of intuition, contradictory to all experience of artworks, is a reflex against social reification. This prevalence amounts to the construction of a special department of immediacy, blind to the thingly layers of artworks which are constitutive of that which is more than thingly about them. It is not only as bearers that they have characteristics, as Heidegger claimed against idealism […]. Their own objectification makes them second-degree things. That which they have become in and of themselves, their inner structure, obedient to ever more immanent logic, cannot be accessed by pure intuition, and their elements which can be intuited are mediated through this structure; compared with the structure, their intuitable aspect is inessential, and every experience of artworks must go beyond it. If they were nothing other than intuitable, they would be subaltern effect, in Richard Wagner’s terms effect without cause. Reification is essential to works and contradicts their essence as something that appears; their thing-character is no less dialectical than their intuitable element. However, the objectification of the artworks is in no way […] at one with its material, but what results from the dynamics of the work, related as synthesis to the thing-character. (ÄT 152–53/AT 99)

This is a relatively oblique passage insofar as it takes issue not only with Heidegger, but also with a heavily mediated Kant. Comprehension is not aided by the difficulties in translation that come about in part as a result of the standard rendering of Anschauung as ‘intuition’ in translations of Kant: both in Kant and in this passage, it refers to the immediate sensory (and thus nonconceptual) perception of an object, as opposed to understanding it intellectually and conceptually.4 Heidegger recognizes that artworks are not reducible to their thing-character, but does so in such a way that he neglects this thing-character in the name of what makes artworks more than things. For Adorno, on the other hand, it is the fact that artworks are undeniably and demonstrably things that enables them also to be more than things. It is through the close attention that they demand to their tangible—one could say thingly, to put it in Heidegger’s terms—character that artworks are able to become more than things: ‘For to the extent that artworks are works, they are things in themselves, objectified by virtue of their law of form’ (ÄT 153/AT 100). Sensory observation of works reveals the presence of something that cannot be fully grasped by the intuition, something that demands reflective judgment.

The translation of geistig as ‘spiritual’ also has the potential to be misleading. An equally valid translation would be ‘intellectual’, which is indeed here the primary sense of the word, insofar as Adorno is working with the contrast between the sensuous and the conceptual character of artworks. His claim is that these do not exist in opposition to one another, but reinforce and enable each other to come to prominence.5 That is, whereas for Heidegger the form–matter distinction is a means by which the thing-character of the work is subordinated and reduced to the schema according to which it is observed—and it is important to bear in mind that for Heidegger this is true of all approaches to the thing-character qua thing-character, which is central to his rejection of the question of what kind of a thing art is—Adorno sees the form–matter distinction as one means among many of approaching the artwork’s tangible thing-character, an approach which is itself necessary in order to access the aspects of the artwork that lie beyond its sensuous, intuitable character. Since the attempt to understand the thing-character of the artwork is for Adorno not a barrier to grasping these aspects but rather the very means of access to them, the Heideggerian critique of the form–matter structure no longer poses a barrier to the consideration of the relationship of form and content as a means of analyzing the relationship of a work’s intuitable character to the intellectual content that emerges from close consideration of the thingly layer. It should be observed, however, that even this elides what is perhaps the sharpest point of Heidegger’s treatment of the form–matter distinction, namely that it functions as a sort of mythical structure that prevents us from experiencing the world, that does not allow the thing ‘to rest in its own essence’.6 I return, if somewhat obliquely, to this point in the final chapter, addressing the manner in which Adorno conceives the distinction between artworks and other made objects. For now, I turn to discuss Adorno’s discussion of form in his reading of Hölderlin.

‘Parataxis’

The text that was, in an extended form, finally published as ‘Parataxis: On Hölderlin’s Late Lyric’, was first given as a talk at the eighth annual meeting of the Hölderlin Society in Berlin on June 7, 1963, the 120th anniversary of Hölderlin’s death. Although the conference report mentions that there was heated discussion after the paper in the foyer of the Akademie der Künste, where the conference was held, Adorno was unable to remain for the formal discussion of his own paper, which took place in his absence.7 The talk was not, as is customary, printed in the Hölderlin–Jahrbuch, but had already appeared in the Neue Rundschau by the time issue 13 of the Jahrbuch was published in 1965.8 Adorno accounts for this anomaly in a letter to Peter Szondi, to whom the essay is dedicated, in which he explains that the Hölderlin Society had made an offer of publication in the yearbook, ‘with the suggestion that he soften the passages on Heidegger’, an offer which he ‘politely turned down’.9 Van den Bergh reports on a personal conversation with Emil Staiger, who described some of the controversy provoked by Adorno’s intervention: a member of the audience ‘stood up and interrupt...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Abbreviations of Works by Adorno
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Form and Content
• 2. Form and Expression
• 3. Form and Genre
• 4. Form and Material
• 5. Artistic Form and the Commodity Form
• Coda
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index
• Back Cover