Adorno and Modern Theatre

The Drama of the Damaged Self in Bond, Rudkin, Barker and Kane

K. Gritzner

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137534477
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

Adorno and Modern Theatre explores the drama of Edward Bond, David Rudkin, Howard Barker and Sarah Kane in the context of the work of leading philosopher Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969). The book engages with key principles of Adorno's aesthetic theory and cultural critique and examines their influence on a generation of seminal post-war dramatists.

1

Adorno and Beckett: from the Crisis of Schein to the Fidelity to Failure

Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst

Das Rettende auch.

But where danger is, grows

The saving power also.

(Friedrich Hölderlin, Patmos, 1802)

Adorno’s reservations about existentialist philosophy become apparent in his interpretation of Samuel Beckett’s oeuvre which radically empties human action and language of positive social value and articulates modern human existence as an ‘outrage’ (Adorno, ‘Endgame’ 251). He finds an intriguing evocation of post-Auschwitz culture in Beckett’s stage plays, such as Endgame (1957), where pain and suffering are translated into a theatrical aesthetics of tragic-comic failure and inexpressibility. Beckett’s bleak stage worlds are expressive of a damaged subjectivity and an absence of social meaning, which evokes a sense of ‘permanent catastrophe’ (ibid.). The notion of catastrophe is also tangible in the formally more radical Not I (1972) in which a speaker (‘mouth’) recounts her experience of being shocked into speech and life in an obscure and indeterminate environment. However, despite their attempts to ‘live on’ in a catastrophic world, Beckett’s characters are un-tragic in the sense that they do not assume the grand gestures of self-affirmation or zealous resistance to adversity that would be expected in conventional tragic drama; they do not meet death in heroic fashion; they are dying on in a static, grey world. As Eagleton has observed, ‘[d]eath would be far too grand, definitive an occurrence for these eviscerated figures to cope with. Even suicide requires more sense of identity than they are capable of mustering. Beckett’s characters thus have all the unkillability of comic protagonists [. . .]. They are not even up to tragic status, which would at least be some kind of recompense’ (Eagleton, ‘Political Beckett?’ 73).

However, Adorno’s view that art is ‘something that has escaped from reality and is nevertheless permeated with it’ (‘Is Art Lighthearted?’ 249) suggests that art – both fait social and pointing beyond its origins in social reality – is an embodiment of tension and contradiction. If, as Adorno suggests, Endgame troubles the Enlightenment belief in an absolute and substantial individuality (the faith in autonomous selfhood and agency) by revealing the individual to be a ‘historical category’ and ‘outcome of the capitalist process of alienation’, it nevertheless (or precisely for this reason) also posits the idea of individual experience as a ‘defiant protest against’ the context of alienation which threatens to jettison the notion of the self (‘Endgame’ 249). The apparent lack of drama and tragedy in Beckett’s work may be considered a result of this work’s status as catastrophic theatre – a theatre which does not annul the idea of self but embodies (in its form) the catastrophe of modern culture.

Adorno’s interpretation of Beckett addresses some of the major aspects of his aesthetic theory, for example the interrelationship between art and society, and the relevance of autonomy, commitment and authenticity for an understanding of the art work’s potential for social criticism. Adorno’s view that Beckett’s work puts meaning on trial raises aesthetic and philosophical questions that remain of interest to British drama, especially in the examples chosen for analysis in this study. Before turning to Adorno’s readings of Beckett, the following section will consider the role of aesthetic form in Adorno’s treatment and conceptualisation of art in general and in his interpretation of Beckett in particular. This is not to suggest that there exists an unequivocal, unproblematic relationship between the concept of art and the concrete moments of its realisation in the forms of each individual artwork. Nevertheless, in his discussions of art Adorno seems to be focussing a great deal on its formal aspects, on technique and material configuration, but he does not generalise the moment of aesthetic construction. He is certainly aware of the attempts of early modernist art to elevate the principle of form to a new ideal which gave rise to the dominance of aesthetic nominalism within modernist aesthetics.

The nominalist desire to foreground the particular and individual moments of art, as opposed to its universal principles of organisation and conceptualisation, is generally understood as a reaction to the notion of aesthetic appearance or semblance (Schein). Accordingly, nominalism is a critique of spirit (Geist), understood by Adorno as a subjective and objective category. His engagement with nominalism is a good example of the ways in which Adorno’s aesthetic theory intersects with his post-metaphysical philosophical project¹ because the point of departure for both critical processes is a revaluation of traditional idealist approaches to subjectivity, human agency and consciousness.

Schein in aesthetic idealism

The concept of semblance or aesthetic appearance (Schein) is a central category of traditional aesthetics where it denotes art’s unique ability to create an illusion, an ‘other’ world which stands apart from the perceptible, phenomenal appearance (Erscheinung) of empirical reality. In Kant’s aesthetic theory, for example, the subjective judgement of taste which describes an object as beautiful also makes a normative claim for universal validity: ‘when a man puts a thing on a pedestal and calls it beautiful, he demands the same delight from others. He judges not merely for himself, but for all men, and then speaks of beauty as if it were a property of things’ (Critique of Judgment 52, emphasis my own). Kant proposes an idea of art as subjectively mediated but nevertheless objectively valid, and the objective necessity of subjective judgments of taste becomes thus a question of aesthetic appearance. In Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason transcendental appearance, as opposed to empirical (perceptible) appearance, is defined as a natural and unavoidable illusion (an ‘objective necessity’) of subjective reason.² Hence, the objective quality of aesthetic appearance in Kant’s transcendental logic is the product of the a priori categories of ‘pure reason’ (specifically space and time) which surpass the limits of immanent empirical experience. This notion of a transcendental ‘as if’ quality of aesthetic appearance is developed further in Hegel who, rather than taking the subject (reason) as the origin and vanishing-point of aesthetic semblance, replaces it with the ‘objective-historical’ notion of the Idea. Schein in Hegel’s aesthetics is both spiritual and material, but nevertheless transcendental (i.e. reaching beyond the confines of empirical use and immediate subjective experience) as is implied in his definition of art (the beautiful) as the ‘sensuous appearance of the Idea’ (sinnliches Scheinen der Idee) (see Hegel, Introductory Lectures Part I).

Hegel’s philosophy of art inaugurates the (German) idealist tradition in aesthetics which emphasises the substance or content of art, thereby shifting the focus away from a previous (Kantian) emphasis on the formal and subjective dimension in art (art as intuition and a matter of judgements of taste). Whilst acknowledging Hegel’s ‘objective’ aesthetics as an important response to both intention- and reception-oriented ‘subjective’ theories of art, Adorno nevertheless criticises the objective idealism initiated by Hegel whose ‘metaphysics of spirit results in a certain reification of spirit in the artwork through the fixation of its idea’ (AT 91). Hegel’s notion of the ‘objective mediation of all art through spirit’ (ibid.) proposes spirit as an objective substance that sublimates its non-spiritual ‘other’. In short, spirit in Hegel denotes totality and unity, and the artwork is the manifest appearance or Erscheinung of the absolute spirit or Idea. Adorno reacts against the systematising and totalising thrust of Hegel’s aesthetics by arguing that a complete classification of spirit in artworks is hardly possible. ‘In actual fact, history knows no artworks in which there is a pure identity of the spiritual and the nonspiritual. According to its own concept, spirit in artworks is not pure but rather a function of that out of which it arises’ (AT 89).

However, this ‘other’ of spirit, the contingent material ground from which spirit arises, is not easily determined. For Adorno spirit enters a socially and historically determined constellation with its heterogeneous other. It would be misleading to define spirit as an entirely subjective and rational category that works on an objective, natural, form-less material which is consequently transformed into an aesthetic object. Adorno does not consider the work of spirit to be associated with a dominant agent who imposes his or her will onto raw, unstructured natural material. Rather, successful or authentic artworks acknowledge the heterogeneous elements as immanent aspects of their own structure (see AT 89). Hence, spirit in artworks has to be more than a principle of formal construction, but it should not be conceived as something residing beyond the configuration of the artwork’s materiality either. It is in line with Adorno’s materialist philosophy to consider spirit, first of all, as being dependent on the material appearance and formal construction of the artwork, indeed as arising from the particular configuration of material elements within the work. However, Adorno’s working through the legacy of metaphysics becomes equally apparent in his insistence that while ‘the spirit of artworks is bound up with their form, [. . .] spirit is such only insofar as it points beyond that form’ (AT 89). We notice here a tension between two philosophical traditions which only seemingly contradict each other. The apparent juxtaposition between materialism and idealism in Adorno’s thought is suspended in his conception of the movement of ‘spirit’ in art, specifically in spirit’s relation to the artwork as a self-identical object. ‘The locus of spirit is the configuration of what appears’ (AT 87) or in other words: spirit is form. More precisely: spirit is the ‘force or the interior of works, the force of their objectivation’ (ibid.). This is also why, for Adorno, spirit in art has an objective dimension, because it is both the cause for, and the result of, an immanent mediation of all elements in the artwork.

It is important to note that for Adorno spirit always implies a process: ‘As tension between the elements of the artwork, and not as an existence sui generis, art’s spirit is a process and thus it is the work itself. To know an artwork means to apprehend this process’ (AT 88). Adorno’s understanding of spirit as process or becoming is in the first instance a response to German Idealism (which sought to reify spirit as the dominating expression of subjectivity), but it is also a defence of the concept of natural beauty. Adorno seeks to rescue the concept of natural beauty from the discourse of aesthetics which, since Hegel, has concentrated on art beauty as a form of autonomous, subjective expression. The progressive rationalisation and spiritualisation of art since the Enlightenment presented nature as something that ought to be overcome by means of the aesthetic which was posited as an autonomous sphere that exists immanently and for-itself. However, Adorno argues that nature is not the antithesis of art; rather, nature re-appears in art as that which escapes domination by instrumental rationality (the labour of the subjective spirit): ‘natural beauty points to the primacy of the object in subjective experience’ (AT 71). However, nature does not appear in art immediately and without distortion, as was aimed for in theatrical Naturalism (which proposed drama as a mimetic imitation of reality); rather, nature in art appears indirectly, in refracted and mediated form. Notable for our discussion of the performing arts, Adorno states that natural beauty is evoked in artworks that produce a feeling of fleetingness, ephemerality, suspension and transcendence – these are qualities of natural beauty, for ‘what is beautiful in nature is what appears to be more than what is literally there’ (AT 70–1). The idea that the appearance of artworks posits ‘more’ than what they show and say is crucial to the Adornian understanding of Schein and his aesthetics of the other.

Adorno argues that modernist art’s rejection of aesthetic semblance (Schein) signifies the art historical ‘emancipation from the concept of harmony’ (AT 100) – a rejection of the illusion of a work’s formal consistency and logical, dynamic narrative development. During the first decades of the twentieth century, aesthetic modernism was characterised by the nominalist tendency to eschew traditional forms and conventional (universal) aesthetic categories in favour of an encounter with sensuous particularity. However, while modernist art can be defined as an attempt to overturn the false idealism and illusory authority of traditional art – a reaction that leads to formal fragmentation in the visual and literary arts, and to dissonance and atonality in music, for example – for Adorno, art without the dimension of Schein would not be conceivable. He maintains that ‘[t]he difference of artworks from the empirical world, their semblance character [Scheincharacter], is constituted out of the empirical world and in opposition to it’ (AT 103). For him, ‘central to aesthetics therefore is the redemption of semblance’ (AT 107), an acknowledgement of the potential illusion that the artwork exists in-itself, as a non-exchangeable object, which allows the particular to be rescued from integration into the empirical world (and its logic of instrumental rationality) as a mere ‘thing’ amongst other things. We notice two applications of the notion of aesthetic semblance. On the one hand, the production of Schein is identified with the activity of enlightenment subjectivity (which produces difference from nature); on the other hand, aesthetic semblance is defended as a category that seeks to liberate the non-identical, immediate, sensuous particularity of the artwork from conceptual domination. We have arrived at one of many instances of antinomy and paradox in Adorno’s aesthetic theory, as suggested in the following dense conceptual constellation of semblance, spirit, and domination:

Aesthetic semblance seeks to salvage what the active spirit – which produced the artifactual bearers of semblance – eliminated from what it reduced to its material, to what is for-an-other. In the process, however, what is to be salvaged itself becomes something dominated, if not actually produced, by it; redemption through semblance is itself illusory, and the artwork accepts this powerlessness in the form of its own illusoriness. (AT 107)

The mere distance of art from empirical reality – and without this distance or difference, however minimal, there would be no art – gives art a character of semblance. This is why modernist attacks on Schein (as carried out by modernist avant-garde movements such as surrealism, dadaism, and futurism) are nominalist critiques of art as such.

As Fredric Jameson has shown, nominalism’s unease with the ‘subsumption of a particular under a general’ (Jameson, Late Marxism 169) in traditional artworks and aesthetic theory continues to be relevant for a Marxist perspective on social and cultural developments in late capitalism. Jameson’s discussion of Adorno’s philosophical dramatisation of the ‘crisis and the agony of aesthetic appearance’ (ibid. 168) draws out the tensions between the nominalist defence of particularity as well as immediacy and the domination of the commodity form which has become the new ‘universal’ and absolute in modern times – the inescapable and intractable rule of capital. From this perspective, the crisis of Schein as initiated by modernist nominalism does not only signify the disintegration of the aura or conventional meaning of the hermetic work of art, it also draws attention to the inevitable process of reification in the construction of the autonomous artwork. The apparent collapse of aesthetic meaning and semblance in modernism can be considered as initiating a renewed and heightened objectification of aesthetic processes according to which the autonomous artwork adopts a fetish character and thus becomes part of the commodification of culture in late capitalism. In this regard Adorno speaks of the autonomous artwork as an ‘absolute commodity’ (Adorno quoted in Jarvis, Adorno 118) which ‘has utterly thrown off that illusion of being-for-society which commodities otherwise desperately keep alive’ (ibid.).

In a way, the autonomous artwork aligns itself with a process that is taking place in the empirical world of the culture industry. By appearing as a being-in-itself, the work mimics the process of reification which not only defines the production and exchange of commodities but increasingly has a bearing on the functioning of interpersonal relationships in consumer society. But it is only through this reification or objectification that works (even events) can be recognised as art at all. Adorno notes that ‘under the compulsion to objectivation, artworks tend toward petrification: It is immanent to the principle of their perfection’ (AT 297). The aesthetic illusion of ‘perfection’ which the autonomous artwork produces is thus understood as a determinate negation of social processes by means of mimetic assimilation to them.

Adorno’s theory of negative dialectics, which he developed in critical response to Hegelian dialectics, refuses to resolve the contradictions and antinomies between the particular elements that make up any conceptual totality. Adorno conceives of the work of art as a totality of appearance or semblance in which expressive (mimetic) and formal (rational) moments co-exist in tension. Their interrelationship within the artwork points to contradictions...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Prologue: ‘After Auschwitz’: Survival of the Aesthetic
• Chapter: 1 Adorno and Beckett: from the Crisis of Schein to the Fidelity to Failure
• Chapter: 2 Edward Bond and the Aesthetics of Resistance
• Chapter: 3 David Rudkin’s Theatre of Myth
• Chapter: 4 Howard Barker’s Theatre of Desire
• Chapter: 5 Sarah Kane or how to ‘scrape a life out of the ruins’
• Epilogue: Adorno, Tragedy and Theatre as Negation
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index