Adorno Reframed

Interpreting Key Thinkers for the Arts

Geoff Boucher

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780857736956
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Critical Theory

Dismissed as a miserable elitist who condemned popular culture in the name of 'high art', Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969) is one of the most provocative and important yet least understood of contemporary thinkers. This book challenges this popular image and re-examines Adorno as a utopian philosopher who believed authentic art could save the world. Adorno Reframed is not only a comprehensive introduction to the reader coming to Adorno for the first time, but also an important re-evaluation of this founder of the Frankfurt School. Using a wealth of concrete illustrations from popular culture, Geoffrey Boucher recasts Adorno as a revolutionary whose subversive irony and profoundly historical aesthetics defended the integrity of the individual against social totality.

Chapter 1

Negative dialectics

Probably the most startling thing about modernism today is that it is no longer shocking. Domesticated into coffee-table art books, it has become an accepted component in the unfolding history of Western art. Most respectable middle-class households have somewhere or other a reproduction of a Picasso or a Kandinsky. Generally reduced to its formal component, the modernist aesthetic becomes a comforting experiment with collage techniques and multiple perspectives. Standard academic introductions to modernism propose that it is a subjective reflection of the experience of the industrialised city, reducing abstraction to the normal perception of a new environment. It is now almost impossible to imagine how any rational person could have criticised these superannuated circus animals, or taken offence at their tired antics. In other words, we have entirely lost touch with the vitality – and the virulence – of modernism.

Critics who try to rediscover the original bite of modernist art are forced into desperate measures, in order to estrange our reception of modernism and make it new again. In Fables of Aggression: The Modernist as Fascist [1979], Fredric Jameson, for instance, turns to the now forgotten literary Expressionism of Wyndham Lewis. ‘It has been my experience,’ writes Jameson, ‘that new readers can be electrified by exposure’ to Lewis’ books, ‘in which, as in few others, the sentence is reinvented with all the force of origins, as sculptural gesture and fiat in the void’ (Jameson, 1979: 2). True enough, but he might have mentioned that to get there, they need to put up with Lewis’ racism, which is generously larded with misogyny. Interestingly, though, what Jameson does add is that ‘such reinvention demands new reading habits, for which we are less and less prepared’ (Jameson, 1979: 2).

To rediscover the radical energy of modernism, we need to make it strange. How then, to recover the freshness and sting of both Adorno’s philosophical modernism and the Expressionist art that he defended? The reader will be relieved to learn that there is an alternative to enduring an aesthetic presentation of the politics of hate, on the lines of Wyndham Lewis, as a means to estrange ourselves from a routinised reception of the modernism that Adorno advocated. That alternative is to prepare ourselves to read more attentively, by seriously considering the possibility that modernism is a major mistake. Of course, our instant response is something like, ‘who on earth would reject Joyce and Picasso?’ But as a matter of fact, Adorno in the 1930s and 1940s confronted a progressive intellectual perspective of considerable depth and sophistication that argued just this.

This chapter argues for a new perspective on Adorno’s social theory, as a preparation for viewing his aesthetics in a fresh light. To achieve this, it begins from the critique of modernism against which Adorno had to defend it, that of the Hegelian Marxism of György Lukács. Only once it ceases to be obvious to us that modernism is automatically legitimate will it be possible to see what it is, exactly, that Adorno is advocating, and where he is coming from in doing so. For the risk is not actually reading Adorno at all – any more than we have seen, heard or read modernism. We have to avoid a selective and superficial examination of his writings guided by our preconceptions, ignoring anything that doesn’t seem to fit. Adorno’s version of Critical Theory deserves better.

Commodity reification and realist art

In the 1920s, Lukács was seeking to recover a version of Marx’s historical materialism that could pose a philosophically significant challenge to the dehumanisation of individuals under capitalism. Before panicked representatives of Stalinist orthodoxy silenced him, Lukács managed to rediscover the humanist critical theory of the young Marx. According to Marx’s youthful writings, capitalism generated what he called ‘alienation’, which is not a psychological feeling but an existential condition. Under conditions of capitalist alienation, human beings confront the social world, the natural environment, other people and even themselves, as raw material to be instrumentally manipulated (Marx, 1964: 77–79).

According to Marx, alienation happens because a market society depends upon what Marx called ‘real abstraction’, the way in which everything becomes measured in money. Money is an abstract representation of the labour time embodied in commodities, useful items produced for profit and sold on the market. Money functions as a ‘general equivalent’ or medium of circulation in capitalism, enabling qualitatively unlike things (different objects) to exchange in the medium of quantitative likeness (monetary amounts). Describing the monetarisation of human relationships as ‘commodity fetishism’, Marx criticised how, through the abstraction of money, ‘definite social relations between men and women assume, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a [monetary] relation between things’ (Marx, 1963: 72). This is part of Marx’s more general criticism of how, under capitalism, formal economic equality conceals substantive economic inequality, and the political liberty of the modern individual turns out to involve their isolation from society. Under capitalism, Marx wrote, there is ‘no other nexus between human beings than naked self-interest, than callous cash payment’. Consequently, all interpersonal relations are ‘drowned in the icy water of egotistical calculation’ (Marx and Engels, 1986: 38).

For Lukács, the young Marx’s critique of capitalist alienation and commodity fetishism represented a potentially fertile critical perspective from which to understand conditions in the 1920s. In his extraordinarily influential work History and Class Consciousness (1923), Lukács combines Marx’s critique of commodity fetishism with an analysis of modern bureaucracy taken from non-Marxist sociologist Max Weber, to criticise twentieth-century capitalism’s dehumanisation of society as a whole. Lukács’ major insight was to connect the treatment of persons as things, which happens because of capitalist alienation and the fetishisation of money typical of market societies, with an apparently unrelated phenomenon, the development of rational management techniques. By the 1920s, the modern nation state had become a vast bureaucracy specialising in the technical management of economic growth and social problems, where rational planning and irrational exploitation went hand-in-hand. In factories and offices, the scientific management techniques of Fredrick Taylor and the mechanised production line of Henry Ford had overnight transformed work into a process where every minute mattered. New entertainment industries mushroomed at the same time that department stores with consumer products appeared. These were highly commercialised and organised on industrial lines, promoting culture and leisure for the masses in ways calculated to provide an escape from work and turn a tidy profit at the same time. The 1920s poster by radical Dada artist John Heartfield expresses the mood of times perfectly: ‘rationalisation is on the march’, it says; and, it shows a humanoid made of machine parts with a clock for a head, running desperately to keep up with the new pace of sped-up work and commercialised leisure.

What commercialisation and bureaucracy have in common is the reduction of reason to a faculty for performing calculations. Rationality as the ability to reflect on the substantive goals of human action and the forms of life conducive to human flourishing is abandoned for formal operations. Lukács proposes that this signifies that the commodity has become the ‘central structural principle’ of the modern world (Lukács, 1971: 86), structuring both society and the psyche, through its mechanisms of abstract equivalence and quantitative calculation. The result is the invasion of the logic of the commodity into the fields of reason, culture and the psyche, in what Lukács ominously describes as ‘reification’ (i.e., petrifaction). The reification of individuals has resulted in the modern phenomenon of the ‘individual without qualities’, the anonymous bureaucrat or amoral entrepreneur, motivated only by formal procedures and instrumental calculations.

For the sort of reified thinking involved in modern management, Lukács argues, the ultimate intellectual ideal is the reduction of social questions to mathematical formulae, in order to manipulate individuals and manage processes. Lukács argues that these formal systems are actually highly fragmented. Specialised knowledge based on formal rationality breaks apart into disciplinary silos, with the effect of a compartmentalisation of society into a host of unrelated domains of activity, whose only apparent connection is through market mechanisms. What this obscures is the central truth of human existence, that historical societies are generated through human actions – through labour practice – and not through the anonymous and impersonal mechanisms that mediate between human agents. Labour, Lukács proposes, is hidden by the fragmentation of the cultural field, for reification involves the loss of every image of the social whole. This is because the experience of oneself and the world as things rules out any integrated standpoint from which to grasp the relation between society and individual as generated through historically conditioned human action. Consequently, artistic representations tend to reflect a kaleidoscope of fragments and philosophical systems tend to be characterised by basic divisions rather than fundamental unity. Bourgeois art and philosophy remain confined within ‘antinomies’, or mutually exclusive conclusions from a single premise, because these arise from the limitations of capitalism as a form of life.

The solution, Lukács proposes, is intellectual and social revolution. The intellectual revolution is carried by the category of totality, as the antidote to reification, for ‘the category of the totality is the bearer of the principle of revolution in science’ (Lukács, 1971: 27). By totality, Lukács means a conceptual systematisation of social reality into a unified theoretical whole, and it is best illustrated by Lukács’ ideas about realist literary works. According to Lukács, literary realism, as practised by, for instance, Thomas Mann, makes it possible for readers to grasp capitalist society as a historical whole (Lukács, 1964). The realist novelist selects characters that are socially typical for their class position and then endows them with a plausible psychology, in order to generate a believable, richly detailed socio-historical world, populated by realistic individuals. In literary realism, a wealth of social relations and historical connections is established, centred on the experiences of the characters as they develop within the ideological limitations of their world. Narrative is therefore the process by which typical, but plausible, characters, come to know their world through actions within it, thereby simultaneously transforming the world and grasping it cognitively.

The significance of this is that the realist artist must represent the experience of everyday life by portraying it as the product of historical social relations, in a vast network of human actions. Such a perspective implies that the fragmentation of culture and the confusing multiplication of different perspectives in modern life are superficial – the result of certain kinds of actions and values, not just automatic features of the human condition. Realist art, therefore, is potentially revolutionary, because it lets men and women understand that the extreme opposition between the individual and society under capitalism is not natural and inevitable, but the product of historical circumstances. Although Lukács’ arguments concern realist literature, they apply equally well to realist painting, for the representation of a historical world through the plight of believable individuals is also present in, for instance, Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo’s celebrated Il quarto stato (‘the fourth estate’).

The concept of a fourth estate refers to a social group not officially recognised. The painting therefore represents the emergence into political life of Marx’s ‘class with radical chains’, the working class, denied many civil rights in Italy until after the First World War. Sometimes erroneously grouped with the neo-Impressionists, da Volpedo in actuality recruited the Impressionists’ technique of painting in small dots and use of colour theory into the service of a more scientific representation of reality. The emphasis on the subjective act of perception of the Impressionists is replaced by the lively subjectivity of the people depicted, who are represented within the framework of classical linear perspective and the accurate portrayal of the human form. Their advancing line, in which they appear to emerge from darkness while narrating their life histories to one another, as if in making themselves heard by society they also make themselves known to one another for the first time, connotes the march of progress and reason. At the same time, the strikers have something ominously sacrificial about them, for their open hands show them to be unarmed to the perspective from which the painting is painted, presumably the police lines. A woman, perhaps the wife of the central figure, remonstrates with the determined leader, underlining her appeal for caution with the vulnerable child carried on her arm. Yet the gaunt faces of the strikers and the challenging look the front rank throws out to the observer speaks of a defiant human dignity, in spite of the poverty of their social, political and military means.

3. Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo, II quarto stato (1901).

Thinking of just such works, Lukács insists that the realist artwork, ‘by its very nature, offers a truer, more complete, more vivid and more dynamic reflection of reality than the recipient otherwise possesses’ (Lukács, 1970: 36). The reception of realist artworks brings the reader’s ‘whole soul into motion’ (Lukács, 1963: 767). Through its presentation of historical life as a dynamic totality, realist art has the potential to transform the ‘whole human being’ of everyday life into the ‘person as a whole’ of the aesthetic experience (Lukács, 1963: 767). Realist artworks therefore act to catalyse an intellectual grasp of the socio-historical totality, together with ethical regeneration, renovated perceptions and deepened feelings. Their cathartic impact confronts the individual with an emotional recognition of the ‘unity and totality of all-rounded human being’ that conveys the fundamental aesthetic imperative: ‘you must change your life!’ (Lukács, 1963: 786).

The Expressionism debate

Against this theoretical background, Lukács’ intervention into the ‘Expressionism debate’ amongst the Western European intelligentsia sent a shock through progressive ranks. The assumption of theorists like Bloch was that modernism was progressive because its distorted forms and rejection of artistic coherence truly reflected modern reality. Expressionism in particular shattered outdated artistic traditions, displaying the industrialised world in all its ugliness, while liberating subjectivity from the constraints of realist conventions. In both Expressionism and Surrealism, there is what Lukács calls, following Bloch, a ‘vivid evocation of the disintegration, discontinuities and ruptures…typical of people living in the [present] age’. Further, Bloch writes, ‘in its original form, Expressionism meant the shattering of images, it meant breaking up the surface from [a] subjective, perspective, one which wrenched things apart and dislocated them’ (Lukács, 2007: 36–37). According to Bloch, then, Expressionism reflects the experience of breakdown that belongs to the crisis of capitalism, and anybody who criticises modernism is ‘confusing experiments in demolition with a condition of decadence’ (Bloch, 2007: 22).

The brilliance of Lukács’ reply is that he entirely accepts this description of modernism, but completely rejects Bloch’s evaluation of its significance and legitimacy. Modernism is a true report of how it feels to live in the modern world, from the subjective perspective of the isolated individual, who is overwhelmed and threatened by an unintelligible and reified society.

The modern literary schools of the imperialist era, from Naturalism to Surrealism, which have followed one another in swift succession, all have one feature in common. They take reality exactly as it manifests itself to the writer and the characters he creates. The form of this immediate manifestation changes as society changes…It is these changes that bring about the swift succession of literary schools…[all of whom] develop their own artistic style as a spontaneous expression of their immediate experience. (Lukács, 2007: 36–37)

But for this very reason, he maintains, modernism remains abstract, one-dimensional and superficial, for ‘when the surface of life is only experienced immediately, it remains opaque, fragmentary, chaotic and uncomprehended’ (Lukács, 2007: 39). For both Bloch and Lukács, the representation of this swirling confusion from the subjective perspective is expressed perfectly in the juxtaposition of unrelated elements in the technique of collage. (It must be noted that in the debates of the interwar era, no distinction is made between the literary technique of pastiche, the painterly technique of collage and the cinematic technique of montage, just as no distinction is made between modernism as whole, and Expressionism, Cubism and Surrealism.) Collage, Bloch proposes, is ‘an account of the chaos of reality as actually experienced, with all its caesuras and dismantled structures of the past’ (Bloch, 2007: 24). Indeed, Lukács comments. Quite right. ‘Bloch’s mistake lies merely in the fact that he identifies this state of mind directly and unreservedly with reality itself’ (Lukács, 2007: 34).

It is crucial to keep in view that the stake in this debate is not solely whether modernism is good art, according to exclusively formal aesthetic criteria. The underlying question is whether modernism is progressive; that is, whether its reinvention of perception and representation of feelings make a contribution to democratic values and human emancipation. The point Lukács is making here is that it is impossible to be a democratic progressive and hold that reality is a chaos of fragments. If an individual stands for social justice, democratic equality, human solidarity and the importance of truth in claims to knowledge, then that individual commits themselves to two things. They appeal to shared values established through rational argument, and they relate this to a reality that is fundamentally intelligible and accessible to human intervention.

Lukács’ position is that, unlike modernism, realism has an emancipatory potential irrespective of the author’s worldview. This is because it belongs to the concept of realist art, in that it reconstructs the historical and social world as a totality of human actions. By contrast, he argues, the concept of modernist art is concentrated in the technique of collage, which represents the world from a subjective perspective as a constellation of unrelated elements. His point, then, is that this expression of disintegration is perfectly compatible with both fascism and an individual exclamation of distress and dismay, but not with an intellectual and social alternative to political authoritarianism and cultural elitism. Lukács argues that ‘if Thomas Mann had contented himself with the direct photographic record of the ideas and scraps of experience of his characters, and with using them to construct a montage, he might easily have produced a portrait ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface and acknowledgements
• Introduction: Atonal philosophy
• Chapter 1. Negative dialectics
• Chapter 2. Adorno’s history of modernism
• Chapter 3. Aesthetic theory
• Chapter 4. Adorno today
• Further reading
• References